Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:01]
| There we go. Hi Yvonne. Hello. Can you hear me?
|
Ivan:
[0:06]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[0:08]
| Okay, good.
|
Ivan:
[0:09]
| I, I, you know, last time we did it on Thursday, I was a little bit tired on, on Friday. So I will try to refrain from stretching it out. I'm getting old.
|
Sam:
[0:21]
| I know you want to just spend like the whole two hours talking about Hunter Biden.
|
Ivan:
[0:25]
| Yes, of course. You know, there's so much to talk about.
|
Sam:
[0:29]
| Your favorite. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[0:31]
| I mean, you know, there is something to talk about, but it's just not very lengthy.
Look, Hunter got offered a deal. He was too greedy on his damn deal.
So there was no deal because he wants like blanket immunity and it's just dumb.
I mean, that's it. It's just basically nothing else.
|
Sam:
[0:49]
| Anyway, shall we start?
Sure. Here we go. Two curmudgeons corner for Friday, August 18th, 2023.
It is just after 2.30 UTC as we're starting to record, uh, which means it is Thursday night, U S time a little after 7.30 for me on the West coast and a little after 10.30, for Yvonne on the East coast.
Is that right? Did I get that right? Seven, eight, nine, ten.
|
Ivan:
[1:42]
| Yeah, that sounds correct. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:43]
| You know, sometimes the math is hard. hard anyway, our plan for today, we're going to do our, but first thingy, uh, then we're going to do a whole segment on Trump because we got to kind of, you know, it's almost obligatory.
Uh, and then for the last segment, assuming we don't just spend two hours on Trump, we will, uh, alternate and each of us will pick one smaller topic and we'll do it that way. That's the plan.
|
Ivan:
[2:10]
| That's the plan.
|
Sam:
[2:13]
| So, uh, so, uh, who wants to start?
Should I roll a die? Should I ring a bell? that while ringing a bell won't, That won't tell us who goes first, though.
|
Ivan:
[2:26]
| That's true. That, that doesn't really, um, help. Uh, uh, so, uh, let me see. I did.
I wrote a book. I wrote a book. No, I read a book.
|
Sam:
[2:37]
| You read, you read a book. I didn't, you're working on writing the book.
|
Ivan:
[2:40]
| I, you know, I, I have to admit that I think I did attempt to do something along those lines.
|
Sam:
[2:50]
| Well, fiction or nonfiction, nonfiction. Like an autobiography or something?
|
Ivan:
[2:56]
| No, no, no. I have more. It's just some thoughts on business and certain things and whatnot. Okay.
But I, I, you know what? I don't have the time for it right now.
I think that if I'm retired, I could, I could, you know, start writing and organize and structure some thoughts around these things.
Okay. I, um, on multiple business areas, uh, I, I, I still always get astounded by, uh, just, uh, people doing things you think are stupid.
It's not, I'm not talking about thinking they are stupid. I'm talking about how, um, Objectively measured they are and people still do it anyway, regardless.
You know, I think one of the things that I've worked in sales for over 20 plus years in some way, shape or form, even more than that, what am I talking about?
Going back to when I was a teenager, I mean, I started selling when we had our travel agency, but Sam knows the travel agency.
I think he was even he was even there once. Okay.
You know, if I was not in November, but yeah, but you know you know, I started selling there and one of the things about being successful in sales that I've always said myself, but that most people that are in sales don't see that it is.
Important is being kind of somewhat structured and organized to be able to be persistent in pursuing your sales.
Okay. Um, and so, uh, for example, I remember back then we had a computer system, but the computer system did not produce reports very easily. Okay.
So because of that, whenever I made a reservation, okay, We actually had index cards that we wrote out.
Some details about the customer and then put those in a little index card.
System that we kept in order to be able to follow up contact people i see what reservations what not because.
Unfortunately the system would allow me to make a reservation but there's no there's no good reporting at least for us is traveling on our end.
It would create a queue where of you know a these tickets you know you book these like thirty days ago nothing's happened what's what's going on with those for example you can set it up that way.
So so i have to have a follow up structure in order to make sure that you would.
Get customers and then when i start working in corporate jobs.
Everybody always wanted to roll out these applications for a CRM.
Okay, customer relationship management.
|
Sam:
[6:05]
| I was going to say, isn't what you're describing just CRM? Don't be fooled by that.
|
Ivan:
[6:09]
| Yes, at the basic level, yes. That's what I had. It's my little CRM, you know, it's basically on index cards, you know, and stuff like that at first.
And then, you know, we put out systems, use spreadsheets to track forecast and some stuff and whatnot. And I remember like working through a whole bunch of CRM systems, the Siebel, which is owned by the company that I work at.
A gold mine. There was a we had but another one from the company or Oracle sales online, which that doesn't exist right now as we merge it to other products.
But there was a HP built their own stuff. OK, I remember they had their own homegrown systems.
Salesforce dot com. I mean, Salesforce.com, famous company. I mean, they sell this product. I mean, it's very big. But one thing that I that I've noticed is that salespeople hate to use it.
For the most part.
|
Sam:
[7:02]
| And your point is like, it's actually useful. Yes, because even though, which of course, like as you just mentioned, whole companies, business models are around providing the company spend billions on this, OK?
|
Ivan:
[7:16]
| And they are pestering salespeople to keep their CRMs updated on a regular basis.
I mean, it's a thing that I've seen everywhere.
You need to log your activity. You need to do this. You need to do that.
I mean, I was with a manager who was insane about this stuff, and he tracked a whole bunch of statistics.
One of the problems is that then they get they get into tracking statistics, OK, of certain activity.
We need to see things that you do, OK, that gets you to sales, which are already sales.
So a whole bunch of people start gaming the damn system. So it'll start generating those stats and not actually, you know, doing any actual work.
But part of the problem is people are lazy.
|
Sam:
[8:04]
| So, so what you're talking about here is that the, but this is the difference between, Hey, here's a tool for you.
Salespeople versus, Hey, here's a way management can monitor the salespeople.
And then it just all gets distorted.
|
Ivan:
[8:18]
| Correct. Right. And I, and I think that, I think that that's exactly what you hit the nail on head when it turns into some kind of monitoring tool that people don't like to use but what will you teach people to use it in a way that helps you be able to you know hey you logged a call with a customer remember to follow up with them like in a bit because you know see if they're still interested in this hey this guy indicated interest in this keep it on track so later on I go and I look back and I'm like oh man I haven't heard back from them last message was on this state, let me go and see if, you know, they're still interested on this.
Uh, I, I do find that that's, it's very useful. And the other thing is I really don't want to be pestered, asking me people asking me questions about what's going on with my deals.
And so one thing is that if you, if you keep it updated, then for the most part, you know, any review becomes pretty easy because you got that information there, but people hate using them. I'm not sure exactly.
I think, but, but it goes back to what you just said. But it turns out it's just monitoring that people wind up being kind of afraid sometimes to even put stuff on there because they don't want, they don't want to hear crap or they wind up putting in garbage just to get people off their backs. Okay.
Um, and so, um, you know, I, I find it very useful personally. And I think that.
I, I I've, I've been successful most of the time because I've had some kind of system for it, but it's just weird how, you know, I mean, Salesforce account is one of the most valuable companies out there and people that use it, they, they just, the, the people who are the target users, they all don't want to use it.
|
Sam:
[10:07]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[10:08]
| For the most part.
|
Sam:
[10:09]
| So, so, so let, let, let, let, let's get this clear.
|
Ivan:
[10:11]
| So you someday when you retire may write a book about how CRM actually write a book And all other things and how to make it useful and so forth and talk about what the tax taxes you should but but but as Accessories here's what goes burgers back. Yes.
|
Sam:
[10:27]
| I Diverted you away from your actual intended topic, which was a book you read Which I which I read a book a book.
|
Ivan:
[10:36]
| I read the book was called dead in the water Okay. Okay.
|
Sam:
[10:39]
| And so, uh, I know nothing about this book other than I wrote it down. I look it.
|
Ivan:
[10:47]
| It's, uh, it's, I think I actually wrote it on a topic list.
I actually remember it. So, okay.
|
Sam:
[10:52]
| You wrote it down and then I copied it. Whatever. Yeah. Anyway, I, I recognize, I looked it up after you mentioned it.
|
Ivan:
[11:00]
| What did you see? What is it about?
|
Sam:
[11:02]
| Well, I already forgot. I was about to look it up again, but yeah, you know, But like last week on the show, you said you read a book, but you didn't say what it was, but you did put it in the commercial square slack on our topic list. And so then I looked it up and then I immediately forgot.
|
Ivan:
[11:18]
| So, uh, a couple of, uh, sometime back I had was reading a Bloomberg story related to, uh, piracy at sea.
Okay. Uh, modern piracy at sea. Um, and this book was mentioned.
About an incident of piracy at sea that happened in the main waters that are troublesome, which are between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, where those incidents have soared in the last 30 years, and how how some guys, basically a guy for an insurance fraud, fake the piracy, uh, you know, fake that, uh, you know, an act of piracy happened.
And what they found through that investigation was the number of huge insurance scams related to shipping and how opaque the entire global world of shipping, who owns the ships, the crews, et cetera, whatnot, how, um, by the way, it's, it's very clearly understood who the perpetrator of the fraud was.
It's a, there is a Greek owner of the ship who paid certain people to actually board to ship and fake a pirate act.
OK, and they set the ship on fire and they set a claim on on Lloyd's.
And one of the things they're talking about is how the Lloyd's insurance market is basically existed from its origins to insure shipping.
And it's it's it is the hub for that. And it's been like that for several hundred years.
But that they you know what? when these kinds of things happen, they basically just decide to just pay it off. they don't want to like dive into it.
Um, they, they just, they, they just won't do it. But one of the things that happened is that a person that, um, uh, was, um, a Marine surveyor, and he's the type of person that would go on a ship.
And it, he's kind of like an insurance adjuster basically. And they would go on a ship and to assess the damage, to determine the cause and whatnot or whatever.
And this guy had boarded the ship and smelled that this was suspicious and how he was murdered as well.
And so you've got a guy, this wasn't just an insurance fraud scam.
There was also a murder along with it and how, despite the fact that it was investigated and it's been, it's pretty clear that those who ordered it, how, what, et cetera, and so forth, that that person, you know, through all a series of shell companies or whatever, is still in the shipping business out in Greece.
And basically has faced no repercussions.
For the event, and, you know, and and so I think that I'm going to give the book a thumbs up.
It's very well written, and it gives you a glimpse of into how sorted the global maritime shipping industry is and all the scams that are done and how people hide profits, how they exploit all the laws in order to just, you know, put people on ships at the cheapest rates possible and how they just abuse them and how, you know, and it's very difficult to regulate because unfortunately, these ships are out in international waters.
And so it's one of those things where everything just falls through the cracks, but, but it shows also how still to this day, even after the great decline of the British empire and everything, man, their influence on that market worldwide in terms of where any maritime dispute that happens, where does it get litigated?
Gets litigated for the most part in British courts where what is the insurance market that controls global shipping?
It's Lloyd's. I mean, that's where it all happens. And that's, you know, after all the times we talk about how they still.
Are the, the, the, the entity that controls that.
And yeah, for global commerce, I mean, one of the most vital links that we got.
I mean, we had that ship blocked the damn Swiss canal and I mean, the whole damn world almost fricking, you know, turned upside down, you know?
So, so it was a good read, uh, well-written, uh, thumbs up.
|
Sam:
[16:21]
| It's dead in the water. The authors are Matthew Campbell and Kit Chalel.
If I don't know if I'm saying that right. Uh, published in 2022.
Yes. Very recent. Yes. So, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[16:35]
| So, so, uh, vacation. Yes. Thumbs up. Good, good job.
|
Sam:
[16:38]
| I, uh, yeah. Uh, I, you know, I, I, I, you know, I've said, we're not, I'm not doing movies or TV until it's done.
Um, I actually have finished one book. That's not on my list yet, but I'm going to skip it for now.
Like it'll eventually get on my, Cause cause like what I do, like every couple months I catch up with my logging of books and movies and TV and all that kind of stuff.
Okay. And that's when I add it to my curmudgeons quarter backlog list.
And I haven't added this book yet cause I just finished it like a little while ago, but I, so I'm not going to do that. I am not going to do that.
|
Ivan:
[17:15]
| You're not going to do it.
|
Sam:
[17:16]
| Not gonna do it.
|
Ivan:
[17:17]
| Wouldn't be prudent.
|
Sam:
[17:20]
| Oh yeah.
|
Ivan:
[17:22]
| Thousand points of light.
|
Sam:
[17:23]
| You know, after you're causing another tangent, you know, after George H.W.
Bush died, you know, there were a number of interviews with Dana Carvey about how George H.W.
Bush called him up about how much he liked the impression. And then they like, and then he came over and they had him do it at some White House events.
And basically they became friends.
And so like, you know, Dana Carvey would go and visit with George Bush periodically for the rest of George Bush's life.
|
Ivan:
[17:59]
| I think it's great. It's fantastic. You know, it's a great story.
|
Sam:
[18:03]
| I had, I had heard about that because, you know, it was a funny impression.
And like, we're showing our age here, of course, but it was a funny impression.
Um, but it was a respectful impression.
|
Ivan:
[18:13]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[18:14]
| No, yes. It like, yes, like, yeah, yes. You were making fun of him, but George H. W. Bush was like, basically like, no, I'm not mad at you.
That's your job and it's funny, you know?
|
Ivan:
[18:26]
| So anyway, like some other modern presidents.
|
Sam:
[18:29]
| But anyway, I digress. So what I was going to mention, rather than a movie, a book or a TV just before this podcast.
You know, should I? Yeah, yeah, I will.
I was out in the front yard using power tools.
|
Ivan:
[18:50]
| What, what, you okay?
|
Sam:
[18:56]
| Well, at one point my daughter came out onto the porch and was like, you are going to cut off your fingers. What the fuck are you doing?
|
Ivan:
[19:04]
| That sounds accurate.
|
Sam:
[19:05]
| I mean, she didn't use exactly those words, but you know, she came out and I actually thought it was Alex coming here. Cause this was all part of working on a project with Alex that involved like cutting wood and stuff like that.
Um, and she came out, I thought it was Alex. Cause I hadn't looked up yet.
Cause I was busy like doing stuff with a, with a jigsaw and specifically I was doing stuff you're not supposed to do with a jigsaw in an unsafe way.
And I say out, I say out loud, I don't think this is safe.
And then my daughter's like, no, that's not safe. What are you doing?
Anyway, cause like, you know, I, I, I'd had to cut some, there were some like two by fours or whatever, actually smaller than that, whatever it is, whatever.
|
Ivan:
[19:52]
| What a God's name possessed you to be doing this.
|
Sam:
[19:55]
| And so, you know, Alex had bought a jigsaw with his own money because he wanted to cut some stuff, but of course he has me do it because it's loud and he would rather not do it himself. God. Okay. Yeah.
So anyway, I had cut this board into a few pieces, but the one piece didn't quite fit in the place that he wanted it to fit, and I will describe the actual project for the podcast in a second.
It's supposed to be a surprise for my wife, but she's not going to listen, and she's on a trip right now. Yeah, she's busy.
|
Ivan:
[20:36]
| She's not going to get to it in time anyway.
|
Sam:
[20:39]
| Anyway, I'll tell you what the actual project is in a second.
But there was this one piece that didn't quite fit where it needed to be. be.
And in order to try to make it fit, the easiest thing to do was just put a a notch in the side of the board.
Okay. And first of all, like the cuts I was making anyway, like Alex had bought a jet jigsaw, but like to do it right, you would, you probably a better tool would have been a circular saw, but we didn't have one of those of course not.
And even better, a circular saw with a proper like table to hold everything in place.
|
Ivan:
[21:14]
| Sure.
|
Sam:
[21:14]
| So instead just to, even for the straight cuts, I was just taking a couple of bricks, propping up the board in between, holding the board and just powering through it it with the jigsaw, which is not like what, you know, jigsaws are.
They can do that, but it's not actually what they're made for.
Right. You know? Um, and so now to do this notch though, I was basically going to be like, okay.
I'll shove the jigsaw in like a quarter inch and just do a bunch of those quarter inch things close to each other.
And then maybe, ideally, I would have had a file or a chisel or something to get rid of that wood, but I didn't have that either.
So I was like, maybe if I make enough little ones close enough together, I can get the jigsaw in and go sideways.
And so, in any case, this is what I was doing.
And the thing is the piece that needed a notch was only about, I don't know, six, seven inches long.
And so to get it in position, I was holding part of the wood with one hand and like ramming the jigsaw and do it with the other in a way. Like at one point I was holding the jigsaw upside down.
You know, I was propping it up against a brick cause I couldn't hold it in a brick.
Anyway, I did a bunch of stuff. Like I eventually got the notch.
It's a really messy looking notch, but it, it did the job. You got it, you did the job, okay, all right, okay. But the point is here.
This was not like, this is not the way you're supposed to use these power tools.
And I tried, you know, look, I, I, I tried to be somewhat careful in terms of how I was doing it.
Um, obviously I did not end up losing fingers or anything like that, but I, I, I had told Alex, like what to do if I cut off my finger, like what is the right way to respond?
|
Ivan:
[23:14]
| Well, thank God. Okay. Did you gave the instructions? Okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[23:18]
| Good, good, You know, I was like, okay, put the finger in ice, call 911, you know, get me to the hospital and we'll stop the bleeding, stop the bleeding, put the finger in ice, then like get me to the hospital, you know, like whatever.
But you know, luck that that did not need to happen. Thank God.
And there was only once when I accidentally turned on the saw by picking it up by the trigger, like without meaning to, that only happened once.
|
Ivan:
[23:47]
| Happened was, okay, that's good. Okay. It's not bad.
|
Sam:
[23:50]
| And nothing got cut when that happened. I was sort of surprised by it.
I picked it up and it was, you know, but you know anyway, I should not be using power tools.
Like, like this is now, now let me tell you what we were doing.
Okay. For years now, there's been one board on our front porch that was broken.
Like, and it first, like our whole front porch, like, honestly, it needs to be replaced.
It's like in bad shape. The wood is rotting. It's like, it's in bad shape. Okay.
But one board in particular, like the rest is salvageable.
Salvageable, like you could, you could paint it, cover it, and it would be okay for a while.
But there was one board that basically had gotten so weak, like one part of it broke off completely.
So there was a little hole and then the other part started to break.
And so like, basically there was a, there was a part of our porch that was, I mean, part of it was literally a hole down into underneath the porch.
The other part was not safe to stand on. So we were doing things like, you You know, putting stuff over it or around it. So like delivery people wouldn't kill themselves on it. Right. Uh, and stuff like that.
|
Ivan:
[25:10]
| Cause like, you know, yeah, I would have been really bad if a delivery person got hurt that they wound up suing you for, you know, exactly.
|
Sam:
[25:17]
| Exactly. So we, of course, you know, given the way, you know, our family works and the way I work in particular, we, you know, now I've been telling my wife for while, fuck this, let's just get an estimate to replace the whole damn porch and figure out how to...
|
Ivan:
[25:35]
| I'll fix it myself.
|
Sam:
[25:36]
| I'll fix it myself. Right, right. And so about three or four years ago, we bought the wood necessary to do that.
|
Ivan:
[25:44]
| Three or four years!
Wait, wait, how long has this been broken?
|
Sam:
[25:52]
| Like, well, if we bought the wood three or four years ago, it was probably broken for one or two years before that.
Um, you know, um, and I may be, I'm not good with time. So maybe I'm a couple of years more than it really is. I don't know.
|
Ivan:
[26:11]
| Like, well, did you buy the wood before the pandemic?
|
Sam:
[26:15]
| I, yes.
|
Ivan:
[26:15]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[26:18]
| Pretty sure. Yes. So, okay. Bought the wood before the pandemic and, um, yeah, so, and then just put it aside and every once in a while we would say like, we should fix that.
|
Ivan:
[26:32]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[26:33]
| And then we wouldn't. Um, at one point I, I got like, I was excited.
I was like, I'm going to fix it. I think I know how to fix it. I'm going to do it.
And I made the mistake of mentioning on our little family chat that I was going to do it that weekend or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[26:52]
| I'm going to do it. It's going to happen.
|
Sam:
[26:56]
| My family chat includes my mom. Okay. And so my mom decided, she was like, that would be great.
I always worry about falling and dying on that thing.
I mean, not, but she was like, that would be great. And then so she proceeded to, for that entire weekend, a couple times a day, to say something like, don't forget to fix the thing.
|
Ivan:
[27:20]
| And now the way- So now you had her on your case about it.
|
Sam:
[27:24]
| Well, no, but the way my brain works is if somebody tells me to do something like that, My internal reaction was, well, fuck, now I can't do it, because they told me to.
So every time she mentioned it, I was like, well, that guarantees at least 24 more hours before I try it.
|
Ivan:
[27:41]
| You know, you, you, you should be, you, you should be in sales based on what I was saying earlier. That, that sounds like exactly like you should be exactly in sales. Yes, indeed.
|
Sam:
[27:52]
| So like, so it didn't happen that weekend. And so another like year or two or decade or whatever it was passes by.
Um, and then And then we talk about it at some point, because we got a piece of wood long enough to replace that whole board, all the way across the porch, not just where the hole was, but replace the whole board.
But here's the thing.
If we replace the board, it would look new.
The rest of the porch looks... Thank you, Siri. Thank you, Siri.
The rest of the porch looks highly weathered.
Alex thought that was awful. He wants it to match. Now, my wife is like, don't worry, we'll replace the board and then we'll paint it.
|
Ivan:
[28:47]
| Paint it.
|
Sam:
[28:48]
| It needs to be painted anyway. We will paint it. We will fix it.
We will put on new wood sealant and stuff so that it'll last a little while longer and And the rest of it doesn't just rot and fall apart like the first, right.
And Alex hated that idea. He didn't want it to change from how it was.
He wanted to make sure that however we repaired it would retain the look of the rest. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[29:16]
| Oh my God.
|
Sam:
[29:17]
| So he, so he like a few weeks back started being anxious to do a project with the wood.
He asked to use part of the wood that we had bought for this purpose.
He would not tell us what this project was.
He just wanted to repeatedly go to Lowe's to buy more stuff for this project.
At first he wanted some different kinds of wood. He needed, he needed, um, a, uh, he, he eventually found a power screwdriver we already had.
So he didn't need to buy that after all, but he, he bought the jigsaw.
He bought a whole bunch of, you know, screws and nails and other stuff and blah, blah, blah. And then.
And he's having me try to help cut things, and he's wanting me to cut it in some specific ways, and then he changed his mind, and blah, blah, blah. And eventually, I'm like, look, I'm not cooperating anymore unless you explain what the fuck we're doing.
|
Ivan:
[30:18]
| What the hell are you... What are we doing? Right. Warby bombing right now.
|
Sam:
[30:23]
| Yes. What are we doing? So eventually, he did explain to me his scheme, which was basically he wanted to take the broken old pieces of wood and be able to put them back after reinforcing it underneath so he would build a new sort of add a board back but add it underneath the level of the rest of the boards so he could place the broken pieces back on top of them so So that the actual original broken pieces of wood would be there.
With the same finish. Okay. Yes. And of course, they would be broken pieces of wood, but they would be supported from below so you wouldn't fall.
|
Ivan:
[31:08]
| But they wouldn't be solid.
|
Sam:
[31:09]
| Yes. Well, you know.
|
Ivan:
[31:10]
| Sorry.
|
Sam:
[31:12]
| I don't... Reinforced. They would be reinforced.
Now, are they reinforced up to any sort of code? No. I'm sure they are not.
We jury rigged something with, uh, with hinges and little IB metal things and whatever it, it, it, um, we tested it by walking and he even jumped on it a little bit.
It works, but I, I will at last, I don't know.
I don't know, but you know, it, it, it was a fun little project.
Uh, we got it done. We finished it about an hour. No, we finished it about 15 minutes before I had to start getting ready for the podcast.
And we'll see. Now, I suspect...
When my wife gets back from her business trip, she's been in Indiana this week.
When my wife gets back from her business trip and she's like, what the hell is this? Yes. She is a, a, my daughter's going to tell on us for me using the power tools and nearly cutting off some fingers.
B, um, she's going to look at it and say, but I didn't want these broken pieces back on the porch.
|
Ivan:
[32:25]
| Like I wanted to replace the law.
|
Sam:
[32:28]
| I wanted to like, pay to do all this stuff.
And, um, and also by the way, we're not sure if the reinforcement underneath is actually like, will it someday still break when somebody walks on it, which would still be bad. It's just, we've sort of covered it up.
So I expect there to potentially be some issues, but at the same time, Alex and I have been working on this project off and on in the afternoons after work for most of the last week.
And it was a fun project. We, you know, father, son doing the thing with the power tools and actually building something. Now I'm not a builder.
A builder. I, this is not my thing, but it is his thing.
And like, we'd got to do it together and spend some good time. So it was fun.
|
Ivan:
[33:22]
| Nobody was hurt.
|
Sam:
[33:24]
| Nobody was actually hurt. It wasn't, it wasn't like the time a couple of years ago where I stuck my finger in a fan and got all bloody, You know, it's better, you know.
Now, could it have gone badly? Maybe.
But we managed not to have any significant injuries.
|
Ivan:
[33:46]
| Nobody was injured in the, in the, in the, in the, uh, uh, rep repair. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[33:51]
| Of the way we built it, by the way, the reinforcement underneath, I mentioned, we used hinges is kind of set up so that if we didn't finish the project for a little while, it was like a little trap doors on our porch.
And I told Alex, like, we should do this right. And actually hook up some electronics.
So we have a button that we can press.
|
Ivan:
[34:09]
| And so we have a real trap door. So if somebody comes in and you can drop people through the trap door, do you guys have a basement? I don't even remember.
|
Sam:
[34:17]
| Uh, no, we have a crawl space.
|
Ivan:
[34:20]
| Not it's OK. Not not not like a basement. No, because I'm like funneling people straight into the basement. Would be interesting.
|
Sam:
[34:26]
| I mean, you know, with the trap door, if we drop people through the trap door on the porch, there's only like a three foot drop or something, maybe even less.
|
Ivan:
[34:34]
| So that's terrible. Now we need to fix that. We need to, we need to get, we need to get more, tell Alex to start getting more equipment.
Tell him he needs a credit card. He needs to start, he needs to go to like Sunbell rentals or some Herc rentals or something and start getting some real equipment, excavators.
|
Sam:
[34:50]
| That's right. You know, and, uh, we, we, we could do some more work here.
|
Ivan:
[34:57]
| Why am I giving him these ideas? Because he will do, I mean, all of a sudden, you can't pack from work and There's a couple of an excavator, you know, a mini excavator parked outside. You're like, what the hell's going on?
|
Sam:
[35:12]
| Exactly. But, uh, but yeah, and, and, and like there were a few minor adjustments that I helped with, but basically the whole idea of how to do it was all him.
He figured it out, uh, places where I was like, ah, well, that doesn't work.
He's like, no, do it this way. And it did work. So we're, we're good.
Um, you know, and I know a few places where my suggestions were valuable.
I think, maybe, but anyway, that's that. That was fun and we didn't die.
Nobody died or got injured that's my but first for this week okay all right well okay let's take a break then and when we come back it's donald trump time oh fuck here we go you're supposed to say do do.
On remembering dad do do do okay we are back and by the way before we get on to other things while I was telling that story my daughter who apparently could hear that we were talking about this texted that she may or may not have recorded a small video clip of what I was doing when she's outside ah so now Now, having said that, the whole thing.
Was recorded by Alex for eventual inclusion on alexemsla.com in 15 or 20 or 30 years.
|
Ivan:
[37:27]
| When he gets back to that sometime in a year 20, sometime after the date, the trial, somewhere around the date that Trump has, so what's for his trial.
|
Sam:
[37:37]
| Yeah. Something like that.
|
Ivan:
[37:40]
| Something very similar, you know?
|
Sam:
[37:42]
| Yeah. Cause Alex has dramatically slowed down his posting on that channel a couple of years ago, he, he did one video a day for the whole year, at least averaged out. It wasn't actually a video day. Part of the year was faster than the other, but whatever.
But this year, I think he's done two this year or something like that.
So maybe three, um, and they're still from when he was seven years old, which is half his current age, almost half. He's going to be 14 next month.
|
Ivan:
[38:09]
| Oh God, you know, it's just the chip of the old off the old block.
|
Sam:
[38:14]
| Exactly. So anyway, Donald Trump, let's start with this.
The big thing, of course, is we finally got the Georgia indictments, which are the last of the four expected indictments.
And it's kind of weird that we can even say expected indictments on this kind of stuff.
It's a 98 page indictment. I will be honest, this time I did not have a chance to read the whole thing. I read the federal one from cover to cover, but this was a really busy week for me, so I had no time.
So I've read summaries and skimmed, but I did not read the whole thing this time.
But basically, it's election shenanigans again, from a Georgia point of view.
It is being done as a RICO.
And which means that basically there's a whole web of activities, some of which would not be illegal independently, but together form an illegal scheme.
And there were 19 people total. Many of the pieces were illegal on their own, by the way, just to be clear.
And there were a number of charges. Rico was just the first of them.
Um, and the, uh, 19 people total indicted, uh, so Donald Trump plus 18 more, uh, we got Giuliani, we got Eastman, we got, um, Meadows.
We, we got a whole big, long list of people, um, from, from those kinds of people to like someone who worked as a publicist for Kanye West, you know, of course, uh, all, all, all mixed in together.
And, you know, it's got everything from the, the, the famous phone call where he asked for more votes, uh, to intimidating election workers to the, uh, to the whole fake elector scheme, all of this kind of stuff is rolled up into this indictment.
Um, and, uh, yeah. So where do we go from there, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[40:21]
| Where do we go from it? Let me start with one thing that you just mentioned that, uh, Rico.
No, no, not the Rico. It's this whole thing where I can't remember who, who specifically set this, but I'm sure the number of, uh, Trump, you know, psycho fans argued the same thing.
And they, they were saying stuff like, look, they're criminalizing normal activity, like phone calls and stuff and whatever, like it's a crime, you know, because the, because the indictment, most of these when describing an illegal act, they talk about all the things that happened, you know, Hey, person a called person B told them this so forth and so on.
Uh, and I'm just like, how could that be criminal?
And I'm like, you know, look, if you're taking orders for like, you know, illegal gambling over the phone, it's taking a phone call and doing that, you're committing a crime.
If you're over the phone, you know, directing somebody to murder, you know, your you know, your wife.
Well, you know, you. Yes, it probably describes a perpetrator.
A made a phone call to this person and offered the money.
I mean, yes, in furtherance of the scheme.
|
Sam:
[41:50]
| Yeah, one example I've heard people, one example I've heard people say over and over again is, you have a First Amendment right to say, give me all your money.
You do not have a First Amendment right to go into a bank, point a gun at the teller and say, give me all your money.
|
Ivan:
[42:09]
| Give me all your money. Exactly.
|
Sam:
[42:11]
| You know, either way, you're saying the same thing. You are exercising speech.
|
Ivan:
[42:16]
| And one is a criminal act.
|
Sam:
[42:18]
| And the other is not. Like I, Yvonne, give me all your money.
Ah, fuck you. You know, it depends on context.
It depends what you're doing. There are lots of things that in isolation could be completely and totally legal, but when you put it together in a scheme to do something else that is illegal, guess what?
I mean, they so desperately want things to be First Amendment related and, oh my God, you're trying to silence him.
|
Ivan:
[42:55]
| It's the First Amendment.
|
Sam:
[42:59]
| He was just doing what every politician does. He has the right to advocate for the fact that he thinks he won or whatever. And again, just like the federal won the week before, of course he does, but he did that.
He went through courts, he lost 60 cases or whatever the hell number it was in the end.
He has then, at that point, exhausted his legal remedies, and now he's doing this kind of stuff and trying to intimidate the Secretary of State to what the charge is to violate his oath of office.
You know, all kinds of stuff.
|
Ivan:
[43:41]
| Find me the, find me, you know, what was the exact amount?
I can't remember the votes that he needed to win, whatever, 11,000, whatever the hell it was.
Um, you know, I, I, I, I loved how, um, uh, during this entire, uh, time, you know, so you've got the people, um, who are like Giuliani, who jumped on the bandwagon to say, yes, who, who I, I am so loving that this guy is right now, you know, under, under 30, you know, he's got, well, by some calculations, some reporters said in their articles that he had more charges than Trump, some said the same, some said more.
Okay. I saw that regardless. It's the same when you, it's 13 and regardless, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's a lot of charges and here's the problem that Giuliani has.
You know, he never got paid for any of this shit that he did, you know, he's broke, he's broke, and he's fucking broke.
And now he's got to defend himself against this. And I guarantee you one thing, Trump ain't giving them any money now either.
|
Sam:
[45:00]
| So he's up a shit Creek without a paddle right now and Trump's pack like Trump's Pack has actually been paying everybody's legal bills including truck, right?
But they they have they have pulled The pack has said they will not give any money to one of it was one of the crazy lawyers Who has actually been supporting this owl or Sidney Powell one of them?
Anyway, she was actually supporting to Santa's now and so the pack is not gonna help her at all Of course not.
|
Ivan:
[45:29]
| So one thing that I, I, you know, uh, I love that some, one of the Trump, because you've got certain people like say the bill bars who were like, okay, you know, yeah, I want to support these policies of Trump, but the moment that he said, Hey, let's do something illegal.
He was like, fuck you. I'm out of here. Okay. All right.
|
Sam:
[45:49]
| You know, at least, at least this level of illegal, I would argue that there was lots of illegal before this, but that, but, but look, When it when it came to let's do a coup bar was like, I'm out. Well, yes.
|
Ivan:
[46:02]
| When it came to let's do a coup, he was like, I'm out, OK? And there was this other there was one guy who was not named.
And this was one of the transcripts, I think, is somewhere it says he said, what our research and campaign legal team can't back up any of the claims made by our elite strength force legal team.
You can see why we're 0 and 32 on our cases.
One senior advisor wrote on December 8th, according to one of the federal indictments against Trump, I'll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it's tough to own any of this when it's all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership unquote.
And this is somebody at the Trump camp saying this. Yeah. Okay.
I mean, you know, I mean, it's like I said it. Okay. Hey, it's just ridiculous.
|
Sam:
[46:56]
| They all, they all knew, they all knew this was, yeah. I mean, and that's part of why, like, I mean, some of this would be illegal action, even if they thought completely, they were totally in the right.
Um, but they didn't, they didn't, they knew this was made up bullshit.
|
Ivan:
[47:15]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[47:17]
| And both the special council and the DA in Georgia have all the evidence need to prove that.
And like I said, they don't even necessarily need to prove it.
Like last week, there was a lot of debate, like, does it make a difference if Trump honestly believed that he won and it was stolen? No, it doesn't matter.
|
Ivan:
[47:36]
| No, because he was, he was trying to, you know, the whole thing, regardless, even if, you know, it was an illegal act, he was trying to, you know, coerce them to.
Basically just manufacture votes and give them the damn election.
|
Sam:
[47:54]
| And the fake electors and the this and the that. Yes. One of the things about both of these two indictments, the federal one and the Georgia one, are they show how expansive this whole plan was?
And I know we've seen some of that.
|
Ivan:
[48:13]
| There was there was an there was a detailed document mapping out the entire plot, okay, from where they operated from.
This wasn't just some fucking like, you know, you know, shooting from the hip thing that Trump was doing.
I mean, he literally had one of these guys commission a document to say it.
And I believe at the start of the document, it said something like, well, this is all kind of, you know, illegal.
And I don't actually recommend doing this, but this is, you know, what you could do in order to, you know, get this election turned. Right.
|
Sam:
[49:00]
| And at one point, they also there was also a quote in terms of what was it?
It was this will all likely be overturned by the courts.
But doing it will buy us time.
|
Ivan:
[49:13]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[49:15]
| You know, uh, yeah, anyway, the whole thing and like, let's, let's compare and contrast with the federal case as well, because I think it's actually incredibly useful that we have both.
Um, the federal case is very, it is much more narrowly tailored.
They have only indicted Donald Trump right now.
They left a lot of things on the table that they could have gone after, but instead went after four very select charges that they felt they have bulletproof evidence on.
So we had lots of people two weeks ago or whenever it was saying, well, why didn't they go after the insurrection?
Why didn't they go after incitement?
Why didn't they, you know, all kinds of things that theoretically they could have gone after, but they didn't.
And the reason they didn't is that case is streamlined to try to get done as quickly as possible.
Now, there may still be all kinds of delays, but it's like, we're going after Trump. We're going after a very limited set of things. Those things are things that are pretty straightforward and we have direct evidence of. So let's go.
The Fonny Willis case in Georgia is really broad.
You're bringing in 19 people total. You're covering all kinds of different aspects of the conspiracy.
You're including almost everything you can throw into the bucket. And so, because we have both, first of all, there's the backup stuff, and Georgia, as everybody has mentioned, there's no federal pardon of anything that happens with Georgia state crimes.
And not only that, but the way pardons work in Georgia, the governor can't do it.
It has to be done by a board that is, yes, is appointed by the governor, but has very strict rules about what they can do, which include, for instance, that a pardon cannot even be considered by the board of pardons until five years after the person has completed their sentence.
|
Ivan:
[51:33]
| So, and also let, let, but let, let me add something.
Look, the Georgia case on top of all of this, you know, one of the things is that a lot of the Republicans have been wishing, oh, oh no, let's change the rules. Yes.
Let's change the Georgia rules. Let's let the governor pardon, blah, blah, blah. Let's do all this. They got a big problem.
You know, Kemp hates Trump. Okay.
|
Sam:
[51:58]
| All right.
|
Ivan:
[52:00]
| Yep. And so, so he's not going to lift a finger to help Trump in any way, shape or form.
And today there was a senior advisor for the governor called the Cody Hall.
Okay. Was quoted saying, where have I heard a special session changing decades old law and overturning constitutional precedent before, Mr.
Hall asked, referring to the unsuccessful calls from Mr.
Trump and others for a special session to overturn President Biden's win in the state.
Oh, right. Prior to Republicans losing two Senate runoffs in January of 2021, he was referring to the this.
By the way, this is a Republican saying this, OK? Of course, referring to the runoff races that Republicans, you know, lost to Ossoff and Warren Cock.
What are people hoping to learn in the second kick of the election losing mule?
And then they asked Governor Kemp what he thought about this, and his response was, look at what my spokesman, look at what my guy said.
He didn't say it directly, but basically just said, yeah, what he said.
|
Sam:
[53:09]
| Nice.
|
Ivan:
[53:11]
| So he's not, You know, the Republicans, any.
You know, what dream that they have that they are going to get some.
Governor Republican legislative, you know, thing to magically make this go away.
It is it's it's not even not not even close. There's another thing that they wanted that I heard that they wanted to go after the prosecutor. OK. Yes. All right.
|
Sam:
[53:41]
| They've tried that several times and failed.
|
Ivan:
[53:43]
| They, they brought that up several times. That one also, uh, is like not listen, not even happening.
The worst thing is that the guy there, there was earlier some type of move to do something, to be able to control local prosecutors and, um, one of the, you know, one of the main, uh, people that has been in Georgia, uh, advocating for Trump opposed that, but now he wants it.
|
Sam:
[54:20]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[54:22]
| As per usual, you know, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah.
We, we, we should be able to get rid of the prosecutors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, yeah.
|
Sam:
[54:32]
| And, and also another important difference, the normal situation in Georgia is that these trials are televised.
|
Ivan:
[54:41]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[54:44]
| So the, in New York, they don't televise the tries in New York.
They don't televise the trials and they don't, they do not televise federal unless, and the, unless the chief justice, unless the chief justice changes it, which he probably won't.
But in Georgia, it's by default televised unless there's a really good reason not to.
So we are likely to see this one on TV.
Now, there are already some motions that have been filed, like Mark Meadows filed his motion to sever his case and move it to federal.
The expectation is Donald Trump will also try to get the trial moved to federal.
If that happens, the same prosecutor will run the case, but there'll be a different jury pool and the procedures will be different and there'll be no TV.
And I've heard people say like, the chances of moving this to federal are better than because he tried the same thing with the New York case and was rejected.
They've said that the chances are better of this one being moved to federal than they were in New York, but still probably not.
But there's at least, it's not completely out of of the realm of possibility, but also because they're all of these.
19 people on this thing, there's also the expectation that it actually won't make it to trial with all 19 at once.
That, well, first of all, the prosecutors are assuming that they can use the pressure from this to flip some of those 19 and get them to plead and get them to testify, etc, etc. That's part of it.
And then also, if that doesn't happen, or if it only partially happens and you get a two or three to splinter off, but the rest sort of hold together.
Apparently, the normal thing to do is sort of to split it into groups of three or four defendants anyway, and split it into multiple trials.
But just split it into the Donald Trump and the three or four most important people like Giuliani and Eastman and folks, and then do that one first, right? I mean, if that happens.
But there's going to be, with so many people and so many lawyers involved, everybody seems to think there's lots and lots of opportunity for this one to slip on the calendar, you know, compared to some of the others.
And even once it happens, someone pointed out there was another RICO trial that this, that Fonny Willis is also involved on that's currently ongoing in Georgia, where the jury selection phase alone, let alone anything else, took like seven or eight months. Wow.
|
Ivan:
[57:40]
| Wow.
|
Sam:
[57:45]
| So, so we will see like, but I think, you know, we talked last week, Yvonne, about how, okay, he's got four of these now.
Um, he may succeed in deleting, deleting in delaying.
Well, he may want, he may want to, yes, but he may succeed in delaying some of them past the election, but certainly he can't delay all of them.
|
Ivan:
[58:08]
| I mean, I don't, I don't see how, I mean, I just don't see how, I mean, there's this, he's going to be, you know, he's going to be at some point, he will be having to be at multiple trials at once.
|
Sam:
[58:22]
| Yeah, well, they'll have to schedule because like with the criminal charges, he's actually required to be physically present. So they will have to deconflict with each other.
But I think they can do that. Like, there's no reason they can't do that.
For the Georgia trial, Fonny Willis requested March 4th, I believe, if I'm remembering that correctly, which is the day before Super Tuesday, which would be fun and interesting.
Fantastic! She probably won't get that date. Like, we'll see how it goes, just like with the other.
And on the federal one, we had news just before we started recording this.
The federal prosecutors for the election case had requested January 2nd.
Let's do New Year's and then let's get started. January 2nd, 2024.
To be clear, the Trump team just came with their counter proposal for 2026.
|
Ivan:
[59:24]
| Listen, listen, that proposal is so, preposterous that I'm wondering if the judge is just going to just sanction the lawyers and just say, you know what, assholes, okay, you guys are already in contempt. You're pissing me off.
If this is the way we're going to start with this bullshit.
|
Sam:
[59:47]
| Well, at the very least, I mean, I saw someone say, well, this is the standard negotiating tax.
2024, they say 2026, the judge will be like, okay, 2025. No, I'm sorry.
No, the judge is, I was going to say future tense, but I'm sure it's already happened.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:05]
| The I mean, the judge doesn't listen, which defendant doesn't want.
Hey, why don't we delay the trial to 2050? The judge, well, you know, you know, 20 years from now. Yeah, well, we'll deal with it then.
What kind of fucking cockamamie bullshit is this?
|
Sam:
[1:00:20]
| With I cannot imagine any reaction other than laughter to seeing this.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:26]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:00:28]
| It's like you've got to be fucking kidding me.
Like, I mean, everybody expected them to suggest after the election, but more than a year after the election, come on, more than, I mean, basically 18 months after the election.
And so we'll see. They have, I believe it's on the 28th. So 10 more days until on that case, the judges said, I will take your proposals and I will tell you my answer. And this is when we'll start.
Probably not going to be January 2nd, but it sure as hell isn't going to be 2026.
And I don't think it's going to be 2025 either. I think it's going to be, uh, in 2024, probably in the first half of 2024, even if they have to like ask, like one of the civil cases to make way or even the New York criminal case, the, the prosecutor on that one has said, I will give no objections if this one needs to be moved back.
We'll see.
We've got, I think it's, by the end of next week, all of these new folks who were just indicted in Georgia have to present themselves and surrender to authorities.
It's not going to be at a courthouse. It's going to be at a jail that that they have to do the surrendering.
And according to the people who run that jail, this time, unlike the last three, there will be a mugshot of Donald Trump getting arrested.
Also, apparently this jail has no back door, so he's going to have to go in the front door where everybody has their cameras as he walks in.
So we'll get a little show. Now apparently Donald Trump is strategically trying to time his surrender to interfere with the Republican debate that he's not going to attend.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:31]
| Of course he is.
|
Sam:
[1:02:33]
| You know, either right before or right after. He would do it during if he could.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:38]
| He's not going to do any of these debates, right?
|
Sam:
[1:02:40]
| Of course not. It would be stupid.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:42]
| You know, he's not going to do any of these.
|
Sam:
[1:02:45]
| What Donald Trump has said about the debates, and he actually, he said this explicitly, which I'm sure made all of the other folks really excited.
He said, I don't think I'm going to attend the debate, but I'll be watching to see which one of them would be best as my vice president.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:03]
| I'm sure that, you know, there's quite a few of them on there that were his cycle feds for years, and I'm sure that the moment that if he gets the nomination, he calls them up to be the vice president.
They are going to be, Oh, I am so honored.
|
Sam:
[1:03:21]
| Yeah, frankly, I think half the people running are running for that purpose.
They, they have no illusions that they're going to be the nominee.
Yeah, they just want the visibility and to maybe be picked for VP.
Yeah. What else we got here, Yvonne?
We talked about the dates. Oh, yes, yes, yes. The other thing that's relevant to dates is that the judge in the DC case said that in terms of the conditions of what Donald Trump is supposed to be doing and not doing and blah blah blah basically said if you don't behave that will give me reason to put the trial earlier.
And meanwhile, Trump has been out there posting memes about how this judge is evil.
He's been out there saying negative things about the prosecutor in Georgia.
His team was, you know, there are all kinds of things like they're clearly Donald Trump pushing the limits to see how far these judges will let him go.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:33]
| So, um, oh, but, but wait, but, but, but, but hold on one second.
I believe according to Donald Trump on sometime earlier this week, this was on the 15th.
So two days ago, he, Donald posted on truth social saying that a large complex detailed bar interfere futile report.
Oh, yes, the report on the presidential election fraud, which took place in Georgia, is almost complete and will be presented by me at a major news conference at 11 a.m.
On Monday and of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey. Of course, you have to do this on a golf course. I mean, where else would you present any of this information if it's not at a golf course?
On the results of this conclusive in capital letters report.
All charges should be dropped against me and others. There will be a complete exoneration in capital letters. Again, they never went after those that rigged the election.
They only went after the after those that fought to fight the riskers.
Am I doing a good probably like Donald Trump, how he would be saying this if you were saying it.
|
Sam:
[1:05:51]
| Your Donald Trump impression could use some work, but...
|
Ivan:
[1:05:56]
| He's a lot of work, it's terrible.
|
Sam:
[1:06:02]
| Here, what to say, what to say. First of all, first of all, many people have pointed out, it is probably not a coincidence that rigors is close to another word that would get Donald Trump in trouble if he said it directly.
Because a lot of what he's been talking about basically boils down to black people shouldn't vote and we shouldn't count their votes.
And so that may be, you don't know.
Now he did not say that. I'm just saying, he did not actually say that, but many people have pointed out that there's a sonic convergence there.
But also his lawyers, apparently, as they well should, told him, Donald, this may not.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:54]
| Are you out of your fucking mind?
|
Sam:
[1:06:56]
| But, you know, the surprising thing to me me is apparently Donald has listened to them. He has canceled the thing on Monday.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:04]
| I think that, look, as much as bravado as he's showing.
He, you know, really has to be right now. He really is seriously scared of this entire thing at this moment.
I don't care how much bravado he's showing. He's got four fucking criminal indictments trying to each of which with many, many counties. These are not civil lawsuits.
|
Sam:
[1:07:30]
| No.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:31]
| This is, one of these goes, and he loses, he's going to jail.
|
Sam:
[1:07:36]
| And to be absolutely clear too, you mentioned four indictments, it's like 91 individual charges.
He only needs one of the 91 to potentially go to jail.
And in terms of his little bravado and, uh, acting out stuff, all it takes is one of these four judges being, I'm sick of your shit.
I'm called, you know, you're going, your bails revoked.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:07]
| You're going to jail until this trial.
|
Sam:
[1:08:09]
| Yeah. Or, if they didn't want to go that far, they could slap him in there for a few days.
They would probably escalate slowly. They wouldn't go straight to you're going to jail. But he's- Home confinement. Yeah. Home confinement, or even monetary fines. Hell, he doesn't like that either, right?
Just like, well, he's got the pack, you know, he'd pay for it.
But there's a series of steps they could take from a light warning to eventually you're going to jail. They obviously wouldn't jump right to the end of that.
And Donald Trump, here's the thing.
At some point, in order to avoid that, he has to back down. He hates backing down, but I'm pretty sure he'd hate jail more.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:01]
| I'm pretty sure he's going to hate jail. You know, I'm pretty sure he's not going to have that psychophant poor guy that he's completely conned.
What's a Walt now does his little valet thing, whatever, you know, carrying around his umbrella and, you know, polishing his shoes.
No, he's not going to have that in jail.
|
Sam:
[1:09:22]
| And probably not, you know.
The the the deeper we get into this the harder it is to imagine the scenario where he escapes completely Yeah, and even that to this day like and his defense seems to acknowledge this his Primary strategy is get elected president the federal stuff He could make go away right away if that happened the state stuff would be harder But you could imagine scenarios like if he hadn't already been convicted at that point there are precedents that existed that said, like, hey, if their state charges or whatever, they have to wait until he's not president anymore.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:03]
| Right, right, right.
|
Sam:
[1:10:04]
| You know, and so further push things into the future now. You know, and that's his his.
So his strategy at this point is delay, delay, delay. Try to be president.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:19]
| Yeah, I mean, that is, you know, about the only strategy that he's got really that guarantees him not going to jail.
|
Sam:
[1:10:28]
| And even that doesn't guarantee it.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:29]
| And even that doesn't guarantee it, but at least it gives them definitely a much better chance of not going to jail.
|
Sam:
[1:10:36]
| Now, the other bit, and I've said this before, and I'll throw it out there again, is counting on hung juries.
Like, given the fact patterns we have here, it's almost impossible to see a scenario to complete acquittals on everything.
Uh, hung juries, though, you can see that possibility because all it takes is one juror on each of these four trials, who's willing to just say, I don't care. I'm not going to convict him.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:06]
| But again, the odds of that gets reduced once again, because you know, there were four trials. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:11:13]
| Exactly.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:14]
| And so, and even if that four hung juries, I mean, it's, you know, Go.
Going to be difficult.
|
Sam:
[1:11:21]
| And even if it did happen, a mistrial, a mistrial or a sorry, I should say a hung jury.
You can retry the case.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:32]
| Exactly. It does result in more delay and more delay, which, you know, I guess, you know, I think that's the one thing his overall strategy always with most of this stuff has been delay, delay, delay, delay, delay, delay, delay, and he's playing that book right now as much as possible.
I mean, hell, I mean, he asked for a damn trial in twenty twenty six. The fucking bastard.
|
Sam:
[1:11:54]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:57]
| Oh, gosh. Anyway. All right. Anyway, enough, Trump, enough, Trump, enough, Trump.
Fuck this guy. I hate this guy. You know, it's just I want fucking Trump to go away. I want my construction project here to finish. I'm so sick and tired of fucking construction.
I'm sick and tired of dealing with contracts and builders.
I want these feet, I want this fucking thing to end and I'm sick and tired of Trump. Those are my two biggest, like fucking things.
I would be, I think my mood would improve drastically if I, those two things were to go away. I think my construction project will be done sometime by the end of the year, but fuck it's man, it's torture.
|
Sam:
[1:12:41]
| Okay. Well, let's take a break and we will come back with one subject from each of us. We'll see where we go with that. Um, I'll give it.
I swear. I use a random number generator to pick these, but we are for a second break. This week, we're having the same as what I believe was the second break last week. It was last week for sure.
Anyway, here we go once again with bugs on my face.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:09]
| Nice. No. No, that was.
|
Sam:
[1:13:52]
| Okay. So, Ivan.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:53]
| You're- Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:13:55]
| So, Ivan. You're- Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:57]
| So, Ivan. You're- Okay. So, Ivan.
|
Sam:
[1:14:04]
| Twitter throttling didn't they do this a while back and then stop again like it is i don't remember i don't i don't remember them doing it a while back no but this is like a about a month ago there was a big thing with twitter but this week.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:18]
| They, well, no, but the kind of throttling I'm talking about is I think, you know, we're talking about a month backward or restricting how many tweets and stuff or whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:14:26]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:27]
| Yeah. Yeah. But, but no, this time what they did is that, uh, Elon had like, say all these publications he doesn't like, whenever you click on the link, this, they opened slowly.
You would have to sit there waiting one, two, three, four, five.
|
Sam:
[1:14:45]
| And then the key to the key to understand this is on trip on Trader Trader on Twitter shitter. Oh, sorry.
X on X. What am I even thinking? There is no Twitter anymore.
It's a shitter shitter. Yeah, sure.
But the way they if you include a link in a tweet, it doesn't actually include the URL that you were trying to link to. Right.
URL shortener, the Twitter one is t.co, lots of those are out there, it basically takes it from a big long URL to a short one with just a few characters, and what that allows is that when you click on it, before it goes to wherever you're going, it goes to Twitter's own servers.
This traditionally has been used for tracking and stuff. They know what you click on, what you don't, which links are popular, which ones aren't.
They can use the fact that you clicked on it to sort of gauge your level of interest and tailor the algorithm.
They can do all kinds of things with that information. But basically, they go to the Twitter server first, it logs it, does whatever they're doing with it, and then it sends you on your way to wherever your original destination was. But.
There's no reason they can't do other things before sending you on to on your way in this case apparently they just.
Decided to add a five second delay just wait five seconds then send you now but they did it not to everybody.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:20]
| Right they did it to a whole bunch of organizations that mr free speech absolutist.
|
Sam:
[1:16:27]
| Hates and and apparently it wasn't always five seconds either the length of time Dependent on how much he hated your organization.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:35]
| Yes So, you know, I mean Anybody else want to try to sell me on the fucking cock a baby bullshit that he's after free speech Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah But X is more vibrant than it ever was before as Twitter.
It's still great Still great.
|
Sam:
[1:16:55]
| They're adding excellent new features.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:58]
| They're doing great. Fantastic.
|
Sam:
[1:17:01]
| All the coolest people are still there.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:04]
| I mean Twitter traffic traffic to the Twitter.
There was before Elon took over.
Twitter Twitter was one of the top. top five in traffic on on the Internet.
Okay, they've already dropped out of the top 20. At this point, I mean, that's a brutal fall.
Okay, for a company that basically I got traffic is their lifeblood.
That's what makes some money.
I mean, you know, so anything that he's trying to tell me that that this thing is better financially in any way shape or form that more people are on it is just complete horseshit.
It's just a lie. I mean, they have bled users, they have bled revenue.
I mean, they're just not, you know.
It's not it's not a good situation for them like right now so i did see by the way you know that the seat there ceo came out after.
Recently you must said who the fuck needs a ceo that you're useless okay.
Um, and I'm just like, I mean, I, I gotta imagine that you're, you gotta be sitting on your toilet, let the Yakarito in the morning and read this tweet and you're like, Oh, a new CEO, she's gotta be like, Oh, great.
Well, this is, this is the job I took on. This is good.
The fucking useless. Um, you know, I will say one thing that apparently she does have, uh, apparently she brought back somebody to PR department.
So you don't just get a poop emoji every time that you said something to that PR. Oh, they did?
|
Sam:
[1:18:58]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:58]
| Oh, well, because I did. Yeah, because I did hear that they asked for a comment related to that, and they actually got a no comment response.
|
Sam:
[1:19:10]
| OK, so you're sure they weren't just interpreting the poop as a no comment?
|
Ivan:
[1:19:14]
| I don't think so. No, I because usually everybody that has said whatever we've elicited a response, they have they have explicitly said that that's what they got.
I'm pretty sure most of these guys, if they're, you know, this was a real reporting, uh, you know, entity.
I read it. I think it was New York times, something, whatever they, they reported what they got, apparently they got this time a no comment from somebody.
So, wow. Apparently she was able to, you know, do that. I mean, I would say that if I'm a CEO, I really would like my PR department not to be sending poop emojis.
|
Sam:
[1:19:50]
| Oh, yeah. You're not funny, Vaughn.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:51]
| No, I know. I know. I know.
|
Sam:
[1:19:53]
| I know. Elon knows better.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:55]
| Yeah, yeah, I know. Terrible, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:19:57]
| So, so let me ask, while we're on text-based social media, let's expand a little bit.
First of all, anything else to say about Twatter? Twatter? Anything else to say about X before I ask you about, like, some threads and Mastodon stuff?
|
Ivan:
[1:20:18]
| I mean, uh, uh, no.
|
Sam:
[1:20:21]
| Okay, let me ask about threads. Are you still using it actively?
|
Ivan:
[1:20:24]
| I am using it. I'm I'm still using it every day.
And there's a lot of there's, you know, look, there was a flurry, obviously, of activity that dropped off afterwards.
But there's quite a lot of people that I regularly follow that are on that are actively on threads. And so, you know, and there's a lot of news and information sites that are publishing regularly on threads.
You know, there's a lot of people on threads. It's not the the crazy frantic level of of people that joined in the first day.
But, um, but yeah, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of people that are.
And a lot of publications, um, you know, I, I'm noticing that, you know, New York times and a lot of those there, you know, they, they have feeds their official feeds that they're posting.
They're, they're posting their news, their NPR.
Um, I see people that I follow from sports like, uh, ESPN and whatever that they're have their accounts there. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:21:25]
| That's one thing for sure. Like I, I don't check it. I don't check it every day, but I check it a few times a week.
And now that they've added the followed throughout, uh, you know, you can, you can just see your followers, the people you follow.
Um, I, I, I go there, I flip straight to that. And of course, what have I followed?
I followed a lot of news organizations and a lot of politicians and a lot of reporters. And so, and so I see a bunch of those, right? That's the first thing I see if I go there.
Um, and, and that's okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:00]
| I'll Frank it on here. He just said something about the Trump trial.
Look, I'm looking at it right now. All Trump has to do is to is convince a jury that he believed he won.
He believed that 61 judges, his campaign team, his DOJ, the White House counsel and every other credible advisor was wrong and instead believe Cindy Powell was right, that he should be president. Well, that's actually incorrect.
Oh, sorry. But he doesn't actually need that.
|
Sam:
[1:22:24]
| You know, he doesn't need that. Yeah. even if he, even if he proved that he actually won the freaking election, that would not mean that he would did not commit crimes here.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:36]
| Correct. Exactly. So no, no, no, Al, sorry. You're wrong. Okay. Yeah. Next. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:22:41]
| Anyway, anyway, the, the, so it's down from where it was.
It's, it's I, I don't, I haven't been to Twitter for comparison lately, but it's, it seems like at least sort of like you were saying, sort of the major organizational accounts are, are liking it.
And there's stuff there from there. I, you know, and I still haven't felt really compelled to check it like multiple times a day, but it's clearly got something going on still.
And we'll see how it evolves. I don't know. And I'm still looking forward to them federating with Mastodon.
If that ever happens, I will love that.
Um, uh, despite all the people upset about that.
And we'll see, apparently they pushed that off.
At first, it was sounding like they were talking like maybe two or three months after launch.
Now it seems like it might be closer to nine months or a year after launch before they get around to that kind of stuff. Or maybe it won't happen at all, right? Like, I don't know, but I still hope that happens. I think that would be a good thing if it happens.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:47]
| Yes, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:23:48]
| The other thing I wanted to mention on this before I jump to my topic, Um, we were talking, we've talked a few times about some of the problems with like Mastodon's decentralized nonprofit model, where it's just like a lot of people run instances as volunteers and rely on donations and stuff like that.
Um, the curmudgeon's corner account and my election graphs count are both on a service called newsy dot social.
Um, and they, and I've noted, I noted before, sometimes they have like the long delays that you talked about, Yvonne, like your server sometimes have that my server has fixed.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:29]
| They actually did add capacity recently that finally that's been fixed.
|
Sam:
[1:24:33]
| Okay. Well, Newsy.social I've noticed, like, I don't read my feed off Newsy.social, because I do that off my Apple's may account, my personal account, but I do like people occasionally reply to like election graphs.
And often I've found they reply to both abelsmay and election graphs.
And there's a significant delay. I will get it at abelsmay almost instantly.
And it will be hours and hours later before it shows up at Newsy.social.
Sometimes it's been one hour at the low end, but at the high end, there was one that took 12.
And I'm like, and this is part of that problem, but also to the point, like the guy who runs Newsy.social, which I picked because it's explicitly said it was US based and expressly said that it was intended as a place for like news people and news junkies and stuff like that.
And I'm like, that's perfect for both curmudgeon's corner and election graph.
So that's why I picked it. But he, he made a post last week, basically saying that, hey, look, guys, Newsy.social is costing me about $2,000 a month to run at this point.
And the donations I have coming in are a couple hundred bucks a month.
I can't keep that up. I've been pulling from other income sources to support Newsy.social.
And if we can't boost donations to the point where...
It's at least breaking even break even right then i'm gonna have to shut it down um, and he gave a deadline like six months away or something like that but fundamentally this is one of the problems with the decentralized volunteer model you know and the decentralized volunteer model where you're you're not doing it for profit is the problem because it it's one of these things where there There is no advertising, uh, coming in or other things to, in order to make money.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:45]
| It's basically you're working off donations. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:26:50]
| So I, I up to my donations, I, I had been giving a token like $2 a month or something.
I upped it to $25 a month, you know, cause I'm like, you know, I, I want to support it. I want to, you know, use it. I don't want to move my damn accounts either.
Like, cause on Mastodon, you can migrate to other places, but.
As it exists today, you don't take your post history with you.
And you know, and it's even like, I forget which, like your followers come along, but who you're following, you have to like manually like export and re-import and it's a pain in the ass and it's not like a full migration.
And so I don't want to do that. And like, I want to support it.
But like, apparently like, you know, out of however many 10, he has like 20, 30,000 users. I forget exactly how many on that server.
Uh, but very few of them are actually donating. Uh, and then, you know, and I wasn't helping all that much by only given like, I think it was $2 and 70 something cents a month or something.
So I, I boosted it. I like, I can't afford to like, you know, give them a few hundred a month or something, but I'll, I'll give 25.
But, like, unless a whole bunch of other people are doing that, at some point he's going to have to say, I'm sorry, I can't do it anymore.
And this is an—, And there have been other servers since I joined Mastodon that I've watched where it wasn't necessarily financial, but the administrator who ran the thing just up and said, I don't want to do this anymore.
It's a pain in my ass. I'm people are complaining about my moderation policies and fuck this. I'm out and have just shut down their servers. Yep.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:34]
| I've seen those. Yep.
|
Sam:
[1:28:36]
| And some people like say, you know, oh, the Federation is like, it's the whole, It's the big strength of this.
If you don't like the moderation policies where you are, you just go somewhere else.
You blah, blah, blah. All these benefits of like, you know, you don't have a, a corporation running everything and, and distorting everything for profit.
And okay. I agree with, like, I like the fact that it's nonprofit and volunteer stuff in principle, but in reality, I want my shit to work.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:06]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:29:07]
| And to be reliable and to have some level of confidence that what I'm using today will be here next year.
And, you know, I know you don't have that 100% on the corporate side either, but it seems like here you're at the whims of all kinds of local stuff and politics and finances that are out of your control.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:29]
| Well on Shitter, you're at the whims of Elon. I mean, so that's the problem.
I mean, you know, but I, I, I do, you know, I think that the, the biggest issue like with, with, um, Macedon is it's just a funding source for it.
It's, it's complicated when you don't have a subscription model or you don't have, uh, an advertising revenue model or some other way that you're bringing in revenue, um, you know, it gets complicated.
|
Sam:
[1:29:59]
| That then you're pretty, you, you're pretty much like if, if running a server that has 20,000 people on it costs $2,000 a month, you need someone who can just say, you know, I can afford $2,000 a month and I want to support you.
Otherwise you're out of luck, you know? I mean, maybe you can get somewhere with, with, with sort of the volunteer donations, but.
You have to really push that.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:24]
| The problem is also in the Fediverse. Here's the one thing about it also.
Unlike, like, say, you know, Wikipedia is free, OK? Yeah.
Wikipedia is free. But but, you know, they get donations. But the thing is, Wikipedia is one entity that is able to gather donations on a global basis.
And as far as I remember, Wikipedia is swimming in money. They get so many donations, OK, on a global basis.
|
Sam:
[1:30:46]
| I have regular monthly donations to Wikipedia and my and my wife does, too. separately.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:52]
| And so, so they are swimming in money. However, the problem is that there is no one Macedon that could go and like, you know, give money.
So you've got servers that have plenty of money and donations, and then you've got others that are, you know, just struggling and can't afford to pay the bills.
|
Sam:
[1:31:12]
| And this is the, this is the thing where lots of, lots of people were pushing, Hey, if you're going on Mastodon, you don't want one of the big servers, you want one of the small servers, but the longer I'm here, the longer I'm like, I'm glad I have my main account on Mastodon.net social, which is the biggest one.
It's well-funded and it's likely not. If it goes down, all of Mastodon is going down practically.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:34]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:31:34]
| You know, whereas like I'm looking and saying, you know, should I have put these other accounts on smaller servers?
I didn't even realize how small they were until after I was on them.
Right. you know, I wasn't paying attention to that.
And so the push is going to be like, if you have this kind of flakiness, then over time, yeah, people are going to migrate to the big ones and it's going to be more centralized anyway.
Yep, yep, yep, okay. Um, I was kind of piggybacking off yours.
Um, right. The one, the thing I actually wanted to bring up for my last topic.
Um, and let me, let me start by giving an example that was going around this week.
Um, which is, I don't know if they've fixed this yet. So let me, let me check this. Let me check this, they may have already fixed it.
Uhm, but I am going to Google. And I am typing.
Uhm, country in Africa that starts with hey, what do you get?
And let's see what it still does it. OK, this this was going around social media like a couple days ago.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:59]
| Uh-huh.
|
Sam:
[1:33:00]
| The answer that Google comes up, you know how Google has right at the very top, like before they give you search results, they give you like, if they think they know the answer to the question, they'll just answer the question. Here's what Google says right now.
While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter K.
The closest is Kenya, which starts with a K sound, but is actually spelled with a K sound.
It is always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:32]
| The fuck are they talking about?
The hell the fuck is this shit?
|
Sam:
[1:33:40]
| This is the large language model AI answering the question.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:47]
| Oh, that's very helpful.
|
Sam:
[1:33:50]
| So boom, completely and totally wrong answer.
Wrong. And so my topic in general is the fucking hype over AI right now, and people jumping on the bandwagon to try to do AI shit.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:10]
| Didn't I say this already a couple of weeks ago? So now you're latching on to my ... You know what I said, which is that I said that these damn things are just utter bullshit. All they're doing is regurgitating this kind of nonsense.
|
Sam:
[1:34:25]
| We always agreed on that. I said, I have hope that someday this will continue to improve and be better.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:31]
| I do too, by the way. I do too.
|
Sam:
[1:34:34]
| But we all agreed that the current state, like we talked about this like, I don't know, six months, nine months, a year ago, whenever chat GPT started getting big, and some of the models that do like images and video to that.
But specifically from the text-based language model ones, they are just so bad.
And I recognize there are places where they're possible and there are some places where they might be helpful or useful in some limited contexts, but the majority of these, I mean what they are built for is to make something that sounds good, not something that's true or accurate.
Correct. And so the fact that companies like Google and Microsoft are putting this as the first fucking thing that comes up when you do a search, they're out of their fucking minds.
And there's AI efforts sprouting up everywhere, all over the place, in every freaking company you can think of is trying to figure out some way to utilize this, and this is just fucking bad.
I mean, we, we talked the other day about how like, um, the, with the actors and writers strike one of the things there. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:52]
| Um, look, I, I will, I will say this. I think that the big tech companies are trying to put this everywhere in their companies and some bigger companies as well, because it's the buzzword of the week.
It's like, as we get these buzzwords of whatever, and then every executive is telling everybody to, to try to come up with some shit.
But the reality is that my experience has been like right now in terms of dealing with the companies that I deal with, which were most part are, are banks, central banks, um, you know, uh, large telephone companies.
|
Sam:
[1:36:24]
| Well, those kind of companies are much more conservative about.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:27]
| Well, that's what I, but that's what I'm saying. But that's, that's the bulk of our economy. Okay. Outside of tech.
And none of those companies are asking me any of that shit. Okay.
I haven't gotten a single...
Inquiry yet or seen any project like, you know, out there, um, with these guys trying to do something like that, maybe something in some small scale for certain stuff, but I have not seen anything, you know, where they're coming in, Hey, how are we going to do this?
We, I, I'm like, Oh, fuck. I see now.
|
Sam:
[1:37:01]
| And look here, here's some things. First of all, this is very cool technology and in certain areas, it may be useful.
I saw somebody post an article a week or two ago that they'd actually done some tests like most of these large language models That they are the ones you're hearing about chat GPT What Microsoft and Google are using all this kind of stuff are based on training off like these huge Datasets that basically tried to suck in like as much of the internet as they could right?
Um, but there've been studies that have shown that you can actually get really good results in specialized areas by ingesting a very small amount of limited, highly trusted content. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:45]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:37:45]
| And so like you, you want, you want a system that's going to tell you good stuff about topic X.
Will you go and find really good, reliable content on topic X and you train it on that and that only.
Correct. And it's not going to answer your random Google questions.
But if you want summaries of information in whatever field X was, that'll actually do pretty good.
But these, like, I mean, come on, people.
If you want accuracy, you're going to train it on the whole fucking internet?
What the hell are you thinking?
Of all possible things you could do. Now, and to be fair also, like, the ones that are working on images or video, some of those have really cool freaking results.
Okay, you can do some really neat stuff with that and you can produce some nice Passable artwork that you can use to illustrate articles and stuff now They have other issues as like the artists and the writers and folks have pointed out It's basically stealing and remixing shit from other what other people have put on the internet over the years Now and in some cases, it's like you could argue that it's fair use and the way they're using it in other cases people people pointed out that it like has lifted images almost verbatim, including like watermarks and crap that were on it.
So it's just not, there are all kinds of issues even with that.
Uh, but the text-based stuff, I just like, people are so excited about diving in and using it just for everything they can possibly think of, whereas really the approach at this point to this technology should be really careful and be like, okay, this may be useful in certain, very limited domains.
Let's figure it out. Let's test it carefully. Let's use it where it makes sense.
Let's not use it where it doesn't make sense.
And let's be very cognizant of.
Fundamentally, if one of the things you need is factual accuracy, these models are not your solution.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:53]
| No.
|
Sam:
[1:39:55]
| You know, if you want it, if you want to do like some of the fun stuff that when chat GPT first came out, like, you know, write me to the lyrics of a song in the style, in the style of Dolly Parton about astrophysics or whatever, and boom, it would spit something out and it was funny and it was entertaining.
Okay, fine. You don't care if it's factually accurate, right?
You're asking for entertainment, but if you're asking for, is there a country in Africa that that starts with the letter K.
And it tells you no, but the closest is Kenya, which starts with a K.
Oh, K sound, but it's spelled with a K sound. It's like, I mean, it's so stupid.
You're just spitting back nonsense. You are spitting back nonsense.
And apparently the reason it did so it actually has the link below it.
There's a website called emergent mind.
Trained out, which was also just spitting back chat GPT, which is another problem with these things, which is eating its own shit.
The more AI-generated stuff gets on the internet and they continue to retrain based on the internet, it's just going to get worse and worse because it's garbage in, garbage out, the old phrase on this stuff.
And I just, it makes me like upset.
I don't know. I like, I want to bang my head on the table when I see all of these companies like big, like Google and Microsoft and all of these big tech companies and some non-tech companies like rushing in headlong to this stuff without being careful about it.
It's like, you know, this is going to crash and burn. Right. Because it's stupid.
You know, and again, I'm sure there are good ways to use this technology if you're careful. I'm also sure it'll get better over the years.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:02]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:42:03]
| But fundamentally also, like, I don't think you can take this large language model approach of statistically analyzing text and jump it to something that really does need to understand what's true and what's not with just making bigger and bigger models.
You have to add something explicitly that cares about truth and tries to understand what the fuck it's talking about.
Or you're not going to make that additional leap. And so, like, you get nonsense like this. And again, if it's just for entertainment, who cares? But if you're...
You shouldn't be passing this off as something that's, like, factual or real. And it's just... the fact that they're even trying to...
Depresses me. That's the right word. It's, it's, it's just like, what are you thinking?
Of course, this is going to crash and you're going to have problems because of this, and I just hope they like pull the plug soon enough that it's not a huge disaster when it happens. I don't know. And again, it'll get better, but this is ridiculous.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:05]
| I mean, yeah, it's ridiculous. And I do think that a lot of, you know, uh, companies are one day start seeing more and more of this garbage.
They're going to throttle it back. And I agree with you that the best use case is what you said.
It's like, you know, you give it, say, certain specific, like a certain specific area of of where you want to feed it something to be an expert on.
It could be really good at helping with that. But man, I mean, what they're doing right now is just dumb, fucking dumb. No other.
|
Sam:
[1:43:38]
| No. You know, yeah, there's no other way to put it. It's it's it's dumb, it's stupid.
And I'm, come on people, do better. And I know you're excited about the cool new thing, but use it responsibly.
I don't know. You know, I don't know.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:56]
| Well, you know, pretty soon, I mean, you know, you'll get your performance evaluations performed by the AI bot.
|
Sam:
[1:44:03]
| Can I, can I write myself reviews that way?
|
Ivan:
[1:44:06]
| Probably I'm sure.
|
Sam:
[1:44:07]
| You know, I have, I have to write some self review bullshit for like mid year, like next week or something. I've been putting it off. I probably should have done it this.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:16]
| You know, I have to admit, I have not had a performance evaluation done to me in.
|
Sam:
[1:44:23]
| Cause they just look at the fucking number. Jesus Christ.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:25]
| Holy smokes.
Six, seven, eight, nine. Jesus, I think it's been more than a decade.
|
Sam:
[1:44:39]
| Nice. I hate the whole process.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:43]
| I, I know everybody's not minding that it's not happened and I've gotten pay increases and other stuff along the way, but I, like I said, with your job, they just look at the damn number.
|
Sam:
[1:44:54]
| They don't need to know anything else.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:56]
| It, most of the time that is true. They just look at the damn number and you know, whatever.
It's like, you know, so, but we don't care how you did it.
|
Sam:
[1:45:05]
| We don't care about the details.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:08]
| We don't have one manager that was depressingly, uh, you know, focused on how I did it, which did not meet their their way of doing.
And they were kind of pissed about it. The problem is that, um, you know, speaking this company particular, you know, we're talking about stats and, uh, you know, people having to put in mindless stuff to, and they wanted to measure, you know, doing some stuff that, that you could manipulate in terms of statistics.
They, they insisted that they wanted our, my salespeople to log how much time they spent on each task every day.
I mean, it's like, I'm like, we're not billable, we're not building hours, sales.
What do you want to know that I, you know, you want me to fill out time sheets that I spent two hours on this deal, three hours on that deal, two hours, you know, four on that deal, what the hell, who cares?
And I had found some way to fill out the time sheets to reduce the amount of work, and they weren't happy about it.
It because they, I guess, I don't know. I was messing up with our beautiful metrics.
|
Sam:
[1:46:34]
| Ah, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:35]
| Well, anyway, at the same time, here's the one thing. There are beautiful metrics, which are pissed off that I wasn't reflecting.
Meanwhile, my team was the most productive sales wise in the company.
And I'm like, you guys are pissed off at the metrics. Well, we're bringing the most revenue. What the fuck is wrong with all of you?
|
Sam:
[1:46:55]
| I, well, all I have to say to wrap up this topic, then Yvonne is what you need to do is for the next month, all communications between you and your clients, your customers need to be written by chat. GPT.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:14]
| You know, I should try at least to ask chat GPT every time. What would you say to this customer? And compared to my answer, that would be an interesting experiment.
|
Sam:
[1:47:27]
| See, now, response, yeah, like, and here's the thing.
This is one of the cases where, like, you giving it a prompt and then taking what it comes back, reading it carefully, making sure it makes sense, using it as inspiration, perhaps, for some phrases or words that you might use, and then writing your own shit might be okay.
But asking it that question and then copying and pasting it and sending it without looking at it.
You would be fucking yourself so badly. Anyway. Okay, I think we're done, Yvonne. I think we're done.
So here we go for the stuff at the end. Go to curmudgeon-corner.com.
You can find all the ways to contact us. You can find our archives, including for the last almost two months now, I think.
Transcripts, transcripts of every show.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:18]
| Transcripts! Transcripts, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:48:21]
| Oh, Yvonne, did, did anybody contact you about the Muppet musical version of curmudgeon's corner?
|
Ivan:
[1:48:28]
| You know, unfortunately, no, man.
|
Sam:
[1:48:30]
| I know.
Anyway, you can find our transcripts. You can find a way to contact us.
You can also find our Patreon where you can donate money and we would love it.
If you do that at various levels, we will mention you on the show.
We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug, all that kind of stuff. There you go.
And very importantly for $2 a month or more, or if you ask nicely, or even if you ask rudely, we will invite you to our curmudgeon's corner Slack where Yvonne and I, and a bunch of our listeners hang out throughout the week, share links, chat, all kinds of stuff.
Uh, so Yvonne, how about one thing that we talked about on the curmudgeon's corner Slack this week that we have not. Mentioned on the show.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:19]
| Ah, Gen Z is replacing LOL with a new word, but we'll never stop warning.
Warring over not warning, warring over how to laugh online.
|
Sam:
[1:49:35]
| OK, so apparently I looked at this earlier and I can't even remember the stupid new one because I can't remember either.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:41]
| I just had to look it up.
|
Sam:
[1:49:43]
| It's like five letters instead of three. Wasn't the whole point of this five letters?
|
Ivan:
[1:49:47]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:49:47]
| Uh, they, they, they, and also can't you just use emojis now?
|
Ivan:
[1:49:52]
| I, that's what I thought too, but you know, people, you know, they, they want to, uh, use I J B O L and which stands for what Yvonne, I just blew a load.
I don't know. I just, I just burst.
I mean, this is ridiculous. I just burst out laughing.
|
Sam:
[1:50:12]
| You know, here, here's the thing, this whole article that you shared, oh, by the way, what was the title?
|
Ivan:
[1:50:19]
| I shared is Bob, Bob shared.
|
Sam:
[1:50:21]
| Okay, well give a reference to it so people can find it.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:24]
| It's called it's on slate.
Okay, the the subject, the title of the article is rip, lo, comma, lol.
The once beloved, beloved, beloved, beloved, beloved, Jesus Christ, beloved acronym had withered grotesquely with age.
Now a new, more virile, chortle has risen to takes its place.
|
Sam:
[1:50:52]
| You know, this whole article.
Reminds me of all of those stupid little thing.
No, not chat GPT, but period periodically, every once in a while, you see things of like, beware, know what your teenagers are talking about behind your back because they use these new phrases that as code to talk without their parents, knowing what they're talking about, which, you know, okay.
Okay. Every generation has new phrases that they use that in the previous generation didn't.
I mean, that's normal. That's completely normal, but I will guarantee you by the time you see something about that in a major news, they've already moved on by path.
They've already moved on. Like the fact that that gets published somewhere means that that was old news a year ago. It's dead. It's over.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:45]
| It's it's dead. It's it's old. It's dead because we're behind at times.
I could totally agree with you. And I'm just like, you know, like, I will say, I, but, but look, I have seen online some, some of these arguments relate to some of this stuff, like punctuation.
|
Sam:
[1:52:02]
| Yes. Yes. There's the, you using a period in a text is rude.
On ellipsis makes people really nervous if you use it and blah, blah, blah.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:11]
| And I, and lately I've just started to actually adding more periods.
Like screw all of you.
|
Sam:
[1:52:19]
| And people really hate the double space after periods that people at our age and older got trained to do.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:25]
| If I fuck them to, you know, just they can all go.
I mean, here's my thing about it. My thing is, listen, you don't have to like my fucking periods.
You don't have to like my double spaces.
I wasn't complaining that you weren't fucking using periods or I would prefer to use some punctuation. OK.
But, but, you know, I'm not complaining about it and sometimes I'm bad at it.
I mean, sometimes I'm in a hurry and I don't use it myself, but these people that are like policing and like getting all, Oh, I'm offended that you, you know, put in a period, I'm like, get the fuck out of here. Okay. You know?
|
Sam:
[1:53:04]
| Well, the other thing about articles like this is half the time.
I feel like, no, no, one's actually using that. Somebody is putting you on, you know?
And, you know, maybe sometimes they are like, like the things you've talked about, I've heard so many people do the thing about like, you know, an ellipsis is like ominous and, you know, Gen X and above use it just to mean a pause, but Gen, Gen Millennials and Gen Z interpret it as passive aggressive and stuff like that.
I've heard it from enough people that I'm like, okay, that's probably a real thing.
Right and I actually unlike unlike you I have consciously like when I find myself using an ellipsis for work communication I'm like, okay, maybe I shouldn't do that.
I'll just put a period or dash or something I'll I'll change because I don't want to upset anybody But but some of these things like whatever the hell abbreviation you just said, which I've already forgotten again I'm like really I can't somebody really doing that But on the other hand, even like, LOL, at some point was a brand new thing that people were like, what do you, people are doing that.
Are you sure? You know? So, okay.
Well, uh, I was trying to think of an acronym to sign off the show with, but I guess GFY isn't a good one.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:30]
| I think it's perfect.
|
Sam:
[1:54:32]
| Perfect. Okay. Well, Hey, everybody, uh, stay safe. Have a good week and GFY and we're out of here. Good. Goodbye. Bye.
Oh, I should hit the button. Okay. Bye.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:48]
| Yes, that helps. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:54:49]
| Yeah, I'm like mouse mouse button here. Bye everyone.
Maybe it'll go. Come on. Here we go.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:59]
| It's thinking we're exiting or exiting exit.
|
Sam:
[1:55:04]
| Go on.
We're thinking the outro should play any second now, I hit the button and it got a little spinning wheel. It's doing something.
LIAM Now you sound like Seinbrenner and it's- SEAN I can always add it when I edit the damn thing, but I'm supposed to be able to push the button and play the outro. And it's like, it's confused.
So okay, everyone, goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:55:28]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:55:30]
| Okay, I'm going to stop the recording, here we go.
| |
|
