Automated Transcript
Matt:
[0:00]
| Hello, Sammy.
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Sam:
[0:02]
| How you doing?
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Matt:
[0:04]
| I'm good. Oh my God. It's been a minute.
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Sam:
[0:09]
| Just a few.
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Matt:
[0:10]
| Just a few. Oh my gosh.
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Sam:
[0:14]
| Before we get started, how you doing? How's the family?
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Matt:
[0:18]
| Family is keeping me very busy.
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Sam:
[0:21]
| Yeah. Yeah.
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Matt:
[0:22]
| Yeah. We, I have one woman from college. i have one getting ready to go to college yeah and then i have another one who's going to be a sophomore in high school nice.
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Sam:
[0:35]
| And my dog's barking over there so very very nice i.
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Matt:
[0:41]
| Mean i'm used to i'm used to seeing just your headshots on just on the on the cover photo which.
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Sam:
[0:47]
| Are nice and old at this point.
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Matt:
[0:49]
| It's really yeah it's really old yeah i think.
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Sam:
[0:52]
| The those headshots were i don't know they we we went to dc once and all met together probably 10 years ago now something like that.
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Matt:
[1:02]
| Yeah so yeah yeah i i i will have to say yeah i i have still listened to every single fucking episode i am that's unbelievable call it oh call it ocd call it add i don't know but like it's it's literally it it's part of my routine i i subscribe i know you subscribe to a kabillion things yeah i subscribe to two podcasts and you're one of them well.
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Sam:
[1:31]
| Thank thank you very much we we definitely appreciate that it's been a i mean this is uh What's the number on this one? This is episode 883. So, 883 weeks, which is however many freaking years. 2007. 2007. June 2007.
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Matt:
[1:55]
| The reason I know this is because I... I was working for a company in Philly from 06 to 07. Then I left that company. I started working for another consulting company in Morristown, New Jersey. And it was an hour and 45 minute commute. And you had, you guys just started and it was like 15 to 20 minutes.
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Sam:
[2:18]
| Yeah.
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Matt:
[2:19]
| We're doing 15 to 20 minutes. And I was like, okay, well, I'll listen to this and something else.
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Sam:
[2:26]
| And, uh, and then we couldn't stop talking.
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Matt:
[2:28]
| And then you guys couldn't stop talking. yeah so like it filled up my entire one way of a commute and then it you know at one point it was it was you know taken longer than one way.
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Sam:
[2:36]
| Nice so.
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Matt:
[2:38]
| That's how i know it was 2007 because it's when i started that job.
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Sam:
[2:40]
| In north japan yeah excellent so there let's see uh your plan seemed fine like the four that you selected so i i think what we'll do is we'll start you said you wanted to talk movies too so we can talk movies at the beginning then take a break and And then maybe two of your topics in one segment and then the last two in a third segment. And then we're done.
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Matt:
[3:05]
| You just tell me what to do, man.
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Sam:
[3:07]
| Okay.
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Matt:
[3:09]
| I'm here. I'm here for the ride because I said, because I remember saying however long ago, sure, send me these emails. And if I could do it, I'll do it. And I was, I was really close one time. And then like, this is the, this is the best it's ever been. I was like, you know, really only doing one thing this morning. I actually had to do work. I had to do work this morning. And that sucks.
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Sam:
[3:28]
| Yeah.
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Matt:
[3:29]
| And then I was and then I was available for the rest of the day.
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Sam:
[3:34]
| Cool. Okay. So we let's let's get this thing started. Here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, May 11th, 2024. It's just before 21 UTC as we're starting to record. I am Sam Minter. And as you may have guessed from the little bit right before the music started, Yvonne Bo is not with us this week. Yvonne texted me a couple hours before we were going to record on Friday night US time and was like, I'm sick. I can't do this. And so we We have Matt, who is, as you probably also heard, a long time, like forever listener of this podcast from the very beginning. So we really appreciate it. But it's his first time actually on the show. So welcome, Matt.
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Matt:
[4:43]
| Hello, Sam. Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me. And it's going to be weird because I'm going to have to listen to this episode too. But it's going to be pretty surreal.
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Sam:
[4:54]
| And yeah you're it's it's it's weird listening to yourself sometimes i like obviously i listen when i'm editing and then i do i i have fallen so far behind on listening to the shows i used to be doing it in order now it's just sort of they're all in my inventory and i randomly sample them sometimes but most of the time these days when i'm listening to podcasts i'm just listening to the podcast version of news shows from like the last 24 hours, maybe the last week. And it's only sometimes that I'll like do the, okay, let's do a random shuffle of all my podcasts or let's do a shuffle of everything. And so I'm just way behind like the, the last, the episode, the, the, the first episode I have not listened to in full at this point is still it's, it's the election where we are reacting to, to the 2020 election results. So I am like just under four years behind at this point, listening to my own podcast, but you know, it is, and, but I sometimes listen out of order. So I've, I've listened to the entirety of some episodes that are much more recent than that, but yeah.
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Matt:
[6:08]
| You also have crazy, you also go off a crazy list. So, you know, you have a list of 2000 things and you're on like number five.
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Sam:
[6:16]
| Yeah something like that i'm and i i'm slowly starting to like purge some of those like whenever i do goes on do go on those things where i'm like just randomly pick from all the podcasts i got if if one comes up and i'm like hey i'm i'm really just not into this i'm actually unsubscribing to them now like there there's there was a lot that i subscribed to because it was like oh this sounds like it would be cool and i added the subscription and you know but But sometimes at this point, it's like, I don't know why I originally thought that one might be cool. But right now, I am not entertained. I'm not interested. It's out of here.
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Matt:
[6:51]
| So I also I'm also an anomaly. I don't listen to podcasts as background music as background noise. I don't I don't do well with background noise. I have too much of a focal point on the thing I'm listening to. So if I'm listening to a podcast, it's really it's in the car or it's it's at home and all all i'm like i'm just playing on my phone so well in.
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Sam:
[7:13]
| The car still sort of background because presumably you're paying attention to driving.
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Matt:
[7:17]
| Well i'm paying it like here's the thing listen to it i can listen to people talk right when i'm in the car i thought i usually listen i'm like i'm like 90 music but i can't listen to like a book on like i can't listen to an audible book i can't listen to you know i was never able to listen to books on tape or books on cd i'm only able to listen to like interview format podcasts, like and even all the true crime stuff that it's taken off over the years you know my wife can listen to that stuff right nauseam I can't because it takes too much focus, Like, you know, I'll admit it when I, you know, when I put you guys on and I draw and I'm driving, like there's times I'm like, wait, what did they just talk about for the past five minutes? I wasn't paying attention. And if I can catch up, I catch up. If not, I just look at the notes when I, you know, when I can. But I mean, I like I like I said before, you know, it's I listen to two podcasts and it's it's curmudgeon's corner and it's it's smartless. So smart list is a popular one with Jason Bateman, Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and the Lego Batman guy.
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Sam:
[8:21]
| Okay. Yeah. I've, I've, I've heard mention of a podcast with those names, but I didn't know it. The name of the podcast. Yeah.
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Matt:
[8:29]
| Yeah. That's it.
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Sam:
[8:31]
| So, and it's, it's really.
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Matt:
[8:33]
| It's really cool to see you. We, we haven't spoken for.
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Sam:
[8:36]
| For those who don't know, like you guys are only hitting the audio, but we can see each other when we're recording here. it's got a nice little video interface blah blah blah.
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Matt:
[8:45]
| I i have not seen sam since the mid-2000s sounds about right i mean we worked together in two places and i hope i'm not one of the guilty things that sent you from jersey to florida, for that company uh-huh but i remember when you went from florida to the west coast And I think that was like, that was like one of the last times I saw you face to face.
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Sam:
[9:17]
| Yeah. And that would be about right. Yeah. I think we, I remember like, you know, we had dinner in Florida or something and.
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Matt:
[9:25]
| You know, I remember coming over and, uh, and man, how old was your daughter? I mean, your daughter was like single digits old.
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Sam:
[9:33]
| Yeah. She would have been like nine at the latest. I, she turned 10 in Florida, so she would have been nine or 10 and then, uh, and then we left. So, yeah.
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Matt:
[9:42]
| Yeah and now now.
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Sam:
[9:43]
| She's nearly 30.
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Matt:
[9:44]
| Yeah that's how long it's been yeah and like i said like when we like in the mid 2000s like i was just i was just having kid number two right in 06 is when i had kid number two and then in in 09 i had kid number three so i have like i'm in i got one i got one who came home from college for this for the summer i got another one who's leaving for college in August. And then I got a sophomore in high school.
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Sam:
[10:13]
| That, yeah, that's just incredible.
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Matt:
[10:15]
| You know?
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Sam:
[10:16]
| Yeah. And yeah.
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Matt:
[10:20]
| Also another thing I wanted to point out, right.
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Sam:
[10:22]
| And then we'll get on to with things.
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Matt:
[10:24]
| So then there's a person we used to work with in the early two thousands. You have his father-in-law on here as a host a lot of times. And we wanted to say, I'm wearing a shirt that he got me 20 years ago, So if he's listening.
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Sam:
[10:42]
| I got, you're talking about Ed who co-hosts here a lot.
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Matt:
[10:45]
| I'm talking about Ed and his son-in-law. Yeah.
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Sam:
[10:48]
| I'm talking about his son-in-law is John son-in-law John.
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Matt:
[10:50]
| So John, I'm wearing a shirt. You got me in like 2004.
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Sam:
[10:55]
| Excellent.
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Matt:
[10:55]
| If you have a question about it, you can, you can message me or something.
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Sam:
[11:01]
| Okay. So our, our, our plan today is going to follow roughly the, the normal thing that Yvonne and I do. we're going to have this first segment where we just bullshit about whatever, as we've already started to do. I have my movie that I'm catching up on. Matt, let me know. He's got some movies he wants to talk about too. So we're going to do the rest of this segment on like movies and stuff. And then we will take a break and we will start hitting newsy stuff. Since we have Matt here as a co-host, he is going to pick the newsy topics. He's already sent me a list of four things he wants to talk about. So we'll probably do two per segment and then go through those. And then we'll close out the thing. And if there's anything else that I want to note, I'll sort of throw it at the end. And yeah, we'll see where we go. I will say like the one thing, none of the four things picked are the current Trump trial. So, you know, tune in next week. The highlights from this last week were Stormy Daniels and a few other things. Next week is going to be Michael Cohen and probably right around the time we're recording next week, the defense, sorry, the prosecution intends to rest its case by the end of next week. You know, who knows? They may end up going long, but that's their intention right now. And so we'll have a bunch to talk about that next week. And yeah, we'll see where that goes. But for now, Matt, movies, what movies did you want to talk about?
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Matt:
[12:27]
| So I, I watch, I mean, I, I watch a lot of shows, but when I, when I finish a long run of a show, I like to cleanse my palate with movies. So like right now I'm actually in the middle of watching a bunch of movies and I just get on a roll with, you know, I, I see, I'll see something on social and I'll see it. I'll see an actor. I'll be like, oh, I'll watch those movies now. So I was on, I was on an Al Pacino kick. So the i mean i've watched a bunch of al pacino movies in a row but you know the the what got me thinking about this was the godfather trilogy right okay so i had i had maybe a couple weeks ago i finished watching all three movies back i'll.
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Sam:
[13:04]
| Just tell you where i am like i have watched the first two i have not watched the third yet so you know uh careful with the spoilers but yeah.
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Matt:
[13:13]
| I won't give anything away. It's plot wise. It's like, you know, it's, it's part of pop culture now. It's the, yeah. Right. And without giving anything away.
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Sam:
[13:24]
| It's okay. Movies have been out a long, long time.
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Matt:
[13:26]
| It's been what? 56 years. So Godfather and Godfather two, I completely understand. I completely understand why they are film royalty as the years have gone on, why they're on the AFI lists, all that stuff. If they came out now they wouldn't be as popular i don't think so i think they established i think number one and number two established a lot of a lot of film style i will also be the controversial person and say you know when number three came out number three came out in like 90 89 90 91 somewhere around there and since then coppola did recuts and there were you know he actually I think I was reading about it. Winona Ryder was supposed to play a role, and then something went wrong, and she actually took another role, and that's where Sofia Coppola took a role. And there was a whole bunch of controversy. And then there was controversy about how horrible the movie was.
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Sam:
[14:28]
| Yeah, I haven't watched it yet, but I do remember there being a lot of people talking about how Godfather 3 sucked, and it like you know it diminished the legacy of the first two and why did he do this and all this kind of stuff.
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Matt:
[14:43]
| Yeah now what i'll say is i can play both sides i could be devil's advocate i can completely say all the reasons why i think it like ruined the movie and it you shouldn't like you shouldn't watch it but then the other side of me says yeah it wasn't so terrible because it puts a it it it finishes the story arc um, it felt like it was like well whatever so the the recut is what i watched because okay you can't find the original you can't find the original anywhere if you want to i think if you if you don't want to pay for it you can't find the original anywhere and i'm like i'm not i'm right like.
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Sam:
[15:18]
| You might be able to like get an old dvd or something.
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Matt:
[15:20]
| Yeah like i'm watching things on 2b and pluto if i have i have to watch 10 commercials i watch commercials i'm a i'm not gonna i'm not going to pay for that stuff so i didn't think it was terrible i do i do think that it got a bad rap because that came out in 90 and the first ones came out 20 years later in the same way that when the original star wars came out that was fantastic and then you had the new you had the new trilogy come out and everyone threw a hissy fit about it but it's this it's just a different time a different decade of people consuming a movie so i mean so expectations.
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Sam:
[15:55]
| Are different and And, you know, and also you have the difference like in Star Wars specifically, it's it feels like this might be different from Godfather because it was aimed at adults in the first place. But Star Wars was aimed at kids in the 70s. And part of the reaction to that was that when people came in for the prequels, the kids who loved it when they were kids were now adults. But Lucas was still aiming it at kids.
|
Matt:
[16:22]
| So yeah so as an adult you're like oh this is what it should feel like but it didn't you know when you watch when you watch 456, So, like, you know, in your ratings. Or 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. Right.
|
Sam:
[16:39]
| Because they're out of order.
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Matt:
[16:41]
| I would give Godfather 3 a thumbs up. I'd give, you know, the whole Godfather trilogy a thumbs up. I would actually say I like Godfather 2 better than Godfather 1. I thought that James Caan was terrible. It was terrible in the first one. I thought that De Niro stole the movie in the second in, in number two. I wanted, I wanted every, every time there was a, there was a flip flop between Pacino's timeframe and De Niro's timeframe. De Niro just stole that movie. I thought he was fantastic. Nope. That's my movie.
|
Sam:
[17:17]
| That's your movie. Yeah. Yeah. You have any others you want to talk about while you're here or you're good for now?
|
Matt:
[17:23]
| I watched. So in my Al Pacino phase, I watched, I watched Scarface also.
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Sam:
[17:28]
| Also, I have not seen that one.
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Matt:
[17:30]
| Scarface is one of those that like it really doesn't hold up with time. And you have this like and again, it's it's this like pop culture lore of the character or the caricature that Pacino plays and how oft he gets quoted nowadays from that movie. And it I mean, it's a it's a decent story, but it's a story. You know, it's it's a it's the pace of a 70s movie.
|
Sam:
[17:55]
| Right.
|
Matt:
[17:56]
| Right. I remember. I remember being like almost frightened by what I thought was gore back then. And then when I watched it, you know, probably two months ago now, I was like, yeah, this isn't so bad. Right.
|
Sam:
[18:09]
| By today's standards.
|
Matt:
[18:11]
| Yeah, it's really not so bad. Like, you know, I love me some Quentin Tarantino movies. This was not even close. I remember Scarface. I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe this this violence and. Yeah, so that was another Pacino movie I just watched recently.
|
Sam:
[18:27]
| Very cool. Yeah. Yeah, someday I'll get to Godfather 3. And I'm sure Scarface is on my list somewhere too. But, you know, I've talked about how I do this in the past. We'll get to everything eventually. There is one thing that we were doing out of order but sort of failed. Like, my wife wanted to see the newest Ghostbusters movie. But I was like, you know, we have to watch the ones leading up to it before. At least the at least the one right before this one because it's they're sort of tied together, and so we started re-watching the ghostbuster series which i will eventually get to talking about on this show but we only got past the first two and we were too slow so i don't even think the new ones in theaters anymore so we'll have to wait for it to come out on streaming but like well you know we'll get to it so every once in a while i do something out of order when like other family members want to do it. So we'll, we'll, we'll do it. The, and the other thing we do live is we watched the new doctor who's when they come out and there was like, uh, the, the new season started coming out yesterday and we haven't watched it yet. We probably will this weekend, but yeah. So.
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Sam:
[19:38]
| Occasionally like i i do have my whole neurotic methodology for watching movies and tv shows but occasionally i do watch things out of order usually with and usually it is prompted by other members in the family are wanting to see something and so you know i'll just go with the flow but i.
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Matt:
[19:57]
| I admire the completionism i admire the rigor of going in order.
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Sam:
[20:00]
| Which is i.
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Matt:
[20:02]
| Like you know i just wanted to watch god like i just wanted to watch godfather 3 but i but i said i can't do that i gotta watch one and two first before i even get there so i.
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Sam:
[20:09]
| Yeah i.
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Matt:
[20:10]
| Can i can give myself the mentality of the story.
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Sam:
[20:13]
| And even if you've seen them before if it's been a while you want to refresh yourself like i'd seen ghostbusters one and two before but it had been like i probably saw ghostbusters one within the last 10 years before but ghostbusters two i'm not sure i'd seen that for decades you know so you know anyway we'll eventually talk about that but yeah you got you got to watch them in order you got to do that and like if you've watched sort of recently enough and recently enough may vary depending on what you're talking about but like if you've watched it recently enough you can just jump to the next one but if it's been a while if it's not if you can't immediately sort of pop off some information about it then okay it's it's time to re-watch you know yeah.
|
Matt:
[21:01]
| When i got i mean i'll be the first to admit i'm getting old so i get even if i saw it three times i'll say yeah maybe i'll just watch it again because i haven't seen it in a number of years and i really only remember the gist and i want to see the details.
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Sam:
[21:15]
| Okay i before i do want my movie i will pull one more out of you you said you binge on movies Okay, after you've finished a TV series, what is the TV series you most recently finished that caused you to move to movies now?
|
Matt:
[21:29]
| I don't so I have series that I watch on my own that my wife doesn't want to watch with me. But I think the most recent series I watched and finished is one that we watched together. Okay. I think a season two was coming because when we got to the end, we got to episode 10. We were like, wait, where's I thought there was a second season. And then we saw on Netflix, it said season two is coming. So we watched The Diplomat.
|
Sam:
[21:52]
| Which is I have not heard of this.
|
Matt:
[21:54]
| So it is on Netflix with Carrie, Carrie Russell. OK, I loved it. It's 10 episodes. I got to the 10th episode. We were like, where's season two, episode one? And then we were really we were upset that it just didn't carry over. So The Diplomat is about, it's politics, and it's about politics between the US, Iran, Russia, and the UK. And I'm not going to say anything else about it because it's a fantastic, I had no idea it was about that. I just knew it was about politics. And, you know, I just read the little paragraph on Netflix and we said, sure, let's watch this one.
|
Sam:
[22:33]
| Nice. Thumbs up.
|
Matt:
[22:35]
| Very, very, very big thumbs up. It was really cool. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[22:38]
| Okay. And did you give a thumbs on Scarface? You said it didn't hold up.
|
Matt:
[22:42]
| Is that a, I'd say sideways on Scarface.
|
Sam:
[22:45]
| Okay. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. My turn on a movie. This is from, yeah, well, this is from, it's a, it's a 2023 thing. I watched it in December. So we're, we're, we're getting closer than we have been. I'm, I'm slowly catching up, but this is a made for TV movie. It came on Peacock. That was a sequel movie to a series. So if you guys remember the series Monk, I don't know. Do you know Monk?
|
Matt:
[23:16]
| I remember Monk.
|
Sam:
[23:17]
| You remember Monk. Anyway, Monk, the series. When did Monk end? Shortly before the pandemic, I think. Hold on.
|
Matt:
[23:28]
| It was on a long time, and I don't remember ever watching an episode of it.
|
Sam:
[23:32]
| Yeah.
|
Matt:
[23:34]
| What I really liked, I really remember liking Tony Shalhoub as an actor since then.
|
Sam:
[23:40]
| Yeah. So let me do first the TV series. It ran from 2002 to 2009.
|
Sam:
[23:48]
| And so it had been off the air a long time. This is a recent trend. It's been popping up all over the place. Old TV series either coming back for a new season, like many seasons after they ended, or little TV movies and stuff like that. So the premise of the TV series, which I really enjoyed, by the way, I probably haven't watched it since its first run. But the premise is you've got this guy who is over the top sort of OCD to the point where it's it's a real disability for him. Honestly, he's got a bunch of autistic traits as well, but the primary thing they focused on at that point was OCD. But the thing was, his OCD enabled him to notice important details that help solve crimes. So of course, he gets recruited by the local police department and works on cases for them and stuff like that. And so it's a combination of your standard of standard sort of crime solving mystery stuff, plus sort of comedy around it. It's, it's bad to put it this way, but making fun of this guy's disability, essentially, you know, because his OCD puts him into all sorts of situations, which can be fine. You know, you can find funny where he gets disturbed by various things. He has to have things just right, et cetera, et cetera.
|
Sam:
[25:16]
| And anyway, it's done nicely though.
|
Matt:
[25:19]
| It's to foster an endearing feeling for the main character, right?
|
Sam:
[25:26]
| Yes.
|
Matt:
[25:27]
| You root for him.
|
Sam:
[25:29]
| Yeah. You root for him. You like him. You sympathize for his struggles. At the same time, you think about it in the way I just put it. It's making fun of his disability. Okay, that doesn't sound cool, but it's done in an endearing way. It's funny. It's amusing. You don't feel like it's at his expense. It's sort of, you know, but in any case, it was off the air for a long time. What came out last year was Mr. Monk's Last Case, a Monk movie, which basically brought him back out of retirement to tie up some loose ends that were left when the series ended. did.
|
Sam:
[26:12]
| There was one sort of monk short in between where like during the pandemic they put out like a short little five or ten minute skit with him but this was the first real substantive thing. It's movie length, it's 97 minutes and honestly it's, it very much felt like picking up where the series left off. Like sometimes these things work, sometimes they don't. I felt like it mostly worked. So I'm going to give it a thumbs up, especially if you watched the series when it was there. This might be one where, like we were just talking about, I don't know how well it would do if you were picking this up cold and had not watched the TV series. So if the premise sounds interesting to you, i would start with the series not start.
|
Matt:
[27:00]
| With this movie yeah it really when did you say this came out the.
|
Sam:
[27:05]
| Movie or the or the tv show.
|
Matt:
[27:07]
| The the movie that you watched the movie the.
|
Sam:
[27:10]
| Movie came out in december 2023.
|
Matt:
[27:11]
| Oh so it's all right just you know six months ago okay.
|
Sam:
[27:15]
| Yeah six months ago it came out streaming on on peacock which is of course the nbc affiliate nbc associated streaming service whatever and yeah the original was on from 2002 to 2009 so quite a while ago it had eight.
|
Matt:
[27:32]
| Seasons that's actually like come to think of it right i didn't know that i mean i knew it was about you know in the crime drama family i didn't know that it was you know he was a an author like a crime fighter with a disability but that's almost like it's before it's time because over Over the past 10 years, there's been a lot of shows that have taken that generic, it's either a lawyer show or a cop show or a hospital show and applied that pattern to their main characters, right?
|
Sam:
[28:03]
| I could immediately put it in a genre with, first of all, people compare it to Sherlock Holmes or something because he's got that sort of come into a scene and be like, okay, these things come together in a way that you wouldn't necessarily see. But like psych was kind of like this um.
|
Matt:
[28:20]
| Where.
|
Sam:
[28:21]
| He he also noticed things that other people didn't and pretended to be a psychic.
|
Matt:
[28:26]
| Um what.
|
Sam:
[28:28]
| What else i had a couple other in my head a second.
|
Matt:
[28:30]
| Ago one lately i never watched it but it was about a kid who it was he was a doctor but it was he he was a he was on the spectrum but because he was on the spectrum it made him an amazing doctor i think it's.
|
Sam:
[28:43]
| House was like that. That's older. House was like that. Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, all of these owe something to Sherlock Holmes. They've got some clear ties to that inspiration. But I think you're right. There are a few others like this. It's sort of always the detective who has some sort of unique ability, not like a paranormal ability or whatever, but some sort of unique ability that enables them to do better with these kinds of things and notice things or whatever. Alex and I are near the end of finishing up Bones, which is also like that. I mean, the two main characters, one of them's a forensic anthropologist, the other one's an FBI agent. The forensic anthropologist is clearly autistic coded and is super, super into her unique, narrow skill set and is really bad with social things and all this kind of stuff. And they make some hay out of that and it provides some comic relief sometimes. Times but you know you're right this is a theme a whole bunch of shows have you know done something along these lines and i i tend to like all of them yeah let's.
|
Matt:
[29:59]
| Take quiet let's take a person and just apply a specialty that and and that makes makes their makes their you know them the differently abled person abled in a fan in a fantastic way and i did these things are on me before before streaming took off these things were filling up the network.
|
Sam:
[30:19]
| Uh shows.
|
Matt:
[30:20]
| There were a lot of a lot of shows like this.
|
Sam:
[30:22]
| And of course you mentioned young doctor so we can't leave without mentioning doogie hauser which was a little bit different but yeah.
|
Matt:
[30:29]
| I i mean i don't think he i don't think doogie was any like was anything other than he was just a young dude who.
|
Sam:
[30:37]
| Yeah he did not solve mysteries and all that stuff he just had adventures but you you still had the young kid with extraordinary thing you know skills etc and there have been things along that genre that don't bring in the crime fighting part of it right you know so i i guess i guess we we have some standard tropes that recur over and over and over again you know in in in media and this is one of them i i guess you could like put like you know you know other detective shows you know you're like columbos and your Kojaks and your Rockford Files and all of these things have this to some degree. Yeah, going back quite a bit there, like some of them before my time.
|
Matt:
[31:19]
| You pulled out the Kojak.
|
Sam:
[31:23]
| You know, that's one. I have not watched that one. Like, I need to pull up some Kojak. I've watched some Columbo. I've watched some Rockford Files. I've watched, you know, who is the... And Yvonne, a few weeks ago, mentioned Quincy, you know, if we're talking from sort of that decade. But yeah, I've never actually watched Kojak. Yeah, neither have I. Maybe I should. I don't know. And like some of these, like there starts to be a spectrum of like, on the one hand, you have the characters who really have whatever special ability it is amped up to 11 and is a major portion of their personality. And then you have just sort of the regular old detective. detective and but there's this sort of a line because even your regular old detectives have some degree of exceptional skills in that area otherwise they probably wouldn't be fun to have a show about you know yeah.
|
Matt:
[32:20]
| That would be a boring it'd be a boring show.
|
Sam:
[32:22]
| If they were just a sucky detective advertisers.
|
Matt:
[32:25]
| Wouldn't come to a show it's.
|
Sam:
[32:26]
| Like yeah i couldn't figure this one out sorry Sorry, it's going on the shelf.
|
Matt:
[32:31]
| Yep.
|
Sam:
[32:34]
| Okay. Oh, and I think I gave it a thumbs up. Thumbs up for Mr.
|
Sam:
[32:41]
| Monk's last case. But again, if you haven't watched the series and you are interested in this at all, start with the series. This really is sort of like a, it's an encore finale episode to the series that's extra long and a decade and a half later. Done for the fans.
|
Sam:
[33:03]
| It's one for the fans and it really is best considered as part of the series. You know, I can't imagine like coming into this and just saying, oh, I'll watch this having never seen the series and having feeling much about it. The ending was a little weird, little melancholy without, without any like spoilers, but it is sort of like, you know, it was sort of a, a satisfying wrap up, but at the same time, it wasn't one of these like super happy, exciting endings. Endings and it, and it really, it, the whole episode, you know, I mentioned all of this sort of made fun of his disability a little bit, but like this last episode really leaned into the fact that, you know, the main character has some mental health issues, you know, and he's struggling with them and dealing with them. And it deals with, you know, you know, personal loss he'd had earlier in his life and how he's dealing with this stuff. And, you know, so on the one hand, it's sort of got the comedic elements. On the other hand, it's got some really serious undertones, you know, and they're sort of mixed together.
|
Sam:
[34:12]
| Anyway, I think that's probably enough. So we will, we'll move on and we will, after this break, start hitting the more serious topics that had been picked. And yeah we'll we'll hit those in just a second i have to pick the right break to hit right now here we go.
|
Sam:
[35:40]
| Okay. We are back. You're muted now. You're muted, Matt.
|
Matt:
[35:50]
| You're right. I muted so you wouldn't hear me cough during the break. I was like, how do breaks work? Can I talk? I'm seeing all the behind the scenes production shit.
|
Sam:
[36:01]
| Yeah. And how we do it behind the scenes has changed quite a few times over the years, but But this way works out nicely. We can see each other and everything comes out on different tracks so I can edit them and deal with overlaps and stuff. Anyway, it's fun. We're using Riverside now, and it's worked out pretty well. We've used this for about, I don't know, six to nine months. And as I told Yvonne once, I'm really bad at canceling things. We're still paying for the service we used before Riverside. are you still.
|
Matt:
[36:35]
| Aren't you still paying for aol like.
|
Sam:
[36:38]
| No i finally i finally stopped paying for aol it took like 10 or 15 years after the last time i actually used it but for the i kept their dial-up network for a long time because i was like you never know when you might need this but the.
|
Matt:
[36:51]
| Zombies come i might need to dial up.
|
Sam:
[36:53]
| The other thing i paid for forever after after i I stopped using it was Netflix's mailing disc services. Like we essentially stopped watching anything on disc. Everything was streaming, but I still had that active service and we still had like, we had the, like the four disc plan or whatever. And I still had four discs out from them and eventually got around to canceling it like 10 years later or something. I don't know. It was a long time. And actually when I was looking through a box just like a few months ago, I found one one of the four last discs we had from them that was never returned. I'm sure when we canceled the disc plan, they charged us for that disc. But whatever, it is what it is. We paid way more for, like keeping that thing active for years meant we could have just bought all the damn discs. But anyway, and the one thing that's open like that right now that I know of, this very second, we have we had three iPads in the family one for my wife and two for my son all three none of these three.
|
Sam:
[38:08]
| Have been functional in many years now, but each of the three has an AT&T data plan that is still active and charging us 20 bucks a month. So that's 60 bucks a month total between these three iPads. And see, here's the problem. I've gone to figure out how to cancel this multiple times, probably twice a year, but fundamentally, and AT&T very much does this on purpose you cannot cancel them online you have to call you cannot even cancel them in an at&t store because we went to activate something new whatever at an at&t store and they were like happily setting up the new thing for us and we're like hey while we're here can cancel the old one and they're like no you have to call and i'm like oh and so of course we'd never call everybody.
|
Matt:
[38:59]
| Talks about you could be a billionaire if you just don't get your starbucks coffee anymore right you You.
|
Sam:
[39:03]
| Know.
|
Matt:
[39:03]
| Save yours to make your home coffee. You just got to cancel your iPad plans and then you can be a billionaire.
|
Sam:
[39:09]
| Exactly. Like, and yes. And if I, I don't even want to think about adding up that 60 bucks a month for however many years that's been the case, it adds up.
|
Matt:
[39:20]
| And what it could have invested it at a certain percent rate. And yeah, don't think about it.
|
Sam:
[39:25]
| Or, or, or how forget the investment. I could have bought something cool. you know you're.
|
Matt:
[39:31]
| Gonna buy your ipad and exactly.
|
Sam:
[39:32]
| It could have paid for a new ipad it could have paid for a freaking laptop i don't know all.
|
Matt:
[39:39]
| The ipads that are on the that end up on the roof and the road.
|
Sam:
[39:42]
| Yes exactly so anyway i think we actually finally canceled the one that got no the one on the roof got replaced and it's trans and its plan got transferred one of the ones that's missing thing is the replacement for that iPad, which event anyway, so many things like around this household don't get done simply because they require an actual phone call. And so they linger for years, you know, anyway. Okay. You had called out four separate topics that you felt like you perhaps wanted to talk about. Where do you want to go first?
|
Matt:
[40:20]
| I don't know one that you can talk about a lot also, and I can, you know.
|
Sam:
[40:24]
| Interject. I will, I will just pick them from the order that they were already on my list and go from there. So in, in doing it that way, the first thing on the list that you chose was the Tik TOK man.
|
Sam:
[40:40]
| Uh, and so just to bring people up to date, this actually did get passed. You know, there was a lot of talk as it was going through Congress. It got bundled in with the Ukraine and Israel aid and wherever else they were sending aid to. There were a couple other countries that were bundled in that. It got bundled in with the big foreign aid bill. There's Taiwan and a few other places. But the way this works is that, you know, there were a lot of politicians saying, it's not a ban. We're just telling them they have to sell, you know. But at the same time, it was clear that selling wasn't an option that was attractive to the Chinese owners. And they at some point explicitly said, hey, if this is the choice, we're not going to sell it. We're just going to shut down in the US because that's what we have to do. So effectively, it is a ban. And meanwhile, the most recent developments on that are that, of course, as everyone except expected, TikTok is suing and is going to take this through the courts, blah, blah, blah. There's a timeframe that's defined in terms of when they have to sell or shut down by that will undoubtedly be extended by years of lawsuits, but we'll see how it goes.
|
Matt:
[41:59]
| So it was like six months, right? It was like, yeah.
|
Sam:
[42:03]
| The timeframe was six months. And I don't, I have not heard yet whether, you know, as part of filing this lawsuit, they're going to get a stay. I kind of assume they're going to get a stay, but we'll see it all. It all has to play through. And then, you know, like I said, it's, it's going to be, I would be surprised if in six months, TikTok is already shut down. It's, it's going to be tied up into courts for a long time. But so what were your thoughts on this?
|
Matt:
[42:33]
| So there's there's the first thing I thought about where there are so many angles to this out, even outside of outside of politics. Right. There's there's the the whole thing that goes back to TikTok is spying on us because it's because it's a Chinese owned company. And, you know, that's that's that's one that's one thing that always that's gotten publicity. Publicity, but the side of like, this is, this is probably up there in the top five used apps. Across a lot of different age groups.
|
Sam:
[43:07]
| Oh, absolutely.
|
Matt:
[43:09]
| If this, if this goes, like, if this goes away, yes, the market, the market will regulate, something will fill its void. The, the masses will find something and the something will benefit from it, whether it's something, whether people, some new innovator comes, comes forward and create something that's a U S company or more.
|
Sam:
[43:30]
| Likely like the traffic will move to, you know, the, the Tik TOK imitation that facebook already includes like reels you know in facebook or whatever you know.
|
Matt:
[43:40]
| Yeah yeah reels reels threads you know something you know snapchat might make a different play on what they put on their platform but the like the sheer popularity of this app if it goes away will completely i i completely change how the users of this this app i think follow politics because it will be railed upon by our politicians to say these are the people that voted this thing out that that took this away from you this is the most important thing in your life 17 year old and you know what next year you're gonna like the next time you vote remember about that well one One.
|
Sam:
[44:26]
| Of the weird things about that, this is one of the, you know, and I've said before, whenever this happens, like watch out because something's going on. This was one of the few things that there was massive bipartisan support for. Like this was not a Republican thing. This was not a democratic thing. This was, you know, large majorities in both parties liked this TikTok ban. It was the weird outlier on both sides that didn't want it. One of the folks who didn't want It was, of course, Donald Trump, but he only didn't want it after he got a big donation from one of the investors in TikTok. Before that, he was all for the ban, and he changed his mind after that donation. So this is a weird cross-partisan thing, and that always makes me suspicious when that's going on in those numbers. There are a couple of things on this in terms of how this plays out. One, you mentioned, oh, they're spying on your privacy concerns. Well, okay, so is every freaking website you ever go to on the internet, okay?
|
Matt:
[45:29]
| And the first thing it makes me think of is xenophobia and being afraid of any non-U.S. entity. And China's become – and positioning the word China as a scary word. And someone who is, of course, is going to spy on us because it's China.
|
Sam:
[45:48]
| Well, and it's not just the spying that they're concerned about. It's also the political manipulation. Like you said, we had all of this talk in 2016 about potentially Russia and others, not just Russia, trying to manipulate the election through social media and planting stories and all this kind of stuff in 2020 as well. And so if you have a situation where a state actor like China effectively controls the levers of an algorithm that determines what you show Americans, I can see that potentially being of concern. Now, there are a couple of things on that to talk further about it. One is. The leadership of TikTok has said repeatedly, and I have not heard publicly any strong evidence refuting this, is that they have made sure to sort of wall off TikTok so the day-to-day management is all done in the U.S. The servers are in the U.S. They've put walls against the sort of Chinese owners. But what people say all the time is, yeah, yeah, don't really believe that. Because if push comes to shove, the Chinese always can exert control when they want to. And the other thing I've heard is these Congress people who are talking about it saying, well, I've read the intelligence.
|
Sam:
[47:11]
| I've read the classified intelligence that I can't tell you about that makes me really concerned. And so the way I react to that is, first of all, if anybody really gave a shit about the privacy concerns and all of that kind of stuff, don't be targeting one company. Give us some sort of privacy bill of rights or something that applies across the board to everybody. Everybody because i think there are lots of legitimate control legitimate concerns there about how information is used how consent is gathered or not gathered all of this kind of stuff and i'm not necessarily saying i want like pop-ups on every single fucking web page in the world every 10 seconds saying can i use your data for this or that but there has to be something better than what we do and there's some uses of data that probably should just be flat out banned that may be very lucrative to all sorts of companies but should be flat out banned but then on the intelligence side i'm like look i know there are issues with sort of classified intelligence and sources and methods and such but if you are going to make ban or or expel from the country or force a sale even of a major social site that is used by hundreds of millions of people.
|
Sam:
[48:31]
| I'm sorry. You have a responsibility of sharing what you know. Like if you want to justify this, then you have to make public why you can't be like, oh, it's a danger. Trust us. You know, maybe it is may and maybe they have like classified evidence.
|
Sam:
[48:49]
| That the Chinese really are putting their thumbs on the scale and promoting content to, you know, promote certain political views and diminish others, or just like the Russians in 2016 were famously doing, just prompting conflict between multiple sides, like pushing both sides of the same issue in a way to try to generate conflict and division. Maybe there's evidence that they actually are doing that stuff. But if you're going to make the argument that it must be banned on that rationale, you can't just say, take our word for it. You have to show your work. You have to show the evidence.
|
Matt:
[49:27]
| Yeah like if it was where like weather balloons are floating over the west coast and those are direct tiktok feeds that's why we need to sell like if that had something to do with it okay well that's something concrete like i'm not gonna i'm not just gonna take someone's word for it unless there's unless there's something but there's like an official official report because otherwise it's just opinion yeah.
|
Sam:
[49:52]
| And and like like i said a lot lot of these politicians are implying that there is secret information that would make a difference to how you evaluate this but show me i'm sorry.
|
Matt:
[50:06]
| It's national security and we can't divulge it let's just trust us it's national security i and i think that's just that's horseshit.
|
Sam:
[50:15]
| I'm sorry i don't trust you you know you know and yeah i understand there might be risks in and revealing that kind of information. But if that is your justification for taking an action like this, then you have to suck it up and make it public. Yeah.
|
Matt:
[50:32]
| I would understand. Like, where is it even coming from? Like the need that like, tell me why. Tell me why it is you have to sell. This is no longer something that we should allow in the US because it's a threat to us because of why. Do you know?
|
Sam:
[50:50]
| Well, what they say are the fault. These are the main things they say. And a lot of these, like we said, apply to all kinds of other platforms as well. But here are the things I hear all the time.
|
Sam:
[51:03]
| One is they're sucking in all kinds of information about Americans and they're going to use it in all kinds of nefarious ways. Two is what I was saying about manipulation. Like they, the, the, the algorithm is secret. Secret and what if the chinese are putting their thumbs on the scale to promote certain content in order to manipulate the politics of the united states in whatever way they want to and then three is just sort of this this does apply to everything in the universe is like oh it's addictive and it's bad for kids and blah blah blah you know i i think the the of these, the second one is the one that i sort of buy the most but again that's the one where i want you to show me the evidence the other two apply to everything we do on the internet and so if you're going to if those two are your problem you should not be targeting one company you should be targeting them all correct if the pro and if the problem is the chinese manipulating social media blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then okay, but you have to show us or again, even there, do something that shows you care if X is doing it. Because, I mean, there's plenty of evidence that Elon Musk is doing all kinds of stuff with that platform to promote the views that he supports and diminish the views he doesn't.
|
Matt:
[52:28]
| If the company that owned TikTok, whatever the name of the parent company is, ByteDance, right? So the previous iteration of TikTok was called musically.
|
Sam:
[52:40]
| Yes.
|
Matt:
[52:41]
| It was one of these, like, you know, when, when, when there used to, there were, there were air, there are air, Yvonne talks about this before there's airlines that go down to the Everglades and then they rebrand it and they call it jet blue. But yeah, we have jet blue, like TikTok used to be musically. And that was shut. That was basically, you know, shut down and turned into TikTok. If TikTok, if bike dance was a company in Australia, would any of this stuff be going on? Would the same, would the same level of, of, of, of threat and news and attention be paying to them?
|
Sam:
[53:13]
| Well, to, to, to that point, I mean, News Corp, you know, owned by Australians, you know, exactly that. And, you know, they've been manipulating the politics of practically every Western country for the last 30 years. Yep. You know, I mean, News Corp, of course, owns Fox News. They own a bunch of stuff in Britain. well they've there's corporate things they've sold and moved things around and you can argue about the control and i think some of them were australian but are now american citizens blah blah blah but you get the point yeah why are you.
|
Matt:
[53:48]
| Not worried that my digital assistant is not is like sharing the data with these other nefarious places i mean i have a digital assistant on my I got three digital assistants, speakers across my house. I mean, I've taken the steps to, you know, to, to change, to, to manage my security, but that could just be them making it look good for me.
|
Sam:
[54:13]
| Well, and also flip, flip all these things aside. Should all of, should every other country in the world be worried about all this American owned technology? Like, you know, Facebook, X, Apple, you know, all, all of this stuff. And maybe they should, I don't know. But you know, the, the sort of.
|
Matt:
[54:35]
| Are we impacting people in France with the content we put on Facebook? We're social engineering content that we want to impose the US way of thinking.
|
Sam:
[54:48]
| Well, and actually the answer to that is absolutely we are. A lot of the stuff that was talked about in terms of how... Social media posts were being used to manipulate American elections, the US absolutely, absolutely, 100% has been doing that in foreign elections all over the world. We don't talk about it as much, but when there was that election manipulation talk following 2016, there were quite a few stories about how the US was doing that in a few African countries and a few other places. And other countries have not just been doing it in the US, they were doing it all over Europe, they were doing it in africa too they were you know all over the world so the the bottom line is yeah actually everybody's doing this to everybody if we think this is a problem, you know said you know just taking out one company that's doing it in this way is not the right way to do that and also if we really think it's a problem we shouldn't be doing it either right you know it's like and.
|
Matt:
[55:56]
| Then it goes back to like.
|
Sam:
[55:57]
| If those were.
|
Matt:
[55:57]
| The three reasons why the tiktok ban is a thing, it just seems so selective. So selective to me with just an arbitrary selection based on the popularity and the company that owns it and where they are geographically located.
|
Sam:
[56:15]
| Yeah. And again, maybe there is evidence that they actually are doing some of these things that are worrisome from a national security perspective. But again, I don't buy the, just trust us. I'm sorry. Right.
|
Matt:
[56:32]
| You know, until I see it on my Facebook news that it's real, that it's real.
|
Sam:
[56:38]
| Yeah, exactly. And, and honestly it's, it's not unbelievable. Like of course China could be doing that. That makes perfect sense. But again, if you're going to shut down a platform like this with that as one of the reasons prove it.
|
Matt:
[56:55]
| Yeah. If I brought this up at work as like, here's my proposal for the things that, you know, we need to fix. You know, my, my senior leaders wouldn't buy that. That's not a, I can't tell that story and they wouldn't buy that with those three reasons.
|
Sam:
[57:10]
| Yeah. Okay. Enough of tick tock next topic. So the next one in order on my list that you had called out that you might have something to add about are the Gaza protests. And Yvonne and I talked about this extensively like two Two weeks ago, we really didn't talk about new developments last week, but it continues to simmer in various ways. So what's your take?
|
Matt:
[57:36]
| So I am conflicted. The reason I brought this up is because it's hot in the news. It's going to be hot. It's been hot in the news for seven months now. It'll continue forever because the Middle East has never been rectified in thousands of years. Um and the reason i'm conflicted is because i am jewish and the you know the t-shirt i'm wearing says jews kick ass i mean that's the t-shirt john got me um i'm conflicted because i believe in the right that these students have these students have the right to protest whatever they want to protest they want to protest that i don't want you know tulips shouldn't be this color and i'm I'm going to protest this, by all means, go ahead and protest that. What gets me pissed off and what gets me angry is two sides of it. It's the anti-Semitic side, because that drives me bonkers. And then it's the side that, like, what are you actually protesting? And are you a student of this school?
|
Matt:
[58:49]
| And if you're not a student of this school, what are you doing on these grounds protesting? Protesting like you have a right to protest, but these are grounds that are not your grounds. So you should like you shouldn't be here. And the school has every I think the school has every right to kick people off of their grounds that aren't students or aren't faculty.
|
Sam:
[59:10]
| Now, a lot of the actions they're taking are on students and faculty, though. There definitely are outsiders involved, but I've heard multiple reports in terms of like. And I think it varies from location to location. How influential were these outsiders? Is it just a handful of people jumping in? How are they taking advantage of the situation? But from all I can tell, in almost all of these cases, the people running the protests and the vast majority of the protests are in fact affiliated with the universities. And the folks who are outsiders may be causing problems, but they're not the core of this. They're sort of on the periphery.
|
Matt:
[59:51]
| And so where my conflict arises and where my wife and I just go back and forth about just talking about it, like I said, they have every right to protest and the freedom of speech to spout whatever they want to spout. However the thing that i that i think got all these president these these university presidents in hot water is you know famously that uh mcgill at upenn said you know we believe in we believe in in in protecting their freedom of this until it turns into hate and then you start talking about well does it like are you basically waiting for this person to scream death to all jews but that's That's fine. But then the second they throw a bottle at a Jew, well, that's bad. Like, if you stopped, if you stop the yelling of death to all Jews, maybe the bottle at a Jew's head wouldn't happen. So that's, The the the the protest, the if they're protesting, if the majority of the protest is, hey, we want the university to to to no longer participate in the funding of weapons to this or we don't our like our university should have no place in funding weapons.
|
Sam:
[1:01:12]
| And that generally has been the biggest demand of most of these.
|
Matt:
[1:01:15]
| Go for it. Right. I mean, we students protested the Vietnam War. Students protested civil rights. Students protested. You know, there's the Tiananmen Square. Those protests were students. The you want to protest things your university is doing that you don't want the university to do. I'm all for it. But if you start chanting like from the whatever the chant is from the river to the sea or, you know, So death to death to these people, then that's where I like, that's where I have a problem. And that's where it is completely anti-Semitic that I then think, yeah, you're like, you have the freedom to do this, but I also have the freedom to react to that and, and do what I want to do to you. So that's, that's where my conflict arises. And that's why I, when I saw it on your list, I was like, yep, just, those are the things that I struggle with when I, when I see this in the news every day.
|
Sam:
[1:02:15]
| And and so one of the things that i'm and and maybe i haven't followed it in as much detail as i could have but it seems one of the issues to me here is that where's the balance between, and yvonne yvonne spoke about this a couple weeks ago as well but like Like if you've got your organized protest, that's 95%. You know, we just have, we want the war to end. We don't want to be funding the war. This is a humanitarian disaster. And yes, the Israeli government is wrong in pursuing it in the way they're doing, et cetera. But without some of the elements you're talking about, but then that 5% comes in and takes it over the top. How do you deal with the thing as a whole and now yvonne's answer to that is like if i'm running this protest and that five percent starts like doing that we're gonna run them out of town right and if we run them out of town then the rest of the protest remains sort of like okay that's still legit but if you tolerate it if you let that happen if you let that grow if you join in their chance okay well then you just poison the whole damn thing right.
|
Matt:
[1:03:37]
| So like i'm i'm no expert in the civil rights movement by any.
|
Sam:
[1:03:41]
| Means so.
|
Matt:
[1:03:42]
| Everything i say here take with a grain of salt there was there there was uh mlk jr and there was malcolm x.
|
Sam:
[1:03:49]
| And they.
|
Matt:
[1:03:50]
| Had two different completely they had two completely different ways of approaching protests and how to go about doing what I want to do. And I mean, history has showed us that the violence from the Black Panthers was not as successful as the pacifism of marching and the pacifism of speeches.
|
Sam:
[1:04:15]
| Although if you do go back there, even in that timeframe though, the people who are against civil rights often didn't distinguish very much. They, they painted the, the, the peaceful marchers as just as disruptive. The, the people who sat at counters as just as disruptive. And one of the things that I've heard, like even Joe Biden say this last week or whatever, in terms of like, you know, yes, you can protest, but you can't be disruptive. You can't cause chaos, et cetera. Well, well.
|
Sam:
[1:04:49]
| The point of those protests was to disrupt. If you do a protest and you're not inconveniencing anybody, then you're invisible. The whole point of the protest is to do things that force people to notice and care about things they would not otherwise notice or care about. And if you march up and down with signs in a designated protest area that is out of the way and nobody sees, you're not accomplishing a damn thing. You have to be something that does some level of disruption to be an effective protest. Now, at the same time, there is the boundary between disruption and violence and protesting and threatening. You know, there are big differences there. And I sort of feel like the other thing that a lot of these places have done is, you know, you mentioned like it makes a big difference once somebody throws a bottle or something and like somebody is injured. There may have been a couple isolated things that I'm not aware of, but for the most part.
|
Sam:
[1:06:09]
| Even when they have sort of occupied buildings and, you know, barricaded doors and things like that, there hasn't been actual violence until the police are called to clear them out or until there is a clash between protesters and counter protesters, you know? And so for the most part, you know, maybe there's property damage, but there hasn't been outright violence against people until you have sort of those conflicts. And I feel like part of the issue here is that authorities.
|
Sam:
[1:06:43]
| Because they want to be shown, they want to be like, we're in control here and we're taking action, have overreacted in a way that only escalates the situation. Generation as opposed to there are a couple of universities who have basically said to the leaders of these organizations, okay, take down your tents. We will talk to you. We will have a nice meeting with the university president and we will promise that we, you know, our board will have a vote on your demands and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, some people say don't negotiate with terrorists. Don't do any of that kind of stuff. But at the same time, it's like, Like, you know, you've got kids who just want to be heard and feel like they're making a difference. The quickest way to sort of deescalate the situation is actually bring them in, take them seriously, talk to them. And if they're, if they're doing things that are completely out of line, some of them absolutely know they're out of line. Others are just naive and stupid. So educate them.
|
Matt:
[1:07:49]
| Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the what you were saying before about like you could barricade yourself in a room and then when the violence starts, that's where the problem happens. Right. So the two things I thought about there was defining violence and barrack and the barricading. So you want to like in, for example, in Columbia. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:08:10]
| Yeah.
|
Matt:
[1:08:11]
| You want to take over one of the halls. Go ahead. Put a, you know, put a lock on the door, put a broomstick through the handles. Don't trash the fucking building and then expect nothing to happen.
|
Sam:
[1:08:22]
| Right? Right.
|
Matt:
[1:08:23]
| If you abscond the room and you're now in the hall... That's fine. Right. But when you trash the you trash the building, you've just like you've shown your hand that your purpose is not just disruption and you've just turned a protest into a mob.
|
Sam:
[1:08:41]
| Right.
|
Matt:
[1:08:43]
| So then then there's the aspect of violence and defining violence. We're talking about, we often think about it as physical violence, but when the protest turns into linking arms and discriminately preventing Jewish people from going places and letting other people go places, that's where it becomes anti-Semitism. Yeah. And if that person if if you were linking if you were linking arms on a college campus and you said we need we don't want our university providing, you know, helping to fund the war in Somalia because the people in Somalia need our support and we're not going to let you walk in here. Like, are you going to link your arms and prevent a person of a race or religion or creed from entering because they live in Somalia? Like, you're not going to do that. And I mean, it's- or religion.
|
Sam:
[1:09:57]
| Et cetera. That's absolutely crossing the line. What if instead of barring old Jews, they had a checkpoint where they asked, do you support Netanyahu? Yes or no? And barred anybody who said yes. Does that make a difference?
|
Matt:
[1:10:14]
| It is none of their fucking business who I support. I don't need a political checkpoint Charlie to walk into my college that I'm paying a tuition for. And even if I'm a faculty member, it's none of your fucking business who I support. Like this, I'm a person at this institution. That's all you need to know, right? Right. The reason why we vote behind booths is so that we have the privacy of voting behind voting for whoever we want. If you choose to walk out of that booth and tell people what you did, that's your fucking prerogative. But you don't have. But if you ask me, I can also tell you I'm not I'm not going to answer that question.
|
Sam:
[1:10:55]
| Right.
|
Matt:
[1:10:55]
| So if you if I walked up to a barricade and you said, do you support Netanyahu? Yes or no. I'm only going to let you in if you tell me if you tell me no. Well, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to walk away because it's none of your fucking business who I support and who I don't support. So there.
|
Sam:
[1:11:13]
| So if you were running one of these universities, how would you handle the situation?
|
Matt:
[1:11:17]
| Situation i i really like the idea of creating a forum for discussion because not if if nothing gets done with stomping your feet and causing disruption and saying it's my way or the highway or i'm going to continue stopping my feet and causing disruption you're never gonna like there's There's nothing that's ever going to go your way without starting to have a dialogue. And I mean, I believe that in every in every facet, whether it's one on one or whether it's whether it's groups on groups, have a conversation, always talk.
|
Sam:
[1:11:57]
| I mean, one thing that's sort of an obvious truth when you think about it is in the end, like when. When you have a conflict and you want to get to peace or some sort of resolution, that does not happen with people talking only to their friends. At some point, you have to talk to your enemy and come to some sort of arrangement. I mean, I guess the exception is if you completely crush and destroy them. You know, but absent that, you know, to end a conflict, you have to bring the two sides to the table and they have to talk no matter how far apart they started, no matter how many people, you know, were killed, whatever the history is behind it. If you want to move past the history and come to a peaceful resolution, people have to sit down and talk.
|
The Doctor:
[1:12:59]
| Because it's always the same when you fire that first shot no matter how right you feel you have no idea who's going to die you don't know whose children are going to scream and burn how many hearts will be broken how many lives shattered how much blood will spill until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning sit down and talk.
|
Matt:
[1:13:26]
| Yeah i mean here's like the these universities are not run by one person they're run by boards right these presidents got fired by boards they didn't they didn't get they didn't just get get fired by the protesters right they had people on the boards and the boards had have opinions unto themselves and the boards decided whether or not they're going to keep these presidents around or not, or what the, or what action should be taken. So the idea that you have, if you have spokespeople for these protests and they're standing up and saying, these are our terms, accept them, or we're not going to, or we're just going to sit here on the green and continue to protest. That's, that's your, it's never going to be a situation where the person sitting in the middle of the, the middle of the green, and then you have the president of university sitting in the office, talking to the rest of the faculty and staff, and then say, okay, we'll take this letter out to the, you know, the head of the protester. And that's how we're going to communicate. It's never going to get anywhere.
|
Sam:
[1:14:24]
| Right.
|
Matt:
[1:14:25]
| Right. So you either, you're either making noise for the sake of making noise, or you're making noise because you want to do something about it. And if you want to do something about it, you have to talk to the people who you want to, uh, who you want to affect.
|
Sam:
[1:14:40]
| Okay. Any last thoughts on that Matt, before we take a break and move on?
|
Matt:
[1:14:44]
| Nope.
|
Sam:
[1:14:45]
| Okay. We will take a break then. And when we come back, Matt's last two topics. Back after this.
|
Sam:
[1:16:55]
| Okay. Before we get to the next two topics, I just wanted to say, like, actually, right before we started recording on here, maybe an hour before, a person on our Commodions Corner Slack, where I know you're not actively there, Matt, although you have an account, so you can come on anytime. Yes. But the one of the people there whose name I will withhold for the moment because of what they say here was also apparently considering saying they wanted to come help out with the show when I sent out the request when Yvonne said he was sick. But he he he says this related to the topic that we were just talking about. Standard disclaimers. You can think the Israeli government is being a bunch of pig fuckers without that being anti-Semitic, et cetera, et cetera. Ivan replied, apparently the guys in the horseshoe can't. You see it's all reinforcing to them. And then the first guy says, it's so easy and people fuck it up. There are motivated actors on the Israeli government side who love to describe all opposition to Israeli terrible decisions as anti-Semitism. And yet people still manage to go straight past reasonable doubt into just straightforward Jew hatred when they don't have to. Everyone sucks. sucks this is why i can't co-host this week i would say things that i would regret.
|
Matt:
[1:18:11]
| So anyway.
|
Sam:
[1:18:17]
| Okay our next two topics unless you have something to reply to that.
|
Matt:
[1:18:21]
| No i well the thing i i i i only listed that as a topic because it's something i struggle with thinking about whenever i see the news for the past eight months you know whatever whatever i say is my feelings like and if this like i i understand someone doesn't want to you know share their feelings under certain forums and i've never been on this podcast before and when when you were like what do you what do you want to talk about i was like oh god i have to share how i feel to know but i don't like one One of the first things I think about is I don't care what people think about me. Like the older I get, the less I care what people think about me. And the more I just have my, formulate my own opinions.
|
Sam:
[1:19:11]
| Yeah. I figure at some point, something I say will eventually get me in trouble with someone somewhere, but I'll deal with it when it happens, you know, I.
|
Matt:
[1:19:19]
| Talk to them and I'll have a conversation.
|
Sam:
[1:19:22]
| Exactly. I won't throw a bottle at them. Yeah. So, okay. Okay, the next topic that you had put up is rescheduling marijuana.
|
Matt:
[1:19:32]
| Yeah, I saw that and I was like, hey, what did you put that on your list for?
|
Sam:
[1:19:37]
| Oh, so what is going on? Okay, so in here, I thought you had a strong opinion on it and wanted to talk about it. No, so what's happening?
|
Matt:
[1:19:47]
| As you tell me what's happening.
|
Sam:
[1:19:49]
| What is happening is that a lot of the laws at the federal level regarding marijuana are due to the fact that it is a Schedule I drug, which is a category that means there is no legitimate medical use for it, it can't be prescribed, you can't do research on it, etc., etc., etc. This is something that came about originally during the Nixon administration. My understanding of the history is that at the time it was brought up, the sort of scientific experts or whatever recommended that it would be put in a higher number category, which means less restrictions.
|
Sam:
[1:20:36]
| But Nixon and his folks were like, no, absolutely not. We want it in the worst category possible. And there are quotes from that era. Who was it? Lee Atwater, I believe, on his deathbed, said some things about how the genesis of the war on drugs during the Nixon administration was specifically constructed to attack the blacks and the hippies. Yep you know and and and this was related to that so like the nixon administration was absolutely not we're not putting it in a lower schedule it's it's schedule one it's the it put it in with the worst of the worst of the hardest most poisonous drugs out there and so it's been in.
|
Sam:
[1:21:28]
| In recent years, obviously, there's been a trend. It's been legalized in a whole bunch of states, a lot for medical use and a few for recreational use. There's this fundamental disconnect between the states and the federal government because it's still illegal at the federal level. So even in states like Washington, where I am, where it's legal for recreational use, produce like the businesses who sell it for recreational purposes like have trouble doing banking because the banks aren't allowed to have them as clients because the banks are regulated by the feds. And so in many cases, it's essentially an all cash business, which of course is a magnet for criminals as well to like attack these places and steal from them and blah, blah, blah. So there are all sorts of difficulties that are caused there. And anybody who's going into this business potentially risks, okay, you're completely okay by the state. You're licensed by the state. You have paperwork. You have this. But at the same time, you're committing a federal crime. And the feds could go after you anytime they feel like it. Now, in reality, the feds have, for the most part, stayed away from states that have made it legal. But that's just a policy decision. That could change at any moment.
|
Sam:
[1:22:44]
| There has been a move simultaneously with this that has been slowly gaining steam for the feds to officially reclassify marijuana out of schedule one, I believe to move it to schedule three, which initially would grant that, and forgive me if I get some of these details wrong, but it would open it up so that you could do research on it, you could do medical research on it, it could be used for medicinal purposes, those kinds of things. So restricted and not would not be opening it all the way up to recreational use, but would take it down a couple notches from where it is now and, and reduce, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:23:29]
| Reduce the ability of the feds to introduce really harsh criminal penalties for like possession or small time selling of marijuana. And this reached another stage this week where I forget which entity, but the entity in charge has officially recommended the rescheduling. And we have now entered a sort of, there's a mandatory period of collecting public comments and all of this kind of stuff that lasts quite a bit. It's at least six months, maybe longer. And they have to do all this public comment collection and blah, blah, blah. And there's a whole regulatory process that has to go through before it becomes official. But they've basically taken a significant step in the direction of rescheduling marijuana out of schedule one which would not bring the feds completely to where like the most liberal states are with this but move it a good deal in that direction and and that's basically the development from this week.
|
Matt:
[1:24:33]
| Okay all right so schedule.
|
Sam:
[1:24:37]
| For last week so.
|
Matt:
[1:24:38]
| Schedule three is currently products containing less than 90 milligrams of codeine like tylenol with codeine ketamine anabolic steroids and testosterone those are current schedule three drugs.
|
Sam:
[1:24:53]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Matt:
[1:24:55]
| And current Schedule 1 drugs are.
|
Sam:
[1:24:59]
| Schedule 3 are all like you can get them, but they do require a prescription. You can't just go into your drugstore and get them at the moment.
|
Matt:
[1:25:05]
| You can go into GNC and get as much testosterone as you want. You can go to GNC. You can go to places in your mall.
|
Sam:
[1:25:15]
| I believe there's a difference from what you can get at GNC to the proper, pure, prescribed version. Cause this is, this has been one of the areas where, you know, like trans folks who want to use this at levels to, you know, physically change their bodies significantly through hormone treatments currently need a prescription and feel like they should be able to do it over the counter. And so this stuff doesn't do that.
|
Matt:
[1:25:42]
| Just by the definition of other schedules, right? Just what I, yes. Schedule one, heroin, LSD, marijuana, ecstasy, meth, and peyote. That's schedule one now let's go to now schedule three is where it would get downgraded to what's two schedule two is vicodin well less than 15 milligrams of hydrocodone and so for example vicodin cocaine meth methadone dilaudid demerol oxycontin fentanyl dexedrine adderall and ridolin those are schedule two schedule three is what i just said before now here's the problem right Right. You got to like I'm theoretically saying schedule one is the worst and the higher your number, the less problematic this thing is. Right. That's what would tell me schedule for Xanax Valium. Like just by the fact that Xanax and Valium are in schedule for tells me all I need to know, because I've never heard of somebody having to go to rehab because of pot. Lot but the amount of people that go to rehab because they're because they're they're having they're rehabbing from xanax is through the roof.
|
Sam:
[1:26:53]
| Well is it strictly like you're you're obviously you brought up the wikipedia page or something i don't have it in front of me is it strictly like the the higher the number the less problematic or they're just different rules for each of these And it's not strictly like a scale like that.
|
Matt:
[1:27:11]
| Drug substances and chemicals used to make drugs are classified into five distinct categories or schedules depending upon the drug's acceptable medical use and the drug's abuse or dependency potential. And it doesn't give me an example of like, hey, the higher number you get, the less of a problem there are. But Schedule 5 are drug substances or chemicals with lower potential for abuse than Schedule 4 and consists of preparations with limited quantities of certain narcotics. Schedule 5 is generally used for anti-diarrheal, anti-tussive, and analgesic, like Robitussin. So your cough medicine is a Schedule 5.
|
Sam:
[1:27:53]
| Right. Right.
|
Matt:
[1:27:55]
| So I would guess that Schedule 5 is not so terrible. Schedule 1 is, you know, these are the bad ones.
|
Sam:
[1:28:01]
| So like from the DEA page themselves, I don't know if that's the one you're looking at, but schedule one defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule two, drugs with a high potential for abuse with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence. These drugs are also considered dangerous. Schedule three, drugs with a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence. Schedule four, drugs with a low potential for abuse and low risk of dependence. Schedule five, lower potential for abuse than schedule four. So basically, it's a scale that is theoretically based on how much the potential for abuse is.
|
Matt:
[1:28:50]
| So we're in favor of science, right? Let's talk.
|
Sam:
[1:28:53]
| These categories are all very mushy, and clearly things are placed in categories almost arbitrarily based on like, you know, who had the political weight to move things in different directions. Right.
|
Matt:
[1:29:05]
| So to the point that you made at the outset, right? Like rescheduling it would allow it to be researched.
|
Sam:
[1:29:11]
| Yeah.
|
Matt:
[1:29:12]
| How did people find out which schedule to place these things into today without doing research in the first place?
|
Sam:
[1:29:22]
| Well, before the schedule system was set up, there was more freedom there. Like once things were put in schedule one, basically people can't do medical research on them anymore. I was just listening to some podcast actually. On this and apparently like there is one official source of marijuana for use in research that's available it's it's like someplace on the gulf coast uh some university on the gulf coast has a plot that is officially allowed to grow plants for this purpose and anybody doing research has to get their stuff from them. And apparently what they were saying on the podcast is like this stuff is not even remotely similar to the stuff that's actually sold anywhere else in the country. So it's not really a good trial. But also for anybody to do that research, They had to go through immense bureaucratic hoops and lots of cost to do it. So effectively, there's been no research in this country of marijuana, its effectiveness, its harms, things that will help with any of that since the 1960s. Now there has been research in other countries.
|
Matt:
[1:30:49]
| That seems ridiculous like why are we preventing 1970s probably why are we preventing science science is there for this purpose test it find out which category to put it into and.
|
Sam:
[1:31:03]
| Also like you know there's a lot of you know sort of, folk knowledge about what it works for, what it doesn't work for, how well it works, all this kind of stuff.
|
Matt:
[1:31:15]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:31:16]
| Yeah. Let's get this backed up. Like some of it's undoubtedly very true. Some of it's probably bullshit, you know? Yeah. Cause at the, at this moment, it's like your, your standard, like the people selling it will hype it up. Of course it's good for X come get it. You know, it'll be great for this. And some of it's clearly true, you know, but some of it probably isn't and we should know and and also in some of these cases it's like okay yeah the the active ingredient is useful for xyz but by the way if you smoke it you're still getting all the harms of smoking anything right and that causes all kinds of problems so maybe if you really want to take this you know take a pill with the active ingredient or maybe eat an an edible i don't know like maybe that's better than smoking it like but like the smoking will still give you lung cancer not because of the thc but because of everything else you're like burning up in the damn plant or whatever you know that's not even like.
|
Matt:
[1:32:15]
| The like the correlation between the the the method of ingesting the drug.
|
Sam:
[1:32:22]
| Right like.
|
Matt:
[1:32:24]
| An edible is like you can like you can equate an edible to to food.
|
Sam:
[1:32:31]
| Right it's.
|
Matt:
[1:32:32]
| A food product or it's it's like it's like a gummy it's like a gummy bear so it's.
|
Sam:
[1:32:36]
| Like the.
|
Matt:
[1:32:37]
| Ish as opposed to i can i have to go to my doctor to tell my doctor that i have anxiety or problem sleeping so he's going to give me 30 pills of xanax what's stopping me from taking that 30 in one fucking day like.
|
Sam:
[1:32:51]
| Right there's.
|
Matt:
[1:32:52]
| Research that says Xanax causes dependency and has problem. I don't understand why science couldn't, Why politics couldn't get out of the way of science and let them study the real effects of different strains of marijuana.
|
Sam:
[1:33:09]
| And that's effectively what's happening here. This is one of those things where the cultural shift has been moving relatively quickly over the last decade, decade and a half. As I said, there's been legalization in all kinds of states, even for recreational use. But public opinion has turned on this. Like, you know, compared to, you know, Nancy Reagan saying, just say no in the 1980s, you know, right now, overwhelmingly, the American public public is like marijuana. Yes. No big deal. Don't don't even worry about it.
|
Matt:
[1:33:44]
| Like, you know, we used to we used to say this in the in the 90s when we were, you know, using some products. Tax and while we were under the influence of using products we always we would talk about like well we get charged sales tax if i want to go get a six-pack the federal state governments can just charge sales tax if we're gonna go to a drugstore and get marijuana there we go that's how we make it legal we talk about the monetary value that the states and the federal government are going to get out of this we turn it into a cash crop that.
|
Sam:
[1:34:16]
| This is another thing that by the way is also fairly bipartisan at this point like.
|
Matt:
[1:34:21]
| Your red.
|
Sam:
[1:34:22]
| States want their pot too.
|
Matt:
[1:34:23]
| Yeah i mean you talk about the gulf coast i mean come on i mean how much rhetoric can you get yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:34:30]
| And so i don't know and and i feel like you you want can you want potential controls over this you want like quality control you want to.
|
Matt:
[1:34:39]
| Make sure.
|
Sam:
[1:34:40]
| Like people aren't screwing with the supply.
|
Matt:
[1:34:42]
| And and.
|
Sam:
[1:34:43]
| Poisoning it or whatever. And you do want the research to, to, to tell you, like, you know, if, if you, if you're, if you're in it to get high, that's one thing. If you're in it for some medicinal value, maybe there's a way to do that without getting high. If you don't want that.
|
Matt:
[1:34:59]
| You know, personal example, personal example within the past month, I have trouble sleeping. I am scared to take sleeping pills for.
|
Sam:
[1:35:10]
| The reasons you just outlined.
|
Matt:
[1:35:12]
| I don't because like there were times we're not like, you know, I decongestants, right? Sudafed is behind the is behind the Walgreens pharmacy desk because people are, you know, can do things with Sudafed and you can get hooked on Sudafed and.
|
Sam:
[1:35:26]
| You can make math with it and.
|
Matt:
[1:35:28]
| Turn it into schedule twos. So as we had just learned, today's a learning experience. So like I'm scared to take sleeping pills, even going to Walgreens or CVS and getting the Unisom or getting the NyQuil Z or because I think I mean.
|
Sam:
[1:35:43]
| That's that you're basically just Benadryl.
|
Matt:
[1:35:45]
| To me, that stuff feels addictive. So I researched gummies that will help me sleep. And I've and I and like I've taken a couple in the past couple of weeks. They've helped and I'm not nervous about it. Because i've experienced marijuana in the past and i know what it's done to me and i know that i've never been i mean i don't have an addictive personality i know it was it was never a gateway to anything else and it didn't infect me any in medically in any negative way so like to me that like it feels safe even though the label says the fda didn't approve this thing right so i mean i i I, you know, you take, you take a half, you see if it does what it does, you take three quarters of it, you see what it does. And, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm up to a full one now. And it helped me the last time I did it, it helped me sleep. So like, that's the, that's the reason I want to know more about it.
|
Sam:
[1:36:44]
| And it would be nice if instead of you experimenting in that way, like you knew it was backed up by like actual real research that showed, yeah, this tends to work and there are no negative side effects or there are negative side effects and here's what they are. So you can decide if it's worth it, you know, et cetera.
|
Matt:
[1:37:01]
| I would have no problem going to my doctor and letting the doctor write a prescription for it. But my doctor, like, because they can't write prescription for it. I mean, they can they can say you can go to a like you can go to a I can go to a dispensary like that just started happening in my state. But like I'm not I'm not there yet. Like in my own personal comfort level, like I've gone to I've gone to dispensaries in other states for recreation, but not never for medicinal purpose, because I've always said, like, the only medicinal purpose I could see it happening for me is sleep. Like, I don't have I don't have cancer. I don't have glaucoma. I don't have these other things that there are medical, there are medical reasons for this to help. So that's just my personal story.
|
Sam:
[1:37:50]
| Yeah. So anyway, it's, it's moving along and I, I think this is one of those things that's just inevitable. It's just a matter of time. And, and you know, like, I I'm, I'm not a fan. Like I, I personally, I don't drink anymore. I did back in the day when you and I were in the same location, but I stopped after a while. I was like, this isn't, I don't need this. And I never felt addicted or out of control. I just was like, it's pointless. I don't need it. And so I sort of slowly tapered over a couple of decades until at some point, I think when I turned 40 or something, I was just like, I'm done. I don't need to ever do that again.
|
Sam:
[1:38:27]
| And, and it's not like a religious thing. Like, you know, if there was a situation where I really had like, I'm fine, whatever. Although I was at a wedding a couple of weekends ago and there was a champagne toast and I was like, I'll stick with water. You know, I don't need to, you know, not, not a big deal. Right. Like, but anyway, I, I, on the one hand, I'm like, do we really need, you know, to make it so much more accessible to everybody, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't really want to see the use of these sort of psychoactive functions go up through the roof. I prefer people use less alcohol and less marijuana and blah, blah, blah, but I don't think it's useful or helpful or appropriate for the government to be stepping in and mandating that. It's like, make sure it's as safe as possible. Make sure that we know what's going on so people can make educated decisions. Give people who do get in trouble with addiction support and help to get out of it. But otherwise, let adults be adults and make their own decisions on these things.
|
Matt:
[1:39:45]
| Yeah. Even just do like, show me the results of studies between alcoholism and marijuana-ism. Like, show me that. And then tell me that you can't just turn it into something that's controlled and that you have to be 21 and show your ID.
|
Sam:
[1:40:00]
| Well, and that's one of those parody things too. Like, you know... Marijuana may not be completely harmless but i think it's absolutely clear that between marijuana tobacco and alcohol marijuana is the least harmful of the three right so you know all.
|
Matt:
[1:40:20]
| Four rescheduling yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:40:21]
| Okay the last item on your list what.
|
Matt:
[1:40:26]
| Was i don't even remember anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:40:27]
| Mtg filing the motion to vacate oh.
|
Matt:
[1:40:30]
| I oh yeah i put that on because i was like that was fucking funny and i want to hear what sam has to say about.
|
Sam:
[1:40:35]
| It i was.
|
Matt:
[1:40:37]
| Like i like that was a week that was a thing that happened in the week and i'm like i gotta hear what sam wants to say about this.
|
Sam:
[1:40:43]
| So you know on the one hand it was anticlimactic you know like marjorie taylor green finally uh did her motion to vacate but the democrats had already said not not just a handful of democrats here and there. But the leadership of the Democrats were like, yeah, we'll support Johnson. We will vote against any motion to vacate. We will save him. Because fundamentally, he did what we wanted him to on keeping the government open, on Ukraine aid. He might have been slower than we wanted to. But in the end, he came through, we got things done. And all of the stuff, by the way, all of the things we're talking about, keeping the government open, foreign aid, all of these things passed with overwhelming majorities, like, you know, nearly all the Democrats and lots and lots of Republicans. I think in, in different situations, the exact numbers were different, but it's clearly a small group of the Republicans who were holding up all this stuff. And so you have, so he, he, he, he did the thing. He kept things is going and.
|
Matt:
[1:41:51]
| What was the number what was the numbers for for for for not going with it wasn't it like, 20 republicans and 11 democrats said sure and then everybody else said you know.
|
Sam:
[1:42:05]
| It was it was 11 republicans i forget the number of democrats i think it was in the 20s i think you had those reversed but yeah like it was a it was like 30 or 40 people said yeah let's vacate out of the whole congress and all of the rest were like nope nope we're not doing that shit again that's what i.
|
Matt:
[1:42:23]
| Loved when i heard that when i saw that i was like that's fantastic.
|
Sam:
[1:42:26]
| And so you know that like i said it was a little bit anticlimactic because we knew that's how it was going to play out in advance because uh because hakeem jeffries had come out and said it before it happened that like look we're the the we don't like him you know but this is ridiculous and there's no reason marjorie fucking taylor green should have the power to completely hold the house of representatives and the entire u.s government hostage you know so yeah we'll we'll support johnson and say this is bullshit and and so they did and you know when she came up to file her resolution she was she was booed by people from both parties and and lost in a humiliating fashion Now, I've heard some people argue that she's absolutely fine with that, that it like being having everybody against her Democrats plus sort of mainstream Republicans. That's exactly the position she wants to be at because she's the she's the rebel and she's doing this. I mean, hell, even Donald Trump was against this.
|
Matt:
[1:43:43]
| Donald Trump – I must be doing something right if everyone's against you. I mean, if that's – like, that's got to be her thinking. I must be doing something right if all these people don't want me to do this.
|
Sam:
[1:43:52]
| Exactly. And, you know, but I think the end result here is this sort of group of Republicans who've been holding –, holding the house hostage every time the Republicans have been in power going back a decade or two now, they've been neutered.
|
Matt:
[1:44:13]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:44:13]
| You know, by, by this, by the Democrats basically saying, Hey, as long as the quote unquote, reasonable Republicans of which, you know, all in all, there are very few of those left. But when you talk about sort of these major issues that sort of are the must-do things, there are enough of them. Like, we really are, like, if you were talking, like, you know, abortion or gay marriage or taxes or something, the numbers would be way different. But on just, like, don't shut down the damn government and let's give aid to our allies, that has near universal support. And it's a really small number of fringe people who've been holding the whole process hostage. And I think what you've seen develop as a way forward, I've seen some people characterize it as like, is what we're really seeing something that's effectively a coalition with the Democrats, plus the part of the Republicans who are willing to sort of not burn everything down?
|
Sam:
[1:45:18]
| Maybe. I mean, and really, the last few times the Republicans have been in charge, lots of the big things happened this way anyway. It was always the Democrats having to join some Republicans to get things over the line because there were enough rebel Republicans to stop things. That's how we got past a lot of the recent government shutdown crises and such. Is it that much different? I don't know. We'll have to to see like one thing I wonder is did the Democrats get Johnson to promise anything else, you know, behind the scenes that we don't know about yet. Um.
|
Sam:
[1:46:00]
| But frankly, I don't know that they needed to, they, they got the main thing that they were really concerned about, which was getting the Ukraine aid over the hump, getting that to happen. Most of the other big must do things are done. Uh, we don't really expect that the Republicans are actually going to be able to do anything on their own because they have trouble get at the moment they only have one vote to spare in the House.
|
Matt:
[1:46:29]
| And that's if that person doesn't get sick that day.
|
Sam:
[1:46:32]
| Exactly. And that'll probably go back up to two or three as a few special elections play out over the next month or two. But they can't do much in the House anyway. And even if they did, they have to get it through the Democratic Senate and Joe Biden to become law. So in all likelihood, there's nothing significant coming out of Congress before the elections anyway. Maybe they'll do some stuff in the lame duck i think i heard and i wish i had checked this but i think there's one more financial deadline where they they as they always do they kick the can down the road but only by a few months i think this comes up one more time in like september or october or something like of course just before the election or but like what often happens when when these come up in September or October is that both parties at that point are like, we don't want to fucking deal with this right now. Let's kick it to January. Yeah. And, and then you'll have a new Congress have to worry about it. So, so I, the Democrats was like.
|
Matt:
[1:47:38]
| My constituents are going to vote for, I want my people to vote for me in two months. So I don't want to do anything.
|
Sam:
[1:47:44]
| Yes. And so the, I, the Democrats may not have extracted anything else. They got the Ukraine aid. That's what they wanted. it i think it it might have just been the deal that said okay get ukraine aid done and we'll save you yeah and so he did and they did because frankly the the alternative if if the democrats had said no we're not saving you we would have a repeat of the last couple of speaker battles Yeah, where the Republicans would just plain not be able to fucking pick somebody for a long time because they've only got that one vote to spare. So they basically have to have a unanimous choice amongst all the Republicans to get anybody in his speaker.
|
Matt:
[1:48:34]
| And then how much longer would have the Ukraine package been delayed?
|
Sam:
[1:48:38]
| Yeah. Or, or, or if Ukraine had happened, but then the Democrats hadn't, let's say they got the Ukraine and then they didn't support him. We might still be in speaker battles right now. Like it could go on for a long time and there's a, there's a lot of chaos there. And, you know, I've seen people say, well, let the chaos play out. It's bad for the Republicans. And why would the Democrats not want the Republicans looking like fools for weeks upon weeks upon weeks upon weeks? And the answer that Democrats have given consistently is like, yeah, that might be good for Democrats in the next election, but it's bad for the country. We need to be able to actually govern and get things done and act like we're functional, and we're going to help make it functional.
|
Sam:
[1:49:34]
| They also could have played it with, after enough of that, maybe some Republican would say, fuck it and vote for the Democrat, and then you have a Democratic speaker. But that would be an unstable situation, too, that wouldn't let, you know, so that so I don't think you'd you'd get and because then the Democrats would be reliant on that one Republican, just like the Republicans were reliant on the Democrats right now. And frankly, having a situation where you have a speaker that to keep his job has to actually keep both parties somewhat happy is not necessarily a bad place to be.
|
Sam:
[1:50:13]
| Every once in a while, people have speculated or talked about, in the UK, the Speaker of the Parliament is a nonpartisan position. Opposition their job is to make sure the debate is fair and to make sure that things move forward etc now it's also very different because there's a lot of party discipline and the party in charge basically controls everything anyway but you could see there's a strong argument to say american democracy would be healthier if in both the house and senate frankly you didn't have leadership have a stranglehold on what came to a vote and what was going to be next on the agenda, and instead said.
|
Sam:
[1:51:00]
| Anything with the support of at least 10% of the members gets a vote, you know, and it passes or it doesn't pass. It still needs a majority to pass, but like basically anything with non-trivial support gets, gets a vote. You, you would have a situation where, you know, comp bipartisan compromises would become a lot more possible than they are today. The reality, especially in the the house but also in the senate in different ways because the filibuster does weird things blah blah blah but like is that neither party was willing to support anything at all that had support from the other part like bipartisanship is is is a no-no that gets everybody in trouble because you know you don't want to give the other side anything that they can use to say that they They did something good. And so of course the Republicans wouldn't help the Democrats or the Democrats wouldn't hurt the Republic wouldn't help the Republicans because it'd be helping the other side where if you had a, a setup that encouraged, Hey, if you can get something that has half the Democrats and half the Republicans, but a majority of the overall, then great do it. Yeah. You know? So I don't know. Of course, then maybe you'll get more tick tock bands anyway.
|
Matt:
[1:52:22]
| So, Well, at least it's both sides of the house would be thinking about it together.
|
Sam:
[1:52:28]
| Right. So. And look, there are a lot of areas where the two sides of our politics have a wall so deep between them that never the twain shall meet. But, you know, there are a lot of areas that that's not true. And you actually could find places where there's agreement. And like, why don't we make progress in the places where there is agreement? You know? Yeah.
|
Matt:
[1:52:51]
| Yeah okay.
|
Sam:
[1:52:53]
| I think that's the end matt so we'll do the stuff at the end real quick.
|
Matt:
[1:52:59]
| Okay as.
|
Sam:
[1:53:01]
| Do you want to do it do you know the things at the end you listen you've listened to every show you know what i say every week.
|
Matt:
[1:53:07]
| I mean when i hit the seven eight minute mark that left i'm like all right sam's just going to talk about all the socials and email addresses and uh and then like what haven't we talked about that you can bring up from slack and i'm like oh that's i like i fast ask if I were to get to that. Like, I know all that.
|
Sam:
[1:53:24]
| I know. I know. I'll say it real fast. Go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You can find there our archives going back all the way to the beginning. Matt, you should listen to them all again.
|
Matt:
[1:53:37]
| I got to tell you, a couple of years ago, I was like, you know what? I'm going to listen to the first few.
|
Sam:
[1:53:42]
| Yeah.
|
Matt:
[1:53:43]
| The audio was fucking horrible.
|
Sam:
[1:53:46]
| Yep.
|
Matt:
[1:53:46]
| And I mean, all the times that you crashed was comical. And you were like, oh, my God, I lost so much of my show.
|
Sam:
[1:53:58]
| Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was sad. We have improved over the years. We are not perfect. We are not a professional production. It's a hobby. Be but like compared to the beginning like you said there's a difference you know hopefully mostly better but you know you never know we are also like much more long-winded than we were like you said the first year the shows were like if we did a half hour show that was like a mega massive show yeah you know and uh now like we're routinely two hours so yeah yeah there.
|
Matt:
[1:54:28]
| Were some times i was like i want to go listen to a show that was a week that coincided with this event.
|
Sam:
[1:54:35]
| Let me.
|
Matt:
[1:54:36]
| See what this event was. And I'm like, okay, Obama was elected. Let me listen to that show over those couple of weeks. And I think that was the last time I went back and listened to old stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:54:46]
| Yeah. One of my coworkers, Jen, who was on the show a couple of times and has since moved on to other pastures. But when she first found out about this podcast, I couldn't believe she did this she she went and listened to the last two or three years of the podcast going backwards starting with the most recent episode and then going backwards one episode at a time i'm like how how could you even do that i'm like you know i make the damn show but like and i i listen to old episodes somewhat but like at the same time how would is that really that scintillating to systematically go back and listen to old episodes i don't know but but the archives are there if you want them.
|
Matt:
[1:55:30]
| What i do is i mean i i listen to the the the oldest one i haven't listened to yet so like right now i am in the middle of the one from april 21st.
|
Sam:
[1:55:42]
| Okay i'm.
|
Matt:
[1:55:43]
| Like three or four behind right now and that happens during the that happens during the year right so during during my kid's school year i'm really not driving a whole lot i don't.
|
Sam:
[1:55:53]
| Drive anymore i mean okay this.
|
Matt:
[1:55:54]
| Is my this is my office like i work.
|
Sam:
[1:55:56]
| Nice fully.
|
Matt:
[1:55:57]
| From home and i go to new york when i when i have, The train is when I listen. The airplane is when I listen. The long drives when I can put headphones in and everybody else in the cars. Or the summertime is really when I catch up because then I'm like, if I'm going to the beach, I can store up two episodes. And that's a few hours at the beach.
|
Sam:
[1:56:17]
| Nice.
|
Matt:
[1:56:18]
| Yeah. All right.
|
Sam:
[1:56:20]
| Anyway, you can find the archives, their transcripts for almost the last year of them as well. And you'll find all our emails or Yvonne and I, our emails, uh, Matt, I don't know if you want to give any contact information, but we have our, our, our mastodons, our Facebook, all of that's linked on there. And of course our Patreon where you can, where I always mentioned, you can give us money. We, you know, we get, we get 15 bucks a month right now. It's very exciting. You listening right now could make that $20 a month. You know, it'd make, it'd make such a difference in our our lives.
|
Matt:
[1:56:55]
| The mug is a quality mug that's right it is a quality mug i mean it's it's it's almost seven o'clock east eastern time i don't know what the hell it is gmt i don't need 255 that's i mean that's gibberish to me um i could i'm not drinking coffee right now but if we were doing this hours ago i would i would have had this with the mug with me you.
|
Sam:
[1:57:20]
| Have two of them now don't you.
|
Matt:
[1:57:22]
| No.
|
Sam:
[1:57:22]
| No, only one?
|
Matt:
[1:57:23]
| No, I have one. I only have one.
|
Sam:
[1:57:25]
| Okay. Because at one point, I believe when I sent you the mug that you have now, your address was already in the form as me having sent you something before. And I don't know what I sent you before. It was something. But anyway, because I'd asked for your address, and then I went to fill it in, and it was already there. And I'm like, oh, weird. So I don't know what it was.
|
Matt:
[1:57:47]
| I don't know what it was.
|
Sam:
[1:57:50]
| Anyway yeah different levels of the patreon we will mention you on the show we will send you a postcard we will send you a mug all that kind of stuff as matt has said it's a wonderful mug, Wonderful mug. I actually have to replace mine. I should get a new one for myself sometime. But yeah, and at $2 a month or more, or if you ask, we will invite you to the Commodions Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and others are chatting throughout the week, sharing links, all kinds of stuff like that. Since Matt is not on the Slack, I will mention one thing that came up on the Slack this week that is also news from my family, sort of. Specifically, my wife and her political career year. This week was the filing deadline here in Washington state for candidates to get themselves on the ballot for this year for all kinds of different races, for everything from governor to state reps like she is to all kinds of other crap. And the way Washington works, by the way, is we have jungle primaries, which are everybody who runs for office, regardless of party, is in one primary and the top two, regardless of party, go on to the general election. So you can have like five Republicans and three Democrats running for an office and you might end up in the general election with a Republican and Democrat, or you could end up with two Republicans or two Democrats or whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:59:14]
| And then whoever does this, this is like, there are several states that do this at this point. Washington is one of them. And so this is the registration for For everybody who wants to be in, the way Washington is, is there's a week that everybody can register in. The deadline was 5 p.m. on Friday. We got to 5 p.m. Friday, and nobody had registered to run against my wife. So she is unopposed.
|
Sam:
[1:59:42]
| And I guess theoretically, you could have a write-in person come out of nowhere and try to do it. But practically speaking, this means she's won the primary and she's won the general election already. And she will retain her spot as the Washington state rep for the 44th legislative district position one. She will be coming back to that next year. Again, you never know. Maybe that write-in candidate will show up, but there's not going to be anybody on the ballot officially against her. Her seatmate in Washington State, for every district, there is one senator and two representatives. It's not like the two representatives have different districts. They're both the same district. her seatmate does have an opponent so my wife is going to be putting a lot of effort to helping her seatmate retain her seat but looks like, My wife's already won re-election effectively because nobody filed to go against her.
|
Matt:
[2:00:49]
| Is this a November election this year?
|
Sam:
[2:00:53]
| Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There would have been a primary in August. Well, there still is. There'll be a primary in August and a general election in November, but her name will be the only one on it for those two races. Her name plus a write-in slot.
|
Sam:
[2:01:08]
| And for those of you who've listened a long time, you know that I used to have a rule that whenever there was an unopposed candidate, I would always write myself in just out of protests thinking there should always be some sort of competition and unopposed was bad. First of all, I sort of stopped doing that after Donald Trump because I was like, fuck it, I'm straight Democratic ticket right now no matter what. But anyway, even if I hadn't done that, I would not be writing myself in against my wife. I'm voting for her, sorry. But anyway, Anyway, she's been still trying to process the fact that she's not going to have competition. She was expecting that while there had been no rumors of specific people who would be going up against her, she was expecting somebody to come up and to have some sort of competition and have to go through all of the stuff that a re-election campaign involves, but I guess not. There's still stuff that she has to do. There won't be zero campaign. I won't be putting out hundreds of signs, but I'll still put out some signs. There's still, she'll be fundraising some for herself, but to, to just standard costs that happen even in this situation, but also she's going to be helping her seatmate. I mentioned plus other candidates that are in contestant rate in contested races. So a lot of that stuff will be going on.
|
Sam:
[2:02:32]
| And so, yeah, so that's look, you know she'll still be doing a bunch of stuff but my main job was assigned so my job went from like i'm planning on spending like many hours every weekend from now to november to okay maybe sometime in the next few weeks i'll put out a handful of signs you know so you.
|
Matt:
[2:02:52]
| Gotta put enough and you gotta you gotta you gotta campaign enough to to be higher than any quantity of right is right there might be.
|
Sam:
[2:02:59]
| Yes there.
|
Matt:
[2:03:00]
| Might be like a whole neighborhood that's like a hundred house 100 households, it's like, all right, we're going to put in John Doe. So you got to put enough lawn signs after that.
|
Sam:
[2:03:08]
| And also just even with nobody else, you still want to make sure you're getting your name out there, that people know who you are, what you've done, all kinds of things like that. And frankly, the reason she's unopposed is probably due to a couple of things. One, the Republicans in Washington state are kind of disorganized right now. There's some issues going on like there are in many states where you've got Not like traditional Republicans fighting with the MAGA Republicans. And, you know, there's a lot of chaos going on there. That's playing out in the governor's race where the official Republican Party nominated this MAGA-ish Republican who has like a history of all kinds of issues over like a mainstream Republican who used to be in Congress and is now running for governor. And it's just, it's just really messy. And they're also in the dirty tricks game when they do manage to get organized. The other thing we talked about on the Slack is this is a tactic that the Republicans have been using in a bunch of States lately, but they just did in Washington. The, the, the strongest of the Democrats running for governor here is named Bob Ferguson. He's the, currently the attorney general, I believe. And he's running for governor. There are a few other Democrats running, but he's the front runner. The Republicans went and found two other people named Bob Ferguson.
|
Sam:
[2:04:38]
| Just random Bob Fergusons they found that live somewhere in the state, no political history, not office holders, not nothing, and put them up to run for governor too. As Democrats, they had them put themselves on a, say that they were affiliated with the Democrats on the ballot. So the ballot will have three Democratic Bob Fergusons on it. One real, two fake.
|
Matt:
[2:05:02]
| This year they did this?
|
Sam:
[2:05:03]
| This year they did this. This week they did this.
|
Matt:
[2:05:06]
| You know, this has been done before.
|
Sam:
[2:05:08]
| Yes. Yeah. This happened in Florida. People are being brought up on charges. I think people have gone to jail in Florida over this. It's happened in Pennsylvania. It's happened in two or three other states as well. The Republicans have started to do this as a habit. It actually appears to be illegal in Washington state, just like it was in Florida, to do this with the intention of confusing voters. The Secretary of State is able to, in these cases, add stuff to the ballot lines to clarify. So the Bob Ferguson, who's actually Attorney General, will be Bob Ferguson, parentheses, current Attorney General, and the others will be distinguished in some other way. The Secretary of State can do that in this situation. But yeah, it's happened in a bunch of places now. And I guess, I guess it's worked kind of in a couple of places where people have gotten confused and voted for the wrong person. So.
|
Matt:
[2:06:07]
| So the thing that when you said that, it just was like, you know, it reminded me of the show Fargo. Fargo is on Hulu now, and they just did a season with Jon Hamm.
|
Sam:
[2:06:21]
| Okay.
|
Matt:
[2:06:21]
| And he plays a sheriff that's up for, you know, among other things in the storyline, he's up for reelection. And like the opposing party gets two or three people of his same name. So they show up to it, he shows up to a debate, and they all announce their names. And they all announce like, you know, I'm, you know, I'm, you know, so and so and he it was the funniest, funniest. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[2:06:45]
| And on the Slack, Yvonne also mentioned that this happened in an Eddie Murphy movie called The Distinguished Gentleman also did the same thing. And Peter on the Slack, you know, I mentioned this happened in a bunch of states. He like pulled out news articles of this exact same thing happening in Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Florida were the three that he was able to quickly find examples of. But yeah, so anyway, funny tactic, but, but anyway, my wife is unopposed and so good job for her. And yeah, so it changes our strategy for the next couple of months. But, but yeah, we still have, there still will be a campaign. There will still be events. We'll get the name out there, make sure people are doing it. And like I said, support other candidates who need it. So anyway.
|
Matt:
[2:07:41]
| Cool. Very cool.
|
Sam:
[2:07:44]
| Do, do, do. This is Sam from the future here. I had said that there were two reasons why Brandy might've been unopposed. And then while I was recording with Matt, I completely forgot to come back to reason two because I got distracted by the multiple Bob Fergusons. So I just thought I would complete the thought, thought I would complete the thought, multiple thoughts, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, basically also, to just put it really simply, she's been making lots of friends and in a bipartisan way, not just Democrats as she is, but she's been gaining a reputation for sort of working across the aisle and listening to various people's needs, even if they're not the typical Democratic constituencies. She's, you know, got a door open policy and will talk to people. And basically, I mean, I guess that's sums up as she's doing a good job. And so it may be that she was deliberately sort of not targeted as well. We obviously don't know, like this is all speculation.
|
Sam:
[2:08:57]
| You know, who knows what was going on in terms of either organized central strategy or the thoughts of individuals who were deciding whether or not to run. But, you know, there are a lot of folks who normally you would think would be amongst the people who might be organizing against her who actually kind of like her. And so maybe they just refrained from doing so. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, that was the reason to just wanted to be complete because I said there are two things number one And then never got back to number two so, Back to wrapping it up. Do, do, do. So that's it.
|
Matt:
[2:09:40]
| Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming.
|
Sam:
[2:09:44]
| Matt. It's been great to have you. You should do this more often.
|
Matt:
[2:09:47]
| I think I will. This was a lot easier than I thought. I get, even in social situations, I still get like, oh my God, what happens if I stumble? And I'm in a big meeting and you always think about that. But I'm like, this is Sam. damn, I'm just going to bullshit with Sam for a few hours.
|
Sam:
[2:10:06]
| Exactly.
|
Matt:
[2:10:06]
| And I haven't talked to you in so long where I'm like, okay, I need to do this. I have the time. I have the time today. Next time Yvonne's sick, I'll throw my name in too.
|
Sam:
[2:10:17]
| There we go.
|
Matt:
[2:10:17]
| We should say the next time he travels because it's always travel or sick.
|
Sam:
[2:10:22]
| Yeah, something like that. It seems to pop up like maybe like, I don't know, six times a year on average, something like that that he's out for one reason or another i hope.
|
Matt:
[2:10:34]
| He feels better and yeah thanks for thanks for uh humoring me.
|
Sam:
[2:10:39]
| Yeah thanks very much for coming and uh hey everybody as usual have fun stay safe we'll see you next week oh uh did you want to tell people any way to if you want to get a hold of matt tell tell me and i'll pass it along if.
|
Matt:
[2:10:52]
| You want to get a hold of me send it to any of the messaging messaging locations for convergence corner and sam will get a hold of me.
|
Sam:
[2:10:58]
| Yeah there you go okay hey everybody goodbye goodbye.
|
Matt:
[2:11:32]
| And yeah, like I'm, I'm going to pay attention to my availability more. This was, this was fun to do.
|
Sam:
[2:11:37]
| Cool. I'm glad you had fun. It was definitely good to talk to you and you did great. You had stuff to talk about. You had opinions. Yeah.
|
Matt:
[2:11:45]
| Yeah. I was like, what am I going to talk about? I don't know. These, these things look okay. I'm not on your level, but like, but I'm usually just, I'm usually just driving. And half of the time I'm like, there's so many times I'm driving and I'm like, oh, I I want to, I want to write this down because I want to send this feedback in and I just forget about it.
|
Sam:
[2:12:04]
| Oh, I understand.
|
Matt:
[2:12:06]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[2:12:07]
| So what's going to happen? I'm going to hit the stop button. You'll have a thing on your screen that's telling you like percentage uploaded. Wait until it says it's completely done. Okay. Once it says it's completely done, then you can hang up, close the window, all that kind of stuff. Like if you, if you hang up early or close the window early, then it makes things more difficult. but just wait till it says a hundred percent done and then you're good to hang up. Okay.
|
Matt:
[2:12:30]
| All right, man.
|
Sam:
[2:12:31]
| Okay. We'll talk to you later. Bye bye.
|
Matt:
[2:12:33]
| Bye.
|
|
|
