Automated Transcript
Ivan:
[0:00]
| Hello.
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Sam:
[0:00]
| Hello, Yvonne. How you doing?
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Ivan:
[0:04]
| Hurry up.
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Sam:
[0:06]
| Are we?
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Ivan:
[0:07]
| I do it. I'm single dad right now.
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Sam:
[0:12]
| So we got to.
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Ivan:
[0:15]
| Well, Juana is in Washington State.
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Sam:
[0:18]
| Yeah, you mentioned she was coming.
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Ivan:
[0:20]
| Right. Yeah, she's four hours away driving. But I mean, she is closer to you than to me.
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Sam:
[0:28]
| Nice. Nice, nice.
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Ivan:
[0:30]
| But not that you could go and pop in to say hi now.
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Sam:
[0:33]
| Right, right. Just a little too far. You know, four hours, I could do that. You know, we're... Yeah.
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Ivan:
[0:38]
| I mean, you go eight hours round trip seems very inconvenient, I must say.
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Sam:
[0:46]
| Indeed. Okay, so. All politics? Or butt first, then all politics? You want to do a butt first or you just jump right in?
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Ivan:
[0:55]
| A minor butt first because I... I'm a minor, but first that I've got, then we got to jump in because I don't have time. I can't.
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Sam:
[1:00]
| I understand. Yeah, I understand. Okay, here we go. Wait a second.
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Ivan:
[1:11]
| No, it's not right.
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Sam:
[1:12]
| I know I did it wrong. Hold on. I forgot to stick this on the live thing. Here we go. Well, we'll rewind it. Try again. Here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, July 27th. It's 2024. It is just after 220 UTC as we're starting to record this. I'm Sam Andreevon Boas here.
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Ivan:
[2:04]
| Hello. Hello. Hello.
|
Sam:
[2:07]
| And absolutely nothing happened this last week. Nothing at all.
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Ivan:
[2:12]
| Nothing. It was totally uneventful.
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Sam:
[2:15]
| Slowest news week in forever.
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Ivan:
[2:17]
| Ever. Forever. I mean, you know, we, I mean, the Olympics. The Olympics. Amazing. oh yes.
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Sam:
[2:25]
| Olympics they they they started.
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Ivan:
[2:27]
| Yes then they add like a barely ceremony and celine dion was singing look i will say that that's momentous look i i you know i've always loved celine dion dating back to before she was even famous i i once like i i glimpsed her because i didn't have the time to hear her sing she was a, Well, I saw her in concert later, but the first time I saw her was in 92 in Seville, Spain. Okay. She was there at the World, that's when they, when World Expos were a thing.
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Sam:
[2:57]
| Yeah. Because now nobody cares.
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Ivan:
[2:59]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[3:01]
| I recently, like within the last couple months, listened to an old episode of this podcast where we talked about going to the Louisville World's Fair.
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Ivan:
[3:11]
| Yeah, yeah.
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Sam:
[3:12]
| Like, it was Louisville, right? With the Sunsphere.
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Ivan:
[3:14]
| No, no, Knoxville.
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Sam:
[3:15]
| Knoxville.
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Ivan:
[3:16]
| I Knoxville close enough close.
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Sam:
[3:18]
| Enough it was same part.
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Ivan:
[3:19]
| Of that was one of those things not a thing okay it was close yeah you were close at least okay so Knoxville so that was like when you know when those were a thing and she was there and the guy who was hosting me who unfortunately is somebody that's passed away he was that old he was about our age unfortunately he had type 1 One diabetes and some other complications. And he wound up dying young, way too young. But anyway, I know. But he was he worked for he worked for a radio station covering the events for some major radio station in Spain. OK. And so he told me that they got, you know, she got to to meet her and talk to her and stuff and, you know, said how wonderful she was and whatnot. And I was mentioning how I liked her music and whatnot and so forth and so on. And I will say one thing that, yes, Celine Dion is a Francophone. She is, you know, French-Canadian. Now, I don't recall that her parents were from France. And now she sings in French very well. And it's how she started singing. I was just thinking, well, I mean, OK, it is. I mean, it's the Olympics in France. You've got OK. Yes, I know Celine sings in French. french but i mean i i did it didn't make that much sense to me other than the fact that she spoke french okay they liked they.
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Sam:
[4:43]
| Liked her that's all you need.
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Ivan:
[4:46]
| I guess but you know like over at the i was watching this thing about the olympics in london where they had james bond right yeah i remember you know do this intro and they had the with the queen and the queen the parachute and everything listen listen that still has to be that that that opening ceremony look those clips i mean they also had mr bean yeah you know with the orchestra which is hilarious i i have to say that almost all those opening ceremonies are boring and the british managed to make it really be cool i saw some of this it was i mean there are there are big events but it's like yeah okay now Now, but, but a lot of people, and I will consider because I just watched this, Celine Dion documentary recently, which is showing how the, the incredible difficulty she's having with her health and the fact that it's precluded her from singing. Okay. And it's, it's cost her quite severe ill health effects for a long time, which she was hiding masking. She was going in some concerts where there were tracks that were like recorded in order to cover for when she couldn't sing anymore at those tones, but she went and she sang in live in public, like but she hadn't done in years and so everybody quite a lot of people are very very emotional about that um.
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Sam:
[6:11]
| Nice so.
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Ivan:
[6:12]
| Yeah so that's the big story for the week i think we're done.
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Sam:
[6:14]
| Oh yeah we can wrap it up so yeah uh and now just to be clear no no we're not we're doing we are doing our little but first thing even though like there was stuff this week that was pretty big and then it was yeah yeah and then uh and then we're just gonna like shift out of that into u.s politics because obviously we had a few things happen this week just just a few and.
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Ivan:
[6:40]
| Wait i mean i i i mean are you sure i.
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Sam:
[6:44]
| Don't know like i you know i slept through most of the week so i don't know no but yes yes we we had yeah well you.
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Ivan:
[6:55]
| Guys all.
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Sam:
[6:56]
| Know you know joe biden got.
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Ivan:
[6:58]
| Out kamala.
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Sam:
[6:59]
| Harris got in we got all kinds of stuff whoa hit thing we had all kinds of stuff and uh yeah and and that's it but uh you you said you had one but first thing what was it the olympics.
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Ivan:
[7:14]
| Or do you got something the only thing now the only thing i was going to mention is that i had to get i i this week i, my airpods died out of the blue now i will say that i had noticed since i got this new pair of airpods which i had to get because unfortunately i left my old airpods in my pants and yeah i never leave stuff in my pants i remember.
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Sam:
[7:36]
| You saying this.
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Ivan:
[7:37]
| Yeah that's not a common thing i'm like look so he we we went and i had to get a new i had to get new airpods and so but i noticed that the sound out of these airpods was not as good as the old ones okay okay they just they just Just were not. I was always like.
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Sam:
[7:57]
| You've got a dud pair of AirPods or something.
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Ivan:
[7:59]
| Well, and then all of a sudden this week, I'm on a conference call, and one of them refused to connect to the computer.
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Sam:
[8:07]
| Okay.
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Ivan:
[8:07]
| And then all of a sudden, neither of them, the next day, neither of them would connect to any device at all. So I...
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Sam:
[8:15]
| Did you buy these AirPods off, like, some random guy in the parking lot that was.
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Ivan:
[8:19]
| Like, selling them out of the back of his truck? Yeah, yeah.
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Ivan:
[8:22]
| Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what I normally, as I usually do. So, no. And so I contact Apple support.
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Ivan:
[8:29]
| And I explain what's going on, and they say uh yeah try this try this no okay well we can make you a genius appointment at the apple store and like that was like at 11 there was one at 12 30 so i'm like okay fine you know i'm you know apple store is like very close to my household over there like during lunch you know try this and the first thing they tried is that first they they ran some diagnostic which managed to coax them back to connecting to stuff because they would they were refusing to connect to any device okay but then i put them back on and since i was there and i noticed this thing about the sound i put them back on i'm like damn it you know what listen the sound is not coming out right of these airpods okay there's just something not right and i'm like well we got this audio diagnostic tool in the back i'm gonna go take apparently so they've got this little do that apparently where they can put them in okay and they will check checks the sound and stuff off and whatever see if they're working or not that i find that really damn cool you know it's not like because let me tell you you got broken earphones of any other kind nobody is doing that to check that they're broken okay all right that's not happening okay so the fact that they've got this little thing to test the audio so they went to the back the the audio test all of a sudden i see them come out with some boxes i'm like what's going on oh your airpods are definitely the the speakers are defective. They're not working properly.
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Ivan:
[9:52]
| So here's, so they gave me a new set of AirPods, you know? So that was, so I had, the other ones were just defective. I mean, so I had to get new AirPods.
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Ivan:
[10:06]
| And then my work computer indicated that my battery is, and I had noticed the battery life on, it's already three years, is fading, okay? Okay, the battery performance is no good. Well, I will tell you something I found out pleasantly surprised. So we have at our company AppleCare Enterprise. Okay, and apparently they're going to send somebody to my house to replace the battery on the laptop.
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Sam:
[10:30]
| Oh, nice.
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Ivan:
[10:31]
| I mean, they're actually going to send somebody. I could have taken it to a store and said, oh, no, no, we can send somebody there. I'm like, really? Yeah, well, you just need to make sure they have a clean table this size for them to work in. And we will perform the repair on time. at your home so i was like okay so that's you don't get that.
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Sam:
[10:53]
| With personal apple care.
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Ivan:
[10:54]
| No don't this is.
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Sam:
[10:56]
| A corporate apple care exclusive feature repair.
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Ivan:
[10:58]
| Yes you know now there is one thing you know this type of repair to send somebody on site for a laptop i remember when i worked at hp okay that existed like in the 90s and 2000s hey you were paying several thousand dollars for a laptop and if you bought extended support right and i mean today's turns is probably like you know five six thousand dollars for a damn computer you know we we used to send people to go and like do on-site repairs to send the parts and i remember that i had one that an hp one does a problem and hp would send an engineer on site they had hp engineers that would go out and fix the damn thing okay but sometime in the early 2000s all the almost every tech company did away with that shit i mean they all did away with it and so i'm like surprised that if you know we talk about things going away that this is apparently the comeback i i i'm getting my my my laptop repaired at at at home so i i was just nice yeah so now i i did i i they did suggest that i make a backup and i have this western digital drive that i've used before but i have no idea it's an old usb 2. i think it's usb i don't know what format it is it's old it's older.
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Ivan:
[12:20]
| No it's not even slower it's refusing it will not connect either to my studio or to my and i noticed this that drive would only connect to my older laptops it will not connect to the new ones that i don't know really old.
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Sam:
[12:34]
| I i've got i've got.
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Ivan:
[12:35]
| I think it is i've got seven i've.
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Sam:
[12:38]
| Got a my the The oldest drive I have connected to this computer right now is one I bought in July 2015 and it works fine.
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Ivan:
[12:47]
| Well, I it's it's also a Western. No, but I have noticed that that that well, I've noticed that that drive had been finicky at connecting almost any hard drive. OK, for computer, for whatever reason. And now any and the newer and I noticed that the older ones that would connect none of the newer ones that would connect. And now apparently all of those new new equipment I got, it just won't connect. So I have to go find out. I have to go get a hard drive. I want to make up. I want to do a backup before God before I do that. So anyway, so that's I'm getting on site. And they're going to fix my... We'll see if they get here. Now, of course, I have to fly out on Tuesday and then come back Thursday. So I got to make sure I schedule it for a day then I'm here.
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Sam:
[13:26]
| That would probably help.
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Ivan:
[13:28]
| That might help, yes.
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Sam:
[13:30]
| So, okay.
|
Ivan:
[13:31]
| Unless I can send an engineer to Puerto Rico. They might be.
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Sam:
[13:34]
| They probably could.
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Ivan:
[13:34]
| I don't... Yeah, now that I'm thinking about it, it's possible. No, no, no. I want to get it done here.
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Sam:
[13:41]
| Okay. My turn?
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Ivan:
[13:43]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[13:43]
| So as I promised last week, my movie this time is The Grapes of Wrath from 1940, which I watched on February 11th of this year. So it is based on a John Steinbeck book from 1939, which I have not read either. But bottom line is it's a movie about the Great Depression. It's people from Oklahoma who, because of the Great Dust Bowl and everything and the Depression, tried to migrate to California and the various travails that they went through. And I I'm, I'm watching this cause of the AFI list. I neglected to check where on the AFI list it was. Let me, let me tell you real quick. I'm grapes of wrath, February. It's number 21 on the grapes.
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Ivan:
[14:50]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[14:50]
| I'm, I'm, I'm getting, I'm getting near the end here. Like we're, we're, we don't have that much left on the AFI list, but yeah, it was number Number 21, and I'm going to give it a thumb sideways. I know this is like, you know, on the list of the greatest movies of all time.
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Ivan:
[15:07]
| Shame. You uncultured twit.
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Sam:
[15:12]
| That's me. I mean, it was fine, but I didn't feel like it was exceptional, right? I mean, as I try to get back to, there we go. Now, let's see. The film is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. It was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation as being culturally or historically or aesthetically significant. Let's see. Did it win any awards? Critical response. Yeah. People who go to pictures for the sake of seeing pictures will see a great one. possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book these are contemporary reviews, it won it won best director best supporting actor or actress yeah and so it it won a bunch of awards you know yeah yeah.
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Ivan:
[16:10]
| Yeah and but but you're you're.
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Sam:
[16:12]
| Like i'm just yeah man it well i.
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Ivan:
[16:15]
| Haven't watched it so i i want.
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Sam:
[16:17]
| You know what we talked about this last week and you were you're supposed to have homework. You were supposed to watch it before we talked this week.
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Ivan:
[16:24]
| I must admit that I have been quite busy. I, yeah.
|
Sam:
[16:31]
| Anyway, the bottom line, I gave it a.
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Ivan:
[16:33]
| So I failed again.
|
Sam:
[16:34]
| I gave it a thumb sideways because it felt a little long for me. It moved a little slowly. It had, yeah, it just never really like pulled me in. It was, it was sort of interesting to see, like, you know, from a historical point of of view and from a, and I, you know, obviously it's based on a novel. It's not like nonfiction, but you know, is sort of, I haven't spent a lot of time learning about that particular part of history, the, the migration of people towards California during the great depression, because of the, all the crops were failing and it wasn't just the crops were failing. It was also like people were buying up all the farms and kicking off the small, the small landholders. and so you know it was sort of interesting from that point of view and there were a couple of interesting moments but it just didn't do anything for me i don't know and and that that's all i got i mean i mean okay.
|
Ivan:
[17:36]
| So so you basically you're an uncultured you know one of these people.
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Sam:
[17:40]
| Yeah i mean it was fine like that's why i'm giving it a side sideways and not a down but like Like, yeah, it's, you know, it's more interesting as a historical artifact than actually being like, oh, I am entertained by this film or I, or even like I learned from this film. It's just sort of like, oh, okay. It's a, it's a thing.
|
Ivan:
[18:07]
| Shameful. Shameful.
|
Sam:
[18:08]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[18:09]
| We are a show just absolutely drenched in shape. We just shit on number 21 movie AFI. One of the top, one of the first 25 ever preserved by the United States. And basically, we just took a dump on it. That's a great show. I think that's a wrap. Okay, so we're done?
|
Sam:
[18:33]
| Well, I'll tell you. Yes, I'll give you the preview, though.
|
Ivan:
[18:36]
| Oh, no, we're done with the show.
|
Sam:
[18:37]
| Oh, yeah, we're done. but no no next yeah the next movie next week is number 20 on the afi list which is what is one flew over to cuckoo's nest from 1975 okay have you seen that one i think i think i have save it for next week we're going to talk about it next week okay okay, it's.
|
Ivan:
[19:02]
| Not capricorn one.
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Sam:
[19:03]
| No okay is that another you're a capricorn one it's a it's a bad movie right i and now i'm adding it to my stupid list it's.
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Ivan:
[19:12]
| It's a it's it's it's not a great movie.
|
Sam:
[19:15]
| It's not a terrible movie does it have oj yes.
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Ivan:
[19:19]
| It does okay.
|
Sam:
[19:20]
| So i knew something.
|
Ivan:
[19:22]
| It's the one where I think it was a fake mission to Mars that they go and they're supposed to be, yeah, they were supposed to be going and fake mission to, right, that's right. It's supposed to be the first mission to Mars. mars and apparently they right before the rocket is launched they take the crew out of the capsule because nasa have determined that they were going to die and they take him to a studio where they can fake everything and then what happens is that the heat shield on the on the capsule fails instead of arriving and it burns up and so they decide well we have to kill him.
|
Sam:
[20:03]
| Okay well thumbs Thumbs up? Thumbs sideways? Thumbs down?
|
Ivan:
[20:08]
| I'm going to give it a thumbs sideways because it was just the, I got to say that it was pretty good up until the end of the movie where the way that it ended was so tacky that it really ruined the movie.
|
Sam:
[20:26]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[20:27]
| But it actually is pretty good up until you get to the end. okay i mean i don't understand how they could have fucked up to get get almost 80 percent of the movie right and then just at the edges oh we don't know how to end this we'll just figure out some idiotic way to do so okay.
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Sam:
[20:48]
| Shall we take our.
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Ivan:
[20:51]
| First break yes and.
|
Sam:
[20:53]
| Then we're just going to do politics and all the stuff associated it till the end of the show okay here here comes the break.
|
Sam:
[22:01]
| Okay we are back so last week i actually like for once like got the podcast out on like saturday evening instead of waiting till sunday night or even monday morning and, that if i had waited we would have like i would have been calling yvonne and been like hey can we do it like a little intro to the show or whatever because of course sunday afternoon noon, Joe Biden does the, I'm not running after all thing. And kaboom, like everything changes. Like, so, you know.
|
Ivan:
[22:40]
| We're going to say nothing happened.
|
Sam:
[22:41]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing happened. But, you know, and we talked about this, you know, we've been talking about this for the last, what was it? Three weeks. It was three weeks and three days from the debate until when he made his decision, I think, or something like that. And last week, we'd said there were lots of reports that it was now a matter of when, not if, and it could come as soon as the weekend. Now, Joe Biden's people were denying that up and down, left and right when we recorded, but there was this weekend or last weekend. And there have been a number of stories about how it played out and blah, blah, blah. I think the bottom line, and then we'll talk about what happened after, but the bottom line is that it had just made, been made completely untenable. Like between like, now obviously there's the, you know, the bad performance that Biden had at the debate itself, but also just all of the three weeks of drama about this, we're just making it worse and worse and worse, like regardless of biggest.
|
Ivan:
[23:55]
| Listen, I don't know, but the, the, the drama was in large part fueled by the fact that the rest of the democratic leaders is not like they came out in strong support of Biden afterwards, because if say all the governors, all the democratic governors and, schumer pelosi and everybody came to the white house and like showed his strong show of support for him okay it it it it probably would have been snuffed out in a week now i'll say um yeah i i it would have it would have really been far far less of a reaction it would have been less of reaction all of them yeah but they all kept but they they were doing the opposite they were feeding it but let me say.
|
Sam:
[24:45]
| They were absolutely actively feeding it. I mean, the counterpoint is if they had done that, like there was a lot of reporting and polls around and you, it's self-referential, right. But about how people were like, look, I saw him. I just don't believe you when you're defending him and you must be hiding something. And there would always, even in that scenario, I mean, we've seen enough of, you know, Joe Biden in those three weeks had a number of really good performances, but he also had a few that were just sort of, eh. And so the worry that at some point he would fall down again was always there. There was also just.
|
Ivan:
[25:29]
| He didn't, he didn't fall.
|
Sam:
[25:31]
| I know. I thought fall down metaphorically. I know.
|
Ivan:
[25:35]
| I know. Um, it's like, well, I mean, well, we've had other guys fall down.
|
Sam:
[25:39]
| Yeah. But, you know, so the worry would always be there. And then you also had the fact that even before the debate, he was losing in the polls and he was not like, well, OK, hang on.
|
Ivan:
[25:54]
| Back up one second. In the days leading to the debate, Biden had actually started taking a lead in the national.
|
Sam:
[26:01]
| In the national. Okay. Yes. Yeah. It had not yet reflected in critical swing states, but yes, he had taken a very narrow lead in the national polls before the debate.
|
Ivan:
[26:10]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[26:11]
| And then that was all blown down by the debate.
|
Ivan:
[26:13]
| And I will say that the big strategic blunder that the Biden campaign did, okay, that created this situation was the fact that they decided to play it with Biden very conservative, where, okay, we don't want him to make a gaffe or a mistake. He is the incumbent. All the fundamentals are pretty solid in his favor. Let's not have him out there in situations Situations where he can, you know, make gaffes and mistakes that that then create certain problems. having to walk them back or whatever the heck it is.
|
Sam:
[27:01]
| So he wasn't, he wasn't out there. He wasn't active. He wasn't like getting the attention.
|
Ivan:
[27:06]
| And all he was doing was stump speeches. And the problem with, you know, and I was looking the other day and you go back like, geez, like some of the Obama campaigns, you know, in the eighties where we were doing like say town halls, you know, we haven't, you know, I don't see any of the candidates really do that kind of like stuff. You know, Biden has definitely not done that. I didn't see any of that in like 2016 that I recall either. It's something that people backed away. And I think that the the the blunder was that by hiding him, then you fed the narrative of, well, there's got to be something wrong if you're not putting him in these situations. Well, even though he was in public and he was doing stuff or whatever, but everybody's like, you know.
|
Sam:
[27:53]
| And that's all bullshit. And this will be relevant when we start talking about Harris. But like the thing was that even when he was doing his best, like there wasn't a lot of excitement around Joe Biden.
|
Ivan:
[28:10]
| No, no.
|
Sam:
[28:11]
| It was just.
|
Ivan:
[28:12]
| But Sam, part of this was, look, it's a self-fulfilling problem.
|
Sam:
[28:16]
| Yeah, no, absolutely.
|
Ivan:
[28:17]
| Look, because the problem is, okay, you had the Republicans for, I don't know, the last couple of years, astroturfing this whole thing that Biden was senile, that he was just this doddering old fool, that basically this is like Weekend at Bernie's with the presidency, okay? OK, they have been saying this over and over and over again. And the thing is that what what his campaign did in terms of that narrative was ignore it.
|
Ivan:
[28:53]
| Whereas what probably would have worked a hell of a lot better was that, you know what, even if he's out in public and he was making a mistake calling, you know, what's his name by the wrong name or whatever the fuck whatnot. Not, you know, those blunders are just, you know, those are minor, you know, compared to him answering questions from the public, like in an open forum and taking questions and doing a press conference and answering questions and showing that, you know, he's got command of the facts, even though he sometimes will make a mistake that that has to be walked back. Look, I mean, you know, it wouldn't be the first president that was in a live press conference where his staff had to go back and say, oh, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what we meant about, you know, whatever. OK, I mean, and that fear, you know, they they paralyze themselves into that. You've got the other guys doing the narrative and, you know, and then he goes out and lays a massive egg. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[29:50]
| And on national TV. me well and and like i you know last week when we were talking about it i i was saying you know hey if they're really going to force him out like that for me to feel like totally justified that that was the right thing to do these people have to know like more than was public like and i and i've heard a couple people say like you know in their private interactions with him, he'd clearly lost a few steps i don't know but like the other thing is even that there's There's also the cold calculation that says, you know, by the time you got a couple of weeks into this, like this, there was so much damage already done that it wasn't repairable. And so, but, but.
|
Ivan:
[30:35]
| But here's the thing. We say that, right? We say that the reality is that the national polling average didn't really move that much. In terms of like, look at where it was in May to where it was now where you got Trump's shot and the RNC, which gave him a boost.
|
Sam:
[30:59]
| In the end, from right before the debate to right before he dropped out, he lost about 4% during those three weeks.
|
Ivan:
[31:11]
| But you know i mean add all the when you're talking about that in the grand scheme of key four percent is basically the within the fucking margin of error it is but like but what people pointed out over and.
|
Sam:
[31:25]
| Over again is that the the amount of slosh you have the number of people in the middle who are changing their minds is much smaller than it has been in previous cycles so four percent is effectively bigger because it's much harder to move the numbers.
|
Ivan:
[31:42]
| Because there's so many but sam again i go back to the fact that after it happened, instead of circling the wagon yeah yeah yeah what you had was that reaction we had the circular firing squad exactly instead of a circle in the wagons he had a circle and firing squad If you circled the wagons, you may have had like a 2% impact, okay? But you add... totally the opposite effect and everybody went and like just decided that we're going to this. Now, look, there is an important thing. Biden had, and I mean, even when he won the first time around, low enthusiasm.
|
Sam:
[32:24]
| Oh, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[32:25]
| I mean, he won, but for whatever reason, people weren't enthusiastic about him. I I, I, I.
|
Sam:
[32:35]
| Yeah, I, he, he, I don't know why he pulled out a squeaker winning the majority of the double haters who hated both him and Trump, but they went for Biden in the end. But there were lots and lots of people last time around who didn't like either of them. Well, the last few elections, the same thing was true of Clinton and Trump, you know, where huge numbers of people were like, I really don't want either of them.
|
Ivan:
[33:02]
| I hate both of them.
|
Sam:
[33:03]
| I hate both of them. And, and that's been the dynamic and that, you know, and, and it, you know, it, it, it, after the debate, like it just, that just got worse, you know? And, and so you're absolutely right. The circular firing squad, if, if people had sort of defended him, I think the narrative had been growing anyway, that said, you know, there were a lot of people who didn't believe the defense. And that would have been even more after.
|
Ivan:
[33:37]
| Well, Sam, there were a lot of people that before, but it goes back to what I said about not countering the narrative in the first place and keeping them in there. Everybody, even before that, I heard it over and over, the doddering old fool, the blah, blah, blah. This narrative been going and going and going and going. And you're not doing anything to counter that. Okay. Anything significant. Okay. And so they and they let that out there where the problem was that if you're going to have that narrative and your strategies to ignore it, then if you're going to go out in public, you better hit it out of the fucking park. Right. And what he did was the opposite. Now, there's a lot of good reasons why it happened. But you know what? When when they've set that narrative and then you confirmed that for the people that believe that, then it's, you know, is a very difficult situation. And then and then the people that supposedly are supposed to be your biggest supporters basically just they they they actually were actively undermining him.
|
Sam:
[34:46]
| Right. And, you know, to give the benefit of the doubt, they honestly felt that he couldn't do this, that he couldn't bring.
|
Ivan:
[34:58]
| I think I listen. Let me tell you something. I think that's a lot of bullshit. I think that a big part of it is, I will say, is that these guys thought that they had the opportunity to put whomever it is that they wanted, okay, instead of Biden, okay? Because none of them wanted Biden in the first place.
|
Sam:
[35:18]
| And, and they didn't want Harris either. So let's not, let's move.
|
Ivan:
[35:21]
| And they didn't want Harris either. Okay. So let's be clear about this. They didn't want, they wanted the opportunity to fucking put wherever the hell they wanted in. That's what they wanted.
|
Sam:
[35:31]
| So, so now let's, let's move to the next stage of this. Donald, Donald Trump. See, I'm doing it again. I'm calling Biden Trump. Every week, every week I'm doing this. Anyway, the Biden put out his announcement saying I'm out. and the immediate reaction was look he didn't endorse anybody he said that we need to have like a process whatever blah blah blah a micro.
|
Ivan:
[35:58]
| An open convention.
|
Sam:
[36:00]
| Blah blah blah all kinds of people right after that announcement were jumping in talking about the open process talking about how we need how we need like some sort of thing convention sam people people were putting out like Like.
|
Ivan:
[36:15]
| The Slack bot was right again.
|
Sam:
[36:16]
| Yeah. People were putting out plans about like, Hey, we're going to have a series of events. Oprah Winfrey is going to host one and we're going to do this. And we're going to do that.
|
Ivan:
[36:27]
| And Oprah Winfrey, what the fuck?
|
Sam:
[36:29]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[36:29]
| Somebody actually threw that out.
|
Sam:
[36:31]
| Oh yeah. They, they had, they said.
|
Ivan:
[36:33]
| Joe Manchin thought he was going to be the nominee too.
|
Sam:
[36:35]
| Somebody had put out the plan of how this would work. And there was going to be a series of five events and they listed who they wanted to be the hosts of each one of them. and Oprah Winfrey was one of them. And I forget who the others were. They were all sort of famous Democrat leaning celebrity type folks. And, you know, and they, they had this whole plan about how you were going to have a bunch of people toss their hats into ring, have some mini debates, have some events, blah, blah, blah. And then a big vote at the convention. And that was going to excite people and blah, blah, blah. And all of this conversation was going on. And then, About 15 minutes after the initial announcement, Biden comes out.
|
Ivan:
[37:13]
| I mean, literally all that shit happened in 15 minutes.
|
Sam:
[37:16]
| Well, people were, people were already talking about that before Biden's announcement. And in that 15 minute gap, like all of the talking heads and all of the people on, you know, all the social medias and stuff were going crazy talking about, okay, well now this is, this plan has to be activated. We're going to do this and we're going to do that. and blah, blah, blah. And Harris is obviously in the mix, but there are all these other people too and blah, blah, blah. And so after that 15 minute gap, Joe Biden comes in and sends a second post out saying, I endorse Kamala Harris. I think she's wonderful. She's amazing. She needs to be the person. I forget the exact words, but it was along those lines. I give her my full-fledged endorsement and then kaboom like it seems like all of the other efforts collapsed almost immediately for the first couple hours there were still people talking a little bit but even in the first couple hours that had diminished a whole.
|
Ivan:
[38:17]
| Bunch of very important endorsements started coming.
|
Sam:
[38:19]
| Out right it started like it started building like very very within like 15 minutes of biden's endorsement you You started to get other important endorsements. And, you know, and by the time I'll tell you one.
|
Ivan:
[38:33]
| I'll tell you two people that I figured out that really love Joe Biden.
|
Sam:
[38:37]
| OK.
|
Ivan:
[38:38]
| All right. More than just by the way, that above anybody, the Clintons.
|
Sam:
[38:43]
| OK.
|
Ivan:
[38:44]
| I mean, because I don't know if you saw, but not only were they behind them when everything was going on, but they were one of the first to go. And like, oh, he said, Kamala. OK, we're we're you know.
|
Sam:
[38:53]
| They were they were within the first. Oh, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[38:56]
| Oh, yeah. They were like, boom. Oh yeah, we're in. He's right.
|
Sam:
[39:00]
| And, and, and, you know, so within the first few hours, you started getting a whole bunch of endorsements and that train just accelerated. Uh, you also start, and of course Kamala came out like 15 minutes, half an hour later. I forget exactly how long it was saying, of course I'm running. Let's go do this. Blah, blah, blah. And, and, and then they started raising money, huge amounts of money, huge amount of months Like within the first 24 hours, you had almost a hundred million directly to Kamala's campaign, mostly from small donors. And then you, I also saw reported, you had like nearly another hundred, 150 going to associated packs from big money donors. And so within the first 24 hours, you essentially had like a quarter billion dollars coming to support this right away. And it's continued since then.
|
Ivan:
[39:59]
| And that basically, I think that sealed it. That was like, when numbers came out, it was like, okay, this is game over. I mean, there's just...
|
Sam:
[40:09]
| And then you started seeing a parade of all of the people who had been talked about as other candidates besides Harris. one by one started coming out and saying i endorse harris i endorse harris i endorse harris rather than throwing their own hat into the ring the the only exceptions were a trial balloon from joe mansion which got shut down right fast and marianne that was.
|
Ivan:
[40:34]
| Like comedic i mean.
|
Sam:
[40:35]
| And marianne fucking williamson which was just ignored by everybody you know.
|
Ivan:
[40:42]
| And he was like, who?
|
Sam:
[40:43]
| And so the other thing I'll say is in addition to all of the endorsements and all of the money, the other thing is that almost immediately this started to be a social media phenomenon in favor of Harris as well.
|
Ivan:
[41:01]
| Listen, there is a massive shift in enthusiasm.
|
Sam:
[41:06]
| And this is what I want to say. And I want to say this flat out. My main concern, well, I had two concerns really. One was you're treating Biden like shit. But the other, the practical concern is I would be willing to treat Biden like shit as long as you were definitely trading for a better option that had a better chance. And what I was worried about was that you would have this open convention bullshit and a whole bunch of people contending and a bunch of like a fight over who would get the nomination that would leave everybody with hard feelings and feeling instead of enthusiasm bubbling up for out of the result of this, it would be a bunch of people with hurt feelings and a bunch of upset and a bunch of chaos. And that was my biggest concern. But I will say flat out right now. I was wrong. I was completely fucking wrong. And I think part of it is, you know, the way Joe Biden did this, and we'll talk more about that in a second, but what we've actually seen here is such a massive change. Like, you know, we, I said earlier, like, you know, there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for Joe Biden. Basically the mood was, especially after the three weeks of dumping on Joe Biden, the mood was sort of like, okay, it's like, okay, fine.
|
Sam:
[42:32]
| We're going to do this. We will do our best. We will, we still have a shot, but like, we, we know it's a long shot, but we have a shot. We can make this happen and we will sort of dutifully go out and do our best. And by the way.
|
Ivan:
[42:47]
| I still will argue again, that it wasn't a long shot that, that the entire thing about how bad it was or how good it was, it was overblown.
|
Sam:
[42:56]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[42:56]
| All right. So I, Sam, I, Sam, Trump in 2016 was losing by that much. I mean, look, I mean, no.
|
Sam:
[43:07]
| By the end.
|
Ivan:
[43:09]
| Biden supposedly, listen, Biden supposedly was going to, the polls in the summer were a blowout, you know, for Biden. And it turned into a squeaker. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[43:23]
| So listen, I'm sorry.
|
Ivan:
[43:25]
| No, the whole narrative that this was, called and done for was also overdone. I get the concerns about what the numbers were, but saying that in July it's over, it's just always idiotic.
|
Sam:
[43:39]
| Yes. And you're absolutely right. The worst Biden's tipping point that I track on election graphs got was just over 5%. There were times in 2016 and 2020 where the Democrat was ahead by over 6%, over 7% even. And like you said, in 2016, Trump came back and won. In 2020, Trump came back and made it very, very close. But I think the worry was that Joe Biden didn't have what it took to make that kind of comeback.
|
Ivan:
[44:24]
| But all I'm saying, and I want to be clear, is that, listen, that the whole thing that all is lost narrative was ridiculous. Now, I do, Listen, like I said, were you on the back foot? Sure. But keep continuing to say that all is lost, which is just dumb puckery.
|
Sam:
[44:48]
| But my point is, we went from that glum, dutiful, we will try our best.
|
Ivan:
[44:56]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[44:56]
| Because, you know, look, we're in a bad situation, but we'll do our best. We'll give it the good college try. Right. But sort of a resigned view of like, OK, we got to make this work.
|
Ivan:
[45:11]
| Yeah, we got to do this. We got to make this.
|
Sam:
[45:12]
| We went from that to a few hours later, actual like enthusiasm breaking out fucking everywhere.
|
Ivan:
[45:21]
| Let me let me give you a number, a stat about that. OK, Wall Street Journal. This is for an article in Bloomberg that I was reading tonight about the polls and how how the race has shifted. wall street journal poll found similar shifts it's talking about shifts in enthusiasm while only 37 percent of biden voters were enthusiastic nice and food and food and food and food jesus enthusiastic enthusiastic about his candidacy less than a month ago now 81 percent of harris voters said they were enthusiastic so from 37 to 81 percent yeah Yeah.
|
Sam:
[46:02]
| Enthusiasm.
|
Ivan:
[46:03]
| I mean, that's an important... You don't get a shift like that. I mean, that's a crazy shift.
|
Sam:
[46:13]
| And it's also important... I mean, everybody's more enthusiastic, but specifically some of the groups are like... Oh, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[46:23]
| Speaking of groups...
|
Sam:
[46:24]
| Go ahead. You got the numbers.
|
Ivan:
[46:26]
| Yeah, I got numbers. 81, you know, winning just 59% of black registered voters a month ago, Harris at 69 share of Hispanic voters. Okay. To 57 from 45 voters under 30 from 46 to 56. So yeah. So you see, you know, all those boom, boom.
|
Sam:
[46:46]
| Boom, boom, boom. Yeah. And that's the enthusiasm numbers, right? Yes. And like I started to mention, she became a social media phenomenon. Like, yes, the memes have been out of control. There's like songs, there's like various clips of her doing things remixed into other things. there's and the other thing is right off the bat like as soon as she came out the gate actually campaigning and doing press releases and all that stuff she has been more aggressive about going after donald trump than biden has been at all like just effectively going out and hitting him and responding to things that are happening in near real time and being really really aggressive about it and to the point and doing it in a way that resonates and gets attention as well. It's just the energy level from, you know, first of all, there's enthusiasm of the public, but also you can tell the energy, her energy level is something that Biden could not do.
|
Ivan:
[47:54]
| Well, that, that is a hundred percent true. I mean, Biden could not.
|
Sam:
[47:57]
| Yeah. Even when he was younger, he didn't have that kind of personality to be honest, but certainly when he was older, you know? No.
|
Ivan:
[48:04]
| Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You ever had that personality and definitely now, you know? Yeah. No, no. That, that, that is a hundred percent.
|
Sam:
[48:10]
| And so she's out there, she's responding to things like the, you know, there's new, new posts and things from her. She's going out and doing rousing speeches, and people are excited. And you mentioned the enthusiasm polls. At election graphs, the state polls, like prior to Joe Biden dropping out, it had been months since there had been Harris polls, Harris versus Trump polls at the state level until the debate. And then there started to be a trickle of them. That trickle of them after the debate and before Joe Biden dropped out, the movement was basically the Harris versus Trump numbers were converging to the Biden versus Trump numbers. They were getting closer and closer together because my averages started out with her doing better because there are still lots of states where there hadn't been 2024 polls. And so there were things like, you know, if you look back, like I start my five poll average with the average of the previous five elections.
|
Sam:
[49:19]
| Obviously goes back many, many years. But you have, for instance, things like, you know, Iowa, if you average out the last five elections, actually very close because there have been years it was blue and years that it was red. Iowa is now pretty reliably red. We have zero polls so far of Harris versus Trump in Iowa. So my average in Iowa still shows that it's close, but it probably really isn't. And the same is true of a couple more states that have gotten redder over Their states got bluer over time too, but on balance, the position as we got more 2024 polls looked worse and worse for Harris, and it was converging to the Biden numbers.
|
Sam:
[50:02]
| That trend reversed as soon as Biden actually dropped out and she became the real candidate and all of this attention started happening. happening we've i mean it's only been a few days my god it's been like what five and a half days or something since that since the announcement it's been three weeks but there have now been a flood of harris versus trump polls and practically with every one that comes out harris's numbers improve and so you know we still have like a lot of states where we don't have good data yet But, you know, we're, we're, it's filling in fast and as it's filling in, Harris is looking better and better. And at this, and along with the national polls that also show like that gap, you know, I'd meant, you know, we, we mentioned that after the debate on average in the national polls, Trump Biden lost four percentage again, about, about four percent. Yeah, I know. I know.
|
Sam:
[51:09]
| That the, the, the initial batch of Harris versus Trump polls, dead heat again, dead heat. So she's right out of the gate within the first week doing significantly better than Biden and the national polls. And it's starting to look like that in the state polls too, are the, although we still need more to feel confident about that.
|
Ivan:
[51:28]
| I saw, I mean, I saw a number of state polls that really had some huge swings to Harris, like Minnesota. I think I saw in some other places where they were like polls that, holy shit. I mean, you know, they, they really.
|
Sam:
[51:41]
| Yeah, comparing to Biden.
|
Ivan:
[51:44]
| Yeah, comparing to Biden.
|
Sam:
[51:45]
| When you look at the averages, it does seem like gut feel. About that 3% or 4% better than Biden was doing in most states, it looks like. We're getting a ton of these, and we're going to have even more over the next week, I'm sure. We'll have a much better picture in another week. The other thing is, and just to keep this in mind... It's very possible that there'll be an initial bounce that fades a little bit, but here's the other thing. Well, I want two things to cover. Let's talk more about Harris and her campaign and Trump reacting to them. But before we move on completely, I just want to go back a second to the way that Biden did this.
|
Ivan:
[52:35]
| That's what I wanted to get back to that.
|
Sam:
[52:37]
| We skipped over that. The whole way that he did... He was clearly pushed out. He did not want to go. But once he decided he was going to go, all of these...
|
Ivan:
[52:48]
| Well, let's be clear about this. Okay, wait, wait. Hold on one second.
|
Sam:
[52:51]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[52:52]
| You know, Biden is the only one that could decide to get out.
|
Sam:
[52:54]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[52:55]
| Okay, all right. You know, the push out... You know, Biden was basically... You know, how do I say? He was... He was pushed out isn't the right thing. Biden was basically... You know, he was... They cornered him, and I think that the part that became an issue, which I think that probably he saw as a significant challenge, was how money started to be completely dry up. Okay. Yeah. With the big, with big money donors, they, they had started withholding money. So I, I think that that was definitely the part where, look, you could have done a Trump. I mean, Trump never, Trump would have never, I mean, you know, the Republican party and everybody could have said, well, you know, whole bunch of donors said, we're not giving you a dollar. He never back away. way he could have done that but the reality is that he.
|
Ivan:
[53:58]
| I think that to him it was look I need all these things lined up in order to win right, and the allies I'm counting on are not there the money is not there so it winds up on him deciding okay I can hang on they can't really force me out do I do that, And, you know, bring upon the nation, maybe some very negative consequences that I don't want on the nation. Or do I just, you know what, I go and I make what tactically is the best decision for everybody, even though it's not, I, I, I, I don't agree with everybody's opinion about what they're assessing about it. But sometimes, you know, it is perception is reality and it doesn't matter if, if the, you know, the narrative is wrong. I mean, the reality is you get caught in it and I mean.
|
Sam:
[54:52]
| You can't do anything about it. In the end, he made the assessment that fair or not, he was now in a situation where what had already, what was already going to be a hard race was going to be even harder. And he didn't even have his own team behind him. And making a shift at that time would give the Democrats a better chance. now the and.
|
Ivan:
[55:18]
| The one thing is that the timing if it was going to happen it had to be now yeah well it couldn't there was you know this was and i and i you know i think we talked about this a little bit earlier is like you know whatever and i said look the one thing i i had said about this if this is going to happen this is when it needs to happen well it can't be in september well and no no no.
|
Sam:
[55:43]
| It It can't be in September, like after the convention would make everything much harder, but already like it, it was clear the people who wanted him out were not stopping.
|
Ivan:
[55:55]
| And so, and I know, but, but the whole, the whole thing is that, look, they couldn't listen.
|
Sam:
[56:01]
| You couldn't let this had already gone on three weeks. You couldn't let it go on.
|
Ivan:
[56:04]
| You know, you could, I mean, like I said, you could, but it's like.
|
Sam:
[56:11]
| It would be, it It depends on who the person.
|
Ivan:
[56:14]
| No, no. But look, it depends on who you are as a person. It really boiled down to that at that moment. Okay. Well, if it was Donald Trump in the same situation. He would have pushed on. And he would have powered on through the whole fucking thing all the way through.
|
Sam:
[56:31]
| But Joe Biden knew that continuing to power on through this situation would not necessarily make the situation better.
|
Ivan:
[56:43]
| No.
|
Sam:
[56:43]
| And he knew he was already damaged. he knew that you know at this point like doing the switch was almost yeah like like you said yes he could have powered on but to have a good outcome he probably needed to drop out at that point it was it was too late to recover from the internal pressure yeah.
|
Ivan:
[57:06]
| And the problem is that the internal pressure is like i said you know none of these people were backing down look in the week Listen, in the week before, you know, during the RNC, you know, powerful Democrats were using other Democrats to continue to pressure Biden. Like this whole Adam Schiff thing, for example, that happened and other stuff and whatnot, which to me, it seemed like, okay, you know, hey, which one of us is going to volunteer to go and be the pressure guy? And he once said, okay, I'm doing it. Okay. You know, it's like I said, look, if you to go and do something like this, you need the allies. Okay. And if none of these people are willing to go and like do like, I don't know, what the hell is the name of the speaker at a house? The guy that the porn monitor? What's his name? Mike Johnson, right? Is it Mike Johnson? Is that douchebag called Mike Johnson?
|
Sam:
[58:01]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[58:02]
| Speaker at a house?
|
Sam:
[58:03]
| Yes. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[58:03]
| Yeah. I don't know. Just double check. You know, like Mike Johnson go out to fucking court after Trump gets convicted, literally convicted of 34 fucking felonies. And these fucking clowns are all over there. Oh, we're with you. Yes, you're our criminal.
|
Sam:
[58:21]
| So, I mean, so.
|
Ivan:
[58:23]
| I mean, seriously, not even Bob Menendez, who fucking has powered through everything, even he's resigning.
|
Sam:
[58:30]
| So getting back to what Biden did, basically, when he decided he was going to get out, he decided he was going to control how and when he was going to do it and who would be his successor. And so, first of all, on timing, he probably decided a few days at least before he actually made the announcement. I, it might've even been as early as the previous weekend, but I think timing wise, he also knew wait till the RNC is over.
|
Ivan:
[59:03]
| Oh yeah, it was the perfect moment because if you get the bump into whatever, what not from them, blah, blah, blah, go and fucking just, just jam this right through. So basically you completely knock out their narrative.
|
Sam:
[59:15]
| Well, cause on, on the other hand, I was thinking for a little bit like, okay, we had three weeks of this chaos. This had to be harmful. Wouldn't it have been better if Biden had just dropped out immediately after the debate? But no, no, it would not have. This was, this is much better timing. you have the three weeks of chaos but then he drops out right after the rnc it maximizes the effectiveness of that change and you know he also screwed the media a little bit by waiting till after all the sunday morning shows were over you know there's a little tiny bit of additional you know but you know but the main thing was waiting till after whatever i'm.
|
Ivan:
[59:53]
| Like give me a fucking break yeah but what the fuck do that many fucking favors.
|
Sam:
[59:57]
| Right and so but then the The Kamala announcement, his endorsement of Kamala Harris, he just immediately kneecapped all of those people who wanted to get rid of both of them and wanted to have the whole open primary and we'll have votes at the convention. And there were a whole bunch of people arguing that the crazy convention would actually excite everybody and blah, blah, blah. And like you said, there are a bunch of people who are sort of angling to get one of their folks in. You know, not listen.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:31]
| Given the circular firing squad that happened the last three weeks, what the hell would give me the impression that an open convention wouldn't wind up being another circular firing squad?
|
Sam:
[1:00:44]
| Yeah. And like we've said for weeks and weeks, if you did replace Biden and it was anybody other than Harris. That would be disastrous in its own way. Like if you screwed over Kamala Harris. I, oh my God.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:00]
| I mean, the, the, you know, the, the congressional cock, you know, what the hell is their name?
|
Sam:
[1:01:07]
| Congressional caucus or congressional backlog. Which caucus are you talking about? There are many.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:12]
| Them. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:01:13]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:13]
| You know how pissed those people would have been.
|
Sam:
[1:01:15]
| Oh yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:16]
| And imagine passing it up to some other white dude.
|
Sam:
[1:01:19]
| Right. You know, yes. Yeah. Like you, you, you give it to, you know, what's his name in California? Newsome or something. Newsome or Shapiro or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:31]
| Yeah. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:01:32]
| Just some, some random white dude who's more centrist and, you know, cause a big part of this was driven by the quote unquote donor class as well. And so a lot of the impression was they, they wanted to get somebody who'd be a little bit more aligned with their interests as like rich white dudes. You know, I mean.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:54]
| Listen, we've had like I was talking about all the tech bros and all these other people.
|
Sam:
[1:02:00]
| I mean, they're mostly Trump Republican ticket.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:01]
| Yeah, I mean, right. But but you still had a whole bunch of you still had some others to you. You've got listen, you've got the guys that wanted to fucking trot out mansion.
|
Sam:
[1:02:13]
| I mean come on no i i just laughed at that i'm like are.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:18]
| You fucking kidding me.
|
Sam:
[1:02:19]
| He if he had put his name in contention at an open convention he'd be lucky if he got like five delegates out of thousands to vote for him like probably the democrats that you know he he's left the democratic party he would have to rejoin in order to even do that but like none he was not loved at best he was like no it's like okay tolerate it's like okay he was tolerated he's better than a republican it's a miracle that we have somebody in west virginia who'll even vote with us some of the time you know yes and so he was tolerated because of that anyway yeah he not so but i think this is i think a lot of those people including pelosi including others like saw biden do that and we're like you know we got biden out but the rest of our plan just collapsed well.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:13]
| That well well that was my whole point about you know where you're talking about for you know force out i'm like look the only guy who could decide to leave was him and biden decided okay all right all you assholes are not you know that i've done you know but the the fucking guys that are perpetrated this This entire, you know, a lot of this shit happening the last three weeks. Okay, fine. I'll leave. I'm fucking leaving on my fucking terms. Not, you know, you guys don't get to dictate how I go. These guys couldn't dictate me to go into first place. Bye. I'll give you this and not anything else. Right. And I'm perfectly happy with that.
|
Sam:
[1:03:53]
| And by the way, I picked Kamala Harris for a reason. I believe in her. I think she'd make a good president. it. I've been working with her closely for nearly four years and yeah here we go like and.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:08]
| I guess she's not fucking couches, Which apparently is not a true, apparently is a correction.
|
Sam:
[1:04:14]
| I meant to do that correction at the very beginning of the show, but forgot. Yes, J.D. Vance, well.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:20]
| Did not write in his book, okay.
|
Sam:
[1:04:22]
| Yes, let's be careful.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:23]
| Because what you said was, let's be clear, we're not saying that he didn't do it. Right. Because we can't know for sure. But what you said was that he wrote about it in the book.
|
Sam:
[1:04:35]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:35]
| Hillbilly Elegy. And apparently that's not correct.
|
Sam:
[1:04:38]
| Apparently that's not true. There was a hoax perpetuated by somebody on Twitter who said so and produced some fake images of a page in the book, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, so he did not have sex with a couch.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:52]
| No, no, no.
|
Sam:
[1:04:53]
| Oh, no, no. He did not write about. Like, I mean, the actual thing. I mean, who hasn't? I mean, come on. You know, so.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:02]
| Trying to think. Not a couch.
|
Sam:
[1:05:05]
| Not a couch.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:05]
| I mean, I've had sex on a couch, but not with the couch. Not with the couch.
|
Sam:
[1:05:12]
| Right. But here's the thing. I saw someone saying, you know, all of these people figuring out how to do opposition research on J.D. Vance, and some stone teenager just makes up a post about this. And all of a sudden, he's having to deny it.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:31]
| And and like their.
|
Sam:
[1:05:34]
| Memes all over the internet about couches and all of this kind of stuff and like you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:40]
| Hey hey hey you know what how how many years of me listening to the fact that apparently joe biden is a clone okay what alex just said that joe biden apparently is a clone this is a clone that's in the white house okay that's one of the latest ones you know be listening to this shit you know we you know what let's i mean let's just fuck with these guys for a little or something where there are bullshit. You know, what the hell?
|
Sam:
[1:06:03]
| So anyway, uh, getting back to, we've got all of this enthusiasm on the Harris side. We've got Harris, like it's actually been amazing to see we're like five days in and she completely ramped up this campaign. Now, you know, she had to have an idea that this might be coming. So there might've been.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:27]
| I, yeah, and I'm sure. And, and, and let's be clear, you know, Biden endorsed her directly. He basically told us handed over the campaign infrastructure. Listen, exactly. You know, you were all on this team. Okay. All right. And so that obviously makes it quite a lot smoother.
|
Sam:
[1:06:47]
| And, and look, I mean, even within the last few minutes, I just saw pass by a new press release. she put out, like critiquing, you know, a speech that Donald Trump just did. That's like, you know, here Harris for president statement on Trump's strange speech at TP USA, uh, Harris for president toilet paper USA.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:10]
| There's a convention turning.
|
Sam:
[1:07:11]
| Point Harris for.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:13]
| Oh, Harris for president sounded better as okay.
|
Sam:
[1:07:16]
| Spokesman released the following statement tonight. Tonight, Donald Trump couldn't pronounce words, insulted the faith of Jewish and Catholic Americans, lied about the election again, lied about other stuff, bragged about repealing Roe, proposed cutting billions in education funding, announced he would appoint more extremist judges, revealed he planned to fill a second Trump term with more criminals like himself, attacked lawful voting, went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn't want to sit near in a restaurant, let alone be president of the United States. That was the statement. You know, it sounds pretty good. And look, you know, single statements like this aren't going to turn the direction of election. But the fact that the campaign is on this stuff and putting out these kind of aggressive responses nearly instantly after something happens, this is just the difference in tone and energy that we talked about before. This is just like, you can't like Joe Biden and his campaign. And I know, like you said, a lot of the campaign infrastructure is the same, but they weren't doing this kind of shit. They were doing every once in a while. They tried, but it wasn't landing. They tried every once in a while. Meanwhile, Harris and her new campaign apparatus are far more aggressive. She's being much more aggressive. She's leaning into all of this stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:37]
| And well, but there's another thing here that I want to check that you you disagreed with me. OK, but but I I totally believe is also helping. Yes. Go for it, Harris. us. Well, the fact that because you advocated, oh, if he's leaving.
|
Sam:
[1:08:55]
| He should resign too. Yeah. I did say that on.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:57]
| The committee for Slack and I told you you're out of your mind.
|
Sam:
[1:09:01]
| Okay. All right. Because at this point, I think there's enough evidence that you were right. Then I will admit I was wrong about that too. Go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:08]
| Because look, a campaign by itself is training enough And running this country, you know, is hard as well. There is a lot to do. It's very difficult to juggle both. And the fact that she could focus on the campaign pretty much exclusively. Okay. All right. And Joe and the cabinet could worry about all the other stuff makes it that she could be far more effective at actively campaigning out there and getting the message out. You really, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:09:42]
| I mean, what, what, what I, what I had said, which again, I admit I was wrong, was that if he also resigned, he hands over the incumbency advantage. He hands over, you know, the powers of the office and everything else that she could use to influence things that the downsides are a everything you just mentioned, but be also anything that goes wrong in the next six months, she would immediately be blamed for.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:09]
| And now she's like, look, it doesn't matter. Anything goes good. I can take credit. And basically, if anything goes wrong, it wasn't me.
|
Sam:
[1:10:18]
| Exactly. So I think you're right. I think they... Yes, Joe Biden was pushed, but in the end, I think he orchestrated all of this fucking perfectly. This is the best possible way to have done this transition, which brings us to the other part, which is the Republicans are absolutely flailing and have no freaking idea how to deal with this.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:43]
| They're going. They're going. I mean, they're losing their minds.
|
Sam:
[1:10:46]
| I mean, they'll probably figure it out before November, but still, right now, it's glorious to see.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:53]
| I don't know. I really don't know. Because, let's be clear, J.D. Vance was a terrible pick for VP.
|
Sam:
[1:11:02]
| Oh, people are already talking about, like, will Trump dump him before the election? You know, what would be involved in that?
|
Ivan:
[1:11:08]
| I think it's very possible. I gotta be honest. I think it's very possible. I mean, the guy is a meme a minute. I mean, you've never seen it.
|
Sam:
[1:11:18]
| We talked about the couch thing. he had also there's here the cat woman thing that yes the couch thing the cat woman thing he's picking fights with jennifer aniston over the cat thing like right you know okay you got any more really popular celebrities you want a child childless women yeah he's he's talking about how like you're you're the one of the problems with the democrats is they're turning the party over to people without biological children and leaving out stepchildren adoptions, all of this kind of stuff, or, and let alone the people who don't have children at all, which is a perfectly valid choice, but he doesn't think so.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:02]
| No, he doesn't think so.
|
Sam:
[1:12:03]
| No, you know, but you got all that. And, and then also like he was heavily known like in 2016 as a never Trumper. and there's like a nice right there's a nice little quote of him talking about how he's never trumper which of course someone has remixed into a song you know it's like a little techno song he was.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:28]
| Like i mean did he say he was you know basically he was our hitler well.
|
Sam:
[1:12:32]
| He his exact statement was he wasn't sure if he was our hitler or something else but but no he said well i.
|
Ivan:
[1:12:39]
| Mean what that's what that's the level of comparison no.
|
Sam:
[1:12:42]
| I know but But in the song, he talks about how he's a never-Trumper, how he doesn't really like Trump, how whatever. And it's all over. If you go into TikTok and start scrolling, you'll find this pretty damn quick. Now, of course, I say that, but TikTok knows I like this stuff. So, of course, it shows me more. But the Kamala Harris stuff is all over the place. It's doing well. But here's the thing. Fundamentally. For nearly two years now, Donald Trump's case for the election has all been about Joe Biden. Like it's all been Joe Biden's old. He's senile. He's this. He's that.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:23]
| Well, now who's the old senile bastard on the ballot?
|
Sam:
[1:13:27]
| Now he's the old senile one. He is now the oldest candidate ever to have been nominated by their party. Because, of course, Biden isn't being nominated by his party. So Donald Trump is now the oldest ever nominated. And of course, before the debate, we were talking about how Donald Trump himself was increasingly incoherent at his events and stuff like that. Now, we have yet to see a really big pickup in the media talking about that. But Harris is bringing that in there in a way that Biden wasn't because Biden couldn't. Biden couldn't start hitting Donald Trump about his age or how he was confused or how he did because it would all bounce back on him.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:07]
| Kamala could completely just damn the torpedoes right now. Just hit him with everything on being a doddering old fool.
|
Sam:
[1:14:17]
| Yeah. He's old. He's confused. He doesn't know what he's doing and all of the other things that are disastrous about him. He's a criminal. You've got the whole, I'm a prosecutor. He's a felon thing going on.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:29]
| Oh, speaking of like shark batteries and other stuff or whatever, what is this thing now that I was seeing about J.D. Vance also about apparently his searches on sex with dolphins?
|
Sam:
[1:14:41]
| He had made a tweet promoting an article about a woman who had been molested by a dolphin, but the words that were highlighted in the screenshot of the tweet or whatever indicated that he had done a search on the terms woman dolphin.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:01]
| Dolphin.
|
Sam:
[1:15:02]
| Now it may have been that he had seen this article and was searching for it to find the article that he, but you know, he was regardless, he was spreading one of these articles about a dolphin molesting a woman in the water, blah, blah, blah, which by the way, male dolphins are known to do, you know, I've heard.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:24]
| I've heard, I've heard something about this i can't say that yeah so much about the dolphin but.
|
Sam:
[1:15:29]
| Apparently like if if you're a woman or even a man and the male dolphin likes you the male dolphin will try to rape you but you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:41]
| Oh that's that's that's that's great well.
|
Sam:
[1:15:43]
| I guess it depends on the dolphin.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:45]
| You know i have swabbed with dolphins i i have to the dolphin did not try to rape you no no not nothing of the sort probably.
|
Sam:
[1:15:53]
| Good I mean I guess it doesn't.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:55]
| Happen all the time I must admit I must admit I did not want to do it my wife was the one that wanted to do it and basically I got dragged into the water and doing this stupid dolphin swim thing which is really dumb.
|
Sam:
[1:16:07]
| So I take it you didn't enjoy it.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:10]
| Not particularly.
|
Sam:
[1:16:11]
| Maybe if you had had sex with the dolphin, you would feel different.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:16]
| I don't think that that would have helped.
|
Sam:
[1:16:18]
| Okay, good. Yeah. Let's move on from this topic. I don't feel like we need to go further in this direction. Couches, dolphins.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:29]
| I mean, this is Vince. I don't know what the fuck else he's done. You know, the I mean, I mean, J.D. Vance is like is a just a machine of generating content. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:16:42]
| Well, yeah. And also not not just all this stuff that he's screwing up, but I've seen a lot of commentary as well that he just sucks as like a speaker and a campaigner. He's like boring and people don't.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:58]
| And I have seen him speak. It's been utterly boring as all hell. And oh, by the way, here's another problem that he created with this, too. Well, you see, the Republicans are kind of fucking like really, I don't know if you've noticed this, Sam, but the GOP is filled with a lot of racist people.
|
Sam:
[1:17:18]
| Oh, yes. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:20]
| I don't know if you've noticed. Have you noticed this?
|
Sam:
[1:17:22]
| I've noticed that. And the sexists. And J.D. Vance is.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:26]
| And the sexists.
|
Sam:
[1:17:27]
| Both.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:27]
| Both. Wife. And, you know, J.D. Vance is a woman.
|
Sam:
[1:17:31]
| No, no. I was saying he's both racist and sexist, but yeah. Oh, okay. But you can mention his wife is, of course, of Indian descent.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:39]
| His wife is of Indian descent. And oh my God. I mean, there has been this ridiculous amount of racist vitriol directed at, I'm not voting for this guy that's married to this Indian woman. Right. Lovely bunch of people. These people are, I mean, it's like every time, I mean.
|
Sam:
[1:18:00]
| Well, and this goes back to the Trump campaign's general approach to Kamala Harris so far, and not just the Trump campaign, but Republicans in general, they've been doing this, like she's a DEI hire, DEI hire thing as well, you know? And as, as someone pointed out, like that's not on the one hand, it's, it's like the code word for the N word because they can't say the N word. They're saying DEI higher.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:28]
| Basically that's what they're... But also I don't know why you're saying they can't. I'm surprised that they're not straight out saying that word. Can I be honest? Because of all the other shit they said, I mean, come on. Why aren't they saying it? I'm surprised.
|
Sam:
[1:18:41]
| But also it's more than that. The whole implication is that she's inherently unqualified.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:50]
| Unqualified, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:18:51]
| And that she's brought... Meanwhile, like she's got a hell of a lot more experience than Vance or that Trump had.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:59]
| I have a lot. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:19:02]
| I mean, Jesus, she's got all the normal things that you would tick off as like you would want in the experience of a president. She was a prosecutor. She was a Senator. She was a vice president. What else do you fucking want? I mean, that's, this is a typical resume for a president. Yeah. And she did well at all of those jobs, you know, and the whole implication that because, she is not a white male, she's a DEI hire and was brought on board for, and isn't really qualified is just inherently racist, like right off the bat. And, and, and this is the, like right now, the attacks that they're coming up with for For Kamala, you got the racism and you got the sexism, and that's been like 80% of it. And then you've got random other shit they're trying. Like someone was digging up a clip about her trying marijuana. Like we got over that in the Clinton administration.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:05]
| Yeah, I thought, yeah, exactly. I mean, what the hell? Really? This is what we're bringing up. I mean, what the hell?
|
Sam:
[1:20:12]
| And, you know, they're, they're, they're struggling on the one hand. They want to, you know, in the primaries when she ran for president, you know, back in 2019, she had the issue with the left wing being like Kamala is a cop and she's a prosecutor and why do you want that? And like, blah, blah, blah. Now she's using that for her advantage. But at the same time, the Republicans want to figure out like a way to get in on that. Like she prosecuted some people she shouldn't have, and maybe she didn't prosecute some people. But they haven't found attacks that are hitting. They haven't found attacks that are hitting yet, even within their core audience. I mean, I guess in the end, you know, the racism and sexism is going to appeal to a big core of Republicans. It just is. But in order to get those people in the middle that will decide the election, they need something else. And they haven't found it yet.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:09]
| You do? So, you know, so that's not a winning ticket. I see. Okay. Well.
|
Sam:
[1:21:17]
| Oh, and my wife is reminding me because I've messed up repeatedly. Kamala. Kamala. Kamala. And I do sometimes, when I'm thinking about it, I get it right. But when I'm talking fast, I mess it up all the time. So I apologize for that. We deserve to get the name right.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:41]
| Of drugs by the way because before i forget i don't know i you know talking about people around this campaign the other day i i shared a a video of uh donald trump jr okay and i swear to god if this guy is not snorting all the cocaine in south florida then i i there well somebody explained to me what the hell he's taken because he looked this guy looks looks just absolutely stoned beyond on belief okay so i don't i i don't know why you know why that is but these guys i mean well why that is i mean come on we found out that when ronnie jackson was the was the doctor over there apparently i mean he was just handing out drugs like it was like you know like there were there were candy so another another thing since so i guess they're going very well another.
|
Sam:
[1:22:34]
| Thing since Since we were mentioning her name, one thing that was going a lot of repetition online were people saying basically this, hey, you call male politicians by their last name as a sign of respect. You never call them by their first names. You should be calling her Harris.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:54]
| Yeah, I've been referring to her as Harris.
|
Sam:
[1:22:56]
| You should be referring to her as Harris, not Kamala. But here's a couple of things. And I've seen a number of people, you know, basically say, okay, no. And the reasons why no are because one, that sounds good in general, but they're, you know, do we call them Sanders or do we call them Bernie? We've said Joe a lot.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:20]
| I guess Bernie, we called him Bernie.
|
Sam:
[1:23:22]
| We've said Joe a lot there.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:24]
| But we usually call him Biden.
|
Sam:
[1:23:26]
| We do. We do call him Biden. But also, so first of all, it's not a universal rule at all. There are some politicians who go by their first name, some that go by their last name, some that do the initial thing. Like we got AOC going on and RFK for that matter. You know, we've got a lot of, you know, and one big.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:45]
| Another fucking drug and drug.
|
Sam:
[1:23:47]
| Oh, quick tangent, by the way, even before this change, his numbers were indeed collapsing. Like even before this change, like if you go back a few months, he would, you know, his average polling was around 10% in state level polls.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:05]
| Hey, the more you know of the more you hate.
|
Sam:
[1:24:08]
| And, and I'd say the average, like there's still some, I say average, that means there's some higher, some lower. I'd say his average has dropped to more like 5% now. Like, you know, yeah, you occasionally see one at seven or eight, but there are a lot of twos and threes as well. And you very rarely now see a number over 10 for Kennedy. So his numbers are collapsing. And I think it's collapsed even more when, when, after the Harris change, but of course you distracted me with that. What was I going to say before that? Oh, the names, the names. The other thing is the preference on the names. Guess what? A lot of that has to do with what does the candidate themselves prefer and what do they push?
|
Ivan:
[1:24:54]
| So what is she like?
|
Sam:
[1:24:55]
| I don't know.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:56]
| I haven't figured it out because I'm referring to her both.
|
Sam:
[1:25:00]
| In 2019, her campaign bus had Kamala in big letters all over it. You know, she.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:08]
| The Kamala Express.
|
Sam:
[1:25:09]
| The Kamala Express. She uses her first name in lots of things. She's branded herself that way. She uses Harris too, obviously, but she, she has not shown any aversion to being called Kamala or Kamala Kamala. I see. I did it again. I did it wrong. Kamala. She has so no aversion to that. She had an ad in 2019.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:31]
| I'll stick to Harris because I, I, I, I do both.
|
Sam:
[1:25:34]
| I do both. And I, I had.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:36]
| Well, I'm sorry. Well, I don't want to keep screwing up the other ones. I'll also, right.
|
Sam:
[1:25:40]
| Right. I mean, I had been trying to do Harris more than Kamala, but you know.
|
Sam:
[1:25:47]
| I will do both. I mean, cause it's clear she's fine with both and she uses both in her branding and her campaign in everything. Both are there sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, you know? So, so yeah. So anyway, let's see, what have we not hit Yvonne? We talked about Biden. Now we talked about Biden endorsing Harris. Oh, VP.
|
Sam:
[1:26:12]
| We have not talked about the Kamala of veep veep stakes so apparently at the moment they're vetting about 12 people there's a lot of speculation on who's the front runners the you know i on the curmudgeon's corner slack i'd never mentioned it on the show itself but on the curmudgeon's corner slack like weeks ago i had said a brilliant choice would be aoc a very risky choice but brilliant because it would unify the democrats blah blah blah in such a way but it would be risky because it would all also alienate a bunch of moderates, but the safe, and I don't think she's going to go there. I I'm not predicting that at all. I think it would be a very interesting choice, but I don't think she's going to go there. And also she's very young. She will only become eligible to even be in that spot in like October or something. She's just going to turn 35, but the safe choices are white male straight governors, You know, so like the people who've been talking or, or, or senators or senators, the people who've been talked about the most and basically almost everybody who's been mentioned is white male. You've got the, uh.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:23]
| Well, you had, uh, what's her name? Not, not Whitmer. Well, they also mentioned, uh, Whitmer.
|
Sam:
[1:27:28]
| Yeah. You, you have, you have, you have some mention, you have some mention of Whitmer. she's repeatedly said she's she doesn't want to do that but she is one of the ones being vetted reportedly and she but people keep asking you know would two women be too much same thing people have mentioned buddha judge which apparently you know kamala has kamala has a really good relationship with pete buddha judge but people are asking you know okay a woman and a gay guy would that be too much and like on the one hand i want to say to all these fuck that if they're you know, maybe, maybe double down on two women and that's the right thing to do this time. Or just, you know, having the gay guy on the ticket would also send a very clear message and blah, blah, blah. But the safe choices are like, Hey, let's get Shapiro. He's a white guy. He's a governor. He's in Pennsylvania, which is kind of a key state. And he's, He's very popular there. And right now, most paths to victory go through Pennsylvania. So do him. And Whitmer's on their list for the same reason. She's a governor of a key state. People are also talking about Kelly in Arizona, Senator Kelly in Arizona. Yeah. Kelly's a key state and they like certain aspects of his personality.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:51]
| Kelly is a key state.
|
Sam:
[1:28:52]
| Well, sorry. Arizona is a key state.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:55]
| But, oh, but I was like, I don't know that we admit them to the union before Puerto Rico and DC. I mean, what the hell?
|
Sam:
[1:29:01]
| But the thing with him is like, yeah, Arizona cool, but you can win without Arizona.
|
Sam:
[1:29:17]
| It's Like what states do you think they will help in? Then Shapiro's probably, they're also talking about Cooper, who's the governor of North Carolina, for the same reason, bring North Carolina back into play. And then there's some, the oddballs. Apparently they're also vetting some general. Yeah, I mentioned Buttigieg, they're vetting him too. And all of this, the campaign has said they will announce the vice presidential choice by August 7th, which is coming up really fast because they're still going to be doing that virtual roll call to solidify all this stuff before that August 7th deadline, which was all prompted by Ohio and their deadlines. Now, Ohio has fixed that issue, but the Democrats are basically like, we don't want to believe it. We don't want to risk it because even if they've If theoretically fixed that issue, you could see the Republicans doing lawsuits on it and blah, blah, blah. And we don't want any doubt. We want to get it done before the old deadline. But anyway, we've got a bunch of candidates in play, potentially. I kind of figure she'll go for, like, I feel like Shapiro is the front runner because you need Pennsylvania. He's popular in Pennsylvania.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:32]
| The only one that I thought that could be a wild card.
|
Sam:
[1:30:34]
| Wait, let me just say one more thing on Shapiro real quick. Also, apparently Shapiro and Harris have known each other for like 15 years. like they were both prosecutors at the same time and have dealt with each other professionally and have a long personal relationship going back a long time i guess long long long i said long multiple times but they've got a long-standing relationship and that makes a difference too because like you know as numerous people have pointed out you know not only are you picking somebody for the campaign but if you win you are picking somebody to well replace you if something Something happens, of course, but also someone who's going to be in the room and a critical advisor for you for four years.
|
Sam:
[1:31:21]
| And, you know, cause these days, like ever since it used to be that vice presidents were just off, you know, the whole quote about worth as much as a bucket of worms, bucket of warm spit, you know, was the phrase that was used to describe the vice presidency. presidency, but basically since, I don't know, Carter, they've actually given the vice president responsibilities and included them in the process in a way that really wasn't traditional before that. And so now these days it's kind of assumed, I mean, any president could change this, but it's kind of assumed that the vice president is there in the room, part of the decision-making process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So you want somebody you like for all that stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:32:05]
| So who's your dark horse that you wanted to mention?
|
Ivan:
[1:32:08]
| Well i was wondering i don't know if i have a dark horse specifically but i was wondering you know georgia if if we won again georgia georgia is a state with a good good number of troll votes but i just i don't know if there's anybody who could name from georgia that could maybe bring you know well what's her name that i mean i i don't know if there's somebody who could name that would balance the ticket you know in order to bring georgia into the into the mix.
|
Sam:
[1:32:35]
| I don't know. I think that's right. I don't think there is because it really had the Democrats who have won in Georgia have done so by the skin of their teeth. They're not like super, super popular. And then, of course, we had the woman who ran whose name I'm blanking on.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:52]
| Stacey Abrams.
|
Sam:
[1:32:53]
| I think it is. But she's lost multiple times. She hasn't shown that she can bring that through.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:59]
| I was going to argue to bring back Mondale, but Mondale's dead.
|
Sam:
[1:33:04]
| Yeah. I don't, I'm not sure he would help.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:06]
| I wonder where he goes. Well, he's from Minnesota.
|
Sam:
[1:33:09]
| But I will say even without that, the polls on Harris that have happened in Georgia since Biden's announcement, a different story before the announcement. That's why I mentioned it because You know, I'm looking at it like a landmark poll, 1.4% Trump lead. A Emerson poll, about 2.3. There was a Redfield and Wilton poll with her down five. But all of these have, all of this is pointing to Georgia being in contention again. Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:49]
| And that's the reason why I said it. And so I was like, shit, if we could get somebody, it could excite, you know, because Georgia, I mean, you know what? It would be nice if we could still take, you know, Pennsylvania and bring back Georgia.
|
Sam:
[1:34:01]
| Now, to be fair, right now, my average for Georgia for Biden was losing by 4.5%. Make sure I got that right. Yeah, 4.5%. Trump by 4.5% against Biden. Whereas for Harris, the average is now Trump by 5%. But again, that 5% includes polls from before Biden dropped out. And there's like a step change. Like after Biden dropped out, the Harris versus Trump polls improved by several percent in Georgia. And I don't like, it's weird, but like, because you're asking the same question. The people before Biden dropped out were asking, well, what do you think about a Harris versus Trump matchup? But this goes to show you there's a big difference between asking Harris versus Trump as a hypothetical versus, okay, yeah, she really is the candidate. Now, what do you think?
|
Ivan:
[1:34:54]
| No, I know. I know. I know. I know. By the way, I didn't, you know. I don't recall us talking about when Mondale died.
|
Sam:
[1:35:02]
| I don't think so.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:04]
| It was only like three years ago.
|
Sam:
[1:35:05]
| Yeah, I don't think we talked about it.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:07]
| We didn't talk about it. You know, Mondale died of natural causes in his sleep at home in Minnesota. He was 93.
|
Sam:
[1:35:16]
| I mean, shit.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:17]
| You know, pretty old. Okay, well, all right. He tried to run for president. Well, here's the reality. I mean, you know, sorry he passed away. Rest in peace. But the one thing is, well, he did, he didn't do very well when he ran for president.
|
Sam:
[1:35:33]
| No, no, he did not.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:35]
| He did. Yeah. He did probably about as bad as you can do ever. So that's not really helpful, I guess.
|
Sam:
[1:35:43]
| Right. So anyway, on vice presidents, I guess I'll, I'll predict, I'll predict Shapiro. Are you going to make a prediction? I mean, this could go anyway. So this is sort of a predict.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:57]
| Who do I predict? What are my options? We got Shapiro. We got Whitmer.
|
Sam:
[1:36:03]
| We got Kelly.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:03]
| We got Kelly. Well, who else do you think?
|
Sam:
[1:36:06]
| Buttigieg.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:07]
| Everybody got it.
|
Sam:
[1:36:08]
| We got some. Yeah. There was some general whose name I don't remember. There were. You got Pritzker. Pritzker's on the list. Who else?
|
Ivan:
[1:36:18]
| No, that makes no sense.
|
Sam:
[1:36:21]
| There are a few others. I mean, like I said, the reports are there a dozen being looked at, but we've mentioned mention the names that come up the most all.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:31]
| All, all, all to pick somebody different from you just to pick a name. I'll go say Kelly.
|
Sam:
[1:36:36]
| Okay. It seems like those two names right now are the ones that are being talked about the most Shapiro and Kelly. Now she could go in a completely different direction. Hell, she might actually pick AOC. Like I said, I don't think so, but like for all we know, but you know, you, you never know. Like, you know, you're. You know, given everything that's going on, I feel like she's going to go for a safe choice. Like, you know, not like a, you know, a choice that everybody is immediately questioning. And I think people would be immediately questioning AOC. I think they'd be questioning Buttigieg. I think they'd be, you know, a lot of these are ones that people would be immediately like, not so sure about that. And was that a good choice and blah, blah, blah. Now, frankly, I think all of these names that have been mentioned would probably be absolutely fine. She's not considering like, you know, I don't think she'll do a J.D. Vance type pick or or for that matter, you know, or Sarah Palin choice.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:41]
| Well, could we see? Well, could we see anybody who is that list that maybe has fucked the couch or written about it? Is that like a qualified criteria?
|
Sam:
[1:37:51]
| I should mention there are people encouraging her to go for a youth.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:57]
| The fuck account.
|
Sam:
[1:37:57]
| No, no. There, there are people encouraging Harris to go for a quote unquote unity ticket by, by picking a Republican for the vice president slot.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:07]
| Oh fuck that shit.
|
Sam:
[1:38:09]
| Now they've talked about Romney and they've.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:11]
| Yeah, I heard about it. I didn't even say it earlier.
|
Sam:
[1:38:15]
| I, I, I, I think there's.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:17]
| You mean Liz, not, not Dick.
|
Sam:
[1:38:18]
| Liz, not Dick. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:20]
| Jesus. is crazy. I mean, he's still around and we could name, you know, we could make, name vice president again, but I don't think that's a good idea.
|
Sam:
[1:38:28]
| Yeah, I think he's older than Biden.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:34]
| And, and I mean, basically he is Darth Vader for real. I mean, he's got so many artificial things in him.
|
Sam:
[1:38:39]
| But yeah, no, I, I, she's not going to pick a fricking Republican for this.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:43]
| Like, no, we're not going to pick a fucking Republican. What are you at?
|
Sam:
[1:38:46]
| No. And I think, you know, part of the excitement around her on the democratic side is actually that she's a little bit more liberal than Biden is, you know, when she was, when she was running in 2019, she was having trouble figuring out like, where do I slot myself in? because I have to appeal to the progressives and the centrists. And I'm not really, I'm a little bit, I'm left of Biden, but like right of people like Sanders and Warren and those folks.
|
Sam:
[1:39:16]
| And I think she's actually in a nice slot right now. And people are excited because she is more liberal than Biden because to a large part of the democratic base, Biden was just a little bit too, conservative is the wrong word, but a little bit too much about like the preservation of the system and tradition and like, let's work with the Republicans and all this kind of stuff. And they want someone who will, who will just fight and in ways that Joe Biden didn't necessarily. Now, Joe Biden got a lot done with that technique, by the way, like there were stuff passed that nobody thought he could pass and it was passed on a bipartisan basis. But I think there's an appetite for fuck working with the Republicans. Let's ram through whatever we can get done.
|
Sam:
[1:40:06]
| You know, and that kind of thing. But yeah, so I think she'll, she doesn't want to screw, she certainly wouldn't screw that up by picking an actual Republican, but I think she's going to be careful because while she's certainly not going to mess that up by picking a Republican, I think she's also not going to want to pick someone too centrist either because she doesn't want to spoil the enthusiasm that she's built up over the last week as well. And I think she, so she's got a tight rope to walk and she's going to have to figure that out. Like one of the things that I've heard brought up about Shapiro is there's a lot of concern about like, well, what is his position on the whole Israel Gaza thing? And is he like a little bit too centrist for that and like too pro Israel when there's a huge portion of the democratic party right now who wants to take a step back from Israel and Harris is trying to find a midline in there.
|
Sam:
[1:41:07]
| And, you know, so who knows, but, and, and of course, like part of the vetting they're doing, which is an accelerated process because they've only got like a week and a half is, you know, the usual sort of things. Do any of these people have skeletons in their closet? That would be a problem. You know, what are the, the potential attacks against them and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's why these These vice presidents, you know, vice presidents usually get this like massive vetting and digging into all their history and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And sometimes done better than other times. But, you know, but all of these people who are on the list seriously are in, in serious positions where they've been in the public eye for a while. And so you kind of think like, wouldn't those things have come up already? But you know, you never know. No, maybe not.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:01]
| So, you know, you mentioned Cheney. So you, you put me down a wild goose chase. I will say a couple of things about, okay. But one is that I would like them or about, no, no, about Dick.
|
Sam:
[1:42:12]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:12]
| No, no, because Liz, you know, that's not going to help us. But I did think one way that Dick Cheney could help us.
|
Sam:
[1:42:18]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:19]
| He could invite Trump to go hunting. That would be helpful. Okay. You know, so aside from that, can I, can I just say something that I.
|
Sam:
[1:42:29]
| You are, you are We're, of course, referring to when Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face while they were hunting.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:35]
| It was on the back. It wasn't in the face. With a shotgun.
|
Sam:
[1:42:37]
| It was the head, though, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:42:40]
| Yeah, it was there in the head, but it was from behind. Yeah, with a shotgun.
|
Sam:
[1:42:43]
| It did not kill the guy. The guy recovered.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:45]
| It did not kill the guy, but he was severely injured.
|
Sam:
[1:42:48]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:48]
| Okay. But, you know, I was talking about that he's got more attachments than Darth Vader. I did remember that he had some thing like a motor or something put in his heart. But look, we've called this guy a heartless bastard. But listen to this. I did not realize this, okay? In early July 2010, Chaney was fitted with a left ventricular assist device to compensate for worsening congestive heart failure. The device pumped blood continuously through his body. The pump was centrifugal. As a result, he remained alive without a pulse for nearly 15 months. This son of a bitch actually walked around as been alive for a year and a half without having a pulse. Sam, I mean, the guy was alive for a year and a half without a pulse.
|
Sam:
[1:43:45]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:46]
| Oh, yeah, that's really insane. And then he got a heart transplant somehow. So, OK, so but but but yeah, but but yeah, the guy, you know, we've said many times the guy had no heart. Seriously. Holy shit. It's true. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:44:03]
| So I'm just going through the list. I think we hit everything. Biden out. Biden endorses Harris.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:09]
| We hit everything.
|
Sam:
[1:44:09]
| The non-Harris contenders, the VP, the VP possibilities, the Trump campaign reactions, the Democratic reactions, say Harris, should Biden step down the instant mood change, whether this was actually good timing, the disarmed and backfiring Republican attacks. And finally, the couch thing and the couch. We covered everything.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:28]
| Yes, we covered.
|
Sam:
[1:44:29]
| So, yeah, I guess that means we're done.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:34]
| I think that means we're done. It's all new ballgame, Sam. which.
|
Sam:
[1:44:37]
| Which ball game is it i.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:40]
| Mean the campaign the camps that's a euphemism saying it's a whole new ball game it's a whole new thing it's not racquetball no not racquetball no no we're not playing no what what.
|
Sam:
[1:44:51]
| What's that that pickleball pickleball.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:54]
| Pickleball yeah that's you know i i got a friend of mine who who lost her job a couple of months ago thankfully their spouse works and that the other day i talked to her sounded very happy she said she's gotten really good at Pickleball right now.
|
Sam:
[1:45:07]
| There you go.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:08]
| And I'm like, Jesus, I need something like this. You know, I need my, I need my.
|
Sam:
[1:45:15]
| You need a whole new ball game.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:17]
| Yes, I do. I would really love it if my wife would make more, but I mean, I don't understand this thing about, you know, I, I, I gotta love that guy. The guy's a goof. I love this guy, by the way. Well, I, I need, you know, I, I, I need something like that. Oh, I want to be just a goofball.
|
Sam:
[1:45:34]
| I met him by the way.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:35]
| You know what? My grandfather was like that.
|
Sam:
[1:45:37]
| Dougie muff. He was at an event that my wife was at. So I, I didn't have a conversation with him, but I think I might've shook, shook his hand or something. I don't know.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:46]
| Well, there you go. That's a hell of a lot more than I've done.
|
Sam:
[1:45:49]
| But anyway, yeah. Along those lines, yeah. I am waiting for my wife to move up from state legislator to something that actually pays money. Well, I mean, it pays, but very little.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:05]
| It pays, but I know what you're saying.
|
Sam:
[1:46:09]
| I would like to be in the Doug M. Moffitt situation where I just go along to the events and sort of be supportive and that kind of stuff. And sign me up.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:22]
| I mean, you know, all these people say, God, I don't want to ever worry about the woman in power. I'm like, oh, sign me up. You know, where the hell do I sign up for this? You know, I realized that my grandfather on my dad's side was like this because our grandmothers are the ones that really built up the business. I mean, he did some stuff, but she was the brains of the operation. He was really just there for like, I, he was just, you know, the guy, whatever. Yeah. You know, it's great. It's great job.
|
Sam:
[1:46:52]
| Yeah. That, yeah. So I, I, I, I heartily encourage my wife to continue to pursue her political career and whatever, wherever it takes her, uh, into, uh, but of course the thing is like politics doesn't pay that much unless you go the Menendez rate way. And I am not.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:13]
| No, no.
|
Sam:
[1:47:14]
| And I do not want my wife to do that.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:15]
| Listen a senator a u.s senator makes a decent buck you know for example you know it's not bad it's not bad you know it's a decent living yeah no but.
|
Sam:
[1:47:25]
| Then you gotta maintain the two houses and all that kind of stuff like you run in dc one yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:29]
| But then you write a book and you write a you know yes like that's absolutely.
|
Sam:
[1:47:34]
| True that's absolutely true.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:36]
| That's the thing you write a book get some speaking or again.
|
Sam:
[1:47:39]
| You go the menendez route you know and then.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:43]
| You can make the big I don't really recommend the route of getting paid in gold bars and just stuffed envelopes with cash.
|
Sam:
[1:47:51]
| In order to influence your political actions.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:58]
| Yes, I highly discourage it.
|
Sam:
[1:48:00]
| You think the little downside of jail, that it's not worth it?
|
Ivan:
[1:48:06]
| It's not great. It's not good. It's not great. Right. Is that, you know, I, I will say, you know, for people I've spoken to, but experience is not, not enjoyable.
|
Sam:
[1:48:15]
| And so to be absolutely clear, I am not encouraging my wife to take that route.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:21]
| Correct.
|
Sam:
[1:48:22]
| Not that she would consider it anyway, but you know, yeah. Anyway. Okay. We're let's stuff at the end, stuff at the end time, go to curmudgeons, hyphen corner.com. You will find there all the ways to contact us, email facebook mastodon you will find our archives including transcripts for more recent episodes, one thing you will not find there yet for the last three weeks we've been live streaming on youtube as well i'll i'll eventually add a link there i guess but you can uh go what is it it's youtube.com slash at curmudgeons hyphen corner and you will find our youtube channel if you subscribe and hit the little bell, you'll get notifications when we go live.
|
Sam:
[1:49:13]
| Bell. Yes, yes. And, and also, yeah, I, I, when we go live, it's posting on Mastodon on the Corregions Corner Mastodon account too. So you can follow there. And of course the live streams stay there after the show is over. So if you prefer watching unedited video of us talking instead of audio podcast, you can check it out. Anyway, that's all the stuff there, there except for the Patreon that is also linked from curmudgeons-corner.com. And on that, you can give us money. And at various levels, we will send you a postcard. We'll send you a mug. We will mention you on the show. We will ring that bell that Yvonne just did and all of that sort of fun stuff. And importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to the to curmudgeon's corner slack where yvonne and i and a bunch of listeners are chatting throughout the week and sharing links talking about the news there was quite a bit of activity on the slack this week about all the all the politics stuff going on but yvonne do you have a highlight from the slack that you'd want to share that would encourage people to join us there.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:29]
| Well this week you know we had that crowd crowd strike out.
|
Sam:
[1:50:33]
| Yeah we talked about that last we.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:35]
| Talked about that last week, but this week, CrowdStrike, you know, trying to mend fences with people, you know, as, you know, the company with a heart. CrowdStrike offers, you know, there's a TechCrunch article where CrowdStrike is offering, offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for the outage. And several people who received the CrowdStrike offer found that the gift card didn't work.
|
Sam:
[1:50:59]
| Nice.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:00]
| While others got an error saying the voucher had been canceled. Way to go, CrowdStrike. Great job.
|
Sam:
[1:51:07]
| Yes and that's all that's finally all all subsided right like delta was the last one that was having problems and they all caught up they.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:16]
| They've been able to get finally all back in order.
|
Sam:
[1:51:19]
| Yeah and most of that was catching up i have heard.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:22]
| There's a whole bunch of straggler.
|
Sam:
[1:51:24]
| Yeah computers.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:25]
| Like in places but nothing.
|
Sam:
[1:51:27]
| That has nothing with a big impact significant.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:29]
| Impact Right now.
|
Sam:
[1:51:30]
| Okay. And I guess we're done. Are we done for we're, we're, we're under two hours for once. We hadn't, we haven't managed that in a few weeks, so we've, we've done good.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:41]
| Right. Good. Good. Great. Wonderful.
|
Sam:
[1:51:45]
| Right. Yes. Anyway, I, I, I'm confused and bewildered.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:51]
| Any other adjectives that we want to throw?
|
Sam:
[1:51:53]
| Confused, bewildered.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:54]
| That's the Biden-esque. Biden-esque.
|
Sam:
[1:51:57]
| Biden-esque. anyway we're done here uh thanks everybody for joining us have a great week, I don't, we'll see what happens next week. You know, it's, it's.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:09]
| I mean, for all we know.
|
Sam:
[1:52:11]
| We said it was going to be a roller coaster this year. Yvonne, we, you know, we may not have gotten this.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:17]
| We have not. I mean, I've realized right now that my prediction for president is.
|
Sam:
[1:52:22]
| Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:26]
| I've got no way of my, my prediction right now has no way of happening.
|
Sam:
[1:52:30]
| I think you're the only one. Yeah, I think since I actually predicted Trump would win, I got who the Democratic nominee would be wrong, obviously.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:39]
| Yeah, I got that wrong. Yeah, I got that wrong. And I predicted somebody that is not on the ballot anymore.
|
Sam:
[1:52:46]
| Yes not gonna be so the we we weren't great on the specifics but we did predict that this year would be a roller coaster and i think i don't that what we did i don't know i don't i don't know if we said that in the show it's in the prediction show itself but we we did say sometime that this year would be a roller coaster and it certainly has been so far and i think it's gonna it hasn't disappointed i think it's i think it's gonna be chaotic the rest of the year too so So we'll see how it goes. Anyway, I was starting to say, stay safe, have a good week, and we'll talk to you next time. Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:23]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:53:54]
| Okay. Thank you, Mr. Bo. I'm hitting stop.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:58]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[1:53:59]
| Do, do, do. Do, do, do. Do, do, do. Do, do, do. Hey, this is Sam. I just finished editing the show, and I have a question for you that I forgot to put in the show. Last week, I asked for feedback because I edited the show a little bit differently, and I said at the end of the show, hey, let me know basically how I did. I got no feedback whatsoever.
|
Sam:
[1:54:24]
| So I'm going to ask again, I'm asking two questions. A, did you notice any difference whatsoever on what the show sounded like or how the show sounded? You know what I mean? Did you notice any difference at all? And B, if you did notice a difference, was it better or worse than before? I'm basically trying to decide whether I continue to do things the way I have the last two weeks or whether I go back to what I have done before. And so I'm soliciting feedback to like, you know, the audience here, like, does it make any difference? And I guess if I hear nothing from anybody that, you know, either it makes no difference or you just don't care. So I'll just do whatever. But I would love to hear from you. Like, did you notice a difference? And if you did notice a difference, is it better or worse? Because I'd like to do what people like, but, and I'm very carefully not saying what I did differently because I don't want to bias what you think, but let me know. I'd love the feedback. Of course, very few people make it this far in the show, so who knows? Even our loyal listeners often skip the last couple minutes because it's like, okay, you're giving the regular info at the end of the show, and I've heard this a thousand times before. But anyway, if you do hear this, let me know. I may ask one more time on the show, maybe at the beginning of the show instead of the end. I don't know.
|
Sam:
[1:55:53]
| Anyway, bye for real.
| |
|
