Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| What's a do-a-this-a-this-a-this-a-this?
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Sam:
[0:25]
| Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, September 20th, 2024.
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Sam:
[0:33]
| It is just before 17. UTC, as I'm starting to record, I am Sam Minter, and no Yvonne, and no other co-host. So we were going to record Friday night U.S. Time, and about 15 minutes before we were scheduled to record, Yvonne was like, something came up. I can't. I'm sorry. I can't. Something just came up.
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Sam:
[0:55]
| And I gather it was something to do with the volunteer work that he and his wife do with election stuff. I don't know. It was something, something came up last minute. Yvonne was like, I hadn't coordinated properly. Didn't realize stuff was happening, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever. It doesn't matter. But rather than immediately start recording on my own on Friday night or trying to find a co-host on super short notice, I was just like, you know, I'll, I'll do my usual like weekend recording where I break it up and do a little bit on a few days. different occasions starting Saturday morning. So it's a Saturday morning U S time here on the West coast. Well, I guess specifically it's, it's Saturday afternoon on the East coast already, but like here where I am north of Seattle, it's just, just before 10 AM. And I'll tell you, I'm not actually ready to be awake. I could easily have slept another couple of hours, but I've, I've got an exciting day coming up. Oh, agenda wise, I'll do some bullshit in this immediate in this first segment and then you know just random stuff and a couple movies as usual and then in the second section we'll get into the news of the week.
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Sam:
[2:11]
| But I got some stuff going on. So like my son and I both have September birthdays. We normally do whatever little thing we're going to do for the birthdays. And is usually like our birthdays are four days apart. There is very frequently, but not always, a weekend between the two. And so we usually do our a joint birthday thing the weekend between our birthdays there was a weekend between our birthdays this time but my wife brandy was out of the country as i've discussed in the last couple episodes i think so we decided to put it off so we're doing it today which is after both of our birthdays by like you know a little bit but you know we're not doing anything.
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Sam:
[3:05]
| Too traumatic. We're going out to a diner for brunch. We do that almost every weekend. So it's not really that special for the birthday, but we're inviting not just my son, myself, and my wife, but my mother's going to join us. So we're going to do that. And then I guess it's not really a birthday thing, but today's my iPhone 17 Pro Max pickup day. So I'm going to go do that and set up my, uh, new phone later today. So that should be fun. Although I have seen reports that even though like, here's the thing, like I normally prefer to get it mailed. Like when, when I'm buying Apple stuff, I'm like, just ship it to me. I don't want to pick it up at the store. Just ship it to me. I'll even wait a little bit longer, like whatever. It can be like a couple of days later, whatever. I'm not like anxious to be the person who gets the new phone on launch day or whatever. My timing usually doesn't align with that anyway. It did this time, but I didn't order it early in the day, early enough in the day so that my pickup was going to be actual launch day, which was yesterday at this point. But it was early enough that I could pick it up on the store today on the 20th. Launch day was the 19th.
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Sam:
[4:27]
| But it said if I wanted it mailed to me, I'd have to wait for like a couple more weeks. I'm like, a couple days, sure, I would have waited. A couple weeks, I'm like, oh, come on. Okay, I'll go to the damn store. But then, and when you do that, you have to sign up for a specific pickup window. So my pickup window is 3 p.m. on the 20th today. And the whole reason behind having specific pickup windows is so that you don't have like massive crowds and lines. Like, I remember years and years ago when the new macOS operating systems came out and you still had to go buy them in a box and people were really excited about it. I remember going to a mall in Pennsylvania and just hanging out for hours and hours and hours to, like, go buy the new version of the operating system. I believe uh one of our listeners john actually like at some point met me there they were also waiting and i saw them there in line or whatever i i think i'm remembering remembering that right right correctly if i'm wrong john sorry but uh yeah let me know but i i remember doing that and like waiting in line and blah blah blah my patience for such things has gone to zero you know, I do not like lines.
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Sam:
[5:57]
| If I'm grabbing lunch at work, there is a place that I don't like the food anyway. But just for the point of this, it always has long lines. Like right at the ground floor of my building, there's a place that is very popular, has long lines, lots of people waiting there. Even if I loved the food, I would not be waiting in those lines. I'd be like, I'm done. There is a cafeteria also in my building. The lines aren't quite as long, but like the thing I get there are burgers and they're kind of slow making the burgers. And there usually is at least a little bit of a line. So I know if I'm going to go get a burger there, I'm waiting at least like 10 minutes.
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Sam:
[6:46]
| And I just don't have that patience. I will walk a couple blocks away and go somewhere else that doesn't have the line. So the point of this is I've seen a few videos now. I think most of them were from yesterday, from actual launch day. So I'm hoping it'll be better today. But where there are like tons of people waiting in line at the Apple stores to pick up the phones they already ordered and had a pickup time for. And I'm like, the reason you have a pickup time is to avoid these things. Now, I know the problem is, you know, somebody has a pickup time of 3 o'clock. They're running a little late. They show up at 3.30 and now there's more people at 3.30 than there were supposed to be and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they probably, you know, and maybe it's a little bit slower than they want. And they are also dealing with people who are trying to come in and just buy them on the spot instead of having pre-ordered, you know, so it's probably going to be chaotic. But I'm hoping one day later, it'll be a little bit better than the videos I saw of launch day. Because I'll tell you, I got my notice this morning of today's the day, come pick up your phone, here's the QR code so you can just show it to them, and they can just go get your stuff.
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Sam:
[8:06]
| I got all that stuff. But it does say, we'll hold your stuff for seven days. So i i i am torn right now as to what level of line will i tolerate like if i show up there i mean if i show up there and there's a line of 10 people i'm i'm gonna stay yeah you know but if there's a line like wrapping around a freaking building or something then i i have a strong, well I don't know I might get wrapped up in it like I want my phone but like will a couple days really matter no not at all I'll like come back tomorrow or come back you know.
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Sam:
[8:51]
| Thursday afternoon or something where there are probably going to be less people than on a Saturday afternoon I don't know I just this is why I like to get a mail too like I just get the box at home, I, at my convenience, pop it up and do the setup. Also, another part of this is that getting it at the store is actually a little bit frustrating, because you probably are going to wait to get home until you do the setup with your old phone and stuff. Because it's kind of awkward. If you try to start doing that right there on the spot, And I have done this, not with my own phone, but I think with my son's phone after his old one had an issue or whatever. And it prefers that you're on Wi-Fi when you do all that instead of over to cell networks.
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Sam:
[9:52]
| And it takes a while, so you're not going to stand there in the Apple store forever. And if you're on a day like this where it's crowded, there's going to be, like, all kinds of people in there using the Wi-Fi, doing whatever. And, you know, at some point you're going to stop and you drive home, blah, blah, blah. It's going to be interrupted. I mean, it's pretty smart these days. It'll pick up where it left off. But, you know, you probably, and if you've got two devices, it's going to occupy both the devices. I don't know. You're probably going to wait to go. You're going to go home, and then you're going to do this stuff. So you wait even longer. Whereas if you get it delivered to you at home, you can start right away. But yeah, I decided I didn't want to wait like an extra two weeks or whatever to have them mail it to me. So I got that going on.
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Sam:
[10:36]
| And we got, we did get some presents for my son. We'll see what he thinks of them. You know, he's 16 now. It is much harder to buy stuff for a 16 year old than it is to buy stuff for, let's say, a seven or eight year old. You know seven or eight year old you know what kind of toys they like, you just buy them more you say oh yeah he likes this kind of stuff we'll just get a couple more now having said that even when he was seven or eight we often had many duds like we'd have a few toys and toy types that we could be really certain of that okay he's gonna like this, but as the but we would always try to like sort of expand his horizon some and those were hidden and miss, but, and, and also my son has a tendency to, you know, he'll open all the presents on a birthday or Christmas or whatever, but he will space out actually using them. So let's say he gets five things. He may actually start using one of them day of, but that fifth thing, the box may not get opened for years. And at the point, just at the point that you've given up and are like, well, guess that thing was a complete dud. The box has just been sitting here for years. One day he'll open it up and start doing the thing.
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Sam:
[12:06]
| He has done this on a number of occasions now, found some box of something that we gave him years previously and decides, okay, now's the time. I'm going to do this now.
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Sam:
[12:19]
| So we'll see. And he sort of picked himself a couple of things too. Like a couple of weeks ago, we were at the mall for something. Oh, it was actually phone related too. I'll complain about this too. I ordered the iPhone 17 pro max. I also ordered a case for it. The case was available immediately. So I got the little notice that was like, come pick up your case. And I'm like, okay.
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Sam:
[12:46]
| And I got, I could have waited a little while to pick that up, but I don't think I could have waited quite long enough until the day the phone was getting here, like because of the seven day you've got, we'll hold it for seven days or whatever. It's like, come on, I want the case with the phone. Can you just arrange it like so that I don't want the case more than a week before the phones actually come out. I mean, I know there's some tech reviewers who are very excited and started reviewing the cases without having the phones yet and you know doing things like trying to destroy them and, what happens when you like try to scratch it or cut it with a knife or whatever and i'm not going to do that i'm gonna pop the case onto the phone but anyway so we were there to pick up the phone case and so he decided he wanted to go to the lego store and i'm like okay look i i still haven't bought lots of stuff for you you want a couple lego sets as part of your birthday and he's like yes so he picked out a couple lego sets and actually last night he wanted to build some lego and i'm like are you gonna actually like do one of the ones that's for your birthday before we get to like our official birthday celebration thing since it's late i'm like you can if you want because your actual birthday was a while ago and and he decided no and instead.
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Sam:
[14:10]
| He picked another lego set that we'd had for a few months that was still unopened and so we did that together it was a lego like it's one of these three-in-one sets i think it's it can be a fox can be an owl and there's one other animal i forget the third animal that it can be but the other thing is when he gets three-in-one sets he always get he gets really upset with the idea of, you know, taking one apart to make the other. Because the three-in-one set is like, you can make one of these three things. It's not you can make all of these three things. And so at first, when you had really small three-in-one sets, like, you know, a $10 set or something, I would just get them all three. It was fine. We'll get three of them and you can make all three. But when he started wanting more expensive three-in-one sets, I was like, screw that. New rule. We'll get you one. If you make the thing and then want the second.
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Sam:
[15:16]
| Then you have to ask, while the thing you made the first time is still 100% intact, and then I will order you a second one. And then if you want the third one, both of the first two things have to still be 100% intact. For you to order me or for me to order you a third version of this Lego set. And, you know, that has worked pretty well. He has, on a number of occasions now, gotten the second set. Because that's fairly easy. Make one set, and then like the second you're done making it, ask for the second set.
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Sam:
[16:04]
| He has not yet ever made it to get all three, because by the time he's made the second one, he's destroyed the first one. Like, it has been taken apart, it has been, you know, played with, pieces are missing, whatever. So he's never yet made it to the third set of those. And so we'll see. He just made the owl. The fox is long gone. so the pieces still exist obviously it's somewhere but it's not intact so theoretically he could go now rebuild the fox out of the go find all the pieces rebuild it oh and he just threw the box at me no this is a different box oh this is this is a different animal this has a flamingo, a parrot, and an axolotl so anyway.
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Sam:
[17:04]
| Point is, are you saying you made all three of these? Okay, he is telling me he actually got to the third one and had all three of these. I don't remember this, but I don't disbelieve him either. I have a horrible memory. So, okay, well, you know, that's our birthday stuff. I will report back, most likely, in the next segment, how it went with picking up the phone. But in the meantime movies it's time for the movies okay two movies and then we'll be done for this segment and i'll go off and have my brunch get the phone our lizard has a vet appointment as well we will do whatever presents we're doing for birthday we'll see how that goes like both myself and Alex are expecting to get things.
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Sam:
[18:03]
| You know at this age for me it's very low-key if i got nothing i'd be fine it's like because for the most part if i want something i get it myself there are a few things where you know, i don't know i i told my wife for instance that the new apple watches are intriguing but i can't actually justify it because you know i haven't been wearing my old one all that often but then again that's because the battery life sucks on it it's it's a series five of the apple watches they're now on 11 so like this is pretty old it's missing some of the current features.
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Sam:
[18:46]
| It's got a lot less battery life both because it had less to begin with and also because it's old and so battery life diminishes over time so i told her this is the kind of thing i won't buy it for myself, but if you want to, that you could do that. And so I think I'm probably going to get one of those and she's working on a couple other things. I don't know. I don't know, but it's, you know, I would, I would pass by my birthday and not notice it. You know, it would be okay. Anyway, movies. First one. I'm moving my windows around on my computer door so that, yeah, I can see better. Okay. First one, Astro Boy from 2009. line.
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Sam:
[19:33]
| As usual, I will read the very beginning of the description of the plot summary. The full plot summary is one, two, three, four, five paragraphs. But to avoid spoilers, I'll go through. There's a specific moment in the plot where things turn, and so I'll go until then. Okay. In the 22nd century, Toby Tenma is a teenager who lives in the futuristic city-state of Metro City, which floats above the polluted surface on Earth. His father, Dr. Tenma, works at the Ministry of Science alongside Dr. Elifun. Under orders of the president of Metro City, Stone, who is running for re-election, they have created the Peacemaker, an advanced defensive robot fueled by two powerful energy spheres with opposite properties, respectively in colors blue and red, from a star fragment discovered by Elephant. Against the scientists' warnings, Stone loads the negative red core into the Peacemaker, causing it to immediately become hostile and indirectly kill Toby while attempting to violently leave the, the research facility before Elifun disables it.
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Sam:
[20:49]
| A distraught Tenma revives Toby as a robot programmed with all his memories, along with built-in defenses including flight and the ability to understand silent robots. Powered by the positive blue core, the robot activates and believes himself to be Toby. Though the robot has Toby's memories and a similar personality, Tenma realizes nothing could replace the original Toby, and so disowns him. Stoney has his forces pursue Toby in an effort to retrieve the Blue Core, leading to him falling off Metro City's edge when Stone's flagship blasts him with missiles. Afterwards, Tenma escapes arrest by agreeing to disable Toby and give up the Blue Core. And then it proceeds from there. So this is an animated movie.
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Sam:
[21:43]
| It I guess based on a manga series and I'll give it a thumbs up it was fun fun movie had some emotional moments which as I've mentioned many times before here sort of make or break a movie for me like do I actually care about the characters do I get emotional about it do I feel like I care about them and this had all those things this had all those things fun I don't have a lot more to say about it. I did find myself being like, okay, if there's a sequel, I would watch a sequel. I'm looking, there isn't a sequel yet. So, you know, okay.
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Sam:
[22:25]
| Rotten Tomatoes only gave it 51%, 5.6 out of 10 for the critics or whatever. Critical Consensus reads, while it isn't terribly original, and it seems to have a political agenda that may rankle some viewers, Astro Boy boasts enough visual thrills to please its target demographic.
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Sam:
[22:47]
| Yeah, it was fun. It is a good movie. I enjoyed it. Like as, as with most of these things, not high art, but that doesn't matter. It was, it was a good, fun movie to watch. And that's all I have to say about Astro Boy. So next, and I mentioned that these two were coming on last week's show, Les Miserables. Now, Les Miserables has been made as a movie many, many times. Let's see if I can. I had a list somewhere. Let me see. Actually, I'm going to do this because I added all of them to my list to potentially watch someday. So let me go here.
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Sam:
[23:34]
| Okay, here is the list. It was made into movies in 1934, 1935, 1952, 1958, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1995, 1998, 2007, and 2012. That is a lot of movie versions of Les Miserables. And this time I watched the 1958 version and oh by the way and some of those are dramatic and some of them are musicals and of course there's also been the long-running musical version as well that you know like actually go to the theater, play people on stage kind of musical as opposed to movie musical, there have been other adaptations and of course it was a novel in 1862 in French and there are, of course, translations of that novel into any language you can imagine, probably. I remember being required not to read the whole thing in high school, but being required to read excerpts in English and not reading everything that I was supposed to read. So apologies in advance to, Any of my high school English teachers who may be listening to this, I don't think any of them are. But, you know, just in case.
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Sam:
[24:58]
| And I remembered very little of it. Yvonne mentioned on last week's show that he had to read it in French when he was in school. And I think he had to read the whole thing in French when he was in school. I did not. But anyway, I'm going to have to go to the novel to get the plot summary of this because the 1958 Wikipedia page doesn't actually have a plot summary here. Let's see. Major, major, major. Or I could actually, like, remember.
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Sam:
[25:38]
| Man it's too long it's too long they their plot summary is like multiple pages long okay bottom line the main character jean valjean very early on i i believe it's a loaf of bread he steals in order to like feed himself or whatever he gets caught for it ends up in sort of French prison camp, whatever. He's marked as a criminal. He ends up escaping and then becoming a wealthy, successful man. But his past continues to haunt him throughout the whole thing. And it keeps trying to catch up with him, no matter how successful he is in life. And that continues. And then it's sort of all tied up in sort of revolutionary France. And I believe I saw that it's not actually the... Some of the events in the movie-slash-book aren't the French Revolution itself, but some of the other battles and insurrections that happened, well, after.
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Sam:
[27:03]
| There's various levels of—France has had a complicated history. There's more than one event. But anyway, that's the high-level thing. This particular adaptation was in French, so we watched it in French with English subtitles. It was, how long is it? 217 minutes. That is, just do my math real quick.
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Sam:
[27:37]
| 217 divided by 60, that's three hours and, and 36 minutes. So a little over three and a half hours. It was long. We did not watch it in one setting. We rarely watch movies in one setting. We usually split it up at least into two bits, but it depends on the movie depends on the exact lengths, but I can't remember how many, how many sessions it took to get through this. I'm thinking three or four, maybe four. I think it was four. Don't remember for sure. Whatever. It was long.
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Sam:
[28:13]
| And, you know, there's a lot to it. I mean, there's a lot of story here. It, you know, I mentioned all the movie adaptations. There have also been adaptations as TV series and miniseries and stuff like that. So I think I have them on my list too, whatever, on the TV section.
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Sam:
[28:33]
| I can see why this is potentially better for like a miniseries format than for a single movie, because there's just a lot going on. You either leave out a bunch and, and by the way, you know, it's a long novel too. I mean, the, even this like three and a half hour version, the Wikipedia page has a section talking about like changes from the book and how many things were left out and characters were left out. Other characters were, you know, much, had much less to them than they do in the books, et cetera, et cetera, which is, you know, you expect that with any, you know, adaptation of a novel. But, you know, there's a lot here anyway. And so I could see you making it shorter by cutting out even more, but I'll jump to the end. I'm giving it a thumbs up. I think it started out a bit slow. There were a few times where I was a little bit confused as to who was who and what was going on because there are a lot of characters and a lot of interactions between the characters. And the span of time covered is like decades. So you see some people at different stages in their life. And so sometimes it's like, oh, is that the same person that did the other thing like an hour ago in the movie? Yeah.
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Sam:
[29:50]
| But I liked it. And in the end, it also had those emotional resonances and, you know, there are bits of tragedy. There are bits of things that work out well and you're like, oh, that's nice. Just whatever.
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Sam:
[30:06]
| Lots of tragedy, though. Lots of things where you keep going, oh, man, if only he'd done this one thing a little bit differently than whatever. And of course, the main character also, part of the reason this haunts him, he has multiple opportunities where he could have continued to escape his past, but he does something noble that gets him in trouble again. He helps somebody out, or he does one thing or another, and it ends up being something where it leads to him having to be caught again, or him revealing who he truly was again, or whatever.
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Sam:
[30:50]
| And yeah, so thumbs up. Les Miserables. Classic for a reason. I look forward to someday seeing other adaptations of it. I think I have the book on my list too, but just to be absolutely clear, an English translation, I will not be attempting to read this in French. I don't know French. I don't plan on learning French just for the reason of reading Les Miserables. Who knows if the book will ever come up on my agenda. I'm going through many more I'm going through like lots of movies right now per year very few books so like books are happening but like we're talking one or two a year you know so chances of me actually getting to Les Miserables are incredibly low that it would A come up and B that I would finish it if it did come up and I started it it would probably take me years to finish the damn book anyway.
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Sam:
[31:49]
| Two thumbs up movies this time. Astro Boy from 2009. Les Miserables from 1958. I think we actually... Alex, did we get this on Blu-ray or DVD too? I'm feeling like maybe we did. I forget.
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Sam:
[32:05]
| Some of these are harder to get in the right format or whatever. Anyway, it was fun. Long, but fun. Two thumbs up, both the movies. I'm going to take a break now. It is about 10.30, and I'm going to check in with my wife and my mother and see if we're ready to put ourselves on the wait list for the diner we're going to go have brunch at. So fun! Fun, fun, fun. There are a number of songs that go that way, including the one from Superman that we talked about a few weeks back, Superman 2005. Then there's also the one about daddy taking the T-bird away. I imagine that lyric is used in a number of places.
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Sam:
[32:54]
| Anyway, I'm here to say goodbye. I just am looking up which break that I'm going to hit play on. Okay, here we go. You guys ready for a break? It'll be a couple minutes for you. It'll be a decent number of hours for me. Anyway, back after this. Ah! Okay. That was a jump scare from my son.
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Sam:
[33:18]
| I don't like jump scare. I probably blew out the microphone too. Anyway, here's the break.
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Sam:
[34:25]
| And here we are again. So it's been like a day and a half for me. It was Saturday morning when I recorded the first segment. Now it is Sunday evening, US time. Well, just before 4pm. It's like 2250 UTC as I'm starting to record. Anyway, on Sunday. So let me start by giving you an update on the phone stuff and stuff. But I promise to do this relatively quick and move on to like newsy stuff because we already talked enough about other stuff in the first segment anyway i, went to the apple store oh oh i before the apple store i got in my car to go to the apple store, and carplay wouldn't connect on my my old phone carplay i was just refusing to connect and i started getting really frustrated and of course this is me so like i wasn't gonna drive the car.
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Sam:
[35:25]
| Without CarPlay up and without Waze up. And you could say, okay, Sam, you could use the navigation system that is actually built into your car. You could do that. And I'm like, forget that. No, no, no, no, no, no. You could also, for that matter, say, Sam, you actually know where you're going. You don't even need a navigation system. You can just go. It's like three miles from here. You've been there a thousand times. You could just go. But no, no, no. My car play was not working. And I was not about to make the car move a single inch until I figured it out. And so I... Attempted to connect it over and over and over again. This is wireless CarPlay, by the way. I tried to connect it over and over and over again. And I made, and that just wasn't working. And I made the car forget the connection to the phone. I made the phone forget the connection to the car. I tried to repair them from scratch. I made the car forget the connections to all phones it ever knew about. I made the phone forget the connections to all CarPlay as it ever knew about.
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Sam:
[36:45]
| And I was just trying over and over and doing this and that. I turned the car off, turned the car back on, turned the phone off, do a hard reset. Not the kind where you go to factory settings, but like the reset reset. So more than just like turn the screen off, turn it back on. I did that a couple of times. I, you know, was like turning on and off Bluetooth, on and off Wi-Fi, you know, changing settings here, changing settings there. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And I was getting extremely frustrated. I was getting extremely angry. I was in my driveway, like, about an hour, probably messing with this stuff. And, of course, by this point, I'd missed my appointment. You know, my designated time was 3 to 3.30. You know, I was doing, and then at the end, I was like, I was like, what kind of accent do I have today? Anyway the the the i asked chat gpt i'm like here's the situation i've been trying stuff it gave me a list of six suggestions out of those and maybe it was seven suggestions out of those suggestions i'd tried all of them already except for one of them i believe it was suggestion number six out of its list which was connect as a wired car play and sometimes when the wireless car play is confused.
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Sam:
[38:05]
| Connecting wired will get it unconfused. I connected as a wired CarPlay, worked almost instantly. Then I immediately disconnected it and confirmed that it had completely cleared up the problem. It was now connecting wirelessly again, just as it was always supposed to. I thanked ChatGPT, told my son Alex that we were actually ready to go, and then we left. Got to the place probably an hour later than I was supposed to, but we got there and there was practically no one there were a couple people milling around outside the apple store there was an apple employee sort of you know checking people in, and i said i asked him were the lines a lot worse yesterday yes the lines were a lot worse on friday than they were on saturday and he said and for that matter they were a lot worse an hour like we had people sort of out here and the liner you know not around the corner corner but like he sort of gestured to like how far along the way the the line went and but when i got there like i waited maybe 30 seconds max for the people to stop talking to the people who got there right before me and talk to me and i i showed him my little barcode thingy doodle qr code whatever.
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Sam:
[39:30]
| And that said I had a phone to pick up and he said, I'll show you to the right line inside. He showed me to the right line inside.
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Sam:
[39:38]
| This line had like three to four people in it and it was moving very quickly. And I got to the front a few seconds later. They're like, oh, they scanned my thing. They got me my box. They made sure that I knew everything I needed to know in order to be able to take it home and set it up myself they made sure like the the activation was set up correctly so that it once i activated the phone it would do it remotely from home no problem and i was in and out of that apple store in like less than 10 minutes so you know it went smoothly we went and got alex uh alex had come with me because he wanted to get a pretzel at auntie and so we did that and i got i got some food too and then we drove home and then i started setting it up i did have some bumps setting it up though the first time i i went through the setup process it activated the phone it took the phone number from my old phone to my new phone and then it offers you the choice and this has been the case a long time but you can either transfer phone to phone or transfer from an iCloud backup now i had a current iCloud backup all the set but i This time I was like, I'll, I'll do the, I'll do the phone to phone because from what it said, you know, the little descriptions, you know.
|
Sam:
[41:02]
| Here, here's the advantage. Like if you do it from the iCloud backup. It's a very short time for an initial setup, but then as it takes time downloading all your stuff, you'll have use of your phone, but not of all your apps and stuff because they have to slowly download in over time. Whereas the phone to phone, at least in theory, it will take longer during the setup process where you can't use your phone, but as soon as it comes out of it, you've got everything ready to go. And i think at least i i i could be lying like i feel like some things are transferred phone to phone like that aren't if you go from my cloud like but i could be wrong about that like things like having to re-enter passwords at certain places and things like that that aren't in.
|
Sam:
[41:54]
| Like not the things that are saved in your passwords that's moved over but like having to I don't know. I could be full of it. Anyway, I decided to try the phone to phone because I don't remember actually having done that before, at least not successfully. Maybe I failed then too. But anyway, I tried the phone to phone and, you know, at first it was like four hours. I'm like, well, crap, that's going to be a while. Then the number went up six hours, eight hours, nine hours. I think it maxed out at like 10 or 11 and then it started going down again fairly quickly and we got back down to two hours and you know I'm I'm doing I've gotten the two phones sitting right next to each other I've got them both plugged in I'm watching tv with my son doing some other stuff just while they're doing the transfer and then at one point I look over and the old phone said, unable to complete transfer.
|
Sam:
[42:51]
| And I'm like, well, crap. The new phone was still thinking it was transferring and not showing any sign of an error, not showing anything I could do. After about five minutes, though, it timed out and it said, bring the other phone closer again, because it had lost touch with the other phone. It correctly identified that, but the other phone was still sitting right next to it. But the other phone no longer wanted to have anything to do with this transfer. It had said, I'm out. I'm done. I couldn't do it. I'm sorry.
|
Sam:
[43:25]
| And so the only way that I could find out of this scenario, I essentially had, I wanted, I wanted to restart and it gave me an offer to do that, but it basically had to wipe the phone again and start from the very beginning. So i'm like okay fine do that it did that but then it got to the point where it wanted to transfer over the phone number and it said you have one phone number available and i'm like okay and this was different from the first time it did it this time it's like do you want to transfer a number from another phone and i picked it it was my phone number and then it said okay complete the actions on the phone, on the old phone, basically. But the problem was my old phone was no longer set up with that number. It had been deactivated and the new phone had just been wiped. So I couldn't do anything on that. So it was like, and basically my op, it said, it basically said I had to contact support to get past this point.
|
Sam:
[44:37]
| And I'm like, well, that sucks. I really don't want to do that. After hemming and hawing a while, it did have an option to continue without cellular, to like set up the phone, but don't bother with the cellular service. So I let it go ahead and do that. And I was getting all agitated and upset and like preparing myself for, okay, once this phone comes up again, I'm going to have to take my son's phone and call either Apple support or AT&T support and have them like reprovision my phone after, you know, I'm going to have to prove it's me, prove it's really my blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
|
Sam:
[45:17]
| And I was getting all upset by this. but after it came up it figured it out the number was still there and i was able to continue and you know it's still you know and like i said you could use your phone right away at that point but it still had like hours of loading my stuff before it was really fully functional as my phone but anyway i've now actually been able to use this thing for i don't know 16 17 hours not counting when i was sleeping or including when i was sleeping and you know i've gone from a 12 pro max to a 17 pro max so it's a five year difference it's so much smoother on everything i mean this is what i expect right like of course it is it's five years newer five years is a long time but it reacts it you know it's just everything works much more nicely it's you know and of course i hadn't upgraded my old phone to the newest ios so i'm also experiencing the new ios there you know and there are a few features that were out a year ago that my phone couldn't do because it was too old. So I'm getting the full experience now. I'm having fun. I'm enjoying it.
|
Sam:
[46:38]
| And yeah, I'm having fun. And now people have been complaining. In the 48 hours that this thing has been out, that it scratches easily. And I've seen a few people saying that, you know, people have been worried about the iPhone Air and whether it would bend, and people put it through all kinds of tests, and it's actually really hard to bend. It's still made out of titanium. The other phones switched to aluminum, and I've seen some complaints of people who've bent theirs already.
|
Sam:
[47:11]
| And the and the people who are talking about scratching are basically just you know the anitized anitized anitized color that's on these things just scratches really easily apparently and it's it's especially noticeable in darker colors like blue which is what i got and but you know i'm a i'm a case person like yvonne does phones without cases my this new phone went into the new case as soon as it came out of the box, before I even turned it on the first time. You know, out of box, into case, it will never not be in a case with, you know, unless I'm in the process of switching it to a new case, and then only for a few seconds. I believe heavily in cases, and now there is a part of the blue finish that sticks out that is still vulnerable. So, you know, I may still end up getting some scratches because, you know, things happen, but whatever. I'll deal with that, and I will try to avoid bending it. We'll see. Like, I've only seen, like, really one person really complaining about the bending part on this one. I've seen other people saying that's actually fine, but lots of people complaining about the scratches. So, we'll see. Mine's in a case. And I'm happy with it. There you go.
|
Sam:
[48:38]
| I guess now i should talk about news news news news news news news news news who's the leader of the news wait no that's probably copyright even if i change the words anyway well that was a that was actually a disney related song so let me this segment is going to be about executive overreach in general and we'll save the third segment for whatever else i feel like but there have been so many things related to the donald trump administration, pushing so far beyond the bounds of anything we've really seen before.
|
Sam:
[49:27]
| The Disney one is, of course, like they pressured ABC into suspending Jimmy Kimmel over some comments he made in the wake of the Charlie Kirk stuff. They said he was disparaging Charlie Kirk. If you actually look at the comments, he wasn't disparaging Charlie Kirk. He was questioning the motives of MAGA folks who were trying really, really, really hard, to imply that Charlie Kirk's assassin was not one of them, that he was some liberal or whatever. And maybe we'll talk more about the revelations on Charlie Kirk's assassin and what's going on that in the next segment. Maybe we won't. I don't know. But that's not the point here. The point is they didn't like the joke he made. And the commissioner of the FCC.
|
Sam:
[50:20]
| Started making waves and saying, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, started talking about revoking licenses to local stations and the ABC network, started putting pressure on, there are various companies that own lots of affiliates, and he was talking about putting pressure on a couple of them who were in the process of looking for mergers.
|
Sam:
[50:44]
| Bottom line, Disney decided to pull Kimmel. Now, there are reports that it wasn't just about the comments that he had already made, but that what sort of put it over the edge was how he was planning on reacting to the criticisms of him on his next show, where he planned to apologize for anybody who took it wrong, but also explain himself and what he really meant and continue on down some of those roads that he was on before.
|
Sam:
[51:20]
| And in any case, they pulled him. And there has been a significant backlash. There have been reports of lots of people canceling their Disney Plus, their Hulu, etc. Some people canceling some ESPN-related stuff. Some people talking about canceling trips to the parks.
|
Sam:
[51:42]
| And it's been blowing up. Most recently, there are reports that they are in negotiations on whether he can come back. Like, are they going to have certain conditions, whatever? Like, is it going to, you know, what's going to happen exactly? So that's, that has to play out yet. But the important part here is the threat of governmental action was the direct prompt for this. Nobody's even pretending. Like in the Stephen Colbert case a few months ago, there was an excuse about the economics. You know, they were like, you know, we're reevaluating the economics of late night shows and we're going to let him play out the rest of his contract, but then we're not going to renew it. We're going to end the show, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a lot of truth to that. The economics of these late night talk shows aren't great. And they're getting worse every year we go on as people move away from linear TV and stop. You know, the days of everybody ending their day by turning on Johnny Carson are long gone, long gone.
|
Sam:
[52:57]
| And they're not coming back. And so the economics of doing these kinds of shows is bad. So there's truth to that. But this time around, there's not even a, no one's pretending. It's all just about like, you said something that made the administration unhappy. And the administration is reacting by threatening folks. And we don't want to be threatened.
|
Sam:
[53:27]
| And that's that. Now, what folks immediately bring up is, isn't this exactly the scenario that was brought up in all those, you know, the Twitter files and all this kind of stuff, both with regard to Hunter Biden's laptop and with regard to COVID misinformation? And in the case of Hunter Biden, not just Twitter, but other places, too, who all sort of bit their tongues.
|
Sam:
[54:00]
| And the idea is they suppressed the story because the administration basically told them it's a Russian info op. Okay now and in the case of covid the the story was that the administration was coming in and reporting people for disinformation and asking twitter to please do something about it and facebook and others a few differences in these cases one for let's do one at a time let's talk by what happened with jim comey and the hillary clinton stuff and about a few other things but that's the big one where they ran with the story and it turned out to be bullshit and it turned out to most definitely be related to a russian information op the russians had specifically hacked into some email and were selectively releasing it.
|
Sam:
[55:12]
| And most of the email was real email, by the way. It wasn't that it was like fake. And that's the same as turned out to be the case in the Hunter Biden case. Almost all the emails and stuff from the laptop were real Hunter Biden emails and such. But it was an intentional manipulation of the information environment. And so the media industry had felt burnt by that, so they wanted to be cautious. And to be absolutely clear, there are two things here. Nobody demanded anything. They just warned them and the media made their own decisions. And any suppression of this that may have happened in certain platforms literally lasted forever.
|
Sam:
[55:57]
| I shouldn't say literally misuse those words. It was very short. I was going to say hours. It might've been days, but you know, cause the reality is this story was spreading far and wide. We talked about it on this podcast. We talked about how it looked like the big media players were avoiding it live on this podcast. You know, we talked about how, you know, certain social media was keeping you from posting it. And we talked on this podcast about how that was probably a bad idea and counterproductive. So any actual suppression of that story didn't work. But very importantly, there was no actual threat. It was just like, hey, beware of this information. And then the media did with it as they did. And very similar on the Twitter file stuff on COVID misinformation.
|
Sam:
[56:50]
| If you look through all of the stuff that they released, for the most part, it showed the normal operation of, moderation and fact-checking processes that had been put in place, where they were warned of certain activity, they researched the activity, and then the company made their own decision. Now, Zuckerberg and others have said they did feel like they were under pressure that they had to remove this stuff. But again, there was no actual explicit threat of actions. Other than, I guess, the implicit threat that if you routinely don't deal with this stuff like this, there'll have to be regulations eventually.
|
Sam:
[57:29]
| But frankly, there needed to be regulations regardless. You know, this is absolutely not something that should have been left unfettered. But anyway, whatever. But yeah, this is much more explicit. it. Even, even, even, even with that though, I was shocked at how quickly Disney folded on this. Like, the guy was making statements on podcasts and stuff.
|
Sam:
[58:04]
| You know, there was no official legal action. There was no like, we are giving you a note from the FCC that you have to address this issue or blah. It was all sort of unofficial guy talking. And frankly, it's one of those things that if it, there had been an official FCC notice or whatnot, they could have taken it to court and easily won. You know, so, but they just, they just folded because a lot of these companies are so entangled with stuff that the administration has so many places they have leverage. It's, it's similar to what was going on with the law firms. It's similar to what was going on with the universities. It applies to the media, too, where there's so much entanglement with places where the federal government has leverage, either through some sort of regulatory mechanism on, you know, the corporate entities that are attached to these things. Because one of the keys here is it's not just, you know, NBC, or in this case, ABC. It's not just ABC.
|
Sam:
[59:17]
| It's ABC is owned by the larger conglomerate that has all sorts of different interests. One thing that's been pointed out is the New York Times, for instance, while they have their issues, has done better in their fights against Donald Trump. In fact, they had his latest lawsuit dismissed out of hand by a judge just a few days ago. But the New York Times is a privately held newspaper by somebody who, it's its own thing. It's not part of some large conglomerate with all sorts of diverse interests all over the world. It is, it's the New York Times. And that's what they do. And that changes things a little bit. But nevertheless, like the government has all kinds of leverage on this. And the Trump administration has decided they're going to use every last bit of that leverage to their advantage. And, you know, and I know the right's take is they're not doing anything the left didn't do in the Biden administration. It's just not true. It's just not true when you look at the details. That's the story they've been told, is that the Biden administration has been doing all of this kind of stuff for years and years and years, and Obama before him and Clinton before him.
|
Sam:
[1:00:39]
| Have they sometimes used the weight of the government to push things in the direction they want? Of course. It's part of what government does. It's have they done this kind of direct, we will threaten you with this action X unless you take that action Y that is designed for the personal benefit of the president and his feelings without even a fig leaf of this is actually for the public good because of XYZ. No and yeah people have talked about the slippery slope we are well down that slippery slope, we're not at the bottom it is a long way down this slope but we're nowhere near the top either like the amount that this has moved in the first nine months of the trump presidency is huge.
|
Sam:
[1:01:43]
| And this is just one part of it so let's talk about some of the others Donald Trump had asked, his Justice Department to go after various of his opponents. So most of these investigations have been about mortgage stuff. So they're trying to catch people for fraud on mortgages. And people pointed out that Donald Trump seems to be going after people or doing things that he did himself.
|
Sam:
[1:02:15]
| Okay, whatever. So we know that there was the effort to go after Cook at the Fed. Subsequently, it looks like she did nothing. Like when you actually looked at the paperwork, it was all actually in order. So apparently nothing behind that. And she participated in the latest Fed meeting. I'm sure there's going to be more. But in this case was the investigation of Letitia James. So this is another one where Trump has accused her of mortgage fraud by falsifying records to secure favorable loan terms.
|
Sam:
[1:02:53]
| And the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia ended up being pushed out because he did an investigation on this and basically said, there's nothing there. There's nothing we can charge her with. there's no evidence i mean some of this is like through the reporting he has not made any sort of public statements but the the reporting is that basically he was refusing to charge letitia james with anything because he couldn't find anything that met the bar for a prosecution and so trump let it be known that he wanted him out he did end up resigning there were some people are saying he He should have made you, you should have made him fire you, but he resigned probably a few hours before Trump would have fired him anyway. And he's out.
|
Sam:
[1:03:51]
| But what's more interesting, well, and that was bad enough. I'll get to the more interesting part in a second. But already at that point, you had clear communication that basically what was going on here was we want you to charge them. We don't care what the facts are. Like I had talked when we did our annual prediction show, I said, look, he's going to kick off all kinds of investigations, but I'm not sure if there'll be indictments on these sort of attacking his enemies sort of thing. This is about getting the indictments anyway, even if there is no crime. You know I've said before like if you actually find a crime by all means like go after the Democrats if there's a crime there like.
|
Sam:
[1:04:44]
| Go for them. You know, I've talked about this in terms of Epstein and Clinton. Like if there's actual evidence that Clinton was doing something inappropriate with these young girls, throw the book at him. By God, please. When Menendez, Senator Menendez was taking these bribes and gold bars, by all means. And he's sitting in jail right now, as is his wife.
|
Sam:
[1:05:13]
| And yeah, if there's something there now, there, there is something to say about like selective prosecution. Like even in those cases, you know, if you're only going after your enemies and you're letting your friends get away with the exact same thing, cause like there's been credible evidence brought up about several Trump cabinet officials who may have the same sort of mortgage issues that he's accusing others of. And of course, there's no investigations into them. So this is already bad. This is exactly, and once again, though, there is not a damn thing here that Trump didn't say in advance before the election that he was going to do. I will be your retribution. He talked about going after all these people with everything he could, you know? And so it's not a surprise at all, but that doesn't, it's still bad. We should still care, you know? To make it more explicit, this weekend, Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social and then deleted it a little while later once it started, once people noticed it. Because it reads as if it was intended to be a direct message to Pam Dutton.
|
Sam:
[1:06:41]
| Pam Bondi, his attorney general. So let me read this to you. Pam, I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that essentially, same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam Shifty Schiff, Letitia? They're all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done. Then, we almost put in a Democrat-supported U.S. attorney in Virginia with a really bad Republican past. A woke rhino who was never going to do his job. That's why two of the worst Dem Senators pushed him so hard. He even lied to the media and said he quit and that we had no case. No, I fired him. And there is a great case. And many layers. And legal pundits say so. Lindsay is a good lawyer and likes you a lot. We can't delay any longer. It's killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice and indicted me five times over nothing. Justice must be served now. President DJT.
|
Sam:
[1:07:48]
| So there are a few things here. First of all, this is clearly him giving marching instructions to his attorney general on specific people he wants to be indicted that he feels there's stuff for. He's also giving instructions on who he wants to replace the one that was fired. Apparently, it's a lawyer he's worked with before in Florida, was responsible for handling some of his legal cases before, is currently on a gig. She's the one that's in charge of interfacing with the Smithsonian to make sure all the bad stuff about slavery and civil rights is taken out so that we don't have to be bothered by that. But it's explicit marching orders and look again he said all this.
|
Sam:
[1:08:36]
| He said he was going to do this, and he's carrying out on what he said he was going to do. It's still bad. It's still very, very, very bad. And in this case, like, you know, again, the reason this guy's fired, you know, fired slash quit slash whatever is because there's no case. There is nothing there. Donald Trump does not care. He wants the indictment anyway. He's going to put somebody else in and he will probably find someone who will go ahead with the indictment. Now, there's some of these cases like what we've been seeing now in D.C., for instance, is we've now had last I heard it was up to seven. It may be higher by now. Places where grand juries have been returning no bill because they just don't believe the government case is worth an indictment. Like now, most of those cases were for things like, you know, protesters who were doing things, you know, against the National Guard or ICE coming into D.C., things like that. The guy who threw the sandwich, as an example.
|
Sam:
[1:09:46]
| And then there are a few cases that have actually gone to a jury already where the jury's tossing them out, saying, this is nonsense. Forget this. And so you can say that part of the process may be working at least some of the time. So that's good. But having, it's a core value of prosecutors that they should feel like they have a real case and one they can win before going forward with it. As much as Donald Trump protests about his various indictments, I'll leave the impeachments aside. Those are an entirely different kind of issue. But for the indictments, every single one of those, you know, multi-hundred-page indictments with all kinds of details on exactly what he did and the evidence against him, these were not nothing. It's not over nothing. There was real stuff there. Of course, Donald Trump doesn't believe there was real stuff there. He believes, of course. Well, I don't know what he really believes. He believes that no matter what he does.
|
Sam:
[1:10:59]
| Is not deserving of any sort of punishment or anything. I mean, fundamentally, I think, what's the right attitude to ascribe to Donald Trump? The law is irrelevant. What matters is what I can get away with. And what matters is, do I think it was important or invalid? And of course, he doesn't think anything he's ever done is invalid in any way. It's right because he did it. and he chose to do it and he has the right to do whatever the hell he wants he doesn't believe in the notion of a written law that has to apply to everybody equally.
|
Sam:
[1:11:41]
| And so there you go and then, moving on from that one the other big example we got this time was Tom Holman, so tom homan was it is is now like he's one of the big folks in charge of immigration stuff i forget his exact title it doesn't really matter here but it was we found out this week that during the biden administration during the end of the biden administration, there was an investigation of him and he was caught on camera taking a fifty thousand dollar cash bribe for influencing the incoming Trump administration in somebody's behalf. They did a little sting. They got him. They got him on camera doing this. The Trump Justice Department, of course, dropped the investigation, decided not to move forward with anything, and he's now a member of the administration. And apparently there was, and I know this is going to shock a lot of you, there was a lot of this going on between the election and Donald Trump being sworn in.
|
Sam:
[1:13:00]
| Of just all sorts of people in the Trump orbit, essentially soliciting money, soliciting bribes on the promise of helping people out once they were in the Trump administration. Shocker. look, People have started making the comparisons to Watergate, too, this time around. But not like, this is bigger than Watergate, anything like that. Because that was true of any number of things in the first administration. No, what they're now talking about is how we essentially have multiple scandals, well, actually.
|
Sam:
[1:13:47]
| Multiple things happen that would have been Watergate scale scandals if they had happened 20, 30, 40 years ago. But we now have multiple of these every single week, and some of them barely break through the news cycle because it is so nonstop, so constant on an ongoing basis. There's a blue No, it was Somebody posted a picture into Blue Sky But it was originally from X Ned Price posted this On a single Saturday in September, One Trump instructed his AG to go after Specific political enemies That's the one I read you Two We learned that his DOJ Ended an investigation into his border czar Who was caught on camera Taking a $50,000 cash 3. His Pentagon-top brass threatened to expel journalists who report info not cleared by them. Oh, I'd forgotten about that one. That was also yesterday.
|
Sam:
[1:15:03]
| 4. His White House spoke to a shady deal that will see TikTok in the hands of a consortium of GOP megadonors. So that may or may not happen there's still some contradictory reporting with Donald Trump saying it's a done deal and the Chinese saying not so fast but, Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:15:28]
| Five, Trump threatened bad things if we don't retake Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. And six, his most senior counterterrorism official is in a Twitter spat with Laura Loomer. I don't even know what that one's about, to be honest. But all of those were in one day. One day. And it is an extremely rare week where we do not have new stories of the administration running roughshod over lines that had been drawn for decades. We've now blown up four of these boats outside of Venezuela, just as another example. And they'll probably be a fifth any day now. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:16:21]
| We're we're, you know, putting National Guard troops into cities. We've got ice capturing people off the streets, left and right, all across with, you know, without any sort of, hey, we're just going to go after the really dangerous people, anything like that. No, it's like, we're just after numbers, getting at anybody, anybody whatsoever. And, and we're, we're including like legal folks. Like, you know, most of those people in the South Korea plant turned out to be legal.
|
Sam:
[1:16:54]
| We have this new announcement in the last 24 hours, as I'm recording of this $100,000 for H1B visas, all of this stuff. Like, and, and by the way, I keep, I getting, I get tired of pointing out, like he does actually have the legal authority for half these things. Like the $100,000 for the H-1B, apparently the law says that you can do a fee, but it has to be just to cover the expense of processing the application, for instance. It's completely, it does not seem he actually has the legal authority to impose this. But what's going to happen? He's going to try to impose it. It's going to go to court. We'll see what the courts say. It'll go back and forth in courts based on recent precedents, they may let it remain in force while it goes to the courts. And then by the time we get SCOTUS, facts on the ground will have changed. And, you know, SCOTUS will probably support him anyway. But even if he doesn't, then he's disrupted things for a year or whatever while it goes through that process.
|
Sam:
[1:17:59]
| You know, all of these things, all of these things, the slippery slope, we are sliding, we are sliding quickly. And it doesn't seem like we have the right mechanisms to stop the slide. I mean, if Democrats had even one House of Congress, they could at least be trying to do some investigations and making some noise. If you had the right Democrats. Frankly, the current Democratic leadership just does not seem to be up to the task at all. Even the places they could be baking noise, they're not. They seem to have strategically decided that that's not the right battle to have right now.
|
Sam:
[1:18:46]
| It's getting bad. It's getting bad fast. You can tell the difference even month to month with how the institutions of democracy are weakening and failing. And by democracy, I don't just mean you have elections and somebody wins. It's all of the surrounding infrastructure. It's the rule of law. It's that the expectation that the government is acting in the public interest, not in self-interest. It's that there's some sort of regularity in things and not just that's what the leader wants this week, that you have to go through certain procedures, that you have to have things happen in the right way. And nobody likes sort of the procedural arguments.
|
Sam:
[1:19:49]
| That's one of the problems that the Harris campaign had, is they were making these arguments about democracy. And in the end, it comes down to a lot of people as, you're just making procedural arguments. You're arguing about not what is the result we want to get, but you're arguing about how do we get there? What's the right way to do it? Have you followed the steps correctly? And the general public doesn't give a shit if you follow the steps correctly. They only care about the results in the end. And so I think one of the things we're seeing is two things. One, why procedures actually are important, because when you ignore them, things can get bad fast, especially if you have someone like Donald Trump in charge who combines malignant narcissism with ignorance. But also, I guess we're seeing a lot of those folks who only care about the result are not going to like the results once the results happen. They bought into a bunch of promises. Well, not even.
|
Sam:
[1:21:09]
| It keeps bewildering me, but I keep having to remind myself that most people fundamentally are low information, low interest voters. They're not, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, let alone if you're hosting this podcast, you're obsessed about this kind of stuff. You pay attention on a regular basis. You're reading about the process and the procedures and the details of this and the details of that and pros and cons and how things, and you paid attention, in your middle school and high school civics classes so you know things like, you know, how Congress is supposed to work, how the Supreme Court is supposed to work, how these interact, the checks and balances, and blah, blah, blah, and what the reasons were behind those, and all of this kind of stuff. Most people don't care in the slightest, and don't pay attention even to the least details. I keep saying Donald Trump is only doing the things he promised to do, but lots and lots of Trump voters, you see the videos all the time, like you saw all those farmers complaining a couple weeks ago, or like, well, we didn't think he meant this. I'm sorry, but that's, he said he was going to do it.
|
Sam:
[1:22:28]
| Maybe you didn't think through the consequences of doing that. Ooh, tariffs. That won't affect me at all. I'm just a farmer who exports things to a country he's going to attack with tariffs. Why would that have anything to do with me? I don't know.
|
Sam:
[1:22:44]
| But I keep being a pessimist. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
|
Sam:
[1:22:51]
| And all of this playbook stuff, I'm going to use my words correctly, all of this is a playbook that has been practiced before. When Putin consolidated power in Russia, he did a lot of this kind of stuff. There had been media opening up after the fall of the Soviet Union. He made sure it got all recaptured. Same kind of thing has happened in Hungary. Same, I think Yvonne mentioned in our conventions course Slack, very similar to things that happened in Venezuela a while back.
|
Sam:
[1:23:22]
| There are many, many countries that have done this backsliding away from democracy. The patterns have looked very similar. And a big part of it has been the people getting in doing this kind of.
|
Sam:
[1:23:42]
| Threatening influence over alternative sources of influence, universities, lawyers, media, you make sure that all of these folks are intimidated enough that they essentially self-censor and stop openly criticizing you in the same way, or at least not as loudly as they would otherwise, because they're afraid of the consequences. In some cases, that ends up being they're actually afraid for their lives. But in many cases, it's just economic fear, reputational fear. You don't want to be the guy that Donald Trump is yelling about on Truth Social, because that can have all kinds of negative effects on you. In this case, people have been encouraging people, encouraging their followers online, that if they see someone posting something derogatory about Charlie Kirk, to try to figure out who that poster's employer is and call them and complain.
|
Sam:
[1:24:53]
| And of course, this has a chilling effect. You know, in that scenario, people jump to saying First Amendment. And that's not necessarily a First Amendment. First Amendment is the governmental part of it. So you can argue that the FCC threats potentially implicate the First Amendment, even though they didn't directly take the action. They threatened the action, and then the company did it themselves. But you could make a First Amendment argument on some of these other things where it's like, hey, just watch your neighbors. And if you see them saying something that we don't like, tell their employer. There's no government involvement there. I mean, unless government is actually the one saying that, which I don't think has been the case. And, oh, man, did J.D. Vance actually say some of that stuff? I forget. But regardless of whether it's First Amendment, regardless of whether it's legal, regardless of all of this kind of stuff, it has a chilling effect that is dangerous and counterproductive.
|
Sam:
[1:26:02]
| Now, again, and I promise I'll wrap this up in a second. Again, you know, the right will say, well, this is what the left has been doing for years. They were trying to cancel anybody who wasn't woke enough. And there's something to be said about some of that. Certainly some folks on the left took that a bit too far. I was never in favor of the people who were like going after people's employers and stuff like that, even in that case. But, you know, they try to make it a mirror image. And maybe you could find a few examples that are really mirror images.
|
Sam:
[1:26:40]
| Regardless, it's dangerous. And I don't mean dangerous in terms of just to the individuals involved. I mean, if you generate a society where, and this is what, I'm actually like saying some of the things that the Charlie Kirk defenders have been saying. That if you generate a society where people are afraid to give their opinions, then you are much less likely to have good results on all kinds of things. Now, I say that having explicitly said on this platform that I am quite happy. I was quite happy, and I now miss the days when the racists were afraid to be racist out loud, where they would at least keep that to themselves. And I think societal pressure on some aspects like that can move things in a good direction. Like, I want you to be ashamed when you have horrible views. But of course, the difficulty with that is nobody agrees on which views are the horrible views, which is why we have the First Amendment.
|
Sam:
[1:28:04]
| Okay, I'm going to take a break. Went much longer on this segment than I intended to. I'm tempted to just end the show right here, but, you know, I will take one more break, and I'll come back with a final segment after this. It's already Sunday, almost 5 p.m. Pacific time. So if I record one more segment later tonight, that means I'm probably not putting out this show until sometime Monday. Oops. Oh, well. Anyway, here's another break. Blah, blah, blah.
|
Sam:
[1:29:27]
| And here I am. It's been a few more hours for me. A couple minutes for you. Whatever. And, you know, I had thought that I would do this last segment on more, you know, more of that Kirk guy. The stuff about his killer. About, you know, the talk about, you know, did his killer, what was his killer? A Groyper? Or had he turned left and he'd gotten much more left wing in the last few months?
|
Sam:
[1:30:05]
| And what about like this thing that he has like a roommate who was transitioning male to female and they were dating. It was a romantic relationship. And what does that mean? Or, but, but some people are saying, well, he wasn't really a transitioning male to female. he was actually a femboy. And, and Gripers actually have a thing for femboys. And it may seem like a contradiction that they're all like right wing and should be, you would expect them to be completely anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-queerness of any sort, but apparently not. But because a lot of these are anyway, there was a there's a whole online discussion about that. And I felt like maybe I was going to talk about some of that or maybe about, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:31:03]
| Today earlier today was the the funeral service and all kinds of prominent people attended, including, you know, Trump himself, of course. And they apparently set off fireworks for him when he appeared at the funeral. And it's just all sort of bizarre. But I'm honestly, like, I feel like I can move on from that. I don't know. I don't really want to get too deeply into it. But I think the details of Kirk's killer and his roommate and their motivations.
|
Sam:
[1:31:43]
| Those will all eventually come out more over time. The only thing that I would caution people about is some of the interpretations by, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:31:59]
| The people who are talking about it right now have their own reasons to be biased and to interpret it a certain way, and also just lack of understanding.
|
Sam:
[1:32:11]
| The one thing I've heard over and over and over again over the last few weeks about this few weeks, however long it's been since this happened, was just that, hey, if you are not deeply embedded in these particular internet subcultures, you interpret their actions and statements at your peril because they don't always mean what you would think they would mean. And if you're interpreting it from, you know, a standard left-right perspective, you may be deluding yourself because it may not have anything to do with that at all, or it may just be a muddle. I I think the best evidence at this point is that it's a muddle. It's like, you know, for this guy and potentially lots of other people like him.
|
Sam:
[1:33:06]
| There just isn't a consistent set of opinions that fit under traditional left-right spectrum. They're just after, I think I said this on last week's show, it's just about burn the system down and oppose everything and idolizing violence while you're at it. And, you know, so, you know, maybe the one other thing I want to say, and I've said this a few times on a curmudgeon score slack for those of you who are there.
|
Sam:
[1:33:41]
| Like whenever they've been talking about, hey, it looks like this guy made a shift to the left. The only actual political opinion that has been stated anywhere whatsoever seems to be that he values and respects gay and trans people and doesn't think that that's bad. And, you know, honestly, a few years ago, that was considered the mainstream American opinion. We have backslid since then, but it's, it's, you know, that is not like radical left. That is what was absolutely mainstream, you know, prior to Donald Trump being reelected, you know? And so just when you hear things like he's moved left, interpret it within context.
|
Sam:
[1:34:45]
| You know, what is left to, you know, the Republican governor of Utah is not, Doesn't have to be Bernie Sanders. Doesn't have to be a communist, you know?
|
Sam:
[1:35:02]
| And, and again, his viewpoints may be ideologically incoherent anyway, because that's sort of not the point of things. So anyway, and the, and the other thing, you know, I, I, I sort of said, I didn't feel like talking about this, but I'm obviously talking about it for a few minutes. The amount of attention given to this guy to charlie kirk continues to be obscene as far as i can as far as my opinion goes yes he shouldn't have been killed in this way but also yes he was a horrible person and he's being lionized here and getting massive amounts of attention, I mean, I didn't watch it at all, but it sounds like every major news network carried a good portion of the services for him live. I even saw some foreign networks were doing so. he wasn't an elected official. He was prominent within certain circles in the MAGA movement, including, and importantly, obviously, he was well-connected with the administration itself.
|
Sam:
[1:36:18]
| He was friends with Donald Trump Jr. J.D. Vance credits him with actually being the vice president now. He knows a bunch of them. A lot of the coverage has noted that for the folks currently in the West Wing at the White House, this is a personal thing because most of them knew him pretty well themselves. So it's not just, you know, some, you know, people have said, you know, it's, you know, medium popularity podcaster. Now, compared to like me and Yvonne, huge. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:36:53]
| You know, obviously. But, you know, he's popular within his zone. But before this happened, I would bet most folks had never heard of him. I mean, I had heard the name, but could I have identified exactly what he did versus what any other of a bunch of other sort of MAGA hangers on? Could I have told them apart? No, probably not. Would I have recognized, oh yeah, Charlie Kerkey's one of them? Yes. But could I have been more specific than that? Probably not, to be honest. Even though I'm sure I've seen little bits and pieces of things he's said and done in the past, but it didn't particularly stand out to me. And I think if you had done a poll of name recognition for Charlie Kirk prior to his killing, it would have been relatively small overall. role. Now, of course, within the certain demographics that he was specifically targeting, entirely different story. You know, there is a certain cadre of people where he was very prominent and where, you know, people paid attention to him and he was big.
|
Sam:
[1:38:19]
| But, you know, Now, people, someone, let's see if I can find the specific reference. I posted it to the Slack a little while ago. This is from somebody with the handle TVMojo, T-V-M-O-J-O-E on Blue Sky.
|
Sam:
[1:38:39]
| As CNN offers day-long saturation coverage of the podcaster's funeral, I went back and checked to see how CNN covered Melissa Hortman's memorial on June 28th, where Walls spoke and Biden and Harris attended. It got about four minutes during the hours it was happening, which was less time than they gave to Jeff Bezos's wedding, which was the same day. And this is the kind of disproportionality that like, OK, this happened. It's somewhat important. Like it shouldn't have happened. It's, you know, guy shouldn't have been shot, but the way that it's gotten the level of attention of the.
|
Sam:
[1:39:26]
| Well beyond what I think was probably warranted here. Or at the very least, I could see if they had given the attention to Hortman, then maybe you could make the case. But no, the shooting was a news story. Do we have to cover the funeral live? No. I mean, and they're doing the thing again where, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:39:55]
| If Donald Trump is holding a rally, which is effectively is what this turned into, they very frequently give it coverage just because he's the president and just because he's crazy. So who the hell knows what he's going to say this time. And so things get disproportionate attention. But the result of all this is the, the, all of these mainstream news outlets have been falling all over themselves to talk about how great this guy was, or at the very least to not talk about the bad side, and just giving him all sorts of attention and leaning into the martyr complex here, which is exactly what Trump and company are trying to do anyway. Anyway, they're trying to take advantage of this to push their agenda and to move things further along. Look, I understand. It's opportunistic. It makes sense. They're going to do that, but the media doesn't have to go along with it. But apparently they do.
|
Sam:
[1:41:06]
| Because if they don't, they'll get the Jimmy Kimmel treatment, I guess. I don't know. Just to bring things around. Okay, that was still relatively short. Let's wrap it up. I am tired. Between the last one and this one, we did open some presents and stuff. That was cool.
|
Sam:
[1:41:27]
| Alex is doing something with one of the things he got right now behind me. While I record, you're probably going to do some other stuff. I don't know. Watch some TV. Anyway, I'm tired. And after I stop this recording, I still have stuff to do to, like, bundle it up and get it published. Some of which I might not do till morning. You guys don't care because if you're listening to this, well, unless you're watching on YouTube, nobody's watching live right now, but you know, somebody could watch a replay. I don't know, but you don't care because by the time you're listening to it, you're listening to it. All this is done, but you know, anyway, I'm, I'm tired. I'm going to wrap it up. That's the point. And then I'll get it out. When I get it out. You guys know the deal. Curmudgeons-corner.com. Go there, find all the good stuff, find our archives, find transcripts, find all the ways to contact us. And of course, I still haven't added the TikTok link. And depending on what happens with TikTok, like maybe I never will. Like, because apparently like part of this deal, if it does happen, is they're going to ask existing TikTok users to move to an entirely different app.
|
Sam:
[1:42:41]
| And yeah, I don't know. And I, you know, you could say like, I was going to say, and I don't trust the people who are being set up as the people who are going to be controlling the new TikTok, but at the same time, okay, do I trust the Chinese now? Not really, but I use it because it's fun. Would I try the new one? I don't know, maybe, But I don't want to move. I don't want to like, I don't want to do anything that takes any work to change where I am. So my gut, well, my gut feel, my inclination right now, and this might change.
|
Sam:
[1:43:19]
| Is to continue what I'm doing on TikTok until I can't anymore. But then once I can't, I actually resist the idea of going anywhere else to replace it. It's a time suck anyway. I don't need that. I can reclaim that time and do more useful things with it. Anyway, there's no link to our TikTok. But if you do want to see our TikTok clips, which I'm still a month plus behind on, I have not been catching up properly. Although i have one ready to post exported and ready to post soon from an old episode, yeah because i'm still going in order but anyway if you search curmudgeon's corner on tiktok you'll find it yeah and of course there's a link to our patreon where you can give us money at various levels we'll mention you on the show we will ring a bell we will send you a postcard we will send you a mug all that kind of stuff and importantly at two dollars a month or more or if you just yeah If you just ask, we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and various other people are chatting throughout the week, sharing links, news stuff, funny stuff. There's a channel where people are still sharing like their Wordle scores and Yvonne plays Pointed at Bloomberg and occasionally other games sneak in there. Yeah, there's all kinds of fun stuff. You should join us. But one highlight from there, Yvonne usually does that, but I'll do one.
|
Sam:
[1:44:49]
| Which one, which one, which one, which one? Oh, Mark Zuckerberg did a demonstration of his AI smart glasses this week, and it apparently was kind of rough. I did not watch it. I saw this article about it and a few others. defector.com had the headline for their summary mark zuckerberg demonstrates that his ai smart glasses suck and don't work apparently there were a number of hiccups during the demo where things didn't work where people clicked on things accidentally that they weren't trying to do and had to restart it and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and i gather they ended up cutting it a little short but yeah i mean look meta's meta's smart glasses or whatever are the leader in that category right now there really isn't a lot else going on this speculation that maybe apple will eventually do something like that obviously they have their sort of augmented reality goggle things that have come out and you know, a really sort of developer prototype at this stage. The rumors that a second one will come out at some point and then a third, and of course it'll get better, smaller, whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:46:12]
| But at the moment, really, if you're getting that kind of glasses, it is Meta that's doing it. Let me read a little bit of that article.
|
Sam:
[1:46:23]
| There we go, said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage as he attempted to answer a video call. Through a combination of movements between a wristband and a pair of glasses. Well, let's see what happened there. That's too bad, he continued. Shortly before cutting short of the live demo, the video call went unanswered. This took place at Wednesday's MetaConnect event, where Meta unveiled several new AI-enhanced wearables and boasted that these would soon be empowering people with new abilities. Those abilities will include being able to answer text messages and look up information online, activities you have surely been unable to do before now and will soon find will change your life in profound ways once you are able to use the power of wearable AI. Imagine, soon you will be able to listen to music while walking. The demo began with Zuckerberg explaining that the keyboard interface had been replaced by a neural band worn on the wrist that allows users to twiddle through menus by twitching their fingers, demonstrated by a disembodied hand moving like a dreaming dog. This constitutes the ability to send signals from your brain. Obviously, this article has a snarky tone about this whole thing. It's on defector.com, published September 18th by Patrick Redford. It's worth a read. Anyway, it's kind of funny.
|
Sam:
[1:47:49]
| And with that, let me close up. Thank you for joining us for yet another Curmudgeons Corner. Hopefully Yvonne will be able to make it next time. Or if not, hopefully I'll have enough notice to get a co-host. But yeah, in the meantime, all the usual stuff I say. Stay safe. Have fun. Have a great week. We'll talk to you next time. Goodbye. Bye. Thank you. I'm Hank Stop. Later.
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