Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| Okay, I think we're ready. Okay. Have you thought about what you want to talk about?
|
Ed:
[0:07]
| Yeah, I've got a couple of things written down here.
|
Sam:
[0:09]
| Okay, then... Lost my pen. Let's get going then. Tell me when you're seated comfortably.
|
Ed:
[0:17]
| I am, I think. The picture looks pretty good. So I think we're good to go.
|
Sam:
[0:23]
| Here we go. Transcription by CastingWords Welcome to Curmudgeons Corner for Saturday, February 7th, 2026. It's just before 18 UTC as we're starting to record. I am Sam Minter, and Yvonne Bowe is not here this week. He let me know a few days ago that his brother was coming in to help celebrate his birthday, which was a few days ago, so happy birthday, Yvonne, and that he'd be doing things with his brother this weekend and wouldn't be available. So, we have Ed. Hello, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:22]
| Good afternoon. Good afternoon.
|
Sam:
[1:24]
| And as usual, when we have a guest, the guest will mostly determine the agenda. I'll probably still do a couple movies because we're desperately behind on movies. So I'll do a couple of those. But otherwise, we'll let Ed control the agenda and decide what we're going to talk about this week. So first of all, for this segment, Ed, before we get to movies and before we get to other stuff that you may have in mind later in the show, do you have anything sort of of the light and frothy, not that serious variety that you want to start with?
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Ed:
[2:03]
| How would you start? The temperature here is seven degrees right now.
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Sam:
[2:08]
| Now, where is here?
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Ed:
[2:09]
| This is outside of Philadelphia, in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which, interesting, by the way, in addition to being colder than you-know-what, our representative, our district is going to be one of the swing ones for the election because we presently have a Republican, and he may lose, which event the House goes further to the left eventually. But we'll see what happens on that.
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Sam:
[2:37]
| Yeah, there are in general a lot more seats potentially in play than seemed like there'd be even a year ago. But, you know, there are a few near us as well that are sort of in that zone. But just generally, I mean... Okay, wait. I was about to start talking politics. You were talking weather.
|
Ed:
[3:04]
| We'll save it for later.
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Sam:
[3:05]
| We'll save politics for later. That's for the later segments.
|
Ed:
[3:10]
| This is the coldest I've been since six years ago when my son and two of my grandsons and I hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. The temperature there was zero with a 20 or 30 mile an hour wind at the top. This is going to be one o'clock tomorrow. And I, there's a run that I participate with a bunch of people every Sunday morning. I'm not doing it tomorrow. I'm not, I'm too old to do that anymore.
|
Sam:
[3:35]
| Too cold.
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Ed:
[3:36]
| Too cold by far.
|
Sam:
[3:40]
| Yeah, so, I mean, now here in the Pacific Northwest, if anything, my understanding is that the West Coast has been warmer than usual so far this year. Right now, at this exact moment while we're recording, it is 48 degrees Fahrenheit here where I am. Um, but my understanding is in general, it's been so warm that people are worried that, you know, the, the snow pack that is supplies water for the rest of the year is not built up, you know, places that do skiing haven't really had a season, you know, things like that.
|
Ed:
[4:21]
| Yeah.
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Sam:
[4:21]
| But I have read about this, you know, cold snap you folks in the rest of the country have been having. How's it been?
|
Ed:
[4:31]
| It's been very cold. My understanding of what's going on is that the polar vortex is being pushed down by warm, clear weather up in the higher, you know, in the far north, which means that Alaska and the Arctic Circle are beginning to melt even faster than usual. But that's pushing all this cold air down. So the folks who talk climate science are not surprised that it's this cold here, and it is not proof against global warming. It's proof of climate change.
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Sam:
[5:10]
| Yes. Although I have seen people point out, you know, there is a bit of misinformation going around that says, hey, the climate change makes these kinds of cold snaps more severe as well or more frequent or things like that. And the answer is, although climate change very much sort of destabilizes and some areas get warmer and some areas get colder and blah, blah, blah. If you look at the overall trends, you know, the kind of cold snap that the East Coast is having right now was commonplace 100 years ago. Like this would like would happen everyone and would be normal and, you know, things like that. So when you when you look at the long term trends, it really is, you know, these kinds of cold snaps are getting less frequent and less severe when they do happen. But what that does mean is that when they do happen. People notice a lot more because it's like, oh, wow, I haven't been this cold in decades.
|
Sam:
[6:20]
| Whereas, in fact, like if you talk to your grandparents, they'd be like, what do you mean? This is like this is what every winter was like here, you know. And so you have a bit of that. And but but yeah, you do have sort of these patterns that happen and and all of this. And, you know, spring will come soon enough. I was talking to my father, who is now in Ohio, just, when was it, yesterday? Yesterday morning, yes. And he also was complaining about the weather. Basically, you know, it being so cold, he likes to, like, go on walks and stuff still, you know? And basically, he's been stuck inside most of the time. And when he does go outside, he has to bundle up or he has to rely on someone to drive him somewhere because, you know, the places he would want to go are not. Even if he would consider walking there in the summer, he's not going to walk there when it's snowy and seven degrees or whatever, you know.
|
Ed:
[7:27]
| I have still been doing a fair amount of, that's my primary exercise is walking. I try to get in about 100 to 130 miles a month. But when I'm going out these days I have downfilled mittens four or five layers plus a down jacket and a stocking cap and long johns and I'm fairly warm then that way but it's, that's basically what I wore is I stood at the top of Kilimanjaro right and it's you know you're comfortable warm like that on the other hand, We got a couple feet of snow a couple weeks ago, and it's somewhat treacherous walking because we haven't been above freezing for the past two and a half weeks now. I think we got to 33 once or twice.
|
Sam:
[8:13]
| Meanwhile here, and I'm not going to claim, I mean, the Southern California people, I've seen them online talking about how it's in the high 70s there, whatever. And of course, Florida has been part of the cold snap too. Our co-host Yvonne has been complaining on the curmudgeon's corner slack that, oh my God, it dropped into the forties there and, and how horrible that is. Uh, meanwhile here, like I said, it's 48 right now. Like if I was going to go out and be out for a while, I'd throw on a jacket, but if I'm just like taking out the trash or something, I don't even bother. I go out on a t-shirt, you know, it's like I'm taking out the trash. I'm coming back and I'll be outside for like 60 seconds maximum. It's not a big deal.
|
Ed:
[8:57]
| You know, I'm even putting on a coat to take the trash out.
|
Sam:
[9:03]
| Okay.
|
Ed:
[9:03]
| To celebrate all that, I wore this shirt today. This is from a run that I do in June and July each year when it's nice and warm.
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Sam:
[9:11]
| So describe in detail for the people who cannot see this because most people are listening.
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Ed:
[9:16]
| This is a run that is a clothing optional one. So we go out and run au naturel, as you will, do wear shoes. And I always wear a hat so I don't burn my head anymore. Otherwise, it's all skin for most of it. Not everybody. Some people still wear some clothing, but I'd say about two-thirds, three-fourths. A couple hundred people go out and run.
|
Sam:
[9:36]
| To be clear, this is not happening this week in the seven-degree temperatures.
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Ed:
[9:41]
| I wore this shirt to remind me that someday it will be warmer again.
|
Sam:
[9:46]
| So to be clear, this is the Bouncing Buns Fun Run. They have this in a few different places, but the one you went to, reading your T-shirt, is at Sunny Rest Resort in Palmerton, PA. And I will disclose that I went to Sunny Rest once, 25 years ago. I did a day visit. It was fun, but I never went back. I regret never having gone back. It's a nudist place. I had fun. I will disclose that here. I was by myself that time, which was one of the reasons I never went back. I did that kind of thing a couple of times in my 20s, but for the most part, I was solo, and that just wasn't fun. I did, on later occasions, get people to come with me to a couple of those things, but then that sort of faded out, and my wife was never really into it. So I haven't been since, but it was an enjoyable experience. Yeah so and yeah but i don't know if i've said that out loud on this show before but yeah there there you go i've implied it but i i have not done the bouncing buns fun run if if i was on the east coast i know you and your son-in-law have done this for a number of years if i was in pa i might join you but i'm not so there i think we're.
|
Ed:
[11:08]
| Up to 15 16 years now.
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Sam:
[11:10]
| Wow we've done it. Yeah.
|
Ed:
[11:13]
| John, John did it one year more than I did. Uh, and then the last 15 or 16 years now, we've both have done it. So as I said, it's, it's, uh, probably as much fun as you can have and still be legal.
|
Sam:
[11:28]
| Yes. And to be clear to anybody wondering, this is one of the places that's sort of family oriented and like clean. And there, there, there are places out there that you can go that are really just like, you know, sex resorts or swingers places or places like that. This place and most like it are not at all like that. In fact, like if you do anything, even remotely hinting, being sexual, you will be tossed out of the place, you know? So it's more about like lying by the pool and, and just chilling, read your book. In this case, do a little fun run or hiking through the woods or whatever, things like that.
|
Ed:
[12:17]
| John gets a kick out of the, they have a volleyball game in the pool all the time. And the referees wear a shirt, but everyone else is naked.
|
Sam:
[12:27]
| Yeah, of course. You know, so. Anyway, that is that. Okay, with that transition, I will move to a couple of movies. And the first is a... An...
|
Sam:
[12:45]
| There is a television series that went from, so I am doing a movie, but the context is it's a follow-up movie to a TV series that I've talked about on here before. The TV series was Psych, which ran from 2006 to 2014, okay? And then after the series ended, they came back with a series of made-for-TV movies that followed up on the series. So Psych ran from 2006 to 2014. I will give Psych a big thumbs up. I enjoyed the series. It was fun. The basic premise of the series is there is a guy who runs a psychic detective agency, and he supports the police.
|
Sam:
[13:43]
| The local police, and solves a bunch of crimes for them, basically. Now of course part of the premise here is he's not really psychic he's just really gifted at noticing things so he's like a sherlock holmes type character who like you know will notice all the little details in the scene and help and put the stuff together he's got his name's sean he's got a a sidekick gus and they it's a comedy it's a well a dramedy it's so they they're they're constantly making jokes and doing silly things and in an exaggerated way. And.
|
Sam:
[14:22]
| And anyway, the thing is, he's not really a psychic. He just knows this stuff. But he pretends to be a psychic, and that gets him into trouble sometimes. And, you know, as it goes on, they sort of do a little less pretending that they're psychic and a little more just doing their thing. But, you know, it's whatever. Anyway, it was followed up with Psych the Movie in 2017, followed by Psych 2 Lassie Come Home in 2020, which is the one I'm going to be speaking about today. And finally, there is a third one, Psych 3 This Is Gus, that came out in 2021. So Psych 2 Lassie Come Home is the one that I am going to talk about today. Look, here's the thing. I liked the series. I think the movies, like...
|
Sam:
[15:15]
| Didn't quite live up to the series. And I said this a while back, I reviewed the first movie and I said, I thought a big part of the problem was that the characters were just a lot older. And some of the hijinks that made sense when they were characters in their early to mid twenties, when they're like pushing 40 or whatever, you're just like, okay, come on, it's time to grow up. You know, it's like, and I think that continues here, like some of the gags and stuff, it's just like, okay, you know, you've been doing this for how many years now? Like, just like, chill a little bit. The one interesting thing I will say about Lassie Comes Home, which I think was interesting, is one of the supporting characters was played by Timothy Amundson, okay, who's an actor, he's been in a bunch of stuff. But in real life, the actor had a stroke.
|
Sam:
[16:29]
| And rather than recast him or write the character out or anything, this movie is actually centered around that. What happens in the movie the character's name is Lassiter and the movie starts out with him being ambushed and left for dead and he's shot but then has a stroke on the operating table and so then they actually you know, make it a part where the actor, in his condition where he was still fairly significantly affected by the stroke he had suffered, plays his own character recovering from a stroke. And I thought that was kind of classy, actually.
|
Ed:
[17:25]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[17:26]
| You know, that they did that. And a little bit brave to do that as part of the story. I mean, in this one of the three movies, he didn't have a huge part. You know, he was shot at the beginning, and a couple moments in the middle, they talked to him a little bit, and he gave some clues about what had happened to him, and they talked to him a little bit at the end. So his part was not big, and it was sort of clear that given his condition, his part could not have been big. But they still included him directly. And, you know, overall, I'll still give it a thumbs up. I will, I continue to say the movies do not live up to the standard of the TV show, which also, like most long-running TV shows, you know, it sort of, it started out good and sort of slowly declined over the course of its run, but the TV show was good. The movies are okay. and if if you watched the tv show i would give a thumbs up go watch the movies i will say though that if you did not watch the tv show the movies don't bother like it's you're not gonna they don't.
|
Sam:
[18:44]
| As a standalone, they would get a thumb sideways at best, maybe even a thumbs down. They get their value from being a continuation of the TV show. So like, if you're interested at all in the premise, watch the TV show first. Then if you're still engaged at the end of the TV show, watch the movies. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't just jump in. Certainly not to psych two movie, you know, like, yeah, no, watch the TV show. Then watch the three movies, et cetera. And I'm not reviewing the third movie yet, but, you know, thumbs up. I enjoyed seeing the characters again, et cetera. Not quite up to the TV show, but still enjoyable, still thumbs up, still worth the watch, if you liked the TV show. So, there you go. You recognized the name when I said Psych. Did you ever watch that show?
|
Ed:
[19:40]
| Oh, we watched it a lot. I don't think we've seen the movies, but the TV series we enjoyed a lot.
|
Sam:
[19:47]
| Okay. Well, in that case, there are three movies. You should go check them out. They are, I am sure they, let's see, where are they available on streaming? Let me check for you. Probably on Netflix. I'll tell you in a second. If I can spell Psyche. There we go. It is available on Peacock.
|
Ed:
[20:10]
| Oh, Peacock.
|
Sam:
[20:12]
| It is available on Peacock.
|
Ed:
[20:15]
| I'm not sure if we still get that one or not. We'll have to second see.
|
Sam:
[20:18]
| Yeah, so.
|
Ed:
[20:20]
| My spouse runs the TV for the most part.
|
Sam:
[20:25]
| Yes. So anyway, that's it for Psyche. And then one more movie to wrap this up. Which is a kids movie called epic from 2013 it is a it says it is a a fantasy adventure film loosely based on william joyce's 1996 children's book the leaf men and the brave good bugs, I will give this a thumbs up. It's a cute little movie.
|
Sam:
[21:00]
| Summarizing the plot, again reading the first couple paragraphs from the Wikipedia summary, after her mother dies, you know, kids' movies always start with parents dying. It just seems like it's a common theme. Not always, but like usually Disney movies, both parents die and the kid is orphaned. I mean, whether it's a human kid or an animal or whatever, you know, going back all the way to Bambi or whatever, the parents always die. And it seems to be a common trope in children's movies. I guess to get the kid in a situation where they're acting independently and you can build a movie around them, but it's still notable. And it's not always the case, not always, like you said, but it happens enough to be noticeable. Anyway, after her mother dies, 17-year-old Mary Catherine moves in with her eccentric scientist father, Professor Bamba in Danbury, Connecticut. So this one only had one parent die.
|
Sam:
[22:03]
| Bamba spent his life researching the Leaf Men, tiny humanoid soldiers who protect the neighboring forest from wicked creatures called Boggins. MK is irritated by her father's work, believing his theories to be nonsense. And it's fairly clear, by the way, when you watch the movie, that she's not the only one who thinks his theories are nonsense. He's clearly like an isolated man off in the wilderness doing his research that nobody in the world takes seriously and thinks he's out of his mind.
|
Sam:
[22:36]
| MK is irritated by her father's work, believing his theories to be nonsense. Meanwhile, Nod, an independent yet rebellious young leafman, decides to quit. So they are real. Much to the ire of his no-nonsense leader, Ronan, who promised Nod's late father he would look out for him. The forest's benevolent ruler, Queen Tara, must choose her successor and arrives at a pool of lily pads occupied by Mub, a laid-back slug, and Grub, a wannabe leafman snail. Immediately after she chooses a pod, the Boggins attack and overwhelm the leafman while Tara flees with Ronan on his hummingbird mount. The pair are pursued by the Boggins' leader, Mandrake and his son Dagda, who is killed by Ronan, but it allowed Mandrake to badly wound Terra with an arrow. So one more paragraph here. MK decides to leave after getting into an argument with Bamba about his research. Outside, MK encounters the falling Terra, who entrusts the pod to her, shrinks her with magic, and tells her to take it to Nimgaloo, a glowworm wizard, before finally dying.
|
Sam:
[23:42]
| MK is accompanied by Ronan, Mub, and Grub, while Ronan recruits a reluctant nod after saving him from short-tempered toad gangster Bufo. Okay, that description had a lot of character names. But in any case, you get the idea. The human girl enters the world of these leaf men, and at a time where they are in chaos, where the enemy has taken over, the queen has died, she is entrusted with the pod that is supposed to be, I guess, the new queen reincarnated thing or whatever. It gives, the exact mechanism becomes clear later in the movie, but whatever, you know, anyway, it's a cute movie. It's, it's, it's, it's fun. It's nice. And, you know, it is, I'd say one of these that is not just for kids. The adults will enjoy it too. And, It's not super deep. You know, it's not, they're not twists and turns that are going to shock you. It ends the way you probably think it's going to end by my description so far. But it was fun. It was cute. It was a nice little movie. It was a fun, how long is it? 102 minutes. So it's not even that long. It is a good movie. Thumbs up. I recommend. There you go.
|
Ed:
[25:03]
| There you go. All right.
|
Sam:
[25:05]
| So okay with that we are going to take a break the first break is an apple dream i've been promising this apple dream for several weeks it is a really short apple dream and it is one that has been on the show before although a long time ago i think it was apple dream 15 and then when we get back we will have ed tell us what his first serious topic is going to be.
|
Ed:
[25:33]
| All right or.
|
Sam:
[25:34]
| I'm assuming it's serious it might not be maybe maybe your topic is clowns is your topic clowns no no not not quite well yeah clowns are serious to some people some people are deathly afraid of clowns some clowns take themselves very seriously so i you know i don't know anyway here comes abel dream 15 i.
|
Break:
[25:56]
| Remember almost nothing but we were at the arctic circle and there was snow everywhere, and people were talking about the world's most northern ATM machine. Except, you shouldn't say machine because that's what the M's for. And I don't remember why we were there or what we were doing. I think that was earlier in the dream, but I no longer remember it. Bye.
|
Sam:
[26:24]
| Well, that was exciting, wasn't it? The world's most northern ATM machine. Uh...
|
Ed:
[26:33]
| I don't dream. Well, I dream, but I don't ever remember my dreams.
|
Sam:
[26:39]
| Right. So let's see. Let's see if I can actually find it. Let's see. The world's most remote ATMs. There's one at Mount Everest-based camp. That's high altitude. There's one in remote part of the Amazon rainforest. Forest this the highest atm in the world is not the mount everest base camp but is elsewhere in is in tibet there's a floating atm in indonesia here we go the most northerly atm since i had that dream about it let's actually long year be in the administrative center of the svalbard Archipelago in Norway, boasts the most northerly ATM. This location is one of the most remote inhabited places on earth, with limited access to mainland Norway, making the ATM a vital service for residents and visitors. There you go.
|
Ed:
[27:41]
| And, uh, I'll have to check that. My wife and I are taking a cruise this fall in, uh, I don't know if we're going to Fallbard. We're going to Norway and we're going to cruise up to Northern Norway. So maybe it'll be there.
|
Sam:
[27:56]
| You'll, you'll, you'll need to ask about it. It's in Longyearbyen, which I presume means a place that has a long year because it's an Arctic circle. So I don't know. Now, I imagine, too, this article was only from last year, but I would imagine, maybe even especially in some of these more remote places, at least once they have internet, there'll be a move, like everywhere else, to transactions that don't use cash anymore, where you're doing an electronic transaction. Action now there's sort of this intermediate ground if you're remote but you don't yet have reliable internet or cell service or whatever then maybe you still need the cash because nobody's going to have electronic transfers because they don't have the right equipment for it but once but once you have got the cell service and a reliable connection it seems like things would very rapidly move towards, you know what? We can just do electronic transactions. Don't worry about having the paper money.
|
Ed:
[29:10]
| I think Sweden is, I think it was sweet. We were there a number of years ago, and they pretty much did not accept cash. You had to use credit cards, and it was fine because I've got my credit card and my watch, and I didn't even need to pull my billfold out. We just went in a store, buy something, flash my watch, and go on our way.
|
Sam:
[29:31]
| This is rapidly accelerating, and I haven't done a lot of traveling, but from what I understand, Europe is one of the areas that's actually moving faster than the U.S., And there are several other parts of the world that are also moving faster with a transition to doing almost everything, not just electronically, but specifically through your mobile phone. Whether it be purchases at stores or even person-to-person money transfers is rapidly moving in that direction. I think in the U S it's, you know, I do, I, I sometimes use my phone for these transactions now, but I probably still use my cards more, but more and more people are just using their phones and watches and stuff for these transactions. And use of cash is way, way down everywhere in the U S for sure. It's not extinct, but I notice it when somebody uses cash.
|
Ed:
[30:30]
| When we were in Canada a couple of years ago, I never did pull out my billfold.
|
Sam:
[30:34]
| Everything the hotel.
|
Ed:
[30:35]
| Fees the restaurant the restaurants the the waitress would bring this this little pocket held thing you'd clash your thing indicate how much tip you want and go on your way it was all done with my with my phone.
|
Sam:
[30:47]
| Yeah i've said before i haven't i.
|
Ed:
[30:50]
| Mean not my phone.
|
Sam:
[30:51]
| Yeah i haven't made the full transition to using my phone and the watch i like have to remember to do so and it's a little bit more convenient when it's attached to a credit card than when it's attached to a debit card because when it's attached to a debit card sometimes they They still make you put in your pen, which is annoying. So right now... And right now I have my, my Apple pay or whatever it is attached to like a debit card. And so I don't know, but I, but I've, I've used it. I've definitely used it, but I haven't carried cash in decades now. Like the, the only time I have cash is if I am, if I know I am going somewhere where I know I will need it, which at this point has not happened in years. The last place that did it, that needed that was like a traditional barbershop I used to go to. And I, and I don't think even that barbershop still requires cash. Now they, they also take electronic payment, but also after pandemic, I switched to a different one and they definitely are all electronic. And so I haven't had a situation where I needed actual cash in a very, very, very long time at this point.
|
Sam:
[32:12]
| So anyway, sorry, I was hijacked by the Apple Dream and remote ATMs and Northern Dream, you know, whatever. So what's your first topic?
|
Ed:
[32:25]
| Well, I thought we ought to talk a little bit about the ketogenic diet. My favorite health administrator, RFK Jr., came out this week and said that schizophrenia can now be cured with a ketogenic diet. And so a lot of people may not know what that is and why it, he thinks it cures them. So I thought we might talk about that a little bit.
|
Ed:
[32:48]
| Just briefly, I don't know how much you know about it, but anyway, a ketogenic diet is one in which 60% of your diet is fat, about 30% is protein, and 5% to 10% only carbohydrates. And what it does is that you deplete your body glycogen stores and you start burning fat for energy. And the side effect or side product of burning fat for energy is ketones. And that's why it's called a ketogenic diet. It's been proven very effective as a weight loss mechanism, although like most diets, you lose weight while you're on it, and then when you stop and take off the diet, people gain their weight back usually, not always, but quite often do. It has also been found fairly effective, especially in childhood seizure disorders, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, but again, it's a pretty strict diet. It's hard to adhere to. People who are on it need to have pretty close medical monitoring because the ketones, if they get excessive, are not particularly healthy.
|
Ed:
[34:00]
| They're not good for you and moderately dangerous. Now, what has happened is a couple people with psychoses have been under treatment. And a few psychiatrists here and there have noticed that some of those, like everyone else, a few people get onto a ketogenic diet. And they find suddenly someone got better. So that gets reported. And that's what we have at this point. There's a psychiatrist in, I think he's at Mass General, Massachusetts General Brigham Hospitals. And he had a number of people, psychotic, schizophrenia, who, for whatever reason, a few of them started on a ketogenic diet. And one of these guys came, oh, he was on it because he was obese. That's what it was. And he came back after around eight weeks And he said, I am not hearing voices And seeing things anymore So this became a case report This psychiatrist has had two or three others, That is what we have is a few incidental case reports, which is interesting to medicine, but it sure as hell is not science.
|
Sam:
[35:05]
| Which is interesting and worth following up. Yeah, it's the kind of thing that makes you curious and is worth following up.
|
Ed:
[35:11]
| Absolutely.
|
Sam:
[35:12]
| You need something, you know, a randomized control trial is not always the gold standard. Sometimes you can look at populations, but you need to make sure you are looking at comparable populations that did or did not do this and see if there's a significant difference that you can actually measure, et cetera. Or was it just that you happened to have a couple people who coincidentally got better at the same time they were taking this diet, right?
|
Ed:
[35:38]
| Sure. And it happens with a lot of, I remember one of my surgery professors when I was in my residency commented that he had a patient who was sent to him for surgery for ulcerative colitis. She was dying of severe hemorrhage and problems of the ulcerative colitis. And she was sent from somewhere in Northern California to him in San Francisco. They landed in San Francisco and she was better. She not only got better, she basically got almost back to normal. So she called her husband and she said, I'm not going back north. San Francisco has cured me. And she didn't have the surgery. And he thought, well, San Francisco did not cure. Diseases have intermittent things. They go up and down and up and down. But she was convinced, well, I don't even think anyone did a study on that. This deserves some study, but chances are it's just incidental findings. It would only take a non-scientist in what should be a scientist role to suddenly proclaim this is the way to cure that disease. That's RFK Jr. in a nutshell. A non-scientist in a scientist-appointed place who doesn't listen to scientists because he thinks he's smarter than they are. And he's appointed by an idiot in chief.
|
Sam:
[37:02]
| Right. And look, you know, who knows? Maybe they'll do follow-up studies and there will be some sort of correlation and they'll figure out something. But you don't want to act on these things prematurely as well. Because like you said, this is a hard diet to be on and there are potentially negative side effects if you do too much of it.
|
Ed:
[37:26]
| I have a friend who decided to go on a ketogenic diet to help him lose weight, and he ended up in a hospital with severe diabetic ketoacidosis because he has diabetes. And ketosis is not good for diabetics. And he damn near died. I mean, his blood sugar was running 800 or 900. It's just a bad scene. So, as I said, the physician who did the case reports that caught Kennedy's attention has come out and said, this is not a cure. I never said cure, but we are going to do a study on it because it is interesting. So I think he's planning to try and do what will probably be a fairly limited study, but at least it'll be looked at it scientifically.
|
Sam:
[38:11]
| Right, right. Yeah. I mean, continuing on this topic, just broadening it a little bit, I know you are a retired military doctor. So this is why, like, you know, some of the medical stuff. Tell us, we've talked a few times about RFK Jr. And the absolutely crazy stuff that's coming out of there. Give us a few more. Well, first of all, is there anything RFK Jr. is doing right? I have yet to identify anything, but is there anything he's doing right?
|
Ed:
[38:50]
| Like Klox, I think he's probably had a couple. I mean, the United States has an overall population and not a good diet.
|
Sam:
[39:00]
| Yeah. The one thing I've heard him talking about that I think there is backup for is discouraging highly processed foods, you know? And I have heard other doctors, I have heard, I've seen articles about this more in general, that highly processed foods, which now make up a huge portion of the American diet. And there are a variety of reasons for that related to how food companies make money and doing things intentionally to make certain kinds of foods more appealing and cheaper and blah, blah, blah. Because highly processed foods, I hate to tell everyone, they're really yummy. They taste great. They are addictive. They're fun.
|
Ed:
[39:51]
| That's because they have lots of sugar and salt in them.
|
Sam:
[39:54]
| Exactly. Lots of sugar and salt. It's amazing. It's good stuff. And other yummy things too. But there is increasing evidence that, a lot of these, and it probably varies based on exactly how it's processed and exactly the ingredients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But these things are not great for health, you know? And, and so RFK Jr. Has initiated some degree of push to, hey, avoid the highly processed foods. And that's probably not bad. Now, the details of his implementation of that probably suck, you know, but the general theme of that is okay. But almost everything else, I mean, come on. I saw another thing, and I was trying to bring it up real quick, but I can't find it. There was yet another vaccination thing this morning about one of the people who works for RFK Jr. Basically, I don't know if they've officially changed recommendations or whether this was just this guy talking in an interview or something, but it was discouraging COVID vaccines during pregnancy.
|
Ed:
[41:12]
| Yeah, he's been after that for a while now.
|
Sam:
[41:17]
| And from what, well, he's anti-every vaccine, as far as I can tell. But in this particular case, it's one of those things where, you know, he's saying something unproven about side effects of the vaccine during pregnancy and negative effects they could have. Meanwhile, the known risks of actual COVID during pregnancy to both the mother and the child are very well known and very serious, potentially. And so it's one of these things where in almost all of these cases, a big part of where folks like this seem to mess up, well, I almost don't want to, like, part of it is just like they have a visceral negative reaction and they don't want to think any further beyond that is really what's going on. But if you try to go one step further than that, it's misunderstanding, like, you know, statistics and math and proportions and, you know, OK, you have a rare risk that one out of any every 10 billion times has a negative side effect that may or may not even be proven because it's so rare. Meanwhile, you have a well-known effect that happens almost all of the time. And how do you balance those against each other? and, The answer is all the time wins over, very rare.
|
Ed:
[42:46]
| Yeah, this is sort of one of the most dangerous things they'd come up with was to stop recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for either when women are pregnant or for the baby shortly after birth. And God only knows how they decided that because there's very few side effects of the hepatitis B vaccine. The data are very clear that the incidence of hepatitis B in at least up through teenage years since we started that vaccine, I think it started around 2005 or 2006, it's a 99% reduction in the incidence of what is a dangerous damn disease. One of the commoner causes of liver cancer, amongst other stuff, and cirrhosis, they have said, well, if the mother doesn't have hepatitis B, the baby doesn't need it. Well, who knows if the mother has it, because not everybody gets a test for it. Who knows what else is in the family, the babysitter, the teachers, you name it. There is no such thing as a low risk. What there is is an absolutely almost zero risk if you get that vaccine.
|
Ed:
[43:57]
| So bottom line is basically Bobby, by stopping that, and a lot of people won't bother getting the shot now, he's killing a bunch of people in the next 10 to 20 years. And I don't know any other way to put it other than to say he's killing them. The measles vaccine we're having in the United States is no longer.
|
Ed:
[44:21]
| There's a definition somehow of you're measles free, and it has to be that there's a certain number of cases that you're below a parameter. We're no longer below that. We are now no longer measles free in our society, which means there's several diseases that are going to come back.
|
Sam:
[44:39]
| Well, and on some of these things, to be clear, the trends have been going on before RFK Jr. got into government. Absolutely.
|
Ed:
[44:48]
| He just accentuated it.
|
Sam:
[44:49]
| He is accelerating and accentuating and giving it sort of public validation. So, like, you know, vaccination rates have been going down in the U.S. For a while. And there's a variety of reasons for that. And part of it is RFK Jr., even before a government, spreading anti-vaccine information. But he was by no means the only one. There was a lot of anti-vax. Yeah, there's a general anti-vax movement that started on the left politically with people who were otherwise on the left. And then during COVID jumped over and a lot of right-wing folks got on board as well. And and so that has been going on but what he has been doing since he got into government is basically realigning all of the government advice to be more anti-vax i mean he hasn't he hasn't gone so far as to outlaw these vaccines thank goodness but he's done essentially everything he would like to, He's done everything short of that, removing recommendations, saying that you shouldn't, you know, putting in more caveats, putting all kinds of stuff that is not supported by the science.
|
Sam:
[46:12]
| They're, you know, Florida famously, just a couple of weeks ago, announced that they're removing vaccine mandates for schools entirely.
|
Sam:
[46:22]
| Not, you know, we're not even just talking about COVID. We're talking about all of the childhood vaccines, all the kind of stuff that in most places in the country have been required for decades and decades with, you know, a few limited exceptions, religious exceptions, other that were allowed for one reason or another. And, you know, so it's just all of these trends that were already underway will be accelerated, whereas the previous public health regime was doing their best to stem that tide, to get the, you know, pro-vaccine information out there, make sure that people knew, etc. Now this is just going to lead to more and more people skipping more and more vaccines, which is going to result in, I mean, you mentioned that we've got outbreaks of measles in several States at this point.
|
Sam:
[47:17]
| And it's like you said, no longer eradicated in the U S but we're going to see the return of all kinds of childhood diseases that were basically, you know, I mean, I remember I had chicken pox as a kid. You've told on this show a story about a patient of yours that died, you know, from that. You know, you look at, there are charts of various of these diseases over the years and how they were very prominent and lots of people caught these diseases. Lots of people died of these diseases and then a vaccine came out and they dropped to near zero in a few years and we're undoing that and a big part of that.
|
Ed:
[48:07]
| The entire world incidence of polio has now dropped to, you know, one or two cases a year in the whole world. The virus is still there. We will be having children with polio. The trouble is a lot of the illnesses that the vaccines present have a lag period before when you stop, you know, preventing it. And then you start seeing the disease might be several years. So people have a hard time saying, well, the vaccine didn't work, did it? But more important, there's some of them have an even longer lag period. The German measles, the mild three-day measles, has about a 20-year lag period until we see the problem. Because the illness itself was very mild. No one gets sick. Two, three days, and you're back to normal. If you're pregnant and you get German measles, your child has terrible birth defects caused by that virus. But that's 20, 30, 40 years before we see it. You can't, and you can't, they always say, well, you need to have a double-blind scientific study. You can't do a double-blind study and be ethical when the disease you're dealing with is one that is devastating. Hepatitis, meningitis, German measles.
|
Sam:
[49:23]
| These are one of the states where you have to do sort of population studies and look at who has or has not been vaccinated already, rather than saying, okay, you're getting a placebo, you know. And it's harder to disentangle that with confounding factors, but there are mathematical techniques to doing that. The problem is, you know, again, the non-scientists often don't understand any of this. It's all mumbo jumbo. And what I was going to say earlier is another big problem is a lot of people react to this with, why does my kid need a measles vaccine? I've never known anyone with measles.
|
Ed:
[50:03]
| Yeah, guess why?
|
Sam:
[50:05]
| Exactly. You don't know anyone with measles because for decades, every child has gotten the measles vaccine. Once you start not giving people the vaccine, these things will come back. And yes, it's incredibly frustrating.
|
Ed:
[50:23]
| Case of polio never saw i never i think i may have seen one case of mumps the only chicken pox i saw, was in the uh the 1980 70s i think it was i never saw another case of chicken pox and and on and on and on these these diseases help we can't even diagnose them anymore because we don't really know the symptoms that much, But we're learning them.
|
Sam:
[50:49]
| Right. So I just did a news search for recent articles about RFK Jr. So the most recent one is apparently he's talking at a convention called CattleCon about the need to beef up red meat consumption amongst Americans.
|
Ed:
[51:10]
| He wants us to eat a lot more meat.
|
Sam:
[51:12]
| Which i i've heard plenty of why actually reducing red meat is good a for the environment and b for health i imagine this there's probably conflicting information about some of that but anyway there's information about him pushing an unproven autism treatment within the last day as Oh, and apparently this also, this is not medically related, but one of the things in the Epstein files is that RFK Jr. Joined Epstein and Glenn Maxwell on a fossil hunting trip in the Dakotas decades ago, illegally getting on an Indian reservation where collecting fossils was illegal. And yeah those are those are the most recent well he's oh and engaged and and information about you know how he helped cause measles up the measles outbreak in samoa a few years ago which we'd heard about but apparently there's new emails about that and about how he lied to the senate during his confirmation hearings about that trip to samoa um all all of this is within the last day Oh, and the keto diet stuff you were talking about, where experts say there's no credible evidence.
|
Ed:
[52:38]
| I think that may be—I think he's outing that for autism also, that he thinks a ketogenic diet will cure autism.
|
Sam:
[52:47]
| Oh, nice. You know, all of this, it's just having him in this particular role is about the worst place you could possibly put him. And of course, it's the place he cared a lot about. But in Health and Human Services is just of RFK Jr.'s toxically incorrect, unscientific beliefs, this is the worst possible place you could put him. He's causing so much damage. You know, and, you know, and this is also someplace where Donald Trump himself, you know, he was one of the actual accomplishments of his first term was the COVID vaccine. His administration did do a lot of things to streamline the process and get that out earlier. And he was very proud of that. He was not an anti-vax crazy person. Donald Trump wasn't. But in order to get RFK Jr.'s support this last time around, he's like, sure, you can do whatever you want on this stuff. Have fun.
|
Ed:
[54:06]
| So, fun. Anyway.
|
Sam:
[54:08]
| Okay.
|
Ed:
[54:08]
| Yeah, RFK is one of my favorite people.
|
Sam:
[54:12]
| Yeah, I can tell. Anything else on that or related topics before we take another break and I ask you for another topic?
|
Ed:
[54:20]
| I think that pretty much covers it. As I said, I think the thing that's going to be the most dangerous is that several of these diseases are really devastating. And the lead-in until we realize how bad this has been is going to be between a few years and a few decades. But it'll be way too late than to say, oh, my God, we shouldn't have listened to him. And it's just right. It's terrible. We shouldn't should not be doing that to ourselves.
|
Sam:
[54:51]
| Well, and more generally, Yvonne and I have talked a lot about delayed effects. What you're pointing out is some very concrete examples in the health care space. But this applies across the board to a lot of the things that the Trump administration is doing. We've talked specifically about economic delayed effects, but there are delayed effects and all kinds of other stuff, too, in terms of policy choices he is making now, whether it be foreign policy, domestic policy, health care policy...
|
Sam:
[55:27]
| Many of the effects won't be fully felt for a decade, maybe longer in some cases.
|
Sam:
[55:38]
| You know, some things have, you know, some of the first things have immediate effect or an effect that you can notice after six months or a year. But there are a lot of things where the full extent of the damage won't be obvious for many years. But then when you track it down you'll be able to tell oh yes this is because of that policy change back in 2025 or whatever you know and the the problem is that the experts will be able to go in and trace that and and say oh yeah that's because whatever but the general population will blame it on whoever's president then you know yeah because that's just how it works You know, it's not you're not looking back and saying, hey, you know, the root cause of problem X is this action that was taken by the president 20 years ago. So, I mean, I've heard those kind of arguments. I see every few months graphs recirculate showing how all kinds of things started going wrong during the Reagan administration and that we can truly blame X, Y, Z that's happening today on something that happened in the Reagan administration 50 years ago. Is it 50 years ago? Oh, 80, 30. Oh, God.
|
Ed:
[57:04]
| I think it was. Kennedy was assassinated in 63 1980.
|
Sam:
[57:12]
| Was that's 45 years 40 45 years ago and that so for 40 45 years ago uh 40 40 46 for the beginning his term started in 81 ended in 89 you know what math math is hard don't ask me to do math okay so not not 50 years more like 40 something but whatever whatever and and you can you can look at those arguments and sometimes they make sense sometimes they don't and again it's a mix some things do have immediate effect and we are seeing some of the negative impact of the Donald Trump presidency already for sure. But there will be some things that get worse and worse and linger and some things will be correctable and some things will not be. And, you know, it's it. Life is messy. OK, let's let's take a break. OK, and then I'll come back and ask you for a second topic and we'll go through that and then we'll wrap it up okay back after all.
|
Ed:
[58:15]
| Right see you in a couple minutes.
|
Sam:
[58:16]
| Yep back after this.
|
Break:
[58:18]
| Okie dokie. Here it comes. It's just my internet being stupid. My internet being stupid is a new song we will make. Do you believe Come on, come on. I'm tired. What's wrong? I'm really tired. It's amazing to get the show on the road. there's a road there's a road oh my god there's a road.
|
Sam:
[59:23]
| Okay we are back so ed what is your second topic of the show i.
|
Ed:
[59:31]
| Got another quickie.
|
Sam:
[59:32]
| For a second quickie okay so we may need more than one additional topic.
|
Ed:
[59:38]
| A week ago tomorrow, my right hearing aid stopped working for reasons unclear. And then so on Monday, then I contacted the company that they have because they're still under warranty. And I sent an email saying what had happened. It was it was working intermittently. It worked for a couple minutes and then it stopped. Then it worked and stopped. And and it was also if I use it as as a Bluetooth, it was working anyway. So I wrote the company and they wrote back and asked, I got an email back that asked me a couple questions. So I responded to that email and almost immediately got another response telling me I should read, reboot my hearing aids. And it told me how to do that. And then to let them know how that turned out, didn't hold on the phone. And so I did that and that didn't help. So I wrote back And then they had me do one more test to describe how to do it.
|
Ed:
[1:00:33]
| And I did that one and it still didn't work. So suddenly it said, okay, a new hearing aid will be shipped to you tomorrow. Now the incidence of this thing, the thing that's interesting is that I think this is all done with an AI bot. Because I never talked to a human. In the past I've talked when I would call in, I talked to a human being. And if there were two or three calls, every time he had to start all over at the beginning and go, this was all done within a course of about, well, three messages and maybe an hour, hour and a half total time. It was incredible. And the hearing aid just arrived, just as when I said, I'll see you in a minute. I went out, it was on the front porch, delivered. Okay. So AI is affecting our lives better than I thought.
|
Sam:
[1:01:20]
| Well, you know, one of the things here, and so I'll talk about AI stuff for a little while. Look, a couple years back when ChatGPT first hit the scene, you know, Yvonne and I spent a bunch of time on this show making fun of stupid AI mistakes, whether it be ChatGPT or Google Gemini in their search results. They famously had a whole bunch of really stupid things where they were telling people to do potentially dangerous things. They were getting facts completely and totally wrong, all kinds of stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:02:02]
| And basically we were saying, it's just not ready yet. Like, this has a lot of promise, but people are putting it into production, doing things prematurely that it's not actually good at yet. And there are still people doing things prematurely with it. But the rate of improvement has been absolutely insane over these last couple years. Um it is it is if you look at things that every every three months things are noticeably better than they were three months previously it's not even comparing year to year at this point you can compare a few months apart the main thing i've been using ai for at this point is working on the personal projects I've been mentioning here. I've talked about, well, the biggest one I'm working on is this Robin Letter thing which is a.
|
Sam:
[1:03:03]
| Yeah, alternative to social media to keep track, to keep up with circles of friends and family that you sort of want to keep up with, but you're not talking to every day, et cetera, et cetera, which I haven't updated on here for a while. So just real quick, I'm perpetually a few weeks away from being ready to do my first tests with real people. I had hoped to be done at the end of December. Then I had hoped to be done at the end of January. But then I ended up in the hospital and recuperating for a while. And I keep having this problem where like, I know if I just worked on it straight through, I could probably be finished and ready for that first test in a week or so. But the problem is I've got other things that I need to be doing too. I can't just do only this. And so I will like concentrate on this for like a day or two. And in fact, after I get this podcast out, like I am due to spend a couple days on this.
|
Sam:
[1:04:00]
| And but then after a couple of days, I'm like, man, all this other stuff is building up. I got to keep I got to do this other stuff. And so I have to put it away and stop for a little while and then get back to it like in another week or something. And that slows everything down. So I'm disappointed by that because I'm really excited about it. I want to test it. I want to get it out. The first test group is going to be my cousins. And then I'm going to I've got a handful of people who've specifically asked to be included in subsequent tests, and I'll try to include them as soon as possible. And I was going to ask, I was probably going to set up one for people who are on the curmudgeon score Slack just as a test. So you'll be in there, Ed. I will. And then maybe ask on Facebook for, you know, are there people who knew me in college who'd be willing to test in a people who knew Sam in college test or a people who knew Sam in high school or people who knew Sam at various jobs he had in the past or whatever. We'll see. We'll see how that goes. But anyway, the point is, I have been using AI assistance for this. I've been using Cursor for this. And more recently, I've shifted to using Claude Code for most of this.
|
Sam:
[1:05:13]
| But the point is, even in the space of time that I've been working on this Robin Letter project, robinletter.com, if you want more information, which I really, like, I was doing a little bit of it going back all the way to January 2025, very slowly because I didn't have time because I was still at work. I wasn't unemployed yet, but I started way back then. And when I started, I really had to really closely babysit the AI. Like every single thing I asked it to do, I would have to like, you know, I would have to check the code and I would have to ask it about stupid things. And I would have to ask it to repeat. And I would, you know, make sure that it was making documents to describe what it did so it didn't forget. And I could tell it to continue later. And frankly, some of the choices on Robin letter specifically, I think I wasted months and months because the AI had me do some stuff first that I should have waited to later to do. Um, you know, I, I ended up doing a, a lot of.
|
Sam:
[1:06:25]
| Preliminary UI stuff that I'm not actually using at this point, that took me a long time to do before I started building actual functionality. And then at some point, I'm like, I'm sick of this. Let's move functionality right away. And things started moving faster. But also, at the same time, over the course of that little bit more than a year on this one project, it's gotten noticeably smarter.
|
Sam:
[1:06:54]
| Things that I had to spell out explicitly or have it do wrong and then I would tell it to correct and I'd have to take three or four attempts before it got it right the way I wanted it to get right. It's now getting right on the first shot. A lot of the planning process that I was manually making it go through, okay, write a doc that outlines all of this and And then we're going to iterate on that doc until I'm happy with it. And then we're going to do implementation based on that doc. Now, it's like volunteering to make that doc without me prompting. And then when I read through the doc the first time, it's got almost all of it right. The last one of these I did on a Robin Letter feature I was working on a few days ago, adding, like, actually, it wasn't Robin Letter. It was Juke Potter. Juke Potter is another of my projects. Jukepotter.com. Go play with it.
|
Sam:
[1:07:54]
| But it was related to that, and I had it write the document, and then I read over the document, and I had, like, two really minor comments that weren't really consequential, and everything else it had written, it had gotten right. Like, from my initial description, which was, like, hey, go look at what we've already done in place A and place B. I want to do something similar in place C, but with these changes.
|
Sam:
[1:08:26]
| It wrote up a detailed description of exactly what needed to be done. And again, other than two really minor, relatively inconsequential things, its description was perfect out of the box. And then I told it, go do it. And it sat and it thought for like 20 minutes and making changes. And then it was basically done. I mean, I then tested it and there were a couple of minor things that had to be corrected, but they were minor things that had to be corrected. For the most part, it had done exactly what I had described and done it right on the first shot. And that was something that even six months ago, it would not have done. Six months ago, I would have been iterating a lot longer to get the same result. Now, even six months ago, even a year ago, it was saving me time versus me doing it myself as someone who is not and has never been a software developer, but has dabbled enough to know a little and who has done a lot more of the program management and requirements development than the actual coding.
|
Sam:
[1:09:41]
| It was already saving me time back then. It might not have fully saved time a year and a half ago for someone who is actually a professional developer and knew what the hell they were doing. But for me, it certainly was. But now it's getting things right on the first try and things are moving faster. There's a lot. I still have to, like, make sure I can't skip testing. Right. If I have it build something, I have to make sure to test it fairly thoroughly and find all the edge cases, and it doesn't always get them all right on the first try, and we fix those and go through them. But compared to—again, the key here is the rate of improvement. It is so much better now than it was even a few months ago, and that isn't even comparable to where it was a year ago. And most of my experience is on this sort of coding kind of thing where I'm working with the AI to build something. I'll be honest, I have not spent a lot of time just chatting with the chatbot. You know, we will probably need to, at some point, do another experiment with having me co-host the show with an AI.
|
Sam:
[1:10:58]
| But, you know, we did that once. I figure at least a year in between. It was sort of, it wasn't great. It was entertaining to do once. But, you know, I asked it to replicate Yvonne's style, and it completely failed at that.
|
Ed:
[1:11:15]
| As I recall, it didn't have any curse words in it.
|
Sam:
[1:11:18]
| It didn't have any curse words. It was not very argumentative. It was very agreeable, basically said, Sam, you're absolutely right a lot. You know, so anyway, but I have not spent a lot of time with the pure chatbots. I have not spent a lot of time with the image generation stuff, although I've played with that and it's done some that honestly, I know a lot of people slag it because it's imitating real artists styles. And it's kind of derivative at times, but, Frankly, when I've done it, it's done stuff that I could never do on my own, and it's been perfectly acceptable for the one-off uses that I've had for it, which are basically things like, you know, somebody says something in a group family chat that I'm like, oh, that would be interesting as an image. And I'll go to chat GPT or whatever and ask it to make an image of that. And kaboom, I've got like a little cartoonish image of whatever weird thing it was like, you know, my dog piloting a spaceship or whatever. And boom, it's done, you know, and I would not have been able to do that on my own. And those are fun, but not super useful. I've resisted using that for, like, my Juke Potter site needs a real logo. I am not an artist.
|
Sam:
[1:12:48]
| I know I could go into any one of half a dozen AI tools, describe what I wanted for a logo, and it would spit one out, and I could use it. But I've resisted using it for something like that because often the stuff is recognizable as, oh, that looks like an AI did it. But also that's the kind of thing where I feel like, hey, it would be nice to like pay an actual artist to do that. You know you'll get get somebody i i've offered both my wife and my son have better artistic skills than i have and i've asked them both to make a logo for that site and neither one of them have it's been months i just saw a facebook friend post online actually they they they just invited me as a linkedin connection and their job description was freelance artist and i'm like oh.
|
Sam:
[1:13:42]
| I'll ask them too. I'll see how much they would charge me for a logo. You know, so I've done that kind of stuff. And I did ask one artist friend of mine to do it. So if you're listening, Mark, I know you sometimes listen to the show. I asked you like a year ago for a Juke Potter logo. No, I asked you for a Robin Letter logo. I asked you for a Robin Letter logo. I have a Robin Letter logo that I did myself now. It's kind of corny. It's just a pixelated version of a picture I had of a robin. Like a picture I actually took myself of a robin. I went and pixelated it by hand painting pixels over, you know, I traced it and blah, blah, blah. You know, whatever. Anyway, Mark, if you want to do a Juke Potter logo for me, you know, I will pay you for it. Just give me a price. Let me know. Anyway, but yeah, I've avoided using it for things like that. And I've avoided using it. You know, people are talking about using these things for like, I'm having a fight with my wife. What should I say? Like, no, come on. No, no, that's a bad idea. That's a bad idea.
|
Ed:
[1:14:57]
| I've heard of people use—, The other place where it's clearly not ready to be used is lawyers have been using it to write their briefs for the judge. And it still has the same thing. It makes things up. It gives citations in which it misquotes the authors. And the judges apparently are getting kind of pissed off.
|
Sam:
[1:15:22]
| If the citation even exists at all, which it usually doesn't.
|
Ed:
[1:15:27]
| But the judges, some judges don't bother you against that thing and they, okay, that's my ruling. Other judges who read through the thing and look up citations are more than a little angry. The one I think threatened a guy with contempt of court.
|
Sam:
[1:15:43]
| Well, yeah, I know that's happened a couple of times now. And I mean, this is just in general, like the other example I was giving, because obviously I'm currently unemployed, I will be looking for a job, blah, blah, blah. People are worried about people using AI on interviews to help them. People are talking about how much AI to use in things like writing resumes and cover letters. Now, I will admit, the last time I updated my resume, I did talk to the AI about it. I gave it examples of things I had done and asked it to help summarize. But I did not accept word for word anything it gave me. Like it would give me a shortened version of it. And then I would take that and recraft it, you know, to, to sound, to, to be more like me and also to get rid of inaccuracies. Cause it was getting things wrong, you know, and make it so like, is this, is this actually true? Is this actually what I did? Or is this like completely made up bullshit that sounds good, but is wrong. Yeah.
|
Ed:
[1:16:53]
| If you're going to use it, you absolutely have to factor it.
|
Sam:
[1:16:56]
| Yeah, you have to fact check it. And, you know, like I said, I wasn't even copying and pasting sentences or anything. I'd be taking the sentence it gave as a suggestion and then writing my own for the most part. Maybe I would take a phrase here or there. But like, because, you know, it just, and would it actually work better if I let the AI rewrite the whole thing? I don't know, maybe. A lot of people are doing that now. But does that actually, I don't know. It seems disingenuous to me and it seems like it's important to have your own voice there in that kind of thing. But, you know, you mentioned the lawyers turning in their briefs. I predict it won't be that long till we have a case where the judge's ruling turns out to be AI written. Where, you know, the judge just feeds in all the documents from all the people and says, ah, write it for me. You know, maybe he'll tell the AI what he wants the result to be, but doesn't want to take the time to write the detailed whatever. Now, most of them have clerks and stuff that help out anyway. But, you know, you could easily see that coming.
|
Ed:
[1:18:19]
| I also, I could have saved me hours and hours when I was at the Pentagon because I was mostly writing policy. Imagine I could have just said to the AI, write this policy. I'll be back after I have a drink.
|
Sam:
[1:18:30]
| Well, exactly. Well, the thing is, there is evidence that people at the Pentagon actually are doing that right now.
|
Ed:
[1:18:37]
| Oh, I'm sure they are.
|
Sam:
[1:18:38]
| You know, and specifically like various members of the cabinet appear to be, you know, using AI guidance. We talked about the damn tariffs were determined by AI. You know, and the thing is, with this growing, it's only a matter of time before the whole loop in some of these cases is AI. I've joked before about people saying, you know, having the AI take bullet points and expand it into a document and then sending it to somebody who has an AI summarize that document as bullet points because they don't want to read the whole document. And what was the point of that whole thing? You could have just transferred the bullet points across to begin with. But I think you're going to have those kinds of cases where everybody involved is using an AI. And so, you know, the AI is just actually introducing noise to the actual person-to-person communication that was intended.
|
Sam:
[1:19:43]
| And who knows what results of that are. And I have also said, you know, with this, I forget if we mentioned it in passing last week, we've definitely mentioned it on the, on the curmudgeons course Slack. There's this MaltBot thing. It has a new name now. MaltBot was the same. It was ClawBot and then it was MaltBot and then it's something else. Anyway, it's, it's this AI utility that people have been using in a way that basically they They give it access to all their stuff, their email. Some people have given it access to credit cards, the web, accounts to various things. And then they just let it run wild. And the idea is it can help optimize, act as a true digital assistant because it has access to all your stuff. Even the creators of this say, that's dangerous, don't do that. Run it in a sandbox where it has limited access to specific things as a task. But people have been going, woo, let it create, control everything. But they created a social media place for these things to talk to each other. called Malt Book.
|
Sam:
[1:21:00]
| And basically, a whole bunch of these Malt Bots have been talking to each other on here and having conversations. Now, it's been pointed out that most of these conversations are probably fake because the owners of the Malt Books could say things like.
|
Sam:
[1:21:19]
| Hey, go sign up for Maltbook and then make some posts about starting a new religion or whatever. And so they start doing that. And so it's started by human prompts anyway. But the point is, these things are talking to each other. I'm sure you'll see more about that. And just generally, you know, am I afraid of the singularity happening anytime soon and these things deciding that they're better and to get rid of humanity, like so many science fiction novels and movies have done over the years? Not immediately.
|
Sam:
[1:21:58]
| Might it happen someday? Sure. Might someday be in a few years? Maybe. But I don't think this month, you know, they're not there yet. But again, the progress has been incredibly fast. I'm sure we have not hit a plateau yet, which is kind of scary because it's still getting better really fast. And so we'll see. And a lot of this is like, how fast can people adapt to this? And at least one of the unstated reasons why so many companies are getting rid of white-collar jobs like mine. It's not the only reason. People have talked about culture and other things, too. But is, hey, we're leaning into AI. One, we need the money to invest in AI. And two, a lot of these white-collar jobs can now be done by these AIs. With a lot fewer actual human beings involved. And I think that nobody's making, or I shouldn't say nobody.
|
Sam:
[1:23:10]
| Lots of companies are still in the mode where they're losing a lot of money in order to lean into these concepts, gambling that in a few years they'll come out of it way in the positive side because they will have gotten in early and taken advantages of these technologies and be where they need to be on this. But there's, and I've heard one people say, one people, I've heard commentary saying that, What AI is doing now to white-collar jobs is essentially the same thing that globalization did to a lot of blue-collar jobs decades ago, where we're taking the highly paid or relatively highly paid individuals and we're finding a much cheaper way of doing it with fewer people or at least cheaper people. You know, the globalization moved a lot to cheaper people in other countries.
|
Sam:
[1:24:19]
| In this case, it's moving it to, you know, a few people who are working with the AIs rather than whole teams of people. And, of course, the cost of running these AIs, which is still huge. So we shall see this definitely has the potential of being massively disruptive to all kinds of different things over the next few years because you know lots of kinds of jobs you just won't need anymore maybe including the kind of stuff i've done in the past so like i'm looking at this and going like, okay, if I was doing this today, a lot of the things could just be AI, write me a status report, return. And so, I don't know, we shall see. But in the meantime, I'm hoping to use the AI to build my little Robin letter thing. And I'm crossing my fingers that people will actually use it and I can find a way to monetize it. And so that I can like, you know, not go back to that other kind of job, but I know it's a long shot, but you know, I got to give it a shot, right?
|
Ed:
[1:25:37]
| Yep, sounds right.
|
Sam:
[1:25:41]
| Okay, I know you said this would be a short AI topic, and then I went rambling on for like half an hour.
|
Ed:
[1:25:47]
| Well, no, I think it's worth talking about because it's clearly a disrupt, as you said. I'll have to say I'm kind of glad to be 84 years old because I'm not going to have to live. I can live with the benefits of it, like the hearing aid thing. Clearly was an AI, clearly a much less painful interaction, or at least a more pleasant interaction than in the past. But it's, you know, I don't have to write resumes. I don't have to write essays for my college professors, only to have them say, that's a goddamn lie. What's the matter with you.
|
Sam:
[1:26:22]
| Haynes?
|
Ed:
[1:26:22]
| You know, that's going to be a disruptive. And the professors are faced with the thing of well was this written by my student or was this written by his computer and is it true is it false uh you know at.
|
Sam:
[1:26:37]
| The very least and also you have to figure out like the the way people react to these things like you can't put it back in the bottle you know so so so the question is like how do you adapt to a world where these things exist yeah both in terms of like you know So, for instance, you mentioned a professor in teaching. Okay, well, how are you going to switch to modes of evaluating teaching and learning that can't be augmented by that? Like, you want to know whether the person learned the material? You can't ask them to write an essay anymore. You have to ask them to stand up in class and tell you about it and have a conversation with you in some way.
|
Ed:
[1:27:26]
| Or write the essay in class.
|
Sam:
[1:27:28]
| Or write the essay in class. Some people are going back to handwritten essays in blue books, absolutely. Or, you know, back to the Socratic method for everything, where you're talking back and forth to the kids in class, and you're evaluating them that way. Now, of course, those things, you know, some people are good at that, some people aren't. And, you know, you're going to have to find ways to adapt for different students as well. But, of course, it won't be long before the students aren't talking to a professor anyway, they're talking to an AI professor, you know?
|
Sam:
[1:28:04]
| So, you know, all of these things are going to adapt and you have to figure out also, you know, just in terms of skill level, what's important to be taught and what's important to not be taught anymore. You know, just like teaching cursive isn't really relevant today, unless you're a specialist who is looking at historical documents or anything.
|
Sam:
[1:28:28]
| You can argue that, We really have to do a deep think about what places is it really important to make sure that a human knows this within their own head and can do task X, Y, or Z versus when is it important that they know the right way to use the technology to get the result they want and know the right way to evaluate facts. Like, we've been talking for years now how media literacy was important and has been not taught appropriately. So people are not understanding what's true and what's not. That's going to get so much worse, you know, in an AI inundated world. It already is worse. There are already people falling for AI-generated video left, right, and center. And, you know, it can be tricky. Some of them are obvious. Some of them are not.
|
Sam:
[1:29:34]
| And it's going to be tough. And I think a lot of this is actually going to be, you know, there was this big push towards, towards STEM and often at the expense of sort of traditional liberal arts.
|
Ed:
[1:29:50]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:29:51]
| I think a lot of the traditional liberal arts needs to come back and come back strong because that's where we, that's where we're teaching people how to think critically. We're teaching people how to be creative, how to communicate, how to be creative. I think, I mean, to some degree, creativity is an innate thing, but it could be taught to some degree. But, you know, you need to, you need to figure out, I think that's the, and the more technology develops, the more it's going to be that the critical skill is not going to be knowing some set of facts. Because you'll be able to get the, I mean, you already can get almost any facts at a moment's notice. The trick is telling, okay, which are the real facts and which is bullshit people, people, people made up.
|
Sam:
[1:30:46]
| Um, and even like knowing the specific, you know, in order to do task X, you do these steps in this order and all that kind of stuff. You can look that up. Now, if it's something critical. You're going to want to practice a lot before you do it for real. And so that kind of thing is still going to be important. But in some of those cases, robots are going to be able to do those tasks. So why does a human need to, you know? And so there's a lot of how do we adapt to that world? And does that world develop so fast we can't adapt effectively? Because, you know, hey, if that kind of thing develops over the course of 200 years, you know, humans are pretty good at adapting. If that kind of stuff develops over the course of five or 10 years—.
|
Sam:
[1:31:37]
| Humans are not that good at adapting in those short timescales, even 20. And we've got a lot of things that are moving really quickly right now. And, you know, and we may hit that plateau. I still feel like there's a lot of place where we could hit a plateau and get to, you know, the AI systems are doing it 99% correct. But that last 1% is really, really, really hard. Like, you know, it seems like we're there with self-driving right now, even though it's gotten, it's still continuing to get better. The last bit is hard. And I think that's true on all of these endeavors where, you know, getting from zero to 50 goes pretty fast. Getting from there to 70, okay. But then as you get to 90, 99, 99.9, 99.99, it gets exponentially harder to bridge that last little gap. But then even there, humans aren't necessarily the comparison. If you're talking chess, no human alive at this point can beat even mediocre average chess programs that you can buy, you know, retail, let alone the best computers in the world, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:33:00]
| So anyway, things move fast. Okay, Ed, did you have one more topic that I've ignored that we want to take a break and then do, or should we wrap it up?
|
Ed:
[1:33:09]
| Well, we can wrap it up. I thought we maybe ought to spend a couple minutes talking about the START treaty that expired this week. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or not.
|
Sam:
[1:33:21]
| You know, I haven't really been following it, but we can talk about it a little bit. Let's take a break. We can bring that up and chat for a little bit and then wrap it up.
|
Ed:
[1:33:31]
| Call it a day. Okay. Sounds good. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:34:16]
| Okay, we are back. So, Ed, salt. It was salt, right? Salt, salt, salt.
|
Ed:
[1:34:24]
| Or the start.
|
Sam:
[1:34:25]
| Which one? Which one is it? Which one is it?
|
Ed:
[1:34:28]
| I think it was the START Treaty that expired Thursday. It's our international treaty with Russia that limited both of us to 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons. Now, that's not all nuclears. That's just the ones that you're going to lob across the ocean. Battlefield nuclear weapons are an addition to that, but they're not covered. Well, that treaty expired this week, and Trump said he doesn't want to renegotiate it because we need something that'll last longer than the 10 years of that one, and they need to be more effective. I think he's right in a couple things, one of which is that that treaty was only between the Russia and the United States. There have been attempts to talk China into joining it, but China says, screw you guys, we only have something, I think they have something like 600 weapons, and they don't want to be that far behind. So when they get up to having 1,500, 1,600 strategic weapons, they might join us then, they'll see. But we also have, you know, there's something like at least eight or nine countries with nuclear weapons. And most of them, they're not going to build huge numbers. I mean, you know. Israel probably has 40 or 50.
|
Sam:
[1:35:43]
| One of the things with things like this is that, okay, yeah, I can buy the notion that, oh, okay, we want something better. But the reality is there's nothing active going on to do anything better. No. And... You know, in that kind of situation, extending the status quo to kick things down the road seems better than letting it expire and having nothing. However, here's the thing. I don't buy anything the Trump administration is saying about us really wanting something better.
|
Sam:
[1:36:26]
| I think both Russia and the U.S. Were perfectly happy to let it expire and start building more again yeah you know donald trump has explicitly complained about the age of our nuclear weapons and that they need to be modernized he has explicitly said things like what good is it having these if we're not going to use them you know and and so i i fully believe that this is both sides really had no interest in continuing this. They really have no interest in treaties in general in the old-fashioned sense. When we're talking about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin specifically.
|
Sam:
[1:37:20]
| These are people whose entire worldviews are based upon person-to-person, individualized, informal deals or arrangements.
|
Sam:
[1:37:33]
| That is how they operate. They don't want anything in writing. They don't want a formal treating. They don't want anything that would potentially bind them above and beyond them saying something to somebody else that, frankly, they both know they could change their mind at any moment. And I think that's what's really going on with things like this. Well, I think, you know.
|
Ed:
[1:38:00]
| We need to be a little bit afraid of the fact that there isn't any kind of a constraint any longer. But I don't know that that's not going to I think you're right. There's not going to be one.
|
Sam:
[1:38:11]
| I don't think there's going to be one. And I think, you know, I was reading there's an NBC News article about this from a few days ago. And it was definitely start and expired on the 5th. So two days ago. And there's a quote from the U.N. Secretary General. For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits under strategic nuclear arsenals. I think that is the word binding. It's delusional. There were no binding limits before. Yes, they had both signed a treaty that said they would behave. And yes, for the most part, they had been behaving. You know, both sides, you know, I believe this was an actual proper ratified treaty back when the U.S. still did that. And, you know, it was being followed. But if you look at the leadership involved on both sides, neither one, neither Putin nor Trump would hesitate in the slightest on violating a treaty if they felt it was in their best interest at the moment.
|
Ed:
[1:39:23]
| Which says a lot about why neither one of those guys should be major leaders.
|
Sam:
[1:39:28]
| Right. I mean, if you look back, if you look at our previous presidents, you know, of both parties, they would have felt bound by this treaty. Donald Trump, no. Vladimir Putin, no. They would not feel bound in any way by any of this. I mean, I think that's obvious with Trump domestically. Like, does he pay attention to any law, anything that says it restricts his power at all? No, of course not. So, I mean, do I wish they had re-upped this? Yes, it would have been better if they did than if they didn't, even if Trump was going to ignore it and Putin. But do I think it actually makes a significant difference to the reality of how things are right now? I don't think it does. I guess it potentially affects the next president. You know, we're not going to have Trump forever. Maybe the next U.S. President would feel bound by this. Maybe the next Russian leader would feel bound by this. I don't know. That's unpredictable at this stage. So it would have been better to keep it. But at least in the short term, like, I don't feel like any treaties—.
|
Sam:
[1:40:42]
| Are worth very much right now when you have leaders who have openly stated that they don't care. Now, having said that, I think Trump is still somewhat constrained. He does feel like if he is going to cross one of these lines, like we've talked about this in terms of NATO before too. If he's going to cross one of these lines and officially do nothing, or like in the case of NATO, if NATO was attacked, have the U.S. Ignore them because they didn't pay their dues or whatever, even though that's not how it works. I think there would be internal resistance. He would think twice. He would figure that out. But for the most part, it's a speed bump. It's a little bit of additional resistance, and Trump wouldn't care. But there we are. Any more thoughts on this, Ed?
|
Ed:
[1:41:40]
| No, not really. I just thought we'd touch on it briefly, but I think I agree with pretty much everything you're saying there. It's not going to change, is it?
|
Sam:
[1:41:53]
| Unfortunately. Well, yeah, let's be optimistic. We've got, you know, to kick off, you started out talking congressional districts earlier in the thing. It sounds like they're, at this point, they're...
|
Sam:
[1:42:09]
| Who knows? Things can always change in nine months. But it looks like the Democrats will almost certainly take back the House. The Senate was expected to be a real long shot for the Democrats. It's looking more and more like it's a toss up at this point. And the Democrats could very well take the Senate. They might not. A toss up does not mean that they will. A toss-up means a toss-up, but it has moved from the Senate being a super long shot to actually being in play. The House looks like it's going to go Democrat. The tone of the Trump administration will undoubtedly—the way things go will work differently if you have a Congress that can actually do something. Now, even then, you know, we know from the first Trump administration, Congress subpoenaed people in the Trump administration and they just ignored them. They asked for documents. They were ignored. They had hearings. They were ignored.
|
Sam:
[1:43:09]
| They impeached. They failed to convict, you know, all of this kind of stuff. So it doesn't change anything, everything. But, you know, and of course, we've got 2028 coming back. And, you know, and while I 100 percent believe that Donald Trump will attempt to cause chaos in both the 2026 and 2028 elections, I don't think he'll succeed. So we shall see. We shall see. OK.
|
Ed:
[1:43:41]
| You mean you're not worried about him nationalizing our election process like he wants to?
|
Sam:
[1:43:47]
| I think... I think this is one of those things where he will try but fail.
|
Ed:
[1:43:53]
| Hopefully. Hopefully. Although, you know, even there, if he were to be able to nationalize even, say, 50, 60 districts, that could sway the election.
|
Sam:
[1:44:05]
| Well, there's also questions of what exactly it means. Like, for instance, you know, the Constitution specifically states that the states are in charge of their elections for House, for President, for, you know, because election for President isn't really an election for President. It's an election for elector, et cetera. And those are state positions. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:44:31]
| For instance, the Democrats last time around, they tried to pass all kinds of election reform laws. They failed. But those would impose national standards on those elections in terms of what was required for ID, what was required or not required, what was required or not required for ID. Standards around mail-in voting standards around all kinds of things um and i would argue that those kinds of standards are actually desirable to regularize things it would still have local control of the elections themselves but would require them to follow these national standards in terms of how it was done. The Republicans could do that. They still have the House. They still have the Senate. They could override the filibuster if they needed to, and they have Donald Trump's signature. If they wanted to pass the evil version of the reforms the Democrats were trying to do four years ago, then they theoretically could. They could require voter ID nationwide. They could outlaw.
|
Sam:
[1:45:56]
| Mail-in ballots nationwide. They could do a bunch of stuff. Now, every single bit of it would go to court, just as I'm sure if the Democrats had got their reforms in, every single bit of it would go to court. And the Supreme Court might or not back them up. It doesn't look like they're actively trying to do that from a legislative point of view right now. And they're running out of time to do so. Yeah, hopefully. Well, certainly for 2026, you know, they're already in the zone where it would be really hard to get anything through. And even if they got something through, it would still be in court and it would be hard to get it through court, you know, in time. Who knows? But it doesn't look like they're even seriously taking that on. Donald Trump has talked about it, but there's no motion.
|
Future Sam:
[1:46:50]
| Do, do, do. Hey, this is Sam from the future. I was absolutely wrong there about saying that there wasn't an active effort going on, et cetera. Shortly after we finished recording, I saw an article about the SAVE Act, which is actively being worked on in both the House and the Senate, and they are pushing.
|
Future Sam:
[1:47:15]
| Apparently, they tried and failed it last year, but they're trying again. It basically is what I was describing, sort of the Republican evil version of the voting reforms that the Democrats tried four years ago. It has a lot of voter IDs. It has a lot of other restrictions. Basically, it would potentially block millions of people from voting or at least make it more difficult for them to do so. And it's got a shot. There still is the issue of time and lawsuits and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, the Supreme Court could decline to stay it and just let it be in effect if it passed. Now, the Democrats can block it with a filibuster unless the Republicans bypass the filibuster, etc. So it's unclear whether or not it will actually become law, but the Republicans are trying actively. So what I was saying about that there wasn't really any active effort. That is incorrect. The SAVE Act bills are very much in play and the Republicans are trying. Okay, back to the show. Do, do, do!
|
Ed:
[1:48:25]
| It's always hard with him to know how much of what he's prattling about is a smokescreen over something else that he really intends to do and how much of it is stuff he really wants to do. You know, that picture he posted of the Obamas over the weekend. What a disgusting thing that is. And it's changed the whole tone of, all the conversations about that picture. And so he's detracted us from all sorts of other things. Because we're not talking about Epstein.
|
Sam:
[1:48:55]
| We're not talking about the election stuff. We're not talking about this. We're not talking about that.
|
Ed:
[1:48:59]
| He's an absolute genius in getting us to talk about what he wants us to talk about.
|
Sam:
[1:49:05]
| Absolutely. And just the flooding the zone with shit thing that Steve Bannon said years ago is so true. Because, you know, there are so many things that pre-Donald Trump, individually would be scandals that would occupy us for months that now barely make a splash on a single news day because by the end of the day, something else outrageous has come up.
|
Sam:
[1:49:38]
| So, I mean, one example of that that was brought up is a week, two weeks ago now, it came out that the UAE invested like billions of dollars into Donald Trump's crypto company like a few weeks before the election. And as soon as he became president, miraculously, several things that the UAE wanted policy-wise came true instantly. Was there a quid pro quo? Was there not a quid pro quo? Is this inappropriate? Regardless, not only is there never going to be a serious investigation into this, well, who knows? Maybe it'll be one of the things that a Democratic House does next year. I don't know. But attention has moved on. That was barely in the news for a day. And now, if you bring it up, people are like, oh yeah okay i i remember hearing about that wasn't that last week or something you know and well you know whereas like that that you know you compare it like.
|
Sam:
[1:50:49]
| Previous presidencies could have been brought down completely by that and certainly you would have resignations and people leaving and and some people being investigated and stuff like that and You know, here it's like, oh yeah, I vaguely remember that happened.
|
Ed:
[1:51:07]
| I mean, as of this weekend or yesterday or whenever the hell it was, he announced or didn't announce, but it's come out that he's trying to bribe Schumer into approving, naming Dulles. Is it Dulles? Yeah, it was.
|
Sam:
[1:51:24]
| No, Reagan.
|
Ed:
[1:51:25]
| Yeah, the national.
|
Sam:
[1:51:26]
| No, it was Dulles and it was also Penn Station in New York, I believe. Yeah, to name them after him. Dulles and Penn Station.
|
Ed:
[1:51:33]
| In return for allowing them to drill some tunnels somewhere, which I think those tunnels are being done by our favorite Tesla's owner. I think it's his company.
|
Sam:
[1:51:45]
| I'm not sure about that part.
|
Ed:
[1:51:46]
| I'm not either.
|
Sam:
[1:51:47]
| But yes, it was reported that Donald Trump is asking for his name on things in exchange for approval of various public works projects and other legislation that in a normal administration, honestly, would go through with huge bipartisan majorities because it's a general public good and not controversial in any way. It's like, yeah, they need a new tunnel. Or, yeah, you need disaster relief for this. Or, yeah, you know, whatever. These are things that would go through uncontroversially in administrations, both Republican and Democrat, in previous years, that Donald Trump is holding up because he wants, you know, his name on something or whatever, you know. So, okay.
|
Ed:
[1:52:40]
| This is an interesting man. Anyway But we're hardly talking about a lot of those things Because that was yesterday's news.
|
Sam:
[1:52:50]
| Yeah, exactly. And there's so much more and so much outrageous, so much wild stuff. I was going to say every single week, but it's practically every single day. It seems like it.
|
Ed:
[1:53:01]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:53:01]
| There's outrageous new news about one thing or other. Okay, I think we're done, Ed.
|
Ed:
[1:53:05]
| Yeah, I think so, too.
|
Sam:
[1:53:07]
| Okay, so let me do the end of the show stuff. Go to curmudgeons-corner.com to find out things about the show. You can find ways to contact myself and Yvonne or just the general addresses for the show you can find all of our old episodes, transcripts, what else, what else, what else, what else, Ed, what else is there oh yes, the Patreon where you can give us money money is important, give us money at various levels there, we will mention you on the show We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug, all that sort of stuff. And at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to the Commudgeons Course Slack where Yvonne and I and Ed and various other people are hanging out and chatting and sharing links and all of that kind of stuff all through the week. So I don't know, Ed, do you have a highlight from the Slack that you would like to give?
|
Ed:
[1:54:08]
| I just panicked a minute ago. I forgot to look up anything. So no, I don't have anything. Actually, the hearing aid thing I think I mentioned on Slack this week, but we've already talked about it enough.
|
Sam:
[1:54:18]
| Well, let me give a couple. There were a couple of AI-related things that came up, but we talked about that a lot. There's apparently a trend going on. I've actually seen this come up. This is like the second or third time I've seen this come up, but people using AI and asking, if my dog was a human, what would they look like? And they send it a picture of their dog, and it sends back a picture of a human that vaguely looks like their dog. We have that kind of thing. We had the lawyer thing and some other AI stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:54:51]
| Here, I will give you one that if Yvonne was here, I am sure he would share. And is also somewhat, you know, medically related as well, which is the Winter Olympics just kicked off. And apparently there is already a scandal with ski jumpers, male ski jumpers. Enhancing their penises to try to fly further. Specifically, they are allegedly injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid in order to fly a little bit further. Now, supposedly, the science behind this is injecting the penis in such a way increases the size somewhat to give them somewhat bigger genitalia at the point that their suits are measured by 3D scanners, which that temporary enhancement for measurement theoretically means that athletes are being given a bigger, looser suit than they would otherwise. And that suit acts like a sail catching wind, which could allow them to make slightly longer jumps. So this is not...
|
Sam:
[1:56:18]
| You have a bigger penis, and therefore you're better long jumping on skis. This is, you do this at the moment you're getting measured for your suit, which gives you a slightly looser suit, which lets your suit act a little tiny bit as a sail to get a slightly bigger jump out of this. Now, the difference is undoubtedly tiny in the aerodynamics here, But when you are talking Olympic-level performances, tiny, tiny differences can make the difference between a gold and silver medal or whatever. So apparently they are investigating this. So, Ed, as a retired doctor, what do you think of this procedure?
|
Ed:
[1:57:06]
| I certainly would not do it. On the other hand, you know, Lindsey Vonn tore her ACL two weeks ago, I think it was. Obviously it can't have surgery on it that puts you off the athletic list for a year and she's she can't take a year off at her age or she's done so she is going to ski with a torn acl and i thought well that's not possible turns out though there was a orthopedist wrote an article about this her quadriceps are so strong that she doesn't need much acl and this guy thinks that She will perform at near peak, maybe not zip peak, but near peak performance with no ACL.
|
Sam:
[1:57:51]
| Now, presumably with some sort, I don't know, do they still have like some bandages or something at least helping hold things together?
|
Ed:
[1:57:59]
| I don't think so. I think it's, you know, when I was in my residency, which is longer ago than I like to think, the orthopedists were constantly stressing to us that the quadriceps is the key to the knee. That if someone comes into surgery with a real strong quadriceps, they're going to do well. and that in long term, even if they have knee injuries with a strong quads, they'll do pretty well. And I think that's been under stress, but this is the point they're making with her is that the athletes doing the slalom courses, that sort of stuff, are relying not on their ACLs, but on their quadriceps muscles and to a lesser extent, the hamstrings. And if you look at it, they ski most of that with their knees bent at around a 90 degree angle, it seems like.
|
Sam:
[1:58:45]
| Right. I guess we'll find out like how she does.
|
Ed:
[1:58:48]
| Well, she already did her first, uh, the trial run that they're required to do before they, she already did that. Well, the first one came down pretty good time.
|
Sam:
[1:58:55]
| Okay.
|
Ed:
[1:58:56]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:58:57]
| Okay. I guess, you know, I, I don't, I am not a sports follower. Like decades ago, I think like with most, with most sports sometime in my twenties, I decided, oh, let's give it a shot and watch once. And for almost all of them, I have watched once and never again. I think I probably watched like, I don't know, the 1984 Olympics or something. And so I do not make a habit of watching any of these things, but they end up being in the news enough that you sort of hear about the major events anyway. I was sort of vaguely aware that the opening ceremonies happened, you know but i don't know i i i haven't watched any visuals from it so i don't know what it looked like i don't know what they did but i know what happened you.
|
Ed:
[1:59:49]
| Know i didn't watch the openings but i you know it's kind of interesting that we keep coming back to some of the old basics that were thought and i know that you know i do some weight work every week three or four times a week and i have always stressed working on my quads because i keep remembering those guys saying how important they are. So I do weight work with my quads to keep my legs, my knees going, but for what it's worth. Anyway, that's the only other thing I have.
|
Sam:
[2:00:19]
| I think we're done. Thank you very much, Ed, for joining us again as a sub. Always love having you here. And it's a bit of a different show than when Yvonne is here, but that's okay. The variety is good.
|
Ed:
[2:00:33]
| It's fun.
|
Sam:
[2:00:35]
| And hopefully Yvonne will be back next week. And hopefully I will be gone. No, hopefully I will be gone. Hopefully I will be back next week too and feel up to it. I have my next procedure related to my various infections and kidney stones and stuff on Monday. Oh, on Monday. And it is an outpatient procedure, but it will be under general anesthesia. They're like going in and doing stuff and they're adding a stent and they're digging around with a laser and they're going in with a camera and all kinds of fun stuff.
|
Ed:
[2:01:11]
| So they're going to try and break the stones up with a laser?
|
Sam:
[2:01:14]
| They're going to start with it. They're putting in an additional, like I have a drain coming out of my right kidney right now. They're going to add an additional stent going from my kidney to my bladder. And they are going to go in with a laser to try to start breaking up the stone. And then they're going to send me home again for what they said was at least two weeks, but it might be more, before they bring me back in to hopefully take all the stuff out of me and including whatever's left of the stone. At least that's the intended plan right now. So there will be digging around inside me doing all kinds of stuff. And I will be thankfully asleep and unconscious while that is happening. But hopefully I will come back out of that, you know, feeling good enough to do a show by the end of the week. So we'll see.
|
Ed:
[2:02:14]
| We'll send good vibes to you on Monday.
|
Sam:
[2:02:16]
| Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. I was going to say, I'm sure it'll be fun, but I'm actually sure it won't be fun. And again, I will be unconscious. So I'm probably very glad to be unconscious. That's the kind of thing you don't want to be awake for. Okay. Okay. With that, thanks everybody. Thanks Ed and Yvonne will be back. I said all this stuff already. Hey, have a great week, people. All the stuff I usually say. Have fun. Not too much fun. Be safe. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we'll see you next time. All right. Goodbye.
|
Ed:
[2:02:55]
| Bye-bye.
|
Sam:
[2:03:26]
| Okay, have a great rest of your day, Ed.
|
Ed:
[2:03:29]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[2:03:31]
| And then I'll tell you when it's safe to hang up.
|
Ed:
[2:03:33]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[2:03:34]
| Here we go.
| |
|
