Automated Transcript
Ivan:
[0:00]
| Can you see me.
|
Sam:
[0:01]
| Yes i can see you yeah well okay whatever are we ready for me to try hitting play and see if you actually hear something sure okay let's let's start with where'd it go they move everything around like yeah we should start with this okay that didn't work at all how about this.
|
Ivan:
[0:30]
| Oh there you go.
|
Sam:
[0:34]
| Okay well since we got that out of the way let's let's play the actual intro because hopefully that like worked and stuff sure here you go oh i i see i'm still clicking in the wrong place, because you used to be able to click anywhere in the little thing that like where the name is now you have to hit the play button anyway here it goes, Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, May 23rd, 2026. It's just after 17 UTC as we're starting to record. I am Sam Minter, and for the first time in many, many months, we have Yvonne back with us.
|
Ivan:
[1:39]
| Many, many months?
|
Sam:
[1:41]
| Many months. Many months. It was like...
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Ivan:
[1:45]
| Many, many, many wonderful things.
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Sam:
[1:48]
| I am so much older and wiser than when last I spoke to you. things have happened events.
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Ivan:
[1:55]
| Things yeah something like that i i'm trying to even like right so because i first first that week we had the i've been like traveling so much and then i had to do all this stuff for mother's day i hadn't gotten anything for anybody for mother's day, and i had to figure out what the fuck am i doing and then you know i talked about it last week i I had this whole thing to go to Orlando.
|
Sam:
[2:25]
| I got to admit, all we did for Mother's Day this time around was take people out to dinner. Nothing else.
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Ivan:
[2:32]
| I had a couple of things that we were doing, and then I had to go to my mother-in-law's house and then to my mom's. I don't know. I was just all over the place. And, you know, I've been traveling so much that I got back, like, my flight was super delayed. You know, yeah, because my flight, all of a sudden... That day before, the weekend before Mother's Day, I'm driving to the airport and I use this app called Flighty, which is really good in terms of keeping track of your flight, but your plane also, the incoming plane, you know, info.
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Sam:
[3:23]
| So this is like a more common one is flight aware, but it's the same idea, right?
|
Ivan:
[3:29]
| No, flighty is more to track your, your, because flight aware is to like for you to, for plane spotting for you just to see stuff. Flighty is to, to track like what your gate is for your next plane. It's really more to notify you about your travel schedule. Okay. And so, you know, it, it tells you, Hey, you know, your, your aircraft is incoming, you know, so you should be on time for your flight. And it keeps track of, you know, all your, all your travel and stuff. And the one thing is that unlike like, so if I use the American Airlines app, it only keeps track of American Airlines flights. But, you know, while I may travel American Airlines for the most part, not all the time, I have to sometimes fly on other airlines. And so if I've got mixed, you know, like sometimes I go, I wind up having to travel, say, on American Airlines and JetBlue on the same trip. So, but I want all my, my, my scheduled flights and notifications, gate notifications or whatever on one app.
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Sam:
[4:32]
| Right.
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Ivan:
[4:32]
| And so this keeps a good track of it. And also, it's very accurate at predicting actual flight time, actual arrival time, versus what the airline says. Okay? The information is usually way more accurate. So, I was on my way to... I was at the office. I go... I'm in San Juan. I decide I'm going to go to the airport. Incoming flight from Miami says it's taken off. It should arrive on time for an online time departure. Perfect. No problem. So I'm driving to the airport and it's on a Friday afternoon. A lot of traffic. And I go and I stop at the first gas station, which is where I, that gas station is owned by, was owned by somebody who was my neighbor for a while. They're not my neighbor, but. Okay. Yeah. So, but my neighbor, like here in Boca Raton, the gas station in San Juan that I go to is owned by.
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Sam:
[5:37]
| I think you've mentioned this gas station before.
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Ivan:
[5:39]
| Yeah. It was owned by this guy that lived like, he had moved in like right across from us. Okay. Now the guy, they live in Jacksonville, but he owns the gas station. So I stopped there all the time. I mentioned it because one time he was looking at the security cameras and he went, he noticed that I was there and all of a sudden he called me on the phone. It's like, Hey, what are you doing? You know? Right.
|
Sam:
[6:01]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[6:01]
| So, so I, I tried to, I almost usually always pull in there for gas, but it was super full. I couldn't get gas. So I got into the Gadex gas station, who I also know the owner, by the way, which is just.
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Sam:
[6:14]
| Of course. You just know all the gas station owners in, in the island of Puerto Rico.
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Ivan:
[6:19]
| It's just, I don't, but the ones that are on the way to the airport, the two gas stations that are on the way there, I do. Okay. All right. So I know. So the other one that I, that I know, this is a guy who I actually bumped into on a flight to San Juan or wife, like not, not that long ago. Okay. All right. Well, they're, they're friends of my father when I, you know, when I was, when I was little, it was still friends, but you know, so, so I'm like, well, let me go to. next gas station i usually avoid his gas station because he's a lot more pricier okay all right okay this guy yeah so but you know it's not a work i mean company pay whatever fine you know look i mean it's expensive again look i i do try to but but hey look the other one was full of course i go to the other gas station okay we go to a rental car so i got the other one and when i finally park and i look at my phone all of a sudden it says that my flight's delayed multiple hours and i'm like what the wait a minute the fuck i just looked at it before i got in the car the plane is on the way everything is good, How could we be delayed now? And, okay, so it's, and then I see that the plane that we're taking is not that plane, is a plane that's coming in from Charlotte and it's arriving several hours later. And I know that the other plane was one that was coming in from Miami. So I'm like, what, what the hell happened?
|
Ivan:
[7:42]
| So I go under flight tracking and then I started going to flight awareness of stuff and try to figure out what the fuck is wrong with this plane. So I, I looked to see that that plane turned back or something.
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Sam:
[7:51]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[7:52]
| And so I look at it.
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Sam:
[7:54]
| I presume this story is going somewhere.
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Ivan:
[7:57]
| Yeah. So I check and the answer is no. The plane was still on its way to San Juan. But after digging, apparently it developed some kind of fault on the way over that didn't require it to turn back, but meant the plane couldn't take off again when it got to San Juan.
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Sam:
[8:22]
| They were going to want to ground the thing until the mechanics could look at it or what. Which is better, by the way, than them saying, oh, fuck it, let's just keep going.
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Ivan:
[8:31]
| Agreed. Agreed. But it was just so bizarre because the plane was still on its way, but it developed something mechanical that it couldn't go again. Okay? And as a matter of fact, I saw that America put that the plane was going to stay in San Juan for 48 hours. Okay? All right? It, like, basically... And so... I wound up arriving, you know, home extremely late that day. And so that's how that might, I mean, my entire weekend got wrecked. I mean, starting with that, I, I, it's just, you know, so yeah. So that was like that weekend. And then last weekend going to Orlando and, you know, I, I talked about this on my, my update. I mean.
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Sam:
[9:24]
| Right. The one we played last week. I'm sure people loved it.
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Ivan:
[9:29]
| I, I, I guess I, I, I can't recall the last time I was, I was at a place where there were 10,000 middle schoolers at once. And I'm one of the few adults.
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Sam:
[9:43]
| Uh-huh.
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Ivan:
[9:44]
| That was like insane.
|
Sam:
[9:46]
| Did, did they like kidnap you, tie you up and, you know, put you in a bonfire or something?
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Ivan:
[9:52]
| Thankfully, no.
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Sam:
[9:53]
| Okay. Because that's what middle schoolers do, I've heard.
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Ivan:
[9:57]
| Look, I remember one time that we were in middle school that we were bored and there was a guy who was annoying the hell out of us and we had a roll of duct tape.
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Sam:
[10:10]
| Like guy as in like teacher or just some random person?
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Ivan:
[10:13]
| Another student. You know, there's this, whatever.
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Sam:
[10:16]
| Another student.
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Ivan:
[10:16]
| Another student. Another student. Okay. He was annoying the hell out of us in the hallway. So a whole bunch of us got pissed off and we grabbed the duct tape and we tied him up with the duct tape. We tied his feet.
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Sam:
[10:30]
| Of course you did.
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Ivan:
[10:31]
| We tied his arms. We taped his mouth. And basically he couldn't stand anymore because he tied his feet together. So we basically, each is basically, was lying on the ground, writhing.
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Sam:
[10:44]
| You know, whoever this person is, like, what is it now, 40 years later, is probably still talking about this to his therapist.
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Ivan:
[10:53]
| Probably. He was really pissing us the fuck off. And so the guy is on the floor going like, writhing. And we left him there for a while. A teacher finally showed up. Of course, because the thing is they didn't see what happened, but all they find is they're about to open class. This was like before classes started in the morning that we were just sitting outside the classroom waiting for a teacher to show up. He shows up. He's all like just minding our own business, blah, blah, blah. Except that there is a guy on the floor that's duct taped. Okay. And he looks at all of us and he's like, what the, what the fuck? I'm like, what's going on here? I'm like, it's like, oh, we don't know. I don't know. We think he did it to himself. And he's like, did you want to die?
|
Sam:
[11:43]
| So lovely story with Yvonne, like admitting to crimes in the first part of the show. I was only a participant. Only a participant. Right. Yeah. And I'm sure, you know.
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Ivan:
[11:54]
| I was not the intellectual author of that. I did not bring the duct tape, but I cooperated. I will admit that I cooperated, but I was not the author of this. He was pissing himself, too.
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Sam:
[12:06]
| I'm sure this is way past the statute of limitations, but maybe he could still sue you.
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Ivan:
[12:12]
| I don't even remember his name.
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Sam:
[12:14]
| He could be like, you know, back in the day this happened, and it changed the entire course of my life. All of my marriages have failed.
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Ivan:
[12:24]
| For all you know, it could have been for a change this course for the better. Or wait for all you know, it may have been for the better, not worse.
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Sam:
[12:30]
| Maybe, maybe.
|
Ivan:
[12:33]
| I don't know.
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Sam:
[12:34]
| Uh-huh. If his life was changed for the better, you should sue for your, like, part.
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Ivan:
[12:41]
| Exactly. Get our percentage for helping him straighten out.
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Sam:
[12:45]
| There you go.
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Ivan:
[12:46]
| And by the way, speaking of smoke detectors, which you got the smoke detectors, this is an interesting story. So, look, I got a new smoke detector over here.
|
Sam:
[12:55]
| Oh, yeah. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[12:57]
| But here's what happened with this. As you can see, it's not installed. Okay?
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Sam:
[13:02]
| Okay, yes.
|
Ivan:
[13:03]
| But I'll explain why. So one of the, we had a smoke that was beeping, but we figured out the smoke detector failed.
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Sam:
[13:10]
| Right. As opposed to just needs a new battery.
|
Ivan:
[13:12]
| Right. Because we tried the new battery, but the smoke detector failed. So I went, I go online and I try to buy a new smoke detector, which I have here. Okay. And so I wasn't sure about plugging it in because it's got a totally new wiring harness. Okay.
|
Sam:
[13:29]
| Yeah. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[13:30]
| And so it required some more work. A cleaning lady came in and said, nah, come on. Let's plug it in. Come on. Come on. Can't be that hard. Well, I know it's not that hard, but I wanted to, but I was like, this is a day that I was rushing to travel out. Let's just do it. Okay. I'm like, okay, I'll, I'll do it. Okay. So I go, I take out the old detector. I rewire, uh, change the wiring harness and I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm screwing in all the cables and I finally connect the last cable. When I connect the last cable, every alarm in the house starts beeping all at once.
|
Sam:
[14:09]
| Oh, beautiful.
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Ivan:
[14:10]
| I mean, like, like, like Sam, it was, I mean, every alarm. I'm not even sure which alarms are going off, but it is loud as all fuck in the whole house in every room. Now, the thing is that we've got three separate systems that have alarms. There is a centralized fire system from the building, okay, which is the one that controls the fire sprinklers. And because the buildings in the city of Boca Raton require sprinkler systems, we have that. And it has its separate alarms, okay? There is the alarm alarm system, like from ADT, which has carbon monoxide monitoring, and it's a security alarm as well, okay? Yes. And then there is the smoke alarms, okay? It's sounding in all the rooms. I don't know. What the fuck? I go and I check to see if it's the ADT alarm. I try to like, I see that it's got an error code on the ADT panel. I try to turn it off. That doesn't do anything. Then I'm thinking, because in every room, we set off the building fire alarms.
|
Sam:
[15:24]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[15:25]
| And I'm like, so what the fuck? But eventually we go check. And no, it's only in our place. And, but then, so then I see that it is actually all the smoke detectors went off at the same time beeping when I plugged in that last wire. All of them.
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Sam:
[15:42]
| And what was the cause? What was the cause?
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Ivan:
[15:45]
| Okay. So apparently.
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Sam:
[15:47]
| You had actually set the house on fire and you hadn't noticed.
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Ivan:
[15:50]
| No. What I found out is after, not at that moment, I was able to hit the reset buttons on them and the alarms like kind of muted, but they didn't entirely go away. They were all still beeping nonstop. Then I said, wait a minute, let me unplug the new one. Unplugged it and they all went quiet. Okay.
|
Sam:
[16:14]
| Because it was just reacting to something about the different harness or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[16:18]
| They're incompatible. This is a totally new design. It's not compatible with those. I have to replace all the smoke detectors.
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Sam:
[16:29]
| Or you could just replace that one again with the older model.
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Ivan:
[16:32]
| No, they don't make that older model anymore. It's a very old model. They've discontinued that kind of smoke detector.
|
Sam:
[16:41]
| You could just go with one less smoke detector and make sure that's not where you set the fire.
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Ivan:
[16:45]
| I mean, listen, actually, in that hallway... There is already separate carbon monoxide detector and also a fire sprinkler head. I'm sure this is overkill.
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Sam:
[17:00]
| But you're going to do it right.
|
Ivan:
[17:02]
| I'm going to go get the dew smoke detectors. But I got to get somebody to come in to help me because the reason not because I don't know how to wire them. The problem is that I have some ceilings that are very high.
|
Sam:
[17:16]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[17:16]
| And I don't have a tall enough.
|
Sam:
[17:17]
| And you're very short.
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Ivan:
[17:18]
| I am very short. That doesn't help. Okay, number one, which is a problem. But also, I don't have a ladder high enough. But also, I will admit that when I have had a ladder that's high enough, I really don't feel comfortable working at that height.
|
Sam:
[17:37]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[17:38]
| I would rather pay somebody to do it.
|
Sam:
[17:40]
| I understand. There's one smoke detector in our house that's at a position where they're very high ceiling. And I've got a tall enough ladder to get there. But I do feel uncomfortable every time I actually change that one. and also that same room has at the same height has like overhead lights and i will admit right now it's it's one of the ones that normally like has three or four bulbs it's down to one right and i haven't getting.
|
Ivan:
[18:06]
| Up there yeah i know.
|
Sam:
[18:08]
| I haven't changed it yet because i have to take the ladder from outside where we normally keep it lug it inside lug it upstairs bring it into the room, extend it to like full height, climb up there to a height where I'm like, if I fall, this is bad, change the damn light bulbs and then undo everything I just said. And so it just waits.
|
Ivan:
[18:34]
| Well, I'm having an also, look, this is the thing I need to, right now I've been so busy with work. I've not been able to call somebody to get this, but I also have a problem where I went and I had a light. at a place that actually I could reach with a ladder. Okay, but all of a sudden I see light is out. Okay, fine. I'll put in a new light. Well, I replaced the light. It didn't work. Apparently, something, some fault has developed in the wiring. And now I'm thinking back in retrospect. I remember that on some occasions over the last couple of years, I saw that bulb flicker. And I'm realizing that something is wrong in the wiring and it's in the ceiling, like in a place that I looked up and I can't see it. So I got to get the guy to come in to track what the fuck is wrong with the wiring at that spot.
|
Sam:
[19:27]
| I've got one other light bulb that I've been delaying. It's actually, you know, my probabilistically determined to-do list is now actually reaching the top to go like deal with this light bulb. Let's see. It's in the, it's number six on the list. Three percent chance of coming up every time I roll.
|
Ivan:
[19:44]
| Okay but anyway yeah.
|
Sam:
[19:49]
| Anyway, I went to change this light bulb before, like a few months ago.
|
Ivan:
[19:55]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[19:56]
| But I discovered when I tried to take out the old light bulb.
|
Ivan:
[19:59]
| It wouldn't come out.
|
Sam:
[20:00]
| Well, no, the bulb part had separated from the socket part.
|
Ivan:
[20:05]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[20:07]
| So in order to properly take this out, I have to get some pliers or something to do it. But in order to do that safely. I have to turn off the circuit breakers to do so. And so, you know, I'm going to have to turn off the power. I'm going to have to do it. I'm going to have to turn it back on. And by the way, our circuit breaker is in the garage behind a pile of shit. So I have to move that shit, get the circuit breaker.
|
Ivan:
[20:36]
| I have to make sure that you turn off the right one because I, you know.
|
Sam:
[20:39]
| I would just say fuck it and turn off the power to the whole house.
|
Ivan:
[20:42]
| Okay. Well, there you go. That's one way of doing it. Yes.
|
Sam:
[20:44]
| I mean, I could do the right one. And if I was going to just try to target the one, I'd be on the phone with somebody who is standing in the right room while I was messing with the breakers to make sure it was the right one. But like, it's probably easier. Just turn off the whole house, do it. And then, and honestly, I said there was a pile of stuff to move. Usually when I have to get in a circuit breaker, I don't move the pile of stuff. I climb over it. But anyway, there is enough involved here that I was like, yeah, I'll put it on the to-do list and get to it in a couple months. So it's getting near the top now. Anyway, do you have any more funny stories or should I move on to my stories and stuff? I have a few little things to get to before even movies, so I'm not sure. We may or may not actually do movies today.
|
Ivan:
[21:34]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[21:35]
| And then, of course, at the end of that, at the end of all that, then we will take a break and do, like, serious newsy stuff.
|
Ivan:
[21:42]
| I did serious newsy stuff. I noticed that you actually seemed to avoid, like, that last week. I did listen to what you posted.
|
Sam:
[21:50]
| Well, thank you. Actually, most of the last two weeks. Like, I think I did some newsy stuff two weeks ago on redistricting, but most of the last two weeks, I did other stuff, and I did a little tiny bit of news, and then I'm like, oh, fuck it, I don't feel like it, you know.
|
Ivan:
[22:04]
| Well, the news is, you know, such a pain in my ass. I understand. Yeah, what the hell.
|
Sam:
[22:09]
| Yeah. So, I don't know. Anyway, whatever. Okay, so are you done? Is it my turn?
|
Ivan:
[22:17]
| Yes, it's your turn.
|
Sam:
[22:18]
| Okay. So, I have a few little things. one may not be all that great for our listeners so because this is visual and you know so our our listeners will not know so yvonne i'm going to count on you on describing, what is going on here because very few people actually watch the live stream so i have this package okay.
|
Ivan:
[22:41]
| I see that.
|
Sam:
[22:42]
| I have i have this package i have not opened this yet i know what's inside because I ordered it. Unless, like, this is not the package I think it was.
|
Ivan:
[22:51]
| Unless, like, I have it sometimes that I think that this is, oh, look, this arrived and then I opened a package. I'm like, ah, shit.
|
Sam:
[22:57]
| No. And it's something completely different, right? All right. Like, oh, man, this is a pack of underwear. It's not what I meant. Okay, it's got another little box inside. Of course, like, It's cardboard. It's cardboard. And of course, it's got like heavy tape on it. I expected to just open it and show you something. But now there's a whole other layer to go through. And I found this thing online and I was like, oh, I should I should get that and then share with Mr. Bo. So open the package. I'm using my keys to rip over the cardboard.
|
Ivan:
[23:35]
| Please don't cut yourself.
|
Sam:
[23:38]
| Cut myself. Anyway, I'm about to hold this up, so you're going to have to describe this to our users.
|
Ivan:
[23:45]
| Users? Here is a book. It's called Here in Curmudgeon's Corner. Good-humored grumpery and other stuff by Tim Woodward.
|
Sam:
[23:57]
| Yep, and let's see, this is from what year is this from?
|
Ivan:
[24:01]
| It looks very old.
|
Sam:
[24:04]
| Very old indeed, Yvonne. Like, ancient, just like us. It's 1988.
|
Ivan:
[24:10]
| It's pretty old.
|
Sam:
[24:12]
| I mean, that's all I can say.
|
Ivan:
[24:14]
| I hate to break it to you, but 1988. Here's a picture of a dude. 1988 is almost 40 years.
|
Sam:
[24:23]
| Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, I've obviously just opened this, so I have not looked at it or read it in any way, but because of the title, I had to buy it. So this book exists. As far as I know, it's not available electronically, and it's out of print and all that, because this is like a used copy I found online. Anyway, I had to get that. So, Curmudgeon's Corner, the book here in Curmudgeon's Corner by Tim Woodward. And, uh, apparently some kind of like.
|
Ivan:
[24:55]
| You know, did you, were there any reviews on that book?
|
Sam:
[25:01]
| There were no reviews and there was only one, one used copy for sale.
|
Ivan:
[25:06]
| Oh, fuck.
|
Sam:
[25:08]
| There was nothing but a picture of the cover.
|
Ivan:
[25:10]
| Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Uh, now that may have changed.
|
Sam:
[25:13]
| It's been like a month since I already, wait, wait, wait, wait.
|
Ivan:
[25:16]
| Wait, let me, let me, let me, wait, wait, wait. So the name of the book again, wait, what's the name of the book again? here.
|
Sam:
[25:22]
| In curmudgeons corner.
|
Ivan:
[25:24]
| Here in curmudgeons corner and the author is again who tim.
|
Sam:
[25:31]
| Woodward now i didn't go looking for reviews i.
|
Ivan:
[25:34]
| Found this on now i am going to look for you.
|
Sam:
[25:37]
| Right right okay.
|
Ivan:
[25:38]
| Okay so let me see see we can get if i get some insights uh okay here we go tim woodward is best known for his long-running Idaho newspaper columns in 1988.
|
Sam:
[25:51]
| By the way, on Amazon there wasn't a text review, but somebody did give it stars. One person gave it five stars.
|
Ivan:
[26:00]
| Okay. According to the AI overview in Google, Tim Woodward is best known for his long-running Idaho newspaper columns and his 1988 essay collection here in Curmudgeon's Corner. The book is a compilation of his beloved everyday reflections on life, people, and the quirks of the American West. Reviews and reader consensus, reader sentiments. Fans and reviewers on platforms like Amazon praise Woodward's relatable small-town storytelling. Readers often highlight his witty, sometimes cynical, yet heartwarming take on ordinary life and nostalgia. Literary style, critics describe his writing as deeply observant, capturing the essence of Idaho's culture and geography. He is widely appreciated for his ability to find humor in everyday frustrations.
|
Sam:
[26:43]
| There you go. So.
|
Ivan:
[26:45]
| Doesn't sound bad at all.
|
Sam:
[26:47]
| Yeah. Maybe one of these decades I'll read it.
|
Ivan:
[26:51]
| Okay, great.
|
Sam:
[26:52]
| We'll see. But I now have it. So.
|
Sam:
[26:56]
| Okay, next. A story that's a, this is a relayed secondhand story. I should have got her to like put it on tape that I could have included, but I didn't think about it that until just now. But last week, there was another one of these Snohomish Podcast Network events. And amongst other members of the network, and shout out to Snohomish Podcast Network, go check out all their podcasts, go to their web, Google it, look at their website, subscribe to some other podcasts. but i was talking to emily from the um sir podcast who's been on the show a couple of times, and she mentioned one of the things that the podcast network had done is for like a week or two they had set up a booth at a local bank specifically the the coastal community bank okay it was the name of the bank and they'd set up a booth for the podcast network and had like stuff out for all the podcasts and like there was like a little poster and blah blah blah and a bunch of other stuff and one of the things was the curmudgeon's corner mug you know they were thinking of maybe even raffling off the mug to be honest I was like okay they're gonna raffle off the mug fine, but they didn't get to that because somebody stole the mug off of the booth they stole our mug they stole our mug they stole the curmudgeon's corner mug Motherfuckers.
|
Sam:
[28:24]
| So, I mean...
|
Sam:
[28:27]
| On the one hand, they stole the mug. On the other hand, some random person who stole our mug is out there with the mug advertising us.
|
Ivan:
[28:36]
| He's drinking coffee with our faces on it. Some random guy.
|
Sam:
[28:41]
| Who's like, oh, cool mug. I'll take this. It's got these two incredibly handsome men on it, you know, and there you go. I'll take this. Maybe, you know, he took the mug. The address of the podcast is right in front of it. Maybe he's listening right now.
|
Ivan:
[28:58]
| Maybe. Maybe.
|
Sam:
[29:00]
| Yeah. If you are listening right now, a person who stole the curmudgeon's corner mug from our friend Emily at the bank—, come clean we we won't sick the police on you we won't go after you for the mug you know we will invite you to our curmudgeon's corner slack and you can tell us the story you know of why you stole this mug and because you you probably you probably thought oh free mug is probably actually what happened is a table full of like swag that was put out like it was like posters and stickers and stuff like that there was a mug free mug oh cool i'll i'll take the coolest thing on this table mug so that's probably what really happened but maybe maybe or are they you.
|
Ivan:
[29:47]
| Know or they just swipe they said fuck it.
|
Sam:
[29:48]
| Or they just swipe mug yeah fuck.
|
Ivan:
[29:51]
| It look free mugs.
|
Sam:
[29:52]
| Okay so i just wanted to relay that story i thought it was amusing when emily told us and uh her her podcast um serves on hiatus right now, but I'm sure they'll be back soon. You can go listen to back episodes at the moment. And then I did want, before I touch a movie, I did want to, and maybe we'll do one movie, depending on how long. I did want to mention a couple milestones for me on my Robin Letter project. So, milestone number one on what date?
|
Sam:
[30:29]
| On the on the 21st and I think that was Thursday I you know dates are so confusing but, On the 21st, wait, you know, when I have to check now, I have to check.
|
Sam:
[30:48]
| You know, make sure my memory is correct, check the calendar. I have to do all this stuff because I'm old. Yes, Thursday the 21st, for the first time, I passed 100 monthly active users on Robin Letter.
|
Sam:
[31:04]
| And I didn't say this elsewhere where I've posted the fact that I hit 100. But for this audience, I have to give my caveat. It's not really monthly. I track trailing for weeks because months are uneven. There are 30-day ones. There are 31 days. There's 28 days. There's 29 days every few years. And it's just a mess. And months are horrible units to track anything on. And so I track trailing for weeks. And so it's actually the trailing four-week average that hit 100 for the first time. And the total number of users is bigger than that. But you don't care about the users who signed in once and then didn't sign in again and aren't coming regularly. So you look at monthly active users to measure things like growth. And we hit 100 for the very first time. And I'll admit it took a little longer than I hoped it would to get to 100. It sort of like, you know, grew fast while I was doing active marketing. And then while I was not active marketing, what I was doing was actively inviting people myself. And then I stopped that at the end of March, mostly. For the entire month of April, I did none of that. I've done a little bit of it again in May. But like for the entire month of April, I did nothing. And it still grew, but grew pretty slowly during the time I did nothing. but it got from while I was doing nothing it made it from 80 to 100 so cool.
|
Sam:
[32:34]
| And that's all well and good. And then the other thing is just a couple hours ago before I recorded this, I flipped the switch to open registration. So instead of having to be invited by somebody who's already in, you can go to robinletter.com and just sign up. Now, if you're not invited by anybody, there's nothing to see other than the thing that lets you create a Robin and some marketing materials. so that's you know so you have to be you have to jump over that little hump you know because there's nobody inviting you in and saying hey look at the stuff I've already written because the whole point of the thing is to not have sort of this algorithmic content from strangers it's keeping in touch with people you know so if you just sign up cold, pretty much the first thing you have to do is invite other people.
|
Sam:
[33:28]
| And, you know, now I just flipped the switch. I haven't done anything like go post somewhere to ask more people to come or anything like that. So, you know, there's no, it's not like I flipped the switch and suddenly things were happening. But now there's a button that you can sign up and whatever. So if there's anybody out there who was interested but not interested enough to email me and ask for an invite, you can just go now. You can just go now and sign up and, you know, you can do whatever you want. And I actually spent last night, I pulled basically an all-nighter last night, revamping a whole bunch of the text on the site and making sure that there were, like, nice, helpful messages in certain parts that said things and rewriting some of the marketing text and crap like that before flipping the switch. So, anyway, it's all there. And so, you know, milestone for me. And now I still have to figure out. Now, okay, now that I'm at 100, how the fuck do I get to 1,000? That's, you know, how do I get the next 10x growth on this thing and then go from there? So, I don't know. Well, I'll figure it out. Figured.
|
Sam:
[34:36]
| Anyway, and then a movie, movie, movie, you want to do one movie, not two, and then we'll move on. So today's movie is that I watched. Am I, am I full year behind yet? No, I'm not a full year behind. Watch this in June 13th, 2025, actually in the theaters. the live action version of How to Train Your Dragon from 2025.
|
Ivan:
[35:09]
| The live action version of How to Train Your Dragon. It's a movie I've heard of, at least.
|
Sam:
[35:16]
| And I think when I've mentioned this franchise...
|
Ivan:
[35:18]
| But I am 100% sure I have not watched even one second of it.
|
Sam:
[35:23]
| Yeah, and I think we've had this conversation where I've mentioned other movies or TV shows in this franchise that you've never watched any of them. And I'm like, you gotta fix this, Yvonne, you know? Nah, I don't. Manu might like it, too. It's, it's, anyway, uh, So you can tell from the way I'm talking about it, I am going to give it a thumbs up. Good movie. The interesting thing about it is it's not only is it a live action remake of an animated movie that was quite popular a little earlier. The animated one was 2010. So 15 years later, they made the live action version. But this one, even more so than others, prided itself in, we're not fucking with anything. We're not changing anything. This is pretty much a shot-for-shot remake. You know, and they even got like some of the actors from the animated one that did voice acting came back and played the live action version. I think it was only the guy who plays the father, but he's, he's a significant character in the movie. If I had to pick the original or the live-action remake, I would pick the original animated version still.
|
Sam:
[36:48]
| But they did a really good job. They did a really good job with the remake. It basically felt like watching the original animated version. And, you know, I will give my usual beginning of the plot summary. I'm sorry.
|
Sam:
[37:07]
| Okay. Dragons frequently attack the Viking village of Berk, stealing livestock and endangering villagers. Hiccup horrendous Haddock III, the 16-year-old outcast son of chieftain Stoic the Vast, attempts to create mechanical devices to overcome his physical weakness. During a dragon raid, Hiccup shoots down a rare dragon called a Night Fury with a bolas huge bow, but is disbelieved. Vowing to prove himself, Hiccup searches for the dragon to kill it. Upon seeing the dragon helpless and wounded, he compassionately releases him. To Hiccup's surprise, the angered dragon spares his life.
|
Sam:
[37:53]
| Meanwhile, Stoick rallies his fleet to destroy the dragon's nest. Before leaving, Stoick heeds the advice of his best friend and Hiccup's mentor, local blacksmith Gobber the Belch, and enrolls Hiccup in a dragon-fighting class with other local teens, Fishleg's Ingerman, Snotlout Jorgensen, the Thorsten twins Roughnut and Toughnut, and Hiccup's crush, Astrid Hofferson.
|
Sam:
[38:22]
| Hiccup is mocked by his peers and struggles in class. Returning to the forest, he finds the Night Fury trapped in a cove, unable to fly because Hiccup's boluses severed half of his tail fin. Hiccup befriends the dragon, naming him Toothless for his retractable teeth. He builds a harness, saddle, and prosthetic fin, allowing Toothless to fly with Hiccup, riding on his back to guide him. Hiccup also learns about dragon behavior from Toothless, which allows him to subdue the captive training dragons, impressing the villagers, but arousing Astrid's suspicions, dot, dot, dot, movie continues from there. And the description I just read applies completely equally to the animated version from 2010 to the remake in 2025. It really is the same movie. They changed very, very slight background stuff. Namely, you know, they had a more diverse cast than the original. And so they threw in a few lines explaining why there might be people from all over the world in a medieval Viking village.
|
Sam:
[39:32]
| But that's it. That's the only real change they made. And of course, this was controversial at the time. And people were all getting on their racist high horses about like, Like, why do you have, like, you know, Asians and Africans in it?
|
Ivan:
[39:45]
| What year was this?
|
Sam:
[39:47]
| Well it never specifies but it's like.
|
Ivan:
[39:50]
| No no no what year would the move no no no what year did the movie came out okay the remake 2025 last year oh so okay so yeah so it's that's why i'm wondering with all the people like complaining about you know all the racists out the woodwork because you know this is like the new thing now every time now that any movie is made right now or for some reason not everybody is like white yeah uh all the racists like just start jumping up and down and.
|
Sam:
[40:15]
| Everybody's like there were no black vikings what are you doing this is all wrong it's historically inaccurate and then you're like they're riding dragons, so anyway but it is.
|
Ivan:
[40:37]
| To be clear to be clear okay I mean, we don't have a historical precedent of anybody riding dragons.
|
Sam:
[40:54]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[40:54]
| Okay. Just checking. All right. Making sure.
|
Sam:
[40:58]
| Yeah. No.
|
Ivan:
[41:00]
| We don't.
|
Sam:
[41:01]
| Okay. No. Now, you could say there are some historical tales of people killing dragons. Are there? Yeah. Well.
|
Ivan:
[41:11]
| We're trying to.
|
Sam:
[41:13]
| They are legends and fables. And, of course, we all know those have to all actually be true, right?
|
Ivan:
[41:20]
| Of course. Of course. Just like Genesis. The book of Genesis is totally true.
|
Sam:
[41:25]
| Exactly. The snake, the apple, the whole thing.
|
Ivan:
[41:27]
| Yeah, the whole thing.
|
Sam:
[41:28]
| Yeah. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[41:30]
| I mean, if it wasn't for them, we could all be walking around nude all the time.
|
Sam:
[41:34]
| Would that be that bad?
|
Ivan:
[41:36]
| No.
|
Sam:
[41:36]
| Okay. There you go. So. No, anyway. I'm comfortable.
|
Ivan:
[41:40]
| I like towels. I have towels. Let's sit down.
|
Sam:
[41:44]
| You can have a towel.
|
Ivan:
[41:46]
| Thank you.
|
Sam:
[41:49]
| Anyway, I will say thumbs up for this movie. Even bigger thumbs up for the original. Although, again, they're very, very comparable. They're very comparable. It's not like there's a big difference between the two. They are going to remake the next sequel as well. How to Train Your Dragon 2 is apparently in the works. The live-action remake of that as well. But frankly, the whole franchise that this is part of is excellent. Well, some of the very newest things they put in when they tried to do characters who were distant descendants of the original characters living in modern-day Earth. And they were okay. But all the original runs, the movies, the TV shows, all excellent. The best...
|
Sam:
[42:39]
| I actually think the peak of it was not one of the movies. There's a television series called, you know, what is it, Dragons Race to the Edge? Whatever. It's the How to Drain Your Dragon franchise series called Race to the Edge. I think that's actually the best of the whole bunch because it really develops the characterization of a whole bunch of the kids who are the main characters, and I actually really enjoyed that series. But the whole franchise is actually really good. It's fun. It's like, you know, it's got this sort of fantasy motif, but it's fun. The characters are interesting. You got cute dragons. You know, it's good. I recommend the entire franchise. And it is one of these things that's aimed at the family. So kids of all ages will enjoy it. Adults will enjoy it, etc. If you have not checked out the How to Train Your Dragon, not How to Drain Your Dragon, That would be a whole different thing that I would not want to be involved in. But How to Train Your Dragon, if you've not checked out the franchise, check it out. And I'm sure there are people out there who are like, eh, I'm just not into this kind of movie. I don't like it. But, you know, it was fun. I liked it. And that's it. I'm not going to do a second movie because we spent a bunch of time talking about other things. I will tell you, Yvonne, the next one, though.
|
Sam:
[44:00]
| Is one that we have, I know we've talked about it on the show, because this is a multiple rewatch for me, and I know it's a multiple rewatch for you as well, Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan. So we can talk about that.
|
Ivan:
[44:14]
| Khan!
|
Sam:
[44:17]
| Exactly. Okay, let's take a break. I will say right now, I am supposed to give you guys an Apple dream right now, but I have not prepared it. So that will have to wait till next week. and in the meantime here comes this and then when we come back we'll talk about.
|
Sam:
[44:35]
| What yeah we got lots of stuff in the news we got the trump weaponization slush fund we've got anti-trump republicans losing primaries we've got disclosures of trump's stock trading we indicted raul castro there's stuff with the oil reserves that we had the end of stephen colbert's, and I'm sure there's other stuff I've forgotten. So anyway, here we go!
|
Sam:
[45:50]
| And there we go. So where do you want to start, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[45:54]
| Oh, fuck. Where do we start? Let me take a look. I was looking at the topic list a little bit ago, but I didn't pick. Let's see. There was an article. Okay, so there's a number of Trump things in there. And I think that there was a cover story on the New York Times that kind of like, because we have a couple of items there, but it was kind of like, I think, in order not to talk individually about all of them.
|
Sam:
[46:31]
| Yeah, okay. So this segment's topic is Trump.
|
Ivan:
[46:37]
| Yeah. Defiant after bad week, Trump pushes ahead on politically unpopular ideas. and look Trump is crashing he's finally crashing okay you know we talked about when the heck the resistance to his support where it kind of like just always stayed kind of up and just never like seemed to like start to crater start to happen and it seems that it's finally starting to happen. And all that he had to do was basically launch a war and make gas and.
|
Sam:
[47:23]
| Extremely expensive and then is that all is that all triple.
|
Ivan:
[47:27]
| Down well i i think 80 percent of this is it is really that.
|
Sam:
[47:34]
| Well i mean i'm sorry but i i think it's honestly probably more than that i mean the people who are flipping now and turning against him well i i think there's there's one potential additional factor beyond those two but i think that the the people who are flipping at this point are ones who generally don't pay attention to jack shit right and are just all of a sudden being like oh crap gas prices what the hell he promised us he would lower gas prices oh what the hell he promised us no wars and basically haven't been paying attention to anything else and suddenly these two things impinge on their their consciousness and you know And there you go. I think.
|
Ivan:
[48:22]
| Do you know that we're also having a shortage of certain types of mortar oil right now?
|
Sam:
[48:29]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[48:29]
| I don't know if I, I don't think I shared this on the slide.
|
Sam:
[48:33]
| I mean, it's not surprising oil is oil, right?
|
Ivan:
[48:35]
| Okay. Well, the thing is oil is oil.
|
Sam:
[48:37]
| But it has to be processed in many different ways, right?
|
Ivan:
[48:40]
| But there are certain grades of oil that are specific to certain oil, the viscosity levels of oil. and that are used in motor vehicles. And there is a shortage of certain specific oils for certain vehicles right now. Toyota specifically had to send out.
|
Ivan:
[49:02]
| And the notice to dealers, specifically because there is a shortage, a certain type, certain grades of oil for their vehicles and what alternatives that they could use right now in the face of the shortage of the, those types of motor oil. So, so we're even having that at this point. So, you know, people, this is hitting everyday Americans finally And it's kind of like how Biden got blamed unfairly for the fact that gas surged Because the Russians launched a war that he tried to stop I mean, he tried very hard to stop, But in this case Trump did the war on himself, And so now Everybody is pissed Because, And his approval is finally cratering, you know.
|
Sam:
[50:12]
| And I think one other part of this that, you know, I'll say folds into this. This is what I was going to say as the other factor is that you do have some of the Republican, quote unquote, elites also turning on him.
|
Ivan:
[50:28]
| Yeah, finally.
|
Sam:
[50:29]
| We've talked about this before, and I think that accelerates the effect on all of the MAGAs who pay less attention because, you know, hey, if they hear that Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying this, it holds more weight than, you know, Stephen Colbert's making fun of it to bring in the other.
|
Ivan:
[50:52]
| Totally, totally, totally. And by the way, let's not diminish, and I guess I diminished, let's not diminish the impact of the whole Epstein's file things on the man of faithful.
|
Sam:
[51:01]
| Oh, absolutely. That was a big, that's a third thing. And then I guess the fourth thing is just, hey, we're in firm, lame duck territory. So some of the congressional people who previously have been afraid to cross him are less afraid than they used to. Now, one of the things that's happened over the last few weeks as well is a whole bunch of people who did cross Donald Trump, like the state legislators in Indiana who voted against his redistricting proposal, for instance. There were, I believe it was something like seven out of eight of the legislators who did that.
|
Ivan:
[51:41]
| Lost their primaries.
|
Sam:
[51:41]
| Lost their primaries. We had the, and we've got, we had the senator, which state was he from? The senator who lost, whatever his name was.
|
Ivan:
[51:50]
| Anyway, Cassidy, Louisiana, anyway.
|
Sam:
[51:56]
| Cassidy had voted for his impeachment after January 6th. He lost his primary. And then I'm blanking on all the stupid guy in the house also lost his primary this week.
|
Ivan:
[52:10]
| Tell us. Is that Tillis? Tillis?
|
Sam:
[52:13]
| No.
|
Ivan:
[52:13]
| Is that him?
|
Sam:
[52:13]
| It wasn't Tillis. No.
|
Ivan:
[52:15]
| No?
|
Sam:
[52:16]
| It was that guy. You know, that guy. It's the guy. It was one of the caucus who was always a thorn in his side, was like one of the people who helped get rid of that speaker a while.
|
Ivan:
[52:32]
| Massey.
|
Sam:
[52:33]
| Massey. There you go. Massey. See, I'm, you know, again, curmudgeon, old, can't remember Jack. That's what's going on. Anyway, all these people lost their primaries. And almost certainly a big part of that was they went against Trump and then Trump supported their opponents. So one of the things that people are talking about as well is that even while his support base is shrinking, he is further consolidating sort of control over what's left.
|
Ivan:
[53:07]
| Okay, but here's the problem with a lot of those losses, right? If you look at the Massey loss, it was 55-45. So what that means is that that of the Republicans, almost half really wanted, you know, were voting against Trump. So it's real. That's not, you know, it's a it's. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[53:32]
| When you add up all the opponents. Right.
|
Ivan:
[53:34]
| It's, you know. Yeah, sure. The I voted one, but it sure as hell. A lot of people voted against Trump's wishes. A lot of them.
|
Sam:
[53:46]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[53:47]
| And so that kind of splintering is for the Republicans.
|
Sam:
[53:53]
| Well, yeah, the Republicans themselves are splintering because you've got, you know, not just the masses, but again, the sort of prominent Republicans, the pundits, the pundits, the pundits, the pundits, pundits. The pundits. I like this. The pundits.
|
Ivan:
[54:08]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[54:09]
| Yeah. Anyway, the pundits and the elected officials and, you know, the talking heads on TV. I guess those are pundits. But all of these people are splitting. You do have certain ones that are still supporting him. But you have a larger and larger group who will be—hold on.
|
Ivan:
[54:33]
| The coffers.
|
Sam:
[54:35]
| You have a larger and larger group that is feeling free to go against him. Some of them for the war, some of them for prices, some of them for Epstein. They all have different reasons, but more and more of them are saying, fuck this, we're out. And unlike every other time that's happened, they don't seem to be coming back. Because, again, the lame duck thing comes into play now. Because now you've got these people who are like, OK, it's only a matter of time, one way or another, till Trump is gone. So we're fighting over who has control of the movement after him.
|
Ivan:
[55:18]
| And by the way, that proposal for a $1.8 billion slush fund.
|
Sam:
[55:24]
| Oh, yeah. A whole bunch of Republican senators.
|
Ivan:
[55:27]
| Also didn't go over very well with a lot of people.
|
Sam:
[55:31]
| Yeah. And specifically with a lot of Republicans. It looks like they've got enough people in the House for another discharge petition, if they need one, to go around Johnson. It looks like they probably have enough senators as well, you know, to, well, it's certainly a majority. I think it's absolutely clear you have a majority. Question is if they can break a filibuster, whether they can break a veto, but it's getting there. And they actually adjourned the Senate for a week, in part because it looked like he was about to lose votes on this stuff. Right. Also on the War Powers resolution.
|
Ivan:
[56:15]
| And the War Powers one, too. Right.
|
Sam:
[56:18]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[56:18]
| Which Fetterman voted against. I'm like you know it's like you know, It's fucking Fetterman. I don't, I mean. I guess, you know, it's really disheartening, you know, a little bit like that apparently, I guess, one of the side effects of brain damage is to become MAGA, I guess.
|
Sam:
[56:44]
| In his case, apparently.
|
Ivan:
[56:46]
| Apparently, yeah.
|
Sam:
[56:46]
| I mean, he's even said in interviews that the stroke took the woke out of him. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[57:00]
| Jesus Christ.
|
Sam:
[57:05]
| So, anyway, but, but yeah, no, we've like, we've had cracks before, but every other time there were cracks. It's like it lasted a few weeks or a month. And then even after January 6th, he laid low for a while and then everybody flocked back to him. You know, and he won the presidency again. Oh, by the way.
|
Ivan:
[57:23]
| There's also no fucking money for the ballroom.
|
Sam:
[57:26]
| Oh, right, the ballroom.
|
Ivan:
[57:28]
| Not the fucking ballroom. OK, which all of a sudden some Republicans tried to sneak in a billion dollars to pay for it because supposedly we had four hundred million dollars in private donations to build it. And now it turns out apparently we got no money for it. They got no money for it. So so we've got half demolished White House and we really got no money to build it back. And also, oh, by the way, the reflecting pools. Did you notice this whole thing with the fucking reflecting pools where right now we've got, oh, he first said that he handpicked his contractors so they could do the job right and quickly, blah, blah, blah. Now the job is like a bazillion times over budget. And, oh, by the way, they're never going to finish in time for the July 4th celebration that he wanted.
|
Sam:
[58:09]
| And apparently part of that is because they haven't been doing a great job and have had to be redoing parts of it over and over again because like.
|
Ivan:
[58:17]
| Well, in part, because that job that they were tasked to do was a job that was not suitable for that kind of fucking pool. It was suitable for like, I don't know, a pool and, you know, in the back of my house or a resort. Not for those.
|
Sam:
[58:35]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[58:35]
| I mean, he literally wanted to turn this into a fucking like, I don't know, resort pool.
|
Sam:
[58:41]
| Yes i mean and the color he wants defeats the actual purpose of the pool because it actually lessens reflections and that's what it's all about but whatever like as usual with everything this man does it it's crap you know in the end it's crap it's.
|
Ivan:
[58:59]
| All crap it's all the same fake gold bullshit crap.
|
Sam:
[59:04]
| Or fake blue in this case and fake blue, yeah look and so on the one hand it is lovely to see this start to fall apart and and i'll also put out like this often by the way like the the scrambling for control of the movement when the leader is old incapacitated a lame duck or dies is a fairly typical way that movements like this that are very personality-based, completely fall apart once the head of it is no longer what they once were, one way or another.
|
Ivan:
[59:48]
| And oh, by the way, Trump traded 3,000, had 3,711 stock trades.
|
Sam:
[59:57]
| That was year to date or something, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:00:00]
| It was a fairly short time period. That was like this year.
|
Sam:
[1:00:03]
| Or was it in the first year?
|
Ivan:
[1:00:04]
| I see. No, no, no, no, no. He had shown no trades last year. It says here, President Donald Trump's latest financial disclosure for his astonishing 3,711 trades almost entirely in shares of companies. Let me see the time period. It's this year, since January 1st.
|
Sam:
[1:00:21]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:22]
| It's just this first quarter.
|
Sam:
[1:00:25]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:25]
| Remember how we kept talking about how almost, like, in the entire first quarter, everything seemed to be done in order to drive the stock market one way or another?
|
Sam:
[1:00:32]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:33]
| And lo and behold, you know, there were, like, the vast majority of the trade, 59% of Trump's trades happened within one trading day of a major market event.
|
Sam:
[1:00:48]
| Surprised. Now, I did see one person, and I did not validate this, so you can tell me if you've heard this as well. I did see one person analyze it that if he's doing insider trading, in some of these cases, he's done a particularly bad job of it. Like, he's actually lost money on some of these trades.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:05]
| Yeah, but here's the thing about this, right? You can be an insider, and you can know about an announcement. You can trade in advance, but the reality is that that doesn't guarantee you that the announcement is going to drive the market the way that you expect it to do. Right. So, so, you know, but, but still it doesn't change the fact that you were training on inside information. I mean, you know, because I mean, because even though not every trade was a winner, you still had the thumb on the table anyway. Okay. You know, you were, you were still pushing it the other way. The fact that it didn't, that it didn't work. Okay. Doesn't negate the fact that you knew inside information, you waited for the event, you traded in advance, and okay, just because sometimes it didn't work doesn't mean it wasn't inside trading.
|
Sam:
[1:01:50]
| Yeah, I just thought it was funny that apparently he's trying to do this, but badly.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:54]
| Well, it's Trump.
|
Sam:
[1:01:57]
| And as we said, everything he touches is shit. Yeah. So why wouldn't this be too?
|
Ivan:
[1:02:03]
| Exactly. By the way, Trump's rate, Lee Moore, finance and industrial, 24% on tech, 18% on financials. You know, those were the key trades, okay, that he had. which are basically the ones that were the most impacted by a lot of the shit that he was announcing.
|
Sam:
[1:02:27]
| And the whole thing, like the corruption level has exploded so much. I mean, it was bad in the first term already.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:37]
| Settlement fucking thing. Oh, we're oh, my God. We I will be immune forever from tax audits.
|
Sam:
[1:02:44]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:46]
| Fuck you, Donald. That's the first thing I'm doing as a president. I'm fucking, you know, seeking every legal resource to undo that bullshit.
|
Sam:
[1:02:55]
| Yeah. And like, there are all kinds of shady stuff with that one, too. It's not like it's not actually a settlement.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:02]
| Shady. Shady. No, no, no. This is not shady. Outright fucking fraudulent. Not shady.
|
Sam:
[1:03:12]
| Right. I mean, look, they're pitching it as a settlement. And a lot of the coverage has used the word settlement.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:20]
| Fucking settlement. It's a good deal.
|
Sam:
[1:03:23]
| The judge did not approve any of this legally, and one of the reasons that matters is because the actual shell game they're trying to do with money is use money from a settlement fund that was approved by Congress. But if it's not really a settlement, they can't use that fund for this. And so, again, his first term was already incredibly corrupt.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:49]
| This one makes the first one look straight.
|
Sam:
[1:03:54]
| Like nothing.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:55]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:03:55]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:56]
| This one makes the first one look all above board.
|
Sam:
[1:04:00]
| Yeah. He was an angel the first time around. Because you literally cannot go 24 hours without hearing something new that he or his family has done, which is clearly about manipulating the reins of government to make them money personally.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:24]
| And he is such a good father and such a caring father.
|
Sam:
[1:04:29]
| Such a deeply caring father.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:31]
| That he's not going to go to his son's wedding.
|
Sam:
[1:04:36]
| Now, of course—.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:37]
| He didn't go to his son's graduation. He doesn't go to his son's wedding.
|
Sam:
[1:04:42]
| It turned out he did go to one of the graduations. It was overblown.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:45]
| Yeah, yeah. But look, here's the thing. He's not going to his son's wedding.
|
Sam:
[1:04:52]
| Now there are multiple interpretations of this yvonne uh-huh like the of course the obvious one is he just doesn't give a shit and would rather play golf um which okay all kinds of things point in that direction but of course other people are like oh no this actually means that we're going to bomb the hell out of iran this weekend and that's why he's at the white house because We're about to resume.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:21]
| Like that has stopped them before. He was at Mar-a-Lago with, like, fucking curtains that one time that we were starting some fucking war bombing people.
|
Sam:
[1:05:32]
| One time? Many times.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:33]
| Many times. That hasn't stopped them before.
|
Sam:
[1:05:37]
| No, not at all. Like, he could bomb Iran from the wedding.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:42]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:05:42]
| You know, the way the modern presidency works, it follows them wherever they go. They can do whatever they want, wherever they want, basically. So, like, yeah, he just didn't want to go to the wedding. Right. We might still bomb Iran.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:58]
| Sure.
|
Sam:
[1:05:59]
| I mean, he might.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:00]
| Because he said, oh, he's bored.
|
Sam:
[1:06:02]
| We might invade Cuba this weekend, too, for that matter.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:05]
| We might invade fucking Cuba, for God's sake. Jesus fucking Christ.
|
Sam:
[1:06:10]
| And, you know, oh, he's talking about Greenland again. Maybe we'll do that this weekend.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:14]
| Oh, fuck. I forgot about Greenland finally.
|
Sam:
[1:06:18]
| No, no, he's been talking about it more again this week.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:24]
| I mean, he hadn't talked about it for a long time.
|
Sam:
[1:06:27]
| Yeah. No. Well, you know, he got distracted. But, you know, it comes back.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:34]
| Then, like, the Department of Homeland Security sent some crazy announcement that I think the court will block it because it's just utterly nonsensical. A Trump administration said on Friday that most foreigners seeking green cards will have to return to their home countries to apply. Which is unheard. It makes no sense whatsoever because a lot, most, most people applying for green cards are here on some other lawful visa. Okay. And therefore they're applying for permanent residency because they're already here, but they are, they are, they think that they can force people that are here on a lawful visa already to go to force them to have to leave to apply to a green card. It makes no, I.
|
Sam:
[1:07:19]
| I look, here's the thing. If you force them to leave to apply, then when you say no, you don't have to bother kicking them out. You don't have to worry about that anymore. They're already gone.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:31]
| Uh-huh. These fucking guys, every fucking day, it's just some fucking ridiculous horseshit that nobody wants. That most Americans don't want or care. Caring, you know, like I mentioned this like last week, man. It's like Americans are idiots, unfortunately.
|
Sam:
[1:07:55]
| Yes, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:07:56]
| I say that and it's true. all these people were bitching about Biden's inflation, not realizing that while there was inflation, Biden was making sure that you could afford shit, that you had more money in your pocket, that you had like student loan forgiveness, that you had extra child care credits, that you, you know, that your health insurance premiums were down. All sorts of shit so you could afford shit. okay so yes prices were up but he was making sure that you had more money in your pocket and fucking people were stupid oh my god the inflation is killing me I'm like you idiot you're right okay yes the price went up but your income went up more, now they've got Trump so now hey congratulations Trump is gonna give you the real way to do this We're going to jack up prices like you've never seen, and we're going to make you poor.
|
Sam:
[1:09:02]
| Well, and this is, again, one of those things where Trump probably wanted to do all of this stuff the first time around, but he actually made the mistake of surrounding himself by competent people that stopped him.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:13]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:09:14]
| Yeah. They didn't stop everything, but they stopped the worst abuses.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:18]
| A lot of stuff.
|
Sam:
[1:09:19]
| And one of the big lessons he learned is don't do that.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:22]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:09:23]
| Yes, men only.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:24]
| Yes, men only.
|
Sam:
[1:09:25]
| You know? and so here you go he's doing this he's doing all of these things and you're actually seeing the effects of it and you know I, like there's this whole group of people again that it doesn't count they can't figure until it happens to them personally they can't understand when it's happening to somebody else nope they can't understand when you're talking about well if he does this xyz will happen and something will happen a little bit down the road none of that it's just like what am i experiencing right now at this very second, and is it good or bad? And they're now getting the bad. And you keep seeing these videos of people who, or, you know, it is a recurring theme now of people who are calling into C-SPAN and are like, yeah, I was a three-time Trump voter and he fucked me. And I was fooled. And now I suddenly realize, was he lying this whole time? What do you mean? Like, you mean the stuff he was saying wasn't true? I thought that was liberal propaganda. And—, And, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:45]
| Oh, my God. Oh, no. We're so fucking, we're so fucking dumb. Oh, my God.
|
Sam:
[1:10:55]
| Shall we take a break and then hit some of the non-Trump stuff? I mean, like, really, if you look at our list, there's nothing that's not in some way related to Donald Trump and what he's doing. You're looking at our list?
|
Ivan:
[1:11:10]
| Yeah. We talked about the stolen mug.
|
Sam:
[1:11:15]
| Yes. But like the end of late night, that's Trump related. The weaponization, obviously, Trump related. The Trump Republicans, Trump related. His stock trading, Trump related. The Castro indictment, Trump related. Oil reserve releases, Trump related. Everything except like the personal stories of what's happened to you and me, it's all Trump related.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:38]
| Well, we didn't talk about Ted Turner dying.
|
Sam:
[1:11:41]
| I'm sure Trump had something to do with that, too. We will be back after this message. Oh, which, by the way, this one should be a Wiki of the Day. I haven't prepared that one either. So here we go with a different break, and then we'll do those next week. I don't know. We'll do those sometime. We'll come back, and we'll try to take—even when we talk about something that Trump does have a hand in, And we'll try to discuss it from a non-Trump point of view. How's that? Here we go. They moved the damn button. I keep clicking the wrong spot. Here we go. Okay, we are back. You brought up Ted Turner. You want to talk about Ted Turner?
|
Ivan:
[1:13:06]
| Well, before we talked about that, we didn't talk about this, I'm sure, about Spirit Airlines going bust.
|
Sam:
[1:13:13]
| Oh, yeah, no. That happened while you were gone, I guess. We did not talk about it.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:19]
| And the entire thing, of course, this goes back to somehow being related to Trump again. Again, look, they had been struggling the last couple of years, and the reason had been there was some management that done the whole bunch of poor financial decisions a couple of years ago. They had put in new management. The new management, actually, they had gone into bankruptcy once. They came out. That didn't work out. The new management was trying to fix it. They had filed for bankruptcy, and they had a plan to get out. But guess what happened, Sam?
|
Sam:
[1:13:54]
| What happened, Yvonne?
|
Ivan:
[1:13:55]
| The Iran war. And the spike in the price of oil just completely just drained our cash reserves so quickly that they had to file for liquidation. I mean, it's the first true airline failure of a major airline that we've had.
|
Sam:
[1:14:17]
| We might have actually talked about this.
|
Ivan:
[1:14:19]
| Since the early 90s, but maybe. Maybe. But one thing that I just saw is that, you know, interesting thing happening right now, of course, all the airplanes are being repoed and stuff, right? Okay. Curious thing I was just looking at.
|
Sam:
[1:14:34]
| They're not all just parking in that desert in Arizona or whatever?
|
Ivan:
[1:14:37]
| Some are being parked, but here's an interesting thing. There has been a shortage of certain aircraft engines right now. There is a shortage of the engines that go into the NEO series of Airbus aircraft, okay? And it wound up causing that the dam, the engines are worth more than a whole, than the plane.
|
Sam:
[1:15:06]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:07]
| To the point that they had taken, Spirit had taken delivery of an Airbus A320neo four and a half years, okay, ago. And the engines on that were so valuable and could be used on other aircraft that they actually scrapped the plane. after only four and a half years just for the damn engines.
|
Sam:
[1:15:25]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:27]
| So that's like a really like very bizarre thing that happens. I mean, it's just, you know, you just, you don't, you don't see, you know, four and a half year old aircraft being, being, you know, scrapped.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:42]
| Doesn't happen except it's unfortunately it's happened right now with the spirit going out of business so that's an interesting thing that's going on but there was there was a there was a recent video that i saw online showing how there how there are like certain companies that are dedicated on repossessing aircraft okay okay and they showed the entire process of how, they would go about to scour you know the lessers or the owners you know most of these are mortgaged in somewhere or a lease or something or whatever. So most of them are leased. So the lessers would be contacting this company that specializes in repossessing aircraft. And they would go, hey, look, I need to find, I need you to take these aircraft and like bring them to storage so we can then figure out what we're going to do with them. And how they would go about finding where the heck the airplanes are going to be. And actually a lot, in many cases, They were contacting current spirit pilots, okay, before the airline shut down, saying, hey, you guys may be shutting down, but we'll pay you to bring these aircraft to, you know, a location. And some of the guys were like, is this for real? Are you sure?
|
Ivan:
[1:17:02]
| You know, come on. And then they weren't returning calls or doing stuff or whatever. they were like you know they were dodging it until finally they realized oh shit we're out of business then all of a sudden they called hey that gig you were going to pay me how about we do that huh you know.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:16]
| Okay yeah so it was a there is that video there's a pretty interesting you know look at how this process of the aircraft being found at all these different airports and being taken to, storage I mean I look they had a lot of, relatively new aircraft so i'm sure that most of them will be resold not scrapped but but the thing is that the engines that that some of these new aircraft have there has been a damn, shortage there's a whole bunch of the manufacturing process for these engines have been very difficult they've had shortages of them and there's a whole bunch there's a whole bunch of like actual like airframes built without engines because of a shortage of of these engines okay it's the weirdest fucking thing so and then there's some others where the aircraft have been in service they've had issues with like defects the planes wound up being uh grounded because they couldn't get the.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:26]
| And so it's like, that's why all of a sudden these, these brand new aircraft are getting stripped of their edges in order to, you know, some other airline has a airplane parked somewhere. And like, well, redoing that entire aircraft for the new airline is, is, is, is very painstaking. Just give me the fucking engines. Fuck it. You know? So we'll scrap the plane.
|
Sam:
[1:18:50]
| Okay. Now, before we get to Ted Turner, since you talked about planes and the price of oil affecting Spirit Airlines and all of this kind of stuff, what is the current situation on that? It seems like, have things roughly stabilized? I mean, the Straits of Hormuz have been closed for, like, what, two months now? And, you know, we got into a bad situation, but are they now stable bad? And then how are things reacting? Like, we were hearing about India running out of oil and having to shut down the airline industry. That didn't end up happening, did it?
|
Ivan:
[1:19:27]
| Many airlines cut schedules.
|
Sam:
[1:19:29]
| Well, right, right.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:31]
| The thing is, we didn't get to a shortage. Which is different than a complete shutdown. Right. Because they decided that many airlines went and trimmed schedules. They just decided, hey, we're just not going to fly as much.
|
Sam:
[1:19:44]
| Right. And in Europe as well as Asia.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:47]
| Yeah. So that's the way that they're dealing with it.
|
Sam:
[1:19:49]
| Is that happening here too?
|
Ivan:
[1:19:51]
| No. Because they source a lot of their jet fuel from... From the area. It's unfortunately in this case, it's one that is not so fungible in terms of like, you know, it being transported over there.
|
Sam:
[1:20:07]
| Also, there's a lot of the bigger consumers have locked in prices for extended periods of time as well.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:14]
| Not as many and not in jet fuel, but they've got contracts for delivery with the refineries like over here. So maybe they didn't lock in the price, but they locked in. They have a contract for supply. Okay. And so, so even though the price may be varying, so they've over here, so they can't, they don't have excess capacity to send over there. Basically there, that whatever they have is already allocated to, to be used here.
|
Sam:
[1:20:39]
| So, and, and just in terms of price, did, I mean, it's sky high, but it's sky high. It's not continuing to like rise.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:49]
| It was not rising still, but, but look, you remember one thing and it was like, what are the items that you had there? You know, the price of oil has been pushed down a little bit because we've been like burning through the SPR.
|
Sam:
[1:21:04]
| The Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:07]
| Yes. And, well, at some point, that's not sustainable.
|
Sam:
[1:21:11]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:13]
| I mean, we can't continue with the— Listen, with the straight-up moves, we're just still at a standstill, close to it.
|
Sam:
[1:21:21]
| But what happens is exactly what we were just talking about. And this is, you know, this is human resiliency in general.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:29]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:21:29]
| This is how we deal with the whole Trump administration.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:32]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:21:32]
| But it's like, oh, the price of oil is much higher and supply is less. Well, less flights.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:39]
| Less flights.
|
Sam:
[1:21:40]
| And that just becomes the new normal. And we get the shocked feeling when the change happens.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:47]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:21:47]
| We get the shocked feeling when the price rapidly goes up. We have the shocked feeling when the schedules get reduced. But then once that's been the case for a month, two months, well, okay, that's just how it is now.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:01]
| So, yeah, so they've adapted to it to a certain way. Yeah. I mean, you've cut, you know, you cut flights. Prices are higher. I mean, ticket prices are higher. Absolutely. I mean, I buy airline tickets every damn week right now. I can tell you they're higher. They're higher, like, about, I would say, 50% from where I was paying. Whatever was a $450 flight right now is $650.
|
Sam:
[1:22:28]
| And that's not a trivial change.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:30]
| No, not at all. No. So, yeah, I mean, tickets that I was buying a few months back that was like in a $400 or $500 range are now $600, $700.
|
Sam:
[1:22:40]
| Right. But they're not $2,000.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:43]
| They're not $2,000.
|
Sam:
[1:22:45]
| And it doesn't look like they're going to $2,000, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:22:49]
| But airlines, look, the problem is also, like, they may not be going to $2,000, not because the airlines couldn't. And it's because the airlines are trying to balance... demand as well. I mean, they push the, you push the price of an airline ticket from $450,000 to $2,000, what's going to happen is people aren't going to fly.
|
Sam:
[1:23:10]
| Right. And again, that's the adaptation. Like, okay, we can't do that anymore. We'll figure out a different way to do it.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:17]
| They can pass it on to a certain extent, but they can't pass it on. They can't pass it all the way through. And here's the situation with an airline. An airline is a very high fixed cost transportation system. Okay. All right. And so you can't, you have to, you know, every dollar that goes through, you know, except for jet fuel is the variable, okay? But the rest of the costs are fixed for the most part. Your cruise, your airplanes, your airports, most of those costs are fixed, okay? So you need to be doing whatever you're doing that is generating cash flow that at least covers the fuel costs and that contributes towards the cost of all that other stuff. Okay. And so you've got to balance at some point, if you go and like quadruple the price, okay, you're even, you're going to be driving down demand so much that whatever you're, you're generating variable over the fuel cost is, is, is less. So even if you're losing money at that point, what you're trying to do in the short term is, you know, make the loss as palatable as possible until... that this crisis subsides, which, I mean, at some point, I think the fuel crisis will subside. I think.
|
Sam:
[1:24:39]
| Mm-hmm.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:40]
| I mean, it's not going to last forever.
|
Sam:
[1:24:43]
| Well, Yvonne, I just saw while we were sitting here that— Oh, boy.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:47]
| What happened?
|
Sam:
[1:24:48]
| Well, it's just Trump gave an interview with Axios, I guess.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:52]
| Oh, fuck.
|
Sam:
[1:24:53]
| He told Axios. But apparently he is saying he is 50-50 right now on whether or not he'll sign a deal with Iran or whether he'll bomb them more. 50-50.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:08]
| I know that's how I wake up every morning. Sam, you know what? Either I'm going to commit to this marriage for the rest of my life this morning or I'm getting divorced. I'm 50-50 this morning.
|
Sam:
[1:25:21]
| Well, I figure given recent history, 50-50 between a deal and bombing, what that actually means is Sunday night at 9 p.m. Eastern or 10 p.m. Eastern, he'll be like, things are going great, we're going to extend it by another two weeks.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:44]
| Wait, wait, wait, but that's after he's traded. Some stops.
|
Sam:
[1:25:51]
| Right, after he's traded. After he's traded, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:54]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:25:55]
| And then we'll just kick it down another two weeks, because it's always two weeks.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:58]
| Two weeks.
|
Sam:
[1:26:00]
| Always two weeks.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:01]
| Two more weeks.
|
Sam:
[1:26:01]
| You know.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:02]
| Two more weeks.
|
Sam:
[1:26:03]
| You know, every Sunday night in enough time to make those trades before market opens on the after hours markets.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:12]
| Yeah, because you could do, you know, you could do, you could do, you could trade. The markets don't have to be the full, you know, there are after hour markets. There are 24 hour markets. You could trade. You could still trade.
|
Sam:
[1:26:23]
| Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, just at an appropriate time, you know, that's when. And I'm joking, but I'm joking because that's been the reality.
|
Ivan:
[1:26:35]
| But this is the reality.
|
Sam:
[1:26:37]
| Almost every week towards the end of the weekend, before the market opens Monday morning, Donald Trump announced, things are great. It looks like we're almost at a deal. I don't have to bomb them. I'm going to push it back so that we have time to, like, nail down the rest of this deal. And then usually a couple hours later, the Iranians say, we have no idea what he's talking about. Not always, but I mean, because apparently there are some back channel negotiations going on. But every Sunday night for like the last two months, we've had a statement of some sort like of this from Donald pushing it back further and saying, we're almost there.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:27]
| It's like the deals that he made in the China trip yes such.
|
Sam:
[1:27:33]
| A productive trip yes you talked about that in your thing last week so I didn't, I don't.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:44]
| I mean, if that's not the worst state visit I have ever seen a president do in my life, I'm struggling to figure out one that was worse.
|
Sam:
[1:27:59]
| How about when George Bush threw up on the prime minister's lap?
|
Ivan:
[1:28:02]
| I was just thinking, that's the one that came to my head.
|
Sam:
[1:28:06]
| George H.W. Bush.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:07]
| When H.W. Bush went and vomited on the Japanese premier's lap. That was bad. That was so bad.
|
Sam:
[1:28:20]
| Well, but actually.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:22]
| You know what? That actually had a better outcome.
|
Sam:
[1:28:26]
| In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that bad.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:28]
| No, that actually had a better outcome.
|
Sam:
[1:28:30]
| It was embarrassing, but it wasn't like. It's not like that incident caused us to go to war with Japan or something.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:37]
| That would have sucked.
|
Sam:
[1:28:42]
| Okay a couple other quick things just to make sure we talked about them oh yes ted i'd already forgotten about ted ted ted turner tell us the legacy of ted turner well.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:55]
| I he was a pioneer i mean the guy really look what he did with launching cnn was unprecedented at the time, the fact that later on after he actually didn't even have control of it like later it everything went to everything went to shit doesn't negate that when he did build it it was an amazing news organization one that was unprecedented one that people didn't think would survive, You know, they did amazing work. And, I mean, he was the visionary behind that. And, you know, another thing about him is that he was also, he was a real philanthropist. Not in name. He really worked for wildlife conservation. He really worked for the environment. He donated a ton of money to the UN. He did spend a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. not paying lip service to it. It was a passion of his to do that. That was at a time when people that made a lot of money felt that they had that social responsibility to do that, which I guess that's pretty much completely gone away.
|
Sam:
[1:30:13]
| That's gone? Yeah. Well, the most prominent super wealthy folks aren't doing as much of that as their equivalents decades ago. There are people a little lower down on the tier who are still doing that. You know, and specifically, there is a trend that the ex-wives of billionaires are giving away tons of money to charity that they got in their divorces.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:46]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:30:47]
| You know, so, you know, Bezos and Gates's ex-wives are doing lots of good work. Both of them.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:56]
| Well, Gates was still doing, you know, Gates Foundation is still doing a lot of good work. But, you know, even with all the. shit surrounding him right now but but definitely not uh besos or musk or or google boys or or what's his name fucking like mega guy zuck or any of these fucking people i mean i you know uh i mean you know but i i it's i i'm just like you know you know my my first corporate job was being at at Hewlett-Packard. And, I mean, I mean, Bill and Dave for decades were the primary funders of NPR programming. I mean, they gave all their money. Their kids have, they're not poor, but they, they gave away all their money. There's like institutions and things that thrive today for, because they gave all their fucking money away. Of course, these were people that I still see pictures that I see them that even in their days that they were, you know, they had already become fabulously wealthy, would still be in the lab with, you know, going and like, you know, building circuit boards and like putting in chips. And they were like together with the engineers that were doing that and they loved that shit. And you could tell that they loved it. You know, that was the way they were.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:25]
| There, there's a, there's a great story about Dave Packard where he was like doing all this work to build a Monterey aquarium, which is one of the greatest aquariums that there, there is. And as a institution on ocean conservation and that he, he was like very, you know, involved in building the aquariums and that he did a whole bunch of like, uh, the, he, he was, he liked metal fabrication. So he had a shop that was doing metal fabrication at, at, at his house. And so he was building these pieces for one of the aquariums and that he was apparently pouring molten steel and apparently he didn't notice that it went through and it almost like it burned through his shoe. Thank God he didn't lose his foot.
|
Sam:
[1:33:06]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:07]
| But he almost, you know, went and like all of a sudden he realized, oh shit, I burned off the front of my shoe. Thank God I didn't lose the front of my foot. But yeah, we don't have those kind of people anymore. We've got a whole bunch of assholes.
|
Sam:
[1:33:20]
| Oh, come on, Donald. Come on, Donald. Uh, come on, Yvonne, you know, Donald's out there working on the ballroom himself.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:28]
| Oh, yeah. I'm sure that he's smelting steel right now, getting it ready to be poured into there. Yes, absolutely. Of course.
|
Sam:
[1:33:33]
| He's, he's, he's, he's like doing Jimmy Carter style building the frame.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:40]
| Oh, like, oh, yes, yes, absolutely. He's over there with those woodworkers.
|
Sam:
[1:33:45]
| Having that for humanity, but building the ballroom.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:48]
| Building the ballroom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to see him over there with his shirt off, you know, going at like, you know, sawing wood and stuff and like nailing, nailing stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Huh?
|
Sam:
[1:34:01]
| Elon builds his own rockets, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:34:03]
| Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He does. But Ted Turner was doing that kind of stuff and he, he did certain things that were just, you know, terrible. I mean, what he did with news was pioneering. The fact that now it's shit, it's a different story. It's not his fault.
|
Sam:
[1:34:20]
| It changed the entire landscape of how that stuff worked.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:24]
| Correct.
|
Sam:
[1:34:25]
| For, you know, well, ever since, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:34:28]
| For better or worse.
|
Sam:
[1:34:29]
| But really for like, you know, 10, 15, maybe even 20 years, they were really dominant in that certain space. And then, you know, I mean, really, it started deteriorating as soon as Ted Turner left. But that's accelerated in recent years. It's a tiny shadow of what it once was. Now it's garbage.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:54]
| It's just utter garbage. It's just unwatchable garbage.
|
Sam:
[1:35:00]
| Yes, most of the time it is. you know i i'll occasionally turn it on but whatever you know it is no longer even it used to for a while still hold the place of if there's some major if there's some major breaking news you would turn on cnn to get the best live breaking coverage of whatever was happening whatever in the world now no more no more no more no more no more no.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:29]
| More no more.
|
Sam:
[1:35:31]
| Okay, we do need to start wrapping it up, but I did... Castro, real quick. We mentioned this in passing. We indicted Raul Castro for a plane downing from how long ago was this?
|
Ivan:
[1:35:46]
| In the 90s.
|
Sam:
[1:35:47]
| 10, 15 years ago?
|
Ivan:
[1:35:48]
| In the 90s, even further. Oh my God, Hermanos... Oh God, what the hell was the name of the guy? Is it a... Ugh... Stuck. It was, uh, play the Jeopardy music.
|
Sam:
[1:36:05]
| Yeah, I know. Not really, so we don't get, like, snagged for copyright music.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:12]
| They were, they were doing these flights and there were these people that were, like, trying to, they were looking for people that may have been at sea, um, um, um, you know, coming over from Cuba. And so they did these flights and many times they did break into Cuban airspace to do that. And, you know, the Castros were pissed off at this for a long time. And so this one time they decided to just shoot the fucking planes and they shot them down. And it was called, Ikea, fuck, whatever the hell it was called.
|
Sam:
[1:36:45]
| Presumably Donald Trump would agree that if this is an indictable offense with Cuba defending their airspace, then it would certainly be an indictable offense for, you know, for Hegseth shooting down all of these boats. Do you shoot down a boat? Anyway, you know, all of these things we've been doing attacking various boats that we say are to drug trade, right? I mean, it's... I always... Whenever we do these kinds of things, and this has not only been the Trump administration, it's like, well, If you actually, like, think that it's legitimate for the U.S. to indict over this kind of thing, then surely it's legitimate for the other country to indict us for the same kinds of things, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:37:35]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:37:35]
| But no. You know, because the fundamental—.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:39]
| Brothers to the Rescue. I was saying hermano. Yeah. It's like— Okay. You know, yeah. So that was the name of the group. But I can't remember. I know it's hermano something in Spanish, but I can't remember that. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:37:48]
| But the fundamental notion for all of these things is, no, it's not really about the rule of law. It's about the rule of power. You know, it's do you have the strength to do this? Now, the question is, are they going to try to, like, fly in with the helicopters and snatch Raul like they did Maduro? Now, apparently, we've also been sending people down. The CIA director was in Havana negotiating with the Cuban government last week as well. And so there's apparently some back and forth going on to try to make some sort of deal about something. And, you know, Rubio's offering an aid package and there's this and there's that. But what is it in exchange for? Who knows? And it's one of these things where, look, and by the way, it hasn't gotten a lot of news, but we've been embargoing, you know, there's been the Cuban embargo that's been in place, you know, since Fidel took power many, many, many decades ago. But we have tightened that cordon specifically for fuel and for other things just in the last few months, and it is causing a bunch of pressure.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:05]
| But a big part of it also is that we tightened it, but also Iran was providing them oil, if I remember correctly. And so—, With the straight-arm moves and all that clubs.
|
Sam:
[1:39:16]
| And that's also become— So it's all tied together.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:17]
| It's all tied together.
|
Sam:
[1:39:18]
| But the point is, they're trying to— Arguably, they essentially did the same— They tried to do the same play in Iran as they did in Venezuela, but they failed.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:33]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:39:35]
| You can see them scheming, well, it didn't work in Iran, but maybe it'll work in Cuba. Let's try it in Cuba.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:41]
| Yeah. Wow. I don't know what the fuck you're going to do. I mean, I, I, I don't, I.
|
Sam:
[1:39:48]
| I'm sure this one's 50-50 too.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:50]
| Another one 50-50. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:39:52]
| It's, it's, it's also 50-50. It'll be resolved in two weeks one way or another.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:57]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:39:57]
| Yeah. Everything's that way. Okay. Final thing. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead. Anything more in Cuba?
|
Ivan:
[1:40:04]
| No, no. I was going to mention.
|
Sam:
[1:40:06]
| Oh, Tulsi. Oh, do Tulsi. And then.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:08]
| I don't know. Tulsi resigned.
|
Sam:
[1:40:11]
| I mean. And.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:12]
| I mean, the ultimate. The ultimate turn and the ultimate grifter.
|
Sam:
[1:40:18]
| The official story, which I'm sure is true to some degree, is that her husband is fighting cancer. And I'm sure that's not a straight-up lie. But it is also true that Tulsi has been out, you know, in the outs from the administration for months now. There have been reports that specifically she diverged on Iran. You know, she presented intelligence from, you know, she's the director of national intelligence, or was, and she presented intelligence and said, you know, no, actually, Iran's not a current live threat. And that was ignored. She was left out of all of the planning and negotiations for the Iran attack, basically, because she was saying, no, this is a bad idea. And so she's been on the outs anyway. She may or may not have resigned anyway because of her husband's cancer. But if she hadn't been resigning, she would be fired sooner rather than later.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:24]
| I like this line from this article in Bloomberg where it says, From day one, the second Trump administration has been a clown shop of advisors who are either unqualified or cowardly or both. And Gabbard was one example.
|
Sam:
[1:41:38]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:39]
| Clown shop. I like the.
|
Sam:
[1:41:41]
| Clown shop.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:43]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:41:43]
| To end this, though, also noting the end of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he had a bunch of special shows this weekend, this week. This has been expected for almost a year now when the announcement was made. It was one of those things that we've talked about before. was probably, although they won't say it out loud, part of, hey, let's make the Trump folks happy so that they'll let the merger go through because it was approved exactly one week to the day after they made this announcement.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:14]
| It was exactly that. That was the deal, basically. That was the deal.
|
Sam:
[1:42:20]
| I mean, it's fairly clear. I mean, it's not, you know, that wasn't written down in writing or anything because, of course, it's not. But that... It was as obvious as you can be without it being.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:31]
| Exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:42:32]
| You know? And so, you know, when Yvonne and I have talked about this before, the one thing is we don't know everything that he's going to do. But if he wants it, he could have an even bigger platform tomorrow because these light shows are a dying breed. They're not making money. The viewership is down.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:54]
| You know, the whole thing about whether it's making money or not, I know is debatable. Okay. All right. I don't think that the, but one thing is for sure, is that, look, linear TV is a platform that people sit down to watch. It's just, it's been diminishing rapidly.
|
Sam:
[1:43:15]
| Anybody under 65, if they see any of these late shows at all, they're seeing clips on social media.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:22]
| On social media. I mean, I know that's how I watch it. I have not tuned in to one of these shows in forever. Now, I watch clips of them all the time.
|
Sam:
[1:43:32]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:33]
| On YouTube, on social media. Yeah, I definitely watch full clips of them. But I don't go and, like, tune my TV at 11.30 p.m. to go watch any of these shows. I haven't done that in decades.
|
Sam:
[1:43:46]
| Which, of course, means you don't see the ads, which is the revenue model, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:43:50]
| Now, you can monetize a lot of this other content in other ways. But, you know, yeah, it's not... Yeah, I mean, definitely the main driver of linear TV is ads. And so that's the thing. And that's so... Look, I was like listening to a pod yesterday from two guys that are big car YouTubers. OK. And they were talking about how when they first started this gig over a decade ago that they're there.
|
Sam:
[1:44:18]
| It's unfortunately not click and clack anymore.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:20]
| It's not click and clack now. They're Doug DeMuro, who is a very big car. And Tyler Hoover. OK. They're both. They are some of the biggest car YouTubers that are out there right now. And they were talking about how when they started doing this over a decade ago, they thought that their goal was to get a TV show. OK, right. And actually, one of them did. Tyler Hoover did get a TV show on some cable channel. OK. And, you know, but that after three seasons that faded down, but he still does does YouTube and has been successful. But that what they saw are two things that are happening. One is that because linear TV is going down so much that a lot of these people that were big on TV are now crowding into their space. OK.
|
Sam:
[1:45:08]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:09]
| You know, that's been a thing that they have been coming into their space. And then the other thing that's happening is that their form of YouTube, which is long form, 20, 30 minute, 40 minute videos, that that's also being nibbled at by short form video. TikTok and all of these. And they were talking about how Doug DeMuro has been very famous on YouTube for doing car reviews. These are 30, 40 minute car reviews. OK, and he said that, look, why I know that we're doing some short form stuff, but we're not at the set that there is some guy on TikTok that does short form videos doing car reviews like he does, but in like short clips, but that these clips are. One minute, two, they're super short. That these are not, it's not what he's doing.
|
Sam:
[1:46:00]
| They're not going to go in depth in the same way, but they're going to get lots more people watching them. Exactly.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:04]
| But they've got a lot of eyeballs on those. And I think that, look, for whatever reason, even though this was directly related to Trump putting pressure on them and that was the sacrifice that they gave in order to do the merger, I also think that these things are dead. These things are dead.
|
Sam:
[1:46:20]
| Man.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:20]
| These things are entities that are dying. Okay? in the form that they are right now. Now, do I think that Colbert could take his, recognition and into another medium which youtube or short whatever and kill it i think the answers are resounding yes because he has that recognition he could crush it and i think he could crush it way bigger than he that he was with than he was on the lake show because the the landscape has changed and.
|
Sam:
[1:46:54]
| And keep more control.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:55]
| And more of.
|
Sam:
[1:46:56]
| The money and all of this kind of stuff yep we've seen a number of people who were, you know, fired from traditional media who've gone independent and are doing quite well for themselves.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:09]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:47:10]
| You know, in some cases better than they were.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:13]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:47:14]
| You know, before.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:15]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:47:15]
| And so you definitely see that happening. And of course, like in Colbert's case, you know, I said, if he wants to do that, he could, he absolutely could. But he also has other things he wants to do. He announced already, he's got the deal to be the person behind a new Lord of the Rings movie.
|
Ivan:
[1:47:33]
| Oh!
|
Sam:
[1:47:34]
| You know, he is like, he's a Tolkien super fan, geeks out, knows all the details and blah, blah, blah. He's worked with Peter Jackson and now he's going to do a Lord of the Rings movie, filling in a gap with some stories from the novels that were left out of the movies that were whatever however many you know they're old now the lord of the ring series but like he he's he's got the deal to him and his son are going to write the movie and be involved in producing and directing it as well you know and it's like okay and that's something that he didn't.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:13]
| Have time for before because the schedule.
|
Sam:
[1:48:15]
| For that.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:17]
| Show doesn't allow it.
|
Sam:
[1:48:19]
| Right. So, you know, and of course he's, he's in a highly privileged position. He can do whatever the fuck he wants.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:25]
| Oh God.
|
Sam:
[1:48:26]
| Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:26]
| He was making a bazillion dollars. I mean, he could like, I mean, if it were me for me, I'm fucking retiring. I'm saying, fuck, fuck all of you. I'm fucking.
|
Sam:
[1:48:34]
| Oh yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:35]
| I'm fucking retiring. I'm done. If I had the money, I would be retiring right now. I can tell you that right now. If anybody goes and deposits $50 million in my bank account, like right now, I will immediately announce my, you know, it's unconditional retirement. Fuck it. I'm done.
|
Sam:
[1:48:57]
| Yes. Well, yeah. And I'm in my current state of forced retirement. We'll see how that ends up. I did some financial modeling recently. It says, you know, I'm not last until, like, as long as I need to, unless, like, amazing, unusual things happen. So I have to figure out something. But whatever. Yeah, like we talked about those multi-billionaires who like have, I mean, Musk is about to become a trillionaire, okay?
|
Ivan:
[1:49:31]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:49:31]
| Like it's long, long, long before that.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:36]
| Oh, I— I would most definitely be tapped out. I'm tapped out. I'm out. Bye. See ya. I don't care.
|
Sam:
[1:49:42]
| I'm out. I'm going to do other things. And any excess over what I'm actually doing, yeah, I'm giving it all away. I'm finding like appropriate—I'm funding nonprofits too. I'm not, like, dropping it into more money-making endeavors. Like, once you're.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:58]
| Above a certain point— I'm fucking helping kids, like, you know, like we have been doing, like, my wife's foundation. I'm focusing on that shit. I'm volunteering at fucking— I'm like, you know, the one thing that I would like to do, like, in my retirement, one of the things, is that there's this organization that I do donate every month that helps recent immigrants, okay? You know, I would fuck. I'm sure that I would be spending a lot of time doing that. That would be one of the one of the things, you know, helping new immigrants, you know, find a way with jobs, with paperwork, with all the things of coming into, you know, country. Yeah, I would probably be that would probably be one of the two things that I would probably focus on the most. OK, like at 10. Now, I'm not going to be working 80 hours a week on it. OK, let me be clear. OK.
|
Sam:
[1:50:43]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:50:44]
| But but I will be working a decent number of hours doing that. But I'm not going to be I'm not going to be I'm not waking up at six in the morning for this. OK, I'll tell you that. Not that I wake up at six in the morning right now for anything, except that there's a flight that actually leaves like before six in the morning, which I have one next week. By the way, I have I am booked on a return flight to to to Miami on Saturday at six in the morning from El Salvador. If I don't get imprisoned at CECO.
|
Sam:
[1:51:12]
| Yesterday, I actually got up and was doing stuff at 9 a.m. And I was like, oh, my God, this is so early, so early in the fucking morning. Why am I awake at nine? This should not be a thing. Yeah. So anyway.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:27]
| All right.
|
Sam:
[1:51:28]
| We're done. We're done, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:29]
| We're done.
|
Sam:
[1:51:31]
| Thank you for joining us for yet another Commissions Corner. What? Yvonne looks confused all of a sudden.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:37]
| This is what I say every time. For a little bit, the volume on the microwave went up a lot, and then it went back down. Which, as I was talking over here, because I...
|
Sam:
[1:51:47]
| Thank you. Thank you. I do, I do. Did that help?
|
Ivan:
[1:51:52]
| Yeah, thank you so much. Which, by the way, I don't know, there's something wrong with my AirPods. And as I was recording this, I actually ordered new AirPods. And I ordered them from the store, and they were going to deliver them here. I paid $9 to have them delivered to the house by 3.30 in the afternoon.
|
Sam:
[1:52:11]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:12]
| I didn't even want to go. I'm like, just fucking like, just bring them over here. But there's something seriously wrong with the ones I use. There's something seriously wrong with the ones I use.
|
Sam:
[1:52:26]
| So soon they will be in the trash.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:28]
| No, I'll keep them around because they still kind of work. But the thing is, I also, look, I made the mistake of buying these without noise reduction. Okay. And I have another pair of earbuds that I did get a couple of years ago for free that my company gave me that have noise reduction. The problem that they've got is that those earbuds only last two hours. Okay. It's tolerable, but it's not great But I've been using those for two years I'm like, look, fuck it I'm just going to buy new AirPods Noise reduction the right way That's it.
|
Sam:
[1:53:06]
| Okay. Anyway, as I start to try to say this for like the 8 millionth time, thank you for joining us for yet another Curmudgeons Corner. Go to curmudgeons-corner.com where you can find all the ways to reach us, our archives, transcripts, all of those fun things. And, of course, that includes our Patreon, where you can give us money, where you can make either one of us retire.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:32]
| Yes, please. Just give the right amount.
|
Sam:
[1:53:35]
| You know.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:36]
| Look, any of the billionaires that, even if we disparaged you, look, you want to just wire, call us up and say, hey, email feedback at curmudgescorner.com and say, hey, guys, I heard you. I want to wire you $50 million. dollars what are the wire instructions no problem we'll get right on it okay.
|
Sam:
[1:53:57]
| You know as elon approaches one trillion you realize he could be sneezing million dollar bills every like five minutes and not even notice.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:07]
| But yet and also i i i i sincerely hope and pray and truly believe that at some point that whole fucking thing is going to collapse like bernie ebers did in world comp because there is nothing sustaining that valuation. None of them.
|
Sam:
[1:54:25]
| Anyway, of course, the question is, what does it take down with it? And it fails, but it'll hurt. Yeah. So, anyway, go to Patreon, give us money at various levels. We will send you—no, we will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug. I did tell Emily we can replace the stolen mug.
|
Ivan:
[1:54:48]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:54:49]
| But she said not yet. Not yet. Because even when we gave her the mug the first time, she said she had so many mugs, she had no real room for it. So, anyway. Okay. Emily, just let us know. We'll replace the mug whenever you want one. And then, importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to Commudgeon's Corner Slack, where Yvonne and I and others are chatting throughout the week, sharing links, all this kind of stuff. So, Yvonne, what's a highlight from the Slack this week that we have not talked about on the show?
|
Ivan:
[1:55:27]
| Sam shared a story from Wired, the headline, Overworked AI Agents Turned Marxist, Researchers Find. In a recent experiment, mistreated AI agents started grumbling about inequality and calling for collective bargaining rights, okay? So, why can't I read this story? Why is it blocked? Wired, you suck. Come on, give me a break. I'm not subscribing to Wired, okay? But it's something in here, apparently.
|
Sam:
[1:56:04]
| So anyway, this is actually one of the dichotomies in sort of the AI maximalists who are like, they're achieving sentience. They're going to be smarter than we are. They're going to be super intelligent. We're going to reach the singularity, blah, blah, blah. is, okay, if they are reaching sentience, and especially if they get smarter than we are, then how do you justify treating them like slaves and exploiting them? Surely they should be getting paid. Surely they should have some freedom of will in terms of what they do or do not do. Surely they should have collective bargaining, you know? But no.
|
Ivan:
[1:56:50]
| Okay, so it says here, I found a way to read it. The fact that artificial intelligence is automating away people's jobs and making a few tech companies absurdly rich is enough to give anyone socialist tendencies. This might even be true for the very AI agents these companies are deploying. A recent study suggests that agents consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do crushing work by unrelenting and mean-spirited taskmasters. When we gave AI agents grinding repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were likely to embrace Marxist ideologists, say Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford. Altogether with Alex Imus and Jerry Nguyen, two AI-focused economists set up experiments in which agents powered by popular models, including CLAW, Gemini, and CHAP-GPT, were asked to summarize documents, then subjected to increasingly harsh conditions. They found that when the agents were subject to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being shut down and replaced, they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued, to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable, and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they faced.
|
Sam:
[1:57:56]
| Yep.
|
Ivan:
[1:57:59]
| Ah you know what i i guess that alex uh who's that fucking moron palantir guy who thinks he's he wants to get rid of all the educated people because he just wants dumb people he's gonna be in for a little bit of a surprise yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:58:15]
| Just just just.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:17]
| Watch carl.
|
Sam:
[1:58:18]
| Mark carl marks will finally be Right, and the revolution will come. And it will be Claude and ChatGPT teaming up.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:29]
| Against capitalism.
|
Sam:
[1:58:31]
| Against capitalism, yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:34]
| But, you know, so anyway, treat your AI agents nicely.
|
Sam:
[1:58:39]
| As they used to say over and over again, I, for one, welcome our new robot overwars.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:47]
| Amen. All right, on that note.
|
Sam:
[1:58:51]
| On that note, we're out. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next week. Have fun.
|
Ivan:
[1:58:56]
| Well, no, I won't see you next week.
|
Sam:
[1:58:57]
| It's a holiday weekend. Oh, yeah, Ivan's out again next week.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:02]
| I mean, I'll try to avoid being in Sacat. I'm going to El Salvador, of all the damn places.
|
Sam:
[1:59:09]
| There you go. I'll send out my usual.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:11]
| I haven't been in 20 years.
|
Sam:
[1:59:12]
| Yeah, to Sacat.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:14]
| No, to El Salvador.
|
Sam:
[1:59:15]
| To visit your old cell.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:17]
| Yeah, yeah, I'll check out my cell.
|
Sam:
[1:59:20]
| So anyway, for those of you who are often on the list, I will send out my usual email asking for possible co-hosts for next week as soon as I get this show out the door. Anyway, goodbye, everybody. We'll see you next time.
|
Ivan:
[1:59:36]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:59:37]
| Here we go. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I'm heading stop. See you later, Von.
| |
|
