Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| We're getting ready to start recording. So... Oh, okay.
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Break:
[0:34]
| You, We'll be right back. Oh, oh, oh, oh.
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Sam:
[1:09]
| Hi. What's your barking at? I'm waiting for you to finish so I can record. Okay. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, May 30th, 2026. It is just after 2030 UTC. I am Sam Minter, and we have no Yvonne Bowe. We have nobody else. Last week, Yvonne mentioned at the end of the show that he wouldn't be on this weekend. Or this week, this weekend, whatever. It is a weekend. And I actually sent out the message asking for co-hosts right after I published last week's show.
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Sam:
[1:48]
| But I got no responses. I feel so sad. I feel so neglected. I feel so alone. It is awful. Now, I didn't go out beyond that one email to solicit anybody or anything like that, but you know, it is what it is. So we're doing another solo show, and you guys know how that works. I'm going to do this first segment. I am going to do a movie and a book, And then we'll take a break. And when I take a break, I'll take a break. A break break for like many, many hours. And then I will try to do at least one actual newsy thing. Like the last few times I've done solo shows, I've kind of like skimped a lot on actual news. And I will probably skimp a little bit on it too, absent any really big breaking news that happens. But I'll do at least a little bit. But, you know, I have some other non-newsy stuff to talk about. We'll see. You know, I don't know. It depends how I feel. It depends how I feel when I get to those segments. I've got a list. I've got some stuff to talk about, you know. So there you go. There you go.
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Sam:
[3:00]
| What else? Any preliminaries before I jump into movies and book? Well, movie and book? I don't think so. I don't think so. You know, nothing you guys haven't heard before. It's a thing. Stuff is going on i i i could i could i could do a robin letter promo but you've all heard that many times before most of you actual listeners are already participating so anyway ah movie number one i previewed this last week star trek 2 the wrath of khan and i'm not going to talk a long time about it because believe it or not i believe i'm sure you believe it we have talked about this movie multiple times on this podcast. Most of the times, Yvonne has been there too. He has raved about how Star Trek II is, you know, classic. He likes it. I like it. Blah, blah, blah. He does the con thing. He does it better than I do. And, you know, it is widely considered the best of the Star Trek movies.
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Sam:
[4:10]
| Ricardo Montalban eats it up. So does William Shatner. It is like, Like, you know, they both, like, are at their sort of peak about being sort of melodramatic over-the-top characters. You've got the introduction of the Kobayashi Maru. You've got some nice little naval battles in space. You know, and, yeah. I will do my usual beginning of the plot from Wikipedia. But I mean, come on, if you're listening to this, you know, Star Trek, too, right?
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Sam:
[4:52]
| Right? Anyway, Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan, I should say the whole thing. In 2285, Admiral James T. Kirk oversees a simulator session of Captain Spock's trainees. In the simulation, Lieutenant Savik commands the starship USS Enterprise on a rescue mission to save the crew of the damaged ship Kobayashi Maru, but it is attacked by Klingon cruisers and critically damaged. The simulation is a no-win scenario designed to test the character of Starfleet officers. Later, Dr. Leonard McCoy visits Kirk on his birthday. Seeing Kirk in low spirits due to his age, the doctor advises Kirk to get a new command instead of growing old behind a desk. Meanwhile, the starship Reliant is on a mission to search for a lifeless planet to test the Genesis device, a technology designed to reorganize dead matter into habitable worlds.
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Sam:
[5:52]
| Reliance Captain Clark Terrell and First Officer Commander Pavel Chekhov beam down to evaluate a planet they mistakenly believe to be SETI Alpha 6. Once there, they are captured by the genetically engineered tyrant Khan Noonien Singh, who explains that they are on SETI Alpha 5. Fifteen years prior, Kirk exiled Khan and his followers there after they attempted to take over Enterprise. Six months later, SETI Alpha 6 exploded. Shifting the orbit of SETI Alpha 5 and turning it into a desert wasteland. The catastrophe killed many of Khan's followers, while others, including his wife, were killed by native parasitic SETI eels.
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Sam:
[6:37]
| One more paragraph. Khan implants Chekhov and Terrell with eel larvae, rendering them susceptible to mind control, and uses the pair to capture Reliant, While Khan's lieutenant, Joachim, suggests abandoning his quest for revenge, Khan insists on killing Kirk. Learning of the Genesis device, Khan attacks space station Regula 1, where the device is being developed by Kirk's former lover, Dr. Carol Marcus, and their son, David. Dot dot dot. Continues. Classic battles. Classic ending involving Spock. You guys all know, but I won't give the spoiler anyway in terms of what happens to Spock. But, you know, yes, it's still the most rewatchable Star Trek, I think, of all of them. And, you know, Alex and I are going through the whole Star Trek franchise very, very, very slowly. We're in the midst of the movies right now. We've actually already watched Star Trek III. I won't preview anything about that now. Now, we haven't done four yet. Four is also good. You know, for a long time, there was this whole meme that the even-numbered Star Trek movies were the good ones, and the odd-numbered ones were bad.
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Sam:
[8:01]
| And, you know, there's something to that, for sure. But I'm not sure good or bad, but the even-numbered ones at the beginning were better, for sure. I don't know that that holds up all the way to the present day, but, you know, it's a fine little thing. Anyway, yes. So, Star Trek, Wrath of Khan.
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Sam:
[8:28]
| If Yvonne was here I'm sure we would reminisce a little bit more about it but I think it is time to move on to the book which is the Westing game now this and you know I should have brought this up beforehand but I'm going to bring up my the the dates that I actually like read this and stuff, because this is one that I read with Alex. It was assigned to him in school. And so we started reading it in March of 2021. And we got to a certain point in it and then abandoned it. Like, I think whatever time they were reading it in school ran out. And I, you know, and so I stopped. But we restarted it in 2024 because I was like, you know, even though they talked about this in class and presumably went through the end of the book, etc., blah, blah, blah. I never got the end of the book. So I personally wanted to know what happened.
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Sam:
[9:42]
| You know, he may have read it without me. I don't think he did. But they probably talked about it in class. He's hitting me. Did you read it without me? He's not telling me. Anyway, either way, I did not ever find out how the book ended. So I wanted to restart it. And so in October 2024, we restarted it and it took us 276 days to read it. So we ended in July 2025. That's 0.7 pages per day on average. I'll mention this again i i whenever we talk books i mention this alex and i are reading together but it's not like continuous that 0.7 pages per day is not like we're reading every day it's like once every couple weeks we read for half an hour so you you have to like multiply by 14 or whatever so it's it's probably more like what's 0.7 times 14 can it can it yeah i'm bringing up a calculator 0.7 times 14, So that's about 10 pages every time we actually sit down to read it for half an hour. That's not too bad, I guess, because I'm reading it out loud.
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Sam:
[11:04]
| Anyway, so we finished it. So The Westingame, what is this book? Oh, I didn't actually say the words. Thumbs up on Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan. Big thumbs up. Anyway, the book, it is a mystery book by Ellen Raskin, published in 1978. I won a Newbery Medal. It's made for kids. It's a kids' literature book. Let's see, it was ranked number nine all-time among children's novels in a survey in 2012 by the School Library Journal. There is apparently a movie adaptation of it called Get a Clue that came out in 1997. We have not seen that.
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Sam:
[11:48]
| The initial two-paragraph summary. On the 4th of July, 16 strangers received personal invitations to rent apartments in the new Sunset Towers Apartment Complex, a luxurious property on Lake Michigan adjacent to wealthy businessman Samuel W. Westing's mansion. Westing made his fortune in the paper business and is rumored to be worth $200 million, worth $1.5 billion in 2024. The salesman, Barney Northrup, gives personalized attention to each potential resident, all of whom except. In October, residents begin to hear rumors that Samuel Westing has died, but that his corpse remains in the mansion. Tabitha Ruth Turtle Wexler, a highly intelligent 13-year-old with a habit of kicking people in the shin if they touch her braid, accepts a dare to enter the presumably empty mansion. She leaves the mansion in terror after finding Westing's body in the bedroom and hearing strange noises, which no one believes.
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Sam:
[12:56]
| Shortly after, news breaks of Westing's death, and all the residents are invited to a reading of the will. The will claims that Westing was murdered by one of them, but that each is still a named potential heir to his fortune and company. It stipulates that they must work in pairs to solve Westing's puzzle and locate his murderer. So then the rest of the book is them in their paired-off states trying to solve the little puzzle that Westing had left them. He left all kinds of different clues, and the people interacted with each other, and they get suspicious of each other because supposedly one of them is the murderer, and things happen, there's explosions that happen, there's other... Anyway, it continues, and they get to the end. And, of course, the mystery is eventually revealed to the reader.
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Sam:
[14:00]
| And, you know, my wife once mentioned during the first time we were reading this that she got bored early because she figured out the answer, like, in the first couple chapters or whatever. I don't know if she ever read the end to know if she was correct or not. I never asked her. I'll say I was a little slower than that to figure out what was going on. I think I did pick it up before the final reveal.
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Sam:
[14:30]
| But yeah, no, I did not pick it up in the first couple chapters, I must admit. When you get to the end, you're like, oh, of course, obviously. That's how it was going to come together. It was fine. It was okay. I mean, it clearly is aimed at kids, or, you know, I say kids...
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Sam:
[14:54]
| You know, up through maybe very early teens, you know, like, I guess the primary demographic would be immediately preteen, like, you know, 11 and 12 year old kind of age target. You know, it was fine, though. It was fine. I'm going to give it slightly above a thumb sideways. I don't think you would go reading this on your own as an adult and, you know, think, oh, I'm so glad, you know, that this, I got so much out of this. Because where it's targeted is fairly clear. And, you know, it's sort of at that reading level and at that level of complexity, etc. et cetera. But if you've got kids in that age range, they might like it. If they like sort of as sort of an intro to a mystery genre kind of thing, you could read it with them too and sort of help puzzle through the, you know, as they're introducing puzzle elements, talk to them about it and think through like, well, what does this mean? What could that mean? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it could be fun that way, but just, just slightly over thumbs sideways, I'd say.
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Sam:
[16:17]
| And yeah, that's all I got to say about that. What, what's next? The next two movies to talk about are going to be Under Siege 2 from 1995, which, yeah. We'll talk about that. And then the 2025 version of Superman. Now, we did have, like, a special episode where we had our listener Pete join us just to talk about Superman 2025 once Yvonne and I and Pete had all seen it. So we have talked about that before. This will be an abbreviated version of it. But, yeah, that's it. That's it.
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Sam:
[17:03]
| So, I'm going to take a break and then come back with other stuff. You know, I said there will be newsy stuff, there's stuff about Iran, Trump lost a lot of court cases, you know, a Blue Origin rocket blew up. I also, though, want to talk a little bit about dumb get-rich-quick schemes. And well i'll talk about it after break but not just dumb but also sort of morally repugnant get rich quick schemes i guess most of them probably are i mean the whole notion of get rich quick is you're somehow taking advantage in one way or another i don't know anyway we'll talk about all that there's a couple that particularly like came across my tiktok for you feed which has been, you know, pumping get-rich-quick schemes at me lately for probably obvious reasons. And, but most of them are really no good. Anyway, we'll talk about that later. For now, we're going to do a break. And this is an Apple dream. It is, however, an Apple dream that has been featured at least once before on the show, like almost a year ago, I think. You know, I pick these randomly of all the published Apple Dream. So sometimes there will be repeats and there is today. So here comes Apple Dream 50.
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Break:
[18:31]
| This is a bad one. So I'll be short. The main part of it is we were all living, meaning my current family and my daughter, my son, my wife, at the house that, that my family rented when I was like a preteen in Durham, North Carolina.
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Break:
[19:00]
| Anyway, the long and short of it comes down to, I was going upstairs for something. I heard Amy yell at Alex something about watching Miley or something like that, watching Miley go out. Then a few minutes later, I was coming back down. And Amy was doing something like preparing to move. Like she was moving her stuff to a moving truck or something.
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Break:
[19:35]
| And the, anyway, somebody, mom yells from the other room or something. I'm starting to lose details. The important part is there. But anyway, it's discovered that the front door is wide open and Amy thought someone else closed it. And and anyway, Miley had gotten out. So people start looking for Miley and I look out the window in the front of the house. And I see right by the door near where the truck was that we were packing Amy's stuff into but it wasn't that it was like the truck was there in my head but it wasn't actually there there was a curb and then there was a spot anyway there was clearly a flat thing there that used to be Miley.
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Break:
[20:36]
| And she had just been squashed, like cartoon-style squashed, like when in a cartoon a steamroller runs over somebody and they're made flat. But there were still enough details that you could see it was Miley. Anyway, I was very, very upset. I yelled at Amy that the door shouldn't have been opened, and I'm like, you killed Miley. And of course like it was an innocent mistake nobody meant to kill Miley but she had obviously gotten run over and I was really upset and my Amy and me and Alex and we're all running to where Miley was then I woke up and I went straight out of bed and looked and found Miley and made sure she was okay. Miley's fine. Miley's a great dog. Miley's an old dog, but Miley's a great dog and she's not flat. Love you, Miley. Bye.
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Sam:
[21:45]
| And I'm back. It's now Sunday, May 31st, just after 19 UTC, as I'm recording this. And here goes another segment. I had promised I would talk a little bit about get-rich-quick schemes. And I realized that that may, in turn, move on to other things. And then I'll do, like, newsy stuff at the end. And I realize there's another thing to talk about. There's just some primaries still going on and stuff like that. So I add that to my topic along with Trump court losses and Iran and all this kind of stuff. We'll see. And depending on how it goes, like maybe I'll, I don't know, I'll do one segment. I'll do two. I don't know. It depends what I feel like and how long I managed to go and get rich quick schemes. Anyway, look, here's what triggered this. So, you know, look, bottom line, I'm currently unemployed. I'm currently not bringing income into the household. We've got like, you know, a bunch in the retirement account, which we would rather not dip into, but we're probably going to.
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Sam:
[22:58]
| And, you know, and I've done sort of the calculations of like, you know, how long can I make that retirement go if that's the only thing we have to live for and the bottom line live for, if that's the only thing that's coming in other than my wife's income, of course. And what would the gap be? And how long would that last? All that kind of stuff. And bottom line, it depends really, really highly on how my old company stock goes, or if I diversify that, how the market goes more generally. But the bottom line is, unless...
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Sam:
[23:37]
| You go in a super optimistic scenario, it's not enough to last for my expected lifetime, okay? It'll last a while in the sort of average-ish scenario, but not anywhere near as long as I would like it to. And in the worst case scenario, we have a major market downturn and it stays bad for a while. It won't last all that long at all.
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Sam:
[24:03]
| But, so there's a gap. I, you know, and it's not necessarily like I have to reproduce the income I had before I was laid off. That would be nice, of course. But we can probably make it work with less than that. And, you know, so how do you fill the gap? So, of course, you know, on things like TikTok and such, you know, they are really good at sensing this kind of stuff because you spend just a little bit longer at things. So I've been getting a lot more TikToks lately on, like, super crazy investment strategies that are, like, super, super risky and stuff. And I've been getting more on, like, you know, get-rich-quick schemes. Because, you know, I stop for a second at those and say, hey, is this one actually, like, viable? You know, could I do this? Is it true that I could make, like, however many huge amounts of money off whatever? And, hey, that would make everything work well. And so I've been getting more of these. And, of course, almost all of these are absolutely ridiculous, okay?
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Sam:
[25:17]
| But one in particular, like, really rubbed me the wrong way. Because it was not only ridiculous in a way that would like.
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Sam:
[25:30]
| Just not work and flat on its face, or it wasn't ridiculous in the, this is super risky and you're far more likely to just lose all your money than to actually make anything. Now, this was, let me, let me describe the scheme to you and tell me if you understand why this rubbed me the wrong way. Okay. Uh, so it was basically faceless YouTube channels. Okay. And basically the idea of a faceless youtube channel if you're not familiar with this idea is it's a youtube channel where it's not like you know right now as i'm recording this for the podcast it's also live streaming on youtube it's got my face it's got i'm talking to the camera you can see what i'm talking about i'm talking about get rich quick schemes right now whatever right you know but a faceless youtube channel is instead of that you have graphics or words it's usually some sort of animated thing.
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Sam:
[26:28]
| You know there's some that are really awesome they're good they're they're good face faceless youtube channels that that that i watch you know that i i see on a regular basis that have educational content or whatever and you know it's got a narrator and there's animations describing what's going on and you know you you learn something and you know there's some of these that are higher effort and some of these that are lower effort. And, you know, look, I've even, you know, like, and, oh, there's another variety of them that is like, you know, five hours, five hours of calming sounds. You know, Yvonne and I have talked about this before. There's, there's ones that are just like white noise. Yeah.
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Sam:
[27:18]
| And these things get millions of views because people, you know, want, yeah, they put on something calming in the background. And there's a variety of these, you know, you have a forest and, you know, here's a stream. They have one made specifically for dogs that has things that would be interesting for dogs. They've got ones for cats. They've got, you know, and, you know, there's, there was one that was really popular for a while that was like for people studying. Studying it was just an animation of a girl sitting at a desk studying for hours and hours and hours and hours it was an infinite thing actually it was i think it was procedurally generated and every once in a while she'd wiggle every once in a while she'd get up she'd do something with her pencil she'd look at the screen and there was just sort of background music going behind it, And, you know, also millions of views, whoever came up with this first is making money, right? You know, they, and then of course, once somebody does it, everybody imitates it, blah, blah, blah.
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Sam:
[28:22]
| And the, the, the, the market gets saturated. And then, you know, whoever's the hundredth person to do this doesn't make any money at all, you know? And I thought at one point, you know, hey, a relaxing thing that I've sometimes done. When Alex makes me like play Minecraft or whatever, sometimes I want to just get into a relaxing zone and just dig a tunnel, just go straight through a mountain and dig a tunnel. And I find it relaxing and calming and whatever. And I'm like, Hey, you could do a video of this. I made one. I put it on my personal channel. It's got like two views or something like a tiny, tiny view. No one came to watch my calm tunnel mining video, and I accidentally left my sound on so you could hear me in the background talking a little bit. I didn't do it well. I didn't do it in a way that would be particularly compelling. Alex laughs at me because I messed up a few times in it, and whatever. Anyway, the point is, there are ones of these that are cool, and every once in a while somebody comes up with a new idea.
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Sam:
[29:36]
| And so there's a whole genre of these Get Rich Quick videos now on TikTok with people talking how to make these headless YouTube channels. And of course, nowadays, it's mostly about.
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Sam:
[29:53]
| How to make AI make your faceless YouTube channel for you. So that you just give it some prompts and have it make the videos, wire it up to automatically upload them every few hours or whatever. You just generate thousands of videos. You can see this is bugging me already.
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Sam:
[30:12]
| Because this is just complete garbage slop. But let me go one step further. The one that really got my hackles up was one that started with, go find a popular YouTube kids channel that has millions of views already. And the video used as an example, Cocomelon. Any of you who don't have small kids may or may not know, Cocomelon is a large international brand. They make, you know, these animated videos of, like, you know, they sing, they have, like, small baby to toddler-sized kids are in the videos, and, you know, they learn a couple things. They are not, like, if I had to rate all of the different possible kids' shows aimed at really small kids, Cocomelon would not necessarily be at the top of my list. However...
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Sam:
[31:18]
| It's real. You know, I should confirm it's real before I go on. But, you know, Cocomelon. Let me look them up. There's the YouTube. There's the thing. Let's see. Let's look up their Wikipedia. Who are they? Cocomelon is a children's YouTube channel operated by the Candle Media-owned Moonbug Entertainment. The channel specializes in 3D animation videos of nursery rhymes and children's songs. As of April 2026, it's the third most subscribed and second most viewed channel on YouTube, with over 200 million subscribers and 220 billion views. The channel launched in September 2006 and was rebranded as Cocomelon in 2018. It's expanded globally in multiple languages with spinoff series, Netflix, TV shows merchandising, special events ongoing product diversification it was purchased by Candle Media in 2021 for $3 billion, a movie about Cocomelon's characters is scheduled to hit theaters in February 2027, okay, you know sigh.
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Sam:
[32:35]
| And, and, and, and yes, like, you know, early on it was created by a sing, you know, a single individual as a hobby with his wife, sharing animations that their own kids enjoyed. Again, reading from Wikipedia here, they uploaded, you know, the alphabet song a couple of times with little animations, then, you know, more and it grew. Okay. It grew and expanded. People found it. People liked it. They write time to do that with an audience that, look, if you've ever had a toddler, you understand that putting on something like this can give you some needed breaks. And they love it. And in the best case scenarios, these things are actually educational. You know, you teach them alphabet, you teach them numbers. As they grow, they're different channels that hit different ages. Anyway, the point is, there is somebody actually thinking about and creating these and making sure they make sense. And, you know, some of these, look, like I said, I wouldn't necessarily put Cocomelon at the top of the list in terms of making sure it's really sort of pedagogically perfect and is taking advantage of the latest research and all that. No, no. This is, it's making some money. And apparently, you know, like.
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Sam:
[34:02]
| I'm scrolling down on a Wikipedia page. Psychologist Mark Travers cited Cocomelon as an example of a children's TV show that may hinder young children's mental development due to its frantic pacing and overstimulating visuals.
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Sam:
[34:16]
| A New York Times has discussed Cocomelon's focus on maintaining children's attention. A media researcher who runs the Babylon Research Facility was quoted as saying that the effect of screen time on child development is a big question without clear answers. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, fine. So the point is, this can be done, whether Cocomelon is doing it or not, it can be done thoughtfully and considerately with thinking about what you're putting in front of the kids, whatever. And this applies to other human-based channels, okay? Like where they... Let me finish what they're doing with it. So basically, they describe an AI workflow where you pick a high-ranking children's channel, like Cocomelon or hundreds of others.
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Sam:
[35:08]
| And you first point an eye at it to look at the transcripts, some screenshots, maybe some video, depending on the AI you're throwing at it, and use it to make a prompt describing those videos. And then you set up another AI to just start generating videos based on that prompt. So what you end up with is an imitation of the channel that you are using as a source. Except I guarantee you, it's going to be ridiculous.
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Sam:
[35:47]
| You know, knowing the way AI works, for instance, you do one with the alphabet, it might not even get the alphabet right. Right. There may be letters that don't exist. They'll sing and look, AI is getting better and better. There's a chance some of these may actually like meet the sniff test if you look at them later. Right. you know but fundamentally your whole thing here and and then they go on about how you know you set up a just post incessantly just flood the zone with these videos they'll have a whole bunch and even if some of them yeah and on an aggregate basis you're going to start getting lots of views and of course they make claims of like you know i did that and i was making ten thousand dollars a month within a week or whatever, some exaggerated bullshit thing. And again, maybe the first people to do this kind of thing might have scammed the system that way for a while.
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Sam:
[36:49]
| After that, though, as soon as a whole bunch of people are trying, it's going to be absolutely saturated. Nobody's going to make a damn penny off it. But regardless, you are starting this whole concept with how can I find somebody who's already making some money off this kind of content and make a low-quality, low-effort imitation of it? And scam some people into watching it because maybe they think it's the other thing or maybe they just don't care and then make some cash off that. And the end result of this is just completely flooding the market with absolute crap. Like, okay, I understand the people doing this, it is a get-rich-quick scheme. The motivation is just, I want to do something low effort that brings in cash. Period. End of story. And look, I understand. I would like something low effort that brings in cash. That sounds cool to me. But fundamentally here, like, look, if you really...
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Sam:
[38:06]
| I don't know. It pisses me off, like, when the initial motivation from Jump is, let me do something low effort to make money. And, God, I mean, on the one hand, I understand. I understand. But, like, even Cocomelon here, like, how was it started? The parents wanted to make videos to entertain their children. And they apparently had some of the right skill set. So, they made some videos and they put them online and they entertained their children. And then they found out, hey, other kids like this too. So we'll make more of them. And eventually it became a business and they started making money off it. But they started with, hey, what's a need out there that we can potentially fill and ideally fill in a way that's different than what's already out there. And then, you know, hey, we found a niche. We can make some money off this. Awesome. I'm not saying everybody should be non-profit. I'm not saying everybody should be only motivated by the good of humanity or anything like that. But, you know, starting with there's a need out there and maybe I can fill it seems like the right place to start.
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Sam:
[39:33]
| Otherwise, this is just a grift. This is just a scam. This is just, you know, you're, and, and it just annoyed me seeing this because.
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Sam:
[39:46]
| If you're the first person to figure out, hey, I can make an animation of a person studying at their desk and rig it up so it's automated and it's never the same twice and it just runs 24-7 and there are people out there who will watch it because it helps them study. Good on you. You made tons of money off that idea, and people like it, and awesome. But if you are the person who says, oh, someone made that thing, I can do the same thing, and I'm going to throw that up and be the 400th person making something like that, and I'm not going to differentiate it in any way. I'm not going to, I'm not going to put any additional thought into it. I'm not going to make it better. I'm just going to tell an AI, copy this thing and do it again and put it up there and hope for the best.
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Sam:
[40:48]
| I don't know that I have a lot of respect for that. And, and again, it might work the first two or three times. I'm not saying it won't if you're early to the game, if you're late to the game, I don't see how it can possibly, you know, because once there's thousands of these things out there, and one of them has a reputation as being the original, I don't see how that thousandth one is actually going to do all that well. But it just seems scummy from top to bottom. And look, I recognize lots of people make money in scummy ways. Fine.
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Sam:
[41:23]
| And if there's one that's truly harmless, okay, I'm not saying I'm above it. I'm not saying I'm above like some of these things, but if you're doing something that just appears to be a complete and total ripoff of somebody else's creativity and hard work, and you're just trying to surf on that for the crumbs.
|
Sam:
[41:49]
| I don't know. And the thing with, people have always done this, of course. And people have always, and, you know, in some product areas.
|
Sam:
[42:00]
| You know, hey, there's a really high quality product out there. I'm going to make the ripoff low quality version that is much more affordable.
|
Sam:
[42:11]
| And so people will buy mine because it's good enough and you don't need the premium product all the time. Okay. well-worn business and even these sort of creative things on like youtube and stuff where you get the imitators coming in after the original it's happened since the very beginning and but until more recently well i should ai has made this much easier much faster the tools have been improving all along, right? You know, so you always expect the person who come in, you know, months later, year later, can do something easier than the first person who did it. That tends to be a trend almost all the time. But right now, it's the bar to doing this kind of stuff has apparently dropped significantly. I have not tried making one of these faceless YouTube channels in a completely automated AI-enhanced way. Maybe I should. Maybe I should give up all my scruples on this and just say, let's make a new kids video channel, you know, imitations, you know, AI-generated animations, whatever. I mean, the AI is getting much, much, much better at doing this kind of thing, you know, and...
|
Sam:
[43:37]
| Maybe I'm being dumb by, oh, yo, this is morally bad, you know, whatever. No, but I still think that, and look, I am not opposed to using AI to help you do things. You know, the whole Robin Letter thing, I mean, I had the idea, but I'm using AI assistants for all the coding, for all the actual building. Like I have the concept, I have the idea, I have requirements, I have what I want it to do, but it's doing the building, but it is not doing the coming up with the idea thing. I am not copying the idea from somebody else and saying clone it. I'm that, that original part, like again, AI, I am not an AI hater.
|
Sam:
[44:30]
| AI can be incredibly useful. Even, frankly, I mean, some people get really turned off by using AI in creative pursuits at all, like, you know, making it to make an animation or to do a whatever. I actually have less problem with that. And I understand it was trained by sucking in the work of all kinds of real artists. I get it. I get why that's potentially problematic, especially since they have, generally speaking, not been compensated for that. In the case of books, there was actually a settlement and a whole bunch of authors are getting paid because their works were used for training in an unauthorized way. But that still hasn't really happened for visual artists and folks like that, or audio for that matter.
|
Sam:
[45:25]
| People are making songs this way too. The narration for these automatic videos is completely generated as well. All this stuff. But I think there's like a key element here. There is a difference. Even if you're having like AI make the video for you, there's a difference with having an idea and saying, Hey, AI, I'd like you to make a video with this topic and this style that has, you know, the characters do these things and here are a few pieces of dialogue for it or whatever, than just saying, make a clone of Cocomelon.
|
Sam:
[46:11]
| I don't know. It bugs me. And that particular get-rich-quick scheme bugged me a lot. You know, again, some of them are just like, oh, okay, you try this, it's just 100% gambling, you're going to lose all your money. You know. There are others where it's just like, oh, this won't work. You know, you can try this. And it's just another one of those, like, pyramid schemes. Like there's a lot of people that's, you know, it's like, how do you make money on YouTube? You make a video about how to make money on YouTube and people repeat. And again, it's one of those things where at a certain point it gets saturated. The first couple of people to do it, probably making lots of bank, giving, you know, their advice on how to make YouTube tutorials about how to make money. but again it feels like.
|
Sam:
[47:12]
| And maybe at some point, you will be able to just walk up to an AI and say, make me a new kid's YouTube channel. Hit return. And it comes up with something original and brilliant and not like anything else out there that meets educational standards that kids love and maybe even makes you some money. I don't think we're there yet. When we are there, I don't know, maybe I'll have to think through this again.
|
Sam:
[47:47]
| Because I think what's bugging me most about this is the, you are ripping off the original creator and you are trying to do something that provides zero additional value above and beyond the original. You're just trying to coast on their success and hope that your ripoff is good enough for some people if you really could do you know hey create something brand new just for me that's 100% original blah blah blah and the ai does it successfully and you really are wow this is something new maybe that changes but at the same time if ai gets to that point and ai remains cheap enough that almost anybody can do this kind of thing with relatively little outlay then once again your market's going to be saturated you're going to have 18 million identical things and, you're still gonna well not even if even if they're all unique and they're not identical You're going to saturate the market. There's too much. It'll be too spread out. Because at that point, you might as well just say, if I'm wanting something to watch, I just say, hey, make me something just for me. So why would I go out to the one somebody else had made?
|
Sam:
[49:15]
| I don't know. You know, I'm doing another solo show here. It's been a while since the last time I tried to do one of these with an AI co-host. Maybe next time I should try that again, see if it's improved any since last time we tried it. I mean, in other things, AI has improved greatly. Can it replace Yvonne next time? Last time we tried to, you know, we fed it a whole bunch of transcripts of this show and said, be Yvonne in this conversation, and it failed utterly. Like, yes, it talked to me, but it did not replace Yvonne at all. It basically just echoed back things I was saying to it and was very agreeable, didn't swear at all, etc. I don't know. And, you know.
|
Sam:
[50:09]
| I think this is, it reminds me of the, you know, Cory Doctorow's in-shitification idea applied to companies.
|
Sam:
[50:20]
| But you can see it on platforms as well. Because, you know, basically, for those of you who are not familiar with the concept, let me bring it up so I can make sure it gets it right.
|
Sam:
[50:38]
| But basically, here's the quote. It was originally posted in November 2022 by Cory Doctorow, and then he spread it in a whole bunch of places. But here's the core paragraph. Here is how platforms die. First, they are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this inshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a two-sided market, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each other hostage to the other, raking off an ever larger share of the value that passes between them. Now, he used as one of his prototypical examples, my former employer, Amazon, he used a bunch of other examples as well. But I think even beyond like platforms where like this happened to email.
|
Sam:
[51:55]
| And it's because, you know, going back, it happened to Usenet, if anybody remembers Usenet. Basically, these things initially were a useful platform for communicating between people. And then they became commercialized and people were like, ooh, I can make money this way. And then over time, they got more and more dominated by the people making, trying to make money with the platform. So in the case of email, first you got legitimate commercial email, which, okay, there's some place for that. But then it moved beyond, oh, here's your transactional mails to here's your marketing mail. And then there's the spam. And for, you have internal corporate email, kind of a different animal. Even that's being replaced by other things. But for like personal home email, oh my God, that's just, that's just garbage at this point for almost everything. On Robin Letter right now, the only notifications are email, and I think that's a problem, and I'm going to have to fix it sooner rather than later.
|
Sam:
[53:09]
| Because, you know, email is just flooded with stuff you don't really want to see. It's no longer, you know, the place where you go to communicate with people. And, you know, I mentioned Usenet. It's showing my age. Old-fashioned, early internet message boards, essentially, where people posted. They also got inshittified the same way with people overwhelming it with spam and just garbage. Whereas at one point, there was interesting, good stuff to read there. There were good discussions. There were things like that. Some of that has moved to private mailing lists, but those are less discoverable. Those have issues too. And I think YouTube obviously is a company and it is set up to make money. So is TikTok. So is all of these places. And frankly, I'll put even like other social, Facebook, Facebook.
|
Sam:
[54:09]
| Certainly the old Twitter. All of these are places where you start with something that has sort of a good purpose and then ends up being, you know, as they try to make it so that it's actually a money-making endeavor and they're, you know, they want to optimize for your attention and people are in there trying to maximize their audiences and the users are also trying to figure out how to get an angle on it. You know, maybe not every user, but like certainly the big power users are like, how do I grow an audience? How do I make money off this? How do I do this? And then, you know, over time, the content becomes less real and less fun and it slowly deteriorates. And then some new thing comes up that once again is sort of nice and interesting and small and has some charm to it. And you're getting sort of authentic things that don't seem overproduced. And then the cycle begins again.
|
Sam:
[55:23]
| And I think that this, the AI is just making this, it just makes it a lot easier to unshittify scale. And I feel like, you know, we've had recently, you know, these graduation speeches where people have mentioned AI and gotten booed. I think it's only a matter of time until the backlash hits harder. You know, Google's shifting from the 10 blue links to more and more AI, I think the AI is going to be very prominent starting tomorrow. Did they say they were starting June 1st? I forget, I forget, but they're, they're changing their UI.
|
Sam:
[56:08]
| But there's going to be a thirst for humanity and authenticness that's going to be out there. And there are, I think there are people who are actually going to make nice money from emphasizing we don't use AI. We're really human. We do this. But, you know, the thing is, I'm not sure that's going to be the mass market. That may be the same kind of thing as the people who are, you know, insistent on, oh, I'm only going to buy local grown produce. Things like that. Because, okay, yeah, there is a market for that. There are people who do that. You know, farmers markets are a thing. And there are people after that. But most people, the vast majority of people, are going to go to their local big box grocery store, national chain, and get whatever's there. It's going to be cheaper. It's going to be at a certain known quality bar. Chances are some of the stuff they do to the produce to make it look nicer actually makes it look nicer.
|
Sam:
[57:37]
| Same thing with other food products, right? You know, and it may well be that that's the same thing. It's like, you know, I want an artisanal TV show that was made by actual human beings, was written by humans, has real actors.
|
Sam:
[57:57]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's nice, Grandpa. Go pay your 50 times higher amount for that authentic experience.
|
Sam:
[58:08]
| Meanwhile, I'm going to be watching my AI-generated slop 24-7, and I'm going to love it. You know, and some of the AI generated slop may not be slop in a few years. It may actually be really good, you know? And again, there's, I feel like there is that difference still between like humans using AI. There was an article that I passed along on the curmudgeon's corner Slack not that long ago. And of course, now, now I'm going to have to find it. But it's a movie that's, here we go, article from The Hollywood Reporter, Tribeca to premiere fully AI-generated Iranian resistance movie, Dreams of Violets. Live action feature cost two thousand dollars to make use no actors sets or cameras in production as director ash kusha insists only ai tools allowed his vital memorial film to be made ahead of its june 10th premiere and this had as as far as i can tell i mean it hasn't premiered yet so I haven't seen a lot of reviews or anything on it, but it had a human being with an idea a thing he wanted to generate, he's the one who.
|
Sam:
[59:34]
| Fleshed out what it was going to be, and then used AI to generate it. And it's getting premiered at a real standard, like high prestige cinema event, right? Maybe, I don't know whether it'll be any good or not. I put it on my list to watch eventually, you know, but the technology is increasing. You know, I think I said on this show a year or two ago that the technology wasn't nearly there yet, but I was sure at some point somebody in Hollywood would be able to, like, write a single sentence saying, give, you know, produce a wonderful new romantic comedy that everyone will love. Hit the button, computer chugs for a little while, and out comes a fully formed movie that you can't tell.
|
Sam:
[1:00:38]
| Was AI-generated, and, you know, wins an Oscar or something. I don't know. Anyway, Brave New World, as they say, but I think this, you know, at the moment anyway, these kind of people who are like, hey, let's just clone an existing channel, again, it just really bothered me. It bothered me enough that I apparently have been yammering about it for an entire segment of this show, and before I start repeating myself more I will close up and we'll do another break the next break is going to be a wiki of the day.
|
Sam:
[1:01:20]
| I forgot to grab it before recording this but because of the miracle of me splitting this recording session up in multiple sessions, I'll just do it before I do my third session so the next one will be a wiki of the day and you'll listen to it and it'll be fun, it'll be exciting you will learn something, probably, anyway, for now, I think I'm going to go get myself some food go do some other tasks for a while, and I'll come back and finish recording later, and I guess since I can't just hit the button to start the thing. I see like I have a little board with some sound effects here. So I'll hit one of these, and then after this, you'll get the break. Here you go.
|
Break:
[1:02:23]
| Doo doo doo. Hello, this is Neural Kimberly. I'm here to let you know about Sam the curmudgeon's other podcasts, the Wiki of the Day podcasts. Wiki of the Day comes in three varieties, popular, random, and featured. Each highlights a new Wikipedia article each day, they just pick the articles differently. This week on popular Wiki of the Day, you would have heard this summary for Victor Wimbanyama.
|
Break:
[1:02:50]
| Victor Nonga Wembenyama de Fadaro Vassal, Wembenyam, French, Victor Wembenyama, born January 4, 2004, nicknamed Wembe and the Alien, is a French professional basketball player for the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association, NBA. He was selected first overall by the Spurs in the 2023 NBA draft and is considered one of the best basketball prospects ever due to his rare combination of height, agility, and skills. Wem Banyama began his professional career at age 15 with Nanter 92 of the LNB Pro A in 2019. Two years later, he moved to Osval and won the Pro A title in his only season with the team. In the 2022-23 season, Wem Banyama signed with Metropolitan's 92 and became the youngest player to win the PROA MVP award, while earning PROA Best Defender honors and leading the league in scoring, rebounds and blocks. He was unanimously named an LNB All-Star twice, winning the All-Star game MVP once, and was a three-time PROA Best Young Player from 2021 to 2023.
|
Break:
[1:04:03]
| Following a historic rookie season in the NBA in which he led the league in blocks per game, when Banyama was unanimously named the 2024 NBA Rookie of the Year and became the first rookie and youngest player ever to be named to the all-defensive first team. During the 2025-26 season, Wembanyama became the youngest and first unanimous winner of the Defensive Player of the Year award. That same year, he led the Spurs to the NBA Finals in his first post-season appearance. Wembanyama also plays for the French national team, with whom he won a silver medal at the 2024 Olympics. At the youth level, he led his team to two silver medals, including at the 2021 FIBA Under-19 World Cup, where he set the FIBA record for blocks per game in a single tournament. That's all there is to it. See? Fun, entertaining, educational, and short. Okay, now look for and subscribe to the Wiki of the Day family of podcasts on your podcast playing software of choice, or just go to wikioftheday.com to check out our archives. Now back to Curmudgeon's Corner. Do do do.
|
Sam:
[1:05:18]
| And here I am. So, for me, it is now Monday, June 1st, just after 5.30 UTC. Some additional time has proceeded, and here I am. And I'll be honest, I've once again let the weekend go past me, and I am tired, and I'd rather be watching TV downstairs or even already asleep, and I'm a little hungry again. You know, I said after the last one, I think I was going to have lunch. I've eaten several times since I last recorded, but yeah, I'm hungry again already. Anyway, you know, but here we are for the last segment. And yeah, then after that, I still have to edit it and put it together and get it out and all that kind of...
|
Sam:
[1:06:12]
| It'll be out when it's out. Okay, I had mentioned that I'd forgotten we have more primaries coming up and all that kind of stuff. So first, I will point you at a nice reference on Bolts. It's boltsmag.org. And the title of the article is 100 Elections to Watch This June.
|
Sam:
[1:06:39]
| By Daniel Nietzscheanian. And I stumble over his name, but the, he's, I believe this is Taniel. Yes, it is. Taniel, T-A-N-I-E-L on most social media. You'll find him on Blue Sky. You'll find him on other places. But anyway, it's a nice little guide that has, you know, you can open up like June 2nd, which is the one that's obviously coming up this week. There are more coming up on June 9th, June 13th, June 16th, June 23rd, June 27th, June 30th. And for each one of those, you can pop open, you know, Senate and House, governors, secretary of state, state legislators.
|
Sam:
[1:07:22]
| Local governments as well, prosecutors and sheriffs, city and county leaders, ballot measures, all this kind of stuff, and see sort of what the most important races are nationwide on each of these dates, which I find very useful. Now, for June 2nd, though, he does point out a number. You know, we've got Democratic primary in Iowa for Senate, Montana for Senate. We've got some significant House races in California and New Jersey and Montana. We've got some other stuff. But like, Like, really, the headline for this Tuesday, I think, is going to be the California governor's race. And Yvonne and I have talked about this before, specifically in terms of the danger of the Democrats screwing it up in such a way that the top two would be Republican and the Democrats would be shut out of the general election entirely.
|
Sam:
[1:08:23]
| It looks like they're not going to do that if you look at more recent polling, you know we had the one guy drop out, Because of, he was a sex pest, you know, and other people have like faded and, you know, so the bottom line right now is the second Republican, Bianco, has really faded way off the list. And so now really we've got three people, two Democrats and one Republican, that are right up at the top. We've got, going from the top down, we've got the Democrat Becerra at 23.8%. I'm looking at the real clear politics poll average at the moment because it was easy to bring up and find. Real clear politics has their issues, but, you know, for straight poll averages, they're not bad. Kind of a similar, you know, way of doing things that I do things at election graphs for presidential stuff. Anyway, and then we've got the top Republican, Hilton, at 23.3%. And then the second Democrat, Steyer, at 21.5%. Now, the reality is the spread between the bottom and the top of that is only, what, 2.3%?
|
Sam:
[1:09:42]
| That's meaningless. You know, in terms of the accuracy, we've got a poll average here, not individual polls. But even so, 2.3% is nothing. You've basically got a straight-up tie for these top three as far as polling can tell. Sure, Becerra's a little bit ahead. Steyer's a little bit behind. But fundamentally, they're all, these three could come in in any order, and it would not be surprising. But Bianco has fallen all the way down to 10.8%. He's not, you know, and this is a jungle primary where the top two go on to the general, regardless of party.
|
Sam:
[1:10:32]
| So Bianco is not going to suddenly surge from his 10.8% and end up in the top two. It's just too far. I mean, it would be a complete shock. I mean, nothing's impossible, but there are things that are like, oh, yeah, that's easily seeable, which, by the way, I keep bringing it up. In 2016, when Donald Trump had his shock surprise victory against Hillary Clinton, it was not that big of a surprise.
|
Sam:
[1:11:08]
| If you looked at all the people who were doing odds on it, the average, or the median, I should say, from the calculations I did of all the big ones who did it, was like a 14% chance. And as I've said before, that's like rolling a regular six-sided die and getting a one. It's not quite, you know. That would be a 17% chance. 16.6666666 but close enough it's like rolling a one on a six sided die, and you know it's bad luck but it's not like crazy out there it was a close race now this though jumping from 10% to like 20 something in order to get the time no and the other Democrats like Porter and Mahan Porter's at 6.5% Mahan's at 5%, and then there are scattering of others that are much lower still. They're done. They should have dropped out a long time ago, you know, but whatever. You know, Porter should have stayed in the house, you know. Oh, well. She was good in the house. And, you know, oh, well, she didn't. But anyway, so it means with these three that are essentially neck and neck for the top, you've got a couple different possibilities.
|
Sam:
[1:12:37]
| I could enumerate all the possibilities here, but fundamentally, you are either going to get a traditional Republican versus Democrat race with Hilton as the Republican and either Becerra or Steyer as the Democrat, or you're going to get the two Democrats against each other, Becerra versus Steyer, and shut out the Republicans.
|
Sam:
[1:13:06]
| And, you know, that would be interesting. It would be a different flavor of race. People say that, you know, I've heard people strategizing this out, arguing, would that be good for the Democrats or not? And so the argument for it being good for the Democrats is that if the top two are both Democrats in the general election for California governor is Democrat versus Democrat, it will more generally suppress Republican vote across the entire state for down-ballot races as well. And so take, you know, California already did their response to Texas and gerrymandered in favor of the Democrats. But this would put even more of the still Republican-favored seats potentially in play just because of Republicans not showing up to vote because there's nobody to vote for for a governor and they decide to just stay home. And so maybe the Democrats pick up even more seats in the House than they would otherwise. That's the argument that it would be good for Democrats. The argument that it would be bad for Democrats...
|
Sam:
[1:14:29]
| Is that Democrats would spend the rest of the time between now and November in California fighting amongst themselves, pointing out each other's flaws, and basically, you know, internecine warfare within the Democrats. The Democrats have problems with regardless, you know, and they would be fighting amongst themselves, and it would just make Democrats look bad across the board, and there you go. Which of those is true? I think that depends on how the candidates behave themselves if you end up with the two Democrats.
|
Sam:
[1:15:10]
| But I think it's actually far more likely we'll get the regular old Republican versus Democrat race here. Probably, you know, with these numbers, like I said, they're very close together. Any of the three orders could come in. But just based on recent polling, I think that the Becerra versus Hilton combination is probably the most likely. But the others are, you know, would not be a surprise. They all could happen again. You know, it's the way odds work. Maybe there's a slightly higher chance of Becerra versus Hilton, you know, but the other two are not unlikely. They could, they could happen fairly easily. So that's the one to watch. You know, if, if you do this, you know, the, the, the site I mentioned on Bolts before, he also thinks, you know, there are, you know, there are a bunch of others he lists. I'm not going to go through the rest of them because I don't know much about the rest of these. You know, I fully admit I don't know anything about the Los Angeles City Attorney nonpartisan primary. I know nothing. There's a little, you know, one paragraph description on here on Bolts, but I don't know, you know, so I'm not going to talk about that.
|
Sam:
[1:16:38]
| So enough about the election 2026. I did, by the way, I don't know if I mentioned this last week, but I did spend some time, recently within the last week, I think maybe it was a little bit more than a week, but i've started prepping election graphs for 2028 nothing that's ready to show the public yet just a bunch of behind the scenes prep stuff you know copying over like because i basically cloned 2024 into a 2028 directory and i have started to make some changes to yeah i you know i have to make everywhere that says 2024, say 2028. And I'm trying to do it a little bit more smartly this time and make it so that I'd make that a variable so that when it's time for 2032.
|
Sam:
[1:17:40]
| No, when it's time for 2032, I can just change the year in one place. Everything works. You know, right now I've got the date like hard coded in like a thousand different places. Anyway, with AI assistance, I've clobbered a bunch of that, change it to a variable, blah, blah, blah. The AI has screwed up a couple of things. So I've got, you know, I have to go through and test pages one by one and make sure everything's working the way it's supposed to work, which it's not quite right now. And then after that, I have to like actually get the data set up for the baseline for 2028, which will of course be different than the baseline was for 2024, because I have to put in the 2024 actuals. And then there actually have been a few state level poll results for the 2028 election already with a number of different candidate combinations. And then I have to like catch up on those and get those in. So I've got a bunch of work to do, but I've got a few months. The target is to have that live and out just about as soon as we have midterms, you know, so.
|
Sam:
[1:18:53]
| And the last couple cycles, I've said my target has been right after midterms, but it hasn't actually launched like January or something. But, you know, I'm unemployed right now. Do I have a fucking excuse? No. I should be able to, like, you know, we have election night on Tuesday in November, and this thing should be out Wednesday. There's no excuse not to. If not even earlier. You know?
|
Sam:
[1:19:22]
| Anyway, enough elections I had mentioned Iran, And, you know, last week Yvonne and I talked about The fact that Did we talk about this last week? I think we talked about this last week Anyway, there was another one of these There's been an entire additional cycle of We're so close to a deal Oh!
|
Sam:
[1:19:49]
| And then, no, there's no deal. The administration was saying we're 95% of the way there. Oh, except the stuff about the Straits of Hormuz and nuclear weapons, or the nuclear material. I shouldn't even say weapons. You know, one of the things that the administration repeatedly says is we need them to commit to no nuclear weapons. They committed to no nuclear weapons many, many times over, over the years. Most notably in the deal with Obama.
|
Sam:
[1:20:23]
| They stated explicitly, we have no intentions of building a nuclear weapon, blah, blah, blah. Now, you can decide you don't trust them on that, but they've said it over and over and over again and put it in writing. They were signatory to the nonproliferation treaty. They had all kinds of inspectors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, and once again, there's no deal. And once again, Donald Trump is threatening, if they don't do their thing, then we will go full-blown attacks again. Now, there have been some attacks. I saw an update come across just within the last hour that the U.S. Is hitting some things again because Iran hit some things again, but these have been relatively minor. For the most part, there hasn't been the level of hostilities that there was at the beginning. It certainly hasn't been zero, though.
|
Sam:
[1:21:21]
| And the Straits are still mostly closed. There's a little bit of traffic that gets through periodically. But, you know, we're in the same cycle. And I believe last week, I'm pretty sure I said this here, not just on the Slack, but the only thing surprising about last week is the cycle started a couple days earlier than I thought it normally does. They were talking about we almost have a deal on Thursday or something, whereas usually it happens on Sunday night. Right now, U.S. time, it's Sunday night, and there has not actually been the usual cycle of, hey, everything's great. We're almost at a deal like there usually is to manipulate the market on Monday morning.
|
Sam:
[1:22:11]
| You know, instead, like I'm just scrolling down the most recent thing in my Blue Sky feed that's Iran related from 10 minutes ago from the Financial Times. U.S. and Iran launched fresh strikes as peace efforts faltered. So, yeah. But I have no doubts that once again, we're going to have another cycle of, you know, yes, there's a deal. No, there's not a deal. Yes, we're going to attack. No, we're not going to attack. Because the fundamental problem here is Trump is screwed. Like, no matter what he does, somebody's going to be mad at him. Like, when we had the reports of we've almost got a deal, the leaks of the reports basically had it being very similar to the Obama deal. But we were giving Iran even more money and maybe giving them some influence to continue doing tolls across the Straits of Hormuz. But when Netanyahu heard about this, when, you know, sort of the traditional hawkish foreign policy Republicans heard about this, they were like, absolutely not. This is completely unacceptable.
|
Sam:
[1:23:41]
| No, we cannot do this. And so Donald Trump was like, oh, no, no, that's not what I meant at all. No, they've agreed to give up everything. And of course, they won't be able to toll the straits. And of course, they won't be able to keep any nuclear weapons. And of course, not weapons, the nuclear material. They will give it all to us and we will take it and blah, blah, blah. And Iran's like, what the fuck are you talking about? No. Well, we haven't agreed to any of that, and it falls apart. And then meanwhile, on the other side, you know, some of these hawks are pushing Donald Trump to finish what we started. Let's go back into Iran and attack some more. And we have to get regime change. We can't stop, you know, until we've completely taken these people out, we've put in a government of our choice, and we've gotten all the nuclear materials out of the country. Essentially, they want a puppet regime in Tehran, and anything short of that is unacceptable. But here's the problem with that. First of all, the American public is pretty upset with this. The approval ratings for this are on the floor. Nobody is on board with this domestically.
|
Sam:
[1:25:08]
| Nobody. You should never use the word nobody. It's not actually nobody. The percentages are fairly low. I believe they're 20% or lower, but that is really small for this kind of thing. And meanwhile, we've actually used up a significant portion of our available weaponry already. Like I was listening to a report earlier, to replenish the tomahawks specifically that we've already used in this war, at the rate they are being manufactured would take five years to replenish what we've used in a couple months. Now, of course, there are things you could do to accelerate that, perhaps. There are all kinds of things you could do to adapt. And the similar situations are true of, you know, the defenses like Patriot missiles and all this kind of stuff. And we've talked before about the gigantic asymmetry of shooting down $20,000 drones with multi-million dollar missiles.
|
Sam:
[1:26:17]
| It's unsustainable in that you'd have to get smarter about that. The amount, if you really wanted to impose a solution purely militarily, it's not one of these quick and dirty in and out things that Donald Trump had convinced himself he was going to do. I mean, all of the reports have that he was sure this was going to be just like the Maduro thing. In and out in one evening. Done. It's clearly not that. And so he's got two scenarios that are unacceptable to Donald Trump. One is a long-term ongoing war that so far is not going that great and would likely, could easily last the rest of his administration if he went down that road. At this point, he's like, why are people complaining? You know, the Vietnam War lasted for years and years and years and years. This has only been a couple months.
|
Sam:
[1:27:23]
| When your best comparison is that this hasn't lasted as long as the Vietnam War, and that's your comparison, you know you're in trouble. Donald Trump does not want a long, ongoing war. He doesn't know how to handle it. He doesn't want a long, ongoing, unpopular war that leaves him looking like a loser. But on the other hand, he doesn't want a peace deal that makes him look like a loser. Because the deal that you could get, almost every scenario right now, would still leave Iran better off than when this started in terms of their strategic position. As we've said before, tactically, okay, you blew a bunch of shit up. You killed a bunch of people. Okay. But you've put into place a more hardline government than you had before.
|
Sam:
[1:28:21]
| And you've had Iran show to the world that they can take control of the Strait of Hormuz whenever they want. And they have done so. And they have shut it down. And you have shown that you are more desperate than they are. I mean, this is the fundamental asymmetry with coming to a deal is Donald Trump wants it more than Iran. But Donald Trump wants them to basically capitulate and give up everything and just give Trump everything he wants, give Netanyahu everything he wants. But they have no reason to do so because they know they're in a better position to hang on than the U.S. is at the moment. Now, if the U.S. does decide to go into an all-out, full-out war that lasts years, maybe that changes at some point. But it doesn't right now. They're not on their heels. And of course, you know, one dangerous part of this is the more you back Donald Trump into a corner here, the more he may think, well, maybe I do want to use nukes. Maybe nukes will show them.
|
Sam:
[1:29:33]
| Now, my take is that if Donald Trump actually did something like that, it would put him in an even worse position overall. It would put the U.S. In an even worse point of view overall. I mean, talk about being a pariah nation. That's one way to guarantee it. Like, we'd be the one with, you know, massive international sanctions against us. And you know yeah that would be painful for a lot of our training partners as well as for us, but you know i think it would happen anyway you know the and it's it is it the scenario that occurred at the end of world war ii is not what's going on right now i think that would not work out well for donald trump in the end and of course it wouldn't work out well for all the people we killed either. But anyway, Donald Trump, and this is all his own damn fault. This was completely a choice. There was no need. There was no pressing need to do this. And, you know, apparently the two folks in the administration who most stringently were against this, first of all, Tulsi Gabbard, she's out.
|
Sam:
[1:30:55]
| She was apparently, you know, there's, you know, her husband has cancer. She's out for that reason. But she was probably on her way out anyway. She had apparently been frozen out of the entire Iran discussion because she publicly had been talking about how Iran wasn't an active threat in testimony to Congress just a few months earlier. And so she was frozen out of this entire conversation. And the other was J.D. Vance, who's fairly consistently been against most of sort of international adventurism and did not think this was a good idea either, but very clearly was sort of what was the summary of his position. I don't think this is a good idea, but if this is your decision, I will back you 100%.
|
Sam:
[1:31:48]
| Which is, you know, what vice presidents are supposed to do. But he apparently also, because of this, is getting, his influence is diminished within the administration. And there have even been some leaks saying that he's reassessing whether or not he will consider running for president in 2028. And Trump has said publicly, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if Vance is the right guy. Maybe it's Rubio. Vance seems, Trump, not Vance, Trump, Trump seems to be waffling whether or not he wants to like.
|
Sam:
[1:32:30]
| Put his endorsement behind Vance or Rubio. Of course, you know, normal presidents in many of these situations would remain neutral when there's a real race and you're leaving office. Biden didn't. Biden put his support 100% behind Harris and pissed a whole bunch of people off in the process. But normally, the president sort of stays out of it during the primary process to replace them. Does anybody believe Donald Trump could possibly keep neutral in who's going to replace him? Assuming he's even willing to walk out of there, you know, he's not going to keep neutral.
|
Sam:
[1:33:25]
| He's going to want to appoint a successor essentially you know anyway so the anti-war folks have you know lost out in this scenario and, We'll see if they can come back into the ascendancy at some point before the end. The worse this goes, the more likely that is, I guess. But look, right now, a whole giant portion of his base is really upset about this war, along with being upset about prices, which is related, along with being upset about the Epstein stuff, which is not related, but they're also upset about.
|
Sam:
[1:34:10]
| Anyway, I'm going to move on. And I will point out one thing. I mentioned the folks in his cabinet and sort of the differing views within it. I periodically plug PBS's Frontline. They had a new Frontline this last week. I think it was last week, week before. Anyway, it was recently called The War Cabinet that specifically talked about the dynamics within all of the key people in Trump's cabinet and how they position themselves in the timeframe coming up to the start of the Iran war. So it's worth watching. Check it out if you haven't. I do want to wrap this up soon. I did mention the one other thing to talk about is Trump's court losses. And I'll just mention this briefly because I don't have all the details in front of me, but it's been a bad week for Donald.
|
Sam:
[1:35:10]
| We've had his 1776 slush fund has been held up in court. And while the judge has demanded to hear briefings on whether or not both sides of the legal settlement were the same side, and therefore the motion to dismiss, you know, and all of this was bogus.
|
Sam:
[1:35:35]
| Yeah. So that's, you know, that'll undoubtedly, you know, you're going to hear briefings, everything will be appealed. All of this stuff, even when he has a setback in court, is usually just a prelude to more because it's all going to go up and down and end up at the Supreme Court and he'll lose some of those, he'll win some of those. But at the moment, he had a setback on that. He's also had, he was told that he has to take his name off the Kennedy Center because his, you know, basically they said Congress set the name of this thing and only Congress can change it. Duh. Which, by the way, same for the Department of Defense. It is not the Department of War, no matter how many signs you change. It is, you know, all of these places, his, you know, his mode of operation has been, just do it and make them stop me. And the weakness in our system is the wake me, the wake me, wake me softly. Yes, wake me softly. The, the, the, the weakness in make me stop. Make me stop.
|
Sam:
[1:36:51]
| I need to be done. The weakness in Make Them Stop Me is that our courts are very, very slow. It's a long process, often takes years. You can change facts on the ground in the meantime.
|
Sam:
[1:37:12]
| They may end up having to put these, you know, change the name of the Kennedys, you know, take the sign back down, whatever. They may have to do that. But this will play out in the courts for a long time, as long as they want to keep fighting it.
|
Sam:
[1:37:28]
| And same of all of these things. And a key thing that we have seen over this, what, year and a half now, almost year and a half of the second Trump administration, is that this 100% is the key thing they learned from the first time around. First of all, nobody in the administration is not going to be a yes person. They have to be willing to say yes, sir, and run with it. Second, just do things as fast as you possibly can, faster than anybody can organize to stop you. And, you know, just do it. And dare them to stop you. And, you know, in the time, even if they eventually successfully stop you, in the meantime, you have done some of what you want done. And it has had an effect. And in some cases, things are irreversible. They tore down the east wing of the White House. Regardless of how that ends up in all the legal battles about it, whatever, it's gone. The historical building is gone. And whether Donald Trump gets his ballroom or some future president builds something else, the original is gone.
|
Sam:
[1:38:47]
| And similarly, like, you destroyed USAID. By some estimates, millions of people potentially died or will die because of lack of access to the resources that that organization provided. That's done. You can't undo it. You can rebuild a new organization, perhaps, in the future, but building things back takes a lot more than tearing them down. It's fundamentally asymmetric. And what we've lost in reputation across the world may never come back or may take decades to come back. I mean, you know, we got rid of Donald Trump and then we brought him back. So even if you get the most wonderful administration possible coming in in 2029, is the rest of the world going to trust that they can make any sorts of deals or arrangements with that new administration and believe that they're going to be long-term because we could, you.
|
Sam:
[1:40:01]
| Just as bad or worse as Donald Trump the next time around. Because we've proven we can. And by bad in this context, I simply mean won't live up to the obligations they made. Forget about the specific policy agreements. Simply won't live by the deals that were made previously. That's all you need. Anyway, I was starting, that was a little detour from Trump's court losses, but he's been having a bad time in court. He's been losing a number of things. I think I only mentioned two, and I think there have even been more, but I don't want to look it up right now. And just generally, I mean, along with his poll numbers heading south, although it does seem Maybe he doesn't know because the people around him are feeding him only the good news. So he may actually be deluded into thinking everything he's doing is super popular right now. I don't know. But, you know, he's got rebellion in the Congress on multiple issues within his own party. He's got these court cases. He's got the war going badly. He's got inflation going badly. Related, again.
|
Sam:
[1:41:24]
| And, you know, we still see him, like, almost every night spending hours on Truth Social posting completely unhinged random crap. And that's still, that's somehow not, you know, the big daily story that the president is crashing out and is completely and totally unhinged, you know? Because we've acclimatized to it. We're used to it. He's been unhinged for a long time. Is he a little bit more unhinged than he used to be? Yes. But he was always unhinged. Is it getting worse? Yes. But it was bad anyway. So we're all used to it now. Oh, yeah, that's just what he does. Yeah. Okay. It's absolutely fine that the president spends like eight hours a night in the middle of the night, posting stupid memes and long rambling threats to his private social media thing.
|
Sam:
[1:42:31]
| Yeah, okay. I think we're done. Thank you, everybody, for joining us on yet another Curmudgeon's Corner. I hope Yvonne is back next week, because I'll be honest, I'm getting tired of these solo shows. I've done three of them in May. Well, I guess this is now June. Well, I started the show in May. It's a May episode. I did three solo shows in May. That's way too much. So I hope Ivan is back next week and that if he isn't for whatever reason, I'm going to be more aggressive about getting a co-host or somebody to interview or something because I'm tired of just yammering to myself.
|
Sam:
[1:43:13]
| Anyway, go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You can find all our old shows. You can find transcripts of recent shows. You can find all the ways to contact us. And of course, you can find our Patreon, where you can give us money at various levels. We will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. What else will we do? Oh, yes. We will send you a postcard. We will send you a mug. We will do all kinds of other exciting stuff. Well, very specifically at $2 a month or more. Or if you just ask nicely, we will invite you to the Curmudgeons Corner Slack.
|
Sam:
[1:43:52]
| Where Yvonne and I and a variety of others chat throughout the week, talk about all kinds of other things. And yeah. So one highlight from the Slack that was not mentioned on the show yet is that Marsha Lucas, George Lucas's ex-wife, passed away this week. And it's just worth a note that, you know, she does not get the credit that she deserves. I mean, for people who pay attention, you've probably heard. She was the editor on the original Star Wars, and I believe on The Return of the Jedi as well, maybe and Empire and Empire she did some things she did stuff on those also American graffiti taxi driver all kinds and but specifically the original Star Wars by all reports was a complete fucking mess it just was not compelling it did not it was a mess.
|
Sam:
[1:45:02]
| It was her editing that restructured it into a format that became the classic it is today. That spawned the whole franchise and all of that. There were whole thematic elements that came from her head that were not in the original script. The way that she ordered things and arranged it and flipped back and forth between the different parts of the story. That's all her.
|
Sam:
[1:45:33]
| And you know George Lucas was all about and you could tell because apparently he waited to sign the contract on the prequel trilogy, until one day after their divorce agreement said that she would no longer get a cut of the Star Wars stuff because like you know she was getting a percentage of everything Star Wars for, I believe it was 20 years. And, you know, I don't know the specifics of their divorce agreement, but it was about that. And then the day after that expired, he was like, okay, now I can do prequels because she won't get a penny. And George Lucas's focus on this was, you know, he was all about the technology, the special effects technology and the showcase for that. And, you know, he famously was not actually that good a writer. And, you know, he.
|
Sam:
[1:46:39]
| You know, the prequel trilogy has grown on people over the years. People have pointed out that the kids who were young when they came out like them and feel nostalgic about them the same way that people of my generation, Gen X, felt about their original trilogy. But, you know, they were a drop-off, I think, from the first three. And at least in part, that's because her influence wasn't there. She was a big part of the original Star Wars and a bunch of other stuff. And at some point, she retired from editing, which, you know, I understand. She got her divorce money. She was a rich woman, I'm sure. But, you know, she undoubtedly could have done all kinds of other things, even beyond when she stopped. But anyway, she died. She was 80 years old. And it's just worth noting that she probably has had as much to do with why Star Wars is a thing and has been for decades now as her husband. You know, it's just another one of these things where, you know, the women involved got less credit than the man involved. And there you go.
|
Sam:
[1:48:04]
| Anyway, she deserves the credit. Not all the credit. He had something to do with it, too. But, you know, her part should not be forgotten. Okay, with that, I am out of here. Goodbye, folks. We'll see you next week. And hopefully Yvonne will be here, too. Bye for, what do I say? Have a great week. Have fun. Not too much fun. Stay safe. Yeah, yeah, all that. Goodbye.
|
Break:
[1:48:33]
| Thank you.
|
Sam:
[1:49:03]
| That's it everyone, hitting stop. Bye.
| |
|
