Ivan: Hello?
Sam: Hello?
Ivan: Oh, fuck.
Sam: You got echo.
Ivan: Yeah, I got echo. Ah, fuck. What the bloody hell?
Sam: It's not on your headphones?
Ivan: No, but I was just on the headphones.
Ivan: What the fuck is wrong with you, you piece of sh— It says AirPods connected.
Ivan: What the—what is this thing doing?
Ivan: Speaker.
Ivan: No. Is that like an op? No.
Ivan: Okay, let me try this again.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Leave. Okay, hello? Okay, now I hear you on my headphones, but okay.
Sam: Okay. And I'm all good?
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Shall we just start then? Okay, here goes.
Sam: Transcription by CastingWords Hello.
Sam: I should do the intro. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner.
Ivan: Oh, the intro. Yes, that helps.
Sam: Yes, the intro. My dog's getting excited too.
Sam: Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, May 3rd, 2025.
Sam: It's just before 1930 UTC as we're starting to record. I'm Sam Minter,
Sam: and Yvonne Bow is here. Hello, Yvonne.
Ivan: Hi.
Sam: So, yeah, I can hear you. Your picture is frozen, but, you know, whatever.
Ivan: You know, I see that. I don't know. okay well and especially i love the the
Ivan: the the way that it froze it's a fantastic look for me it is this what the fuck
Ivan: i'm gonna take a screenshot of that.
Sam: Before that disappears.
Ivan: Exactly which is like you know the right i i totally believe that that is the
Ivan: right face to be having for everything every day just be.
Sam: Your thumbnail forever.
Ivan: Yes like you can change You can add all.
Sam: Your social media to that right now.
Ivan: Exactly. And that's like an accurate take on how I feel on a regular basis right now.
Sam: For those listening who cannot see, Ivan, he's got his lips sort of pursed. He's scowling.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: He looks sort of a mix between anger and confusion.
Ivan: Yes, that's exactly right. And that's like standard every day now for a lot of people.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, perfect.
Ivan: Because every time you look at your phone, you get an alert and you're like, what the, what?
Sam: I hear the next Pope is going to be Donald Trump.
Ivan: Yes, I saw that. Yes, he wants to be the Pope.
Sam: Anyway, so the agenda as usual is we're going to do but first,
Sam: lighter, non-newsy stuff first.
Sam: And I don't know what Yvonne has planned, but I'm going to do a movie.
Sam: And then we'll do a couple segments of, you know, things that have actually been in the news lately.
Sam: Or, you know, whatever comes to mind. Like, I'm actually looking at,
Sam: like, yo, I've got a few things that aren't newsy that I might bring up. I don't know.
Sam: I won't make the decision until the last instant. We'll see. We'll see.
Sam: But, so, Yvonne, you want to start us out with something non-newsy?
Ivan: I don't know. What the fuck is going on? Let's see. I, I, I,
Ivan: I'm just, Jesus. What day is today?
Sam: Today is Saturday.
Ivan: May, uh.
Sam: May 8th. or no no may 3rd may 3rd i got confused for a second because you know
Sam: a three is like an eight with the left hand side erased and so it's easy to
Sam: confuse those especially.
Ivan: At this age i guess you can't really see very well.
Sam: Yeah exactly i just it's all trying to.
Ivan: Figure out what the hell you know happened this week i i mean in terms of you know i i.
Sam: Stuff.
Ivan: It's been the blur.
Sam: You can just pick a regular topic.
Ivan: No, but I think that it's been a blur, but it's a blur of.
Ivan: I'm talking to people that are at around this age.
Ivan: You've got jobs, you've got a child, you've got, you know, every day seems to
Ivan: be packed with something happening
Ivan: right after the other, right after the other, right after the other.
Ivan: It's like there is no, no, no, no break, you know, right.
Ivan: Anymore. It used to be, you know, we're not married and you don't have kids, you know, whatever.
Ivan: I mean, I still remember, you know, talking to there's a whole bunch of like
Ivan: much younger people that I work with. Right.
Ivan: And it's like, you know, I remember like back then, I don't know, I worked so many hours.
Ivan: And, you know, we go out, I would, I would go out regularly during the weekdays
Ivan: and somebody the other day went and like told me how they wanted to have some
Ivan: kind of like a work meeting. And they said, well, can we talk about this Sunday?
Ivan: I said, I hear you fucking mind. I, I, I, there is, listen, unless,
Ivan: you know, there is an apocalypse of some kind. Okay.
Ivan: I am not getting on a fucking call to discuss something work related on Sunday.
Ivan: I hear you. There is just no effing way.
Ivan: I was reading the other day about some of these people working at this junior
Ivan: bankers at this investment bank.
Ivan: They were working 120 hours a week at this place.
Sam: That's nuts.
Ivan: Some guy I came in as a whole bunch of them were at work at four in the morning, mind you.
Ivan: OK, I'm guessing there's an investment bank, probably some trading,
Ivan: trading in Europe opened at that time or something, you know,
Ivan: which makes them, you know, it's one of those things where you're trading investments
Ivan: in Europe is open at that hour.
Ivan: You're probably have to be somebody's got to be looking at what the fuck is going on.
Ivan: And the guys were a bunch of them were talking about how burnt out they were
Ivan: and stuff or whatever. And some executive came in at four in the morning and
Ivan: told him, you know what? We're not pulling our weight.
Ivan: We're not working hard enough here.
Ivan: He's giving this speech at four in the fucking morning.
Ivan: You know, like, what the hell? I'm sorry. You're telling these guys that are
Ivan: in the office at four in the fucking morning that they're not working hard enough?
Ivan: What the fuck is wrong with you?
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: So, you know, you know, this is one of my job does not demand anything of a sort.
Ivan: And actually, the one thing that the people that wanted to have discussion,
Ivan: it wasn't actually related to my my job job itself. It was related to something
Ivan: that happened at the condo association.
Ivan: OK. All right. Which is kind of like a job. OK. When I had it.
Ivan: And, you know, the people from the property management or whatever,
Ivan: they wanted to discuss it. They said, hey, what do we meet on Sunday?
Ivan: And I'm like, that's all right, out of your fucking minds. I'm not meeting on a fucking Sunday.
Ivan: My job, you know, the only times that we've had something like come up on a
Ivan: weekend is, you know, I mean, we have systems that we manage 24 by 7.
Ivan: OK, so, hey, you know, somebody, you know, something went down hard.
Ivan: You know, something I mean, we've got a customer in a crisis.
Ivan: Yeah, that that would, you know, that wouldn't fail. And I get that.
Ivan: That's something that's not planned, unexpected. And you've got a customer that's
Ivan: on fire. And yeah, you got to do something. OK.
Ivan: But other than that, I mean, you know, you know, it's just, you know, that's what I said.
Ivan: You know, something's got to be apocalyptic.
Ivan: You know, something really bad has had to happen.
Ivan: And a lot of the systems that we service are critical, you know,
Ivan: to customers, you know, I mean, like one of them is like, you know,
Ivan: for a public utility for electricity, you know, so it does the service calls and stuff like that.
Ivan: So, you know, or a telephone company where our systems also do the service calls
Ivan: or something or whatever.
Ivan: So if that goes down, you know, you can see how that would impact,
Ivan: you know, a lot of people at the same time as something that is of critical
Ivan: need, you know. So, yeah, I get that. But other than that, I mean, I don't know.
Ivan: You know, this whole thing where we've gone from...
Ivan: We went from whatever the work-life balance that was before the pandemic,
Ivan: which I think was, you know, for most people, it wasn't bad.
Ivan: I think that our, well, I'm going to take that back.
Ivan: I think companies were, my experience had been working at about three different
Ivan: companies that most employers were pretty reasonable about that. Okay?
Sam: Although this is the kind of thing that varies a lot from place to place, company to company.
Ivan: Right. No, no, no. I get that. But at the three different companies I spent,
Ivan: like before then, it had been pretty reasonable.
Ivan: Okay. All right. You know, what do you get to happen and so forth?
Ivan: You know, there were no hard and fast rules.
Ivan: Like, you know, I had employees that most of the time were tasked to an office,
Ivan: but they said, hey, you know, I got something going on the next couple of days.
Ivan: Can I work from home? It's like, sure.
Ivan: No problem. It's not like me telling somebody to work from home is violating
Ivan: some corporate edip of some kind.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: You know, you know, and now to where all of a sudden you've got executives and
Ivan: chief executives mandating, you know, how many days and what,
Ivan: you know, exactly when they need to be in the office and micromanaging this in a level.
Sam: Yeah, and I think part of this is that for the people who got to work at home
Sam: over the pandemic, and obviously this does not apply to all jobs.
Sam: If you're in a factory making something, you could never work from home.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: But for the people who did get to work from home, pandemic time was a realization
Sam: of the amount of freedom you could have.
Sam: So even going back to sort of where things were before would have still been a constraint,
Sam: but because management is really wanting to control it and really force the issue,
Sam: they're putting all these additional constraints which make it seem more like
Sam: kindergarten than it was before.
Sam: Yeah like yeah even even when they say the right things like like even when
Sam: they say look look if you if you have a dentist appointment and you have to
Sam: work from home no problem just tell us like fine but like,
Sam: All of those things were very informal pre-pandemic.
Sam: And now it's like, oh, yeah, you have to be sure to tell us.
Sam: You have to put something on your calendar to block off the time.
Sam: You have to do this. You have to do that.
Sam: And even if it is fairly informal, even if it's still just, oh,
Sam: tell your boss, it now feels like you're being watched at every moment.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that for a lot of people. I will say that for me,
Ivan: you know, and I think that I'm reading that I'm talking about from other people, not not me.
Sam: You in your role, you're you and your company, you're still at home when you're not traveling.
Ivan: Right, right, right. I think that the one thing that did change is that my my
Ivan: kind of like I guess that my kind of like office time really was travel time.
Ivan: That's really what it boils down to in the essence.
Ivan: And the reality is that it's made me have to go back to traveling a lot.
Ivan: But at the same time, that was still a lot more flexible than most work arrangements
Ivan: that anybody else had in the first place.
Ivan: I mean, it's not the same thing. I mean, the one thing is, you know,
Ivan: you've got customers that are in the office and they're expecting you to come
Ivan: to visit them instead of doing a Zoom.
Ivan: And so, you know, that's that's, you know, that's fine. I mean, it is what it is.
Ivan: OK, so but I guess the thing is, it's just reading that.
Ivan: I'm like, oh, and I'm like, you know, how the hell some guy go.
Ivan: It's just the extreme insane of you've got people that literally are working
Ivan: 120 hours a week and you're bitching that they need to double down. I'm just like,
Ivan: You know, and honestly.
Sam: The thing is, and you know, I know people are pushing for get more and more
Sam: done with less and less resources, but with technology and automation and everything
Sam: else, we should actually be going to other direction.
Sam: The humans that are working should be doing less.
Sam: You know? Yeah.
Sam: Things should be a little bit more relaxed. You look at these curves they do
Sam: of per capita productivity comparing decade over decade,
Sam: and each individual is getting so much more done than they did a few decades ago.
Sam: Come on, let them some slack. Let's work at 1950s levels again, okay?
Ivan: Well, think about farmers, for example, right?
Ivan: I mean, they talk about small pounds and whatnot. I mentioned this before in
Ivan: the podcast. You see how the productivity per acre is so much higher than it's ever been.
Ivan: And, you know, how farmers now have all these automated tools to help do farming.
Ivan: You know, they don't need, you know, they don't need like people like out there,
Ivan: like picking the fields.
Ivan: They've got these damn combines that are robotic, that are GPS,
Ivan: you know, that could be driven by GPS.
Ivan: That they can pinpoint where the hell they have to be on
Ivan: the on the damn field and like you know that
Ivan: the systems and like they they pull and they automate they measure and they
Ivan: do all of this all this stuff it's amazing shit and i'm like you know but what
Ivan: that means is you definitely don't need as many people to do like i mean one
Ivan: person can do so much more than they used to be able to and right and of.
Sam: Course what everybody what the tech industry right now is gambling on is that
Sam: as ai continues to advance the same thing will be true of knowledge workers very soon.
Ivan: I mean i i and i think that that's you
Ivan: know like i was talking the other day and i and
Ivan: i and i saw a couple of other people like uh in the news talk about in the news
Ivan: talk about this and i i had thought this myself that a lot of the things that
Ivan: ai does is enable a lot of us to do work faster not necessarily remove the work.
Ivan: Not, I mean, not at least in this current iteration. And a lot of times,
Ivan: you know, what technology that we've done,
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Well, and again, and again, the gamble is that you can't judge it based on what
Sam: it's doing now because it's moving so fast in another year, two years, three years.
Ivan: But still, I mean, it's like, you know, I still remember like,
Ivan: you know, come on 30, 40, 50, look, 50, 60 years ago. Okay.
Ivan: If you were doing, say, for example, one that is was so people intense that
Ivan: I remember reservations, travel reservations, airline.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: Okay. Dude. You know, if you ran a big airline. And you were trying to do reservations
Ivan: back then, which was on paper.
Ivan: The amount of manual labor required, okay, to be able to track all of these
Ivan: things, okay, and to do so.
Ivan: And how, when they first came up with the first computers, ah,
Ivan: we won't have any employees doing this, blah, blah, blah, you know,
Ivan: we'll remove the humans from this.
Ivan: And that was the fear. It was like, oh, my God, who's going to work and whatnot?
Ivan: And, well, yes, we didn't remove a whole bunch of people that were doing a whole
Ivan: bunch of manual shuffling and paper and stuff and whatnot.
Ivan: But in the end, you know, they were put into a whole bunch of other things that
Ivan: actually people figure out.
Ivan: We want to figure out, oh, we're really not doing all this other stuff,
Ivan: you know, because we didn't have time because all of this stuff took.
Ivan: It was so manual that it didn't let you do any of this other stuff.
Ivan: Um you know it's just
Ivan: we even today with all the tools
Ivan: that we have all the computer whatever there are
Ivan: so many things that i do like for my job
Ivan: or for my previous jobs that are so manual even with
Ivan: all the computing that we have that i know that
Ivan: there's a lot of things that probably would be able to drive
Ivan: more sales that that would do
Ivan: that but look it's estimated that a lot of salespeople spend
Ivan: 70 and 80 percent of their time actually doing
Ivan: admin work not really selling
Ivan: okay that's just the fact i
Ivan: mean imagine if you take people and you you know and that in a lot of instances
Ivan: we cover so few of the accounts that are assigned that if you actually were
Ivan: able to reduce that admin time down where things could be done a lot a lot easier
Ivan: it would actually allow people to be able to do far more in terms of the actual selling.
Sam: Well, and I think that is true for many jobs, if not most jobs.
Ivan: Most jobs are like that.
Sam: There's like so much that's overhead. And if you look at what portion of the
Sam: workday is actually spent doing something that,
Sam: isn't just documenting or tracking or writing a report or whatever,
Sam: but is actually pushing the ball forward.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: It's a small percentage.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: For like lots of jobs, not all jobs. There are some jobs that are structured
Sam: that, you know, 90% of your work actually is productive.
Sam: But, and I use the word productive. Look, I just want to say this.
Sam: I use the word productive lightly here because some people actually,
Sam: consider sort of those things like status reports to actually be very valuable
Sam: in communication so people know what's going on etc etc but that's the kind
Sam: of thing that is ripe for automation.
Ivan: I'm going to tell you something that one of the things that happens with so
Ivan: many status reports of my life is like so many people no one reads them well
Ivan: no it's not that it's you know maybe people won't read them the problem is that
Ivan: you know it's turning that actionable one of the It's like, I mean,
Ivan: you know, I still remember that there's this one guy, there's a story when I
Ivan: joined HP, a long time ago, talking to me about this guy that had been in charge,
Ivan: I believe, of service levels.
Ivan: Okay. All right. And he had all these metrics. He was like the master guru of
Ivan: measuring, you know, the service levels and how, you know, how long to take
Ivan: a call, how long to repair. He had all these stats.
Ivan: Okay. But he was in charge of delivery, not just of measuring.
Ivan: The problem was that they were all ready.
Ivan: All of them. and the question was like yeah great so you can measure every yeah
Ivan: so you're an expert you're better than everybody else at measuring all this
Ivan: shit and all you're saying is you know really well you know really really well.
Sam: How screwed you are.
Ivan: Right but but you you have you either you don't have the time or don't know
Ivan: how to take any action on any of that shit that you mentioned that's wrong So yeah,
Ivan: you know, that's just, I think that every technology always imparts a high level of fear.
Ivan: In people and what their job will be, okay? You know, and it has had impact
Ivan: on jobs, okay? We've seen this, you know, before.
Ivan: But I do think that the problem is always how to deal with a dislocation and
Ivan: how to deal with a change.
Ivan: Because, okay, great, so now people are not doing this, so what are we going
Ivan: to do? Or what are we going to do with, you know, with the money?
Ivan: You know, sometimes you go, hey, you're making more money, but you don't need as many,
Ivan: you know, the economy is bigger, but sometimes, hey there's
Ivan: certain labor you don't need so how do you help people but i don't
Ivan: know it gets into another day but anyway my whole point was like
Ivan: man you know people are out there yeah my point is you know it goes back to
Ivan: what kind of an asshole goes and bitches to fucking people that are working
Ivan: 120 hours a week that you've got to work harder that really takes a special
Ivan: level of asshole And I think that we are in an era of high-level assholing.
Sam: Yeah, I think so. And we've said, you mentioned earlier, the pendulum has swung.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Well, the pendulum always eventually swings the other way.
Ivan: Yeah, at some point. It's just a matter of time. I saw a bunch of air traffic
Ivan: controllers that walked out in New York or something, forcing United to cancel
Ivan: a whole bunch of flights.
Ivan: You know that's the kind of like pushback against a whole bunch of this shit
Ivan: that that keeps happening in different places so.
Sam: Well and and sometimes it's just a matter of
Sam: time and the economics go
Sam: through a couple cycles or whatever or people
Sam: adapt to the technology but like right now we are in an era where lots of companies
Sam: feel free to push really really hard on their employees because they know the
Sam: employees don't have a lot of other options.
Sam: Eventually, things will turn, and there will be lots and lots of options.
Sam: And then people will be competing for those employees again and trying to offer
Sam: all kinds of perks and benefits and work-life balance and, you know,
Sam: whatever in order to get those people who are good.
Sam: And letting them work from home again. You know, all of this other stuff.
Ivan: And it's eras. I mean, it's eras. Look, I still remember how I worked an entire
Ivan: era where I joined HP when it was really a company that – I mean,
Ivan: my work career is born in the South.
Ivan: And it was – it had a reputation for being one of the – if not the best,
Ivan: one of the best places to work in the world.
Ivan: And my later life has shown that that wasn't hyperbole, okay? All right?
Ivan: Because it really, truly was that. and from everybody that I work with who is
Ivan: now in other places, we all talk about, holy shit, I mean, were we you know, we, you know,
Ivan: where we worked and how the company treated us and everything,
Ivan: it's just I'm like, I don't think I appreciate it, but we said we didn't even
Ivan: appreciate it enough how good the.
Ivan: Treatment of people was at HP and their respect for employee and all of that
Ivan: stuff, and I lived through that transformation into complete assholery,
Ivan: you know, because it went from that into, you know, having Mark Hurd, who's dead,
Ivan: okay, you know, and I'm not really shedding a tear for that asshole,
Ivan: okay, who goes, and like, I still remember, like, every fucking time was,
Ivan: hey, what the fuck do we take away from employees, you know,
Ivan: every, I mean, it was like, every fucking announcement, every six months,
Ivan: as he announced that our profits were ever higher and higher and higher,
Ivan: it was just like, hey, what do we take away from people, what can we take away,
Ivan: you know, what's the next thing i'm like you know i'm like motherfucker you
Ivan: keep saying we're making more and more money and all you you know you're making
Ivan: more and more money and everything you're doing is trying to figure out how to fuck us over more yeah.
Sam: You know and and mentioned this these things come in cycles but part of the
Sam: problem is the cycles are long you know.
Ivan: Yeah it's.
Sam: Not like oh next year it'll be better it might be better in five or.
Ivan: Ten five years yeah i mean they are long you know they are along but but you
Ivan: know but but that's that's where we are and so you know we are in the era of
Ivan: assholery in general yes.
Sam: It is not limited to employer employee relationships.
Ivan: No you know if you just.
Sam: Look at uh you know the current administration that just is.
Ivan: Exemplar of everything about just even in general daily life you know yeah well.
Sam: It all flows from the top down like because if you demonstrate that a certain
Sam: type of behavior is acceptable, then more people will engage in that behavior.
Sam: Like if there are prominent people,
Sam: who not only are assholes, but seem to get ahead by being assholes.
Ivan: Yes, yes.
Sam: Then more people will strive to be assholes themselves.
Ivan: Yes! I strive to be an asshole! I want that on a shirt.
Ivan: You know, let's put that on some t-shirts. You know, they probably sell very well right now.
Sam: I bet you there is already a t-shirt that says that. yeah i'm gonna strive to
Sam: be an asshole t-shirt you.
Ivan: Know kids growing up right.
Sam: Now oh yeah what do you want to be where you want to grow up i want to
Sam: be an asshole it's my dream let's see i've got i'm not always an asshole just
Sam: kidding go fuck yourself um stop asking why i'm an asshole i don't ask why you're
Sam: stupid let's see i never dreamed i'd grow up to be an asshole but here i I am killing it.
Sam: I'm the nicest asshole you will ever meet. There are more, but Alex is throwing
Sam: things at me for saying asshole too much.
Sam: Oh, so I'm going to stop.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: So your, your precise one isn't out there yet.
Sam: No, you could go set it up on like one of the sites that lets you set up random t-shirts.
Ivan: Oh, wait, don't we have like a commercial merch site we could be you know don't
Ivan: we have like you know we could set that up as an option we.
Sam: We at the moment it's not set up as a merch site that people can just go buy.
Ivan: It's just set up as a place where i can order stuff and you know we should set
Ivan: up you know because there are all these really cheap like ways to set up like
Ivan: a merch site you can just set up like and it's all you know right.
Sam: Now right now for the stuff i use zazzle And actually, Ed has received his new mug.
Ivan: Yes! All right!
Sam: I saw the delivery confirmation notice come in recently.
Sam: And it's an I hate curmudgeon's corner mug, not a regular curmudgeon's corner mug.
Sam: But Alex did insist on changing, on adding one line somewhere.
Sam: Uh, I think he said, he said it had, it had to say it was a specimen.
Sam: So I think I have a note on it that says, you know, Alex says specimen or something.
Sam: So it's different than the one we made for him.
Ivan: So like, oh, so like when you get those fake bills, you know,
Ivan: like whatever, that's a sample. It says this is a specimen.
Sam: Yeah, except it doesn't like a specimen.
Ivan: Like a urine is specimen.
Sam: No, no, no. But it, so, but it doesn't have like the word all over everything.
Sam: I just have it in like a corner.
Ivan: No, no, no. But usually there are certain events that you see that it's like
Ivan: a small little thing somewhere that it says, this is a specimen.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So there you go.
Sam: Yeah, but anyway, the point was I set all that up with Zazzle,
Sam: but Zazzle's like shop view is actually kind of sucky.
Sam: Like it wasn't, I haven't looked in years, so maybe they've improved it.
Sam: But like you could set it up so anybody could buy the thing you created.
Sam: But it was hard to make it a controlled experience. like, hey,
Sam: you're in the curmudgeons corner shop and here's all the curmudgeons corner
Sam: stuff and I've constrained it in a certain way so you can only buy the things
Sam: we want you to buy, you know?
Ivan: Okay, okay.
Sam: But there are other companies that do that too. So yeah, we could look up into
Sam: it again. I'm sure the demand would be astronomical.
Sam: But maybe not for the regular curmudgeons corner merch, but for the curmudgeons
Sam: corner, I strive to be an asshole shirt.
Ivan: There you go. Talk about it. Talk about it.
Sam: We could take the image of you from this podcast, have a giant version of your
Sam: face on one side with a caption of the, I strive to be an asshole, right under.
Ivan: That sounds actually great.
Ivan: That sounds like a fucking great idea.
Sam: Alex keeps throwing things at me, so I'm going to stop saying that word for now.
Sam: Okay, are we ready for my movie?
Ivan: Yes, we're ready for your movie.
Sam: Ready for the movie. So, I had mentioned before we've been going through the Ghostbusters series.
Sam: The next one that I've watched, and actually the last one I've watched,
Sam: watched it back in August, is Ghostbusters Afterlife from 2021.
Sam: There's one more movie after this but i haven't seen the last one.
Ivan: Once again i you know i have no idea.
Sam: Yeah and and see last time we talked about
Sam: like one of the ghostbusters franchise we talked
Sam: about the one with the women i mentioned you know it was worthwhile it is people
Sam: criticized the one with the women but most of the criticism was just because
Sam: they were women and it did like it wasn't a great movie it was an okay movie
Sam: but people made it out like it was a horrible movie and it was not a hard movie.
Sam: It was just people being sexist assholes. Oh, oops, I said it again.
Sam: Oops. Yes. And I suddenly started getting the Britney Spears song going through
Sam: my head, even though it wasn't said it.
Sam: Okay. My head is starting to become injured. I'm going to get a concussion from
Sam: all the cups being thrown at me.
Sam: They are plastic cups, just to be clear.
Sam: He's not like throwing your mugs then
Sam: yeah right yeah no mugs no hammers yet
Sam: but you know i wonder if i continue anyway ghostbusters afterlife is 2021 unlike
Sam: the one with the women it's in the original continuity of the first two movies
Sam: okay okay so what you actually get is the what is it uh is it,
Sam: Like the main character you follow is the granddaughter of Egon Spengler from the first movie.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: And her brother's there, too. Her mother's there. A couple other things.
Sam: They end up, I'll read you the beginning of the plot summary, so no big spoilers.
Sam: In Somersville, Oklahoma, Egon Spengler captures an entity in occultist Evo
Sam: Shandor's mine outside the town and lures another to his farm.
Sam: He activates an elaborate setup on his property, but the power fails.
Sam: Egon manages to conceal the ghost trap in his home before being attacked by
Sam: the entity and suffering a fatal heart attack, and the entity returns to the mine.
Sam: Egon's estranged, financially struggling daughter, Callie, inherits the farm
Sam: and moves there with her children, Trevor and Phoebe, after being evicted from
Sam: their Chicago apartment.
Sam: Trevor becomes infatuated with carhop Lucky Domingo, and the scientifically-minded
Sam: Phoebe enrolls in a summer science class taught by seismologist Gary Gooberson,
Sam: whom Callie later dates.
Sam: Phoebe discovers the farmhouse is haunted, and the poltergeist residing in it
Sam: leads her to the ghost trap, which she shows to Gary and her new friend.
Sam: Her new friend podcast. Gary, a fan of the Ghostbusters, helps her learn more
Sam: about them and her grandfather.
Sam: He, Phoebe, and podcast tamper with the trap, releasing Vins Clortho,
Sam: key master of Gozer the Gozerian, which escapes to the mine.
Sam: The farm ghost leads Phoebe to Egon's underground laboratory, and I will stop there.
Sam: Okay. Because then it starts to get spoilery after that.
Sam: Anyway, it does have cameos from the original Ghostbusters later in the movie.
Sam: Obviously, there was a bit with Egon at the very beginning. But to be clear,
Sam: this was filmed after the actor for Egon, who was Dana—no, not Dana Hecker.
Sam: Dana Hecker is still alive. yeah a yvonne
Sam: reitman is that right i even right um i haven't
Sam: reitman uh yeah it was already dead when they
Sam: filmed this movie or he died while it was filming or something something like
Sam: that so so anyway yo so he appeared he appears in cameos anyway through the
Sam: magics of magic of cinema but i look,
Sam: Thumbs up. I actually really liked this movie.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: I'd say it gives the original a run for its money. It is different.
Sam: It's definitely a modern 2020s movie, not a 1980s movie.
Sam: But I think that actually makes it better.
Sam: It's still got its comedic elements, but it's not so much a straight-up comedy
Sam: as the original Ghostbusters was.
Ivan: It was Harold Ramis. I'm sorry.
Sam: Oh, Harold Ramis.
Ivan: I thought it was a director that actually died as well.
Sam: Yes, Harold Ramis. Sorry. Right.
Ivan: It looked like one of our college looks Dead Ringer for Al.
Sam: But anyway, I really liked it. Like, it's a different style than the original,
Sam: but I think it's just as good.
Sam: I mean, if I had to say which of the Ghostbusters movies would I want to see
Sam: again, I would pick this one over the original now.
Sam: Now, having said that, that's partially because I've seen the original quite
Sam: a few times at this point. I've only seen this one once.
Sam: But yeah, I liked it. It was funny.
Sam: It was sort of heartwarming at the right places.
Sam: It had just enough of the lore of the original so that, you know,
Sam: you felt connected to the original but
Sam: it was moving the story onward and bringing in
Sam: new characters to continue the story which by
Sam: the way is the way i i prefer continuations after
Sam: a long period of time you know sometimes and
Sam: we've talked about this on the show before but sometimes complete reboots work
Sam: and the new version is good in its own ways and i'll point to for instance battle
Sam: star galactica oh yeah they're the newer and they're they're apparently redoing
Sam: a new reboot of Battlestar Galactica well by.
Ivan: The way I love the reboot of Star Trek.
Sam: I know a lot of many reboots of Star Trek at this point.
Ivan: But the last one.
Sam: The last one.
Ivan: So that was the three movies that were that were by what's his name?
Sam: You're you're talking movies, not because there there have been like five new
Sam: Star Trek series in the last couple of years.
Ivan: Well, yeah, yeah, not not not so much the TV series, but more enough,
Ivan: you know, because in a movie era, I mean, you had like that series of movies that was by J.J.
Ivan: Abrams that he did that a lot of people like criticize. But I actually thought,
Ivan: yeah, but I thought they were great. I actually enjoyed them.
Sam: Yeah, I haven't even watched all of them. I think I watched the first two,
Sam: maybe. But, like, I was not impressed by them. I thought they were okay.
Sam: But, like, you can tell how little impressed I was that I didn't bother seeing the last one.
Ivan: I liked them very much. You see? But there were a lot of people that shared.
Sam: But also, even that one, by the way, they actually made a connection to the original series.
Sam: It wasn't actually a real reboot. correct because they had like spock fall backwards
Sam: in time and create a new timeline correct and he was in it like with the older
Sam: spock so yes so they they maintained the continuity with the original sometimes
Sam: like the the battlestar galactica one was completely yeah.
Ivan: Completely rebooted yeah.
Sam: Although at the very end of the series they sort of did hint at connections to the original.
Ivan: I'll tell you one thing. The Battlestar Galactica, the second one itself, compared to the,
Ivan: first series was, Jesus, was so much more dystopian.
Ivan: I mean, I mean, not that the first one wasn't like it in that sense,
Ivan: in the sense of, I mean, Jesus, you know, all the all the humans were almost
Ivan: annihilated. They had to escape on ships.
Ivan: Right. I think that the that the tone of the second one was far darker.
Ivan: And I think that the other thing that they did is
Ivan: that they visualized and like presented a lot more
Ivan: what actually happened during the attack uh a lot of the suffering oh yeah yeah
Ivan: yeah yeah and so yeah it's like because on the on the first series that got
Ivan: very little play it was just a little bit of you saw that the you know the planets
Ivan: were attacked that they escaped that's it boom right and.
Sam: This is also a thing where you know after so many decades pass it's a difference
Sam: in you know what the style of television is right like is it the original premiered
Sam: in 1978 you know and the new one was 2003 you know.
Ivan: There's a substantial difference.
Sam: In how things are done but yeah my my point that though is just that you know
Sam: sometimes people do complete reboots, wipe the slate clean, brand new cast.
Sam: They reset it perhaps in a different time.
Sam: They make different assumptions about the characters.
Sam: And it really is a whole new show that just takes some of the same premises and does it again.
Sam: That's one way of doing it. And I'm always a little wary of those.
Sam: Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. And then the
Sam: other way is you actually like say we're
Sam: going to pick up the same story 20 years
Sam: later and so the original characters
Sam: are older but they're still around or at
Sam: least they're in the history of the show even if the actor is not available and
Sam: you know and you refer to the events of the first
Sam: series and you continue the story for there that also
Sam: sometimes works and sometimes doesn't work but i
Sam: generally prefer that second approach to the first
Sam: i feel like it gives more respect
Sam: to the original and it may like
Sam: whenever you do the complete reboot i kind of feel
Sam: sad that you really and truly are burying the old version whereas the new version
Sam: whereas if you continue it it's more like a celebration of the old version it's
Sam: all part of the same thing and so i like it when they do the second,
Sam: better than when they like the first.
Sam: And anyway, the point is even within the Ghostbusters franchise I think the
Sam: one where they rebooted it completely was the one with the women and it sort
Sam: of fell flat on its face and again part of that was people being sexist and jerks.
Sam: But you know,
Sam: part of it was like you get less of the, you don't get the nostalgia effect
Sam: if you don't connect it to the original.
Sam: In this one, in Ghostbusters Afterlife, they connected it to the original two
Sam: movies. They connected it to the original characters.
Sam: The original characters made cameos as themselves.
Sam: Like the one with the women, the original characters did make cameos,
Sam: but playing different people.
Sam: You know, in this one, the original characters made cameos as themselves.
Sam: And it was like, oh, that's great. It's good to see what they're up to these days, you know?
Sam: Anyway, I liked it. Big thumbs up to Ghostbusters Afterlife.
Sam: There's one more, Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. I have not seen that yet.
Sam: Eventually, I will see that.
Ivan: No, I haven't seen that yet.
Sam: Maybe I'll see that soon. I don't know. But anyway, this is one,
Sam: Yvonne, where I recommend you go ahead.
Ivan: Sam beating me to the punch on watching some movies, which is stunning.
Sam: I recommend you go ahead and watch all the Ghostbusters movies.
Sam: Start at the original and work your way forward.
Sam: Don't skip the one with the women. It's not awesome, but it's not horrible.
Sam: But give it its due service to sort of counteract the jerks.
Sam: See, I'm using the word jerk now.
Sam: And watch the new ones too. And I don't know, maybe the very most recent one
Sam: sucks. I don't know, I haven't seen it yet.
Sam: But I liked Ghostbusters Afterlife. There you go.
Sam: Okay, with that, we will take a break. And after this break,
Sam: I don't know, Yvonne will pick something to talk about.
Sam: We'll talk about it for a while. Then I'll take a break and I'll pick something.
Sam: Or we'll take a break. I mean, I guess I could take a break and Yvonne could keep going.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: But that would be weird.
Ivan: That's possible. That would be strange.
Sam: You could talk straight through the spot, like just giving your thoughts on something or other.
Ivan: Yeah, it's possible. Yeah.
Sam: Anyway, here's a break. We'll be back in a moment.
Sam: Okay, we're back.
Ivan: We're back. And we're bad.
Sam: So I kept looking over to see what Yvonne was doing during your break,
Sam: but it's still his big frozen face.
Ivan: Yeah, I'm still, you know, frozen.
Sam: So anyway, what do you want to talk about? What do you want to talk about?
Sam: There's been stuff going on.
Sam: It's been longer than normal since we recorded the show early last time.
Sam: Oh, I guess I should mention my surgery went fine.
Sam: It went well. I had the thing cut out of me, and then the next day I had plastic
Sam: surgery to patch up the big open wound that I had.
Sam: It was like, I don't know, the size of a dime across and several millimeters
Sam: deep in my nose, maybe even slightly bigger than that.
Ivan: Well, I mean, given your lobotomy, it doesn't sound like anything.
Ivan: You don't sound very different.
Sam: Yeah, and then they patched it up. They didn't have to take skin from my forehead.
Sam: They described it as they rotated the skin on my nose to cover up the injury.
Sam: But apparently it was big enough that it would never have healed properly on
Sam: its own. So that's why they did the plastic surgery.
Sam: I got the stitches out a week later.
Ivan: Why do we even call this plastic surgery? It's not like they put in plastic.
Sam: They did not put in plastic.
Ivan: Yeah, because it would be very weird.
Sam: Okay, cosmetic surgery. Reconstructive surgery.
Ivan: But they do call it plastic surgery. And I'm just like, you know,
Ivan: what the hell? You know, we're not patching people off with plastic. Okay.
Sam: Sometimes they are.
Ivan: Rarely at this point, I'm assuming. But for the most part.
Sam: Sometimes plastic, sometimes silicone, sometimes other things.
Sam: But yeah, you're right. It's not usually actually plastic.
Ivan: Because that would be very weird. And we were just, you know,
Ivan: all of a sudden, hey, I just came back from my plastic surgery.
Ivan: Your nose is made out of plastic.
Sam: Yes indeed that might look.
Ivan: Like a clown.
Sam: Well it depends they can make some like you know realistic look like.
Ivan: A like a permanent clown nose.
Sam: Well alex alex did
Sam: a image edit of me with a muppet nose and has
Sam: been sending around to people he didn't send it to the curmudgeon score
Sam: slack maybe you should do that now alex but yeah
Sam: yeah so he's but yeah yeah like no i mean
Sam: you know they make they make like the madame tussauds stuff that look realistic
Sam: they make the animatronics at disney that look realistic you're right you you
Sam: could you could substitute a brand new oh i've i actually saw yvonne moving
Sam: instead of the freeze frame again hey.
Ivan: I am moving again what the hell okay all right.
Sam: Back and anyway for those of you listening to the podcast later this means nothing
Sam: to you anyway it looks fine my i i still have a little bit of swelling i still
Sam: I'll have to like put Vaseline on it.
Sam: And I'm supposed to be careful about sunlight for a full year.
Ivan: You're not supposed to be using that for sex.
Sam: I was putting it on my nose.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: And okay.
Ivan: I mean, what are you doing? Okay. Anyway.
Sam: Anyway. Yeah. I still, I'm supposed to like wear sunscreen and a hat for like
Sam: a full year. Like to keep the sun.
Ivan: I should always wear sunscreen and a hat.
Sam: Well, that's what they told me actually, is that you be sure to do this for
Sam: a year and actually forever. because you should have been doing it anyway.
Ivan: Yeah. I usually try to like, I mean, I'll say that I do a lot of times when
Ivan: I know that I'm going to be out in the sun, I do put up sunscreen on my face more than anything.
Ivan: And actually on the, I mean, on the back of my head where it's a little bit bold.
Ivan: I always try to make sure that that doesn't get, but you know,
Ivan: I mean, I do try if I'm going to be outdoors, you know, to wear a hat.
Ivan: I mean, not just walk into the car, you know, that just seems like a little bit.
Sam: Right. So anyway, there's still a little bit of swelling, and I think the shape
Sam: is slightly different than it used to be, but whatever.
Sam: Like, you know, it doesn't look too bad.
Sam: There's going to be a small scar, but whatever.
Sam: Anyway, so I was giving the update since I was reminded.
Sam: What I was saying is it's been longer since our last episode than usual.
Sam: It's been like a week and a half instead of a week.
Sam: So stuff has happened. So what do you want to talk about, Yvonne?
Ivan: Okay, so, Sam, Trump has only been in office for little more than 100 days.
Sam: It doesn't seem like so much longer.
Ivan: It seems like it's been a year.
Ivan: Jesus Christ.
Ivan: How's the approval doing, Sam?
Sam: Oh, great.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: He's the most popular president ever.
Ivan: According to Trump, yes. How's he doing?
Sam: Oh, it's been horrible.
Ivan: I mean, right now, he has the worst. I mean, if you track almost every metric
Ivan: in terms of stock market,
Ivan: you know, economy, like just about anything, he is performing at a rate that's
Ivan: worse than any time that we've ever tracked this shit pretty much.
Sam: Yeah i mean look people have
Sam: generated all kinds of charts i'm looking at approval right now there
Sam: are a whole bunch out there i'm looking at the one from the economist right
Sam: now uh if you google economist trump approval tracker you'll find it but there's
Sam: like a half dozen of these there's rcp there's there's a whole bunch nate silver
Sam: has one the silver bulletin 538 doesn't exist anymore, but there are all these others out there.
Sam: Anyway, Trump had already been the lowest net approval of any president since
Sam: they started polling other than his first term.
Sam: That had been true almost since the day one of his presidency.
Sam: A couple of weeks ago, he is now doing worse than his first term for the first time.
Ivan: Congratulations. Yay.
Sam: Yeah. And so now it's just straight up the worst
Sam: net approval of any president since there was
Sam: regular polling of this question and like
Sam: you said all kinds of other metrics too in terms of how the stock market has
Sam: done in the first 100 days worst ever start for presidency yeah um yeah hell
Sam: in terms of how much legislation congress has passed like i i think i read they
Sam: pass they have passed and had signed six bills in these hundred days.
Ivan: And in comparison, how is that?
Sam: Oh, I think it's usually in the mid double digits, like 50 or 60 by this time.
Sam: You know, I don't have those numbers ahead of me, in front of me,
Sam: so I'm going by memory, but much higher.
Sam: Even by the standards of recent congresses.
Ivan: Which have been very low on the productivity scale, yeah.
Sam: Yeah. And of course, number of bills isn't a really great measure anyway,
Sam: which is why I stopped tracking it myself. Well, also because it was too much.
Ivan: I mean, but it is a measure. I mean, you know, look, I mean,
Ivan: if you're Congress and you're not passing bills, the fuck are you doing?
Sam: Now, the one metric that he has blown away every previous president is executive orders.
Sam: He has issued more executive or he's like, I believe he's more than doubled,
Sam: maybe even more than tripled the previous record for the number of executive
Sam: orders in the first hundred days.
Ivan: I mean, yeah, I mean, everything is every other week they come up with some
Ivan: fucking executive order on something.
Ivan: And it's like, you know, like on some something, just on whatever the fuck it is.
Ivan: I mean, you all of a sudden you read the news, you're like, wait, he's doing what?
Ivan: You made an executive order on what? I mean, what, a fucking showerhead.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: A fucking showerhead.
Sam: That's been pissing off Donald Trump for years. I remember him talking about it in 2016.
Ivan: Yeah, but come on, man. I mean, showerheads. I mean, you know, I don't know.
Ivan: Like, it's just there's always an executive order on something,
Ivan: okay? Targeting individuals.
Sam: Okay, so let me, I think there have been more since then. This is through April
Sam: 29th, which is the first 100 days.
Sam: For the last, going back through Clinton. No, going back through Reagan.
Sam: Although they don't have George H.W. Bush on this list. I don't know why.
Sam: Anyway, so Trump had, I'm going off a graph, so I'm estimating the numbers,
Sam: about 85 in the first 100 days.
Sam: Next highest was Obama at about 65.
Sam: So I was wrong about the doubling, but still significantly higher.
Sam: Next above that was about 55 for Reagan, about just over 50 for Clinton,
Sam: just under 50 for George H.W. Bush.
Sam: No, for George W. Bush. For some reason, George H.W. is missing here.
Ivan: Or maybe he just didn't do many.
Sam: Or none. I don't know. I should look that up, but I'm not going to.
Ivan: Okay. so i mean 100 days one of the things that happened is the tariffs so we're
Ivan: tariffed you know uh peter navarro had gone on tv and said that we are going
Ivan: to be negotiating i screwed up.
Sam: I did not properly look up that graph.
Ivan: Okay sorry uh-huh yeah yeah yeah correction that.
Sam: Was the first hundred days of his first term.
Ivan: Oh, so what's the current term?
Sam: Well, now I'm going to have to go find it because apparently I failed in finding it the first time.
Ivan: Oh, my goodness.
Sam: I have seen this graph, but now I'm not going to be able to find the stupid thing. Let me add.
Ivan: Well, just ask how many executive orders, you know, here, let me see.
Ivan: Hey, Siri, how many executive orders has Donald Trump signed in his current presidential term?
Ivan: Do you want me to use chat gpt yes do
Ivan: okay here we go which i figured it was gonna do
Ivan: looks like 102 working with
Ivan: chat gpt okay so as of may 3rd 2025 president donald trump has signed 89 executive
Ivan: orders in his current term from yo 14 147 through yo 14 235 that was from chat
Ivan: gpt Check important info for mistakes.
Sam: Yeah, I've got, he has signed three today.
Sam: So that information is out of date. I have an executive order tracker.
Sam: It's the executiveordertracker.com.
Sam: It lists 43 in progress because after he signs them, it takes a couple of weeks
Sam: for them to get into the federal register and be in effect.
Sam: He's got 43 in progress, three that have been blocked by the courts and 69 total.
Sam: So whatever and three with an unclear status so.
Ivan: If you add up nine plus 43 70 so no oh my god 113 112 69 plus 43 is 112 plus what else plus.
Sam: Plus six more.
Ivan: So 118 118 okay so that is a a record pace by by a lot.
Sam: By a lot yes.
Ivan: Yeah okay well and the people are people really liking all this stuff.
Sam: No. We went through his approval rating before being the lowest ever.
Sam: I mean, you still, the diehards of the diehards, they're never going to give them up no matter what.
Sam: But all of these people who were sort of like, oh, I don't know,
Sam: I'll vote for Trump because I liked the economy in his first term,
Sam: forgetting the second half of his first term.
Sam: And because, like, Biden's old and Biden hasn't done all the things I want to
Sam: do. And I want change, damn it!
Ivan: Change!
Sam: Change, Sam!
Ivan: Change!
Sam: Yeah, those people are like...
Ivan: Well, you could go to National Change.
Sam: This isn't what I meant.
Ivan: Oh, this isn't what you meant. Well, yeah, that's a reference, but, you know.
Ivan: But, yeah, the change for... I always find...
Sam: Oh, and now I find the damn chart. Ah. Okay, so I will give you a reference
Sam: to not only this chart, but a bunch of others.
Sam: This is from the New York Times, published on April 29th, which was the 100-day mark.
Sam: Trump's astonishing 100 days in eight charts. So the very first one is the executive
Sam: orders, shows how much higher he is.
Sam: The next closest, which our previous chart did not go back to,
Sam: is FDR in 1941, who also was over 100.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Um, the next chart was lost war go.
Ivan: Well, there was world war two going on. So I'm like, okay, I'll give FDR a pass.
Sam: Yeah. The next number two and number three are FDR 1941 and FDR 1937 followed
Sam: by Truman in 1945, then Biden in 2021.
Sam: Those are the top five. The next chart is how much he's been sued in federal
Sam: court against the president.
Ivan: Uh, and he, He's got to break a record of some kind.
Sam: He has got, I'm eyeballing from the chart, like around 250 lawsuits so far.
Sam: The next closest was Trump in 2017, who was only at like 115 or something.
Sam: And then after that was Bush in 2005 and Obama in 2013.
Sam: The next chart, revenue from tariffs. He's actually number one. Number two is Biden.
Ivan: No, get out of here.
Sam: Then the dollar plunged. The dollar has plunged more than any of these other
Sam: comparison presidents there.
Sam: And it's weird here. Like, yeah, yes.
Sam: The next worst was Nixon in 1973.
Sam: Then markets.
Ivan: Of course, Nixon's 73. Okay. The main thing, 73 was the year of the oil shop,
Ivan: if I remember correctly.
Ivan: So that's why the dollar plunged. I'm pretty sure that that's what happened in 73.
Sam: Speaking of markets, Trump 2025 first hundred days was not the worst ever,
Sam: which I believe I said before.
Sam: Nixon 1973 was actually worse. And Ford 1974 was worse as well. They're close.
Ivan: So by the way, for those that don't know, just because I say that oil shock
Ivan: like everybody knows what it is.
Ivan: OK, but but, you know, in October 1973, OPEC announced that it was implementing
Ivan: a total oil embargo against countries
Ivan: that supported Israel at any point during the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
Ivan: which began after Egypt and Syria launched a large scale surprise attack.
Ivan: And that was, you know, a massive shock.
Ivan: The price of oil rose by nearly 300 percent.
Ivan: OK, from three dollars per barrel to nearly twelve dollars a barrel globally.
Ivan: Prices in the United States were significantly higher than the global average.
Ivan: Okay, so it was even higher than that.
Ivan: After it was implemented, the embargo caused an oil crisis, oil shock,
Ivan: which very short and terminally affects the global economy as well as global politics.
Ivan: So think about this right now.
Ivan: Current price of oil being at $70 a barrel. Imagine if, like,
Ivan: overnight, it went to, what, 200-plus dollars a barrel?
Ivan: What the impact on the economy would be?
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Ivan: Hey yeah you know that was so that was a brutal one a 73 with nixon but uh but
Ivan: this one here's a funny thing but here's the thing that was an external shock
Ivan: trump managed to do the same thing by doing it himself yeah.
Sam: There you go the rest of the charts on this one fewer state department briefings
Sam: than all these other presidencies significantly.
Ivan: Lower budget his budget request for the State Department. His budget request
Ivan: cut the budget for the State Department by 85%.
Sam: Federal funding for medical research, the lowest of all of these other recent
Sam: presidents. He's almost half the level.
Ivan: Medical research. We need some medical research.
Sam: His approval.
Ivan: We got RFK Jr., man. What do we need that medical research for?
Sam: Yeah. So then approval. This chart, we talked net approval before. This is just approval.
Sam: So straight approval-wise, Trump 2017 is still worse than 2025 if you don't
Sam: take the net and you just take the approval number.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: But it appears to be dropping faster than it did in 2017. And that's the last year.
Ivan: To be more effective.
Sam: Yes. And it's important to keep in mind, the people who do still approve of
Sam: Donald Trump, many of them think he's doing awesome and all this stuff is great.
Ivan: No, no.
Sam: Not all of them.
Ivan: No, no.
Sam: Not all.
Ivan: Wait, wait, wait. No. I've heard a whole bunch of them actually,
Ivan: no, no, no, say, oh, this really hurt me, this is so bad, but I still trust them anyway.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: Which is even dumber.
Ivan: It's just ridiculous. They're like, oh yeah, I lost my job because of him and
Ivan: I can't afford anything and you know we're economically hurt but hey, I still trust him.
Ivan: Damn it. He's my guy.
Ivan: Sounds like I'm right. You know, this sounds like honestly, and I'm not minimizing
Ivan: this in any way, like the victims of like spousal abuse.
Sam: Yeah, very much so.
Ivan: This is like daughter, spouse you know, behavior.
Ivan: I mean, because the reality is that everything he has done, the people he has
Ivan: fucked the worst, for the most part, are people that voted for him.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Think about Wall Street. Now, Wall Street, okay, wind up on Elia,
Ivan: we're going to go on the Trump bandwagon because, you know, he's going to cut
Ivan: regulations and stuff and whatever, going to cut taxes.
Ivan: Everything's going to be great. First guys that got fucked Fucked,
Ivan: fucked, fucked Wall Street.
Ivan: Both completely, you know, just absolutely annihilated them. You know?
Ivan: Farmers, okay? Farmers are getting killed by the tariffs.
Ivan: Killed, okay? This whole tariff trade is fucking screwing them.
Ivan: And they're still going around saying, Oh, Trump's my guy.
Ivan: Yeah, I can't sell my soybeans, but, you know. but hey you know Trump's still a genius.
Sam: Right of course he is okay you know obviously this segment is the 100 day mark
Sam: so what else do we want to say about how the first 100 days have been going anything um.
Ivan: I think the one thing on immigration, and do you have any stats there on deportations?
Ivan: How are they tracking versus?
Sam: I did not. Like, one other chart.
Ivan: That would be a good one to look up.
Sam: I will look at, while I'm talking, though, I have seen, by the way,
Sam: one of, like, the whole Dodge thing is, like, to cut federal spending.
Ivan: Oh, yeah.
Sam: And I have seen charts that, now,
Sam: future spending may still be affected, but there are charts of the actual dollar
Sam: outlays from the federal government for these first hundred days are higher. Are higher.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Are higher than, well, I don't think they're comparing from four years ago,
Sam: but compared to last year, 2025 compared to 2025.
Ivan: Compared to, exactly. They're higher.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: They're higher. Yes.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: So Doge is costing money and even like when you, you know, but also,
Ivan: even if you take that out, The savings that were realized, okay,
Ivan: in terms of savings realized versus savings promised,
Ivan: it's about, I guess it's the standard, like, Elon Musk promised to delivery
Ivan: ratio, which is over 90% less than what he promised, okay, all right?
Ivan: So that's, you know, par for the course for Elon in everything that we've seen
Ivan: the last decade at this point.
Ivan: So that part is there.
Ivan: And I think also that if you probably measure the cost of the economy of a lot
Ivan: of the things that he got rid of.
Ivan: In the end, even though you save the money, maybe technically for the second
Ivan: year after severance or whatever for that, the cost of the economy is probably going to be higher.
Ivan: I mean, people, you know, yeah, you're getting less federal spending,
Ivan: you know, and the return is that you're going to have more costs across the
Ivan: board from eliminating programs that actually helped.
Ivan: In many ways, like in terms of climate forecasts, in terms of,
Ivan: say, I'll give you an example, one that always adds cost. That's simple, okay?
Ivan: FAA understaffing, okay? All right? For example, say you save a few billion on that.
Ivan: The cost of the airlines, from airline delays, okay, that they,
Ivan: again, far outweighs whatever you spent there. Another great example.
Ivan: Oh, we're cutting, you know, people at the IRS, left and right, okay?
Ivan: Cutting people in the irs usually whatever you
Ivan: cut the multiplier in terms of lost revenue
Ivan: is way higher so the savings are bullshit because you're
Ivan: saving you know oh yo we're gonna save a
Ivan: few billion here and people expecting tax returns well that
Ivan: means that a lot of people that are you know are skating without paying their
Ivan: taxes because we got rid of the people that make sure they do so that right
Ivan: so many of these okay and and those are short-term costs as a matter of fact
Ivan: Stats are showing already the tax, you know, receipts outside,
Ivan: you know, outside of the stupid tariffs. They're down.
Ivan: The deficit is way higher than it's been. So so they haven't saved the damn dime.
Ivan: OK, from any of this. So that's that's a savings.
Ivan: You're getting any close on the deportations there?
Sam: Yeah, I have one number. This is from Forbes, which we've discussed before.
Ivan: Yeah, shaky.
Sam: Not shaky as a source, but they say that so far during Trump's first 100 days,
Sam: he has averaged 660 deportations a day.
Ivan: Okay, so 660 a day.
Sam: The average for all of last year for Biden was 742 a day.
Ivan: So bottom line is, once again, what he's done is be more cruel about them,
Ivan: but not more effective at removing people.
Sam: Right. Right.
Ivan: Yeah. Let's be arbitrary. Let's be unfair.
Ivan: You know, and all we want to do, because of course they're trying to do what
Ivan: the heck is this thing they keep talking about.
Sam: Now, I will say the same Forbes article
Sam: indicates that the Trump administration disputes those numbers and that the
Sam: actual deportation rate should be higher because they are reporting numbers
Sam: that also include deportation by the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection.
Sam: Like, I guess, turning people away at the border and counting those,
Sam: as well as counting people who self-deported using the CBP app.
Sam: So they're counting those. But I figure if it's apples to apples, then, you know.
Ivan: You're not deporting as many people, you know, and it's just,
Ivan: you're making it more cruel and arbitrary. That's all you're doing.
Sam: Right. And it's been pointed out too that like
Sam: this is not you know the the worst of the worst we're getting the horrible criminals
Sam: and kicking them out oh most of these are just normal people that the only thing
Sam: the only thing they've done wrong is the actual immigration offense that's it and.
Ivan: Or you know like all of these that marco rubio is threatening all these people
Ivan: that if you've got a visa and that we're going to revoke your visa if you did some kind of like,
Ivan: fuck, he's trying to revoke visas for people that got like speeding tickets.
Sam: Yeah. Or, you know, the big example of was people like the woman who wrote an editorial on Gaza.
Sam: But yeah, they're trying to do speeding tickets. They're trying to use any possible excuse.
Ivan: But again, the reality is that it goes back to, like I said,
Ivan: the numbers are not at anywhere near the pace that he's wanted to do it.
Ivan: All they've managed to do is, is because they're focusing so much on,
Ivan: they are so focused on the show more than the effectiveness as usual, okay?
Ivan: That is all that counts. You know, you have the photo op with Miss $3,000 purse,
Ivan: purse for $3,000, you know, in front of a jail wearing her $50,000,
Ivan: $60,000 Rolex, you know, in front of the fucking jail.
Ivan: Down there at the photo op that they do. That's the shit that they like.
Ivan: By the way, aside from that, for her being such a publicity fucking dog,
Ivan: the other day as I was crossing through TSA, all of a sudden, I hear her.
Ivan: I'm like, what the fuck? So they replaced this video that as far as I recall,
Ivan: I think it may have happened.
Sam: Oh, okay, a video. For a second, I thought you were going to say she was right there in person.
Ivan: Oh, fuck, Jesus Christ. Yeah, no, thank God, no. I'm like, you know,
Ivan: and they, on all the TVs now, when you're crossing DSA, they have a video showing her face,
Ivan: you know, telling you, you know, about the procedures to cross through security.
Ivan: And i was just like i am man i
Ivan: don't think that the last one had a video of
Ivan: the face of the homeland security secretary right but but she's such a fucking
Ivan: publicity hound that i guess she was like no like like trump give me a video
Ivan: oh by the way another cost saving thing did you see that trump apparently somehow
Ivan: has managed to finagle himself a new air force one i.
Sam: I saw uh what he's doing yes i wouldn't call it quite that but yeah i mean i
Sam: guess it will be if he flies in it it's air force one period.
Ivan: Right you know tell the story is that
Ivan: is that save a lot of money not as
Ivan: far as i can tell here's the thing about it and the worst thing is that he's
Ivan: going out is that there was the qatari government i many years ago had purchased
Ivan: a brand new 747-8 which is the latest version of the 747 passenger one, okay?
Ivan: And it outfitted for VIP trap, okay? It's an extremely, extremely posh,
Ivan: over-the-top, ridiculous interior, okay?
Ivan: And I know that the government, they've been trying to sell it for a long time, okay?
Ivan: They're just not using it. And they're like, eh, don't sell this thing. It's ridiculous, okay?
Ivan: So they've been shopping it, and apparently Trump went and saw this.
Ivan: And so somehow they managed to, I guess, acquire this aircraft in some way.
Ivan: And they're doing this conversion where they're adding all of this stuff to
Ivan: this aircraft so Trump can travel on it.
Ivan: And what they said is they're going to add it as a third aircraft to the fleet
Ivan: of Air Force Ones right now.
Ivan: Because they said that the air force had been looking to
Ivan: make sure that they could get a third aircraft because you know the other aircraft
Ivan: are old and they are old okay you know they're they're delivered in the 90s
Ivan: okay and that you know for reliability and whatever to make sure that we could
Ivan: have an aircraft that that can serve as a third aircraft okay you know i i really think that,
Ivan: this is bullshit. Trump is just obsessed on getting a new fucking airplane. Okay?
Ivan: He wants this new airplane. It looks a lot more luxurious than the current Air Force.
Sam: He wants his new colors.
Ivan: And he wants his new colors, okay, as well. He's insisting on changing the colors, okay?
Ivan: But I have a feeling, I have a feeling that because how complex any of these renovations,
Ivan: that need to be for him to be able to really use it, he's going to wind up again
Ivan: we're going to have three fucking air three fucking air force ones that are
Ivan: going to be under construction and none of them will be flyable anytime soon.
Sam: Okay didn't didn't they say also that like some of the things they wanted to
Sam: some of the requirements for air force one that aren't in the stock planes can't
Sam: be retrofitted if you're not building it from scratch to be this?
Ivan: I mean, it's very difficult to do so. You're basically having to fucking strip
Ivan: apart the whole fucking plane to do so.
Sam: And that's the problem. Are they going to let him fly it without all those things?
Sam: Because that's a safety concern too, but this administration doesn't seem to care about that shit.
Ivan: I mean, you know, look.
Sam: And the national security.
Ivan: Can I just say this? If Donald Trump puts himself at a security risk where he
Ivan: gets shot down because, you know, he's an idiot because he wants to fly a new
Ivan: fucking plane, I'm not going to be crying over it.
Ivan: Because he's such a fucking asshole.
Sam: And he doesn't put in, like, you know, whatever extra classified security stuff that Air Force One has.
Ivan: Air Force One has fucking military countermeasures, you know,
Ivan: that are a secret, you know, on that fucking plane.
Ivan: I don't see how they're going to take a fucking stock 747-8.
Sam: And we know this because of the movie with Harrison Ford.
Ivan: No because i have not seen i've.
Sam: Seen clips of it but i've not seen the.
Ivan: Movie it's on the list i i some speculate that there are some things that are
Ivan: shown in that movie that it has i think i'm guessing most not but i i am guessing
Ivan: you know things that they have said is like stuff that blocks like laser aiming
Ivan: and your radar jamming other kind of stuff like that I mean, the plane,
Ivan: you know, you know, you're carrying, you know,
Ivan: the it's he's not the leader of the free world anymore.
Ivan: You're carrying this, you know,
Ivan: the president of the United States on the thing. And so he's a target.
Ivan: And so obviously you want as many security measures. Look,
Ivan: the biggest mistake in this whole procurement thing with the fucking Air Force
Ivan: jets was this whole thing where they decided to try to instead of building two
Ivan: new airplanes to start with fucking refitting two. built.
Sam: So the plan was to refit them anyway.
Ivan: Well, not the Qatarian one.
Sam: No, but I mean the other ones that were part of the existing contract.
Ivan: They took two, because they were bitching about how much it was going to cost.
Ivan: And so they had, Boeing had produced two 747-8s for this Russian airline,
Ivan: okay, that never took delivery of them because they went bankrupt, okay?
Ivan: This was even before the same age and whatever, okay and
Ivan: they decided that those are the fucking place that they were going to refit those
Ivan: so that way technically supposed to save money and in the end it's it's they
Ivan: haven't saved any money the project's been you know it's it's made the project
Ivan: so go so much slower and right now there was a message said the speculation
Ivan: is that boeing won't be able to deliver these aircraft for another 10 years,
Ivan: I mean, 10 years, they said 2035, which to me seems crazy because this thing
Ivan: has been already going on for almost 10 years.
Sam: Trump's going to have to fly commercial.
Ivan: That would be great. You know, I'm sure that I will go, you know,
Ivan: you know, I'm sure that will go perfectly fine. He won't be bothered by anybody.
Sam: No, no. I mean, honestly, push comes to shove. The Air Force has lots of planes.
Ivan: The Air Force definitely has quite a lot not all of them are.
Sam: Like super comfy like Air Force One.
Ivan: But there are a lot of comfy ones I mean you know there's 757s that are VIP
Ivan: configuration there's other aircraft I mean you know there definitely are there are a number of
Ivan: aircraft that we have private jets, Gulfstreams 757s, 737s I mean the Air Force
Ivan: has a big ass fucking VIP fleet of aircraft, okay?
Ivan: But, you know, he wants this guy, you know, hey, I'm gonna make everybody,
Ivan: like, eat cake, but I, and have only two dolls instead of 30,
Ivan: because apparently kids get 30 dolls for Christmas, okay, as we found out.
Ivan: Of course. And I realize that they got, you know, most kids,
Ivan: you know, got 30 Barbie dolls, okay, but now they're gonna get two.
Ivan: And, you know, he's gonna get his, he wants his new, shiny 747. painted in its color.
Sam: Right, of course.
Ivan: It's the most ridiculous fucking thing ever.
Sam: And it'll have a big copy of his face and striving to be an asshole on the side.
Ivan: Oh, we'll get those shirts, yeah, for that, yeah.
Ivan: I like, yeah, that's a great idea, yeah, yeah, good, good, yeah, I like it.
Sam: Your 747 will have your face.
Ivan: Yes, yes, we're going to get a 747 for Dicker Muggies' quarter, 747.
Ivan: There's going to be a Dicker Muggies' quarter, 747, yes. You know,
Ivan: that sounds like just, you know, yeah.
Ivan: I mean, we need a 747. You know, I think there was a band, Iron Maiden,
Ivan: that had bought some old 747-400s that were using for a tour.
Ivan: But they did crash one of them.
Ivan: So I don't think, I really, you know, it's not a good omen, you know,
Ivan: to see that they crash one. I think it was in Chile or something that they crashed one.
Ivan: I don't, I think we can, I think we can just stick to commercial.
Sam: Okay. We can do that.
Ivan: We can do that. We can do that.
Sam: Okay, let's take a break, and then it's my side, my side, my turn, unless you have more.
Sam: You have more Trumpy first hundred days stuff that you're anxious to get out?
Ivan: Uh, no, no. Let's, let's go.
Sam: Okay. Here we go, then. Here comes the break. Now, remember,
Sam: you do not get to take this break. I am taking this break.
Sam: During this break, you need to recite Hamlet's soliloquy. Got this?
Sam: You got it, Seth? Okay, here we go.
Sam: Okay, so Yvonne had to step away for a second during the break,
Sam: so I will read Hamlet's soliloquy while waiting for him to get back.
Sam: To be or not to be, that is the question.
Sam: Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous
Sam: fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, to die, to sleep no more.
Sam: And by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
Sam: Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, to die, to sleep, to sleep,
Sam: per chance to dream. Ay, there's the rub.
Sam: When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.
Sam: There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life.
Sam: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Sam: the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
Sam: the pangs of dispersed love, the law's delay, the insolence of office,
Sam: and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might
Sam: his quietus make with a bare bodkin.
Sam: Who would Fardal's bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life but that the dread
Sam: of something after death,
Sam: the undiscovered country from whose born
Sam: no traveler returns puzzles the will
Sam: and makes us rather bear those ills we
Sam: have than fly to others that we know not of
Sam: thus conscious dust make cowards of us all and thus the native hue of resolution
Sam: is sickly door with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pith and
Sam: moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.
Sam: There we go and yvonne is back,
Sam: wow there you go stunning simply stunning hamlet soliloquy not from memory i did read it,
Sam: yeah i i only know like the first couple lines of it i do i do know to be or
Sam: not to be that is the question whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the
Sam: slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles
Sam: and by opposing end them i only get to that's as much as i don't know that's as much as i.
Ivan: Only get to the part where it says that is the question.
Sam: Okay alex is covering my eyes to be or not to be that is the question whether
Sam: it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Sam: or by opposing end them did i miss something there.
Ivan: You go did.
Sam: I miss something or to take arms against a sea of troubles i did miss one line
Sam: i missed one no well anyway better.
Ivan: Than what i could do.
Sam: So it's my turn I don't know.
Sam: And I don't feel like talking about Donald Trump.
Sam: I have a thing on the list about talking about trade and tariffs and all that
Sam: kind of stuff. I don't feel like it either.
Sam: We did have elections in Canada and actually Australia, both of which did not
Sam: go the conservative way.
Sam: We have some tech stuff with Apple and Meta. But no, what I feel like talking about is blue sky.
Sam: We haven't talked about the social media landscape in a long time.
Sam: And recently, like in the last few weeks, you know, for a long time,
Sam: I've had, I've had a blue sky account. I had a threads account.
Sam: I obviously, you know, I didn't actually cancel the X account,
Sam: but I haven't logged in in years at this point, I haven't logged in in forever.
Sam: And I've mostly been using my Mastodon account, but I was hearing more and more
Sam: activity around Blue Sky.
Sam: Like, when Threads first launched, a bunch of sort of the journalists and celebrities
Sam: and academics and such, they were all going to Threads.
Sam: But threads sort of plateaued and they threads also made a very conscious decision.
Sam: They said as much where they did not want to be a platform for breaking news.
Sam: So they were not optimizing it in a way to sort of surface those.
Sam: Now I was always just looking at the following feed anyway, not the recommended
Sam: algorithmic feed, but, but threads sort of seem to have plateaued for that kind of stuff.
Sam: And we got to a point where it seemed like all of the.
Sam: News organizations and reporters and scientists and all of those kinds of folks,
Sam: all of the internet personalities that once upon a time I followed on Twitter,
Sam: who had left Twitter and not ended up on Mastodon, it seemed like they were all going to Blue Sky.
Sam: So I decided to give it another try.
Sam: I mean, I'd still, both threads in Blue Sky, I'd been logging in every once
Sam: in a while and just sort of looking at it. But I wasn't taking it seriously.
Sam: I wasn't spending a lot of time there. I wasn't taking time to make sure I was
Sam: following the people I wanted to follow.
Sam: So a couple of weeks ago, I started doing that.
Sam: And also, I was prompted, like, you know, on Mastodon, I use Ivory as my main client.
Sam: The people who make Ivory, Tapabots, announced
Sam: like a month ago that they are going to be making a blue sky client
Sam: as well okay it's not okay you're not it's not actually
Sam: going to be out until sometime in the summer and even then
Sam: only in like alpha or something some sort of developer preview and so probably
Sam: late this year by the time it has general availability but i'm like okay i'll
Sam: try it and and for now i'll use the official client so i've been i've been playing
Sam: with blue sky more i've and and i've i've been And the main thing also,
Sam: when I was using Blue Sky before, I was only looking at it. I was not posting. I was not replying.
Sam: I was not favoriting. I was not engaging anyway on Blue Sky. I was only looking.
Sam: I've started to do all those things. I've started to make sure I'm checking
Sam: Blue Sky on a regular basis, make sure I'm following more and more people I'm interested in.
Sam: I've been, one of the things that Blue Sky allows is it lets you subscribe to
Sam: custom feeds that are created in a few different ways. I subscribe to a few of those.
Sam: So I have like, I have my regular following feed. I have another feed that's
Sam: just mutual followers, like people who I follow who also follow me back.
Sam: I have a feed that's my following feed, but only original posts, not reposts.
Sam: I've got some for news and for science and a few other things.
Sam: So I've been trying to make use of it.
Sam: I also, by the way, I set up the wiki of the day, Blue Sky, and set up the automation for that.
Sam: I also have set up a curmudgeon's corner, Blue Sky, but I haven't set up the
Sam: automation for that yet. We'll see it. I'll do it at some point.
Sam: And so it posts new episodes when they come out and stuff like that.
Sam: And by the way, I set those all up with my domain. So I'm no longer ablesmay.bsky.social on Blue Sky.
Sam: I'm just applesmay.com on social and the wiki of the day one is wiki of the
Sam: day.com on blue sky and curmudgeons corners curmudgeons hyphen corner.com on blue sky.
Sam: So go follow us even though there's nothing on the curmudgeons corner one yet.
Sam: Bottom line, my initial, I don't yet think I have a full experience that I want
Sam: there. I'm not following enough people yet.
Sam: And I probably want to have a few more rules. Like one thing I haven't found
Sam: on blue sky yet. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, is the equivalent of lists.
Sam: I make heavy use of lists, and I guess maybe I could make my own feed.
Sam: That would essentially be what a list is.
Sam: But in the previous platforms, in Twitter and then in Mastodon,
Sam: I've made heavy use of lists.
Sam: Specifically, I'll have all of the people I follow, and there's that feed,
Sam: but I make another feed that's just people who post about the news. Yeah.
Sam: And I actually spend most of my time on that list.
Sam: And so I don't quite have the equivalent of that yet.
Sam: I did subscribe to a news custom feed on Blue Sky, but it's not the same.
Sam: Because mine is people who talk about the news and post about the news a lot,
Sam: not just news stories from news sources, which is what that news feed is.
Sam: But the main thing is just, yeah, I'm finding a lot of the people who I used to follow on Twitter,
Sam: that I have not seen much of for a couple years now because they weren't on
Sam: Mastodon and I wasn't checking the other places on any sort of regular basis.
Sam: And I'm finding them now on Blue Sky, which I'm like, oh, that person.
Sam: I haven't seen them in a long time.
Sam: And it's kind of refreshing to see some of those people again.
Sam: And, you know, I'm still building up my experience there.
Sam: And, you know, I think, you know, So since I, and I guess Blue Sky is all the following feed.
Sam: I mean, some of these custom feeds are algorithmic feeds. Like there's a Discover
Sam: feed and there's a best of your followers.
Sam: There are a few different algorithmic feeds you can follow. But the default
Sam: is here's a chronological feed of the people that you follow.
Sam: And for that kind of feed to be good, you need to be following a lot of people.
Sam: And I'm still working on building up.
Ivan: Well, one of the things is that, I mean, I have been, and I guess maybe the
Ivan: reason why I think, I mean,
Ivan: you started jumping more Blue Sky because I had been using it more in the last
Ivan: six months, maybe a little bit more around there than I started using it,
Ivan: more than I had been using Mastodon.
Ivan: And, well, I must admit that at first I avoided Blue Sky because you remember
Ivan: how originally it was invite only.
Sam: It was invite only, and I had someone who was offering to give you an invite,
Sam: and you were like, I don't want it.
Ivan: Well the main reason I didn't want it is because to be clear I mean it was really
Ivan: like Jack Dorsey was one of the driving forces at fucking Blue Sky Jack Dorsey is another fucking,
Ivan: well that's the one thing that changed significantly because he
Ivan: was originally one of driving forces at Blue Sky and Jack Dorsey is a fucking
Ivan: asshole and I'm like no man I'm just you don't want to just trade one asshole
Ivan: for another exactly I'm like I know that it threads at Meta well I mean You know, yeah.
Ivan: Meta is complicated because, you know, Zuckerberg is a fucking grifter.
Ivan: But but now he's gone like full, you know, well, I don't know.
Ivan: I don't know if he believes any of his own bullshit, you know, Trump won.
Ivan: And he's like, oh, yeah, listen, here's my I'm taking my shirt.
Ivan: I'm a new shirt. I'm back. I know, baby. I'm like, oh, for the love of God,
Ivan: he's like, you know, ah, that's it.
Ivan: Zuck is like Marco Rubio. That's who he is.
Ivan: Fucking like exactly like him. He may not believe any of this bullshit or whatever
Ivan: whatnot, but he'll fucking put whatever shirt gets of money,
Ivan: he'll put that fucking thing on. Okay?
Ivan: And, you know, all these things with the moderation, and when Zuck and I saw
Ivan: this shit with the moderation changes and whatnot, I was like,
Ivan: oh, maybe we should go back and fucking look at Blue Sky.
Ivan: Especially since Dorsey left. Okay? And so I've been using it,
Ivan: and that's the one thing that I noticed.
Ivan: Like you just noticed, there's a lot of people that actually have been on Twitter
Ivan: that definitely have not jumped the threads that are there.
Sam: Or Mastodon, yep.
Ivan: Or Mastodon. And so, yes, it has been quite refreshing to see these people there.
Ivan: And I will tell you this, that I've still been using threads significantly.
Ivan: And look, there's been a lot of...
Ivan: At this point, almost everybody that I used to follow in Twitter regularly,
Ivan: or stuff that I was interested in, is available in these other places.
Ivan: There is only one thing that I will say that I miss, and it's many times when
Ivan: we're watching a sporting event, a live sporting event.
Ivan: So Twitter had these easy-to-follow threads related to the events.
Ivan: I haven't seen neither Blue Sky or threads have replicated that experience,
Ivan: that it works in the same way, where you're seeing people comment on real-time
Ivan: on what the fuck is going on.
Ivan: And Mastodon does have that. And actually, it does work decently.
Ivan: The thing is that there just aren't as many people there following those things.
Ivan: And so it's just not as engaging.
Ivan: But there definitely are. That is something that is far more workable in Macedon.
Ivan: But it's just the critical masses in there. So that is the one thing that I
Ivan: will say that is a little bit.
Ivan: But other than that, for the rest, I'm, you know, I've gone on Blue Sky.
Ivan: There's definitely a lot of people there that weren't on threads that are there.
Ivan: I mean, I only have like one list or one of these like featured like,
Ivan: you know, feeds that I'm following.
Ivan: I'm not following more I haven't found like more than
Ivan: I that I really like I for the most part what I
Ivan: did is I do think that I did start following a lot of people and I'm getting
Ivan: a lot of what they're posting which is interesting to me so I did take care
Ivan: take time to do that and so that's been so that's been the way that I've been
Ivan: using it but you know look I think that these will evolve yeah,
Ivan: positively uh in some way i'm thinking uh the lady who leads uh blue sky i see
Ivan: her face i can't remember her name she seems trying to not replicate the same
Ivan: mistakes done at at shitter.
Ivan: Um and so you know for now it's a much better place to be than at that than
Ivan: definitely at shitter, that's for sure.
Sam: You're thinking of Jay Graber, by the way, the CEO of Blue Sky.
Ivan: Jay Graber. Okay, there you go. I don't remember her name. I can see her face,
Ivan: but I don't, you know, I'm terrible with names and faces. Like, but fucking Jesus.
Ivan: So that's, yeah, I mean, I am using it quite a lot in recent past.
Sam: The one thing that's getting me, though, and to be honest here, is the split.
Sam: Like, using more than one is a pain.
Ivan: Well, yeah. I mean, That is the one thing that happened with,
Ivan: with, with, with Elon's takeover that, that the audience has been fragmented
Ivan: significantly, you know, you're not on one place following, you know.
Sam: I mean, I feel like at this point I'm, I'm checking, I'm checking Facebook itself.
Sam: I'm checking threads. I'm checking Mastodon. I'm checking Blue Sky.
Sam: Now I had been in a mode of like Mastodon was where I was all the time.
Sam: And I would check the others like once a day or twice a day or something.
Sam: Whereas, whereas Mastodon, I'd be checking like at least hourly, you know?
Ivan: Right, right, right.
Sam: But whereas now it's more like.
Sam: I'm checking both blue stick, blue sky and Mastodon on sort of a roughly hourly
Sam: basis and the others may be daily and then tick tock.
Sam: It's a different kind of thing, but then, then tick tock. But, um, well, well.
Ivan: Well, you say that it's different. It's different because it's video form,
Ivan: but the reality is a lot of people are getting the information, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: It still takes time and it's a different format, but like if you,
Sam: if you talk about what sucks up more of my time, tick tocks right up there with the rest.
Sam: But if you, but for this kind of stuff, it really is the text-based platforms I'm talking about.
Sam: But even then it's like, okay. And if I'm going to participate,
Sam: if I'm going to repost something, or if I'm going to answer something,
Sam: do I, if I post something, do I post it in both places?
Sam: Do I post it in one? Do I reply in one? Do I reply another?
Sam: And for the most part, I'm thinking like wherever I see it first is where I'm
Sam: going to interact with it. But that then splits my presence too.
Sam: And yeah, I don't, I don't know. it's it's like.
Ivan: Well look and i i was checking to
Ivan: see what i'm using like on my uh screen time oh
Ivan: yeah let me check my screen time and this confirms what i
Ivan: what i was what i was pretty confident of okay
Ivan: i am using threads a lot okay but almost about the same amount the place where
Ivan: i'm getting most of my news is actually the apple news app okay yeah i i am
Ivan: like the the reality is that there are a number of reasons why that is.
Ivan: Apple has actually improved. One thing that was annoying about the Apple News
Ivan: app in recent time is that it's being far...
Ivan: Far faster at displaying to you recent news events, okay?
Ivan: Because it used to be that when you scrolled, it wasn't unless you dug down
Ivan: into latest news in certain areas or whatever, it's gotten way better at,
Ivan: hey, something's happening like right now, and boom, it's right there on the
Ivan: feed. It's right there on the feed.
Ivan: And it's a place where the great thing about the news app is that,
Ivan: look, I follow all these different publications, okay,
Ivan: for news, and it's consolidating like
Ivan: into for you for example i got bloomberg story
Ivan: npr story espn story a guard guardian story
Ivan: palm beach post washington post reuters you know you know all these news on
Ivan: and and on the things that i selected for me that are you know relevant and
Ivan: timely okay and it's not just from one source of news okay yeah i've never.
Sam: Taken the time to like figure out how to use apple news effectively.
Ivan: I spent a lot of time figuring out which was
Ivan: to follow law whatever so like when
Ivan: i look here like you know stories that came out in the last you know recently
Ivan: for example multiple stories on what warren buffett spoke about is this morning
Ivan: on tariffs for example that's something you didn't want to talk about you know
Ivan: a story nine minutes ago from here palm beach county you know something about
Ivan: what to know about alligator mating season.
Ivan: Okay. Very critical for us to know, like over here, you know,
Ivan: but, but number of timely stuff here, something that Trump just said a little
Ivan: bit ago, Trump draws criticism after posting an AI image of himself as the Pope,
Ivan: you know, that that's been going around. That's a, it's a good one.
Ivan: Global factories over struggling to overcome Trump tariffs.
Ivan: So, you know, the F1 races are on right now.
Ivan: I've got this. There's a number of stories about what's going on in the racing in the last few hours.
Ivan: I took a lot of time picking which ones, subjects, doing that and whatnot.
Ivan: In order for me to get news, it's better.
Ivan: I will say that the one thing that I also like, that I realize that Apple News
Ivan: Plus, is they expand a lot which magazines are included.
Ivan: You get the Atlantic. you get the new yorker you get new york magazine you know
Ivan: all of these that have to have a separate subscription no they're all included in the.
Sam: And this is this is something by the by the way like i think it was new york
Sam: magazine that had the profile on fetterman a couple days ago and yes exactly and i got.
Ivan: And they got new york magazine and i read.
Sam: A lot and and here's well my story is like i saw that reference several times
Sam: i clicked the link there was the paywall so i couldn't read it and i was like
Sam: oh well i guess i'm not going to read it but and then i realized I said, I did say to myself,
Sam: you know, you probably have this in Apple news and can probably read the whole
Sam: article, but I was like, oh, but that's a pain. I'm not going to bother.
Ivan: Didn't I share the link on the Fetterman article?
Sam: I don't think we shared that on the Commudgeons Corner Slack.
Sam: Like, I was going to share it, but I didn't find one without the paywall,
Sam: and I didn't bother to look at Apple News.
Ivan: Okay, well, I know I did read it, and I realize I'll make it easy for you because I didn't read it.
Sam: So for anybody who doesn't know what we're talking about, there was an article
Sam: on Fetterman's mental health, which is apparently not good.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: That's the subject.
Ivan: And that it's been deteriorating over the last couple of years.
Ivan: Significantly and there was like and.
Sam: His staff is seriously concerned about his condition and whether.
Ivan: And there was an incident there was an incident recently there
Ivan: was like also on what the heck where the heck was it on on it
Ivan: was like on some social media here it is john fetterman struggle here it is
Ivan: there we go there see so this is the thing i'm getting you know all of this
Ivan: shit i'm getting through here right and you know and i'm not having to pay seven
Ivan: i'm not having to go through seven different sites and subscribe to seven different subscriptions.
Sam: You pay for the one bundle to Apple. It's not like you don't pay,
Sam: but you pay Apple the one price and you get a whole bunch.
Ivan: You pay Apple the one bundle and you get I mean, that's the one thing.
Ivan: It's like we're talking about cable bundles and the non-bundling, whatever.
Ivan: Fuck. You know what? I'm getting the bundle here. I'm not having to subscribe
Ivan: to each one of these damn publications separately. I'm going to Apple.
Ivan: I get my News Plus. I get all these really good publications.
Ivan: You know, so I just shared the Fender Runner article for you so you can go like
Ivan: read it. So, but, but yeah, so, so I also, by the way, here's another one.
Ivan: That's a big one that's in here.
Ivan: Wall Street journals included no extra chart. Okay. All right.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Wall Street journal in, in, in Apple news plus. And that's the reason why I
Ivan: share a lot of journal articles. It's included in there at no extra charts.
Ivan: And that in and of itself is 300. That's a subscription of $300 a year that
Ivan: I don't pay anymore because I realized, Oh, it's free at Apple news.
Ivan: Fuck this. I'm not paying.
Ivan: I'm not paying for the wall street journal subscription. It's in here for free.
Ivan: So, you know, so that's, that's the one that I've been using.
Ivan: I did spend, I will tell you that I did spend quite a lot of time in,
Ivan: in the section picking what are my favorites, what things I want,
Ivan: not blah, blah, blah, the channels and topics,
Ivan: you know, and blocking shit that I didn't like, you know, it's not the best interface for that.
Ivan: I will say that they should, they need to work on that.
Ivan: And one thing that I, that I've said before is that they should have a way to
Ivan: block certain subjects.
Sam: Is there a single feed where you just get all the magazines you followed?
Ivan: Yes. Okay. Yes.
Sam: You'll have to show me how.
Ivan: That's in the News Plus tab. That's where you get that.
Sam: It's not in the following tab.
Ivan: No, it's in the News Plus tab. The magazines are in the News Plus tab.
Sam: In my magazine? Where is that? Where is that?
Ivan: Yeah. If you get in the, no, there is the, well, you get the best of News Pluses
Ivan: selected, the magazines that you select, and it'll show you the ones that are, you know.
Sam: Okay. I'll experiment later. But I did, by the way, look up my...
Sam: So this isn't entirely representative because last week was the week I had surgery, but whatever.
Ivan: They don't have the best interface. I will say this, but the thing is,
Ivan: they need to approve this.
Ivan: But everything that you want is there, and you don't have to pay for 15 fucking
Ivan: different subscriptions, okay?
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: And it does learn from what you read.
Sam: Okay. Excellent. So let me give you, I was just going to give you my screen
Sam: time report for the last complete week, which again is not representative because
Sam: it's the week I had my surgery, but whatever.
Sam: And these, I'm ignoring all the other apps. These are just the social or communications related apps.
Sam: The order. TikTok was number one last week.
Sam: Then messages for like texting back and forth with family and stuff.
Sam: Then iCatcher, which is the podcast app I use.
Sam: Then YouTube TV for watching live TV.
Ivan: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: Followed by Ivory for Mastodon and Blue Sky for Blue Sky.
Sam: And looking, by the way, they are so close together last week.
Sam: Ivory, six hours and 53 minutes. Blue Sky, six hours and 47 minutes.
Sam: So last week, I was pretty much splitting them evenly.
Sam: Then Slack at six hours, 31 minutes. And then mail, YouTube,
Sam: then Facebook, and now we're really, and then threads, LinkedIn.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: We're getting to really small amounts of minutes now, but yeah, so that's it.
Sam: So anyway the social media world.
Ivan: Is continuing to evolve it's very fragmented i mean and the news world is continuing to.
Sam: Evolve as well yeah.
Ivan: I mean everything is very fragmented right now we talked about this about you
Ivan: know overall you know that that how people consume everything is so fragmented
Ivan: and unfortunately to a certain to a certain extent it's also a reason why,
Ivan: people to a certain extent now what the facts
Ivan: are becomes so difficult to
Ivan: to discuss with people because of
Ivan: what they what they what they watch and consume and because a lot of people
Ivan: are i think people are so susceptible to just propaganda as i've mentioned before
Ivan: and it's like you know they they go to i mean they hear bullshit and so many
Ivan: of them are just so open to,
Ivan: not even questioning, without question believing it.
Ivan: I will say, we do, you know, I mean, how many times have you and I not seen
Ivan: a story that we, something that is fake, but that is something that we would like to be true.
Sam: Okay?
Ivan: That's fake, that we look at it and we say, nah, man, that can't be true.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would be great, but it's like, nah.
Sam: Well, having Having said that, both of us have occasionally been fooled.
Ivan: We have been fooled.
Sam: Last week on the show, you brought up an example, and I'm like, that's fake.
Sam: And you're like, oh, damn it, it is fake when you looked into it.
Ivan: Yeah, but that's my point. My point is you point out to me it's fake.
Ivan: It's not like I go and I start getting into a fucking argument with you telling you how it's true.
Ivan: You're a fucking liar, you know? You're part of the fucking mainstream media, blah, blah, blah.
Ivan: No, you're like, point out. that's exactly my
Ivan: point i go and i share it i'm like that's fake and i'm
Ivan: like oh man i wanted that to
Ivan: be true but okay no it's it's not it's
Ivan: not true and i i think that's that you know we try to you know if you show me
Ivan: how it's not true i'm very open to understanding how even it may be something
Ivan: that i really really want to be true oh fuck it's not true so i still remember
Ivan: the one that we love the most,
Ivan: but we knew it had to be not true. The Alpha server. Alpha Bank.
Sam: We knew from the moment that came up, we were like, that's nonsense.
Ivan: It's ridiculous.
Sam: Especially when they started listing details, it's like, that's just stupid. No.
Ivan: Right. No.
Sam: Alpha Bank.
Ivan: Sounds great, but no, it's not true.
Sam: But I'm sure they are selling children
Sam: for child prostitution out of the basement of a pizza parlor in D.C.
Ivan: You're sure about that?
Sam: I'm sure about that.
Sam: I went to that pizza parlor with my dad and stepmom a few years back.
Sam: After this, it all happened. I went to that pizza parlor.
Sam: And I can confirm there are pages full of children all over the place.
Ivan: Ah, so that's part of the experience.
Sam: Actually, there is no basement at all. It was good pizza.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: It was good pizza.
Ivan: I mean, I know that I've been in the area many times, but I don't know.
Ivan: I don't know if I went to that place.
Sam: It's sort of like It's, it's, it's like, it's Comet Pizza, by the way,
Sam: if I remember the name correctly.
Ivan: It's Comet Pizza.
Sam: It's just a hole in the wall pizza place. It's not like some high end fancy place.
Ivan: Oh, I know, I know.
Sam: It's just, it's just like.
Ivan: But you, but you, okay, but there were no cases, but you met with a cabal, right?
Sam: Oh, yes. Met with a cabal, had all kinds of other things.
Ivan: Well, that's good. As long as you meet with a cabal, then you.
Sam: Okay, I want to say one other social media related thing before I wrap up.
Sam: The the other thing about social media that i've
Sam: noted like some of the sites like like blue sky is not
Sam: you know facebook almost alone
Sam: out of these was actually intended for you
Sam: to keep up with friends and family originally yeah they
Sam: they've moved on from that but all these other sites like twitter blue
Sam: sky mouse no whatever that's not what they're built for they're built
Sam: no no that not at all they're they're meant
Sam: for individuals broadcasting to the world and for you to consume content from
Sam: people broadcasting from the world it's not meant to keep up with like i'm not
Sam: going to expect to find out what's going on in yvonne's life by looking on blue
Sam: sky yo that is just not where i'll find it okay.
Ivan: I see what have i reposted or like because i maybe there are some i wonder what
Ivan: have i posted so based on my blue sky profile or what i've posted let's see
Ivan: what would you conclude that up doing if this is what you thought.
Ivan: Okay, posts. Let's see. I mentioned something about primary Democrats.
Ivan: Okay. The next one was, I reposted something about ICE.
Ivan: There was a story about how Mr. Seymour Wiener, and by the way,
Ivan: this is the true name of this person. Okay. This is actually a real name.
Ivan: New York Men's announced Tuesday that noted fan and World War II veteran Seymour Wiener has died.
Ivan: So, yeah, the guy was actually i i got to try to check picture of me with my
Ivan: son was a baby something about kilomar abrigo and back from this thing you would
Ivan: see me sitting in there at an office like actually going to an office you would
Ivan: think i work in an office and you know i don't think you'd get much out of,
Ivan: knowing anything about me on blue sky other than a pair of like do you like
Ivan: the movie stripes because what I said was about Mike Waltz was named to the
Ivan: instead of like being fired Trump does this thing where.
Ivan: Puts people in, like, I don't know, like, who was it? Don Jr.'s ex-girlfriend
Ivan: sent her as ambassador to Greece.
Ivan: I guess it's kind of like he dispatches them somewhere, okay?
Ivan: He doesn't get rid of you, but he puts you in some job just very far away.
Ivan: And so I guess Mike Waltz is going to be now a U.N. ambassador,
Ivan: which, you know, knowing how much he cares for the U.N., he basically might
Ivan: as well have put him in Siberia.
Ivan: And so the one thing is that I was, like, remembering this line from the movie
Ivan: Stripes where it told, like, the captain of the movie that if he screwed that
Ivan: up, he was going to assign him to a weather station above the Arctic Circle.
Ivan: And that would be like, you know, what in the past, somebody,
Ivan: if you did something like Mike Waltz did, that would be the right,
Ivan: that would be the thing that I would expect.
Ivan: They were probably in a prison, probably, in the Arctic Circle.
Ivan: But, you know, we're talking about Air Force One security, signal,
Ivan: and all of this stuff right now, apparently.
Ivan: I mean, by the way, one thing that we didn't talk about, before we go.
Sam: I still have a thing to finish on social media, but go ahead.
Ivan: Did you see that Mike Waltz getting fired and they had a screenshot.
Ivan: They took a picture of what the fuck he was looking at in the stupid cabinet
Ivan: meeting and he was still using Signal!
Sam: Well, and also people discovered that's actually not Signal.
Sam: It's a Signal clone on the Signal interface who is built for the purpose of
Sam: archiving the messages. Which means
Sam: by definition, it is also sending your messages to a third party to save.
Sam: And the company who makes the signal clone for this purpose is tied to Israeli intelligence.
Ivan: Why are these guys so stupid? Why are they so stupid?
Ivan: In their zeal to avoid actual scrutiny here, they're basically just giving everything
Ivan: away to the Russians, to the Israelis, to whoever the fuck wants that.
Sam: Uh-huh.
Ivan: I saw Marco Rubio using it on there. They had, I mean, yeah,
Ivan: fucking everybody on that damn thing.
Sam: Right. Anyway, the thing I was going to say about social media is that everything
Sam: is moving away from actually like keeping up with friends and family.
Sam: Like these other platforms aren't meant for it. Facebook was originally meant
Sam: for it, but long ago moved away from that.
Sam: So I just wanted to mention, one of my personal projects right now is intended as a low volume,
Sam: longer form way of specifically keeping in touch with friends and family. Now, I want to be clear.
Sam: This is something I'm sparing maybe like an hour a week to work on.
Sam: So it won't actually be ready to show.
Ivan: It won't be ready by the time I'm done.
Sam: Exactly. Like it won't even be ready to show like in an alpha version to interested
Sam: parties for like many, many, many months, probably.
Sam: But for anybody who's interested, I have a splash page only with the basic information of the concept.
Sam: It's on Robin letter.com. R O B I N L E T T E R.
Ivan: You know, you could share a link on, you know.
Ivan: This thing we use.
Sam: The Slack?
Ivan: Ah, that's it. Yes, we have this thing called the Slack.
Sam: I was bringing it up on the show
Sam: because of the fact that we were sort of talking about adjacent stuff.
Sam: But it's not ready. It's just a splash page. I can share it on there.
Sam: You can share it on there. Whatever.
Sam: But I was going to wait to share it until I actually had functionality to share. All I have is like a bad.
Ivan: Nobody told. Well, of course, nobody, you know, probably nobody listening at
Ivan: the end of the show anyway.
Sam: But there you go. But like I have bad pixel art of a Robin that I did myself
Sam: and I have a couple of paragraphs.
Sam: That's all that's there. A couple of paragraphs about the concept.
Sam: I have built some more behind the scenes, but it's all just like infrastructural
Sam: crap. There's no actual functionality to share yet.
Sam: Like I said, it'll probably be months before that. But the basic idea is you
Sam: have a circle of friends that you share updates with sequentially when it's
Sam: your turn instead of just a free for all.
Sam: And it emulates a really old way of communicating that people had.
Sam: And I thought it was interesting, so I'm spending some spare time on it.
Ivan: Well, one thing that I did here, and I haven't seen this yet,
Ivan: but I thought that they said that in Facebook, and oh, there it is,
Ivan: they have a friends tab now.
Sam: They have a friends feed now again. Now, what they did, they have added back in a friends tab.
Sam: And what it is, is it's still an algorithmic feed, but it's an algorithmic feed of only your friends.
Ivan: But without knowing, but that's good because it's really, you know,
Ivan: that's, yeah, I mean, that works because it does the part.
Sam: I just wanted to share, though, and the instructions I'm going to give are the iOS mobile app.
Sam: But there was a way to get this anyway, non-algorithmic, just actually like
Sam: chronological, reverse chronological only.
Sam: If you are on the iOS Facebook app, bottom right-hand corner says menu. You click that.
Sam: And then you get a page. On that page, there's a button that says feeds.
Sam: If you click feeds, then the top bar has options, all favorites,
Sam: friends, groups, and pages.
Sam: If you click the friends one, then you have a reverse chronological feed of
Sam: everything your friends are posting.
Sam: So like the algorithmic feed, even the friends tab, is trying to selectively
Sam: choose from what your friends post for the things that are most interested,
Sam: that might be most interesting. It's not reverse chronological.
Sam: They're cycling it and bringing things to the top based on what they think you'll most likely respond to.
Sam: The instructions I just gave, menu, feeds, friends, will take you to a proper
Sam: reverse chronological feed of everything your friends have done.
Sam: There's an equivalent on desktop.
Sam: But this is several clicks deep. It's kind of buried.
Sam: But for a couple years now, whenever I do go to Facebook, that's what I do.
Sam: Sometimes I use the menu feeds all to also get things posted in my groups and my pages.
Sam: And that's fine too. But I get the reverse chronological feed. I get to see everything.
Sam: And if I want to filter it down to friends only, I just click over to friends.
Sam: So it is there. It's just buried.
Sam: The new friends tab is an improvement though. You can at least go to just your friends.
Sam: It's still not reverse chronological, which bugs me a little bit.
Ivan: But hell, it's better than, you know, being cluttered with all this other shit.
Sam: You know. You could say there are advantages to that, too, because it surfaces
Sam: sort of the thing from a day and a half ago that you missed that is getting
Sam: a lot of traction from comments and such that you might miss if you're only
Sam: doing reverse chronological and you're not diligent to go back down to the last thing you saw.
Sam: So there are advantages of algorithmic feeds there, but being just friends is
Sam: good. Now, of course, Mark Zuckerberg was on TV saying, you know,
Sam: most people only have three friends, but there's demand for 15.
Ivan: Oh, fuck that.
Sam: So we can make up the difference with 12 AI friends and that'll make everyone happy. Right?
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Anyway, we'll wrap it up. Go check out RobinLadder.com. If you are at all interested
Sam: in the concept, send me an email and I'll include you whenever I do get to the
Sam: point where there's something actually to see.
Sam: Like I said, I only have like an hour a week to work on this stupid thing,
Sam: so it's going to be a long time, but whatever. Email me if you're interested.
Sam: Okay, let's wrap this sucker up. What is it?
Sam: Oh, yeah, curmudgeons-corner.com. Which, by the way,
Sam: we have curmudgeons-corner.com because somebody a long, long time ago actually
Sam: took curmudgeons-corner.com without the hyphen.
Sam: And it had some sort of placeholder page.
Sam: The domain without the hyphen is now officially for sale for $2,695.
Sam: So if any of you out there want to buy it for us feel free,
Sam: you can get curmudgeonscorner.com is available for purchase for $26.95 and we
Sam: can start using that instead of curmudgeons-corner.com for my own purposes,
Sam: let me just say right out there I would pay a little bit for curmudgeonscorner.com
Sam: without the hyphen, not $26.95,
Sam: I could see going up to $100 or $200. Yeah.
Ivan: Do they have an offer button?
Sam: No. They do let you do a payment plan where you can pay $225 a month for $12.
Ivan: No, no, no, no, no. Fuck them. No, no, no.
Sam: There's a 30-day money-back guarantee. No.
Ivan: Yeah, no, no, thank you.
Sam: No. Anyway, we're at curmudgeons hyphen corner. And by the way,
Sam: there's at least one more curmudgeons corner.
Sam: There's a curmudgeons corner podcast on YouTube.
Sam: That is not us. That, that has been, you know, been around a while, get some viewers.
Sam: I've never watched an entire episode of their show, but you know, it's out there.
Sam: So we're not the only one. So maybe they'll buy the 2695 domain name.
Ivan: Oh God.
Sam: They're they're only on youtube as far as i can tell right now and
Sam: there there are a few others but anyway we are at
Sam: curmudgeon's hyphen corner.com and there
Sam: you can see our archives you can see all the ways
Sam: to contact us you can see links to our our facebook our youtube etc i still
Sam: have not linked to the tiktok and i i'm getting further and further behind point
Sam: posting the tiktoks like i haven't posted the tiktoks for last week yet i'll
Sam: post them before i put this episode out but I'm getting behind because they're
Sam: not getting many views lately. So maybe I'll stop. I don't know.
Sam: Anyway, you can find all those things. You can also find a link to our Patreon
Sam: where you can donate the $26.95 to us or anything else you would like to.
Sam: At various levels, we will send you, we will mention you on the show.
Sam: We'll send you a postcard. We'll send you a mug.
Sam: And I mentioned earlier that Ed got his mug.
Sam: The postcards are not out yet. However, I have written the two postcards for Pete and Brett.
Ivan: There you go. I've made progress.
Sam: I took the week off after the surgery. And I haven't felt too bad,
Sam: so I've been able to do stuff.
Sam: And I'll tell you, I didn't need to take the time off, apparently.
Sam: Apparently, there was a risk.
Ivan: It was the best thing to do. It was the best thing. It was the best thing to
Ivan: do. They said take it easy for a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: And I have taken it easy for a week. I've just, I've watched a bunch of TV and
Sam: movies with Alex. I've just laid around the house.
Sam: I've done some work on my personal projects. I've done, I've done some laundry,
Sam: you know, and, and honestly,
Sam: like completely independent surgery or not the mental health break of like just
Sam: relaxing for a week, very much needed.
Sam: It was, uh, and so, so anyway, I wrote the postcards, but the next step is to
Sam: send them to Yvonne for him to add his comments, and then he'll send them out to actual people.
Sam: And I haven't done that yet, but I hopefully will by the end of this weekend.
Sam: Anyway, I am eventually getting to these things. It took a while, but I'm getting to them.
Sam: It took me having surgery to have time to get to them, but you know, whatever.
Sam: Anyway, importantly, on the Patreon at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask
Sam: us, we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and
Sam: others are hanging out throughout the week, sharing links, all of that kind of stuff. So Yvonne,
Sam: What's a highlight for the curmudgeon's quarter slot from the curmudgeon's quarter slot?
Ivan: I'm going to give you two quick ones. Two quick ones. One was $800,000 in dimes
Ivan: spilled onto a North Texas highway.
Ivan: Somehow there was a truck that had, I mean, this is 8 million dimes.
Ivan: I'm trying to understand, how the fuck were you hauling?
Ivan: Where the hell did you get 8 million dimes from? How the fuck were you hauling them? It's like crazy.
Sam: Well, presumably it was a shipment from like the Mint.
Ivan: From the Federal Reserve to the Mint, I guess. But geez, man,
Ivan: 8 million dimes, 8 million dimes.
Ivan: I don't even remember the last time I saw a dime. I got to admit.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: It's been so long. Okay. So that was like one that was interesting.
Ivan: And then there was this thing where I'm not sure which stores are the ones that
Ivan: have like this Amazon kitchen brand. Okay.
Ivan: But they had this thing at the store. Okay. It said, it's a rap,
Ivan: and it said, Lorem Ipsum Duller and Cheddar.
Ivan: With Lorem Ipsum Duller, I am, no mummy, no mummy, nim osimod tinsidunt,
Ivan: perishable, keep refrigerated.
Ivan: So, you know, I mean, I think the one thing is,
Ivan: well it's you know obviously somebody forgot
Ivan: to uh complete uh fill out their template but
Ivan: you know that lorem ipsu door thing has been
Ivan: around like i i remember this is like
Ivan: being like a random like scribble on like microsoft word in order to show you
Ivan: where the word of words went and it has no meaning as far as i know whatsoever
Ivan: i looked it up there is no meaning to this but for some reason automatically
Ivan: you know that it's somebody that you you know that this is like somebody typed this out.
Ivan: Somebody went and they had a template, they were supposed to erase something
Ivan: and put it in, and boom, you wound up with So according to Wikipedia.
Sam: The lorem ipsum text is derived from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of Cicero's
Sam: De Finibus Banorum et Malorum.
Sam: The physical source may have been the 1914 Loeb Classic Library edition of that
Sam: thing, where the Latin text presented on the left hand,
Sam: even pages, breaks off on page 34 and continues on page 36 with Lorem Ipsen
Sam: suggesting that the galley type of the page was mixed up to make the dummy text today.
Sam: So it's not actually a quote from that text. No, it's not. It's from that text
Sam: and then scrambled in some way.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: And so the the relevant section of Cicero is printed in the sources reproduced
Sam: below with the fragments used in lorem ipsum highlighted.
Sam: So lorem ipsum doesn't even like lorem starts in the middle of a word.
Sam: It's del lorem ipsum in the text.
Ivan: Yeah, I know. It's not exactly not even a word. Yeah.
Sam: Right. And so it's like it's if you look at the highlighting here,
Sam: it's just it skips a whole bunch of words. It's whatever.
Sam: But it's apparently taken from that source. there you go so so so very tasty all.
Ivan: Of some it'll learn of some dollar and cheddar rack.
Sam: Alex is requesting that i give one other thing
Sam: for people to take a look at which is i shared
Sam: on the curmudgeon's corner slack a few minutes ago but is also posted on youtube
Sam: i've been trying to post it on tiktok but tiktok's been giving me trouble so
Sam: it's not on tiktok yet so i don't know if it'll show up there but alex entitled
Sam: it daddy torture video so if you go to YouTube and search on Abulsme, A-B-U-L-S-M-E.
Sam: Don't search on Samuel Minter because there are lots of Samuel Minters.
Sam: But if you search on Abulsme, one of the first things that comes up will be
Sam: the Samuel Minter channel that you can click through and see everything on the channel.
Sam: But also, if you're listening to this soon after I post it, probably the second
Sam: video or within the first few videos is going to be daddy torture video anyway.
Sam: I just posted it a couple hours before recording.
Sam: Basically, the bottom line here is we needed Alex to sign a medical form because
Sam: legally here in Washington state, if you're over 13, there are certain things
Sam: that your parents cannot do for you.
Sam: And there are certain things that the doctor's office isn't even allowed to
Sam: talk to the parents unless they have written permission from the child.
Sam: So we needed to get the form that gave us written permission to talk to the
Sam: doctor in addition to Alex.
Sam: And Alex did not, well.
Sam: Alex demanded extortion. I don't know.
Sam: He, he would, he would not sign without us giving us something significant.
Sam: There were a couple, there were a couple of things he asked for first from his
Sam: sister. Her, his sister did not give him what he wanted.
Sam: So when we were at a diner, he indicated that he would sign the papers.
Sam: If I drank slash ate a concoction, he made it the diner.
Sam: Made out of all the random shit that's on a diet on a diner table he's hitting
Sam: me because i said shit mixed all up together so we've got creamer we've got
Sam: french fries we've got hot sauce we've got salt we've got pepper we've got butter you.
Ivan: Have to give it a try you have to drink the whole fucking thing i.
Sam: Have to drink the whole thing and you can see the video you can see me do it i i did it.
Sam: He signed the papers, but it is a 10 minute long video of me forcing myself
Sam: to consume this absolutely disgusting concoction and to try to do it without throwing up spoilers.
Sam: I did not throw up, but I make quite a few funny faces while I'm,
Sam: while I'm eating this stuff or drinking, eating, drinking slash eating.
Sam: Cause like there was a bunch you could drink, but then there was stuff left
Sam: at the bottom that you had to eat.
Sam: Like I ate an entire like sphere of butter straight, you know, things like that.
Sam: And the concoction itself was absolutely disgusting. Anyway,
Sam: he wants everybody to like watch the video. So there you go.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: And with that, we are out of here. Thank you for joining us for yet another
Sam: at Curmudgeon's Corner. Have a great week.
Sam: If all goes well, we'll be back next time.
Sam: Stay safe. Be good. Blah, blah, blah. Goodbye. Say goodbye, Yvonne.
Ivan: Bye!
Sam: There we go. Here comes the music.
Ivan: That would help.
Sam: I was actually worried that YouTube and TikTok and these places would block
Sam: it just because the name is Daddy Torture Video.
Ivan: That could be a problem.
Sam: Torture. I mean, it was kind of torture.
Ivan: Well, the torture right now is very popular in this country anyway.
Sam: There you go. Okay, I'm hitting stop.