Sam: Greetings.
Ivan: Salutations.
Sam: Okay, shall we start?
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Okay, here it goes. Transcription
Sam: by CastingWords
Sam: Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday,
Sam: August 9th, 2025.
Sam: It is just seconds after 2UTC as we're starting to record. I am Sam Menter.
Sam: Yvonne Boas here. Hello, Yvonne.
Ivan: Hi.
Sam: You sound so enthused today.
Ivan: Hi. Yeah.
Sam: You having a great time? You're, you're, you're pumped up.
Ivan: You're, you know, I, I'm, I'm a little bit of loss for words to describe how I feel.
Ivan: Not sure exactly why I even feel like this at this moment.
Ivan: It's not, well, a lot of things have happened, but I, I don't know.
Ivan: No, it's just, there's just, is the life thing, news things,
Ivan: just general. Everything, everything.
Ivan: It's just, but we've had this, I think here is the main thing.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: That we have, you know, our days sometimes can get very lengthy with a lot of
Ivan: things going on and so forth and so on.
Ivan: And they get kind of tiring. I mean, if I, last Friday, I felt exhausted, like by noon.
Ivan: I also, well, one thing that's not helping is that I strained,
Ivan: I have an abdominal strain.
Ivan: It's a muscular strain.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Not, okay, which at first I thought that maybe could have been diverticulitis
Ivan: or the pain was. I wasn't sure.
Ivan: Because you had that before. Or intestinal, right.
Ivan: But I thought for a bit, but then I realized this pain is not the same. This is not intestinal.
Ivan: I'm noticing that the pain is in the same location, but it's only happening
Ivan: when I'm like standing up.
Ivan: And standing up in a way that I'm using my abdominal muscle, like when I'm in bed.
Ivan: Okay. That was like the worst. And so I noticed that if I stood up very gently,
Ivan: it wasn't happening. I went to the doctor.
Ivan: My doctor was a little bit out of sorts.
Ivan: I realized after, I mean, but he did, you know, check me and he said,
Ivan: look, this doesn't feel like the verdiculitis, but I'm going to send you to get a CT scan anyway.
Ivan: Thing is my CT scan wound up getting canceled because they, the doctor hadn't
Ivan: sent the notes. They didn't get the approval, blah, blah, blah.
Ivan: But he was doing that as a precaution because it felt like it was muscular.
Ivan: We felt, you know, it looked like I did it where I felt like I had a little
Ivan: twinge there in my lower abdomen.
Ivan: And then on Saturday, the workout that I did at where I go to Orange Theory
Ivan: Fitness involved quite a lot of sit-ups, a lot of sit-ups which aggravated.
Sam: Whatever issue you had.
Ivan: Yes so make doing quite a
Ivan: lot of sit-ups and i just the problem is i thought
Ivan: it was gastro my my soreness there so i'm like eh whatever i'll do a ton of
Ivan: sit-ups right wrong that was bad really
Ivan: bad not good okay so i've had this underlying like malaise and pain,
Ivan: which has been getting better. I've been resting.
Ivan: It's all I can do. It's all I can do for this. Rest. Not much else to do.
Ivan: And then it's just that we live right now in this era where there is just this
Ivan: constant drumbeat of annoying shit happening in the news every fucking day.
Ivan: And it's every fucking day.
Sam: So what you're saying is your body is reacting badly to the general stress of life in 2020.
Ivan: Well, no, I don't know if it's, no, I'm not saying that that was my body's reaction to it.
Ivan: What I'm saying is you're asking me, why am I feeling like blah?
Ivan: And then some other annoying shit.
Ivan: Exactly. You've got this constant drumbeat underneath.
Ivan: I've got my abs that I got my damn lower abdominal that's like hurting.
Ivan: And then some annoying shit happened. and whatever and
Ivan: so it and then i'm tired because i feel i mean i like you know this afternoon
Ivan: i got to like two o'clock and i'm feeling fucking just exhausted already um
Ivan: so it's just so by the time i'm getting now to like 10 o'clock eastern i'm just feeling,
Ivan: And then I just saw some guy that had a football game on, and apparently they
Ivan: suspended the football game because some guy apparently got really badly hurt.
Ivan: Like, you know, bad enough that, you know, they stopped the game. Bad enough.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: So that wasn't uplifting.
Sam: Yeah. And, you know.
Ivan: I mean, look, which part is worse, okay?
Ivan: Hey, you know, the ice raids, the alligator Alcatraz,
Ivan: the stupid president that we've got that's just tariff this tariff that I had,
Ivan: uh, you know, my, my, you know, somebody was telling me a story about ice showing
Ivan: up at some condo, like, uh,
Ivan: you know, like about five, 10 miles away and how they were worried.
Ivan: Well, actually, I'm not even sure it's totally ice. It was a big police presence.
Ivan: The suspicion was it was ice. I don't know. They were arresting.
Ivan: It looks like they were trying to arrest some maintenance guy or some stupid shit.
Ivan: And they show up with, like, 15 police cars.
Ivan: Like, you know, they're arresting. You know, it's some nonviolent dude.
Ivan: And they're going at it like, you know, we're picking up Osama bin Laden or something.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Ivan: You know, and I'm sorry to tell you that that whole thing about that shooting
Ivan: in Atlanta wasn't exactly uplifting either.
Ivan: You went and you actually you got ahead of me. I was like, I was thinking of texting our.
Sam: So just for our listeners, Friday evening, early afternoon, evening, whatever.
Sam: There was an active shooter on sort of Emory University slash CDC.
Sam: They're right next to each other.
Ivan: They're right next to each other.
Sam: And it, as it turns out, I think it's all like settled now, but they, uh, the shooter's dead.
Sam: The shooter's dead. It's all taken care of whatever.
Sam: But apparently he was specifically targeting the CDC seemingly because he thinks
Sam: the COVID vaccine made him sick. Something like that.
Ivan: Yeah. Great. You know, and anyway.
Sam: A friend of ours, Kathy, who, uh.
Ivan: Her husband works at the fucking CDC.
Sam: She used to work there. Her husband still works there. She's got a bunch of
Sam: friends that work there.
Sam: And so I saw the news alert and I like pinged her and her like, is everybody okay?
Sam: Her husband had left like 15 minutes before this had happened,
Sam: but a whole bunch of other people she knew were still in lockdown over there. So great.
Ivan: I mean, it's just all very annoying, Sam. Irritating.
Ivan: Yeah, this is all of it. It's Peter actually said it best on the Slack today.
Ivan: I can't believe Americans elected this motherfucker again. Yep.
Sam: Yep.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: I mean, I'll bet.
Sam: What else can you say?
Ivan: What else can you say?
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: I mean, fuck. You fired the IRS guy. Apparently, I guess he was too nice or something.
Sam: It's unclear why. But this is like the sixth one so far since Trump has been president.
Sam: So, like, they don't last very long.
Ivan: I mean, the sixth guy. It's only been eight months. What the fuck?
Ivan: this guy was just confirmed by the Senate two months ago,
Ivan: right I don't know he's going to go meet Putin in Alaska you might fucking explain
Ivan: you know explain to me this horse shit well they're going to meet in Alaska I'm just very very you.
Sam: Need part of the Ukraine deal to be giving back Alaska right.
Ivan: Yeah I'll probably sell it back at something you know when he's up there or
Ivan: claims a great deal or something.
Ivan: And by the way, look, another thing, I tried to buy a new suit.
Ivan: I failed at buying a new suit.
Sam: Okay. You went to buy a new suit. Like, and like.
Ivan: Okay. Now, yeah, I realize that I am in the minority.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: In terms of buying suits.
Sam: In that you do it at all.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Okay. Yeah, I bought a suit, like, what was it, last year sometime?
Sam: Because I was going to some event and my size had changed. So like I couldn't
Sam: wear, I mean, I could have worn the one I had before, but it probably,
Sam: I don't know, it wouldn't need to be cleaned.
Ivan: So I, here's the one thing I, I, I, I, my number of suits, I haven't bought
Ivan: any new suits in a while. Okay.
Ivan: And my number of suits has dwindled. There were some older suits that I got
Ivan: rid of because I didn't fit in very well.
Ivan: The one thing about it is that, and the problem was that I bought suits a lot
Ivan: that were tailored. And so usually if it was, if it was, I gained weight,
Ivan: like my waist, they could be adjustable.
Ivan: The problem isn't that the problem is that because I've started lifting weights
Ivan: about 10 years ago, the size of the jacket right now that I need is bigger.
Ivan: Okay. There, there is, and there, and there is no, there wasn't any fixing that.
Ivan: Okay. It was significantly bigger.
Sam: Your massive muscles you now have.
Ivan: Because I have more muscles than I used to have. Yes. Okay. There is no way
Ivan: of me fitting in the old jacket.
Ivan: It just won't happen.
Sam: You could do that Incredible Hulk thing. You put on the jacket and then you go, and it like wraps.
Ivan: Yeah, that would have been great. So I had to get rid of some suits that I just
Ivan: could not fit in because of that.
Ivan: And then I had one of my favorite suits, which is a Hickey Freeman suit,
Ivan: which are American-made suits. and not just that look Hickey Freeman is a brand,
Ivan: Made in, they were made, not anymore, in Rochester, New York,
Ivan: okay, in upstate New York.
Ivan: Presidents wore them regularly. Barack Obama is a wardrobe of suits consistent
Ivan: mostly of Hickey Freemans, okay?
Ivan: So this is a suit that was a brand that was recognized as the,
Ivan: I mean, the gold standard of a suit that was made in America,
Ivan: okay? And they were expensive, okay?
Ivan: All right, they're, you know, a Hickey Freeman suit was.
Ivan: over $2,000, okay, a pop, okay?
Ivan: And you got a custom-made one, it could be $3,000, $4,000, but it was,
Ivan: you know, the one thing is that a Hickey Freeman was the American suit,
Ivan: the best one that you could really get, okay?
Ivan: Unfortunately, that suit, the pants I had damaged by sitting in a couple of
Ivan: places that wind up ripping the pants.
Ivan: I had repaired the pants a couple of times, but they got to a point that there was just no more.
Ivan: They couldn't be repaired. Taylor looked at it and said, it's done. It's over.
Sam: You're done.
Ivan: And so that suit died, and I'm like, damn it.
Ivan: The store where I bought suits in the last 15, 17 years, I'd say,
Ivan: has been Nordstrom. Okay?
Ivan: So I go to see, okay, you know what? But I really liked, I had that one.
Ivan: I have another Hickey Freeman sport coat, which is really nice.
Ivan: Her stuff was really nice. I think I'll try to fly a Hickey Freeman.
Ivan: Well, Nordstrom's not carrying Hickey Freeman anymore.
Ivan: And I'm like, well, why the hell happened? And then I go and I find that the
Ivan: only place that has Nicky Freeman is Dillard's.
Ivan: Look, Dillard's is not high-end clothes. Okay?
Ivan: And I noticed that the prices on the suits are about a third of what they used to be.
Ivan: And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Well, whoever owned Hickey Freeman,
Ivan: by the way, that have been in business making those suits up there in Rochester
Ivan: for over 100, I don't know how many years.
Ivan: got sold to some company that decided to offshore the making of the Hickey Freeman suits to China.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: And now they're sold exclusively at Dillard's for, you know,
Ivan: six, seven hundred bucks. They're not the same suits.
Ivan: It's a cheap Chinese suit now that they just took the fucking brand and slapped it on.
Ivan: So that's so fuck. I can't buy a Hickey Freeman.
Ivan: Well, you know, I could, but I would be a cheap piece of crap.
Ivan: so i'm not buying that i'm like fuck i'm not no i'm not buying the other thing
Ivan: is look nordstrom does the alter listen nordstrom when you buy a suit they will
Ivan: properly fit the suit for you,
Ivan: they they will do it and one thing well i had the nordstrom credit card which
Ivan: for some reason my credit limit is very small i was gonna have to figure out
Ivan: what the hell to do i don't know think they lowered the credit limit i'm like
Ivan: i can't buy buy a suit i got but it includes an alteration credit.
Ivan: So the alterations are free.
Ivan: I want to take advantage. Okay. Well, I got, I got free alterations.
Ivan: Well, you'll go, you go get that done.
Ivan: Okay. But, but there's no more Hickey Freeman suits.
Ivan: So I'm like, okay, at Dillard's, they won't do a custom fit like that.
Ivan: So they, they don't do that there. You buy it off the rack and you know, people wear it that way.
Ivan: I, you know, I, no, I, I, okay. So I can't do that. Okay.
Ivan: Then they used to sell at Nordstrom also another American brand,
Ivan: Joseph Abood. And I like those suits and I got a couple of those.
Ivan: Another brand that also, because the suit market is going to shit, that brand also gone.
Ivan: The only place that you can get them now is some shit at Men's Warehouse that
Ivan: is not made at the factory because that was also American made. That was made up there.
Ivan: Nope. No go. That's also disappeared. I'm like, fuck me, what the hell?
Ivan: Okay, so the other suits that I had, which I got rid of a couple,
Ivan: the ones that I couldn't fit because of my because of my, because of your massive biceps.
Ivan: My massive biceps, yes. I couldn't fit. They're canales, which are Italian.
Ivan: Okay. And I like those and I've had a number of those over the years.
Ivan: Okay, great. Okay, well, they do have canales. Okay, great.
Ivan: But that was about, but I figured out.
Ivan: I looked through the brands and the brands of suits that I bought over the years.
Ivan: They're all like gone. They have very little inventory.
Ivan: I went to store, you know, I was looking at even the high-end stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks.
Ivan: Well, Neiman Marcus, here's a problem. These stores are all go bankrupt.
Ivan: Saks, Neiman Marcus and all of these basically were not being able to pay vendors.
Ivan: They had almost no inventory of suits either. Okay.
Ivan: Another thing is my size. Look, I'm not, I'm a weird oddball size. Okay.
Ivan: You know, I'm, you know, I'm short, I'm wide.
Ivan: I need, you know, I need a suit. Look, I didn't fit into, but listen,
Ivan: you know, short and wide.
Ivan: I couldn't fit in a fucking MRI machine. Okay.
Ivan: Well, you know, last year, because my shoulders are, I have shoulders that are
Ivan: so broad that I couldn't fit in a fucking MRI machine.
Ivan: could get through my shoulders. I'm like, what the fuck? I had to go to another
Ivan: MRI place that had a bigger machine to get in.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: So, yeah, so my dimensions are odd, okay? So I need a specific size.
Ivan: And so I go to, oh, let me find some discount places online.
Ivan: Maybe they have some Italian suits at a discount online.
Ivan: Yeah, they got, I found, oh yeah, this place has it at a discount.
Ivan: Only on one size that, I don't know, maybe my son could fit in it. I don't know.
Ivan: And I'll like, or, you know, so bottom line that I concluded,
Ivan: nobody's buying fucking suits. Nobody.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Just nobody it's not easy to go out there to buy a suit even at like places
Ivan: like men's warehouse or whatever is supposed to specialize very few you know what what they had.
Sam: Was a lot of the number a lot of sport coats
Sam: yeah the number of situations where it
Sam: is expected that you wear a suit has reduced
Sam: dramatically over the last few days i mean it's
Sam: it's just like it's now i mean there are a few businesses industries where it's
Sam: still sort of expected but they are dwindling i mean even the politicians aren't
Sam: always wearing them right you know and actually a.
Ivan: Lot of politicians now just maybe they're not wearing ties but many of them
Ivan: are still wearing a suit just without a tie.
Sam: That's what you see a lot but you see a lot of that but you're seeing you're
Sam: seeing more casual stuff even but you're.
Ivan: Seeing a lot more casual yes.
Sam: Even there and so So it's starting to be like, you know, weddings and funerals and not even those.
Ivan: Not even those. Listen, I showed up in a black suit for a funeral lately and
Ivan: I was, you know, we were in the minority.
Ivan: Not the only one, but we were definitely in the minority. Okay.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: And so I look, I have this thing. I'm in sales.
Ivan: I'm going to people sometimes, not just asking for hundreds of thousands,
Ivan: millions of dollars. Okay.
Ivan: You know, a number of my customers are in a sports coat jacket or maybe a suit still. Okay.
Sam: So you match your customer.
Ivan: I, yeah, I'm not going to a customer, you know, wearing fucking jeans and some
Ivan: dumb, you know, whatever thing I'm fucking, you know what?
Ivan: I'm, I want somebody that I want to,
Ivan: get like a million dollar deal from i
Ivan: i'm you know what i'll show up in a suit i
Ivan: mean that's just you know yeah i i i i'm not i see other people that do it that
Ivan: way i'm not comfortable with that i'm just not comfortable with that and maybe
Ivan: it's just a habit it's just whatever but i'm just not not presumably that presumably.
Sam: It depends at least a little bit on the client right like if If you went to
Sam: a client that was 100% casual and they're like, don't show up in a suit, you would.
Ivan: Oh, the thing is that none of my customers are like that.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: None of my customers are like that. So it's just none of my customers are like that.
Ivan: And I will tell you that even some of my customers that tend to be more casual,
Ivan: I do see that they expect that the vendors are not.
Sam: We want you to put on your little show, monkey.
Ivan: Yes. Yes. Dance, monkey. Dance. Here we go. Yes.
Ivan: So, you know, but yeah, I found it that it was far more challenging to,
Ivan: I mean, look, I'm telling you, almost...
Ivan: all the American brands that are gone. The only one that I saw that has left,
Ivan: I guess, is Brooks Brothers.
Ivan: Because apparently Brooks Brothers is making suits at that same factory where
Ivan: they used to make the Hickey Freeman suits.
Ivan: But I will admit that I have an extreme disdain for Brooks Brothers.
Ivan: I don't like their clothes. I don't like their suits. I don't like their shirts.
Ivan: I don't like anything they sell.
Ivan: And the last time I bought something there, I got into a very...
Ivan: I, I, I, I, I got into an argument because they sold me something that I didn't
Ivan: realize had a grease stain. Okay.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: And it was a sweater. And I, I went and I got home and I, I,
Ivan: I, I, you know, I guess I had, I tried it.
Ivan: It didn't look. And then all of a sudden when I went to put it away,
Ivan: I'm like, what the fuck? I went back and I said, guys, I'm sorry,
Ivan: but this suit had to stain.
Ivan: And they tried to say that I, that I did it. I literally came back like an hour
Ivan: later. I'm like, what the, I, look, I took it out of a bag and it looked like this.
Ivan: They gave me a fucking hard time about it. I was like, Jesus Christ,
Ivan: fuck this store. Okay. All right. I'm not.
Ivan: Yeah. But I, so, and even by the way, Brooks Brothers also had gone into bankruptcy.
Sam: Yes. So, so the moral of the story is that this is a dying industry and you should not invest in it.
Ivan: That's for sure. Don't invest in the suit industry. That's, that,
Ivan: that, that definitely, if, if there are suit stocks out there,
Ivan: like, I mean, I guess men's, men's warehouses and financial dire straits as well.
Ivan: So I, you know, I will tell you one curious thing that I saw in the industry
Ivan: where it's doing fine in terms of like more formal attire.
Ivan: The wedding, like, tuxedo wedding businesses?
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Those are actually doing pretty good.
Sam: Because it's one of the few things where at least the wedding party wants to dress up.
Ivan: Exactly.
Sam: Maybe not the guests, but the wedding party themselves, they still want to dress up.
Ivan: Yes. Yes, totally. And so that industry seems to be doing pretty well,
Ivan: okay, from what I could tell.
Ivan: Those guys. But, you know, All the other stuff, they're doing like shit.
Ivan: I mean, I, you know. So...
Sam: Okay, my turn.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: So I should have said this at the very beginning, but I didn't.
Sam: We are, of course, doing our butt first where we talk about non-newsy stuff,
Sam: then we'll take a break and we'll do news stuff.
Sam: Although the first thing Yvonne started talking about was adjacent to the news.
Sam: It was, you know, everything going on. But so as usual, I'm going to do a couple
Sam: of movies, movies, movies, movies, movies.
Sam: We are now in November of last year, by the way.
Sam: so the this yeah second half.
Ivan: We're not listen november last year means we're not like 10 years off.
Sam: That's right i'm still.
Ivan: Behind but this is why i'm doing two perhaps i mean this is
Ivan: not that bad i mean you've you know i still remember sam had these to-do lists
Ivan: that he used to have when we were in college when he kept reorganizing every
Ivan: week reorganizing shit and there must have been shit on that to-do list that
Ivan: was on there for years and years and still not done.
Sam: You talk about this as if it was past tense. I still have lists like that.
Ivan: Wait, you still have the to-do? I mean, I remember you used to print up and
Ivan: add organize and add timestamps and shit.
Sam: The form has changed. I no longer have like a single document with the to-do
Sam: list that gets printed out on a regular basis, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: But I've actually got multiple mechanisms whereby I use random number generators
Sam: to determine which project I'm going to work on at a particular time.
Ivan: So I have, of course, of course, this is how to prioritize stuff.
Ivan: Hey, hey, do, do I, hey, do I turn off the bomb or do I, or do I change the oil?
Ivan: I'm like, ah, I'll do the oil, the bomb, whatever.
Sam: Yeah, so I have things where I have multiple layers and random numbers that
Sam: get you one category and then you go into another.
Sam: I did have a system a few years back where I had a Google spreadsheet that automatically
Sam: adjusted the priority based on how long it had been since I'd last done the thing.
Ivan: That was, yes, that was like, you know, you kept doing it. That's right.
Sam: But that one ended up getting like, well, here's what happens with all of my to-do lists.
Sam: No matter what, I always have more to do than I have time to do. So eventually.
Ivan: Oh.
Sam: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So eventually what happens is that there's something that
Sam: I feel like I really should be
Sam: spending more time on that isn't coming up enough in the existing system.
Sam: So I layer on top of it, another system that gives more precedence to that thing,
Sam: but still all the old things are there.
Sam: so like right now for instance i the first thing i do is roll a one to six number
Sam: and if it's a one then i fall back to the older mechanism i had before and roll from that,
Sam: and and and like the other items
Sam: and i am simplifying slightly actually
Sam: the other items two through six only two
Sam: of them are actually single item items the others like if i roll a four for
Sam: instance there's actually something like 25 different tasks within the four
Sam: so if i roll the four then i roll a one through 25 and determine which of those i do and oh.
Ivan: My god this is the most hilarious thing.
Sam: I've heard in a while and so yeah
Sam: so i have i i have sort of a a tiered level of priorities and a random number
Sam: picks the first thing and then when you're in the second thing there's another
Sam: system that picks what you do there and of course random numbers are are a key
Sam: part of this system at all times of course of course randomization has.
Ivan: To be part of It.
Sam: Has to be part of it. Now, I have various things to make sure the randomization,
Sam: not everything is equal.
Sam: Some things are more important than others, so we're more likely to come up
Sam: than others, but it's still randomized.
Sam: And then things happen like, you know, the system breaks down.
Sam: And so I realized, you know, it's been four weeks since I've done laundry or something.
Ivan: Down. What a shocking development. No, no kidding. Really? Wow.
Sam: You know, and I'm like, you know, I can't just keep buying new socks when I run out of clean socks.
Sam: I have to actually do laundry sometimes. You know?
Ivan: Ha ha ha!
Ivan: Yes, I can see all that randomization. Oh, just buy underwear.
Ivan: Oh, buy underwear. Oh, buy underwear.
Ivan: Oh, shit, I need socks. What am I doing?
Sam: Exactly. So, anyway, I could spend a half an hour on the details of this,
Sam: but I think this has probably been enough.
Ivan: No, it's been enough. We need to make sure we catch up on some of these movies. Okay.
Sam: Okay, okay. Two movies from this time. first was i
Sam: i watched a whole lot in november of last year
Sam: because you know holiday thanksgiving right
Sam: like there was time yes so this was november 17th
Sam: but then like i'm looking ahead today i'm going
Sam: to do one from november 17th and one from november 21st but there were actually
Sam: two movies on the 21st and one on the 23rd and one on the 24th and one on the
Sam: 30th because you know wow it was that kind of time you know there's lots of
Sam: tv watching at the end of november because there's holidays and there's home time and you know sports.
Ivan: Right you watched all the football games of course.
Sam: What there's football games football
Sam: yeah i have no idea what you're talking about okay anyway the november 7th 17th
Sam: movie was from the year 2015 the second movie in the divergent series called insurgent oh.
Ivan: God this stupid divergent series i got this the whole divergent series kind
Ivan: of like just pissed me off.
Sam: Did you watch all i don't.
Ivan: First of all no i think i watched parts of the first one i know shylene woodley is in it i know that.
Sam: Yes yes it's been a while.
Ivan: About 10 years first of all the name pisses me off.
Sam: Divergent yeah.
Ivan: I don't know what the hell it is that a movie called Divergent sounds to me like it's stupid.
Ivan: I don't know why. I don't know why.
Ivan: To me, it's like some guy was trying to make the movie different.
Ivan: Oh, well, call it Divergent.
Sam: Well, it was based on a book that was also called Divergent.
Ivan: I know. There's three movies, if I remember correctly.
Sam: There's three movies. I think there's four books.
Ivan: My wife was... Five books now, actually. All right. I have not.
Ivan: This is another one that I have not watched in its entirety.
Ivan: This was a time also with linear TV. When this happened, my wife happened to
Ivan: be watching it. I watched a part of it.
Ivan: I came away with thinking this thing is stupid.
Ivan: And I left a room. Something along these lines.
Sam: Let me tell you where I was. I believe I gave the first movie a thumbs up. I really liked it.
Sam: And it basically, the title Divergent actually comes from the fact that there
Sam: are some individuals, the society has been broken up into sort of cases by like
Sam: what kind of jobs they do.
Sam: So there's like the intellectuals, there's the politicians, there's the soldiers,
Sam: there's the whatever. Each of them have different names, but it's divided up into these casts.
Sam: And then the divergent people are essentially people who don't fit into any
Sam: of those categories well. Okay.
Sam: And I liked the first movie. I thought it was like some interesting,
Sam: and I have not read the books, by the way, but I thought there were some interesting ideas.
Sam: I thought it was well executed. I liked the actress.
Sam: I liked sort of the situations they put her in and how it played out.
Sam: I felt like the second movie, I'm only going to give a thumb sideways to,
Sam: it was sort of like it doubled down on the action part of things as opposed
Sam: to the interesting ideas part of things.
Sam: Like the first movie I found interesting because, you know, they had the factions
Sam: and how was this society structured and what was the divergent person and why and stuff.
Sam: And there was still some of that in the second one because you sort of evolved
Sam: the idea and found out a little bit more about why the factions existed and
Sam: how that came about and blah, blah, blah.
Sam: But it really sort of doubled down on being, hey, it's an action movie.
Sam: There's a war, there's a battle, there's people running around and jumping on
Sam: trains and shooting and blah, blah, blah. And I just find that aspect of it
Sam: less interesting than the ideas part.
Sam: And it felt like the ideas were explored in the first one.
Sam: And the second one was more just about, okay, now let's have everybody run around
Sam: and fight and, you know, this kind of stuff.
Sam: And that was just less interesting to me. It was okay.
Sam: I'm giving it a thumb sideways. Again, I reserve the thumbs down for the worst of the worst.
Sam: But I give it a thumb sideways. It was okay. It was an entertaining couple hours. How long was this thing?
Sam: 119 minutes, so almost exactly a couple hours.
Sam: And it was fine. It was a fine little movie. It did not bore me. It was interesting.
Sam: It covered the couple hours, but it didn't feel like, oh, wow,
Sam: this is a good movie I will remember.
Ivan: Amazing, yes.
Sam: Whereas, I mean, the first movie wasn't going to be like...
Sam: It wasn't like going to, I'm going to say it wasn't award-winning,
Sam: but I don't know. Maybe it did win some awards. I don't even remember.
Sam: But like, but I like. I have to look this up. The first one,
Sam: I was like, that was a good movie. I really enjoyed this.
Sam: This second one was more like, it was a movie. It was okay.
Sam: And nothing. That's it. But you hated the first one enough that the second one
Sam: wasn't even in your radar.
Ivan: I think it may have been. I'm thinking now.
Sam: I think I remember you saying you fell asleep in one of these.
Ivan: It's very possible. I fall asleep in a lot of movies.
Ivan: It's, you know, so that, that's, that's a distinct possibility.
Ivan: I think, I think that the one that I hated, the, where I, I had not watched
Ivan: the first one. My wife's watching the second one.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: I'm pretty sure about this, that it was the second. Okay. Because of the.
Sam: Moving on. Let's, let's, let's move it on. The second movie for this time around,
Sam: which again, I watched on November 21st, 2024, is Kubo and the Two Strings from 2016.
Ivan: Kubo and the what?
Sam: The Two Strings.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: It's a stop-motion animated fantasy film.
Sam: And it gives you some of the people who are in it.
Sam: Charlize Theron, Ralph Fiennes, Rooney Mara, George Takai, Matthew McConaughey.
Sam: so it's got it's got some and and art parkinson
Sam: i don't know who art parkinson is but like anyway thumbs
Sam: up i really liked this movie like i really enjoyed this movie let me give you
Sam: the the first paragraph of the plot in uh from wikipedia of course in the in
Sam: the early feudal Japan era,
Sam: a 12-year-old boy with only one eye named Kubo tends to his ill mother,
Sam: Sarayatu, in a mountain cave near a village.
Sam: He earns their living by manipulating origami with music from his magical shamisen,
Sam: a Japanese stringed instrument, telling the tale of his missing father,
Sam: Hanzo, a samurai warrior.
Sam: Kubo is never able to finish his story, as he does not know what happened to
Sam: Hanzo, and his mother cannot recall the end due to her deteriorating mental state.
Sam: His mother warns him not to stay out after dark, as her sisters Karasu and Washi,
Sam: as well as his grandfather, the Moon King, who took his eye when he was a baby,
Sam: will find him and take his remaining eye.
Sam: Obviously, at one point, he stays out after night.
Sam: after dark and things happen and adventure ensues
Sam: and a whole bunch of stuff happens and he
Sam: finds out this is as spoilery as as i'm going
Sam: to get he finds out more about what happened to his father and to the history
Sam: of what happened to his eye and all this kind of stuff and blah blah blah he
Sam: he discovers some of that in any case i really liked the movie there i didn't
Sam: think i was at at first I was like, what the hell is this? This is kind of goofy.
Sam: But like, as it went on, it drew me in.
Sam: I really got it. It, it, it hit some emotional notes.
Sam: It, it, it was the kind of thing where by the end it was tugging at your heartstrings.
Sam: And that's the kind of movie I end up liking the most.
Sam: Like it, it, you know, I, I'm pretty sure I ended the movie like crying,
Sam: which I like it when a movie makes me cry, you know?
Sam: And yeah, I, I, I, I liked the movie.
Sam: It, it, uh, it was not one I'd really heard of before I watched it.
Sam: I don't know how it got on my list. I'm sure somebody mentioned it.
Sam: Like I put movies on my list. If, if, if I ever see anybody mention a movie
Sam: in anything, even remotely like a positive way, I add it to my list.
Sam: Also, it's, if it's ever a wiki of the day, I add it to my list,
Sam: you know, things like that.
Sam: Um, anyway, big thumbs up for Kubo in the two strings. It is animated,
Sam: but, you know, it's an all-family movie.
Sam: It's not like a kid's movie. It's got some, like, themes that will hit you as an adult as well.
Sam: But it's also, like, it's not going to be bad for kids either.
Sam: Kids will also enjoy it. Anyway, let's see.
Ivan: 97% in Rotten Tomatoes rated, so it got really good.
Sam: There you go.
Ivan: So by the way.
Sam: I was nominated for best animated feature at the Academy Awards as well as best
Sam: visual effects, but it lost to Zootopia and the Jungle Book.
Ivan: Oh well but you.
Sam: Know i have not seen either zootopia or the more recent jungle book i think
Sam: i once upon a time saw the original from like whatever it was the 60s or 70s
Sam: whatever that was but but yeah no big thumbs up.
Ivan: So i went back yes i
Ivan: went back and checked on diversion i still remember the one thing that these
Ivan: were like multiple movies here so i i think i started getting annoyed because
Ivan: the first one is divergent the second one was divergent series insurgent it
Ivan: sounds like something that a car that actually annoys me too that it's not like just.
Sam: Insurgent it's the divergent.
Ivan: Series insurgent and you know it sounds like it sounds like a made-up name that
Ivan: a car company would give a car like acura with the integra okay this is what
Ivan: this sounds like Then the third one was Allegiant series. Allegiant.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: Okay. You know, sounds like Allegis. They made up a name that was sort of a
Ivan: corporate name for some travel company, whatever.
Ivan: I don't, by the way, they went, according to this, they kept going really downhill.
Ivan: The third one was very poorly received. It was so badly received that there was supposed to be.
Sam: It was supposed to be a two-parter. I have seen the third one at this point
Sam: too, but I will save it till when we get to it in order. but I will agree this
Sam: is one of those trilogies where each one is worse than the one before.
Ivan: Yes. It was really bad. And not just that I'm supposed to be two parts.
Ivan: It was so bad that they canceled the second part.
Ivan: There was supposed to be a TV spinoff and they canceled that too.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: But Kubo and the other thing, I, I, as a matter of fact, I, I honestly,
Ivan: I don't even remember it.
Ivan: This happened. So, but yeah, Like I said.
Sam: I hadn't really heard of it. I mean, it somehow got on my list, but like, yeah.
Ivan: And you liked it, and I saw the reviews, and it's a very big thumbs up as well
Ivan: from other people who have watched it.
Sam: It is worth looking up. I'm sure it's on one of the streaming services,
Sam: or you can buy it on Apple or something, but it's worth it. It's a good movie.
Sam: I enjoyed it. Now, if you like that sort of, you know, kid goes on an adventure,
Sam: there's family dynamics and it pulls on your heartstrings kind of movie, then you'll like this.
Sam: Okay. Okay. With that, let's knock this sucker out.
Sam: Let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about the news. Back after this.
Sam: Okay, and with that, Yvonne, your pick. What newsy thing shall we start with today?
Ivan: Thank you. Yeah, I, uh, shit.
Sam: Tough choice? Nothing exciting you?
Ivan: I hate all of it.
Sam: We could just do more movies.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: Wait, it's not on the list, but... So, Trump was on the roof of the White House.
Sam: Right?
Ivan: This was this week.
Sam: Right? That was real. That did happen.
Ivan: What the fuck is going on, Sam? I mean, what the... What in the fuck? I mean... Sam!
Sam: Sam! So, wait.
Ivan: Sam! The President of the United States, out of the blue, all of a sudden,
Ivan: is walking around yelling at the roof of the White House.
Sam: No, no. So there's the joke answer, and then there is a real explanation as far as I can tell.
Sam: So the joke answer is, like, he shot up on the roof, and the reporters down
Sam: on the ground were like, Hey, sir, why are you on the roof?
Ivan: Right.
Sam: And he's like, I'm taking a walk. I'm just going for a stroll.
Sam: Yeah, that is what he said. And then he yelled back and forth at the reporters for a while. but if
Sam: you listen to the continued conversation after
Sam: that it looks like this is yet
Sam: more donald trump looking at remodeling the white house stuff he's like he he's
Sam: talking about like building some additional stuff up there on the roof like
Sam: he made some hand gestures like maybe he was going to build a dome of some sort
Sam: up there um is this still crazy.
Ivan: Shit sam we're in I mean, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Sam: And he wasn't by himself. He had the Secret Service and other people with him up there.
Ivan: Yeah, there were some people there that looked not too pleased about him being
Ivan: on the fucking roof, by the way.
Ivan: Those people were not looking like, oh, yeah, this is a great idea.
Sam: Uh-huh. Look, he wants to build a giant golden dome on top of the White House roof.
Ivan: Oh, my God. There keeps more gold in the fucking Oval Office.
Sam: Every time you look at the Oval Office, there's more gold.
Ivan: It's like a fucking... I mean, what the hell? And the mirrors...
Sam: Did you see the patio that they replaced the Rose Garden with?
Ivan: Oh, God. Yeah, with the fucking...
Sam: It's also got the gold umbrellas. golden umbrellas,
Sam: I yeah so yes he was around on a roof but he had a purpose,
Sam: sort of although it's unclear for real what he was like there's no real information
Sam: about oh yeah he's considering building X or whatever it was just,
Sam: bullshitting while he was talking up there and like who knows what was serious
Sam: and what was a joke and what wasn't and whatever but I mean.
Ivan: Of course, he keeps saying that he's paying for with donors for this fucking
Ivan: golden fucking ballroom.
Sam: Well, but now let me understand to build this ballroom.
Sam: They basically have to demolish a huge portion of the existing White House to
Sam: replace it with this thing, right?
Ivan: I that's not what I understood. I understood that.
Sam: Are they squeezing it in between the existing?
Ivan: They're squeezing it in. Yeah.
Sam: Oh, sort of where that long hallway is that goes off to the east wing or whatever.
Ivan: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that is my understanding. Yeah.
Ivan: They're just going to squeeze it in.
Sam: I thought they were going to actually like gut the existing building.
Ivan: Nah. But my whole point about this is, this is the shit that is just in his head.
Ivan: And then, then he was there the other day with a whole bunch of charts.
Ivan: about the economy about the economy and
Ivan: i don't know with a whole bunch of but but but he didn't even he started showing
Ivan: these charts he doesn't even know what the fuck they say and he's just saying
Ivan: look look at these numbers they're great numbers wonderful numbers you don't
Ivan: even know what the fuck's on the charts yeah the line went up right and then we were tariffing gold,
Ivan: and then they're trying to clarify we're not tariffing gold because.
Sam: The swiss were upset.
Ivan: Well, the Swiss were here this week, and I don't think Trump even talked to
Ivan: the president of Switzerland, which I'm guessing is because he didn't talk to
Ivan: her because she's a woman.
Ivan: And he's just a sexist prick as well.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Aside from a pedophile.
Sam: Yes. So is our theme here Trump's mental health and competence?
Sam: I mean. Because we've talked about this before. I mean, he was never very good,
Sam: and he's been getting worse.
Ivan: Worse? And then, you know, I don't know. I'm going to give—listen.
Sam: Oh, and of course, we can't hear about anything else on TV other than Trump's mental decline, right?
Sam: Because that's what happened to Biden when he had a couple missteps.
Ivan: Right. Look, I know that—I'm pretty sure that Jake Tapper is working on his
Ivan: book right now on Trump's mental decline. Yes.
Sam: Yes, and non-stop coverage about how he should resign because he clearly doesn't
Sam: know what he's doing anymore, right?
Ivan: Right, yeah.
Ivan: I got a fucking lunatic president walking through the fucking roof in the middle
Ivan: of the day in the White House. And I'm like, oh, what the fuck is going on?
Ivan: And yelling at reporters up there.
Sam: Well, if he didn't yell, they wouldn't have been able to hear him.
Ivan: That's true. Yes. Yeah. Good point.
Sam: And they were yelling at him.
Ivan: Yeah. And then apparently now he's trying to insert himself into the New York
Ivan: City mayor race. that he's trying to endorse everybody.
Ivan: You know, so he's trying to endorse the supposed Democrats that are against
Ivan: Madami. Oh, God. Let me butcher his name.
Sam: Madami.
Ivan: Madami.
Sam: I'm sorry. Madami.
Ivan: Oh, fuck.
Sam: See, now you got me having to check.
Ivan: Oh, God. I'm sorry. I should know this by now.
Sam: Did you find it? Did you find it? Did you find it?
Ivan: I'm working on it. Mamdani. Mamdani. Sorry.
Ivan: Mamdani. Fuck, Jesus.
Sam: There he is. Zoran Mamdani.
Sam: Okay. Yes. Continue.
Ivan: He's scheming with Cuomo for the New York mayor's race?
Sam: Well, there were reports they had a call. Cuomo denies it was about the race
Sam: at all, but he didn't actually deny there was a call.
Sam: Meanwhile, Mom Downey is, of course, running with it that, you know,
Sam: clearly a vote for Cuomo or Adams is really a vote for Trump.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Yeah. This like.
Ivan: Is that, I mean, it's true. I mean, Eric Adams cut a deal with him.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: So he's in his pocket. And it seems like Cuomo, for some reason,
Ivan: also is like playing, you know, for Trump, too.
Ivan: Yeah, that is what that is what it seems like right now.
Sam: Well, I think the thing is, I mean, at various times.
Ivan: Here's the problem, Cuomo just wants to win. He doesn't care.
Sam: Yes, I was going to say that at various times in the past, Cuomo has positioned himself as anti-Trump.
Sam: He's also positioned himself as like, hey, I can I can work with whoever I can
Sam: get things done, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: He's positioned himself a whole bunch of different ways.
Sam: the whole Cuomo thing just pisses me off.
Ivan: Oh my God. To no end.
Sam: You know, like after what happened to you go slink away and disappear.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: You know, like you've got plenty of money. You'll do fine. Just go retire. Kick your feet up.
Ivan: Watch some TV. Like, like, like fucking like what's his name?
Ivan: Giuliani. He could be collecting a couple of billion bucks a year.
Sam: There's a bunch of things he could do. He does not have to go back and run for office again.
Sam: I mean, you resigned in disgrace. Come on.
Sam: Of course, the lesson all of these people have been having, I mean,
Sam: the lesson from Trump himself getting reelected and everybody else is never
Sam: resign, double down and screw it.
Ivan: Okay. Here's one thing on the New York race. I looked up to see if there was any recent polling.
Ivan: Recent polling right now, this is about five days ago that I found here on The
Ivan: Race, a new poll found with a significant lead in the current field of five
Ivan: candidates, attaining 50% of the vote, regardless of his opponent.
Sam: Now, unlike the first round, this isn't any funky runoff, multiple choice, whatever.
Sam: This is just like whoever gets the most votes wins, right? There's not even a runoff.
Ivan: Let me see. The combined little support for... Let me see.
Ivan: Actually, I'm not sure, so I'm checking to see if they got ranked choice polling for the...
Sam: I think that was only for the primary.
Ivan: My number is going to... misconducted, 2.0, I support never dips below 50% and
Ivan: only increases in a thinner field of candidates.
Ivan: For example, in a hypothetical four-way race without Cuomo,
Ivan: Mamdani's support rose to 55%. In a four-way race without Adams,
Ivan: his support rose to 51%. Mamdani is the only candidate of five that the majority
Ivan: of respondents, 58%, said he would consider voting for in November's election.
Ivan: In comparison to the 37%, they were voting for Cuomo, 27% they were voting for younger Adams.
Ivan: It's a very like the Republican doesn't exist in this election, basically.
Sam: Essentially, yeah. I mean, Republicans have been mayor in New York many times
Sam: before. You mentioned Giuliani.
Sam: Yeah, but this is... Bloomberg was a Republican before he was a Democrat.
Sam: But, you know, it takes a certain situation for that to occur.
Ivan: Yeah, and it's not happening right now. But it's looking like it doesn't matter
Ivan: who he's trying to, like, support.
Sam: I have answered my question in New York City.
Sam: Primary elections are conducted with rank choice voting while first past the
Sam: post is used for general elections.
Sam: So that means whoever, whoever has the plurality, they don't even have to get 50%.
Ivan: Oh, beautiful. So he's got the edge. Like, like, you know, yeah,
Ivan: he's got, he's got a, he's got a total edge. So.
Ivan: Okay. So, yeah. So it's looking like he's, you know, he's looking like he's
Ivan: definitely way ahead. So.
Sam: And by the way, there's still all sorts of leadership Democrats hedging their bets on this guy.
Ivan: By the way, they're idiots. Okay. I just went and I went to this,
Ivan: I searched on the, on this and I got ads.
Ivan: CBP is hiring officers now. Serve your country while earning a competitive salary
Ivan: and benefits with a CBP. Apply today.
Ivan: so there's a career option for you sam.
Sam: Border patrol yeah you.
Ivan: Could go and like they could partner you up with dean kane you met you guys are the dream team.
Sam: For those who didn't see see dean kane who's one of the actors who played uh
Sam: superman in a tv series a while back who's basically hasn't had a active acting
Sam: career lately and came out as a rabid mega conservative type has said he's joining ICE.
Ivan: He must be doing really well since he's joining ICE.
Sam: Well, and ICE apparently said, too, he'll be there sort of in a symbolic fashion.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: It's not like he's actually going to be out on the street doing stuff.
Ivan: I mean, so he's lying, really, because I figured he just signed up to be a fucking officer.
Ivan: But, well, to help all these guys lie about everything.
Sam: Well, this seems like a natural segue into the South Park episode on...
Ivan: Oh, you know,
Ivan: the one thing about this, this whole thing, the South Park episode where they,
Ivan: they had Kristi Noem on shooting every puppy that appeared on TV.
Sam: Which by the way i have not seen the whole
Sam: episode but i have seen multiple clips yvonne shared on
Sam: the curmudgeon's corner slack the the first clip
Sam: where she was shooting puppies which apparently she was like shooting a commercial
Sam: in a south park episode she was shooting a commercial to recruit for ice and
Sam: it was basically like you know the theme of it is no qualifications anymore
Sam: we don't care who you are you can join but she kept getting distracted by having to shoot puppies,
Sam: that wandered by or whatever.
Sam: But apparently, from other clips I've seen, this was a recurring theme throughout the entire episode.
Sam: And the closing credits had her running into a pet store and just shooting up
Sam: the whole place and killing everything in there.
Ivan: Ha ha ha!
Ivan: And the thing is that, you know, while she's doing this.
Sam: By the way, apparently she's all this.
Ivan: Yeah. Well, I was going to get to that. And while she's, you know,
Ivan: motivating all these people with all this Nazi sloganeering and shit,
Ivan: whatever, whatnot, and shooting puppies in front of them.
Ivan: The one thing is that her makeup starts falling apart. OK.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: And then an entire coterie of aides come in to try to fix her.
Ivan: And her whole takeaway from this was that they were ragging on her looks.
Ivan: That's what she took away from this. And I'm just like, wait a second.
Ivan: Not that you're shooting the puppies.
Ivan: Not that you're being basically a Nazi on TV.
Ivan: And by the way, what they were mocking wasn't the looks.
Ivan: What they were mocking was her obsession on the looks, which basically trumped,
Ivan: pun intended, everything else, okay, because its image is everything for this woman.
Sam: Well, it's more than that, too. They were also mocking the general tendency,
Sam: if you look at women in Trump world.
Ivan: Oh, fuck, yeah. They're all, holy shit.
Sam: You can see, if you Google this online, you can see before and after.
Ivan: Yeah, it's a Mar-a-Lago look.
Sam: Where before, they looked like normal women.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: And then the after, they've had, like, in some cases, it's just makeup.
Sam: In some cases, there's plastic surgery.
Sam: There's whatever. But there's a specific look.
Ivan: Oh, shit.
Sam: And as far as I'm concerned, they universally look worse.
Ivan: Oh, my God. So much worse. Holy shit.
Sam: It's like you looked like a normal, like, attractive woman. And now you look
Sam: like some sort of, I don't even know what.
Ivan: Some kind of Frankenstein, you know, experiment is what they look like afterwards.
Ivan: Holy shit. Yeah. So they're mocking that, not the way that she actually looked,
Ivan: but their obsession with this look and the obsession with the looks.
Ivan: I mean, you know, she was standing, like I mentioned, she was standing in front of a jail in El Salvador.
Ivan: Okay, a jail. A gulag, basically, that they created in fucking El Salvador wearing an $80,000 watch.
Ivan: You know, and I'm not like going, and again, as I said, tell me where the fuck
Ivan: this money's coming from, Sam.
Ivan: Because this woman never made more than a hundred and some odd thousand dollars a year. Okay?
Ivan: Before she got to this job. And somehow she was wearing an $80,000 watch.
Ivan: You want to explain that one to me?
Sam: Trump coin.
Ivan: Ah! Trump coin. Yeah. Forgot about that. Now you can hold it in your 401k.
Sam: I, I've, I've heard.
Ivan: Yeah. Now, you know, we, we could, we could buy the Trump coins into our 401k.
Ivan: Prepare for a retirement.
Ivan: Excellent.
Sam: Okay. Also, any other general ranting about the Trump administration you wanted?
Ivan: Yes. Tim Apple went to the White House.
Sam: Okay. Yeah, I was going to bring that up if you didn't. Go ahead. Tell me about Tim Apple.
Ivan: Look,
Ivan: first say what he did before you talk about it. He went to the White House.
Ivan: Look, he has been the company's getting hit from all sides on all these tariff
Ivan: announcements and all this shit, you know, move production to India.
Ivan: Then there were tariffs on India. They were talking about tariffs on chips.
Ivan: They're talking about everything.
Ivan: And because Apple, unlike a lot of their competitors right now,
Ivan: the other, you know, big Silicon Valley companies, okay, you know,
Ivan: the only two that really move massive amount of goods are Amazon and Apple.
Ivan: Okay. The rest are which is, you know, advertising, software, whatever.
Ivan: They don't have, they're not, they're not, the impact of this shit isn't hitting
Ivan: them. But Apple definitely is,
Ivan: looking at this, and it's problematic. And so they went with an olive branch
Ivan: to the White House to formally declare,
Ivan: that they were going to invest $100 billion in certain specific manufacturing
Ivan: that they figured that they could do in the U.S., basically to try to get that
Ivan: in exchange for not having to bring fucking iPhone production to the U.S.
Sam: Wait, wait. Don't forget the little...
Ivan: Wait, wait, wait. But part of the whole thing was the presentation of this,
Ivan: because they were manufacturing glass,
Ivan: Corning Glass factory, and one of the things that they were doing is this presentation
Ivan: of this glass plaque with an Apple logo with a commitment to it with a base
Ivan: made out of 24 karat gold.
Ivan: Yes. Hey, anybody worried about gift limits to the White House anymore?
Sam: No. And I hadn't heard, like, traditionally gifts like this officially belong to the government.
Sam: It's not a gift to the individual Okay.
Ivan: Do you think that's staying in the White House?
Sam: Here's what I think Like, it may officially be a gift to a government But just
Sam: like everything else, Donald Trump will just take it Like, he did that Didn't
Sam: he take, like, some sports trophy a couple weeks ago?
Ivan: He took, yes, he took the fucking trophy From the damn FIFA tournament And he
Ivan: kept the damn thing They had to make a replica to give it to the fucking winners Yes.
Sam: So, yeah, he's going to take the damn thing. I mean, he, you know,
Sam: remember there was a whole thing about stuff he took to Mar-a-Lago that he wasn't
Sam: supposed to take. He got invited for that shit.
Sam: Of course he's going to take things like this.
Sam: I will say, before we talk a little bit more about Tim Apple,
Sam: and we're calling him Tim Apple because Donald Trump called him that once.
Sam: But the thing is,
Sam: from what I've read after this, is it not true that basically everything Apple
Sam: promised that they were going to do, they were already doing anyway?
Ivan: I believe that the previous—you know what?
Sam: Like, they talked about making this glass in Kentucky. They already are making that glass in Kentucky.
Sam: Now, they may be committing to make more. I don't know.
Sam: But like it seems like a common theme,
Sam: a common theme in all of these deals with Donald Trump is whether it's whether
Sam: it's Apple or whether it's other countries is to dig up things they were already
Sam: doing or planning on doing anyway and serving them up on a silver platter and saying,
Sam: OK, we're going to do this and let Donald Trump claim it as a way.
Ivan: Silver, silver, gold platter. What are you talking about?
Sam: Gold platter, sorry.
Ivan: Is that a gold platter?
Sam: Yes, it has to be gold. Sorry.
Ivan: Yes. My bad.
Ivan: Well, so is that right? I did not look into the details of this.
Ivan: I did not whether that was already in the plans or not.
Ivan: However, what I will say is that it is in most of the cases,
Ivan: like you've mentioned, that has been the case.
Ivan: The reality is that, you know, that Trump didn't know any. It wouldn't have known about it anyway.
Ivan: And so, therefore, in large part, you know, just going up there and showing
Ivan: him, hey, we did make a commitment to build.
Ivan: This is what it is. don't fucking tear off my goddamn phones and chips.
Sam: Right and.
Ivan: He said yes.
Sam: Yeah yeah so apple got the exemption that you
Sam: know they're like we're throwing these massive massive thing on chips but not
Sam: you guys because you said you would do this and and part of it is also again
Sam: it is the optics it is coming to the white house yeah it is kissing the ring
Sam: it is telling donald how wonderful it is.
Sam: It is giving him the golden glass thingamabob and saying, we're going to do all this stuff.
Sam: Again, whether or not you are going to do it anyway doesn't matter.
Sam: It is the physical act of sucking up to Donald Trump that gets you your exemption.
Sam: And so then I've seen a lot of criticism that says, this is really disgusting.
Sam: Tim Cook, see, I used his real name that time going and doing this stuff but
Sam: at the same time he got his company the damn exemption.
Ivan: Exactly you know he's looking for out for his shareholders and his employees
Ivan: he's like you know the fuck am i gonna do and let us get fucked by this guy
Ivan: look i i'm gonna say this probably,
Ivan: most of you know if you had told me like say 10 years ago hey ivan do you want
Ivan: to be ceo of apple I would have been like, absolutely. I'll take the job.
Ivan: I want that job. I would have loved to take that job. I would have taken that job.
Ivan: You ask me right now, do I want to be CEO of Apple? Having to deal with this
Ivan: shit? I would be like, fuck no.
Ivan: I don't want to be in Tim's shoes. This is, you know, some people have been
Ivan: talking about replacing him, whatever, Weld or behind whatever.
Ivan: Let me tell you something. This fucking nightmare, fucking scenario that as
Ivan: executives of many companies are having to deal with, with this fucking Trump
Ivan: administration, which operates like a mob enterprise, okay,
Ivan: that you're getting shaken down by Donald
Ivan: Trump every time you go over there is a fucking nightmare for anybody who has
Ivan: been a ceo of a public company during their during their lives it's the worst
Ivan: fucking environment to to to fucking have to operate no i wouldn't want the job right now no because.
Sam: Nothing's about like hey here are the fixed rules that you have to play in and
Sam: then figure out how to do that instead it's all 100 about can you suck up enough
Sam: to donald trump that he doesn't.
Ivan: Go after you. Yeah, basically. Like you did Intel CEO this week.
Sam: Tell that story.
Ivan: Apparently, I don't know what the Chinese ties that he have and Intel's problems.
Ivan: All of a sudden, Donald Trump started demanding that Intel fire CEO.
Sam: Now, what Donald Trump and company have said is all sorts of conflicts of interest with China.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: But is there truth to that?
Ivan: I have seen no basis for that.
Sam: Or is it just like...
Ivan: This is just racism as far as I can tell.
Sam: That's what I was going to say. Is it just flat out racism?
Ivan: The guy's Chinese. It seems like it, yes.
Sam: Is he going to go after every CEO that's not white?
Ivan: I don't know. He hasn't gone after a Microsoft guy, Satya.
Sam: Yeah. Yet.
Ivan: Yet. I don't know. But look, it wouldn't be... I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if he does it.
Ivan: I mean, you know, the guy is a rampant racist.
Sam: Yeah. Okay. Anything else on this or should we take a break?
Sam: I promise not to bring up Donald Trump in the next.
Ivan: Uh, I see if there's anything, you know, nah, there, there's nothing, there's nothing else.
Ivan: I had made a, I had, I had left an item from, no, from previously talking about
Ivan: reshoring and I was not going to happen anytime soon. And it,
Ivan: it, and, and really this whole thing with Apple, the whole thing was affirming.
Ivan: It was, it was precisely affirming that.
Ivan: but they're like dude we can't bring this fucking production here it's just we could bring this,
Ivan: but that the the rest of the shit you're talking about impossible that's what this is all about,
Ivan: everybody else is getting killed look the automaker i don't
Ivan: know why the automakers can't get a can't get a
Ivan: break from him okay because gm
Ivan: and ford are getting hammered by by the the tariffs they're getting hammered
Ivan: and they haven't been able to go and like get some kind of like way of presenting
Ivan: him a golden tire or something i don't know whatever so he could get him off their backs,
Ivan: right now the current trade deals favor you making a car in japan and bringing
Ivan: it over versus making one in the u.s.
Sam: Right it's it's insane because of high tariffs on raw materials and a relatively
Sam: low tariff on Japan after the latest deal they gave.
Ivan: Correct.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: It's nuts.
Sam: Because once again, the theme on all these tariffs, which by the way,
Sam: all of the tariffs that had been put off over and over and over again,
Sam: most of them went into effect this week as well.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Now, who knows if they'll last, what the deal is, but we now basically have
Sam: this baseline 15, 16% across the board worldwide.
Ivan: The average that was calculated by some people is 18%, but even some guy today
Ivan: on Bloomberg said, look.
Sam: There's a lot of ups and downs and differences.
Ivan: It's so complicated.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: And that he's still, look, I don't understand how some of the people are even getting to that number.
Sam: It's complicated. Because there's a lot of rules.
Ivan: Exemptions, things, certain materials don't apply, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: But also, and again, no rhyme or reason to it either.
Ivan: No, there's no rhyme or reason.
Sam: Like it's all over, it's all about who has sucked up to Donald lately.
Sam: Yeah. You know, basically. basically and so it's not like there's some sort
Sam: of coherent philosophical tariff worldview that you apply and get this other
Sam: than tariffs are cool and they're something i can use to like beat people over the head of it.
Ivan: I would never imagine that somebody would ever utter the phrase tariffs are
Ivan: cool can i can i just say that that is just the you know that was a phrase that
Ivan: i I never expected in my whole fucking lifetime to hear.
Ivan: By the way, but how complicated it is.
Sam: Okay, go.
Ivan: You know that Trump said Brazil 50% tariff, right?
Sam: Yes, yes.
Ivan: Well, apparently there are so many buts in it that it really isn't the 50% tariff.
Sam: OK, tell.
Ivan: I'm not I'm not sure which ones, you know, here it is. It was an economist article today.
Ivan: Donald Trump's tariffs on Brazil are more barked than bite. The Latin American
Ivan: giant may have avoided the worst for now.
Ivan: And it said here that let me see where the detail are of it.
Ivan: But it's saying here that there is there's the tariffs now in place against
Ivan: Brazil, except nearly 700 products, including planes.
Ivan: So the biggest worry first, Embraer. They export a lot of aircraft.
Ivan: Guess what? They're exempted.
Ivan: Oil also exempted. Wood pulp, orange juice, exports of coffee,
Ivan: beef and fruit were not so lucky.
Ivan: But but still, the exemptions were so big that in the end, it's not a 50 percent tariff.
Sam: Right. So, yeah. And as we said from the very beginning, watching these exemptions
Sam: is probably more important than looking at the top level.
Ivan: All you got to do is follow the fucking money trail to figure out who's getting exempt, basically.
Ivan: I would like just a report of who the fuck, the company, and who's donating.
Ivan: You're going to find, predict, who's getting a tariff exemption.
Sam: Yeah. I would bet money that you are correct on that.
Ivan: You know, in the Godfather movies, they had this part where guys from,
Ivan: you know, I guess this is from from the telephone, you know,
Ivan: I can't remember which telephone company they were portraying there.
Ivan: I think it's probably ITT probably at the time show up in Cuba and they give
Ivan: this golden telephone to the dictator.
Ivan: OK. All right. In the thing. And it's just amazing how exactly it is working right now.
Ivan: Just like that in the Trump White House.
Sam: Right. One other Trump administration-related thing, although it's not as directly
Sam: Donald Trump, is a long string of things RFK Jr.
Sam: has been doing in the health area. Yeah.
Sam: The most recent was canceling $500 million in research to mRNA vaccines.
Sam: And look, I've seen so many posts on like Blue Sky and Mastodon and other places from, you know,
Sam: health-related people, specialists in the field, talking about how incredibly
Sam: stupid this is and shooting ourselves in the foot like everything else.
Sam: And in this particular case, It's like now some people have said,
Sam: you know, people are going to die because of this lack of research.
Sam: But I feel like it's it's more complicated than that because other countries
Sam: are going to do this research.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: You know, it will get done. It's just we're going to be behind.
Ivan: We're going to be behind. Exactly. Other and here are going to be the ones that
Ivan: are going to control this and that that we're going to need at some point.
Ivan: And we're going to be behind. Yes.
Sam: Well, and here's the thing, like of all.
Sam: If you look at Donald Trump's first administration, the one thing that he did
Sam: that was probably really good was the goddamn Operation Warp Speed on the COVID
Sam: vaccine to really push it,
Sam: push it hard, and use some of this mRNA technology that was really cutting edge
Sam: and resulted in a vaccine that worked really, really well.
Sam: Multiple vaccines using this technique across the world. But the thing is,
Sam: the technique involved in that, which, by the way, it was not brand new for the COVID vaccine.
Sam: They had been working on researching mRNA vaccines for a decade plus.
Sam: And this was just the first one that was like, OK, we'll use it on this one
Sam: right away and we'll fast track it and blah, blah, blah.
Sam: But this stuff has shown extreme promise, like for an actual HIV-AIDS vaccine
Sam: is in the final stages and was one of the things canceled.
Sam: The tests on it were canceled on this. It's been showing promise for all sorts
Sam: of cancer vaccines as well for certain types of cancer.
Sam: there it's it's a really really
Sam: promising technology that has all kinds of
Sam: potential applications in different areas that's been
Sam: showing that it's been working really well now a lot
Sam: of this stuff is still in the research phase and that's what they're canceling
Sam: is like it's really super promising technology with the potential to save you
Sam: know millions of lives potentially and it's like okay we're not going to do
Sam: that research anymore sorry you're on your own And again,
Sam: I, I've, the research will get done, but the fact that it's not by us is,
Sam: is just hurting ourselves for no reason.
Ivan: I mean, we're, we're just, we're just idiots.
Sam: And it probably will set things back. Like, you know, even if other people will
Sam: pick up the slack, if we were the ones that were running ahead on this point,
Sam: it's going to take a while for other folks to catch up. You know?
Sam: And this is just one of many things that RFK Jr.
Sam: is doing to really decimate our health infrastructure in this country, and it's really sad.
Sam: And Donald Trump was asked about this, by the way. He's like,
Sam: you know, the mRNA vaccine was one of the major successes of your first administration,
Sam: and now all this stuff is being canceled. What do you think about that?
Sam: And he says, like, that was the past.
Sam: We're moving on. was basically his answer.
Ivan: He doesn't give a shit.
Sam: Okay, shall we take a break? I'll come back with some non-Trump, non-politics thing.
Sam: We'll be back right after. I was about to say, I don't think this will take
Sam: very long, but every time I say that, it ends up taking so long.
Sam: So we'll be back. We'll be back.
Sam: Okay, here we are. Okay, so the topic I have in mind for the rest is just we
Sam: had more AI stuff this week.
Sam: And the big headline news was OpenAI released GPT-5, which is their latest version
Sam: for chat GPT, has a number of improvements.
Sam: They had hyped this as like major game-changing new thing.
Sam: The initial reviews in the first couple days have been like, eh, maybe not so much.
Sam: But then OpenAI also said the rollout hadn't gone smoothly and some things that
Sam: were turned off that should have been turned on.
Sam: Like apparently the thinking mode was not working for a significant portion
Sam: of the first 24 hours this thing was out.
Sam: But people have been posting their usual sort of AI fails of,
Sam: like, AI doing really stupid things, like not being able to count the number
Sam: of bees and blueberry, generating maps of the U.S.
Sam: or lists of presidents that are completely wrong, things like that.
Ivan: Well, the great thing is that, look, the list of presidents that you shared,
Ivan: you know, showed that apparently our past presidents time traveled because they
Ivan: served in backwards time order.
Sam: Most of them did. Some of them served in frontwards time order,
Sam: but for hundreds of years.
Ivan: For hundreds of years, yes.
Sam: Yes. Like, I believe FDR began his presidency sometime in the 1500s.
Sam: You know. Now, he was president a long time, but not that long.
Ivan: But not 400 years.
Sam: And, of course, the name was wrong. They screwed up all the names.
Ivan: Yeah, the names, the names.
Sam: In really amusing ways.
Ivan: You know, I don't know. They just released a new AI program.
Ivan: the model for us for internal use just
Ivan: announced like yesterday as well i mean like i
Ivan: like i've mentioned actually our engineers are using it more than
Ivan: than me in order for solution you know
Ivan: in order to put together solutions and stuff we had a couple of internal models
Ivan: but i i i do think that well it was like this whole thing the other day the
Ivan: whole thing the other day that i shared about this girl that got thrown out
Ivan: of a trivia competition, okay?
Ivan: Where they were in the trivia competition and she got thrown out because they
Ivan: found out that she was like searching for the fucking answers.
Ivan: She was looking up the answers.
Ivan: She was looking up the answers and she got all pissed off and started screaming,
Ivan: this is bullshit. This is impossible.
Ivan: Nobody can know all these answers without fucking searching.
Ivan: and i'm like sam look i've already i've heard i can't remember who the hell,
Ivan: blurted this out to me the other day and i've seen this from and now i hear
Ivan: it from so many other people so many people are just admitting to me right now
Ivan: that they could not write an email without using chat gpt period they can't write an email well.
Sam: Well look i will tell you like at my place of work,
Sam: Everyone is being encouraged to actively use AI for like everything.
Sam: Now, internal AI is not like these external.
Ivan: Yeah, it's like, yeah, same thing as ours. Yeah.
Sam: And it's like, you know, everything from writing an email to writing a report to coding to whatever.
Sam: It's like explore what's out there, figure out how you can use it effectively.
Sam: Now, it's still expected that, you know, you as the human are reviewing it and
Sam: making sure it makes sense.
Ivan: But this is my problem. Most of these people aren't reviewing anything that
Ivan: this shit is generating.
Ivan: OK, if the you know, so many of these people, the ones that I that I've heard
Ivan: from more not inside the company, but from other places.
Ivan: The main thing that the main thing that I see is that these people are using
Ivan: it and they don't they don't have no clue about what they said.
Ivan: They don't understand the subject matter.
Sam: I joked about this when this first started happening a couple of years ago,
Sam: that we are now in a situation where somebody is given the assignment to send
Sam: out a summary email or an email talking about whatever's going on, right?
Sam: And so they give the AI like three or four bullets and say, write me a status
Sam: report based on these three or four bullets. and the AI expands that out to
Sam: like a one-page document or something.
Sam: And then they send it out. And if anybody reads it at all, which may not even
Sam: happen, but if anybody looks at it at all.
Ivan: They probably ask for it to summarize the EA back to them so they're not even
Ivan: reading the fucking thing. So what the hell's the point of a stupid thing anyway?
Sam: They have the AI summarize it back to three or four bullets and you could have
Sam: just sent the three or four bullets.
Ivan: Four bullets!
Sam: To start word.
Ivan: That's the one thing. I don't understand why you're making, using the ai just to make tons of filler.
Sam: I i mean the the on a lot of
Sam: these things it's like if if if
Sam: it really matters that little then why
Sam: are you wasting the time on it anyway i don't know at the same time like i i
Sam: will fully admit both at work and at home the ai is saving me all kinds of time
Sam: the ai is letting me do things that i would not have done And I get it.
Ivan: But I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is people not being able
Ivan: to answer simple questions anymore or do simple things because they can't.
Ivan: They can't think anymore.
Sam: And there was a study that came out like a few weeks ago as well,
Sam: talking about they had one group of people write like your old traditional like
Sam: five paragraph essays themselves about some topics that they had to research.
Sam: And then they had another group who were encouraged to use AI to write the paragraphs.
Sam: And then they tested both groups on something theoretically unrelated,
Sam: but that still exercised your brain in some way.
Sam: And they found that the people who'd used the AI did worse on the other tests afterwards.
Ivan: Yeah, no kidding.
Sam: Simply, I guess the theory is simply
Sam: because they weren't exercising their brains for the other activity.
Sam: so they got lazy or whatever i don't know you know but but at the same like
Sam: i said i have to admit like i am i am getting things done that i wouldn't even
Sam: have attempted without ai assistance here but.
Ivan: But you know what and and i guess you know maybe the one thing that i'm seeing
Ivan: and it's something that even other tools have shown in the past we've had google searches or whatever.
Sam: Is that.
Ivan: It really depends on.
Sam: How you use it.
Ivan: Yeah you know because there's just so many people that just they they they will
Ivan: be they don't care about understanding what the hell is behind it and they will
Ivan: just go and like just you know whatever.
Sam: Well the thing is the people are right who say like if you are in a situation
Sam: where you can just copy and paste the output of the ai and it is perfectly acceptable
Sam: and the people who receive that are fine with it and don't,
Sam: and any problems it has are just like, oh, okay, that's fine.
Sam: Then you really are redundant.
Sam: You know, the AI could just do that without you. Like if you are adding value
Sam: because you are, you are using the AI as a tool to go back and forth and refine
Sam: something and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: And you're actually putting a decent amount of yourself into it. Okay.
Sam: Then maybe you can make the argument that you plus AI is better than you alone.
Sam: But if all you are doing, if all you are doing is, oh, copy and paste the output,
Sam: move it over here, done, then you are useless.
Sam: And maybe you served some function in the past, but the argument that says your
Sam: job is not actually needed anymore becomes very, very strong at that point.
Ivan: I think that it's just really, you know, it's the application.
Ivan: I, you know, for example, I'm working on something, applying AI,
Ivan: in which what the net result should be. is that I've got a call center that's overwhelmed.
Ivan: There's just too many fucking calls coming into this call center.
Ivan: And this AI will offload a significant burden of some of the calls that are coming in.
Sam: Basically handle all the simple ones and the more complicated ones.
Ivan: Exactly. Right. That's basically what you're trying to do.
Sam: And if we do that.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: We've had, by the way, we've had systems to do that for call centers for decades now.
Ivan: It's just it's getting better. Exactly. You know, so this is to make it even
Ivan: better, okay, in that way, that it can do more than what a simple menu prompt
Ivan: system with automated stuff can do.
Sam: Which people hate, by the way.
Ivan: Which people hate.
Sam: They're always like, how do I get to a huge...
Ivan: I'm like, agent, agent, fuck you, agent. What the hell?
Sam: Exactly.
Ivan: I don't want to fucking... Listen, I don't want you to repeat my balance.
Ivan: I don't give a shit. Give me the damn agent. Agent.
Sam: I was on a customer service call as recently as a few days ago where I was like,
Sam: yeah, zero, zero, zero, agent, agent, agent, whatever.
Sam: Exactly.
Ivan: And then for some reason, the voice recognition on there keeps being distracted
Ivan: by noises, strenuous noises in the room.
Ivan: So I keep saying, you know, I keep having to wind up muting the line and pressing
Ivan: zero, because if I'm sitting there, it says, I'll just hold on the line.
Ivan: It will. Did you say something? No, I didn't.
Sam: Right. Anyway, just getting back to this for a second, and I will I am going
Sam: to give the examples of the presidents in the states a little bit more just to close it out.
Sam: But before doing that, you know, I feel like the bottom, people are making some
Sam: fun of GPT-5 for not quite living up to the hype.
Sam: But I think once it settles down a little bit, people will find that it is yet
Sam: another significant improvement over where we were before and that we have not like leveled out yet.
Sam: One of the big things they said, by the way, is OpenAI,
Sam: ChatGPT used to have like a whole bunch of different models that you could select
Sam: from that said like, you know, oh, are you going to use the 4.0 model or the
Sam: 0.3 model or the 0.3 mini or whatever?
Sam: And to really make the best use of it, you really had to understand the differences
Sam: between all of those and pick the one that was most appropriate for what you were trying to do.
Sam: One of the big things they've tried to do with five, apparently with mixed success,
Sam: is try to have a layer that takes your prompt and figures out which underlying
Sam: model to use. Like they've...
Sam: Tried to market it as, okay, now there's only one model.
Sam: But from the experts I've seen looking at it so far, there really clearly are
Sam: multiple underlying models.
Sam: They've just added a layer that tries to figure out which is the right one for
Sam: you and routes you the right place based on what you've set.
Sam: But people found out fairly quickly, like, you know, for instance,
Sam: if you wanted it to do a deep analysis, you had to specifically tell it in the
Sam: prompt something along the lines of,
Sam: now, please think about this carefully, you know, and then it would take more time.
Sam: Whereas if you left out those words, it would be much more sloppy about whatever
Sam: it gave you, but a lot faster.
Sam: Apparently, OpenAI is backing up and saying, okay, for our paid users,
Sam: we will give you back the way to manually select which one.
Sam: Another thing, you know, so I think they've got some growing pains,
Sam: but this probably is significantly better.
Sam: Apparently on standardized benchmarks or whatever, it is better. We shall see.
Sam: This is still a race and they still haven't plateaued yet.
Sam: But apparently a lot of people got upset because they felt like...
Sam: The other thing OpenAI did is they shut off version 4 and moved everyone to 5.
Sam: But a lot of people started complaining that its personality was different because
Sam: they had specifically done things like make it not flatter you as much,
Sam: make it not agree with you all the time, make it not whatever.
Sam: And they also added some protections in, by the way, where they were finding
Sam: in version 4.0 that people were getting dependent on the AI and where people
Sam: were spiraling into like various,
Sam: like, I'm going to say conspiracy theory, but it wasn't exactly conspiracy theories,
Sam: but they were spiraling into like, there was one case where there were a couple
Sam: of cases, actually, there are a bunch of cases where people started.
Sam: Thinking that they were super grandiose important because of the way this thing
Sam: was flattering them and telling them how important their idea was and how really
Sam: like they were going to revolutionize the world or whatever.
Sam: So in chat GPT-5, they've scaled back on all of these things intentionally,
Sam: But then people who'd built up these relationships with ChatGPT4 were like,
Sam: you know, you've completely changed its personality.
Sam: My relationship, like, is gone. Like, what have you done?
Sam: You've killed my friend kind of things. So apparently they're also going to
Sam: let people in the paid tier go back to version four if they want to.
Sam: So they can continue their unhealthy relationship with ChatGPT4.
Sam: So anyway, this stuff is still moving forward.
Sam: It's still like, if you compare now to six months ago, to six months before
Sam: that, to six months before that, we're still, these systems are getting more
Sam: and more capable every time. We have not flattened out yet.
Sam: So we'll see where it goes. But in the meantime, they're still messing up the president.
Sam: So let me read you some of this. The prompt people asked was,
Sam: show me a diagram of the U.S.
Sam: president since Herbert Hoover with their names and years in office under their photos. Okay.
Sam: So we start out with Herbert Hoover. And by the way, it's got pictures of all
Sam: these people who are clearly, you see, maybe some resemblance to the real person.
Sam: It's like a caricature that's a bad caricature of sort of that person mixed
Sam: with other people. Like, the Bill Clinton person looks like a mix of Bill Clinton
Sam: and Ross Perot, you know, for instance.
Sam: You know, Ronald Reagan looks like the spitting image puppet of Ronald Reagan.
Ivan: Remember spitting image, the little puppet shows?
Sam: Anyway, but Herbert Hoover was apparently president from 1929 to 1539. Okay?
Sam: Then the names start getting messed up. We have Franklin D.
Sam: Rosanet.
Ivan: Rosanet, yeah.
Sam: Yeah, he was president from 1539 to 1946.
Ivan: It's a nice long presidency.
Sam: Harry S. Truman, they got his name right, but he was president from 1848 to 1523.
Sam: Dwight D. E. Fishworth. Yveshwar. Yveshwar.
Ivan: Yveshwar. Yes, Yveshwar. And he was president from 1983 to 1991.
Ivan: I didn't realize we had Yveshwar as our president. Look at that.
Sam: Yes. And all of these years are messed up, so I'm not going to give those anymore.
Sam: But just a few more of the names. John F. Catwady.
Sam: Lynn Dunn B. Johnson.
Sam: Richard Ninnon. Gerald Yard,
Sam: They got Jimmy Carter right They
Sam: got Jimmy Carter right, thank God Ronald Bagan Bagan George V. W. Bixar,
Sam: Bill Churton Bill Churton.
Ivan: Yes G.
Sam: R. W. Bush,
Sam: Um, Abrak Ufawani.
Ivan: Sounds like the way that I would expect, like, Donald Trump to pronounce it or something.
Sam: Donald Trome.
Ivan: And the picture, the fucking picture of Trump is just, oh my God.
Sam: And then we have Joe Biden. They got his name right, but he looks like,
Sam: um, Orrin Hatch or somebody.
Ivan: Something. And what year did he start? as president?
Sam: The year, it says two zero and then they're not even numbers.
Sam: Yeah. It looks like it might be 2066 with some lines through it.
Ivan: Let me tell you something. Donald Trump, it says he's president from 2017 to 2,431.
Sam: I hope it's wrong.
Ivan: This better be fucking wrong. That's all I'm saying.
Sam: And similarly, where'd it go?
Sam: I won't do all 50, But there's somebody who also asked it to generate a map
Sam: of the USA with each state named.
Sam: It got Washington and Oregon right.
Sam: California is California.
Sam: We've got Montana, Teneho, Nevada, Mezmico for New Mexico.
Ivan: Mezmico.
Sam: Mezmico. We got Dakota and Sonota for North and South Dakota.
Sam: Okay, I'm trying to read Minnesota.
Sam: Mahim and then some things that aren't ladders. Yes. Wisconsin is Wiscubsgia.
Ivan: Yeah.
Ivan: Miss Fronnie?
Sam: Yes. We got Lundus for Illinois.
Ivan: Ohio. Oco. Oco.
Sam: West Virginia is apparently Russian or something.
Ivan: Georgia is the CEO of COLA.
Sam: Yeah. And Pennsylvania, female pohamp.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Anyway. That's enough. You could look these up.
Sam: So, you know, so AI has all the typical AI problems. They haven't solved them all yet.
Sam: Apparently, some of these may have been gotten by not remembering to tell the
Sam: AI to think carefully about it.
Sam: It might have done better if you told it to think carefully.
Sam: So you got to remember. Think carefully.
Sam: Anyway, that's it. Shall we wrap it up, Yvonne?
Ivan: Yeah, let's wrap it up.
Sam: Ah, okay. Go to curmudgeons-corner.com. You can find all the ways to contact us.
Sam: You can find our archives. You can find transcripts of shows.
Sam: Importantly, you can find a link to, oh yeah, all the ways to contact us,
Sam: except I have not linked to the TikTok yet.
Sam: I still have not linked to the TikTok.
Sam: I still have, I opened a Blue Sky account for Curmudgeon's Corner,
Sam: but I haven't done anything with it yet. It's not populated.
Sam: It's not doing anything. I'll finish that someday.
Sam: Anyway, and of course, you can go to our Patreon as well to give us money.
Sam: At various levels, we will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell.
Sam: We will send a postcard. Have you sent the postcards yet, Yvonne?
Ivan: No, I have not.
Sam: I would yell at you, but I like had the postcards on my to-do list for something
Sam: like four months before I sent them.
Ivan: Exactly. So give me a fucking break.
Sam: You know, I told you at the beginning of the show how my to-do list works.
Sam: One of the things on that list was send those postcards. So.
Ivan: Explains a lot.
Sam: Anyway, postcards, mugs, whatever, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask,
Sam: we will invite you to a curmudgeon's corner of Slack, where Yvonne and I and
Sam: others have been chat every week, throughout the week.
Sam: We share news stories. We talk about whatever.
Sam: Yvonne and Peter and a bunch of other folks were talking about investments. earlier today.
Sam: I did not partake in that particular conversation. I looked at it,
Sam: but I did not contribute. I was busy at work and I didn't care.
Sam: But sometimes there are things that are of interest to me.
Sam: It is a variety of conversation and there's interesting news stories every day.
Sam: So Yvonne, what is the highlight this week from the Curmudgeons Corner Slack
Sam: that we have not mentioned on the show? I got two for you.
Ivan: I got two for you. First one, will wheaton is now older than patrick stewart
Ivan: was when star trek the next generation piloted you're welcome this is.
Sam: Another thing that's clearly a lie it's.
Ivan: Not uh and uh the second one is dial-up internet to be discontinued aol routinely
Ivan: evaluates its product services and has decided to discontinue dial-up internet
Ivan: the service will no longer be available in AOL plans.
Ivan: As a result, on September 30th, 2025, this service and the associated software,
Ivan: the AOL Dialer software, and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older
Ivan: operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.
Ivan: This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan,
Ivan: which you can access at any time on your AOL plan dashboard.
Ivan: To manage or cancel your account, visit my account. For more information,
Ivan: if you have any questions about your account, please call.
Sam: It's amazing AOL even exists still.
Ivan: I'm like, how the hell? I mean, who can dial up?
Ivan: How do you dial? I mean, how? I mean, what can you do doing dial up right now in the modern internet?
Sam: Not much.
Ivan: Who has a modem? Who the hell has a modem?
Sam: I'm sure there's still some people out there.
Ivan: Well, I shared on the Slack also a picture of what I thought was the coolest
Ivan: design of any modem from the 80s and 90s, which is the Hayes smart modem. I really like the,
Ivan: metal case of it.
Sam: It's got the blinking lights on the front.
Ivan: It's got the row of blinking lights on the front.
Sam: And they still made the noise when you dialed up.
Ivan: Yes, yes, yes.
Sam: It's important.
Ivan: This one is a picture of a Hayes smart modem 1200. I mean, I know that the last one I had was 5600.
Ivan: kbps but you know this is i.
Sam: Think i might have even had a.
Ivan: 128 at some point yeah i had a probably i did not what's my my my slowest was
Ivan: 300 that that was my lowest i.
Sam: Think i think my first was actually a 1200 i don't think i ever had a 300.
Ivan: I had a couple i had a 300 that was slow let me tell you about slow you could
Ivan: see the letters just it was like a teletype with the letters i remember The 300 baud modem. Yeah.
Ivan: This is not blazing fast by any stretch.
Sam: We should get some of those modems, Yvonne, and record the next show on a 1200 baud modem.
Ivan: I don't think that will work. I have a strange feeling.
Sam: Oh. Oh. Well, you know.
Ivan: According to the file size that
Ivan: I am like right now, we have used 3,898 megabytes on my end and counting.
Ivan: Let me see. I'll ask ChatGPT, hey, how long would it take to transmit 3,907 megabytes at 1,200 BPS?
Ivan: All right. Let's see. Let's see if you can give me an answer.
Ivan: I know it's terrible at math, but here we go.
Sam: Yes. Well, this is the kind of application where a simple calculator is actually better. Go ahead.
Ivan: Well, but I don't have the, you know, I'm not sure how to do that, that mathematical.
Ivan: I got to add a lot of zeros. It did give me a quiddick answer. 301 days.
Sam: I don't see why that would be a problem.
Ivan: There you go. It'll only take 300 days for me to upload the file. It's fine.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. And of course, like actually having the conversation at that speed as well.
Sam: Yeah, we'd have to do that.
Ivan: So we'd spend like the next 300 days working on our next episode.
Sam: We could go back and forth by typing at the 1200 bond.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: And then feed that into text-to-speech or something.
Ivan: Yes, there you go.
Sam: But it would have to be 1980s text-to-speech.
Ivan: Oh, Jesus Christ. Sound like a rope. Yes, the entire robotic voice. Yes, there you go.
Sam: Yeah, okay. Anyway, so AOL does apparently still exist.
Ivan: It still exists somehow. I don't know. Who owns AOL?
Sam: I have gotten email from an AOL address within the last year.
Sam: Our friend Chad still has an AOL address.
Ivan: Ah, yes.
Sam: He let us know he was getting married.
Ivan: Oh, that's right.
Sam: We watched the wedding online. Not via AOL, I don't think.
Ivan: No, we don't.
Sam: So who are they on by now?
Ivan: Yeah, I got to look this up.
Sam: Verizon? Oh, Verizon.
Ivan: Oh, yeah, it was Verizon a while back that bought them, yeah.
Sam: Wait, that was through 2001. No, no, it's now Verizon sold 90% of the Verizon
Sam: media division, which apparently included AOL, to Apollo Global Management.
Ivan: Oh, the hedge fund? Okay.
Sam: And which also bundled with that was not just AOL, but also Yahoo.
Ivan: Yahoo, right. It was Yahoo, yeah, because I know they own Yahoo too on that, yeah.
Sam: Ah, anyway. Okay. That is it.
Sam: Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Have a wonderful, wonderful week and do amazing things.
Sam: And make sure to, whenever you're thinking about texting your spouse or significant other,
Sam: Just say what comes to mind. Ask chat GPT 50 first what you should say.
Ivan: Yes, I've seen that trend.
Sam: You know, God, I've seen people recently talk about how, like,
Sam: they're asking chat GPT, like, hey, I'm going to be late to this thing that
Sam: I was supposed to do with my wife because I was doing this other thing instead.
Sam: Dad, give me an appropriate excuse to text her that won't make her mad.
Sam: And then doing whatever it says.
Ivan: Yeah, great idea.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: How could that miss?
Sam: I don't know. It seems perfect to me.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Okay. Goodbye, everyone.
Ivan: Bye.
Ivan: Oh, God.
Sam: Okay. Good night, Yvonne. Go to bed. And I'm going to have dinner.
Ivan: Oh. Oh, good.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Hitting stop.
Ivan: Stop.