Ivan: You have a Pac-Man t-shirt with the sun eating all the planets. Interesting.
Sam: Yep.
Ivan: Now, where did you get that?
Sam: Brandy gave it to me.
Ivan: Ah, okay. So she shopped for it. You know, this wasn't some random...
Sam: Yes, she saw it somewhere and bought it.
Ivan: That's a very thoughtful one. Yeah, okay. I like this. There you go.
Sam: You'll notice.
Ivan: There's some kind of plant back... Oh, there you go.
Sam: Up here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She painted that.
Ivan: Oh!
Sam: That's all the planets, but each one of them is a fruit of some sort.
Ivan: That's very cool as well. There we go.
Sam: Hello. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you.
Pete: I need a minute to get the sound actually routing correctly.
Sam: Yeah, no problem.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I hear you.
Pete: Let me figure out how to do that.
Ivan: Pete, you know what? I hadn't seen you in a while. I think you had more hair.
Pete: I had a lot more hair. So these are headphones I've never, ever used.
Pete: They were from Verizon. They were like free for getting Verizon.
Pete: And I have no idea why they're so quiet.
Sam: Wow.
Ivan: You got to like sometimes. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.
Pete: Say something.
Sam: Hello, hello, something.
Ivan: It's tricky. Like which sound output volume it's picking. It gets,
Ivan: I don't know, you gotta pick the right...
Ivan: Not the right fuck. I meant the right volume slider.
Pete: I hope we're not recording yet because I'm going to be cursing a little bit while I get this work.
Sam: Oh, yeah. You're live streaming right now.
Ivan: Do you realize I'm on this show? I mean, seriously?
Pete: Do you get many people on your live stream?
Ivan: Not really. Just usually just every once in a while a straggler goes into the live stream.
Pete: Sam's mom.
Ivan: Yeah. Or Alex.
Sam: Sometimes Alex. Yeah. And we do get like a handful of like after the fact non-live
Sam: views of the YouTube, but handful.
Ivan: Yeah. It's really mostly audio. I mean, do we get?
Sam: Yeah. And we are, our ongoing long-term average is like 50 downloads a week.
Sam: We're actually slightly lower than that right now.
Sam: We were slightly higher than that a few months ago. So that's also affected
Sam: by how good my robot detection happens to be on my log processing at any given
Sam: moment. But you know what.
Ivan: It's normal that after an election cycle, our downloads go down.
Ivan: It's been historically since we've done this podcast.
Sam: Yeah. So like right now, so far today, there's been one download from an IP
Sam: address with a Philadelphia philadelphiapa.fios.verizon.net download of last week's episode.
Pete: Well, that's clearly David Cornswit, who, as we all know, played Superman and
Pete: is from Philadelphia. He heard word that you were going to talk about this week,
Pete: and he was, you know, he got the wrong episode.
Ivan: All right, well, let's jump in. I remember I got to be somewhere like this afternoon.
Sam: Okay, okay, okay. Here comes the stuff.
Sam: Welcome to Curmudgeons Corner for Saturday, August 23rd, 2025.
Sam: It is a few minutes after 16 UTC as we're starting to record.
Sam: I am Sam Minter, Yvonne Bo is here, and Peter B.
Sam: We have a special guest, Peter B. We have a special guest.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Special guest, special guest.
Ivan: Special guest, whatever, I don't know.
Sam: As we have mentioned on the show a few times, Pete had asked us whether he could
Sam: join us to talk about Superman.
Pete: Like a younger brother. Did you do it yet? Did you do it yet?
Sam: Yeah, exactly.
Ivan: To be fair, listen, to be fair, look, I had planned to see the movie in the
Ivan: theaters, but I, this decrepit old man over here, who's apparently just turned
Ivan: into a decrepit old man, got hurt.
Ivan: And I hurt, I have hurt an abdominal muscle, okay, which I first,
Ivan: I thought was a recurrence of my diverticulitis that I got last year.
Sam: Just to be clear, as this podcast has aged, getting close to 20 years on this
Sam: podcast, the percentage of time of the co-hosts complaining about their health
Sam: issues has increased dramatically.
Ivan: Oh, I feel right at home here.
Pete: I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about gout. I'm going to talk about bursitis.
Ivan: Fucking gout. You know, well, thank God I have no gout. I got I got family members that got gout.
Ivan: I had a friend of mine who unfortunately passed away that also had gout.
Ivan: But I'm like, you know, this thing like right now, every other year.
Ivan: Oh, my knee. Oh, my, you know, my my shoulder. Oh, my.
Ivan: And so now somehow I had this bout of dermaticulitis last year.
Ivan: This was a whole mess. I wound up in the hospital for a few days over this.
Ivan: OK, thank God it was only meds that that that that, you know,
Ivan: I only needed meds, no surgery.
Ivan: And then a few like about a month ago, I feel, oh, this hurts down here.
Ivan: Oh, am I getting something?
Ivan: Whatever. And I thought it was just my gastro. And I'm like,
Ivan: I go work out like an idiot.
Ivan: OK, doing a ton of ab exercises. And then I realize, oh, it wasn't my gastro.
Ivan: That muscle there, I must have strained it. And now I've really done it.
Ivan: And so, yeah, I'm in pain again.
Sam: Yeah. So anyway, we are going to spend our first segment talking about Superman. Right.
Ivan: So I couldn't go watch it in the theaters. But, but...
Ivan: The moment it came out on Apple TV for purchase, I immediately just purchased
Ivan: the damn thing and watched it.
Pete: Now, I want to hijack you for a minute here, Sam, because as you know,
Pete: I have a YouTube channel, Tea Leaps Programming.
Sam: Oh, yes. We're doing a special, like, joint thing.
Pete: Normally talks about nerd stuff. Superman qualifies as nerd stuff.
Pete: So I'm always on the lookout for times when someone else can do the work and
Pete: I can somehow claim that for myself. So I am going to edit.
Pete: You graciously agreed to share the video and audio. I am going to edit that
Pete: and put it on the channel.
Ivan: You sound like the perfect corporate employee right now.
Pete: Well, the thing I'm going to do, which could be controversial,
Pete: is I know you guys talk politics. I normally try to avoid politics.
Sam: After we do Superman, we'll spend the rest of the show doing news and current events.
Pete: You guys were so patient with me younger brothering you with,
Pete: did you watch it yet? Did you watch it yet? Can we talk about it yet?
Pete: I know that I've kind of deferred in the past, but I will join you on this conversation
Pete: and hopefully will not curse too much so that I can keep it.
Ivan: I don't understand why you're worried about the cursing.
Ivan: Look, I mean, exactly like from me,
Ivan: who has apparently probably set a world record this year for uttering the word
Ivan: fuck on this podcast about everything that is fucking going on.
Ivan: But anyway, I digress. Let's go back to him.
Sam: You know, Pete is trying to do a nice, like, child-friendly YouTube channel, right?
Sam: Like, your big audience is like the 10-year-olds, right?
Pete: Actually, according to YouTube analytics, the big audience is,
Pete: in fact, 60-year-old American guy.
Pete: So what can I tell you? Who else wants to play old video games but those people?
Ivan: Apparently, yeah. Well, you know what? I'll tell you who likes to play old video games.
Ivan: My son, 12-year-old, is absolutely fascinated by old video games.
Ivan: As a matter of fact, I got this recently.
Ivan: I got the box here. Hold on.
Ivan: I don't know if I can share this, but there we go. This. I got one of these.
Sam: Okay. For those who are listening to only audio, it's one of these retro,
Sam: like, Atari simulators that you, it comes with, like, thousands of games and
Sam: you attach it with an HDMI to your TV. But it plays like the old Atari.
Ivan: Yeah. So he is fascinated by the old retro games, like Tempest, Missile Command.
Ivan: I don't know. he likes all the old video games so so there you go.
Sam: On on my on my tempest console that
Sam: was finally assembled that my son gave me
Sam: for christmas like years ago years ago he of
Sam: course has blown away my high score on tempest for sure of course i think he's
Sam: beat my centipede score like any one of the games that he has actually consistently
Sam: tried to play he's he's crushing me so as it should be but you know so go ahead
Sam: superman so yeah so tell me tell.
Pete: Me your history with this character what do you go what expectations.
Sam: Are you going into this so so i had brought up superman in film specifically
Sam: the wikipedia page so i could reference what i've seen what i haven't but i
Sam: will start by saying never read the comics okay from a comic book perspective,
Sam: never done it from i have
Sam: i have what so let me start with the movies what
Sam: i've watched and what i haven't then there's like the tv shows as
Sam: well i haven't brought up that list but i've watched a few of the two
Sam: tv shows let's see i have not watched i i might have seen like one episode or
Sam: something of the 1948 superman serial i have not watched the two night the 1950
Sam: serial or the 1951 Superman and the Mole.
Pete: George Reeves.
Sam: Yeah. I have not seen George Reeves or Kirk Allen, which was the 48 one.
Sam: Yeah, that's correct. Now, I've seen, I believe, all of the Christopher Reeve
Sam: movies, all four of them.
Sam: I will probably agree with most.
Sam: Well, my take is Superman 2 is my favorite of the bunch.
Sam: I think that's a fairly common and three and four went downhill really rapid.
Sam: Okay. I do not believe I have seen the 1980s Supergirl at all.
Sam: I have not seen Superman Returns. I have not seen the Donner cut of Superman 2.
Pete: You're not missing anything.
Sam: I have seen Man of Steel and I hated it.
Sam: I have not seen any of the other Zack Snyder versions of Superman.
Sam: I have not seen Batman versus Superman.
Sam: I have not seen Justice League. I have not seen the Zack Snyder cut of Justice
Sam: League. I have not seen any of those.
Sam: And I've seen this one, obviously, and that brings us up to date on those.
Sam: And like I said, for TV, I watched most of Smallville.
Pete: Oh, that's a commitment. There's a lot of Smallville.
Sam: There's a lot. I watched most of it when it was on, like when it was actually
Sam: on, you know, it was one of the shows that I watched on a regular basis.
Sam: I can't tell you for sure that I've seen every episode, but I think I've seen most of it.
Sam: I think, what was the one before Smallville? Lois and Clark?
Sam: Is that the one? Yeah. I think I saw a lot of that one.
Pete: Lois and Clark Adventures, yeah.
Sam: Yeah. Like I should have brought up that list too.
Pete: But I didn't. I don't think I saw, I don't think I ever watched that.
Pete: It was a thing when I was in grad school, and I was just too busy,
Pete: I think, to be watching things then.
Sam: Right. And I don't think I've seen any of the other TV shows.
Sam: Well, the cartoon when I was a kid. The Justice League one.
Ivan: The Justice League one. Or is it? No.
Pete: No, the Super Friends.
Sam: Yeah, Super Friends.
Pete: Do you mean the Super Friends? No, I met Super Friends. Or do you mean like the late 90s?
Sam: I met Super Friends.
Pete: Batman, the animated series.
Ivan: I was trying to figure out which one. I know that the way that I first watched
Ivan: Superman was cartoons on TV.
Ivan: And now I realize which one it was. It was this one that was called the Batman Superman Hour.
Ivan: That's really where I watched Superman.
Pete: That's pretty good. It's not bad. Even to this day, it's aged well.
Ivan: Yeah. So that's the one I really watched. I will admit that I went through the
Ivan: entire list right now of Superman movies.
Ivan: I'm pretty sure that the only ones I watch are the Christopher Reeve ones.
Ivan: That's it. I watch Superman 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Ivan: No Supergirl. And I was not one that, I think I did read some comics, but not a lot of them.
Ivan: But I did watch, I liked the Christopher Reeve version of Superman, okay, on film.
Ivan: And I did watch all four of those.
Ivan: But my thing as a child was that Batman Superman hour.
Ivan: I watched that regularly all the time. And that's the one that really,
Ivan: you know, stuck to me that I watched it.
Ivan: But look, I have, I'm, I'm the, I'm the guy, for example, that only saw like
Ivan: the first Jurassic Park.
Pete: I don't think you have to, I don't think you have to apologize for not.
Ivan: Oh, no, no, no. I was not apologizing. I'm explaining that I am like the guy
Ivan: who only saw the first Jurassic Park.
Pete: So you're coming in kind of.
Ivan: Yeah. I am one of these guys that watched like, oh, I watched whatever.
Ivan: Most of these reboots of almost anything, I'm like, in the 2000s,
Ivan: I stopped watching any of it.
Ivan: I'm like, you know, not Batman, not Superman. I mean, shit, I think I watched
Ivan: like The Dark Knight basically because at my sister's house, somebody put it on TV.
Pete: I mean, comic book movie fatigue is a thing. I don't think you're alone in that.
Ivan: Yeah so i i you know i
Ivan: just was not one that that that
Ivan: that watch movies and to be honest as being the curmudgeon
Ivan: i am basically about the only film series that i think i've consistently watched
Ivan: over that entire time span has been bond film series that's it all outside of
Ivan: that i think i've watched every movie in the bond film series dating back to sean connery but,
Ivan: I don't think there is anything else. Oh, and the Mission Impossible series with Tom Cruise.
Pete: Well, a good sidebar for a future Curmudgeon's Corner episode could be which
Pete: is the best Bond movie and why is it on Her Majesty's Secret Service?
Ivan: Oh. Oh.
Pete: All right. But I'm not going to – having thrown that grenade.
Ivan: All right. So now that we explained, okay, what our background is,
Ivan: why is it that you felt compelled to talk about this movie?
Ivan: Now, I've seen a lot of comments, and I know there are good reasons to.
Ivan: I'm just wondering, from your perspective, what is it that—because my take is
Ivan: that you really loved this movie.
Pete: I did. And I was expecting it to be, I mean, not a disaster,
Pete: but just okay. Okay, so to give a little bit of background, I was a comic book kid.
Pete: I wasn't a Superman kid. I wasn't a DC Comics kid.
Pete: My relationship with comic books is my parents went every week in the 1970s
Pete: to the local, and it wasn't really local, to Flea Market in New Jersey.
Pete: And they would bring home a pile of comics, which was basically whatever garbage
Pete: comics they could get for five cents for a stack of them, right? It's a lot cheaper then.
Pete: And so I read whatever was in that pile.
Pete: That's what I read. If it was Marvel, I read that. If it was Archie, I read a lot of Archie.
Pete: If it was Little Lulu, I would read Little Lulu. I was completely nonjudgmental.
Pete: It had pictures. It had words. I wanted to read it.
Ivan: You know, I had this a little bit easier. You know, we had a pharmacy back then
Ivan: and they came to the magazine deliveries every week. They had a rack.
Ivan: But here's the great thing. I would grab them. I grabbed all of them.
Ivan: Of course. I read them. I just put them all back.
Pete: I was going to say the pharmacy is too expensive, but you came up with a light.
Sam: Well, I'll tell you my one like experience with comic books was when I was.
Sam: Oh, I don't know. I must have been.
Ivan: Oh, by the way, they're all in Spanish.
Sam: Of course.
Pete: Of course.
Sam: I was seven, eight, nine. And where my parents worked at the time,
Sam: there was like a block over.
Sam: There was one of these little family owned pharmacies.
Sam: It was a small family owned pharmacy actually had the soda fountain,
Sam: all that kind of stuff. And one of the things I got to do when I had to sit
Sam: with my parents at their work,
Sam: was I would get to go over there, get something from the soda fountain, and get a comic book.
Sam: Now, just to tell you where I was, I would usually get Casper and Wendy.
Pete: Absolutely. They were very popular.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: So that was the comic book I would get. I have no memories of the comic books themselves.
Sam: I only remember the experience of going to that little pharmacy,
Sam: getting my drink, getting the comic book. They had a little nook where I could
Sam: sit and read for a little bit or I could take it.
Sam: And I remember doing that. I do remember some of the ads from those because one.
Pete: Charles Atlas.
Sam: Well, one.
Ivan: Yes. Oh, my God. The Charles Atlas ads.
Sam: No, no, no. I will tell the story. I don't know if I've told this on here before.
Sam: I've told it to Alex and he really enjoys it. And he's made some like he made
Sam: some chat GPT assisted stories that riffed on this.
Sam: But specifically, there was one ad I was really excited about,
Sam: about like a ghost that you could get.
Sam: Like it was sort of like, you know, fool your friends, get this ghost thing,
Sam: blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah.
Sam: I remember being super excited about it, saving up some money to order this
Sam: thing, like clipping out the little thing from the comic book. You mailed it in.
Sam: And back then it was like delivery in like four to six weeks or something.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: You know? And so I remember marking up a calendar with like days until the ghost arrives. Right.
Sam: You know? And then when the thing finally came, right?
Sam: It was a white balloon with a little square of plastic that you put over it and a string.
Pete: Right.
Sam: You know, I forget how much I paid for this thing, but it was such an incredible disappointment.
Pete: I never sent away for sea monkeys, but I definitely wanted to.
Pete: I'm sure everyone who did was disappointed.
Sam: I'm pretty sure we got sea monkeys at some point. I don't know that we sent
Sam: in mail order, but I remember having sea monkeys.
Sam: And, yes, they were not what was described in the ads.
Pete: All right. So.
Sam: Okay. Back to Superman.
Pete: Comic books come in. I'm reading whatever I got. But I will say that the weeks
Pete: when there were DC comics, when there were Superman comics and Legion of Superheroes,
Pete: were like better weekends than the rest.
Pete: Because those are a little higher production quality. So I like them quite a lot.
Pete: But fast forward, I kind of fell out of comic books after basically I kept reading
Pete: them through college and I kind of stopped because it's an expense.
Pete: They got more expensive.
Pete: And I was a big moviegoer. I would see if you name a movie from like 1980 through
Pete: about 2000, I certainly saw it.
Pete: Right. I would just again, very I don't know what the word is.
Pete: I would see whatever was there. I would go.
Ivan: Well, that was the thing. Undiscriminating.
Pete: That would be a word. So, of course, I saw all of the Superman movies.
Sam: It was something to do.
Pete: Yeah. I did see Man of Steel when it came out in the theater,
Pete: and I did not like it at that time.
Pete: And then what happened, the reason that I was actually so excited for Superman
Pete: 2025 is a couple years ago, I was doing a weekend kind of movie night,
Pete: virtual movie night, with some of my friends.
Pete: And this was, of course, COVID-related.
Pete: And, you know, you kind of go through themes, right? Maybe we're going to watch
Pete: a bunch of monster movies a few weeks in a row.
Pete: And at some point we said, well, wouldn't it be fun to watch all of the Superman movies back to back?
Pete: Not in one session, but, you know, one a week.
Pete: And so we watched the four. I think we did not watch Superman 4.
Pete: I think we watched three of the three Reeve movies. We watched Superman Returns
Pete: and we watched Man of Steel and I was shocked.
Pete: By my reaction to the movies, and this is, I think, going to be a relevant topic
Pete: when we talk about Superman 2020.
Pete: I was shocked because I came out of that and I said, you know what?
Pete: I didn't like Man of Steel.
Pete: And it was the best Superman movie of all the ones we just watched.
Ivan: Wow.
Pete: Because those early Reeve Superman movies. First of all, Christopher Reeve is
Pete: incomparable, right? Like, he inhabits the character.
Pete: So anything I'm saying is not about him as an actor.
Pete: Those movies, the way they are written.
Ivan: Cheesy.
Pete: This is the creepiest thing you will ever. Like Superman is basically written
Pete: as a stalker and a sex pest.
Pete: He's looking at women's underwear. He spends half the movie floating outside
Pete: Lois's apartment waiting for a.
Pete: It's really creepy. He takes away her memory without consent.
Pete: Right. By kissing her. I mean, there's like so much wrong with it.
Pete: And I can remember being in the theater at age, you know, whatever,
Pete: I'm not going to say my age, but being a little kid and watching Superman do
Pete: this stuff and just being like, yes, this is how men should treat women. This is correct.
Pete: This is totally fine. As an adult watching it, I'm like, oh, my Lord, this is awful.
Pete: And so that made me walk away saying, OK, well, Man of Steel was maybe a little
Pete: more thoughtful how all this stuff fits together.
Pete: but none of those despite me saying that Man of Steel was the best of those movies,
Pete: none of them really captured what I thought about the character and so when
Pete: I heard that James Gunn was going to be doing a movie I said this is either
Pete: going to be fantastic or terrible and the guy's track record has me very optimistic
Pete: that he will get to the core so you were cautious.
Ivan: You were being cautious going into it you.
Pete: Were like.
Ivan: You were like, let me lower my expectations to make sure that I don't go in
Ivan: thinking, I know this guy's good, he's going to do great.
Ivan: And then I go in there and I'm like, oh, my God, what the hell is this term?
Pete: I was convinced. I was like, there's a 50% chance I'm going to walk out of theater
Pete: and just be slightly depressed.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Let me give my thoughts on those earlier movies, the ones I've seen anyway.
Sam: so like yes super i
Sam: haven't watched superman one and two recently enough to know if i would have
Sam: the same reaction as you i mean i think i've now i i'm not even going to speculate
Sam: when the last time i saw them was i think it's before i've been tracking what
Sam: i've been watching okay now i have to check.
Sam: See, you've done this to me. Let's see movies.
Sam: I'm going to my little superman.
Sam: Okay, 2025. Boom. Boom. Yeah, no.
Sam: I've been tracking what I've watched since 2014.
Sam: And I have not watched the only Superman movies I've seen in that time are Man
Sam: of Steel and the new 2025 one.
Sam: So any of the originals before 2014 is the last time I've seen them.
Sam: So I don't know if i would react the way you just did but you know i i i felt
Sam: i i still have i have that nostalgic thing for one and two three and four the
Sam: only thing i can remember is that they sucked you know i mean he's.
Ivan: Superman three let's be clear about this superman three was ridiculous it.
Pete: Was a richard pranger movie.
Ivan: That exactly i mean it was a who the hell thought that the way to do a Superman
Ivan: movie was to fucking put in Richard Pryor.
Ivan: I mean, I'm like, what the hell is this?
Pete: I'm going to stand for the guy.
Pete: You know, this is one of the problems when you talk about this movies.
Pete: Richard Pryor, like, the guy showed up and did his job for that movie.
Ivan: Oh, oh, totally. I mean, I agree, but it's just the entire thing was just ridiculous, okay?
Pete: When you learn about the production of these movies, like this and Star Trek,
Pete: the motion picture like the amounts of cocaine that went into.
Ivan: The development.
Pete: Of these pictures that's basically the story is.
Ivan: You know mario being.
Pete: Locked in a room.
Ivan: With cocaine rocked.
Pete: Off his gourd trying to turn this into a movie at a time.
Ivan: When there was no.
Pete: Culture that like the idea the very idea of a good comic book movie was like
Pete: what's the word that when you like military intelligence what do you call that yeah.
Ivan: Yeah oxymoron an oxymoron contradiction in
Ivan: terms that's right yeah so um you
Ivan: know here i will say that of those old
Ivan: movies the only one i think that well first of all you know i i wasn't even
Ivan: like thinking about all the ridiculous sexism that that the that the superman
Ivan: who movies had because oh my god it's just you know like the the lex luther's
Ivan: girlfriend in the first movie was just ridiculous, you know,
Ivan: and in the, you know, and in Superman 3, it was just also ridiculous.
Ivan: I mean, I will say that the only one that had a plot that really did,
Ivan: was good out of any of those was two.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Ivan: You know, with, you know, with- I think most people felt that way.
Pete: Yeah.
Ivan: With, by the way, just died last week.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Yeah. You know, that plot was actually pretty, you know, pretty good out of
Ivan: those three. But still, I mean, yeah.
Ivan: You know, the reality is that it's just like you said. Christopher Reeve did a great job.
Ivan: given material that was honestly shit.
Pete: Can I take a Terrence Stamp detour?
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead.
Pete: The best Terrence Stamp story. So Terrence Stamp famously played tough guys
Pete: in movies. Most of his roles were tough guys.
Pete: And he starred in the movie, the movie that I remember him best from,
Pete: called Priscilla Queen of the Desert, where he plays, and if I get this wrong, I apologize.
Pete: The main characters in the movies were a mix of cross-dressers and transsexuals.
Ivan: Excellent.
Pete: And he plays an actual transsexual, someone who identifies as a woman.
Pete: And the director talked about him being in that role as a tough guy.
Pete: And he looked somewhat ridiculous, right?
Pete: He didn't pass, as I think this is what the directors did. But it was very important
Pete: to him as an actor that he pass.
Pete: And so, like, word went out among the crew that, like, the most important thing
Pete: is that if Terrence Stamp said, like, how do I look?
Pete: People were like, Terrence, you look beautiful. You look so elegant.
Pete: You look—you're the definition of, you know. It's just a very interesting story.
Ivan: Yeah. All right.
Pete: That's my detail.
Sam: Okay. I did want to say Man of Steel. My thoughts on that,
Sam: I watched it on one of the streaming services when I was in Toronto with my
Sam: wife visiting for my sister's wedding a few years back.
Sam: And we were just like, oh, let's put something on. And that's what we put on.
Sam: And my overall feeling of it was I just felt bad.
Sam: Every like, and a big part of it was sort of comparison of the memory of the
Sam: Christopher Reeve movies, because I felt like it trod some of the same ground.
Sam: But on every scene that had a direct comparison, I felt like the original movie did it better.
Sam: Like when the same scene was done, you know, like the spaceship crashes or the
Sam: scene with, you know, with Clark Kent and his father or the first time he meets Lois or whatever.
Sam: Whenever the same scene existed in both, I felt the nostalgia for the original
Sam: movie and felt like the new movie did it worse.
Sam: I felt like they really played up, you know, the Superman as alien thing in
Sam: a way that I didn't like, as opposed to the Superman as human,
Sam: you know, or orphan or whatever.
Sam: You know, lots of people have complained about how, like, they have a big battle
Sam: in the city and don't seem to care about collateral damage at all,
Sam: which, of course, Superman 2025 directly responds to in a number of ways.
Sam: And and i understand that was some of the
Sam: setup for superman versus batman too even though i haven't
Sam: seen that but and and
Sam: i felt like the the elements
Sam: they added were all elements that i thought actually detracted like there was
Sam: more violence there was more there was just the the the battles were really
Sam: extended and long and i found them boring i i like in in many action movies and superhero movies,
Sam: I sort of tune out the battle scenes and I'm like looking for the character beats in between.
Sam: And it felt like this was a movie that really played up the,
Sam: we're going to do the special effects, which often really, really,
Sam: really looked CGI and played up the battles, played up the special effects,
Sam: played up like we're going to have aliens in this and all this kind of stuff.
Sam: And I felt took away most of the like,
Sam: The the character and human bits that I found potentially interesting in in in these movies.
Sam: And so I felt like it just paled in comparison to the first one because it it
Sam: tried to do the same things, but not as well.
Sam: And then it added a whole bunch of stuff that I didn't like at all.
Sam: That's sort of how I felt about that.
Pete: That gives some really good context and I think sets the table for Superman 2025 pretty well.
Pete: So Man of Steel, part of, I think, everyone's issue with it,
Pete: or many people's issue with it, or for the people who like it,
Pete: it's what they like, is this Zack Snyder aesthetic.
Pete: The guy has an uncanny ability to put together a composition,
Pete: a visual composition, that is very, very striking. And you either are bought
Pete: into that or you're not, right?
Pete: It has certain attributes, the color grading, this kind of very steel blue cast over the entire film.
Pete: In terms of writing, though, there's stuff in there that, to me,
Pete: is not a fit with Superman.
Pete: That movie, the big conceptual problem with Man of Steel is it's basically smooshing
Pete: together Man of Steel and Jesus, right?
Pete: Or Superman and Jesus, excuse me. I mean, the imagery was with the guys.
Sam: Yes, I remember that. I remember thinking that when it came up, going, what the hell?
Pete: And Superman is fundamentally a power fantasy by two Jewish kids in pre-war Cleveland, right?
Pete: Who is about partially what if there's a guy who can't be beat,
Pete: but also he always does the right thing, right?
Pete: Now, the Snyder bots are going to flood your comments.
Pete: This is going to be your most popular episode because they're going to tell
Pete: me I didn't understand the character.
Pete: You know, Henry Cavill's Superman does eventually get there in Man of Steel,
Pete: but there's a lot of hemming and hawing. He doesn't have that kind of innate goodness.
Pete: There's been a lot of writing changes in comic books lately.
Pete: since I'd say the year 2000. And I would frankly say that the stuff being written
Pete: today since 2000 is a lot more interesting. And some of the most interesting
Pete: attributes of Superman have come out of that.
Pete: Writer Grant Morrison talks about the magic of Superman is he's like Paul Bunyan, right?
Pete: He does everything you and me do, but he does it on a grand scale.
Pete: You know, He didn't literally.
Pete: Superman brushes his teeth. He grabs a sequoia to do it, right?
Pete: But fundamentally, he is treated as a human being in those comics.
Pete: You can connect to him emotionally. And that is what Man of Steel,
Pete: I think, put this distance between you and Superman.
Ivan: Well, here's the thing, you know, related to comic book writing post-2002 before.
Ivan: You know, I tend to think that the audience for a lot of these has probably
Ivan: morphed, where before this was written for children.
Ivan: I think that was the main audience and that now this is really written for adults because— Dude.
Pete: I can't afford comic books. How does a 10-year-old afford them?
Ivan: Exactly. Right. Yeah. So I think
Ivan: that that's I think that's the biggest change with nuance and things.
Ivan: And with a lot of these, you're talking about the superhero movies like in,
Ivan: you know, in the theaters right now, where the entire audience where they they're
Ivan: positioning these four has completely changed from where they were thinking
Ivan: 30 years ago, 40 years ago.
Pete: Right. And I think that the written comic books have changed in part because
Pete: the movies and the knock-on franchises exist.
Pete: And when you're making a movie, like, what's the gold stake?
Pete: You would love to be able to make a four-quadrant, what they call a four-quadrant
Pete: movie that, like, you know, the kids and the adults and grandma, they could all enjoy it.
Pete: And that's the way you make your audience as big as possible,
Pete: which is not the only thing an artist would be concerned with,
Pete: but it certainly is, you know, not something to ignore.
Ivan: Well, hey, you know, look, what are we kidding here?
Ivan: You know, these are all, you know, this is, they're not, these are not nonprofit,
Ivan: these are not nonprofit organizations, okay? You know, these guys going in there, okay?
Ivan: You know, they're going in and they're trying to figure out,
Ivan: okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm doing my artist thing or whatever,
Ivan: but I'm like, hey, where, where's my $100 million payday?
Ivan: Okay? You know, and I'm not, and I'm not, I'm not begrudging them.
Sam: And they're looking at international markets as well.
Ivan: Yes. Oh, totally. And it's a global market versus, used to be a very reduced
Ivan: market. And now global gross well exceeds whatever the heck you do in the U.S. as well.
Ivan: So that's also an important consideration for all of these movies as well.
Pete: So you asked 20 minutes ago and I kind of failed to answer it.
Pete: Why was I excited for this movie?
Pete: I mean, part of it, I think, is the social context of where we are.
Pete: I wake up every day in, you know, first of all, trying hard to avoid reading
Pete: the newspapers. Your slack does not help with that, by the way.
Pete: And, you know, you can just wake up every day and I say to the world,
Pete: I say, just give me something.
Pete: Just give me something that isn't going to make me more depressed.
Pete: And, you know, we can look at Man of Steel as being a kind of a response to the 9-11 era, right?
Pete: Or soaked in that. I feel like Superman 2025 is and clearly was before it came
Pete: out was was a response to the moment we're living in where the people with power
Pete: are the worst people you could possibly imagine.
Pete: And that's why I needed this movie to be good.
Ivan: So, right.
Pete: I don't know if that's the answer you wanted before we've talked about the movie.
Ivan: No, but let me ask a question. Why, just, you know, cinematically and entertainment
Ivan: wise, what is it that you found that made this movie good?
Ivan: Because you're giving it a thumbs up, okay?
Ivan: You know, doing the reviews. You're giving it two thumbs up.
Ivan: What is it that, why is it that you think that this worked better than most
Ivan: of the other movies we just talked about? which, admittedly, we're dog shit.
Pete: I'll give you—let me see if I can reduce this down.
Pete: So we haven't actually talked about the individual plot beats of this movie.
Pete: It might be spoilers, right?
Ivan: Yeah, it might be spoilers. Spoilers, and this is a relatively new movie, okay?
Ivan: Usually we don't, like, cover—you know, we're covering movies that were released
Ivan: in 1975 or something, whatever you're— And first and foremost.
Pete: The writer, in this case, James Gunn, understood the assignment that we go to
Pete: the movies, you know, well, I go to the movies at least, to connect to characters emotionally.
Pete: And the center of this movie, right, the thrust of this movie is abstracting
Pete: away all the superpower stuff.
Pete: Here's a man. He has a job. He thinks he's doing that job for one reason,
Pete: because he thinks he's a certain person.
Pete: He finds out he is not that person. And he finds through the help of the people
Pete: whom he loves and who loves him, he finds a new reason to keep doing the right thing.
Pete: That to me is a powerful emotional message.
Pete: And so there's that. Second, and this is very James Gunn-specific, I think,
Pete: the side characters he chose to be in this movie, absolutely bull moose loony, right?
Pete: Like, Green Lantern, okay, yeah, I'll buy Green Lantern. Hawkgirl, okay, maybe.
Pete: Metamorpho? If you told me that you could have Metamorpho in a movie on screen
Pete: and it didn't read as, like, people didn't laugh the moment he showed up on
Pete: screen, I would have said that is not possible.
Pete: When you put Metamorpho on screen, people are going to laugh because he looks ridiculous.
Pete: Same Mr. Terrific, not that he's a laughable character, but again,
Pete: he's so obscure. And so part of it was, okay, I know he can pull this off because
Pete: he did it with Guardians of the Galaxy.
Sam: Just to be clear, as a non—
Sam: comic book dc universe follower i didn't know who most of these people were
Sam: i mean i'd heard of green lantern i think maybe i would tell you i had known
Sam: of the existence of hawk girl the rest of these no no no idea.
Pete: None none yeah and and then
Pete: the other thing about this movie that really really worked for me
Pete: just on a mechanical level which is also something
Pete: people complain about is the pacing there
Pete: are fights there are set pieces and you know what each
Pete: i didn't actually time them but like that mr
Pete: terrific fight which is clearly the best the best
Pete: fight in the movie the best set piece in the movie i mean if it's 90 seconds
Pete: i'd be surprised they're fast you do not have the kind of the man of steel problem
Pete: where you have these 10 15 minute or at least what feels like 10 15 minute slug
Pete: fests the action happens and then they get back to the important part,
Pete: which is Clark and Lois sitting in an apartment arguing about the political
Pete: ramifications of the dumb thing, maybe dumb thing he did.
Pete: And I think that's very, you know, I think it's a brave choice in a superhero movie.
Pete: But more than that, I think it's a smart choice because fundamentally,
Pete: there's not a lot you can do in a fight scene that's surprising.
Pete: You know what a fight scene is going to happen. You know that at the end,
Pete: the bad guy is going to fall from a great height and, you know,
Pete: maybe be impaled on a church spire or something.
Sam: Yes. I mean, this is the thing that you mentioned as well in terms of like,
Sam: well, there's the people who like it and then there's the people who don't.
Sam: I mean, there are some folks who come to a movie like this.
Sam: Specifically, that's all they want. They would be happy if it was a full two
Sam: hours of nothing but the fight scenes.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Whereas, like I said, the thing that,
Sam: I get bored during those parts.
Sam: I'm like twiddling my thumbs and going, okay, when's this part going to be over
Sam: and we can get back to the real movie?
Sam: But I feel like I'm probably in the minority.
Pete: I also appreciated, again, from a purely mechanical standpoint,
Pete: that the movie treats the entire audience, including the kids watching it, like they're adults.
Pete: They don't spend 15 minutes explaining who Superman was. We all know who Superman
Pete: was. If we are certainly in the U.S., everyone knows his story,
Pete: or at least the outlines.
Pete: They don't spend time over-explaining anything. In the entire movie,
Pete: I could think of two instances where they kind of over-explain things.
Pete: One, the bit where, you know, Mr. Terrific is like, no, no, that recording of
Pete: your parents, that was real.
Pete: And then the bit at the end where they kind of hang a lampshade on the Daily
Pete: Planet explaining how Luther Corp's bad plan or big plan.
Pete: That's it. I watched the Fantastic Four movie a couple weeks after Superman.
Sam: Oh, I've not seen it.
Pete: I've not seen it. I won't spoil it. It was fine. It was an absolutely standard
Pete: Marvel comic book movie about Marvel's most famous team.
Pete: Most people, if you don't know who the Fantastic Four is, you need like six
Pete: seconds to understand them. Right?
Ivan: Yeah, that's true.
Pete: Oh, that guy's fire. Oh, they're invisible. They spent the first 10 minutes
Pete: of that movie, like, recapping their origin.
Pete: And I'm like, I'm in the, like, oh, come on.
Pete: Do you really have to be doing this?
Ivan: You know what? There's one thing. This is one of the few movies that I've watched
Ivan: over time that I did not watch this new movie.
Ivan: But I watched the pre, you know, they had done a Fantastic Four movie.
Ivan: When the hell was it? Like 15 years ago or something like that?
Pete: They've done, like, a bunch of them, yeah.
Ivan: You know, I actually liked that movie. And I heard a lot of people criticizing
Ivan: that movie for whatever the hell reason, not liking it. And I thought it was good.
Ivan: I don't know what the problem was with it and why people hated it.
Ivan: But, you know, but go back to the Superman movie.
Ivan: I will say that I, very weird for me, I hadn't watched any of these recent movies.
Ivan: I will say that in the end, I did like it. I think that there was just,
Ivan: there is something in me that I will say that I don't particularly like for
Ivan: whatever reason of watching Superman getting the crap beat out of him.
Pete: I've heard a lot of people say this.
Ivan: I don't, that really, I find it, I'm like, ugh, what, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Sam: Why isn't he just winning?
Ivan: Exactly. What the hell is this shit? He's getting to beat the crap out of Lex
Ivan: Luthor. Lex Luthor, he's a human.
Ivan: The fuck is he doing this? What bullshit is this? There is that.
Ivan: Okay. I think that I have this visceral negative reaction. But in the end,
Ivan: I do agree that the entire how they pulled everything together plot wise and
Ivan: the human elements of the story in the end, I thought it worked at the end.
Ivan: I don't know if I'm going to say that it's for me.
Ivan: I know it's not the kind of movie that I usually go watch, but it's a movie
Ivan: that I watched and I wound up being entertained and liking in the end.
Sam: Well, I guess since we're rolling through our ratings, I'm giving this a thumbs
Sam: up as well. I actually really liked it.
Sam: Again, it's not, and I'll put this into the category of good,
Sam: fun movie that you enjoy the time you're there, as opposed to,
Sam: oh my God, this should win all the awards. This is life-changing, right? It's not that.
Sam: It's just a good, fun superhero movie.
Ivan: And then nobody's overreacting like they did.
Pete: I wouldn't call this high art, you know?
Sam: Yeah. It's not high art, but the things that I liked out of it.
Sam: I liked that it had a good sense of humor all the way through.
Sam: Like, you know, it was, it did not take itself super seriously.
Sam: You know, you could, you could see, you know, some of the characters were over
Sam: the top and it was okay that they were over the top.
Sam: You know, you, you have Guy Gardner, the, the version of Green Lantern that's
Sam: in here, you know, being an ass, but being an ass in an entertaining way.
Pete: He stole the show, I think.
Ivan: Yeah, he was just hilarious.
Sam: Well, honestly, though, I think most people I heard saying that what stole the
Sam: show was crypto, the dog, you know.
Pete: Like there was just I was worried there was going to be too much crypto.
Pete: And it was it was I thought just the right amount.
Ivan: I got to admit that to me, to me, I found Mr. Terrific just absolutely hilarious.
Sam: Yes, people loved Mr. Terrific, too. And this is one of those things,
Sam: too, like when you come out of this, the responses were not all about Superman.
Sam: They were about all of the other characters, too, right?
Sam: Now, in terms of like when I saw it with my wife, my mother, and my son, okay?
Sam: And I, you know, she's not here to give her thought, but I didn't feel like
Sam: either one of them were super, super impressed.
Sam: They were just like, okay, this is a whatever. They both mentioned the dog as a highlight for them.
Sam: I did think that the dog was one place where he seemed to, I mean,
Sam: I've seen some behind the scenes stuff. I know the dog was fully CGI,
Sam: but it was, it felt a little bit too obvious that the dog was fully CGI.
Sam: It actually felt to me like they could have taken advantage of like using a
Sam: real dog in a few scenes to like,
Sam: sort of add a little bit more realism and then, you know, fill in like when
Sam: it's flying or whatever, use, use CGI or whatever.
Sam: But the main thing to me is that, yeah, it did—again, we keep coming back to
Sam: it. It's the emotional resonances rather than the action parts of it.
Sam: And, you know, it hit me in the right places. And I know some of it is fairly
Sam: obvious emotional manipulation, but whatever.
Pete: I really appreciate it that in every fight scene that he's in,
Pete: Superman is, except for maybe the very final one, Superman is busy protecting something.
Pete: Even the fight scene with the kaiju, he's trying to figure out,
Pete: how do I keep this thing that I'm fighting alive?
Pete: Right. And that to me is a character. They took the time to show that.
Pete: In fact, James Gunn talks about, like, one of the scenes that got a negative
Pete: audience reaction was Superman saving the squirrel.
Pete: And they had taken it out. And he said, no, he has to save the squirrel because
Pete: you're showing what motivates this character.
Sam: Yeah. No. And, yeah, I think all of that, I think, worked together nicely.
Sam: And the emotional and character beats are what makes it.
Sam: And, you know, and, yeah, of course. Like at, at the end when he's like doing
Sam: the video scenes with his, watching his, his real parents, the adopted parents. Yeah.
Sam: I'm starting to choke up even just talking about it now.
Pete: Absolutely.
Sam: Absolutely.
Pete: It is emotional manipulation. For me, the thing was when Lois basically asks
Pete: him, you know, why are you going to turn yourself in to save the dog?
Pete: And, again, it's like he doesn't even think about it.
Pete: The way he's written, he says, yeah, and he's not even really a very good dog,
Pete: but he's alone and he's probably scared. And that, for me, I'm like,
Pete: this is a guy who is doing the right things for the right reasons.
Pete: And, you know, obviously I have to—and now in today's world,
Pete: I have to go to a work of fiction in order to experience someone with power doing good things.
Pete: So, you know, maybe that's why the movie means so much to me.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Yeah. Yeah. That's depressing.
Pete: It's been great, folks.
Sam: Thanks for— Ah, yes.
Sam: So, anything else? We sort of just gave our final recap after taking a long time to get there, but.
Pete: I think that's really, I mean, what else is there to say? It's a movie,
Pete: and we've now done your movie segment.
Pete: I feel like I've accomplished something by, now the real question will be if
Pete: I can ever get you to see the movie Tempopo.
Sam: Tempopo.
Pete: It's on your list. I know it's on your list.
Sam: I'm going to add it to the list again.
Ivan: Yeah, the question is, of course, like, will we see it before we,
Ivan: you know, we are like 90 years old is the question.
Pete: Well, it's an old movie, so there's no rush.
Ivan: No, but my thing is that, you know, Sam was discussing his algorithm for doing
Ivan: things recently, which I fucking almost, you know, these algorithms have existed
Ivan: since we were back in college.
Ivan: Okay. All right. And he's changed them.
Pete: Probably this list has existed since you were back in college.
Ivan: Not in this form not in this form but yeah but you know it's like this one yeah,
Ivan: that one i think right that is it
Ivan: you do pete the
Ivan: the these kind of algorithmic decisions let
Ivan: the shit happening like me all the sudden being in puerto rico
Ivan: working and you know this is when i had
Ivan: traveling when i had when i was still at the pharmacy this is after i graduated
Ivan: from college pharmacy at traveling you see and you know this is back when i
Ivan: got stacks of mail every day i had a guy that went to the post office oh you're
Ivan: gonna talk about my checks again yes and so so i would go and open the mail
Ivan: and I get something like I had given money to Sam.
Ivan: And I'm like, I wasn't expecting him to pay me back. But he would keep a ledger
Ivan: detailed with however much money he paid me. And he insisted he was going to
Ivan: pay me back in installments.
Ivan: And all of a sudden I would open I would get an envelope from Sam, okay?
Ivan: Wherever he was. Open it. And there was a check for three cents.
Pete: Right.
Ivan: And there was a check for three cents because that's about how much his algorithm
Ivan: decided that he could afford to pay me.
Pete: That is an extremely Sam story.
Ivan: And at I'm getting a fucking check for three cents, okay?
Ivan: Now, I will say, all those checks got deposited.
Ivan: Now, the reason they got deposited is because back then, because I had a business
Ivan: that generated thousands and thousands of dollars in cash every day,
Ivan: I had somebody that went to the bank every day to make my deposits.
Ivan: And so, therefore, yes, I would take the fucking check, stick it into my deposit
Ivan: thing. I'm like, here, Marcella, here you go.
Ivan: Go to the bank, deposit a fucking three-cent check along with everything else.
Ivan: Otherwise, they probably would have not gone deposited. But yes.
Ivan: So this is what generates this algorithm probably for this list.
Ivan: And who the hell knows when it's going to be viewed.
Ivan: I mean, we may be, you know, in intensive care at some point or whatever.
Ivan: And Sam will text us something. Hey, I watched Tim Popo.
Ivan: I'm like, and I'm like taking my oxygen mask off. Really? Finally?
Sam: Hey, well, I will say, and I've said this before on the show the last time you
Sam: brought this up. Two things. One, I did eventually completely pay you off.
Ivan: He did completely pay me off.
Sam: And two— Now, however.
Ivan: By the way, remember that this algorithm also generated a moment when he was
Ivan: getting evicted, and I had to send him a lot more money to stop him from getting
Ivan: evicted because, in a way, he was managing his cash.
Sam: Did you on that one? Yes!
Ivan: I had to send you the fucking money to Jersey so you could go and pay him with
Ivan: a fucking, like— Well, here's the
Ivan: thing. Some kind of certified check or something so you could get— Yeah.
Sam: Well, and I paid for I paid for a lawyer and all that. We took care of it.
Sam: The thing was, the way I looked at it was there was a seventy five dollar late
Sam: fee for paying my rent late. So I just paid it every month.
Sam: And it was just as if it was a $75 more late fee. I would routinely pay one to two weeks late.
Sam: Just because that's when I got to it by my algorithm.
Ivan: It started dragging and dragging until they finally said, you know.
Sam: No, no, no. There was no dragging. I was consistently two weeks late.
Sam: I was never more than a month late.
Ivan: They obviously.
Sam: They didn't care. I was looking at it as like, you get more money every month.
Sam: Why are you complaining?
Sam: And they were like, well, but it's not on time. Anyway, so the end result of that.
Pete: Sam, let me just say, I would absolutely evict you. I would 100%.
Pete: I'd be like, but it's red. The data's red. You were evicting.
Pete: It's red because of you.
Sam: And so the end solution to this was I simply set up automated payments in Quicken
Sam: that were like a week before it was due or something and that it was taken care of.
Sam: Because it's not like I didn't have the money in general. I did have the money.
Sam: I was just consistently paying late.
Ivan: But sometimes what happened is that your algorithm made you misallocate your
Ivan: cash resources at a moment, so therefore you would pay something else first
Ivan: instead of prioritizing the roof over your head.
Sam: Well, when you say algorithm.
Pete: Like I gots to know now. Was this, like, just your heuristics about what you
Pete: pay, or did you actually, like, write a little program to, like,
Pete: tell you what the payment is?
Sam: Well, I did not write—well, this applies to almost everything in my life,
Sam: Pete, but I generally don't take the time to write it down.
Sam: But for almost every activity I do, I construct a mental algorithm that is sort
Sam: of this step, this step, this step, decision point. Here's how you make the decision.
Sam: This step, this step, this step. And sometimes those are completely deterministic.
Sam: Very often they involve random numbers as well that I use.
Sam: Currently I use an app to pick the random numbers.
Sam: But for instance, if I am doing laundry, I have a defined, I have a laundry
Sam: round that certain things happen in a certain order.
Sam: I have to do a certain amount of stuff. I have to do this, I have to do that,
Sam: I have to do this and that, and then it ends.
Sam: That particular one has no random factor other than I need to roll a certain
Sam: thing in order to be doing a laundry round at all.
Pete: So my weakness as a math student was that I wanted everything to be algorithms,
Pete: and they give instructions on how to calculate things. And I would reach the
Pete: end of my algorithm, right?
Pete: And let's say for the sake of discussion, this is a ridiculous example.
Pete: Let's say I'm talking about my spending for a month, right?
Pete: I never really learned...
Pete: as a child or if they tried to teach me i didn't pay attention how to estimate things,
Pete: and i never really did a kind of cross check so i
Pete: do my math of what i spent this month and i end up saying oh i spent 23 or i
Pete: end up saying oh i spent 622 000 and at no point would i say well is is that
Pete: a sensible number like do i think that maybe i mean so when you ran these algorithms
Pete: or maybe you still run them.
Pete: Do you ever like when you're doing the laundry, like the laundry comes out and it's green?
Pete: Do you like check to say like, should the laundry be green? Have I,
Pete: has this algorithm led me to a good place?
Sam: There are a few elements along that. One, as I'm constructing the algorithms and changing them,
Sam: one of the things I do think all the time about is if I consistently use this
Sam: algorithm, what does the steady state end up being?
Sam: Now, I have never taken the time to actually code up a simulation and do the
Sam: simulation, but I do think about, like, where will this get to?
Sam: What will be the steady state?
Sam: What will be the normal, you know, like, what will be the normalization?
Sam: And I also occasionally think about, like, okay, using this particular algorithm,
Sam: will I ever get to a completed state?
Sam: And often the answer is no. Okay?
Ivan: I was going to say that. The answer is no.
Sam: It'll be like, okay, if I do this algorithm, like, for instance,
Sam: let's just take, you know, a certain example.
Sam: Like, let's say this is not an active one I'm actually doing.
Sam: but let's say I had a bookshelf and I decided I was going to change the order
Sam: in which I'd sorted the books on the bookshelf.
Sam: So like I'd, before I'd had it by author and now I want it by publication date
Sam: or something like that. Okay. Let's say I'm going to make that change.
Sam: I would never say, okay, let's pull all the books off the shelf and then put
Sam: them back in the right order. But instead, I would say, OK, from now on,
Sam: whenever I put a book back, I'm going to put it back using the new order.
Sam: And so you'll have a section of the shelf that's the new order and a section
Sam: of the shelf that's the old order.
Ivan: I mean, if he ran a library, OK, you know, can you imagine trying to find a
Ivan: book at this damn library?
Sam: And then I will occasionally do the mental estimate and say, OK,
Sam: given that I put one book back every two weeks, it will take approximately 132
Sam: years before the book the shelf is completely resorted but that that won't that
Sam: won't deter me from using this is.
Ivan: A perfect example of how he manages things yes that's it that is exactly this is.
Sam: The but but to answer your question your direct question i change these algorithms
Sam: all the time so for instance,
Sam: On the laundry example, the very first stage of a laundry round for me is putting
Sam: away baskets of already clean laundry. Okay?
Sam: And over time, that had been in different parts of the position,
Sam: but it is now first because that is required to generate empty baskets that
Sam: I can then use to put the dirty laundry in.
Sam: Because we have a problem that various people in the family will run the laundry
Sam: machines, but people rarely put things away.
Sam: So we've got like 15 laundry baskets and lines of lined up laundry baskets,
Sam: okay, of clean laundry that are waiting to be put away.
Pete: I can see that Yvonne is trying to stop himself from flying to your house to put your laundry away.
Ivan: By the way, you realize, well, I wouldn't do this now that he's married,
Ivan: but you know that I've showed up when he was single. And I basically,
Ivan: one time, I just fucking started cleaning the goddamn place. I just said, okay.
Sam: Fuck this. Yes, this has happened. But no, the point was, originally the algorithm
Sam: was, you know, you put away one basket and then you do the rest of the round.
Sam: I have found out that because people do laundry outside of my rounds sometimes, that's not enough.
Sam: So I'm now up to, like, periodically, whenever it's getting further and further
Sam: behind, I change the number of baskets I have to put away before I do the rest. It's now up to four.
Sam: I have to put away four baskets of laundry before I do the rest.
Pete: My solution to this problem, by the way, is to throw out 14 of your 15 laundry
Pete: baskets without telling anyone else in the house.
Ivan: I figured I'm going to solve this problem. We're going to have 40 baskets.
Ivan: Now we don't have, now we'll always have enough baskets. Okay.
Sam: You know, and look, I have definitely thought about this, but knowing our family.
Ivan: What would happen is not. Throwing out the baskets or buying more baskets?
Sam: No, no. Throwing out baskets. Because like the proper, like one proper algorithm
Sam: here is just only have one and make sure that before you start a new load of laundry,
Sam: you've always put away everything from the previous load. That would make it nice and balanced.
Pete: I, of course, always do this every single time without fail.
Ivan: Look, I... Listen, Pete, let me just say this.
Ivan: I'm far more practical about this for the last 30 years.
Ivan: Listen, I just pay somebody to do it. Fuck this shit.
Ivan: I got somebody that comes in here twice a week. They take care of it.
Ivan: Everything is filed, sorted, assembled. And by the way, the person I hired...
Ivan: is as anal and actually probably more than me, which is wonderful because,
Ivan: I mean, she will make sure that she uses the right hangers for my clothes.
Pete: Okay. I don't have someone to do my laundry anymore.
Ivan: They fold my underwear.
Pete: For a while, there was a laundromat near where I worked and it was a laundromat
Pete: run by a little Chinese lady and you could do the laundry there.
Pete: or you could pay her an extra dollar, drop off your clothes, and she would do it.
Pete: And the most wonderful part of it was that I would bring a bag of clothes like this.
Ivan: It was all folded right ago.
Pete: I would get back a perfect cube of clothes where the socks were folded to the same size as the jeans.
Pete: And you just literally, you took the cube, you put it in a drawer,
Pete: you were done. It was magical. And I have not found anyone like that.
Ivan: Oh, you see, that's what I have with this lady that comes over here like twice a week.
Ivan: Everything, I mean, like everything is just, it's just, we found,
Ivan: I found, I'm like, listen, I pay this person way more than market.
Ivan: Because I just said, I don't, listen, you can't go anywhere. I don't care.
Sam: Okay?
Ivan: I don't want anybody else. You need to be, you need to be here.
Ivan: I don't, I don't care how much, I don't, oh, you know, you need time to go pick
Ivan: up your kids. You get whatever you want.
Sam: Yes. So anyway, to finish off the thought, yes, I am continually adjusting and
Sam: tweaking the algorithms, but they are for the most part in my head.
Sam: But they are in my head in a completely rigid and fixed way,
Sam: other than when I explicitly change them.
Sam: Like I have to make a decision. There is no such thing for me.
Sam: And again, this is autism speaking. There is no such thing for me as just like
Sam: doing the laundry without thinking about each individual step.
Sam: Each individual step is defined and I do them in a certain order in a certain
Sam: way each time until I change that.
Ivan: Let me ask a question. Does it now involve checking the pockets?
Sam: No.
Ivan: Okay. So I guess the reason you don't have any more problem with pens is I guess
Ivan: we don't use pens anymore.
Sam: We really don't.
Ivan: Yeah, I figured.
Sam: Like, Yvonne is referring to something that when I first moved into Carnegie
Sam: Mellon at Hampshire Hall, where Yvonne and I both were, within the first few weeks,
Sam: I think it was probably within the first few times I did laundry there.
Ivan: And I just met him, like, recently. And I am as anal then as I was now.
Sam: Yeah, there was. Anyway, I did laundry, and there was...
Sam: a blue pen in with the laundry and all of my clothes came out with blue spots
Sam: all over them and i i just wore them for the rest of the year like you know.
Ivan: With fucking blue wake all over them yes.
Sam: I did not replace well i mean i gradually over time oh yeah place the clothes
Sam: but i didn't make it i didn't i didn't go out and say oh i need all new clothes and go do that.
Sam: I just continued to wear them until they gradually aged out of the cycle.
Sam: And, you know, and these were permanent stains, permanent blue splotches all
Sam: over like sweatshirts and things.
Sam: And I was like, it looks cool. No big deal. It's, it's fine.
Ivan: So anyway, we need a break.
Sam: We finally need this break. And then we will talk news of the day for the rest of the show.
Ivan: You'll cheer Pete up so much when we start talking about this.
Sam: We spent like an hour or something on this stuff.
Pete: I've prepared myself mentally and physically.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Okay.
Pete: I'm ready.
Sam: Here we go. We're going to take a break. We'll be back after this.
Sam: Okay, one more note about movies, just to apologize, because I had said last
Sam: week that this week we would talk about King Kong vs.
Sam: Godzilla from 1962 and All About Eve from 1950.
Sam: Obviously, Superman trumped that. We will deal with them some other week.
Ivan: No pun intended.
Pete: I really like to imagine that All About Eve 420 is in the chat right now complaining
Pete: that we did Superman instead.
Sam: Exactly. Or, you know, Godzilla's in the chat complaining.
Ivan: Listen, I'm going to try to bring a news topic to try to cheer Pete up about the news.
Sam: Oh, it's going to be the hands.
Ivan: Yes, look, I put it down as, look, is Trump really getting extremely sick?
Ivan: because there are a lot of signs pointing that something is seriously amiss with Trump's health.
Ivan: What do you think, Sam? I know you saw the hands thing.
Ivan: We've seen the ankles swelling.
Ivan: Many people have pointed out that the other day that he was in,
Ivan: I don't know where he was sitting. I think maybe it was in the Oval Office.
Ivan: I think that's where he was sitting.
Sam: Instead of standing like he usually does.
Ivan: He was sitting and he was wearing his hat. And if you looked at his face,
Ivan: something looked really off in his face as well, okay?
Ivan: He really looked like his eyes were really tiny. He looked exhausted.
Ivan: What do you think? You think we're just grasping straws here?
Sam: Look, here's my take. He does not look great for sure.
Sam: But I think anybody who is jumping to the conclusion that this means he's on
Sam: death's door are probably reading their own optimism.
Ivan: Well, I'm not saying a death's door yet.
Sam: I mean, look, here's the scenario. He's 79.
Sam: He has never been a particularly healthy man. He is aging. He is deteriorating.
Sam: That is all to be expected.
Sam: Now, it may well be. I've seen dozens of people online at this point speculating,
Sam: you know, he's got congestive heart failure.
Sam: The symptoms are getting worse fast.
Sam: I've seen some people being like, oh, I've had patients like this.
Sam: I give him months to live, you know. But I've also seen doctors saying that's
Sam: completely irresponsible to try to be diagnosing that from just what you can see here.
Sam: And that while certainly some patients deteriorate quickly, some hang on for
Sam: years and years and years, and it could be other things.
Sam: And so I feel like, yeah, is it, is it possible that he's got something seriously
Sam: wrong that's getting worse fast? Absolutely.
Sam: Is it also possible that this, you know, is just reading a lot into normal human
Sam: aging and, you know, he'll he'll
Sam: be around for another 15 years before he dies, you know, or 20 or 30.
Sam: He's going to be 150 years old. You know, I don't know.
Ivan: Look, here's what the other thing that people have pointed out,
Ivan: which, by the way, I mean, you've got the you've got the hands. Okay.
Ivan: A few people have mentioned that one possibility could be he's getting,
Ivan: he's having to get regular IV treatments for some reason.
Ivan: Which, by the way, could also, if he's getting regular IV treatments.
Sam: It seems perfectly reasonable given what we're seeing. Yeah.
Sam: The most natural explanation for the patchy look of his, he's getting IV treatments.
Sam: He's got bruises for the IVs and he's trying to put on the same crap he puts
Sam: on his face to conceal it and he's doing a bad job.
Ivan: But here's the one thing that that also creates, because that explains why he's
Ivan: getting so swollen, because people have noticed that his fingers have been getting
Ivan: swollen, his ankles have been getting swollen.
Ivan: And that that is also if you're having to get extensive IV, one of the side
Ivan: effects of it is that you'll swell up.
Ivan: OK, I mean, if you're having to get that much in fluid, so you're covering up
Ivan: the hands because you're getting IV. So why the hell are you having to get that many fucking IVs?
Ivan: OK, number one is the question. OK, no, the thing about it is I'm not saying
Ivan: he's dying next week or anything, but I will say this, that for all the talk
Ivan: we had about fucking Biden's health.
Sam: We deserve to have a little bit more about Trump than we have been.
Ivan: Yeah, because he is. He is. All of these things are not pointing out to anything good at all.
Sam: Well, and also just, you know, for the talk we had about Biden specifically,
Sam: there's also the mental state talk.
Sam: Oh, my God. You know, like, he's never been great, and he's clearly getting
Sam: worse in terms of a lot of that, in terms of, like, incidents of,
Sam: like, him getting confused at events and going off into...
Sam: stuff that makes no sense and whatever. Like I said, there's always been some
Sam: of that, but it has been getting worse.
Pete: I mean, what that says is the extent to which what is viewed as important,
Pete: what reaches the public consciousness, uh, is really, you know,
Pete: tightly, fairly tightly locked down. And that's rather depressing.
Sam: And the thing is, like, there seemingly was no hesitancy to make that the conversation
Sam: about Biden for months, months and months and months.
Ivan: I mean, about every tiny thing.
Sam: And I have heard people talking about this.
Sam: Obviously, you know, outside of the major media, I see lots of people on TikTok.
Sam: I see lots of people on Blue Sky. I see lots of people wherever in those kinds
Sam: of informal, less structured places talking about this stuff. I do see it.
Pete: Right. But if they said it on NBC News, tomorrow the DOJ would be investigating them for.
Sam: Yes, exactly.
Pete: To take away their license.
Sam: No, I have. I have seen commentary about it on MSNBC. Yes.
Sam: ms now soon but fucking but but the i have seen some but even have we lost all.
Ivan: The branding people does nobody know how to do branding anymore what the fuck is going on.
Sam: I mean.
Ivan: Max now we've got ms now who the hell is gonna know what the hell ms now is.
Sam: Yes anyway i i
Sam: have heard some but it's relatively muted it's certainly
Sam: not like let's go all in on this and of course part
Sam: of this like people are actually i see lots
Sam: of people trying to maintain focus on the epstein stuff as
Sam: as the more like one of
Sam: the things that our entire media ecosystem
Sam: has a really really hard time on
Sam: is dealing with multiple things on the same time
Sam: and this is what trump and driven by steve
Sam: bannon the flood the zone with shit thing
Sam: because our our whole we're so single focus minded like the the general like
Sam: attention ecosystem of the united states tends to want to think about one thing
Sam: at a time and like this is today's not for a very long time.
Ivan: By the way.
Sam: Yes not for a very long time and it'll last a day or two maybe a week on the
Sam: outside and then we've moved on to something else.
Ivan: Yeah, like, where the fuck are the Epstein files, Sam?
Sam: Yes, I've heard more about that in the last few days. It's done a remarkably
Sam: good job of sticking around, but even so, that's diminishing.
Sam: But when you have a universe where every single day,
Sam: there's like an assault of 30 or 40 things that any one of which would be significant
Sam: in and of itself, we end up only being able to like, well, which one are we
Sam: going to think about this week? You know?
Ivan: Um, I, I, I, I, you never, which one, right? Like yesterday,
Ivan: I don't know, I guess, you know.
Ivan: For example, 4.30 p.m., Ghislaine Maxwell says he never saw Trump in any inappropriate setting.
Ivan: Like, well, obviously, any inappropriate setting depends on what you think is
Ivan: appropriate. Hold her? Exactly.
Ivan: What the fuck? You know, talk about saying nothing about nothing, okay?
Ivan: The most lawyerly answers. And she said something else later that was something
Ivan: like, all the answers were the perfect answers that any, you know,
Ivan: your defense attorney would want you to give.
Ivan: Those are all the answers she gave. She said nothing else, okay?
Sam: Well, and by the way, just to be clear, part of that is she has maintained consistently
Sam: the entire time that she never saw anything inappropriate.
Ivan: Period. That anything inappropriate ever happened. Exactly. So that's what I think.
Sam: Not just Donald Trump. Nothing inappropriate ever happened.
Ivan: Listen, 4.30 p.m., that shit. At 6.12, we get this thing that they want to deport
Ivan: Kilmar Obrego to fucking Uganda now, okay?
Ivan: So that was 6.12, okay? today at, let's see, at 635, Trump is saying that now
Ivan: he's going to investigate the tariffs on furniture.
Ivan: So I guess if, you know, you thought your furniture was not expensive enough,
Ivan: you're in for a surprise.
Ivan: Pete, I suggest that since you're talking about not having enough furniture,
Ivan: I think you better hurry up on acquiring any furniture than you need.
Pete: It's on hold. I went and priced furniture and the tariffs are impacting it.
Pete: I literally have a room that I'm like, I'm just going to wait until 2030 to, you know, get a couch.
Ivan: There you go. And then, let me see, what else? Oh, then later. Excellent news.
Ivan: We freaking, you know, mob pressured Intel to give up 10% of their stock to
Ivan: the administration. Okay?
Pete: As an Intel stockholder, I legitimately want to know whether this is good or bad for me.
Ivan: I mean, how the hell, you know, do you go and do that?
Ivan: I mean, such a dilutive, you know, so quickly, you know, without what?
Ivan: Without a board? I mean, how the hell?
Ivan: How did this happen so quickly? They just like double.
Ivan: I mean, but but again, you want to talk about all of those moves were just yesterday afternoon.
Ivan: That was yesterday afternoon.
Ivan: Yeah, it's just, I understand why you want to avoid the newspeak.
Ivan: Believe me. It's coming fast. Why the hell?
Pete: I mean, it's ridiculous.
Ivan: I'm taking, look, antacids I got here. I got, I'm fucking taking a combination
Ivan: of goddamn Aleve and Tylenol at the same time. I got to tell you something.
Ivan: The alcohol works better than any of this.
Ivan: I, you know, I, the other day I had, we downed out at all much wine.
Ivan: I realized, fuck, I feel so much better now.
Pete: I mean, it's, you know, it's not a joke. It's how, it's, one of the things that
Pete: I say is that a lot of the American Revolution and the politics of the 1800s, the early 1800s,
Pete: is readily explained when you realize that, like,
Pete: most people were completely south to this, I'm not joking, most of the time.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Yeah.
Pete: Yeah, throughout most of human history, right?
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Yes. Well, because, you know, you couldn't get clean water. So,
Sam: yeah. Alcohol. All the time.
Sam: But, yeah, look, I think that that's a big part of it is, like, when we say, well...
Sam: If Biden had done this, they would have gotten all this attention on any one
Sam: of the things you just mentioned.
Sam: Well, part of the problem is this like split of attention because there's so much stuff.
Sam: Another is what Pete brought up earlier. No one's afraid that if they go report
Sam: on Biden's health or his mental health or he's getting old.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: That there's going to be retaliatory action that could impact them dramatically.
Sam: And so like all of, you know, Harris, when she did that interview a couple of
Sam: weeks ago and was asked, like, has any of this surprised you?
Sam: Her answer was none of the actions Trump has taken have surprised me.
Sam: He telegraphed all of this. This is exactly what he said he was going to do.
Sam: What has surprised me is all of the capitulation.
Ivan: Yes.
Pete: And it's a huge problem because it leads to, you know, when you started talking
Pete: about Trump's health, my knee-jerk reaction was, well, now it doesn't matter.
Pete: It would have mattered to talk about his health before he was elected.
Pete: But now these people are moving so fast to consolidate power such that it doesn't
Pete: matter what the electoral situation is.
Ivan: What do you – in which sense do you mean?
Ivan: In the sense of like if Trump isn't the standard bearer that,
Ivan: you know, they still get – I think if.
Pete: Trump had dropped dead in, you know, November of 2023, Kamala Harris had a pretty
Pete: good shot of beating whoever showed up.
Pete: If we have to go through four more years of this type of government destruction
Pete: and centralization of authority,
Pete: I don't know how anyone beats whatever loser they put up.
Pete: That's what we're looking down the barrel of right now.
Pete: We're seeing what's going on in Texas with the mid-cycle redistricting.
Pete: We've heard that Ron DeSantis in Florida is going to jump aboard that train too.
Sam: And like two or three other states are on the way out.
Pete: I think that every move they've been making is essentially moving us closer
Pete: to, you know, and I feel hysterical for saying it, closer to becoming a police state.
Pete: And, you know, it's not something I could have imagined myself saying 10 years
Pete: ago or even five years ago.
Sam: You know, we've mentioned before, like the problem is one of the problems are
Sam: people are looking for sort of the magic moment where the day before we're a
Sam: healthy democracy and the day after we're a dictatorship slash police state.
Sam: It doesn't happen that way. It's a gradual degradation.
Sam: And we are well underway.
Pete: I mean, what I would say to you is I have multiple people who,
Pete: over the past 10 years, at various points during this administration,
Pete: have noped out and left the country.
Pete: And I can remember thinking to myself, well, that seems like an overreaction.
Pete: And for all of those people, I'm basically looking back and saying,
Pete: well, they really saw it was coming much better than I did.
Ivan: Well, I do think that it's a dark period, but I don't know.
Ivan: All these coming cycles, I do think so.
Ivan: But there's one thing about this, that a lot of this related to Trump is related
Ivan: to a cult of personality still.
Ivan: And one thing is that none of the people surrounding in a circle,
Ivan: for whatever reason, have the same weight personality-wise that he does.
Ivan: If he dies, it does take a substantial hit because, remember,
Ivan: people aren't voting for the policies.
Ivan: As a matter of fact, if you look at what they're doing, everybody hates it. They're voting for him.
Ivan: Okay? It's him. Because he's doing it.
Ivan: I mean, every single thing you do, what is your approval on what he's doing
Ivan: to the economy? We hate it. What is your approval on immigration?
Ivan: We hate it. What is your approval on? We hate it. If you put up a guy that doesn't
Ivan: have whatever the fuck these idiots find charismatic about this asshole, okay?
Ivan: It doesn't work is the problem, okay? It doesn't work anywhere nearly as well, okay?
Ivan: You put Ron DeSantis up trying to do the same shit, okay?
Ivan: It doesn't work the same way on an actual level.
Pete: Does the party have control over what's needed to validate and verify and what's
Pete: the word I'm looking for?
Pete: To certify the results of the elections.
Pete: I mean, that's what, you know, what I've learned here is it's not Trump, right?
Pete: It's the rest of the apparatus that has coalesced around him.
Pete: And if that apparatus is in charge of deciding who has won the next election,
Pete: Yvonne, then I'm not sure it matters who runs.
Ivan: I don't know. You know, here's one thing. I am prepared for a dark period, is what I'm thinking.
Ivan: Look, I expect a lot of darkness, a lot of problems, a lot of things.
Ivan: My thing is, and maybe it's my experience with dealing with people like in different
Ivan: places, like I got friends, for example, had to go through military dictatorships
Ivan: in both Brazil and Argentina.
Ivan: I spent a lot of time there. It's the one thing that I found out about all of
Ivan: those at the day end, eventually, during a lifetime.
Ivan: They have a tendency to self-destruct in a certain way.
Ivan: In large part because they tend to, one of the big problems is a lot of the
Ivan: shit that they're doing.
Ivan: It's so much self-dealing that they are causing, they're already causing so
Ivan: many issues for the economy itself, okay, that eventually in a lot of these,
Ivan: the economic issues that they create because of their shitty policies, okay,
Ivan: wind up being the cracks that start like really, you know, breaking them apart.
Sam: I think the problem is when you say, yeah, they end, yeah, they end.
Sam: But it can be a long time. Like some.
Ivan: It just.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: Look, listen, it all depends. Sam, but what I'm saying is it depends on what
Ivan: your outlook of a long time is.
Sam: Well, right. OK, the thing is, if you look at these across the world,
Sam: certainly there are some that have only lasted a few years and they fall apart very quickly.
Sam: There are others that have gone decades. I'm saying, you know.
Ivan: I'm saying, you know, yes, true. I mean, that that is very true.
Ivan: I mean, Franco, that lasts in Spain about 30 years. You know, that is true. Okay.
Sam: How long have we had the, you know, how long North Korea? You know?
Ivan: Well, yes, longer than that. I mean, you know.
Sam: You know, so, yes, the thing is, if you're lucky, the bad thing lasts for like
Sam: four years, five years. That's still pretty bad.
Sam: But if you're unlucky, it might be 50 years.
Ivan: Well, and then the related question. On average, they don't,
Ivan: on average, in a country that was a democracy, they don't last like North Korea.
Sam: But maybe, yeah, I understand.
Ivan: That's what I'm saying. Look, I'm looking, look, I'm trying to look this.
Sam: You're trying to be positive.
Ivan: No, no, I'm not trying to be positive. I'm trying to be realistic,
Ivan: okay, in terms of, okay, what has been the experience of countries that have
Ivan: a federal system and a democracy and how long these kind of periods have lasted. Yeah.
Sam: So what would you say on average, 20 years?
Ivan: 10, 15 years.
Sam: And look, we're talking a generation.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: You know, at least.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: And so, and what would you say?
Ivan: Don't get me wrong.
Sam: I've been looking at.
Ivan: Listen.
Sam: Look, I want to say one thing.
Ivan: Wait, wait, wait.
Sam: Okay. One important thing. even after you
Sam: get to the end of that dictatorship and you resume sort of a healthier government
Sam: for the country to actually recover to be at the level of health that was before
Sam: is even longer just saying but.
Ivan: Here look what i'm saying is this i am saying that i i think that this is what we're,
Ivan: I am saying that, and also at the same time, it brings me to remind me to get
Ivan: my mother today to get me my grandfather's birth certificate so I can submit
Ivan: my paperwork to get my EU citizenship,
Ivan: which I am also planning on doing at the same time, okay? So, yes, you know.
Sam: I get to- Get the escape rafts going.
Ivan: And then as we've talked about- Wait.
Sam: Wait, importantly, we talked about this on the show. Once you have your EU citizenship,
Sam: Yvonne, you have to adopt me.
Ivan: Fuck this. Jesus Christ. I guess I'm adopting a lot of people at this point. Okay. Fair enough.
Sam: Okay. Go ahead.
Ivan: No. So anyway, so yeah, I mean, what I'm saying is that it's not a good time
Ivan: to be a citizen in this country right now.
Ivan: It's awful. Well, and just to be clear.
Sam: Even for the MAGA heads who think they are getting what they want.
Ivan: Oh, they're getting fucked. Okay? You know, it's the reason why all this polling
Ivan: on, like, grocery prices and everything, that they are all distraught about
Ivan: the fact that grocery prices are soaring.
Pete: Seemingly less distraught about it than they were last July.
Ivan: No, no, no, no. Not apparently, according to the latest polling data.
Ivan: they find if you see like where they're they're you
Ivan: know satisfaction on these issues okay it is
Ivan: like in the crater like right now they had been like because they went in 2022
Ivan: they were i mean with good i mean inflation was high they were very upset that
Ivan: started trending down like last year but you know it hadn't been like back to
Ivan: like where it was like pre-covid or whatever but man,
Ivan: ever since trump took,
Ivan: took office where I think they were super optimistic, it's like collapsed.
Ivan: It's like one of his worst rated issues right now at this point.
Ivan: It's that. And, you know, the reality is that I find it so hilarious that these
Ivan: guys, that for the most part, according to the demographics of who voted,
Ivan: are the ones that can least afford it, okay?
Ivan: So many of them still, like, jump up and down saying, yeah, yeah,
Ivan: yeah, you know, whatever. And
Ivan: I'm like, but he's fucking you on every pocketbook issue that you want.
Ivan: I mean, literally this tax bill, okay?
Ivan: The reality is, like research just showed, the biggest money grab from the poor
Ivan: to the rich that this nation has ever done.
Ivan: I mean, literally. We took all money from the poor to give it to the wealthiest 10%.
Pete: It's a cult of personality.
Ivan: Yes. Anyway, we've bounced around a subject, you know, but, you know,
Ivan: because I did start on Trump's health and obviously we went on our tangents as usual.
Ivan: You want to talk about something like more cheap and cheerful, like,
Ivan: you know, like, hey, have you noticed, for example, how Trump really that one
Ivan: of his main targets that they're weaponizing the government against is all the
Ivan: black women that are that are investigating him? And I was specifically.
Pete: It's like black women or mayors. I was going to say, like, they're firing generals.
Pete: They're firing every black woman in any kind of government position they find.
Ivan: It's got nothing to do with what they're targeting. No, no, no.
Ivan: But you had all these Fed governors they could go after. So who did they go after? The black woman.
Sam: Yes. And the cities he's targeting all have black women mayors,
Sam: you know, at least so far.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Yeah. I mean, look.
Ivan: Eric Adams handing out wads of cash. OK. To reporters. OK.
Ivan: Yes. And potato chip bags. Which apparently this is some kind of good thing.
Ivan: And I guess he's not worried about getting prosecuted because,
Ivan: you know, whatever. I mean, because he's not going to be.
Pete: Do we know what brand of potato chip bag? I feel like that's relevant to this question.
Ivan: That's a great question. I think one of the reporters did mention what brand of potato chips was.
Ivan: And as a matter of fact, the reporter was like, hey, I don't need a snack. I'm fine.
Ivan: Because he didn't understand.
Ivan: You know, the guy's like going, but I'm not hungry. It's okay.
Ivan: No, no, no, no. Take it anyway.
Ivan: Take it, take it. Then they open the bag. Like, what the fuck is this?
Pete: If it was me, I'd be like, I was really looking forward to getting wise sour
Pete: cream and onion potato chips.
Pete: And instead, there's just this money. And that would be how the story broke. I was disappointed.
Ivan: It was kind of. Like, the way that this person broke it, it kind of sounded like this.
Ivan: And they were kind of, like, refusing the snack because they weren't hungry.
Ivan: It's just—and then, oh, and Cuomo—and then you've got Cuomo New York saying—what
Ivan: did he say at a campaign rally?
Ivan: That Trump was going to rally to his side to make him win?
Sam: He said that—I think it was a fundraiser.
Ivan: And a fundraiser.
Sam: Like, he wasn't expecting that to, like, get out. Like he wasn't saying that at like a public event.
Pete: The extent to which people, Mondani, is that his name?
Ivan: Mondani.
Pete: He's completely unhinged this kind of sector of the Democratic Party is hilarious to me.
Pete: Because like he's the mayor of New York. What's he going to do?
Pete: Right? Like there's a certain amount of power he's going to have.
Pete: But people are not reacting rationally to this.
Ivan: Listen, the whole thing, but even still, when you look at the policies that
Ivan: he's saying that he wants to do, it's like, what? He wants to help poor people?
Ivan: He wants to have them earn a living wage?
Pete: I already like the guy. Why are you selling him to me?
Ivan: Exactly. I'm like, this is your problem? This is your big problem, okay? Okay.
Ivan: I don't know. It's all fucking racist. I mean, let's be clear about this.
Ivan: You know, just like it was with Obama. It was all fucking racist.
Ivan: By the way, talk about a little bit of cult of personality.
Ivan: Not that Obama had such a cult of personality, but there is a reason also why
Ivan: we've suffered since Obama,
Ivan: because the candidates that have come afterwards did not have the personal magnetism
Ivan: that Barack Obama had. That's why he was able to win.
Pete: I mean, the two Democratic presidents we've had in the past,
Pete: what, 25, 30 years, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, both of whom,
Pete: you know, yeah, I think it's fair to say.
Sam: You just forgot Biden there. The two presidents we've had.
Pete: Well, you know, that case in point.
Ivan: Biden didn't win on magnetism.
Pete: It's his fault, not mine. Yeah.
Ivan: Biden did not win on magnetism. Let's be clear about this.
Ivan: OK, Biden, Biden was a guy that guys like me who like policy like policy troubleshooters
Ivan: who like fixing shit love because he works like I do.
Ivan: OK, because I've gone to companies and gone to places and whatever,
Ivan: and I have fixed things that have saved companies tens of millions,
Ivan: hundreds of millions of dollars even. Okay.
Ivan: All right. And I don't go around on my LinkedIn or my whatever and like interior
Ivan: going with all these metals saying, look at how I saved the company,
Ivan: the body, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, I'm just doing my job.
Pete: You got a very raw deal.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Anyway, back to your point, though. Charisma matters.
Ivan: Yes. By the way, which is why maybe, and I know that people,
Ivan: a lot of people, although I see a lot of people turning, which is what maybe
Ivan: this whole Newsom thing probably works.
Ivan: And I'll tell you why the hell it also works, because this is something that
Ivan: Trump cannot go against.
Ivan: You know what? Newsom's a handsome looking guy.
Ivan: And this gets under Trump's skin in a way that he can't get around.
Ivan: The other day, they were showing a picture of, like, Newsom in, like, high school.
Ivan: How he was dressed. Very suave. Okay?
Ivan: Versus Vance in high school. And the juxtaposition, I mean, Vance looked like some, like a dweeb.
Ivan: Like he is. Okay? He just looked like a dweeb. Versus, and this, but this kind of shit.
Ivan: Do you know how much under the skin it gets into all these MAGA people,
Ivan: all these women, especially the ones that are doing the MAGA,
Ivan: you know, the Mar-a-Lago look and whatever and all of this shit, you know,
Ivan: it is to them, it's got to be one of the things that probably drives them most crazy.
Pete: Well, I think Newsom is a man without any moral center whatsoever.
Pete: He has the potential to be in another world. He could be as bad as Trump.
Pete: In the world we live in, if you gave me a rotting pile of garbage and said,
Pete: would you like this for president instead of Trump, I'd say rotting pile of garbage.
Ivan: Listen, I would have voted for a corpse.
Pete: Yeah. Didn't Newsom used to date one of the big Trump- No.
Ivan: Newsom was with- I think actually- Kim Goffoil.
Ivan: Goffoil, yeah. You know, yeah, it was- But by the way, have you seen the before
Ivan: and after pictures of- Terrifying.
Ivan: Or with Newsom and now?
Ivan: It's like one of these things that you're just like, what in God's name happened?
Ivan: Okay, all right? It's like they went to like- It's mystifying.
Ivan: They went to a, it's like she went to a lab and got like morphed into some other thing.
Ivan: I mean, I think they have, they must have some thing at the Mar-a-Lago spa where
Ivan: they just go and like fill them up with fillers, lip fillers,
Ivan: whatever, and they come out on the other side of the production line and they look like this.
Sam: Yeah, so I mean, I've said this before, I'll say it again.
Sam: Some of what Newsom has been doing recently is quite effective.
Sam: I, I hope somebody else emerges before we get to 2028 who is just as effective.
Sam: I'm not saying like.
Ivan: I got to tell you something. I don't think. Let me tell you something.
Ivan: Seeing the timidity that everybody else is having about this.
Sam: This is the problem.
Pete: Except Pritzker.
Ivan: Except Pritzker.
Sam: Pritzker and AOC are the other ones that come up all the time.
Ivan: That's it. That's your only three that have had like. And I mean,
Ivan: I would say Bernie, but Bernie's too old.
Sam: Yeah. maybe you get a uh maybe you get a ticket or
Sam: something yeah uh but but i
Sam: i think the other thing that i've
Sam: been saying repeatedly is like being out and doing stuff now is gonna like i'm
Sam: i'm gonna remember that by the time we get closer to the election it's like
Sam: the people who show up only after the midterms and start then,
Sam: my immediate thought is, where the fuck were you?
Ivan: Exactly.
Sam: You know, we needed you back then, you know?
Sam: And I recognize some of these people aren't in positions where they can do a lot.
Sam: But when you are completely in the minority and you don't have any levers of
Sam: power, just being out there speaking and being loud and being angry matters.
Sam: I mean, you know, hell, people are talking about fucking Jon Stewart just because
Sam: he's, like, talking about stuff.
Sam: You know, now, I'm not sure that would be a great choice, and he's repeatedly
Sam: said he's not interested.
Pete: I'm sure that would be a terrible choice.
Ivan: Yeah, probably not. But you know what? Honestly...
Ivan: Why would that be a terrible choice compared to Trump?
Pete: First of all, he's Jewish. And I don't think America is ready for Jewish president.
Pete: I say that as a Jewish guy.
Ivan: Yeah, no, I know.
Pete: I don't think it would, don't think it could happen. Second of all,
Pete: he has a very New York Jewish accent.
Pete: Three quarters of the country just freaking hates that, you know,
Pete: and is not going to put up on it.
Pete: And third of all, I think that it takes, you know,
Pete: a certain level of bloodthirstiness, of being willing to go for the throat to
Pete: combat fascists, and I don't think Jon Stewart has that.
Sam: The other thing I've heard criticism of him on is he's got a little bit too
Sam: much of the pucks on both their houses tendency.
Sam: Although, frankly, I think that is something that actually resonates with the public right now.
Sam: It's not like the Democrats are popular right now. They've got their lowest
Sam: approval ratings ever, you know?
Sam: So, but anyway, I wasn't seriously suggesting Jon Stewart.
Sam: My point was just that his name is brought up because he's one of the ones that's being loud now.
Sam: And I think that is critically important. Like, I know the standard thing and
Sam: Democrats have this whole like we we play by the way things have always been.
Sam: We play by the rules. And one of those rules is the presidential election doesn't
Sam: start until after the midterms.
Ivan: That's bullshit. Well, I got to be honest, but, but I'm sorry,
Ivan: but Newsom is already running.
Sam: Oh, yeah.
Ivan: Like he's running for president.
Sam: I mean, he's fucking campaign commercials. The videos he's putting out.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: It's like, those are campaign commercials.
Ivan: He's like, fuck this shit. He's already running for president.
Ivan: And by the way, I think that's the right call.
Sam: Yeah. No, I think more people should be. Like, my criticism here,
Sam: I've never really liked Newsom, but my criticism here is not of Newsom.
Sam: It's that why the fuck aren't more people doing this?
Ivan: Listen, here's the one thing that people need to get over about this, OK?
Ivan: Listen, Newsom, if you're trying to pick the ideal candidate,
Ivan: OK, all right, of the people that I've seen like in the Democrats like right
Ivan: now, the governors or whatever.
Ivan: You know, look, my favorite is Kamala.
Ivan: here's the one thing that he but the the
Ivan: thing is a even though i
Ivan: know that people say no he's like kind of like trying to be on on on everybody's
Ivan: side look you look at his tracker he's been a democrat consistently he's been
Ivan: mayor of cities his policies for the for the most part have been on the right
Ivan: side of doing things i'm talking about newsom a newsom about newsom okay his
Ivan: policies have been all that's not gonna know that i said that kamala would be
Ivan: my favorite candidate Oh.
Sam: But, okay. And now you're talking about, okay, I got confused. I'm dumb.
Ivan: No, no, no. It's okay. And I talk fast, so that works.
Ivan: But, you know, Newsom has been, for the most part, in the right side of policies.
Ivan: Yeah, he said a couple of things I maybe disagree with, but whatever.
Ivan: He has never been somebody that has been like a Republican that all of a sudden
Ivan: turned a Democrat, say like Michael Bloomberg, for example, or even like that.
Ivan: So in that sense, look, he's been on that side of the ledger consistently for
Ivan: a long time, doing public service for many years.
Ivan: And like somebody pointed out, this guy actually comes from a rich family.
Ivan: If he just wanted to be some rich asshole sitting around somewhere,
Ivan: he could be doing a whole bunch of shit that is, you know, probably,
Ivan: you know, that he could be doing instead of this.
Ivan: You know, and I haven't seen him be doing this for a grift either,
Ivan: like totally, like for most part, like like most other fucking Republicans are
Ivan: doing everything right now as a grift, you know.
Ivan: So so those are the things that I'm like looking at this. And oh,
Ivan: by the way, sorry, but he is the only guy that is going out there actively doing
Ivan: what you need to fucking do.
Pete: All right, Yvonne.
Ivan: How about this?
Pete: All right, Yvonne. One of these guys is president tomorrow. You get to pick.
Pete: There's no election. You're not thinking about electoral party.
Pete: You got Newsom or Pritzker? Newsom or Pritzker?
Ivan: I would pick Pritzker.
Pete: Okay. Why?
Ivan: Because I think Pritzker is more thoughtful in policy itself.
Ivan: I think that Pritzker is, in terms of being a policy person and how to implement
Ivan: it and how to do things at the ground level, is more aligned with what I like.
Ivan: It's why I like Biden, for God's sakes. Okay?
Ivan: But right now, my focus is get these assholes off the fucking thing.
Ivan: And he may not be the right person for that right now. So I need somebody that
Ivan: can go and fucking win right now.
Pete: You need a Newsom Pritzker ticket and then Newsom resigns the day after he wins.
Sam: So, nope.
Sam: But what, Yvonne, what you've said is precisely the way I've been thinking about.
Ivan: The old white guy ticket. Hey, if that's what it takes to win right now.
Pete: Fuck this shit.
Ivan: If that's what it takes.
Pete: I'm sorry. I'm beaten like a dog. I'm just, you know, whatever gets us out of this period.
Ivan: I tried the white woman that I loved. She didn't win. I tried the black woman and she didn't win.
Ivan: They fucking like, you know, they chased off my favorite white guy,
Ivan: okay, that I had to do what the fuck they're doing because they called him old,
Ivan: okay? So yes, like right now, give me an all fucking white guy ticket to go
Ivan: beat these motherfuckers.
Sam: This is what my approach has been the last couple of elections, frankly.
Sam: Like when I do the election graph stuff and I'm looking at it,
Sam: I've said, for instance, like last time around, I was, not last time,
Sam: two times ago, I was a Kamala Harris fan,
Sam: but then it became clear, looking at the general election polls,
Sam: that Biden did better against Trump than anybody else.
Ivan: Else! Yes!
Sam: Better than Sanders, better than Buttigieg, better than Harris,
Sam: better than all of those other people who are running.
Ivan: Yep.
Sam: And so I'm like, you know, Biden might not have been my direct choice as the
Sam: candidate I preferred that I would love to have as president,
Sam: but he's got the best shot of winning. And that's the only thing I care about right now.
Sam: Because, you know, the alternative is so bad.
Sam: You know, and that's been my thought process the last few elections.
Sam: And I think it's going to be again.
Ivan: Let me tell you something. In 2020, everybody kept saying that Biden couldn't win.
Ivan: Biden couldn't win the primary. Biden couldn't win the thing. Biden could win.
Ivan: Okay. Everything was supposedly stacked against him and he won.
Ivan: And I will tell you this, that right now I know that everybody's shitting on
Ivan: like whatever Biden shouldn't have stayed. He should have bought out blah,
Ivan: blah, blah. Let me tell you something.
Ivan: The whole fucking thing about how many people couldn't vote for a black woman. Black and a woman.
Ivan: Can I tell you that I really think in retrospect that if Biden is state,
Ivan: he had a still better shot at winning than Kamala?
Sam: Yeah, I don't think so. Like, from my life...
Ivan: Bullshit! No, no, no. I'm going to tell you why.
Ivan: You, again, like everybody here in this country for the last 20 years,
Ivan: underestimate the racism and sexism in this fucking country.
Sam: No, I don't underestimate that at all. I just flat out, like,
Sam: when Harris took over, her numbers were instantly five to seven points better than Biden.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what? Yeah.
Ivan: And that's, you know what?
Ivan: This is like the surge that people get when they get, you know,
Ivan: the happiness when they get that toy that all of a sudden they got during Christmas.
Ivan: And then three months later, they don't play with their fucking PlayStation
Ivan: again because they forgot about it. OK.
Ivan: And yes, people got their toy and all of a sudden, yeah, we're excited or whatever.
Ivan: And then three months later, what the fuck happened? Yeah. Yeah.
Sam: Yeah. Now, I can see that. But I think by the time we got to the candidate switch
Sam: out, Biden was too damaged.
Ivan: Let me tell you something.
Sam: I do not think he would.
Ivan: I'm going to say I'm going to call back and I'm going to say bullshit and I'm
Ivan: going to tell you why. because if it had been a Republican in the same shoes
Ivan: what the fuck would they have done?
Ivan: Do you think they would have Trump would have bowed out?
Pete: They would have propped his corpse up with a stick up his back.
Ivan: And powered through it.
Pete: Yes.
Ivan: And powered through it. Just like Trump did when that stupid fucking Hollywood
Ivan: you know access Hollywood tape came out in October which was going to destroy
Ivan: him when they were trying to pull him out.
Sam: I agree with you entirely that Republicans would have...
Ivan: No, no, no. The people voting for Democrats have a fucking loser mentality.
Ivan: I'm telling you this right now. This is what I was going to say.
Sam: The Democrats would never have rallied behind Biden the way you just described
Sam: the Republicans. But that's the problem.
Ivan: The problem. But Sam, the problem was that the people in leadership in the Democratic
Ivan: Party that at that moment immediately,
Ivan: what they had to do is, I don't give a shit if we're carrying Biden's corpse to November.
Ivan: We're fucking carrying that fucking corpse to November come hell or hard water. What do they do?
Ivan: turned them on a dime yeah.
Pete: I think it's i think i think in retrospect
Pete: i think that's correct i i'm not willing
Pete: to say i don't have the certainty that you
Pete: have yvonne that that would have turned the turn the game but i think i said
Pete: you and i talked a lot during that period i think i said it's got nothing to
Pete: do with who with what horse you're replacing mid-race replacing a horse mid-race is bad.
Sam: Well, I think the key is I'm evaluating with, as of the point that Kamala took
Sam: over, but Biden was already damaged there.
Sam: Your counter hypothetical is if the Nancy Pelosi's and George Clooney's of the
Sam: world had never done what they did.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: And I think that's a different scenario. Yeah, like if there had been unity
Sam: behind Biden from the beginning.
Ivan: That's an entirely different situation. And that's what I'm talking about.
Ivan: It's that the moment that whatever the hell happened, happened.
Ivan: All of these people needed to like, well, whatever. It is what it is. We're carrying.
Ivan: I don't care if he's a corpse or fucking carrying it. We're carrying him across the finish line.
Ivan: Period. That's it. And these fuckers, what they did is fuck everybody.
Sam: Okay, so enough retrospective. We're running up on time, but any other things
Sam: on our bullet list we want to make sure to hit?
Sam: We had the whole Trump-Zelensky thing this week.
Ivan: Well, Trump just said today that apparently he's giving up.
Sam: Oh, was there new stuff this morning?
Ivan: There was something here that says Trump. I saw a headline scroll saying Trump
Ivan: right now is kind of like, you know, giving up Trump, giving up on this thing.
Ivan: That was something. Let me see if I can find the headline.
Sam: He kept saying the next step is getting his trilateral meeting.
Sam: Yeah. And Trump and Trump.
Sam: Putin was basically like, yeah, that's not happening. I'm not talking to that
Sam: guy. What are you talking about? No, he's not a legitimate president of anything.
Ivan: Ah, let's see. He has something today. Russia's noncommittal.
Ivan: There was something that I said that Trump was, I can't find a headliner.
Ivan: And I said that Trump is like kind of tired and just doesn't,
Ivan: you know, he's like giving up on this thing right now.
Sam: I think this is, this is, this is Trump overall.
Sam: And I think it's Trump more often now, but he wants the quick win.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: He expected to go to Alaska, shake Putin's hand and have a deal.
Pete: So does giving up mean he's giving up on, I mean, do we continue to send arms
Pete: to Ukraine? Do we block European attempts to support them?
Pete: I mean, you know, is he basically losing interest in wandering away?
Ivan: I think he's losing interest right now for a bit.
Sam: Like, if he doesn't get a quick win, then he wants to move on to something else.
Ivan: He's just going to ignore it.
Sam: He said his two weeks thing again. Oh, we'll resolve this in two weeks.
Ivan: I think he's going to do, like, somebody, I can't remember who told me this
Ivan: the first time I heard it.
Ivan: He's going to treat it like a teen pregnancy. He's going to just wish it away.
Sam: The thing is, like, he just likes a teen pregnancy.
Sam: He wants to wish it away, but there are certain things that keep coming back anyway.
Sam: Like the Abstein stuff is going to be here. The Ukraine stuff will be there.
Pete: He's going to play in the big game next weekend.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: Yeah. But it's what happens with a teen pregnancy. You wish it away for a couple
Ivan: of weeks, and then you realize it comes back. And you're like, oh, fuck. Come on.
Ivan: This war's still going on, really. He's still got to go to class.
Sam: He has lived his entire life with the idea that he can sort of warp reality
Sam: around him. He can say things.
Pete: Pretty good evidence for it, you know?
Sam: Oh, yeah.
Ivan: Yes!
Sam: It's worked. It's worked. But, you know, basically, like, all he has to do is say something.
Sam: Doesn't matter if it's true. Doesn't matter if it's not. and it either becomes
Sam: true or it stops mattering.
Sam: And that he can influence how people think of things even if the reality is different.
Sam: And as you said, it's worked. It's worked incredibly well for him.
Sam: For 79 years he's done this. And he's president of the fucking United States.
Sam: And he's richer than he's ever been.
Ivan: Let me tell you something. I still to this
Ivan: day rue the fact that when i was god
Ivan: i must have been 12 or 13 12 very young
Ivan: my father my father occasionally would
Ivan: take me to new york city okay all right my father used to
Ivan: go loved go to new york city we would be i mean sometimes we'll go and take
Ivan: the morning flight out of san juan to go shopping literally in new york city
Ivan: and then we would come back in the in the night in the night I still remember
Ivan: that one of these times he took me and he specifically wanted to go to Trump Tower. Okay.
Ivan: And I should have, you know, when I saw all the, I still remember this.
Ivan: Okay. When I went there and I wrote that stupid golden escalator.
Ivan: Okay. All right. That they went down.
Ivan: I kind of like my whole thing, man, this thing all seems so tacky.
Pete: I got to, I got to interrupt you right now. I'm saying this,
Pete: Have you seen what this tasteless motherfucker has done to the White House? I mean, the Oval Office.
Ivan: Oh, my God. It's the worst thing.
Sam: Wait till you see the ballroom.
Pete: And he's tearing down the building and extension.
Ivan: Oh, my God. It is just.
Pete: I want the new president, whoever he is, to do two things.
Pete: Day one, knock down the White House. Day two, fire everyone associated with
Pete: ICE and shut the agency down.
Ivan: Oh, yeah.
Pete: For anyone who tells me they're doing that. Maybe you could reverse those and shut the ice on day one.
Ivan: Oh, my God. Listen, by the way, you know what? No, no, no, no,
Ivan: no, no. That is a perfect interruption. Listen, you know what they should do?
Ivan: We should do like an event.
Pete: I'm going to interrupt you one more time. And for those of you on my live stream
Pete: coming back on my recording, coming back just after I censored that bit,
Pete: it was really, really great.
Pete: and you should go to the Curmudgeon's Corner podcast to hear the unedited and
Pete: unexpurgated version. Please continue.
Ivan: By the way, I do think that there should be some kind of community event where
Ivan: we go over there and we get given jackhammers so we can like fuck.
Ivan: I want to drill up that damn cement that he put on the Rose Garden.
Ivan: And I want everybody, I would pay.
Ivan: I would pay money to go, give me a damn jackhammer. I'll pay $1,000.
Ivan: I'll donate $1,000 to Habitat for Humanity so I can get a jackhammer and be
Ivan: able to frickin' drill part of that cement out.
Sam: Yeah. It's like everything he's been doing.
Sam: I mean, like, in the grand scheme of importance, redecorating the White House
Sam: is at the bottom, but in terms of the symbolism of the stuff and that he's just
Sam: trashing everything, it just shows it all off.
Sam: And it's that and, like, the shenanigans with Air Force One from the paint scheme
Sam: to the one he's getting from Qatar or whatever.
Ivan: You know, the good news about all those three fucking planes is that you realize
Ivan: it'll probably be dead and not be able to have flown a single one of them.
Ivan: Between the two ones that we were building before and the Qatari one because
Ivan: there's the idea that they could somehow retrofit one that they got now that
Ivan: already had an interior built that was like whatever and they could retrofit
Ivan: it faster and the other two that they're building is just so stupid.
Sam: Well, one thing that I would find extremely amusing is if they retrofit the Qatari plane.
Sam: And as part of the retrofit, in order to meet the security requirements,
Sam: they have to make the interior the same as the other two.
Sam: And of course, what he liked about the plane is it was all full of this gold
Sam: shit, like he's doing the White House. That's right.
Sam: And so he wouldn't get what he wants. I don't know. Anyway, but are we done?
Ivan: Yeah, we're done. We're done.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Stick a dick in it. Yeah.
Pete: I think I'm going to have to go watch downstairs and watch Superman two or three
Pete: more times to recover from all this politics.
Sam: Okay, so before— Wait.
Ivan: Wait, listen. Mission Impossible—if you've not watched Mission Impossible,
Ivan: The Final Reckoning, okay.
Sam: All right?
Ivan: It's available on Apple TV already. I will tell you this.
Ivan: You want a story about—you talked about the same thing about somebody doing
Ivan: the right thing. Watch that.
Pete: Mission Impossible, Final Reckoning. I will check it out.
Sam: Yes. Okay, so before I give the plug to our website and all that kind of stuff,
Sam: Pete, you want to plug your stuff?
Pete: Sure. It's a YouTube channel called Tea Leaves Programming.
Pete: And if you just search for the word tea, the word leaves and programming, it should come right up.
Sam: There you go.
Pete: I mostly talk about nerd stuff, video games, retro games, computers,
Pete: programming, stuff like that.
Pete: Occasionally accounting, really gripping, gripping stuff.
Ivan: Ooh, accounting. Oh, Jesus, I'm tingling.
Pete: We'd love to have you over there. So come on over. Yeah.
Sam: Okay. And so for my side, curmudgeons-corner.com, you guys know the drill.
Sam: There's all our archives, links to all the ways to contact us, all that kind of stuff.
Sam: I still have not linked to TikTok.
Sam: I did want to mention just briefly that I'm still behind on posting TikTok clips of this show.
Sam: But this week, one of the TikTok clips that I posted got a strike as a community
Sam: violation at TikTok for misinformation.
Sam: And I was going to have it prepared so I could play that clip here again,
Sam: but I didn't actually get it prepared.
Sam: The bottom line is, at the end of it, I said something like,
Sam: I was quoting, I think, I forget who I was quoting.
Sam: I heard somebody say online that all of this stuff with how Donald Trump is
Sam: behaving with regard to the Epstein stuff, You know,
Sam: beforehand, I thought he probably really wasn't involved and hadn't done that
Sam: stuff, blah, blah, blah.
Sam: But now, given how he's reacting, I'm starting to think he actually framed Epstein
Sam: and he's the one who is running the child sex trafficking ring.
Ivan: Oh, so that was stricken. Oh, my God.
Sam: And I'm like, I'm not even appealing it. I'm like, OK, I was quoting somebody
Sam: else. I was laughing about it.
Ivan: It was your thought and opinion, not a factual statement.
Sam: Yeah, I know. But I look at it and I'm like, okay.
Sam: But I'm not even going to appeal. I just posted something else.
Sam: But I've got a strike on me now for a commodity violation.
Sam: Apparently, if I get more, they can shut me down. You know, whatever.
Sam: So go to TikTok on the Curmudgeons Corner account. You can see these other clips.
Sam: I'm slowly catching up. I have not linked to it.
Pete: Do you have any dances yet?
Sam: On our website yet. Oh, since you asked, not on the Curmudgeon's Corner account,
Sam: but last night, Alex made me do one on my actual, on my Samuel Minter TikTok.
Sam: Now, interestingly enough, he just sort of put the camera at me and was like,
Sam: you need to dance or whatever.
Sam: So, of course, I did something incredibly stupid looking.
Sam: He found it hilarious. we added the music later so i wasn't dancing to some
Sam: particular music and it was barely a dance i made like a couple of i stared
Sam: at the camera for a few seconds and then i made some comical moves,
Sam: and and then we added music afterwards from one of the trending tick-tock well.
Ivan: I'm not dancing anytime soon because i i'll tell you this that you went to ub40
Ivan: concert and we actually went to a club over at the Hard Rock like afterwards.
Ivan: I can't dance right now. It hurts.
Ivan: I tried to dance a little bit. I realized at the concert, all of a sudden I
Ivan: sat down, what happened? I'm like, my muscle hurts. I can't dance.
Sam: I'll tell you my dance now has 42 views and two likes.
Sam: So it needs some love. Go in there. You know, pay attention to it.
Sam: Share it. You know, all kinds of other stuff.
Ivan: Well, I got our one thing from our Slack to share. Okay, by the way.
Sam: Okay, well, let me finish. I have to say the Patreon bit.
Sam: Also on curmudgeon-corner.com is a link to our Patreon where you can give us
Sam: money. Patreon is set up as a great payment.
Ivan: I've heard people send mugs, too.
Sam: Well, I was just saying, Pete here doesn't like Patreon for various reasons,
Sam: but he has donated a couple times his one-offs.
Pete: I don't like subscriptions.
Sam: Yeah, well, that makes sense. I don't like subscriptions either.
Sam: You know, and— I fucking subscribe to everything.
Ivan: For God's sakes. I'm like, Jesus Christ, I like him.
Sam: He has donated one-offs a couple of times and gotten a couple mugs.
Ivan: One thing I was telling my wife lately is she was like asking,
Ivan: so what—you know, I know that you read so much right now.
Ivan: What did you do when you were doing it? Look, at my house, we were subscribed
Ivan: to every fucking magazine in the history of mankind.
Ivan: I mean, you know, the stacks, the amount of magazines.
Ivan: I mean, every news magazine you could get. You know, we just had,
Ivan: and in the bathroom, oh, read in the bathroom?
Ivan: In the bathroom door, these massive stacks of magazines, newspapers.
Ivan: There was just always something to read.
Ivan: Well, I was not a fan of Reader's Digest because of a lot of those stuff, whatever. No, no, no.
Ivan: Get me. I want all the fucking magazines all of them I mean we literally subscribe
Ivan: to I can't imagine how much money
Ivan: in like today's dollars we have to be spending on getting all that shit.
Sam: Anyway you can go to our Patreon give us money at various levels we will send
Sam: you a postcard Yvonne mailed the postcards I.
Ivan: Mailed the postcards yes.
Sam: We will mention you on the show we will ring a bell we will send you a mug and
Sam: by the way like I have had enough requests now that I am I am going to set it
Sam: up so that you can just buy a mug.
Ivan: That'd be cool because I might buy an extra mug. Here you go.
Sam: Yeah. Like I actually, I have it set up on Zazzle already. I just have to add
Sam: the link to the Curmudgeon's Corner site. I'll do it at some point.
Ivan: Cool.
Sam: But anyway, yeah. Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah.
Sam: Oh, and importantly, at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us,
Sam: we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and Pete
Sam: and a whole bunch of other folks are chatting throughout the week,
Sam: sharing interesting links, all of that kind of stuff.
Sam: So, Yvonne, now, what is your prepared link that you want to highlight that
Sam: is on the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack, but we have not talked about it?
Ivan: Sam shared an excellent thing that I'm trying to see if somebody in the Trump administration,
Ivan: can sell to the president, which is MIT Technology Review, a startup is pitching
Ivan: a mind-uploading service that is 100% fatal.
Sam: Didn't we talk about that last week?
Ivan: No, I don't think no.
Pete: I swear I've seen this sci-fi movie at least three times.
Ivan: Netcom will preserve your brain, but you have to be euthanized first.
Ivan: How about that? Huh?
Sam: I am pretty sure we did mention that last.
Ivan: I don't think so.
Sam: I could be wrong.
Ivan: I looked through it. It doesn't look like it was, you know, or maybe we did.
Ivan: Who knows? But that's the first one.
Sam: It's so good you wanted to mention it again.
Ivan: Indeed. Yes. It could be. I just looked.
Ivan: I was looking through the material we had, and that was the one that popped
Ivan: up to me as the most interesting one at this point, I think, for two weeks in a row.
Ivan: Because, I mean, is anybody really interested right now on, I mean,
Ivan: is it funny that FireWire support is being dropped in the new macOS version.
Ivan: I mean, I know I haven't had a FireWire device in a long time.
Ivan: Okay, that's one. But I'm sure somebody out there is trying to sync their original
Ivan: iPod. But I know mine died.
Sam: Somebody will build a third-party adapter solution thing, box, whatever.
Ivan: There was also, Sam also created, I was complaining that ChatGPT,
Ivan: I tried to have it create a flyer, and it was like whack-a-mole.
Ivan: because every time I asked it to fix something on the flyer,
Ivan: it would fuck up five other things.
Ivan: It was like, it feels like formatting in Microsoft Word sometimes and you're
Ivan: trying to move margins and everything just moves all the wrong directions. But it was worse.
Ivan: I'm like, okay, just add the phone number. And then it got rid of seven.
Ivan: I didn't say get rid of all the other shit. I said, just add the fucking phone
Ivan: number, you stupid AI client.
Ivan: Anyway, you know, by the way, AI helps, but sometimes it's stupid.
Ivan: Okay. I don't know what the hell the thing is.
Ivan: What other thing was in here? Well, you didn't mention that. I don't know.
Sam: I produced the poster in response to that. And ChatGPT got it right on the first
Sam: shot about your whack-a-mole event.
Ivan: Yes, a whack-a-mole contest. I guess the one last thing that I shared that this
Ivan: one was hilarious is I saw, you know, what I observed as one of these,
Ivan: like, traffic stops of, like, beat-up pickup trucks.
Ivan: Like right now, we seem to be the new, you know, how are we going to catch immigrants? Very simple.
Ivan: If you see a pickup truck and there's a Hispanic-looking guy driving,
Ivan: you're getting pulled over.
Pete: They're just going to park near Home Depot's at 6 a.m. and arrest everybody.
Ivan: No, no, no, no, no, no. But it's just driving around the airport.
Ivan: And what they're doing is, hey, you see around a neighborhood,
Ivan: you know, some guy in a beat-up pickup truck that looks Hispanic?
Ivan: Well, call ICE. You know, they got it.
Ivan: That's a— Hey, racial profiling is making a comeback. I mean, what the hell, man?
Ivan: Listen, we need a misogyny making a comeback. We need racial profiling to make a comeback.
Ivan: You know, I don't know.
Ivan: People dying, you know, without health care, making a comeback,
Ivan: starving people. Hey, war.
Sam: Way to end things on an up note, Yvonne.
Ivan: Positivity. Listen, I'm going to have a drink this afternoon.
Ivan: So I'm getting psyched up for this, like right now.
Pete: Yvonne, Sam, thank you so much for having me on your show. I really appreciate it.
Ivan: We appreciate your participation. if you want to end on an.
Sam: If you want to end on an up note again Yvonne you can you can mention like.
Ivan: I'm gonna say I'm gonna say an up note up note Pete look I'm gonna I think I'm
Ivan: gonna drag Sam next year we're gonna fucking wind up making a pilgrimage to Pittsburgh all.
Pete: Right well look forward to seeing you.
Ivan: I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna have to drag a few people I think it's it's
Ivan: been long enough you know there's a couple of people there we need to we need
Ivan: to make it up for like you know like when they do reunion shit or whatever.
Pete: We will get all the salads with french fries on them that you can eat.
Ivan: Oh, there you go. Perfect. All right.
Sam: Okay. Okay, we're done. Thank you, everybody. Have a great week.
Sam: Have fun. Not too much fun. Stay safe. All of that kind of stuff.
Sam: And we'll be back next week. Well, Yvonne and I will be. Pete will probably not be with us next week.
Ivan: Pete will have some more hammering going on in his place.
Sam: Welcome next time you have something to say or always welcome as a co-host.
Pete: Well, I'll tell you next summer...
Pete: Supergirl, the movie Supergirl Woman of Tomorrow, which was the best comic book
Pete: of the past 10 years, is being made into a movie.
Pete: And I have high hopes. So maybe we'll talk about it then.
Ivan: Which was the movie that Warner Brothers, like, torpedoed? Batgirl.
Pete: I thought it was Supergirl.
Ivan: Oh, it was Batgirl.
Pete: No one's seen it that I know of. But Peter Safran, who is James Gunn's co-CEO,
Pete: co-studio head of DC Studios, whose judgment I generally trust.
Pete: he's a pretty reserved guy, said he saw a cut and it was, like,
Pete: unwatchable. He said it was not selling.
Pete: So the word on the street was that it had nothing to do with the movie.
Pete: They just killed it for the tax rebate or whatever.
Ivan: But who knows? But it seems that the movie was really bad, so therefore might
Ivan: as well. If it's going to be a box office bomb, instead of that, why don't we think that?
Pete: For a studio, I had to say that. I mean, you're burning a bridge with whoever
Pete: worked on that movie to say that. So I got to imagine that he would have looked at it.
Sam: Given recent trends, this is one of those things where they'll say that now,
Sam: but they'll save it in the vault.
Sam: And like 20, 25 years from now, they'll pull it out and put something.
Pete: Okay. I got one for you. You guys can cut this out of the podcast if you like.
Pete: I just got to tell you this story. You mentioned the Donner cut of Superman 2.
Pete: We watched this in our Superman marathon.
Pete: And now part of it is the guy's working with a limited amount of footage.
Pete: But you might remember the subplot in Superman 2 where Clark,
Pete: Superman, gives up his powers.
Pete: And he's at a diner somewhere in Canada.
Pete: And some local drunk tough kicks his butt.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah.
Pete: And then at the end of Superman 2, he shows up at the diner again as Clark and
Pete: basically beats the guy up.
Pete: So in Superman 2, the Donner cut. Thank you.
Pete: They go back to the well from Superman 1, where something bad happens,
Pete: and Superman turns back time by flying around the wall. They did it again, right?
Sam: Okay.
Pete: So they do that. They've turned back time, resolved everything,
Pete: and then Superman shows up at the diner and beats the living stuffing out of this guy.
Pete: Which means that this is a movie where Superman walks into a diner,
Pete: walks up to a guy who has done nothing wrong to him.
Sam: Yes.
Pete: And just beats him up.
Sam: Right, because he undid.
Pete: Because he undid it. Yeah, I hate that movie.
Ivan: Ah.
Pete: That's why I say don't watch a daughter. All right. Thank you, Sam. I'm going to try it.
Sam: Okay, we're out of here. We're playing the outro now. Goodbye.
Pete: Goodbye.
Sam: Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, hold on.
Sam: Okay, now I'll hit stop for real. Hopefully his is all retained properly.
Sam: It usually is. I'm going to hit stop. Bye.
Ivan: All right. Stop. Stop.
Ivan: Thank you.