Emily: Hi, welcome to be here. Am I really this close?
Sam: Your head's about the same size as mine on my screen. You're good. Now we wait for Yvonne.
Emily: How are you?
Sam: I'm doing okay.
Emily: Yeah? Living the dream?
Sam: Yeah living the i get i get to do fun things because i don't have to work but
Sam: i'm not making any money thing you know but yeah.
Emily: Well that's well that's it same having a good time that's for sure.
Sam: Oh there's mr bow.
Ivan: No people we have people.
Emily: I'm here i was prompt lots of people and i don't have my mic going you two are
Emily: all fancy and i got i got great backdrops okay.
Sam: There you go.
Ivan: I have a hyper expensive backdrop. Don't. Yeah.
Ivan: I have to.
Sam: You know, you have to look impressive on video calls every day. Basically.
Ivan: Regularly, at least. Maybe not every day. But, you know, if I'm trying to get
Ivan: a CIO to purchase like a million dollar contract from me, you know what?
Ivan: I don't want to be looking like me. Yeah. Yeah.
Emily: You need to dress for the job.
Ivan: Yes. Dress for the job.
Emily: Yes. But it's background expensive because it has a lot of degrees back there. So that was it.
Ivan: Well, no, no. All the cabinetry and stuff. From both. From the furniture.
Ivan: Well, yes, the degrees, yes, the degrees were expensive.
Emily: Yeah.
Ivan: Well, actually, not totally.
Emily: Okay.
Ivan: But, you know, Carnegie Mellon University, when we went to school,
Ivan: I remember, it was only like $12,000 a year.
Sam: Because that was a long time ago.
Ivan: And my master's degree was free. I got a full scholarship plus expenses to get my master's degree.
Ivan: So, therefore, you know, so in real relative financial terms,
Ivan: they were not expensive right now compared to today.
Emily: Yeah, I think, well, my parents would probably beg to differ,
Emily: but I managed to get out of, you know, it was a state school,
Emily: but I paid $16,000, I think.
Emily: That was after, like, yeah, and I got two degrees.
Emily: I went every summer, which was helpful. I would get, like, I got it in that
Emily: amount of time. I think I went maybe one more quarter, one more class to get
Emily: my final political science one.
Ivan: Sam and I, look.
Emily: So summer. Wait, summer.
Ivan: Summer, summer, come on.
Emily: I did go to summer school.
Ivan: Sam and I, we're very lazy people. We don't go to summer school.
Emily: Well, I'm lazy too, and summer school was not about just school.
Emily: It was about partying at WSU in the summer.
Ivan: Look, I could get partying done without having to have the excuse of going to
Ivan: school, okay? That was not a requirement in any way, shape, or form.
Ivan: I could figure out how to party without being at school. Thank you very much.
Emily: Me too.
Ivan: Okay, I got subjects lined up. I got things.
Sam: Yeah, we had a few things happen.
Ivan: Really?
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Calm. Everything is fine.
Ivan: All right, well, come on. Let's get this show on the road. Let's go. Come on.
Sam: Okay, everyone ready?
Ivan: Ready as we'll ever be.
Emily: Never ready, but I'm ready.
Sam: Here we go.
Sam: Welcome to Curmudgeons Corner for Saturday, January 17th, 2026.
Sam: It is just after 3 UTC as we are starting to record. I am Sam Minter. Yvonne Bowe is with us.
Sam: And this time we also have Emily Wicks with us again, who is,
Sam: of course, the co-host of the UMSUR podcast and is joining us again.
Sam: So thank you, Emily. Thank you, Yvonne.
Ivan: Hello, hello.
Emily: Hello.
Ivan: You know, you guys, what's the temperature up there where you guys are at? Oh, yeah.
Sam: Just checking right now. 42.
Emily: It's really nice.
Ivan: 42.
Emily: We've had really sun skies lately.
Ivan: And it was 42 this morning over here.
Ivan: All right. Look, it's 60. I was out with a sweater, a jacket.
Ivan: I'm indoors. I'm freezing my ass off.
Ivan: You know, I. Yes, I know.
Ivan: And it's going to be. Yes. And it's going to be cold again tonight.
Ivan: I'm not. I'm not doing well.
Emily: So when would it Cold means 40s. Yeah.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: No, no, no, no, no. That's that's that's Arctic.
Ivan: No, cold is 60.
Emily: Wow. You don't belong in Washington State.
Ivan: No, I do not. There is a reason I live down in South Florida.
Ivan: Look, I mean, I'm Puerto Rican, for God's sakes. This is not my, no, no.
Sam: Look, Yvonne, here at 60 degrees, people are wearing shorts and T-shirts.
Ivan: Listen, I got a whole bunch of Canadians down here. Not as much,
Ivan: not as many as we usually have gotten, you know, thanks to our dear old Presidente,
Ivan: okay, you know, that are all around in shorts and whatever and stuff and bathing suits.
Ivan: And I'm looking at them and, you know, my wife takes out her winter coat,
Ivan: literally takes out her winter coat. I'm not exaggerating.
Ivan: You know, high 50s, 60s is you go to a Starbucks and there are people wearing boots and winter coats.
Sam: Yeah, ridiculous. You guys are, I don't know what to say.
Sam: You know, I know you're not used to it, but come on.
Ivan: I'm going to tell you something. Look, I made some notes about some stuff that's been going on.
Ivan: One thing, you know, a few weeks ago after my surgery, they drew some blood work.
Ivan: And they tell me this thing.
Ivan: Hey, you know what? Your cortisol levels are high.
Ivan: Now, cortisol is related to stress.
Ivan: And they asked me, hey, have you been enduring stressful situations?
Ivan: And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?
Ivan: Where are we living, for God's sakes?
Ivan: Have you seen the news? Between the news, my job, this shit,
Ivan: or whatever? You know, yes, of course.
Sam: My cortisol is high. Not to mention the surgery as well. And the surgery, right.
Ivan: And the surgery.
Sam: You know, like, this reminds me, like, you know,
Sam: Both when my wife and my mother both had surgery recently as well.
Sam: And in both cases, the doctors at one point or another, as they're preparing
Sam: for surgery, were like, your blood pressure is a little high.
Sam: Are you nervous about something?
Ivan: No. No.
Sam: Yeah. So.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: Anyway.
Emily: Well, have you done the, because when you have high, like, stress levels,
Emily: you're supposed to do the superwoman stance or the superman stance.
Emily: It lowers your cortisol levels, you know?
Emily: Like, when you go, we always tell people before you're going to a stressful
Emily: interview, go into the bathroom or go wherever you need to do and stand like
Emily: this with your, you know, like, or just, like, go big. And then it lowers your
Emily: cortisol levels and it helps.
Ivan: I am taking some new supplements that they recommended I take.
Ivan: So based on that, I'm doing that. But I got to be honest.
Ivan: This is, I'm kind of like at a point, like right now, where this is like,
Ivan: I've realized this is the normal. You know, you...
Ivan: Look, I saw that you had done a post about, you were doing an interview about
Ivan: stuff that's going on in the Capitol recently.
Ivan: But the thing is that I went to the podcast episode, and it's not what I was listening that you had.
Ivan: You mentioned something about being, there was a whole bunch of different subjects,
Ivan: but the one that I heard was about living in different places.
Sam: You're talking about UMSR, of course.
Ivan: I'm talking about UMSR. And you mentioned about, I guess you recently visited Brazil.
Emily: Oh, yeah. Well, no. It was 2018.
Ivan: 2018. Well, relatively recent.
Emily: Yeah. And I was just listening to your podcast when you guys recorded when you
Emily: were in Brazil. And that was what? Was that 2006 or 2009?
Ivan: That was 2009.
Emily: Oh, my God.
Sam: You were listening to a 2009 episode?
Ivan: So this is what happened. She mentioned that she was in Brazil.
Ivan: And I realized that I said, I realized that, you know, I mentioned,
Ivan: well, I remembered, Sam, we recorded a lot of podcasts.
Ivan: episodes from when I was in Brazil. Okay.
Sam: Well, in general, when you had the job that you were traveling internationally
Sam: every single week, we recorded episodes with you all over the world.
Ivan: Yeah, basically. Yes. Did we, did we, no, we did not record from Russia.
Ivan: I think I avoided recording from Russia.
Sam: No, no, I don't think we recorded from Russia, but I know, I know we recorded when you were in Asia.
Sam: I know we recorded in South America. You know, you were all over the place.
Ivan: Yes so so we recorded episodes from from everywhere but i i must tell you so
Ivan: that's your only visit that you went to brazil.
Emily: Yeah i mean i it was what city.
Ivan: Did you go to.
Emily: We just we went to rio de janeiro that's where we spent most of our time and
Emily: then we did take a trip to ila grande the island okay it was so funny because
Emily: my friend was telling me he had gone there he had stayed with a family there
Emily: for many years and his wife so we went with his dad and
Emily: And we went with his wife at the time and his daughters. That was her first
Emily: time, like, coming back.
Emily: His wife was, she was from Brazil. She's Portuguese and, not Portuguese, she's Brazilian.
Ivan: Brazilian, yeah, don't, yeah, don't say, listen, don't, do not ever say that to.
Emily: Yeah. You're right, yeah.
Ivan: Don't tell a Portuguese person they have a Brazilian.
Ivan: Oh, my God. Talk about the ultimate insult. They will, yes, they will kill you.
Emily: Two things. I know Spanish relatively well, not well, but I can get around if I need to.
Emily: I'm not good at just busting it out, but it can get around.
Emily: But my friend was like, oh, yeah, Portuguese is just the same.
Emily: You can build on it. And I was like, I don't know.
Emily: Like, I was doing Duolingo for a year before we left.
Emily: It was so hard. And I go, this is not the same. And then you go there.
Ivan: It's no.
Emily: And the way that I thought you were supposed to say something was not the same.
Emily: because the country is huge.
Emily: It's like trying to listen to somebody, you know, speak in Texas or like Chicago
Emily: or Boston and then talk to someone.
Ivan: The accents are so different between cities, like, you know,
Ivan: Sao Paulo accent or Rio accent. They're so very different.
Ivan: But one thing, what I will tell you, listen, there is one thing I want to say
Ivan: that you mentioned that you did on the trip that I cringed a little bit, okay,
Ivan: is that you guys did this whole, when we were, when I spent a lot of time in
Ivan: Brazil, one of the things that we were talking about,
Ivan: American tourists go for the first time, was this.
Ivan: Focus on doing favela visits, which people locally were like,
Ivan: why are the Americans crazy?
Ivan: And they think that they want to come over here and visit the favelas.
Ivan: Like, like, you know, it's not, it's like to a lot of the locals,
Ivan: it's very, a very big cringy thing.
Ivan: But you said that you didn't go on one of those.
Emily: We had a host. We, that was actually where my friend stayed.
Emily: So we were actually a host family.
Ivan: Oh, but you stayed with a host family. Okay.
Emily: That was his host family.
Ivan: No, because there are people that go on these bus tours.
Ivan: And I'm like, okay, so it was that you were staying. Okay, that makes me feel better.
Ivan: No, the one thing is that I think to a lot of people, and I say that,
Ivan: you know, I saw, I visited Brazil so often for like 25 years.
Ivan: Last time, the last trip that I did, and I think I saved the boarding pass on
Ivan: my desk. It's right here. Okay. Yeah, I have.
Ivan: This is the boarding pass from a flight from Sao Paulo to Miami on the 12th of March of 2020.
Emily: Okay. Gosh.
Ivan: Now, if you think about how that date may be important in our world history,
Ivan: it's because it was right before the COVID shutdown.
Ivan: And I actually, I was very concerned about this. And when I landed...
Ivan: The satellite internet had stopped working on the flight over overnight.
Ivan: So all of a sudden, I was trying to get updates on what's going on.
Ivan: We're all very worried about what's going on with COVID rearing,
Ivan: about shutdowns, things, stuff, or whatever.
Ivan: And we landed, and literally all our phones blared, and all the flight attendants,
Ivan: and everybody from America's flight attendant was standing nearby.
Ivan: We're all in shock because America announced right when we landed that all flights
Ivan: to South America, international, were all suspended. And that was the moment that we landed.
Emily: Wow.
Ivan: So I beat, like, not being stuck, like, in some foreign country for months by
Ivan: a very, by a whisker, okay?
Ivan: And so, but one thing is that.
Ivan: i i love brazil i have a lot of friends it's a
Ivan: great country i just always like go to people it's like
Ivan: i saw how brazil had one of the biggest developments of a middle class that
Ivan: we've had in history from when i used to visit in the 90s to like now where
Ivan: i mean brazil was so poor when i I used to visit in the 90s.
Ivan: And one of the things to give credit to the current president,
Ivan: even though he was sent to jail for bribery and he's out and now he's president
Ivan: again. But okay, you know, who's counting?
Ivan: But who's counting, right? Okay, at least they did send him to jail.
Ivan: Okay, I can say that. Okay.
Ivan: That they take a lot of people out of poverty. It was just the transformation
Ivan: where I still remember one thing that I always found incredible was looking
Ivan: out a window out of our office.
Ivan: We're back in the 90s. There was this huge favela. And as time passed, it disappeared.
Ivan: And it's not because, you know, like in certain places, you know,
Ivan: in cities where they try to like
Ivan: hide all the homeless. No, it's because people were making more money.
Ivan: It's because actually, heaven forbid, there was income distribution.
Ivan: It happened where the poor got more money instead of just the rich having money.
Ivan: There was an economy that grew and the poor were made richer.
Ivan: And it was just one of those things that, and it was just kind of one of those
Ivan: interesting things that I saw out a window where you saw, I remember this place
Ivan: where all of a sudden it was favela and all of a sudden disappeared,
Ivan: disappeared, disappeared.
Ivan: Yes, what happened? Oh, well, people got money. They got houses.
Emily: They moved out.
Emily: he got to go to places it's like it's one of those things good i just remember
Emily: something with the it rained one night really it was really crazy so yeah we
Emily: were not in a bus i'll just say we were not tourists in a bus we had people
Emily: that knew the area that were from okay very specific area,
Emily: but i yes but i had a lot to learn and it
Emily: was really helpful to learn about that experience while i
Emily: was there with a friend who was like this is
Emily: what i learned as a white person from marysville washington as well and like
Emily: who's traveled here and stayed here for a long time so there's a lot of things
Emily: that i didn't understand like the tipping culture i thought was really interesting
Emily: um they don't i i was like i want to tip and he's like do not tip them do not tip they.
Ivan: Don't yeah they don't it's not yeah.
Emily: That was something that you know threw me off but that i do remember we were
Emily: having a great like you know we are having steak at a friend of his home it
Emily: started pouring down rain.
Emily: We saw, you know, police officers like coming up, you know, the favela,
Emily: like the hill that was right up.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah. It was really- Usually on hills. Yeah. And when it rains,
Ivan: I mean, the storm of water that comes through is a gusher.
Emily: Yeah. There was a couch that came down the hill.
Ivan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That'll happen.
Emily: Side, but underneath things watching, we were like, holy shit. Like, you know,
Emily: But, you know, his host father that was there was talking to us about how he
Emily: felt a lot safer in the favelas than he did when he was, you know,
Emily: out in other areas of the city.
Emily: And we were there during New Year's Eve, which I'll tell you was,
Emily: you know, being on Copacabana Beach, I'll never see fireworks,
Emily: no matter what, that will ever, like, compare to that firework show.
Emily: and but i did have a um it was
Emily: a i was wearing a necklace someone told me not to wear you know
Emily: jewelry and i was wearing like a cheap gold necklace it was
Emily: nothing it was like you know i forgot i even had it on it was just so flimsy
Emily: or whatever and this you know kid started going like you know getting in front
Emily: of me went like this and then grabbed at my neck to grab my necklace and this
Emily: was as we were like going there to to new year's and going to the beach and i was
Emily: what the heck? And my friend, you know, pulled him aside.
Emily: Later, he went to go find some friends of his that were trying to find us,
Emily: which I don't know how he found us back on the beach because we just slow.
Ivan: There's like so many people. Yeah.
Emily: I mean, we made our little area and then we just, you know, it just zoomed in.
Emily: We had nothing at the end of it. And so he said that he ended up seeing that
Emily: little boy later and he was beat to a pull because he was, you know,
Emily: like basically trying to rob people at the beach. It was just like.
Ivan: Yeah, probably some people were like, okay, enough, you know, come on.
Emily: He was, you know, helpless, you know, or like, I mean, yeah,
Emily: it was really, it was just interesting.
Emily: And then that was also when, it was 2018, you know, my husband and I remember
Emily: this because my spouse and I, we got engaged on the beach and it was really interesting.
Ivan: Oh, oh, there you go.
Emily: He was literally holding this ring that he wouldn't want to get robbed.
Emily: whole time.
Ivan: Listen, I did get robbed in Brazil. Okay. They stole my briefcase at the airport.
Ivan: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was, it was, it was, it was an opportunity to, it was stupid.
Ivan: I was checking in at the ticket counter and there actually had a gang of people
Ivan: that were preying on, on people at the ticket counter.
Ivan: I was super exhausted. I put my briefcase on the floor and they caused a commotion
Ivan: behind me. And all of a sudden I looked down again at my briefcase.
Emily: Yeah, I mean, that was an experience I don't think I would ever,
Emily: like, have been able to do without having the relationship with the friends
Emily: that we had, that my, you know, husband had. It was incredible.
Emily: But we were there for three weeks, and that was too long. Oh, there you go.
Emily: That was too long to go anywhere and to be away. Sam, have you been to Brazil?
Sam: I have not.
Emily: Yeah.
Ivan: But he's been to Portuguese-speaking countries. That is true.
Sam: I lived in Mozambique when I was two to four years old, yes.
Sam: And I visited there once when I was college age as well.
Ivan: When you were in college, yeah.
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Somewhere over there.
Sam: But yeah, no. And I believe on the way back from Africa, we stopped in Portugal.
Ivan: Yeah, okay, that doesn't count.
Sam: When I was four years old. Like, we stayed there for like a week or something.
Ivan: Okay. Well, very good, Sam.
Sam: I have very vague memories of this house we stayed at when I was four years
Sam: old on the way back to the U.S.
Sam: from Africa because the guy had an accordion, and I was very intrigued by the accordion.
Ivan: Oh.
Sam: Outside his place, they had people playing, what is it, bocce ball or whatever?
Ivan: Yes, yes.
Sam: I was very intrigued by that. And I believe this is also where I got a little toy truck that I really,
Sam: really enjoyed until I lost it when my parents and I were visiting New York
Sam: City several years later. And it upset me ever since.
Sam: To this day, I am upset. It was a little double truck thing,
Sam: like matchbox car size. And I probably
Sam: had it from when I was four to when maybe I was like six or seven.
Sam: And then I think I left it at the house of the people we were visiting.
Sam: But I never got the damn thing back.
Sam: And I'm pissed to this day. I'm like, I should call up my mom and dad,
Sam: find out who we were visiting, and go see if they're still alive. As you can see.
Ivan: Sam will hold grudges for a long time. Okay, so don't cross them.
Sam: Hey, it's been slightly less than 50 years, like maybe 48 or 49 years.
Ivan: So, well, I'll make one, you know, aside from like asking Emily about her podcast
Ivan: and like her adventures,
Ivan: I want to just say one thing because we didn't talk about this in the last week
Ivan: because we didn't record after this happened. that I'll make a mention about...
Ivan: My buddy that passed away on Wednesday.
Emily: I'm so sorry.
Ivan: So last, when I was around after Christmas, I had a call from a mutual friend
Ivan: of ours that a friend of our friend, a friend I have, Bob Corby. He, uh, but he was sick.
Ivan: And I was like, Mark, how sick is he?
Ivan: I don't know. Wow, baby. And, you know, Mark is old, but much older.
Ivan: And I met him like 20 some odd years ago.
Ivan: and i met him because we had boats i i used to
Ivan: do a lot of stuff with boats and and
Ivan: i go and i'm like you know so but is
Ivan: he okay i think he's okay okay well
Ivan: i i call him back i call bob
Ivan: a couple of days later hey bob are you okay no i'm at
Ivan: the hospital i'm like shit you're at the hospital well do you know do they know
Ivan: what you have they don't know they're doing tests so i go i went to visit him
Ivan: and he was jaundiced he was yellow i mean he was not looking good of course
Ivan: and the doctors were there for and they couldn't figure out what the heck was wrong with him,
Ivan: Next day or two, they said that they had discovered that he had a cancer that metastasized.
Ivan: They'd metastasized all over. Basically, there was nothing that they could do
Ivan: that they were just sending him to hospice right away.
Ivan: And I went to, this was like, so this was Tuesday. Thursday, I found that out.
Ivan: Friday, I saw him at the hospital. They were sending him to hospice over the weekend.
Ivan: I was going to go try visit him this week. I found out where they sent him to hospice on Monday.
Ivan: so and Wednesday morning they called me that he passed away hmm that's awful uh,
Ivan: and that was just you know Bob was I posted something online about,
Ivan: look I met him just because I needed somebody to drive a boat I come down here
Ivan: and I didn't I I'm one that knows how to drive a boat I took Sam to the,
Ivan: Virgin Islands on a boat with a compass and a map back then there was no GPS
Ivan: Yes, basically from Puerto Rico.
Ivan: All I had was a, not even a map. I didn't even use a chart. I knew where we were going.
Ivan: I'm like, I just used the, I'm like, ah, we're going to go, we're going to go west. There you go.
Sam: That way.
Ivan: That way. Basically. Just follow the compass. But over here,
Ivan: I didn't know this area and it's like dangerous, honestly.
Ivan: Charts don't show everything.
Emily: You didn't have to jump on an island when you were there somehow that you shouldn't
Emily: have been on, right? like on that trip.
Ivan: Sorry. No, no, no.
Sam: But Yvonne has mentioned we passed within sight of it.
Ivan: Okay, we did pass within sight of it. Yes, we passed actually less than,
Ivan: Probably a couple hundred feet from it.
Emily: Okay. Okay. I've already written this down. We are coming to visit you,
Emily: and you are taking us on a boat. Me and Sammy need to go.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: He doesn't have the boat anymore. He got rid of it a long time ago.
Ivan: I don't have a boat right now. I've got to buy another boat at some point, but, you know.
Emily: These people tell me to come to Florida, and until I met you,
Emily: I didn't feel like I had a reason.
Ivan: I don't have a boat. My wife wants me to buy another boat, but I don't have
Ivan: a boat right now again. But we did come within a couple of hundred feet,
Ivan: you know, of that island.
Ivan: That island is exactly there. When you leave, if you go to St.
Ivan: Thomas, okay, specifically, and St. Thomas, the U.S. Virgin Islands are a chain of islands.
Ivan: You got St. Thomas, St. John, St. Croix, which is further south where Joe Biden
Ivan: was on vacation recently. But that was like further south. But St.
Ivan: Thomas and St. John are very close.
Ivan: And when you go from the capital of Charlotte, Amalia, to get to St.
Ivan: John, you actually, the passage that you cross in order to go over there goes
Ivan: right by Epstein Island.
Ivan: It's like right by there. OK, so, yeah, it's an island that I saw and passed
Ivan: by many times through there.
Ivan: And I saw the house. I remember you could see the house.
Ivan: But I never in a billion effing years thought that's what was going on at that damn place.
Emily: I mean, I would if there's just a bunch of, like, you know, expensive fucking boats there.
Emily: Excuse my French, but, like, I'd be like, something's going on over there.
Ivan: You know, there's a lot of, listen, a lot of expensive boats out there.
Ivan: And as far as I remember growing up, there was no pedophilia going around,
Ivan: okay, all right, with the people, at least the ones I knew, okay? That's all I know.
Emily: But you know what, though? Like, I look back.
Emily: on, you know, we read Virginia's book, right?
Emily: Gouffre's book. And I, all I can think of when I'm like listening to or reading
Emily: her book and thinking back about this time was just, you know,
Emily: Britney Spears growing up in this world of, you know, the Christina Aguilera's,
Emily: the Britney Spears, the feeling.
Sam: I remember, I remember the countdown pages for various female teenage celebrities,
Sam: like on the web you could go to like pages and be like how many days until they turn 18 and are legal.
Emily: Seriously that.
Ivan: That that was a thing.
Emily: Oh yeah for like for the olsen twins for britney spears for.
Sam: All if if you had a famous.
Emily: Female celebrity who was a teenager there.
Sam: Were countdowns for like when they turn legal.
Emily: The the way that we were
Emily: like i was treated as like an old millennial
Emily: you know like i remember that like the what we needed how we needed to look
Emily: how we needed to feel what we were jealous of the expectations of women it is
Emily: it's so creepy it's like hindsight's 2020 though too because i didn't see it
Emily: but like looking back and reading the number of quotes that she quotes, like,
Emily: the odd songs, you know, in her book.
Sam: Yeah, and, well, you're talking, like, the early aughts. If you go back to the 80s or 90s, it was worse.
Sam: Yeah. You know, if you look at a lot of 80s media, like, there are all sorts
Sam: of movies that have as a theme the older guy and the teenager.
Sam: There's songs going back to the 50s and 60s that have that theme.
Ivan: Look, to be fair, okay, look, in the reverse, Look, I did like older women,
Ivan: okay, especially when I was younger, and I did date.
Ivan: Like, when I was 16, I know more. Once I went out with somebody that was 18, 19, 20.
Ivan: Okay, and when I was 18— By the way.
Sam: 16 and 18 is starting to push it a little bit, but it's still,
Sam: like, within the realm of, eh.
Sam: But, like, what we're really talking about is the 16-year-old with the 30-something guy.
Ivan: Yeah, well, okay, but the girlfriend that you met that I had when we were at
Ivan: Cardi Bell and Sabina, when I was 18, 19, she was 23.
Sam: Right. Well, once you're 18, 19, it's a little bit different, too.
Ivan: Like there's a, there's a lot bigger of a difference that we were 22.
Ivan: Okay. It was like, you know, my point is, you see, I realized why I wasn't interested
Ivan: in those countdown pages because I liked older women.
Ivan: I was like, no, no, no, I don't want, I don't want young image. No, no.
Ivan: Give me something, you know, give me older. No, no, I don't want to deal with that.
Emily: That's the way to do it.
Ivan: So anyway, so that was it.
Sam: And now you're creeping on the 70-year-olds whenever you get a chance.
Ivan: Right. Exactly. Of course. Yes. Well, listen, the youngest woman I dated,
Ivan: who is my current wife, because I met her at a party.
Ivan: Listen, I met her at a party in South Beach where it was a work party,
Ivan: okay, that somebody had bought a condo.
Ivan: Somebody from a friend of mine or a co-worker bought a condo.
Ivan: This was, by the way, this is when condos in Miami Beach were cheap.
Ivan: Okay. All right. This is like 25 plus years ago.
Ivan: and you know bought this little condo whatever and we went there for a party
Ivan: and i met her and i thought she was like i don't know my age or whatever then
Ivan: i realized she was like i was like eight years older and she was and i was like
Ivan: the heck i'm like i didn't realize that i was you know,
Ivan: but but you know she was of age anyway she was like this was not like you know
Ivan: she's 20 she was in her 20s we were both in our 20s i just thought that she
Ivan: was like my age not not eight years younger than I was, you know.
Ivan: Damn it. But then we're not getting married.
Emily: God, I always keep you scared of me.
Ivan: Well, Sam, are you going to review a book? I mean, a movie?
Sam: Well, I was going to, but we've sort of like been going on and on and on.
Ivan: No, but we're way behind on your movie reviews. We need to catch up on a movie review. So come on.
Sam: Just one?
Ivan: Yes. Let's get to movie review.
Sam: The next thing is actually a book. It is not a movie.
Ivan: What the heck? My brain actually picked it out. This is, Okay.
Ivan: Somehow, for some reason.
Sam: You got it right.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: This is one that Alex and I read together.
Sam: As I've mentioned on the show before, all of my book reading at this point,
Sam: both one series I have of ones I'm picking for myself and a separate simultaneous
Sam: series of ones I'm picking for Alex that are mainly books that I liked when
Sam: I was his age that I'm choosing to read again with him. So we got both things going.
Sam: This is from, this actually came up in my list, but then we are continuing the series with him.
Sam: But all of these, by the way, the way we're doing these, despite the fact that
Sam: he's 16 years old right now, is I am reading them out loud to him.
Ivan: This is so ridiculous. I mean, how long does it take?
Ivan: I mean, this has to be the slowest damn process in the history of mankind to go through a book.
Sam: Well, we're doing it in half hour chunks. Like, we do a half hour at a time,
Sam: and I will read for half an hour.
Ivan: So how many pages do you go through in half an hour?
Sam: I don't know. I'm reading on a Kindle. I don't know what a page is.
Emily: It's true.
Emily: I love that idea I read to James when he's driving like you know when we take
Emily: long road trips it's either you know or it's me reading with him I know some
Emily: people can't do that but I'm lucky that I can so I like to read out loud my.
Ivan: Wife on a road trip goes to sleep and we blast like EDM music the whole way
Ivan: on a and my wife somehow figures out how to go to sleep and between us like just go and like on a,
Ivan: on a heater of just bagged music.
Sam: Anyway, to move on, this is a book I liked when I was a teenager.
Sam: It's A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, published originally in 1968.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: It is a fantasy novel. She wrote both fantasy and science fiction.
Sam: This particular one, reading from Wikipedia, It is regarded as a classic of
Sam: children's literature and of fantasy within which it is widely influential.
Sam: The story is set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centers on a young
Sam: mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gaunt.
Sam: He displays great power while still a boy and joins a school of wizardry where
Sam: his prickly nature drives him into conflict with a fellow student.
Sam: During a magical duel, Ged's spell goes awry and releases a shadow creature that attacks him.
Sam: The novel follows Ged's journey as he seeks to be free of the creature.
Sam: Anyway, and this is the first of a series of books. It was originally written
Sam: as a one-off, but then she ended up doing a bunch of sequels afterwards.
Sam: And I think back when I was a teenager, I read this first one and maybe the
Sam: second one, but not any further in the series.
Sam: And I didn't, you know, I didn't really remember much from the second one,
Sam: but the first one, you know, was, was impactful for me.
Sam: There were several items, there are several bits of it that I remembered,
Sam: even though I hadn't read it since I was a.
Sam: Oh, yeah, I remember really noticing and thinking, oh, this is an important
Sam: insight. This is really cool.
Sam: This is whatever. Back when I was a teenager.
Sam: Anyway, reading it again with my son. First of all, I really enjoyed it again.
Sam: Big, huge thumbs up on this one, too.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: It is sort of a coming of age teenager, goes through an adventure,
Sam: becomes an adult sort of through the process of maturing and figuring out what's
Sam: going on. So it is that kind of story.
Sam: I remember originally sort of being blown away by the ending,
Sam: being like, oh, wow, you know, and reading it now, on the one hand,
Sam: I was like, actually, that ending was kind of telegraphed and obvious.
Sam: But then again, I remember I'd read it before.
Ivan: You read it before.
Sam: And I knew what happened. And so I was anticipating the ending the entire time
Sam: I was reading the book again.
Sam: But I think...
Sam: I think as an adult, having read a lot more things and have gone through a bunch
Sam: of tropes, I probably, you know, anticipated the ending anyway,
Sam: even though, but it's hard to tell.
Sam: Like, what's it, is it really more obvious than I thought it was when I was a teenager?
Sam: Or did I just know the ending because I'd read it before?
Ivan: I'm going to guess that you knew the ending because you had read it before. Yes.
Sam: But anyway, big thumbs up.
Sam: The other thing that I had not
Sam: caught on to at all when I was a
Sam: teenager that I noticed a lot this time and comes specifically because I was
Sam: reading it out loud is how much the word choices were such that it's almost
Sam: obvious it was meant to be read out loud.
Sam: There's a lot of places where there's like a rhythm in the words.
Ivan: What's the age target that the book you think had when you read it?
Sam: The age target was definitely, it was intended as older children, young teenagers.
Sam: That was the target audience for the book original.
Sam: And I think as you go through some of the sequels, it ages up with them a little bit.
Sam: But the thing is, it was, you know, just reading it, it was almost poetic in a variety of places.
Sam: I mean, it was never outright like, I'm reading a poem.
Sam: But it was clear that the author paid a lot of attention to things like the
Sam: cadence of the words, the rhythm that was going on,
Sam: that the fact that when you said it out loud,
Sam: it had more power than if you were just reading it and zooming past the words,
Sam: not thinking about how they were pronounced and how they were said.
Sam: And so that, I kept noticing that over and over and over again as I read this
Sam: book out loud. You know, places where,
Sam: You know, there was alliteration. There was, I keep saying rhythm.
Sam: There was definitely rhythm.
Sam: There were definitely, like, patterns to the tone where all of it sort of came
Sam: together in a way that I noticed because I was reading it out loud. Okay, question.
Ivan: How long did it take you to read the book?
Sam: Okay, hold on. I will tell you.
Ivan: I know you know this. I know he knows it. He tracks this.
Sam: Yes, I log all these. Let's see.
Ivan: Right. Of course you do.
Sam: And, you know, I should have brought it up already to have that ready, but I didn't.
Ivan: Come on, Sam.
Sam: I'm going for the logging.
Ivan: I have to cut your pay, Sam, again.
Sam: Yes, definitely. Okay. Wizard of Earthsea began on May 8, 2024,
Sam: finished on March 2, 2025.
Sam: It was 198 pages long.
Sam: It took 298 days to read it. So that's an average of 0.7 pages per day.
Sam: Now, keep in mind, keep in mind, this is, we were not reading every day.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: I mentioned we would do the half hour of reading maybe once a week or so. So.
Ivan: And then what, did you all of a sudden pack a few, you know,
Ivan: like a long reading session where you read out loud for what, an hour or so?
Sam: No, no, no. Every, it was always half hour sessions.
Sam: So if you estimate, we did a session about once a week and it was 0.7,
Sam: then 0.7 times seven, about five pages a day.
Ivan: Five pages a day.
Sam: Five pages per half hour session.
Ivan: Per half hour session.
Emily: Okay.
Sam: Approximately.
Emily: There's no judgment here. You know, you gotta.
Ivan: No, no, no. It's just, you know, it's just, I'm always, I'm not judging. I always just laugh.
Ivan: Sam's methods are always like very interesting to, to understand,
Ivan: you know, what, how he, how he goes about to get a task completed, you know.
Emily: See, I don't know is why we've been wasting our time on JK Rowling.
Emily: her bullshit when this existed, you know, when this book's here. And also I needed to.
Ivan: Can I say that I've been at the forefront of the anti-JK Rowling thing because
Ivan: I never wanted to read any of her shit or watch any of her movies.
Ivan: So I consider myself a pioneer.
Emily: Yeah, you are.
Sam: Well, you know, there are similarities. Obviously, this is a wizard who goes
Sam: to a wizarding school and figures out stuff.
Sam: And, you know, so you got some similarities. And this was, of course, many decades earlier.
Sam: The details are all completely different, of course. But, you know,
Sam: there's definitely some similarities there.
Sam: And I think this is definitely superior in sort of a literary and how well thought
Sam: out it is sort of way to J.K. Rowling.
Sam: And there are also some things. She has complained, the author of this, who died a few years ago.
Sam: But there were a handful of attempts to make made-for-TV movies or miniseries
Sam: or whatever out of this book, and she hated all of them.
Emily: Oh, yeah.
Sam: And one of the reasons she hated him all is that she intentionally made the main character black.
Sam: And when they made, like, movies, the miniseries or whatever, they made him white.
Emily: Yeah, he's like, not just white, because I was looking this up because I wanted to see.
Emily: He's like, he's like redhead white. Like, he's as white as you can be.
Emily: It's not even, like, white passing.
Emily: it's like white.
Sam: Yeah and you
Sam: know and i i we are going through the rest
Sam: of the series now we actually just started the third
Sam: book in this series a couple weeks ago but but
Sam: yeah like i have not watched any of the the
Sam: things the the the video remakes of this
Sam: i have put them on my list i will see them
Sam: if they come up but all but apparently she hated
Sam: them she was like upset that she'd sold the rights because
Sam: she was guaranteed that they would do a good job
Sam: and she'd have some creative input and then they didn't do any
Sam: of that um and but but yeah this is it's good stuff i enjoy it and apparently
Sam: this is the only series of hers i've read but she has a bunch of other output
Sam: that she did both in the science fiction and fantasy genres and apparently it's
Sam: almost all universally really good.
Emily: So they, it sounds like thumbs up.
Ivan: Well, thumbs up for sure.
Sam: Absolutely.
Ivan: Okay. All right. So double checking, make sure that we got our preview.
Emily: It also sounds like A24 is currently developing a new TV series with hopes for
Emily: a more faithful rendition.
Sam: Oh, nice.
Ivan: There you go. Hopefully you can fix that.
Emily: Yeah.
Ivan: Well, but to be fair, look, we are. I know.
Ivan: You know, the other day I was hearing somebody complaining about how they portrayed
Ivan: some Cuban or something as a redhead.
Ivan: Look, one of my best friends. I think you met him.
Sam: I met the one you're talking about.
Ivan: Yes, it's a massive redhead and he's 100 percent Puerto Rican.
Sam: Well one of the things she did in this book is she very intentionally she set
Sam: out a world that had a lot of diversity and there were a lot of people you know
Sam: with a whole bunch of different descriptions it is a hell hole.
Ivan: For steve miller sam is what what she said she designed a complete complete
Ivan: the the nightmares of which hannity's nightmares and you know what's his name
Ivan: steve miller and what's that other asshole and fucking fox news i keep forgetting
Ivan: for for an idea the other the other fucker i care tucker oh tucker carlson the one they took.
Sam: Off now the one thing i did read in her introduction is
Sam: that after the fact after this first book
Sam: came out and was very popular and whatever she realized
Sam: and criticized herself for being
Sam: a female author who created a very male book
Sam: for the first book well there are a couple of female characters but they're
Sam: secondary or even tertiary characters and so she corrected that in the second
Sam: book and there was a major female character in the second book but but she's
Sam: like what the hell am i doing you know.
Emily: George rr martin says that to people all the time you know i mean he's creating
Emily: like i don't know it's kind of weird to me sometimes hearing the stories about
Emily: these women that george rr martin wrote it you know about women but
Emily: Yeah, like, I think good for them. Take a different perspective.
Ivan: Sometimes, look, like I've mentioned that we talked about this here sometimes.
Ivan: So we have these subconscious bias and things that are created to us,
Ivan: even including ourselves, about who we should be and how should something be
Ivan: portrayed and who should be in it.
Ivan: Just because culturally, that's what's been told to us. And that's what we,
Ivan: you know, go and project.
Ivan: So, but it's, you know, and we don't sometimes, sometimes we don't,
Ivan: we don't even think about it. It's not, not even, it's not conscious.
Ivan: So, no, well, but she fixed it. But she realized it and fixed it. So that's good.
Emily: It sounds like she has a lot more self-awareness than J.K.
Emily: Rowling. And I'm like, want to make this person, sorry, Ursula, let's help her.
Emily: I know that she's no longer with us, but yeah.
Ivan: Maybe her family is like, make a buddy off of this. I don't know.
Ivan: They're good people. Who knows?
Emily: I'm excited to read this. I've been wanting another good fantasy book.
Emily: And I think it's really cool that it's, you know, from the 60s, you know.
Sam: And presumably, you won't read it half hour a time a week or two apart.
Sam: And so it'll take you less than 298 days to read it.
Sam: It's actually a relatively short book and a relatively quick read if you just
Sam: pick it up and read it normally.
Emily: I'll let you know if I feel like the ending is surprising.
Sam: There you go. Let me know. Like, yeah. Yeah.
Sam: And it wasn't just surprising. I mean, even as a teenager, I might have seen
Sam: it coming, but it was sort of, it was still sort of a powerful ending, I thought.
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: But again, that's my teenage brain talking, a little less so rereading it,
Sam: but, you know, whatever, you know.
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: Okay. Shall we take a break and then start?
Emily: Sorry.
Ivan: No, no, no. You're good. You're good. Say hi.
Sam: Okay. Ready? Ready? Ready for a break?
Emily: Ready.
Ivan: Ready for a break.
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: Okay. Here comes the break. And then when we come back, Emily,
Sam: we'll let you pick a topic first.
Sam: Oh, I don't have to. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff going on this last week.
Ivan: Okay. Yeah. If you go to the show topics list, you can pick some stuff or you can just pick.
Emily: You know. Okay. I'll tell you. I already know.
Sam: Yeah, because we got Minnesota. We got Greenland. We've got Venezuela.
Sam: We've got Iran. We've got like, we got all kinds of stuff. We got all kinds of stuff.
Ivan: Where are my anti-cortisol pills? God's sakes.
Emily: I'm going to let you guys know what's up. I'm going to be like, tell me what happened.
Emily: I know kind of everything, but like someone dive deep because I could not this week.
Sam: Okay, here's the break. Back after this.
Ivan: Oh, God. It's the break we wind up with. Excellent. Thank you, Sam. Okay, great.
Sam: Of course. It's beautiful. Okay, we are back. So, Emily, what have you chosen?
Emily: I want to talk about Kristen's cinema.
Ivan: Oh, that fucking... Okay. Oh, that's... Okay.
Ivan: Well, there you go. You know, this is good, so we don't have to talk about something depressing.
Emily: We can talk... Everything's depressing, even this.
Ivan: No, no, no, not this. Because, you know, at least we can shit on this fucking bitch, for God's sakes.
Ivan: I, you know, it is the, I must say,
Ivan: one of the things that, to this day, still, I always, when I think of cinema,
Ivan: that really, really, really pisses me off, to no end, is how she,
Ivan: just like a lot of her Republicans that have been,
Ivan: recent additions to the Senate and House, their main focus is getting fucking rich.
Ivan: OK, I mean, she came in with a net worth of bupkis into the Senate and left
Ivan: with tens of millions of dollars.
Ivan: And you're trying to fucking tell me that this was out of just,
Ivan: you know, not insider trading or not, you know, bullshit.
Ivan: OK, and so many of them have been doing this recently, especially in the G.
Ivan: Because, you know, AOC hasn't done that. You've seen her financial filings.
Ivan: I know that my representative, you know, over here, you know,
Ivan: that I sat beside her in coach many times flying, wasn't also doing that either, okay?
Ivan: But, yeah, but she, what, I mean, I saw the lawsuit and I'm going, what the fuck?
Sam: Okay, fill us in the details. I know some of it. Let me read the article title.
Emily: The article title says, MDMA and steamy texts alleged as ex-senator sued over Trist with Bodyguard.
Sam: What publication was that in?
Emily: Well, it's in Raw Story, so that seems pretty right based on.
Sam: So Raw Story doesn't ever do their own reporting. They summarize other places
Sam: and link to it. But you can find it there.
Ivan: But there was a lawsuit that claimed that I, and I know I, didn't I share this?
Ivan: I don't think I shared it under the news side. That's why, because I didn't
Ivan: think it was like really news.
Ivan: But it was like, they talked about that some, who was it that sued her over this?
Emily: His wife, and it was a controversial law in North Carolina.
Sam: The wife of the person she had the affair. So she got involved with,
Sam: like, one of her bodyguards or something, and it was the bodyguard's wife, right, who's suing?
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Yes, that sounds right.
Emily: North Carolina law allows a person to be held liable for malicious interference in a marriage.
Emily: That's an interesting, I mean, it's controversial because like, yeah.
Ivan: Okay, so here, I found a story because, I don't know, for some reason I didn't find a link on our Slack.
Ivan: But MDMA, the title, MDMA and Steenie Tex alleged as ex-senators sued over Tristwith Bodyguard.
Ivan: A former lawmaker was accused of sending sexual text messages using MDMA and
Ivan: having sex with her former bodyguard in a lawsuit filed against her for alienation of affection.
Ivan: Alienation of affection. I loved how that sounds. According to reports Thursday,
Ivan: the lawsuit was filed by Heather Amel,
Ivan: Matthew Amel's wife, who alleged in a lawsuit filed in North Carolina that Foreigner
Ivan: Senator Kirsten Sinema sent her husband photos of herself wrapped in a towel
Ivan: and recommended via signal messages that he bring MDMA on a work trip to guide
Ivan: him through a psychedelic experience that Daily Beast reported.
Ivan: The ex-bodyguard's wife also alleges Sinema was having sexual relations with
Ivan: other security members.
Ivan: So this was like some kind of security orgy that was going on.
Ivan: The alienation of affection lawsuit falls under a controversial North Carolina
Ivan: law that allows a person to be
Ivan: held liable for malicious interference in a marriage, the Beast reported.
Ivan: Heather also claimed in the allegations that Sinema told her husband she could
Ivan: help him overcome his mental health challenges after his U.S.
Ivan: Army service. Yes, I can see how she was helping.
Ivan: Mental health challenges. Sinema served in the U.S. House of Representatives, blah, blah, blah.
Ivan: So anyway, yes, apparently she was, you know, having orgies and drug parties
Ivan: with her security staff.
Emily: What a fucking idiot.
Ivan: Sounds like she should have been a Republican. I don't understand how the hell you wound up with her.
Emily: She was getting there.
Ivan: Yeah. I mean, you know, but I'm confused. Am I confusing her?
Sam: What's she up to anyway?
Emily: What?
Sam: I was thinking the same thing, but I think she was always advertised herself as bi.
Ivan: Oh, she was bi. Okay. All right. Okay.
Emily: I think.
Sam: But my first memory was, wait, wasn't she a lesbian? But I think she was bi.
Ivan: Now I don't know. But yeah, but that was. But you know what?
Ivan: while the details were salacious, honestly, I read it and I'm like,
Ivan: this is not shocking me in one bit. This is, you know,
Ivan: Not really surprised, especially who we're talking about.
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: Well, what's she been up to anyway? She's a lobbyist for like energy firms or something, right?
Emily: I don't know. You got to do something after that failure.
Ivan: You know what? Something. Listen, let me see. What is she doing?
Ivan: I'm looking it up because usually these people wind up being partners in some
Ivan: damn law firm where they wind up getting paid millions of dollars or something.
Ivan: Just like career after elected office.
Ivan: Sinema joined Coinbase. Oh, crypto. Jeez. You know, fucking tracks.
Sam: Oh, okay.
Ivan: Global Advisory Council to advocate for the cryptocurrency industry and help
Ivan: it coordinate with U.S. lawmakers.
Ivan: Gee, another shocking development is that she's peddling crypto. Okay.
Emily: Wow. Can someone know what a proudest socialist is? Because she called herself that in 2004.
Ivan: What the fuck does that even mean?
Emily: I don't know.
Sam: It means she's a socialist, but she likes expensive stuff.
Emily: Everybody, you get a Prada, you get a Prada, you get a Prada.
Ivan: I mean, that was the one thing I kept saying. Look, I had this dinner with some
Ivan: friends of mine, executives at a few different companies around here.
Ivan: And we were talking that we had a few of our wives and kids that they were talking about.
Ivan: you know they were all like talking like they were all these socialists but
Ivan: they were socialists and they are you know with their expensive watch and bag
Ivan: and shit or whatever and we're going what the fuck are you assholes talking
Ivan: about you guys have with Louis Vuitton bags and shit or whatever you're talking
Ivan: like socialists what are you,
Ivan: what is that bullshit yeah why why it's disgusting yeah yeah well although i.
Emily: Love listening to the every outfit podcast it's one of my favorite and they
Emily: uh talk fashion all the time but it's like something i i don't have or care
Emily: about like i'm like i got this at the thrift store that is it that's where i'm going.
Ivan: You could be a fashionista from shit from the from the thrift store let me tell
Ivan: you something it does not require money exactly.
Emily: Yeah well i know and i love but i love my vogue magazines but i'm still never
Emily: gonna be that person unfortunately i like just looking at it.
Ivan: No but my whole thing is these people that
Ivan: go and like oh i am a proto social listen this is fucking bullshit and and i
Ivan: mean i'm sorry every time that you saw her dressed up and you're saying listen
Ivan: this outfit cost how many thousands of dollars every fucking time you saw her
Ivan: because Don't give me this shit that you're the socialist defender or whatever the fuck.
Ivan: Every time I see you dress, it's costing like $5,000 for every outfit that you're
Ivan: wearing, including a purse. Give me a fucking break.
Ivan: No. And of course, now she's peddling crypto.
Emily: But also, why would she ever say that she's a socialist?
Sam: If you remember, if you remember when she was first senator,
Sam: wasn't there a brief blip of like publicity or news articles over the fact that,
Sam: you know, she was selling outfits on eBay or something?
Ivan: That's right. That's right.
Sam: Like, worn once by Kyrsten Sinema, you can buy this for, like, $600 or whatever.
Ivan: Probably paid with campaign funds, actually. You know, I wouldn't be surprised.
Emily: Those are the people that drive me fucking. Also, I'm sorry,
Emily: but, like, wasn't she, isn't she, like, a, where, why would she ever say that she was a socialist?
Emily: Am I, like, maybe I'm forgetting something because, like, even a Prada socialist,
Emily: because isn't she just a horrible Democrat?
Ivan: But listen, listen, listen.
Sam: So this was one of the things that came up after she was elected originally,
Sam: because she campaigned as a lefty.
Sam: And then as soon as she got into office, she started moving right quickly.
Sam: And then immediately started figuring out the place where she could...
Sam: I guess, you know, tying into what Yvonne started this conversation with,
Sam: tying into the grift part of it, the way that she could leverage her position
Sam: the most was to be right on the edge and the key vote for things.
Sam: where she could she could then say like
Sam: you need me and therefore you
Sam: know you can you know and so she put herself her and mansion were the key votes
Sam: that the democrats needed anything almost anything and so she put herself in
Sam: the position where you know depending on who would do what for her,
Sam: she might change what she was thinking in that key spot.
Emily: Well, that's what you get from Arizona. No, that's Arizona.
Ivan: Oh, come on. We got Mark Kelly. He's not anywhere nearly as bad now as this.
Emily: We love their freeways, though. That place is ridiculous. I can't drive.
Emily: I don't like the roads there. That's my complaint about Arizona.
Ivan: I'll say, listen, I'll say one thing. I've only, I've been to Arizona,
Ivan: I think, only once or once.
Ivan: And I remember that I got in the car at the thermometer. I mean,
Ivan: I'm fine with heat, but I remember that it was 11 o'clock at night and it was
Ivan: over 100 degrees. And I'm like, oh, come on.
Ivan: Give me a break. OK, this is just ridiculous.
Emily: I mean, I can go to a hot place or whatever. I just if you're like like I remember
Emily: James and I went for spring training before I had gone this last November to Arizona.
Emily: And, you know, it was it was Peoria area, you know, a Phoenix area.
Emily: But I I was like guiding him. We had a rental car.
Emily: Like, there's no way you can really
Emily: get around there without having either taking a Waymo, taking a cab.
Emily: Like, their transit sucks. And I said, okay, you're going to turn at the next block. It's coming up.
Emily: It's coming up. It's still coming up.
Ivan: For many miles. So let me get this right.
Ivan: You're blaming her turn into grift on the road network in Arizona.
Emily: I'm saying that I like Mark Kelly, too.
Emily: But the Arizona folks, they love their roads. They love roads. And I can't stand it.
Ivan: Okay.
Emily: Separately, Kyrsten Sinema sucks.
Ivan: Yes.
Emily: Ruben Gallego. They're on the way up. Mark Kelly, yes. You know,
Emily: they do have some good folks there.
Emily: But Mark Kelly wanted more freeway. And I'm like, remind me to tell you never
Emily: to run for president because I don't like that.
Emily: So I'm glad he didn't become the vice presidential nominee is what I'm saying. He was up there.
Ivan: Well, I don't know.
Sam: Okay. So, Emily, do you have another topic for your segment before we take a
Sam: break and let Yvonne pick one?
Ivan: Well, wait, wait. No, we can own one and a break. We've got to pick.
Ivan: You know, we only went like a few minutes. Let's go. Let's pick one other topic.
Sam: Okay. We usually take a break between who is picking, but, like, okay.
Ivan: Let's see. So.
Sam: Unless we're explicitly doing a lightning round. We want to do a lightning round.
Ivan: Go ahead, anyone. Well, we went short on that one, so let's go.
Sam: Yeah, that was short. It was all short. It was, like, 20 minutes.
Sam: What's it? Yeah, go ahead.
Ivan: I know.
Sam: 15, 20 minutes.
Ivan: Anyway. Well, let's see. Next.
Sam: Wait. No, no, no. I am wrong. I misread my notes. It's been more like eight to ten minutes.
Ivan: That's what I thought. What are you doing to me, Sam? You're driving.
Sam: You know, math is not my strong point.
Ivan: But that's why we need that math as a service software application that you
Ivan: wanted me to develop and charge $50 a year.
Sam: I shared a joke video from TikTok on the curmudgeon score of Slack of this guy who was like,
Sam: He was setting up a service. It did have a free tier, but for full usage,
Sam: it was $99 a month for a Celsius to Fahrenheit converter.
Ivan: $99 a month.
Sam: But like hardened.
Sam: And then unless you're an enterprise, then you have to call sales.
Ivan: Right. They have to call me. I'll charge. I'll charge. Man. And I'll charge.
Sam: I only shared one video, but he produced a whole series of videos responding
Sam: to people's comments on this and taking himself completely seriously.
Sam: Obviously, it's a joke, but he was taking himself completely serious.
Emily: I feel like you guys could do this without this.
Ivan: I'm like, do we really need to be this precise on our temperature conversions?
Ivan: Really? Is it really not necessary?
Ivan: Do I really need a whole data center in Arizona, you know, in order to crunch
Ivan: the numbers, you know, for this conversion?
Emily: Here's my code. I was like, why do we need this?
Ivan: All right.
Sam: Okay. Anyway, Yvonne, what's next?
Ivan: Look, let's talk about fucking Minnesota. Okay?
Emily: Oh, we're Minnesota.
Ivan: Because, I know, because it sucks.
Sam: And it seems like it's getting worse before it gets better too but okay so bring
Sam: us up to speed there have been a lot of things happening you want me to bring us up to speed?
Ivan: You bring us up to speed because there's been so much shit going on.
Sam: Okay, so let's start with this. You know, for the last year since Trump became
Sam: president, it's been almost exactly a year. Three more days, it'll be a year.
Sam: And Trump has sort of, on the anti-immigration ICE stuff, he's sort of picked
Sam: one location to pick on at a time. You know, he did L.A.
Sam: for a while. He did Chicago for a while.
Sam: There was talk of several other places. But the most recent place that he's
Sam: sort of surged is Minneapolis.
Sam: And he's been sending many hundreds of ICE folks into Minneapolis to do raids
Sam: all over the area. a Minneapolis-St.
Sam: Paul area, suburbs, et cetera, where they're just going around,
Sam: they're doing their normal thing, going around often in unmarked cars,
Sam: wearing masks, et cetera, et cetera,
Sam: going and basically finding brown people to harass, grabbing them,
Sam: asking for their papers, et cetera.
Sam: in Minnesota specifically and this has happened in the other places too but
Sam: people don't like this gee you think yeah,
Sam: And not just the brown people being targeted, but also the white folks around
Sam: them, too. Look, let me just say this.
Ivan: I had to live with this for a number of years in Puerto Rico specifically.
Ivan: And the one place where it was stupidly annoying was at the airport when you were taking a flight.
Ivan: Because we are inside the United States. We don't need to.
Ivan: We don't clearing immigration. However, at some point, the fucking CBP people
Ivan: decided to install some people to start asking everybody if you're a fucking U.S. citizen.
Ivan: And they started getting belligerent at one point if you didn't answer, okay?
Ivan: Until one time many years ago, people sued, ACLU sued, and it went all the way to SCOTUS.
Ivan: And SCOTUS actually ruled against CBP and said, you know what? You can't do this.
Ivan: However, since the advent of Trump, it's happened to me more than one occasion
Ivan: that all of a sudden I've been, it hasn't happened recently, but it happened,
Ivan: where I'm boarding a flight to go to Miami and all of a sudden they're asking
Ivan: for people for their fucking papers on a domestic flight in the jetway.
Emily: Wow.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: So anyway, people have been organizing to basically do peaceful,
Sam: nonviolent interference.
Sam: So one of the common things is people...
Sam: So monitoring where ICE is going, sending out alerts on social media,
Sam: sending out alerts on various apps, and even things on the ground like blowing
Sam: whistles and stuff to basically warn people, ICE is coming, hide,
Sam: get out of the way, do whatever you need to do, etc.
Sam: One of the things that they have done in some places is sort of intentionally
Sam: like create excess traffic on streets where ICE is trying to go.
Sam: I'm not going to say explicitly block them, although in some cases they have.
Sam: the particular situation a little bit more than a week ago is that this this
Sam: one woman who was there there are actually conflicting reports whether she was
Sam: explicitly trying to do this or whether she was just leaving her house and was
Sam: at that spot but i gotta be honest i've.
Ivan: Watched that video many times and she seemed that she was just trying to maneuver
Ivan: around there and she wasn't blocking the street let's be clear cars passed around her.
Sam: She was waving people past Yeah.
Ivan: She was waving people past.
Sam: So, but anyway, she got in, you know, they were, they started telling her to
Sam: get out of the way, to move, whatever.
Sam: And as she was, I've seen the video too, as she was apparently trying to start
Sam: to comply, they shot her.
Sam: Initially, the reports were that she was shot in the face.
Sam: Earlier today, more detail came out. She was apparently shot twice in the chest,
Sam: once in the arm, and perhaps a fourth shot grazing her in the head.
Sam: But, and apparently, the initial reports were also, she was shot twice in the
Sam: face, she was dead instantly.
Sam: No, apparently not. When the paramedics got there.
Ivan: No, she had a pulse.
Sam: She still had a very weak pulse. They were unable to revive her.
Sam: But, but yeah, so, and most likely the injuries would have been fatal no matter what.
Emily: They were supposed to shoot to kill anyways So they fucked that up Sorry, I'm being rude.
Sam: Yeah, I'm just no.
Ivan: No, that's that's that's curmudge's corner. Now you're being you're you're you're
Ivan: you're you're doing our show now.
Ivan: So, yeah, no, no.
Ivan: Yeah, they missed bastards. You know, they failed their training.
Emily: I'm just sick of men saying that to me that like like guns all the time.
Emily: Like, yeah, you're when you shoot, you shoot to kill. I'm like, why?
Emily: Why don't you be good at like not shooting to kill? I'm like shooting someone
Emily: in the leg where they can't go after you or something.
Emily: But whatever, you know.
Ivan: That that thing. Can I be honest?
Ivan: The people that I hear that they talk like about that, about guns shoot to kill,
Ivan: are usually the people that are the least trained in actually using guns who
Ivan: have actually done any shooting.
Ivan: These are just the cowboy idiots.
Emily: They're not good at it either. That's clear.
Sam: So to continue bringing us back up to speed, her name was Renee Good, by the way.
Sam: And, you know, she had just finished dropping off her six-year-old at school.
Sam: She was with her wife. you know etc the wife was there with her when it happened
Sam: but since then things have escalated further because obviously this.
Ivan: Situation wait wait but let's be clear they they went around that incident for
Ivan: they they have claimed that she ran over this guy they have claimed that she
Ivan: and that the guy was hit even though all videos show that that's not the case
Ivan: they had claimed that the guy was in the hospital.
Ivan: They actually published a fucking video narrated by some jackass.
Ivan: Just a complete fabrication of lies about everything that happened in the incident.
Ivan: You know, and it's just, they have completely created this entire fabricated story.
Ivan: Somebody was, I think, in the Bulwark podcast, they were talking that these
Ivan: guys must have this entire, like, fill-in-the-blanks lie form where they have
Ivan: already all this shit ready.
Ivan: Just to put in the names of the new person, Oh, this is the lie that we're going to tell this time.
Ivan: Oh, yes. The guy was like bleeding internally and dying, hit by this person
Ivan: who was, depending on what it was, whether it's the illegal immigrant or the
Ivan: interferer or whatever.
Sam: Blah, blah, blah.
Ivan: And it's just the same prefabricated bullshit story. Yes. They called her a
Ivan: domestic terrorist. Yes.
Emily: Yes.
Ivan: And then as for her wife to be investigated for domestic terrorism,
Ivan: it's just the most preposterous fucking bullshit.
Sam: Yeah. The whole damn thing. A number of federal prosecutors resigned because
Sam: they were being ordered to investigate her and her wife for—
Sam: over this incident at the same time that the feds locked out the local authorities
Sam: from the investigation and the evidence.
Sam: And from all appearances, we're jumping straight to the conclusion that she
Sam: was guilty, the officer was not, and we're not doing any sort of serious investigation.
Sam: There have been some reports that the other ICE officers on the scene very quickly
Sam: cleaned up the evidence and who the hell knows where it is right now, et cetera, et cetera.
Ivan: But here's the thing about this, and I'm a little bit alike,
Ivan: that Minnesota has been very timid in this investigation because clearly there
Ivan: is sufficient video evidence to have that guy charged.
Sam: Okay, without any of the physical evidence.
Ivan: Without anything else. Without anything else. There is sufficient video evidence
Ivan: to have that guy charged and arrested, okay, for that incident, period.
Sam: But Yvonne, J.D. Vance says he has complete immunity.
Ivan: Yeah, what is it? Complete immunity now they call it? Is a new thing now?
Ivan: Now it's complete immunity. It's the new thing.
Sam: I forget the exact word.
Ivan: It's like, you know, it's like new Coke or like new whatever.
Ivan: Now it's complete immunity, you know? The new brand, newly and improved, yes.
Ivan: What's complete immunity? Complete immunities. We can do whatever the fuck we
Ivan: want when we say we want to do it. Yes.
Sam: The theory that has existed for cops for a long time is basically they do have
Sam: immunity from things done in the course of their duties.
Sam: And as this has gone through the courts, that is generally upheld in most situations,
Sam: except when there's something extenuating and it's like, you know,
Sam: okay, they completely, they weren't doing what they were supposed to.
Ivan: Look, it's like in almost any situation that somebody that is doing their job
Ivan: and it's doing it according to, you know, the rules that exist for that job,
Ivan: that they are usually protected from a lawsuit or legal action.
Ivan: However, there is nothing in this incident that indicates that this guy was
Ivan: doing anything of the sort.
Sam: Well, I mean, one of the things is they, you know, people have published the
Sam: actual ICE guidelines for how to deal with vehicles and situations like this.
Sam: And the guy violated every rule in ICE's own guidelines.
Ivan: Exactly. Exactly. Violated their own guidelines completely. So that's my point.
Ivan: There is nothing in there that the guy has done.
Sam: But, you know, one of the media outlets, I forget which one,
Sam: maybe it was the New York Times, maybe it was somebody else,
Sam: dug up 14 other incidents of ICE or Border Patrol interacting with vehicles
Sam: over the last few months.
Sam: And this exact situation, absent the gunshots at the end, has replayed,
Sam: well, even absent the person dying at the end.
Sam: like there were something like 14 of
Sam: these and i believe it was in a majority of
Sam: them they actually did end up shooting into the car even though they're
Sam: not supposed to it's just the people survived and you know and so this is a
Sam: pattern of behavior regardless of what the guidelines are and it's becoming
Sam: increasingly clear that even when the administration officially does have guidelines,
Sam: the actual guidance to people on the street,
Sam: is, oh, ignore all that shit.
Sam: Just do what you need to do and be badasses.
Sam: Go crack heads. Oh, and by the way, mandate to everybody, get as much video
Sam: as you can because we want to be able to publicize this and make people scared
Sam: and all that kind of stuff.
Sam: And in fact, one of the issues going on with this one is the cop that did the cop,
Sam: the ice person, they're not cops, who did this, was videoing on his phone with
Sam: one hand while he was shooting her with the other, and.
Emily: And and they.
Sam: And they released the video.
Emily: Thinking it would make them look good,
Emily: they're so stupid but there's also stupider
Emily: people out there that are like sitting there
Emily: repeating this nonsense over and over my friend who
Emily: works in the same like democratic policy and public
Emily: spaces as me she was like
Emily: my dad was like oh she was a domestic terrorist and
Emily: i showed him videos and then he was like i don't know why she was shot like
Emily: literally just showing someone like the truth actually like helped that person
Emily: in that situation they're not seeing the same things that we're seeing that's
Emily: what's really scary and they're not having those experiences like we are And it's all.
Sam: They hear is J.D. Vance saying domestic terrorist.
Ivan: Yeah. Listen, Emily, they live in a completely alternate reality.
Ivan: You know, it is everything that they look at is just, you know,
Ivan: it's crazy. You know, it's like every once in a while.
Ivan: I don't I don't try to do this very often. I have this four up thing on my TV
Ivan: that I that I have here in my office where they've got like,
Ivan: say, the different news feeds.
Ivan: And I'm usually watching the business feeds. And so they've got the Fox Business
Ivan: feed versus the CNBC feed versus the Bloomberg feed and some other channel that
Ivan: is nonsense. I don't even understand.
Ivan: There's this Cheddar News channel. It's complete nonsense.
Ivan: It makes it that is the most useless channel.
Ivan: I don't even know how to consider that news. But anyway, you know what?
Emily: It's good for a bar at night when you can't.
Ivan: Yeah.
Ivan: That's what it's good for. If I'm hammered after quite a few drinks,
Ivan: I'm like, oh, look at this bullshit.
Ivan: Oh, look, maybe, maybe, maybe I could get like this dog crypto shit from Saudi Arabia.
Ivan: And if I buy like five bonds and exchange them for Argentinian currency,
Ivan: maybe I could create this synthetic.
Ivan: Oh, Jesus Christ. It's like anyway. But no, the thing is, Fox News,
Ivan: what they're talking about, you see on the other channels, hey,
Ivan: Jay Powell's being, you know, forced into this. Jay Powell's being arrested over there.
Ivan: The immigrants are invading the North Carolina border today with,
Ivan: you know, and you're like, what? Which, which, what, what invasion?
Ivan: Which one are they talking about now?
Emily: Yeah, it's nuts. I think what's even easier is that the ICE officers now,
Emily: like three or four videos that I've seen of people,
Emily: of the public recording the ICE officers, where the ICE officer is sitting there
Emily: being like, have you learned nothing from the past few days?
Emily: As if they think that is going to...
Emily: you know, deter people. I mean, it will. I mean, yeah, but I think this is actually.
Sam: This is actually key. The ICE folks and the administration for the matter,
Sam: for that matter, think the lesson that you should take out of that is protesters
Sam: should go hide at home and stop doing this because their opposition to ICE is the terrorism.
Sam: Whereas polling has shown The general public responds in exactly the other way
Sam: that, you know, by like a 75-25 sort of margin that,
Sam: no, the lesson here is that, you know, to use a term from years ago,
Sam: I mean, we got a bunch of jackbooted thugs over here that are running rampant
Sam: and are trampling on people's rights, left, right, and center.
Sam: And, you know, these folks who are, I'm not the first one to point this out,
Sam: but these same folks who are going, don't tread on me and keep the government
Sam: out of everything a few years ago are now saying comply or die.
Ivan: Comply!
Emily: Mm-hmm.
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: You know, and so you were getting at these for me.
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: You were you were getting at these folks, you know, warning the public,
Sam: basically, don't do like she did or you're going to get shot,
Sam: too. But generally speaking, over the last week, there's been escalation.
Sam: The protesters have gotten more mad.
Sam: The protesters are coming out in bigger numbers.
Sam: There have been—.
Ivan: They're sending a thousand more fucking ICE agents to Minnesota,
Ivan: these assholes, for God's sakes.
Sam: Outnumbering the local police forces by almost 10 to 1 at this point.
Sam: And basically, you know, the governor and others have been warning— And they've
Sam: been getting some flack for this, basically saying, look, don't take the bait,
Sam: don't get violent, you know, don't give them what they want.
Sam: Because the administration is telegraphing almost completely obviously that
Sam: what they are hoping for here is to set up a situation where there is a violent
Sam: confrontation and not just their folks shooting some innocent white woman.
Sam: But a confrontation where protesters do something that they can use as an excuse to further
Sam: crackdown. Trump is talking about the Insurrection Act and nationalizing the
Sam: Guard and bringing in regular army and stuff to basically go take over these cities.
Sam: Just a little while before we started recording, I saw that there was a report
Sam: that Trump has instigated a federal investigation of Walls and several other
Sam: Minnesota politicians to...
Ivan: Well, but he did that to news. He's done that to everybody.
Sam: No, no, no. Right now, it's part of his playbook, but that's the point.
Sam: The point is he's using all the aspects of federal power to harass anyone who goes against But.
Ivan: Here is the thing, Sam, but here's the thing. This is the opportunity,
Ivan: Sam, that we have been forgetting, okay?
Ivan: Because as all these people are getting investigated, look, if you want to steal
Ivan: a lot of money and bribe somebody big time all the way, this is the perfect opportunity.
Ivan: And by the way, you will get out of jail. Listen, we should be figuring out
Ivan: a way to steal millions of dollars at this point.
Ivan: Because one thing that's guaranteed is that I will go, if I steal $50 million
Ivan: right now, and I take out $5 million to put into MAGA whatever thing that I
Ivan: need to put in, I will be pardoned.
Sam: Yes. No problem. And by some reports, like, some people are paying $5 million.
Sam: Some people are paying less and still getting, you know, their- Two and a half. Yeah.
Ivan: They pardoned the fucking- Let me tell you, Emily. They pardoned today.
Ivan: the fucking ex-governor of Puerto Rico who was on,
Ivan: Goddamn recorded soliciting a fucking bribe from this Venezuelan banker,
Ivan: okay, for her goddamn campaign in exchange for her terminating an investigation
Ivan: and firing the guy that was the head of the fucking office of financial institutions
Ivan: in Puerto Rico to fire that guy because he's investigating the bank that was
Ivan: a Ponzi scheme and a fraud.
Ivan: And, oh, by the way, hey, this guy donated $2.5 million to Trump,
Ivan: and all of a sudden he's pardoned and she's pardoned, and they're all out of jail today.
Emily: It's crazy. There's no integrity.
Emily: I remember my friend Cindy was running for county auditor, and she was running
Emily: on this, like, bringing integrity because she has so much of it.
Emily: And I was like, no, none of these fucking people care about integrity.
Ivan: Care about integrity.
Emily: They don't do that, unfortunately. can I bring it back to something really quick
Emily: did you talk about oh no well.
Ivan: Sorry we we are.
Emily: Very good.
Ivan: On our tangents.
Emily: Yes okay how.
Ivan: Far are we off.
Emily: This is kind of an old story but I like it I always it always comes to mind
Emily: like I mean it was only January 2025 but did you talk about the Seattle man
Emily: that came to a Sunnyside City Council meeting which Sunnyside is in you didn't
Emily: see that So this was in 2025,
Emily: in January, so early 2025,
Emily: and this man, claiming to be a bounty hunter, made threatening comments at a
Emily: press conference—it was actually at a city council meeting, I understood,
Emily: or as I saw it—saying that a U.S.
Emily: immigration and custom enforcement plans to deputize and pay private civilian
Emily: forces to detain undocumented immigrants—.
Emily: He said, you can put a price on every human being. Every human is worth a dollar amount.
Emily: He identified himself as Martin Alvarado before being hushed by the city manager
Emily: and residents and attendants.
Emily: He was basically saying, like, they're going to pay us all of this money to
Emily: put people away. What are you going to pay us to protect yourself?
Emily: Because this is what we're doing.
Emily: It was the most frightening thing that I've ever heard happening in Washington state.
Emily: And what was even more frightening is that the city council members that were
Emily: hearing, I mean, he was somebody posted he was warning us, you know, like he was.
Emily: And the council was like, you need to get out of here. You need to get out.
Emily: You're scaring everybody.
Emily: And it was, you know, a predominantly Hispanic council there in the Sunnyside
Emily: area. And it was just, you know, they didn't want to hear anything about it.
Emily: They just wanted him out of there.
Emily: But he was literally explaining what is happening right now and what was happening
Emily: and was going to happen very quickly.
Ivan: Well, well, here's the thing. I don't know. No, it's like, I mean,
Ivan: the thing is, listen, right now, can you really tell the difference if you wound
Ivan: up with a whole bunch of scammers dressed as fucking ICE agents that went around
Ivan: and started grabbing people and then holding them for ransom?
Sam: Well, we have had a couple of verified incidents already where people impersonated
Sam: ICE and did things like that.
Sam: You know, most of them is actual ICE. ICE is acting badly on their own.
Emily: Why can't I go and be ice and just keep letting people go? I mean,
Emily: like, no, man, that's not what was said.
Emily: Like, actually, you got the wrong person.
Emily: That's what I would do. Pretend to be ice and, like, derail their whole act.
Emily: I might get shot, though, so maybe not good. I don't know. Maybe some of the
Emily: men can do it. Maybe I can't sell it. I don't think I could.
Emily: I wanted to say this real quick. How are you going to stop us from coming through?
Emily: Because we don't have to worry about warrants.
Emily: We don't have to really follow too many of the laws. And if we're going to be
Emily: deputized by ICE, we can pretty much do anything we want, he said.
Emily: $1,000 per illegal is a pretty good price just to do things that you kind of
Emily: enjoy how or what are you guys going to do to stop that what are you going to
Emily: do how what are you going to pay us more are you going to pay us two thousand
Emily: dollars just to leave them alone,
Emily: it's crazy sorry i just had to read that part it.
Ivan: Ain't but it is crazy the whole thing is crazy we are.
Emily: Situation right.
Ivan: Now that is just beyond nuts in terms of you've got an entire,
Ivan: They created this entire parallel military force right now.
Ivan: They had all these issues with, well, we want to send the National Guard,
Ivan: and all the court orders stopped us from sending the National Guard and the
Ivan: military to places, and we got turned away. So how do we scare the cities?
Ivan: Well, now we've got this army of fucking Gestapo people that are called ICE
Ivan: that we are sending and flooding cities with just to scare the living shit out of people.
Sam: Well, and that's the thing with the Insurrection Act as well.
Sam: If he... Not if he, Vaughn.
Sam: If Donald Trump initiates the Insurrection Act...
Ivan: Listen, if I right now have the right to fucking invoke the Insurrection Act,
Ivan: I'm sending it to Washington, D.C., and I'm grabbing this asshole,
Ivan: you know, from his bed and fucking dragging him out on the street and fucking,
Ivan: like, putting him in Fort Leavenworth. without a fucking trial.
Ivan: Then we'll discuss it later.
Sam: The thing is, if he invokes the Insurrection Act, then that is a completely
Sam: different authority for nationalizing the National Guard, and he can also do
Sam: regular military as well that has not gone through court yet.
Sam: Now, obviously, and they're already talking about that, if he does that,
Sam: like, people are talking about the scenario, like, why doesn't Walls bring out
Sam: the National Guard under his command in order to help defend against dice?
Ivan: Because the federal government can nationalize the National Guard that he's fucking, okay?
Ivan: So it's not really a great solution at this point.
Sam: Right. And yes, so we enter a whole
Sam: different universe if Trump actually initializes this insurrection act.
Ivan: What could he do?
Sam: Now, obviously it would instantly go to court again on that as well.
Ivan: Well, right now already, one thing, they've got a court order right now that happened this evening.
Ivan: related to ICE that we had posted on the Slack specifically where a federal
Ivan: judge restricted immigration agents' actions,
Ivan: Towards protesters, specifically, you know, restricting a whole bunch of the
Ivan: shit that they had been doing where they had been using force against peaceful
Ivan: protesters, where they had been like, just because people were peaceably protesting,
Ivan: they had been tear gassing them, attacking them, doing whatever.
Ivan: And there was a judge order today that they could not be using those broad dispersal
Ivan: tools, that they couldn't be like, you know, doing this thing on the road where
Ivan: they were like, like what they did to Renee Good. But basically,
Ivan: that was the order tonight. Of course, I'm wondering if it's going to be challenged.
Sam: I'm sure it will be appealed. I mean, if we follow the pattern of all of these
Sam: other court things that have happened, whether or not there's an order in effect
Sam: will go back and forth as it works its way up the courts.
Sam: And then eventually, most of these will get to SCOTUS.
Sam: And eight times out of ten, they're siding with Trump.
Ivan: Here is the one thing that's happening right now.
Ivan: This entire thing has gone from a nuisance into something that is hated by the
Ivan: majority of Americans, okay?
Ivan: It is supported by a very, you know, in terms of who says this is good right
Ivan: now, the polling has this down to like 25%.
Emily: Okay?
Sam: And I said 75, 25 earlier, but to be clear, it's actually more like 56,
Sam: 25, and then a bunch of people in the middle who always say,
Sam: I don't know, I don't know what's going on.
Ivan: No, but those people always don't know anything, whatever.
Ivan: They got their head up their ass their entire life. So, you know,
Ivan: it won't happen. But you've got a situation where...
Ivan: I shared that chart on the Slack of what has happened to Trump's disapproval this last two weeks.
Ivan: It has skyrocketed. Like, I've never seen such a surge in a brief amount of time.
Ivan: People are angry, okay? People are pissed.
Ivan: There are people that I've ever heard of basically calling these guys the Gestapo.
Ivan: People just disapproving of this en masse. And so The pressure on This kind
Ivan: of shit continuing You know is ratcheting up Significantly across the board I know that,
Ivan: One thing that could be done And some people started discussing is We gotta
Ivan: cut the fucking funding off this thing Okay The money has to be This shit where
Ivan: all this money Got given to ICE This money needs to be cut As soon as possible Yeah.
Sam: Well, and here's the thing of this, you know, there, you are definitely hearing
Sam: a few Republicans wavering on this now in the Congress.
Sam: The question is, you know, is it enough? And can, you know, now Democrats can,
Sam: the one point of leverage they have, even if they don't get any Republicans,
Sam: is they could force another government shutdown.
Sam: Yeah. But it sounds like leadership doesn't want to,
Sam: you know, and that and unless you get a whole bunch of Republicans also willing
Sam: to go along, that's pretty much the only thing that congressional Democrats could do.
Sam: Now, there are, you know, on a few other issues, some Republicans in some other
Sam: areas, like, look, there was a Republican senator, I forget which one,
Sam: who made some comments about, like, I expect a serious investigation of goods
Sam: killing, and they better have something real.
Sam: and then there are a few others who said the same thing about the investigation
Sam: into the fed there are republicans starting to splinter off but as usual there's not they are a whole.
Ivan: Bunch of fucking pussies.
Sam: I'm sorry they have no fucking sign to stand up to any of that what were.
Emily: You saying I said her ball sacks Well, they're ball socks.
Sam: There you go.
Emily: Pussies are strong. Ball socks are not.
Ivan: That's fair. That is very fair.
Emily: It's not offensive.
Sam: Um, so no, even on like the Venezuela war power resolution, there were,
Sam: there were like a bunch of Republicans who, who actually voted on a procedural
Sam: thing and then they backed off because Donald Trump called them and pressured
Sam: them and they were like, ah,
Sam: you know, and so that, that didn't go anywhere.
Sam: And I think this is the pattern you have on a lot of things.
Sam: You just don't, to really do anything, you need a whole bunch of Republicans
Sam: to defect and we still aren't there, even though there are cracks growing.
Ivan: You know, the cholesterol is not working fast enough.
Ivan: Did you see, I saw some rumor today that apparently Trump had a stroke.
Emily: Oh, God.
Sam: We've been hearing that rumor of multiple strokes over the course of the whole
Sam: last year. Like, this comes up every month or so.
Emily: I mean, he's not normal. It's not.
Sam: He's not doing well. He is clearly not doing well in all kinds of different ways.
Ivan: He had a fucking half stroke, a heart attack, something, anything.
Ivan: I mean, it's just, everybody in that party is just so scared of him, okay, to do anything.
Ivan: They just are so, none of them will stand up to him.
Ivan: And look, look at anybody that's stood up to him so far has gotten their political
Ivan: career put in a shredder.
Ivan: They have been burned completely.
Emily: MTG seems to be doing pretty good now.
Ivan: I'm seeing their political career. What is MTG even doing?
Sam: You say MTG is doing pretty well, but she's out of a job for the moment. I mean, yeah.
Emily: Well, yeah. I mean, yes. But I was just saying, like, there's, yeah. Yeah.
Emily: I guess what's so frustrating about this whole situation is not even that,
Emily: like, the Republicans can't stand up to him.
Emily: It's also that, like, you already said this earlier today, that two prosecutors,
Emily: like, quit their job or resigned because they didn't want to, you know, investigate.
Emily: And it's like, I'm kind of sorry-sickening, and maybe this is just me not really
Emily: understanding, but hearing that Tim Walz is not going to fight and just is going to leave after.
Emily: I know he's gone through a lot as a governor. Like there's been a lot that happened
Emily: in Minnesota from the shooting of the legislators to to everything in that in
Emily: that state, you know, and he's gone through a lot.
Emily: But like to resign, to not fight back, like let them.
Sam: Well, he's not resigning. He just announced he's not running for reelection.
Ivan: No, but that's me.
Emily: That is like he. Yes. But it does look like it.
Sam: I mean, the initial impression is that he did so because of these sort of thing.
Emily: Like the families.
Sam: Yeah. It was the nonsense Somalian fraud thing where the people actually committing
Sam: fraud were not actually Somali.
Sam: There were people committing fraud and there was an investigation already going
Sam: on and it was being worked on.
Sam: But like, you know, it was trumped up by the administration, pun intended.
Sam: and they were using it as leverage against all of the Democrats in Minnesota
Sam: when, you know, that's not really what was going on and it was whatever.
Sam: Like, as usual, it's misrepresented. But...
Emily: People that are stealing millions, we're pardoning those people.
Sam: Yes, of course. But also, Wall's, I mean, his stated reason is,
Sam: look, I have to concentrate on, you know, Minnesota's under attack.
Sam: I have to concentrate on this stuff.
Ivan: And by the way, I do understand that reasoning right now, given the situation that Minnesota is in.
Ivan: With all these investigations and all of this stuff, trying to actually do a
Ivan: campaign at the same time, it's kind of very crazy.
Ivan: So I do give him credit that, look, if you're going to focus on something,
Ivan: Minnesota, against this assault against the state, which is a federal assault
Ivan: against the state, it's very difficult to also be campaigning for an election as well.
Ivan: and you know what at least it also and the assault against you personally with all these frivolous.
Sam: Investigations and stuff.
Ivan: But it deflects fire away from him is the one thing because
Ivan: you can wind up okay whoever is going
Ivan: to run as a democrat you know he can be taking the fire for that while the other
Ivan: person is running a campaign to make sure that the democrats win the state so
Ivan: I think that in terms of his motivations for doing this I think they do make
Ivan: sense but But right now falls into that.
Emily: I feel bad for him. But also no one should be quitting their job or just resigning
Emily: is what he's OK. He can do it if he has a plan.
Ivan: OK, so I know that Sam gets gets gets gets crazy when when I when I talk about my condo association.
Ivan: But about a year ago, OK, listen, you know, listen, I you know,
Ivan: you let me tell you something.
Ivan: Listen, a whole bunch of people started making up a whole bunch of accusations
Ivan: about me, about me stealing money from the place that I was like,
Ivan: I took construction funds, that I took bribe, that I, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Ivan: And this was like when I was sick with demarticulitis, my wife was,
Ivan: I just had surgery, and I've got all this work, and I'm like,
Ivan: look, I got to focus on myself.
Ivan: I can't, like, be, like, trying to run this place and, like,
Ivan: with all these people, and I quit.
Ivan: But here's what's happened in the interim. The people that were accusing me
Ivan: of this right now, basically, it's the usual. They have been...
Ivan: They've been doing anything that they said that they're doing.
Ivan: They're the ones that are doing.
Ivan: And like right now, basically, but what it gave me that time to rest gave me
Ivan: the time to figure out how to mount a proper counterattack in order to expose
Ivan: everything that they had been doing.
Ivan: And so I think in terms of having seen how this works and how sometimes you
Ivan: wind up in a situation where, look, I can't, tactically, it's not a good attempt to stay there.
Ivan: I don't think tactically was a good thing to just stay there.
Ivan: And it maybe risks the state, you know, being lost. Okay.
Ivan: It's better for him to say, look, I'll step aside right now.
Ivan: They've got enough time. We can get somebody to run.
Ivan: And we've got enough time to rectify the situation. I think that makes sense.
Ivan: But I think that the one thing is that Tim, they need to get more aggressive.
Ivan: And he just started yesterday than he had been now.
Ivan: Because one thing that I give credit to Pritzker and Newsom,
Ivan: when they were doing this to them,
Ivan: especially Pritzker. Pritzker was very, very vocal and strident against what
Ivan: was being done in Chicago.
Ivan: Tim has been distracted by all these hacky-shades or whatever.
Ivan: He hasn't been strident in defending his state against this.
Ivan: He needs to step up his game in this right now.
Ivan: He is on his back foot right now, and he needs to step up his game.
Emily: Yeah. I think about it. You were talking about the prosecutors, though, like, yes.
Emily: And as somebody who left public office to do other things, I think that are
Emily: actually more effective.
Emily: I guess I can say that. Yes, that's right.
Emily: And I but it's it's the paramount, you know, executives that left to it's like
Emily: for for being upset by that.
Emily: It's it's like, come on, you have the money standing, you know, go and fight.
Emily: And actually, that's where the real levers of power are those people that are
Emily: sitting in those executive seats.
Emily: And if you leave from those positions, you're actually just throwing in the towel for some things.
Sam: There's always a debate in some of these situations where, you know,
Sam: especially people like prosecutors, things like that, or for that matter,
Sam: military folks, you are being ordered to do something you think is wrong,
Sam: illegal, unethical, whatever.
Ivan: They're not leaving you a lot of choices.
Sam: Well, the question is, do you do you resign in protest or do you not do it and make them fire you?
Sam: You know, either way, you're not going to stay there in the end.
Sam: You know, now they're one of the things that was said over and over by people
Sam: in the first Trump administration is the reason we're staying.
Sam: And people would say this privately off the record, et cetera.
Sam: They said the reason we're staying is we can mitigate the damage by staying.
Sam: We can stop some of his worst impulses. And we gave him shit.
Ivan: By the way, we said we said shit about them. And now we realize.
Ivan: that, you know what? They were right. They did.
Sam: Yeah. And that's what's different about this Trump second term is none of those folks are allowed here.
Sam: If you have the slightest whiff of saying no or not just jumping and saying
Sam: yes, sir, and moving as quick as possible, you're out of there very quickly.
Ivan: Hey, Sam, let me ask you a question. Where's Tulsi? Anybody heard from her?
Sam: Uh she's been very quiet no but
Sam: there was something she was
Sam: in the news for a few weeks back let me see if i can find it but but no mostly
Sam: she's been missing mostly oh the latest news article i see eight days ago from
Sam: the wall street journal tulsi gabbard sidelined from venezuela planning how there you go there.
Ivan: You go oh yeah there you go perfect beautiful.
Sam: U.s spy chief Gabbard excluded from Maduro plan over past views.
Sam: Tulsi Gabbard booted from Venezuela plans.
Sam: Age-joking, DNI stands for do not invite, etc.
Ivan: Good work, Tulsi. There you go.
Sam: That's all the recent news about Tulsi is how she's been.
Ivan: You fucking sold your soul, and this is what it's gotten you.
Ivan: Congratulations. Great job.
Emily: Speaking of Venezuela, when somebody mentioned, you know, just because someone
Emily: gives you a peace prize doesn't mean that you got a Nobel Peace Prize.
Ivan: Oh, my God. Jesus fucking Christ. I mean, you know.
Emily: Can we just talk about, like, how dumb.
Ivan: Sam, Sam, look. Look, I got an award over here.
Emily: Yeah.
Ivan: You want the award? I have. Look, it's a medal. I got this medal. There. Here we go.
Ivan: Let me get the medal. Check it out. Look. Here.
Ivan: Look, I got this medal.
Sam: Mail it over. I'll put it on my resume immediately.
Ivan: Hewlett Packard, 2003, most valuable player. Okay? I mean,
Ivan: Sam, you could be the Hewlett Packard. 2003 Most Valuable Player. Look at that.
Sam: It's a metal. Mail it over. I'm going to put it on my resume immediately. I will claim it.
Ivan: Old blue HP color. It's made us some metal,
Ivan: Kind of thing. I don't think it's gold.
Emily: Do you think that Maria Karina Machado is an idiot?
Emily: Sorry, I keep just being like, why did you think Trump would treat you any differently
Emily: throughout this process at the end?
Ivan: No, I think that she, no, no, no. I think what she did today was basically what
Ivan: she decided is, look, I got to play the book, okay?
Ivan: Which the book is, look, the Swiss arrived with a Rolex watch.
Ivan: Apple showed up with a gold orb. okay
Ivan: and i'm like well fuck here by
Ivan: the way she had it framed with this thing that said presented the trump and
Ivan: this old thing inside this case and the thing and the metal i mean so she said
Ivan: look this is the playbook apparently where everybody gets what they want so
Ivan: i i gotta step up my game well.
Emily: Look here here's the thing she's a woman and he's not gonna do that like he's
Emily: not going to give or this awful.
Ivan: She's a woman and she's no she doesn't mean she has to not pass the double D test,
Ivan: for Trump. Okay.
Emily: And she just continued to like metaphorically suck his dick more. So I'm like.
Sam: But the fundamental problem here though,
Sam: is not that like she played pretty much the only place she had left, but the thing was,
Sam: and the reporting on this is basically when there were conversations with her
Sam: earlier in the year with the administration,
Sam: her responses were things about democracy and human rights and doing better for the Venezuelans.
Sam: And we need to respect the results of the election and all that kind of stuff.
Sam: And the question is there.
Ivan: Where's my money? Where's my goal? Where's my money? Where's my medal?
Sam: Well, exactly. But here's, and Donald Trump apparently right off the bat,
Sam: like was upset that she got the NOBA Peace Prize and not him.
Sam: And he almost wrote her off at that point anyway.
Sam: But also, very importantly here, he is 100% transactional.
Sam: When they had back channel conversations with the VP, with Maduro's VP,
Sam: she apparently was very open to, we will talk to you about oil.
Sam: We will talk to you about this we will we will be open to doing what you want
Sam: and oh by the way democracy.
Ivan: Bullshit i don't give a shit about that it's probably well.
Sam: And also wait.
Ivan: Elections democracy fuck you i don't even want an election here the hell.
Sam: Do i want election over there also apparently not to leave this out one of the
Sam: points of contention when when the trump administration,
Sam: was talking to her as the nobel peace prize winner earlier in the year and saying
Sam: what they wanted her to do.
Sam: They wanted her to enter into negotiations with the Maduro government to come
Sam: to an end, you know, whatever.
Sam: And basically, she stood on principle and said, he's illegitimate,
Sam: he's a dictator, we're not going to negotiate with him.
Sam: And the Trump folks said, well, then you're just an obstruction and we don't need to deal with you.
Ivan: Great beautiful well i don't know look he gave her he gave him the medal and
Ivan: i don't know look i know that the did you see the transaction where apparently
Ivan: they gave us 500 million dollars of oil but apparently the money instead of
Ivan: going to the u.s treasury went to a bank account in qatar,
Ivan: yes well which is normally where of course the u.s government always wants their money.
Sam: People have pointed out this pattern with all kinds of things venezuela is just
Sam: the latest example, the ballroom is another. There's another,
Sam: there's several others.
Sam: Basically, Donald Trump is making these side deals all over the place that involve
Sam: money coming into accounts that he controls independent of what Congress has authority over.
Sam: Which, by the way, of course, is illegal under the Constitution,
Sam: but who the hell cares about that anymore?
Sam: Like, you know, like.
Emily: You cannot be okay with, I mean, that's what I'm saying. somebody have some fucking balls.
Ivan: Actually, wait, I'm sorry. You just explained to me the balls are weak, okay?
Ivan: They need to have a fucking real pussy and show up over there instead of balls.
Ivan: This is the fucking problem that we've got right now.
Emily: Have some fucking pussy. Have some fucking...
Ivan: Yes! Damn it! That's what we need!
Emily: You still want the ball now.
Sam: I don't think I think I can get away with making that the title of the episode.
Emily: Let's be clear. The ball sacks are not great. The balls are good. And the pussy.
Ivan: But the balls are weak. You hit the balls and we fall over in two seconds.
Emily: Where are your ovaries? Where are your balls?
Ivan: Exactly.
Emily: But isn't you know and i think it's also crazy that they're letting the former
Emily: vice president lead and she's basically in with maduro was not doing anything
Emily: differently so like well no the the key the key thing no she is doing something
Emily: very crucially different okay she.
Sam: Is willing to talk to donald trump and make the deals with him.
Emily: Oh yeah she's.
Ivan: Willing to deal She's been willing.
Emily: To deal.
Ivan: She's been willing and dealing. She actually did free some political prisoners.
Ivan: Okay. All right. But other than that, not much change.
Ivan: One thing that I had, you know, I have a lot of friends.
Ivan: Look, my boss is Venezuelan. Okay. They're Venezuela and diaspora.
Ivan: Okay. And that's just my boss. I have a lot of friends out here that are Venezuela and diaspora.
Ivan: And I spoke to them about this. Look, the one problem right now,
Ivan: the situation is even with Maduro gone, the reality is that nothing really has
Ivan: changed in terms of the political situation nothing really has changed because
Ivan: they did not come in with a plan,
Ivan: this whole thing is honestly as far as I can tell this whole thing has been
Ivan: so far a distraction from the Epstein files that's it nothing else.
Sam: I will add to that you mentioned the 500 million or whatever it is I think the
Sam: reality here is that well maybe Rubio wanted something more.
Sam: But as far as Trump is concerned, mission accomplished.
Sam: As long as he can get some random money coming into accounts that he controls,
Sam: he's done what he wants to.
Sam: He doesn't care about in one little tiny bit what the situation on the ground is in Venezuela.
Ivan: Well, there was one other thing that they wanted. They did want to be able to more easily deport,
Ivan: because they ended in temporary protected status, they wanted to more easily
Ivan: deport the $150,000 people with TPS that we had over here. Okay,
Ivan: so you want it to be able to do that as well.
Ivan: And the other thing is, like I told you before, transactional again,
Ivan: the $500 million that came in.
Ivan: The Venezuelan diaspora, a lot of them talk to Trump regularly because they
Ivan: are the biggest contingent of theirs is in Doral, Florida.
Ivan: Doral is where he has that country club that's just a little bit south,
Ivan: like here, Bob Marlano being a little bit north, that he spends a lot of time at, okay?
Ivan: Where he's had the G7 and whatever and all this shit. Those people are members.
Ivan: They have money. And they have been talking to him about this,
Ivan: about getting rid of Maduro.
Ivan: And a lot of them were pissed because he was in a temporary protected status.
Ivan: So this whole thing about they all hated Maduro was a lot to appease these guys,
Ivan: okay, that give him money. And they promised him money.
Ivan: Somehow, he's already gotten $500 million.
Ivan: They keep promising all this other oil riches. and he figures he can get money somehow out of this. And,
Ivan: You know, this is all, again, like you said, transactional. Boom.
Ivan: They wanted him out. I get him out. I'm going to get money somehow.
Ivan: I already got $500 million. I'm going to get a few more billions somehow out of it.
Sam: Yeah, exactly. And like Rubio wants more stuff. Rubio cares about coming off Cuba.
Ivan: Rubio wanted democracy. Seriously. I don't believe it.
Sam: Or, you know, as with everything else and everybody else who works with Trump,
Sam: you know, So Rubio is not going to get the things he wants.
Sam: He's going to get stabbed in the back and get screwed in the end.
Sam: He may get a little bit of things here or there, but he isn't.
Sam: All of these people delude themselves into thinking that they can manipulate the situation.
Sam: Take advantage of poor, delusional, senile Trump and get what you want out of
Sam: it. Some of them are better at it than others.
Sam: I think Miller is better at it than Rubio, as an example.
Ivan: Miller is definitely, I mean, well, I mean, Jesus Christ. The guy's a vampire, for God's sakes.
Ivan: I'm sure he's, like, fucking, like, sucking his blood every other day,
Ivan: which is part of, like, why the hell he gets the shit that he wants.
Emily: Good Lord. It looks like an anal polyp.
Emily: That's what we know.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: I can't.
Emily: Okay. Not being able to say it, we have to talk about it all the time.
Ivan: Cannot disagree.
Emily: We are waiting for South Park to do an episode where he is an anal polyp.
Ivan: That sounds wonderful.
Emily: We are suggesting that South Park, if they ever hear this, please.
Ivan: Well, given that our first question went eight minutes, and now we have gone one hour.
Ivan: Okay. All right. almost on the second one. Are we going to take a short break
Ivan: and we're going to try to end this pretty soon.
Sam: I guess? I was wondering if we should just wrap it up.
Ivan: Maybe we should just wrap it up.
Sam: If you have anything else to talk about other than wrapping it up,
Sam: I will take a break and then we will come back and we can do that.
Ivan: Do you have anything else? No, no, no, no. We can wrap it up.
Emily: If anything, we can just talk about... I'm bummed out because I feel like I
Emily: don't get to know Yvonne enough you know I mean I get to see Sam a little bit more often so I feel like,
Emily: What should we talk about now that I'm not just talking to you over?
Ivan: No, no, no. Listen, you'll get the right. I said I'm going to pop up to one
Ivan: of the meetups. I just got to figure out my schedule, okay?
Ivan: Like, next month is bad. I'm going to have to be in Puerto Rico again.
Ivan: I'm going next week, and I'm going to have to be that week. But I'm going to
Ivan: come up to one of the meetups.
Emily: Okay?
Ivan: So I'll play out.
Emily: It's a summer one, like, in our hottest month of the year. Let's try to get you in July.
Ivan: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'll look at the calendar whenever it pops up.
Ivan: It's got to be, you know, whatever I got to, I got an opening on the calendar
Ivan: right now. I thought about maybe February and sucking up the cold.
Sam: Yvonne is talking about the meetups for the Snohomish Podcast Network,
Sam: which both this podcast and Emily's Umsur are members of.
Ivan: Okay, well, by the way, my wife doesn't want to go to Seattle.
Sam: Check out the home network and all the other podcasts.
Ivan: She is part of a group that meets regularly that is in Seattle.
Ivan: She's actually been to Seattle a couple of times.
Ivan: Well, not Seattle. She's been nearby. No, she did fly to Seattle. Yeah.
Sam: It's closer to us than Seattle.
Ivan: Yeah. No, but the thing is that they went through this retreat and banged down in...
Ivan: Near Oregon, basically, on the coast.
Emily: Vancouver? Oh, okay.
Ivan: Yeah, so, well, we were supposed to be there last summer to go to Vancouver,
Ivan: but my son freaked out on the plane and he couldn't get on the plane.
Ivan: That's another story. Okay.
Ivan: But, I don't know, at some point we'll figure it out. By summer,
Ivan: I'm sure we'll be there because my wife is talking about, at least not that I come up by July.
Sam: Okay.
Emily: I'm excited.
Ivan: All right.
Sam: Okay. So this time around, just to, we hit Venezuela.
Sam: We didn't talk about the January 6th anniversary. We didn't talk about Jack Smith.
Sam: We talked about Minnesota. We have not talked about Greenland.
Sam: We have not talked about Iran.
Sam: We have not, I meant, we mentioned in passing the investigation of Powell.
Ivan: The longest, the longest podcast in history.
Sam: I'm just listing the things that we didn't get to, but just to show how busy this last week was.
Sam: we didn't talk about like interest rates and
Sam: ai and blah blah blah we we
Sam: we kind of talked about pardons a little bit but
Sam: you know look there's just the the rate at which things are happening is once
Sam: again seeming to accelerate and it feels like you know who who was it what what's
Sam: the famous quote about like that there there are some weeks that nothing happens
Sam: and there's some i don't know,
Sam: There's a stupid quote that's very good about like how sometimes you have very slow periods of times.
Ivan: When we did this in the Obama administration, when we did this podcast during
Ivan: the Obama administration, you could find some episodes that are pretty short.
Ivan: You could find we were like, ah, it's a boring week. Nothing happened.
Ivan: You know, I mean.
Emily: Boring weeks.
Ivan: Yes. So do I.
Sam: Anyway, things are being crazy right now. And there are a lot of places that could blow up.
Sam: You know, is Trump about to attack Iran?
Sam: Is he about to attack Minnesota more greatly? Is he going to do more crazy stuff in Venezuela?
Sam: Or Cuba. Yes. Or, you know, he mentioned like a half dozen countries in the
Sam: last two weeks. So, you know, whatever.
Emily: You know what, with what you were just saying, I was about to ask this question,
Emily: like, during the Obama administration, was less happening or were we just not
Emily: talking about some of the things?
Emily: because one thing I'm getting frustrated with is Democrats and people that were
Emily: Obama supporters starting to...
Emily: call out trump especially about regarding venezuela and
Emily: say well obama did this and obama did
Emily: that like this idea that we're justifying donald trump or trying to find some
Emily: reason and i just i need to say that out loud like i mean one these are not
Emily: the same people and stop trying to wrap your head around donald trump or make
Emily: justifications there are none so if you are you know comparing comparing a president that.
Ivan: Was trying to do something where his considerations were national security,
Ivan: the security of people providing food.
Ivan: These were not selfish considerations versus a guy with presidents.
Sam: There was lots of things that we criticized Obama on at the time,
Sam: but the nature of those things was entirely different.
Sam: It was even when he did something we disagreed with,
Sam: you could feel like okay he's he
Sam: may be doing something we disagree with and we think is wrong but his he has
Sam: a good motivation he's trying to get a good result and he's doing it wrong or
Sam: but and at least he's thinking about it he's thinking about it he was a deep
Sam: thinker you could tell all this kind of stuff they're.
Ivan: Not selfish considerations is my.
Sam: Point everything.
Ivan: That trump does is only about him.
Sam: Right that's.
Ivan: It there is nobody else he doesn't care about the world about america about his family doesn't care.
Emily: About him.
Ivan: He doesn't care about his kids son of a bitch.
Emily: Anybody and and and we as democrats have never been shy about dragging somebody
Emily: democrat or whatever that we just don't agree with we're like yeah that's a bad move and we're
Emily: like immune to it and that's why i just cannot understand why there are people
Emily: that are trying to like because.
Sam: Well this is this is the same thing as we.
Ivan: Live in a world where we don't value listen people like obama,
Ivan: And I fall into this category where we just do the hard work.
Ivan: We're not out there just trying to get credit for doing the hard work of keeping things together.
Ivan: The hard work that it took to get the Affordable Care Act passed.
Ivan: People criticize it, shit on it. It's not national health care. It's not a one.
Ivan: Listen, so many people, tens of millions of people benefited from that.
Ivan: And everybody, so many shit on it Because, well, it's not universal health,
Ivan: instead of seeing how hard it was to get that and how many people's lives improved, okay?
Ivan: Because it's not the perfect solution. It sucks.
Ivan: He's a fucking, you know, neoliberal asshole, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Ivan: I'm not sick of those people because it's so many, because they,
Ivan: and then they don't go and are taking this president that basically couldn't
Ivan: give a flying fuck about the lives of anybody.
Ivan: You weren't just posting, Sam, about this fucking measles outbreak now in your
Ivan: fucking county, for God's sake.
Ivan: This motherfucker is bringing back diseases we had eradicated.
Ivan: He's making people hungry. He has killed millions of kids in Africa.
Ivan: He doesn't give a fuck about anybody.
Ivan: And you know what? These people are all, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Ivan: motherfucker. Fuck you.
Emily: No, the purity politics only applies to Democrats, but it can do no wrong on the other side.
Emily: Or maybe, no, it's bullshit.
Ivan: Hey, by the way, tell me where the fuck Jill Stein is. Can you fucking,
Ivan: hey, can you tell me where the fuck Jill Stein is?
Emily: I'm sorry. You know what the fuck Jill Stein is?
Ivan: The alarm is going to be a warm honor and what's going to destroy the world?
Ivan: Where the fuck is that bitch?
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: Well, look, this is a fundamental cultural difference, too. The right thing
Sam: This fundamentally is about authority and lines of authority and respecting
Sam: authority and blah, blah, blah.
Sam: The left is about diversity of opinion and all of this kind of stuff.
Sam: And so this is very much aligned with all the folks on the right saying,
Sam: well, what if Clinton's in the Epstein files?
Sam: What if Clinton did this? And people on the left are like, well, then fuck him.
Emily: Jail yeah he probably is go put him in jail let him die there let him rot yeah whereas they.
Sam: And they can't imagine this because they're like well you defend your guy no.
Emily: Matter what fucking idiots i can't.
Ivan: I can't i can't anyway all right we were supposedly trying to wrap up.
Emily: Yeah sorry i did that I need that. I did it. Sorry, it was me. No, no, no.
Ivan: But we do it. No, no, no. Sorry, we do. No, no, no. We do this. Fuck.
Ivan: You know, yeah, we're going for a wrap up. And all of a sudden,
Ivan: it's like, what happened? Oh, yeah. Okay.
Sam: And I heard you going for the Taylor Swift lyric. And then Yvonne interrupted
Sam: you. But, you know. Anyway.
Emily: Does anyone have any plans this weekend? Good plans. Fun plans.
Ivan: I think we're done bowling tomorrow.
Sam: I'm going to exercise.
Ivan: I'm going to go bowling, and I'm flying to Puerto Rico on Monday.
Emily: Wow.
Sam: I'm going to work on stuff around home and watch TV.
Emily: Same. Same.
Ivan: There you go.
Sam: Okay, so.
Emily: It's so beautiful in Washington right now. Hopefully it'll be nice this weekend, too.
Sam: Yeah, it's in the 50s. Awesome. Go out, walk.
Sam: Yeah, we probably will go to a park and walk the dog with my mom and my son.
Ivan: I will say, look, one of the issues with what it gets cold here is that my house is made to stay cool.
Ivan: And what happens is that when you've got more floors, they get so damn cold.
Ivan: And so it's just during the day, it's just really uncomfortable.
Ivan: And I And since I Since I don't live like in I have a friend in Mexico City
Ivan: that did the thing Where under the marble They ram these lines To heat the floor
Ivan: Since I don't live in a place that's that cold I don't have that shit here Okay We have.
Emily: A upstairs bathroom And it's way too hot up there Like it's like Sammy cleans my bathroom.
Ivan: She hates it You need more controls.
Emily: It's so easy to do those, though, because you just have to lay it down before you... Sorry.
Sam: As I try to wrap it up for like the eight millionth time... Are you trying to get...
Ivan: As I have my medal here that I will present to you the next time I see you.
Sam: Yes, my medal.
Ivan: For the 2003 Most Valuable Player.
Sam: Curmudgeons-corner.com. Go to the website. You'll find all the ways to contact us.
Sam: Yvonne and I, anyway. Emily, what's the best way to get in touch with you and or plug your podcast?
Emily: Oh, sure. So you can find us at theumsurpodcast at gmail.com.
Emily: You can follow the ums or follow umsir podcast, know thee on Instagram.
Emily: And you can also follow me, Emily and Everett, and I will connect you with Sammy and everyone else.
Emily: So both places are really fun, but we're definitely on Instagram.
Emily: And then you can find us, Samly Blicks on TikTok, because that's where the kids
Emily: are these days. And you guys are too. The kids.
Sam: Yeah, the kids. We're the kids.
Sam: so anyway on the website all the ways to contact us our archive of episodes
Sam: transcripts all that kind of stuff and a link to our patreon so you can give
Sam: us money we like money money is fun,
Sam: and at various levels we'll send you a postcard we'll send you a mug we'll mention
Sam: you on the show we'll do all this kind of stuff importantly at two dollars a
Sam: month or more or if you just ask us we will invite you to our conventions corner
Sam: slack where yvonne and i and emily and And all sorts of other folks are sharing
Sam: links and chatting throughout the week.
Sam: So do either of you have something from the Slack that you would like to highlight?
Ivan: I have it already because I had mentioned something earlier and I realized that
Ivan: I did save it. Okay for this? Okay.
Ivan: Sam has these weird methods of organizing his work and algorithms.
Ivan: Like, he's got these lists sometimes.
Ivan: Now he's working on this list thing where he randomly assigns his tasks and stuff.
Ivan: So he's got these methods, you know, he's got his methods, okay?
Ivan: So I found this guy online that apparently is kin to Sam in this way.
Ivan: For he wrote, I write C++ every day for two hours.
Ivan: And find this a day. I add two hours to the next day This has truly been a game
Ivan: changer Tomorrow I'm supposed to code For three years And this totally sounds
Ivan: like something Sam would do Based on his schedule Absolutely,
Ivan: You know, so yeah, so this guy, this guy is your kind of guy, Sam.
Sam: Excellent. Emily, do you have one?
Emily: What is this? What are we doing?
Ivan: Some random tidbit that's funny.
Sam: Is there some article or something from the Curmudgeon's Chorus Slack that you
Sam: wanted to highlight that we have not talked about on the show?
Sam: Or for that matter, if you have a funny article.
Emily: You know, I want to just read this because as you were saying that,
Emily: I was like, oh, am I supposed to find something in the Slack?
Emily: And this is what I immediately came to, and I will read it out loud.
Emily: What did we get stuck in our rectums last year?
Ivan: Oh!
Sam: Yeah, I think we mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but go ahead, go ahead.
Emily: No, I'm just clicking in there, and I'm like, this is what came up.
Emily: So this is what I'm choosing.
Emily: This is the time of year to be grateful for not having things stuck in our asses
Emily: and to think of those less fortunate than us.
Emily: So spare thought for those Americans who misjudged the capacity of their own orifices.
Emily: All reports are taken from the U.S.
Emily: Consumer Product Safety Commission's database of emergency room visits.
Emily: So, yeah, those are things that got stuck in people's asses and were reported.
Sam: And they have, like.
Ivan: They file reports with details on every single one, yes.
Emily: And people are very creative. I do not want to look at it.
Emily: but I appreciated that. Also, I had like a random, the Slack bot did a custom
Emily: response for me. Have you seen those?
Emily: And in response to someone, it wanted me to put a little poop,
Emily: you know, like a little poop emoji. And I'm like, I don't understand.
Sam: No, there are some auto responses that
Sam: were actually set up by someone who was on the
Sam: Slack years ago who isn't anymore that if if people say certain things it will
Sam: auto respond not just you saw it but other people saw it too so like for instance
Sam: you're you're one you saw is basically if anyone says shit or poop or anything
Sam: like that it just automatically responds with the emoji yes.
Ivan: Well and the thing is that whenever i you know whenever the word fuck is used
Ivan: on the slack it assumes it's me.
Emily: Oh.
Ivan: Which is probably correct.
Sam: There goes Yvonne again.
Emily: Well, I guess I'll use my colorful language going forward. Okay.
Emily: And it can guess who it is.
Sam: Okay. Well, thanks everybody. Thank you, Emily, for joining us once again.
Sam: Thanks for being here. It's been a blast as usual.
Emily: So fun to be here.
Sam: And everybody, listen to us, but also tune in to UMSUR.
Emily: Yeah.
Sam: They also publish most weeks and it's good stuff. Okay.
Sam: And with that, I think we are done. Thanks everybody for listening.
Sam: Have a great week. Stay safe. Stay fun.
Sam: Sorry, because these last two weeks we recorded at the beginning of the week
Sam: two weeks ago and the end of the week this time.
Sam: So it's one of the longest gaps between episodes we've ever had.
Sam: So hopefully you didn't get out of the habit and you're back here.
Sam: I guess if you're still listening here at the end of the episode, you are. So whatever.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: Anyway, have a great week, everybody. We'll see you next time. Everybody say goodbye.
Emily: Goodbye.
Ivan: Bye.
Sam: Goodbye.
Sam: Okay. Yvonne, next time we lose your audio in the middle, we'll take the time
Sam: to fix it, because it did sound, like, noticeably worse ever since that happened.
Ivan: I don't fucking understand.
Sam: It's on the ones in your ears. I can tell.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: Okay. Bye, everyone. Thank you again.
Ivan: Stop. Report.
Sam: Stop. Stop.
Ivan: Stop. Stop.