Ivan: Hello?
Sam: Hey.
Ivan: Rise and shine!
Sam: Shining, rising...
Sam: There we go. Beep. Yes, it has not risen to the level of attention yet.
Sam: You know, you notice because it's the closest one to here. Like,
Sam: when it's the ones downstairs, you don't notice.
Ivan: Well, yeah, well, the other night,
Ivan: a couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the night, the one in our master bedroom
Ivan: at five something in the morning beeped a couple of times.
Sam: I think you mentioned this and Juana made you get up and fix it right then at that second.
Ivan: No, no, no, no. I mentioned in the past.
Sam: If it had happened.
Ivan: She would get to it. But then after we had that conversation, it happened.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: But here's the thing. It didn't beep again. And I'm really confused with what
Ivan: the fuck happened with it.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: I mean, it just... Did it...
Ivan: And then didn't do it again.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: It's been weeks.
Sam: It decided it was okay after all. Or maybe it just died completely.
Sam: No longer enough energy even to beep.
Ivan: Well, these have like an electrical connection.
Sam: Yeah, yeah.
Ivan: As well as the battery.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: I'm wondering if there was a power flicker or something and it's just...
Sam: Flicker.
Ivan: Yeah. Anyway, but I thought that was curious.
Sam: Ah, yes.
Ivan: I noticed that you had not put any topics. I have put some topics.
Sam: I, yeah, I, yeah, it was, I was distracted this week, I guess. I don't know.
Sam: But, yeah. Okay.
Sam: Shall we go? Beep. Is that a yes?
Ivan: Yes. I think it was answering for me.
Sam: Oh, okay, okay, here we go.
Sam: Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, March 14th, 2026.
Sam: It's just after 17 UTC as we're starting to record. And I have two things to say about that.
Sam: One, it's 17 instead of 18 because of clock changes and savings time and all that kind of stuff.
Sam: So we're actually doing this earlier than we normally do it when we do it on a Saturday.
Sam: And so let me just, that is our abbreviated version of the daylight savings time rant.
Sam: We don't have to like get deeper. And second is, of course, it is March 14th, which means it is Pi Day.
Ivan: Oh, it's Pi Day. Yay.
Sam: Pi Day. Yes, indeed.
Ivan: I mean, pretty soon it will be 15 hours.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: So it'd be, you know, 3.14.
Ivan: Oh, well, on Eastern time, I guess. Yeah, true. 17. Yeah, we missed that.
Sam: Oh, well. Anyway, Pi Day. Go get yourself some pie.
Sam: You know, I'm not a big actual fan of pie. Like, cake is fine,
Sam: but I'm not a big fan of pie. They're very, you know, I'll occasionally have
Sam: some pie, but it's not my favorite thing.
Ivan: Well, there is one pie that is one of my favorites. The pecan pie.
Sam: I will say that the pecan pie. I can't say I have a mental, like,
Sam: you say pecan pie, and I'm sure I've had it at least once in my past,
Sam: but I cannot bring to mind what that tastes or even looks like.
Ivan: Like Publix, the supermarket chain here in Florida, makes a fantastic pecan pie.
Ivan: And so the thing is that Publix has these desserts that they have pre-made.
Ivan: They have like, if you go and say you're going to have a little party or something
Ivan: or whatever, you want to pick up a dessert.
Ivan: They'll have like a shelf with like freshly baked pecan pies or apple pies. Okay.
Ivan: And a few other assorted things. But I have heard other people comment,
Ivan: just like I have, that the pecan pie is superb. I have had it many times.
Ivan: It is absolutely delicious. I am not one that usually will have a pecan pie from other places.
Ivan: But that Publix pecan pie here is quite, quite spectacularly good.
Sam: Very well.
Ivan: My other favorite dessert is probably, I don't know, not so easy to get in Washington State.
Ivan: But, I mean, usually the ones that I eat it either because I'm in Puerto Rico
Ivan: and it's available at the restaurants or like my family makes it. A cheese flan.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Not the regular flan, but the cheese flan.
Sam: Cheese flan.
Ivan: Yeah, and a cheese flan is, oh my God, that is just, that is, mmm, delicious.
Ivan: And I don't know, a flan is not a pie.
Ivan: I don't think it's considered a pie.
Sam: Is it more like a pudding?
Ivan: It's more like a custard.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: It's more like a custard.
Sam: Yeah. Right. No crust.
Ivan: Yeah, so, no, no crust. Yeah.
Sam: Like that, the crust is what makes it a pie, right? You have a crust and then you put stuff inside it.
Ivan: Right, exactly. Right. But no, it's not a pie. It's a custard. It's not a pie.
Ivan: But you get the opportunity to try a cheese flan.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: I highly recommend it.
Sam: I will keep this in mind next time someone is offering cheese flan.
Ivan: Or you're in a place that maybe, you know, all of a sudden could be,
Ivan: you went to, you know, many, even though I think it's more, I'm not sure if
Ivan: it's completely Puerto Rican, but it's very typical in Puerto.
Ivan: Well, I don't know if there's a lot of shared foods that Cubans and Puerto Ricans have. Okay.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: I'm not sure if it's ours or theirs. I can't claim that.
Ivan: Ownership for it. I'm not sure, but it's very typical in Puerto Rico.
Ivan: But I'm not sure if we also share that with the Cubans.
Sam: That's exciting. Anyway, our usual agenda, we'll talk about lighter stuff like
Sam: cheese flan and pie at this beginning part of the show. I'll do a couple movies.
Sam: Yvonne may bring up something else. And then after our first break,
Sam: we'll talk about more strictly newsy stuff, newsy stuff.
Ivan: Sam, so last week I got a call from someone that we both know in a panic.
Sam: Oh, no, I know what this is going to be about.
Ivan: Oh, I want it because all of a sudden they decided.
Ivan: And I, you know, I had I had heard people having horror stories and,
Ivan: trying to synchronize their files with Google Drive and losing data and it not being recoverable.
Ivan: I can't remember from where I read it, but I know I read about this,
Ivan: people online complaining about this.
Ivan: And our non-tech savvy, very risk-averse mutual friend for some reason decided.
Ivan: To try to synchronize all their files,
Ivan: using Google Drive now just to be,
Ivan: wait wait wait you can go into this later and then let me explain how this happened
Ivan: you can talk about this later all of a sudden she calls me that there are all
Ivan: these messages that all these files that she was freaking out about preserving,
Ivan: were tossed in the trash.
Ivan: The message said they were tossed in the trash.
Ivan: Problem is that when you clicked on the message that said that they're in the
Ivan: trash, and they weren't in the trash, okay?
Ivan: The fucking message kept saying, oh, all the photos are in the trash.
Ivan: You go in the trash. Nothing in the fucking trash. I mean, nothing, nothing.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Ivan: I was driving. She is screaming. I just, I.
Sam: So you sent her.
Ivan: And then I go, no, no, no, I did not. Okay. I did not.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: What happened is, look, I was on the phone with her an hour and a half.
Ivan: And on the screen, the thing is that the first thing I think is,
Ivan: well, you're Mrs. Backup. Where's your backups?
Ivan: Oh, yeah, I got the drive. It's sitting right beside the computer. It's not plugged in.
Ivan: I'm like, fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Ivan: Lesson number one a time machine backup drive doesn't do backups unless you
Ivan: connect it and set it up to do the backups it can't it doesn't just it can't just sit to.
Sam: Be clear it wasn't it wasn't just sitting there it was still in the box unopened if i.
Ivan: Understand the box unopened yes in the box unopened doesn't do anything. Okay.
Ivan: So she has an old computer and I'm like, that was connected and synchronized.
Ivan: I thought, Hey, let's pull the time machine backup from that computer.
Ivan: Well, the backup was from October.
Ivan: I, I was actually, look, I spent a lot of time looking at it,
Ivan: I knew the files had, some had to be hidden somewhere.
Ivan: Because I went into the recents, and many of the files appeared in the recents listed.
Ivan: And I went and I'm like, show me the folder where they are.
Ivan: And it would open the folder and show the file, but only that one file that
Ivan: recents had, not the rest of them.
Ivan: It was really weird. So I'm realizing, look, there's something here where these
Ivan: files have been made invisible somewhere for some reason, at least a good number of them.
Ivan: But I did not send her to her. It said to her, what happened is that I did.
Ivan: I was like, you are in an earlier time zone than I am.
Ivan: I was, it was getting very late. I was at my parents' house.
Ivan: I, I, I'm like, I was with Manu the day that I took, that we took his cast off.
Ivan: Okay. Just last week, Manu got his cast off from surgery. Okay.
Ivan: So he's recovering very well.
Ivan: And I, I'm like, look, my last, my last thing was, you know what?
Ivan: Let me tell you something. I think you're fucked.
Ivan: And the easiest thing to do is just to restore what you have from October.
Ivan: And then try to figure out what you're missing. Okay? And I've had to do this before with a backup.
Ivan: I once, like, lost stuff. And the backup was a week or two old.
Ivan: And I just had, you know what? Look, I lost some stuff from recently.
Ivan: But I have to go back to that backup. And do the best with the rest that disappeared.
Ivan: You know? It is what it is.
Ivan: That's where I left it. I did not.
Ivan: Direct you to. But she did say, at some point she was going to talk to you,
Ivan: and I was like, well, it's getting very late.
Ivan: You're in earlier times, so I figured you could help. So what did you manage to do.
Sam: Sam?
Ivan: Did you manage to find these files?
Sam: Well, I found some. Here's a few additional things.
Sam: So first of all, to be fair to her as much as I can, the...
Sam: Look, what her thought process was she was installing Google Drive for something
Sam: else in order to access some files.
Sam: And it offered her the opportunity to also sync her desktop and her documents folders.
Sam: And she's like, awesome, an additional backup of those things.
Ivan: Yes.
Sam: So I will turn those off.
Ivan: Yeah, but here's the thing. And this is where my thing that got,
Ivan: I'm like, here's the thing. she has always been so cautious about doing anything.
Sam: Right well so he i.
Ivan: I was like so wait what that was offered you've asked about every fucking thing multiple times.
Sam: So why.
Ivan: Didn't you ask if that was a good.
Sam: Idea yeah yeah so here's the thing yeah fundamentally and
Sam: and people get this screwed up all the time iCloud
Sam: and Google Drive and these things are not
Sam: backups they're not backups they are
Sam: not backups they are they synchronize and
Sam: whenever you have something synchronizing that means
Sam: if something gets removed from
Sam: one of the locations it gets removed from all of them so in some senses it actually
Sam: makes your stuff less secure you know now it's distributed they have it in multiple
Sam: it's safer against some kinds of things but what it's not safe and.
Ivan: Listen it's safer against like i've had the the experience where say my computer died right.
Sam: Yes it is safer What it is not safer against is something getting removed.
Sam: Like you actually, you accidentally delete a file or you move something or,
Sam: you know, cause, cause then it will propagate what you have just done everywhere else.
Ivan: Yeah. Oh, it's removed. Oh, great. Let's delete it everywhere. Everywhere.
Sam: Exactly.
Sam: And also just as a general thing, I mean, it's much, much better than it used to.
Sam: But synchronization used to
Sam: be kind of iffy, you know, like it would sometimes work and sometimes not.
Sam: It now is fairly reliable as long as you're syncing with one thing.
Sam: Once you are trying to sync with multiple things at the same time,
Sam: they can still get confused in a variety of different ways.
Sam: So and by the way I will continue the story from where you left it off but I
Sam: will not be able to finish it because she the last update I had from her was
Sam: yesterday afternoon and there was more that she was going to,
Sam: try to deal with tonight okay um so anyway here's the thing i i looked in a
Sam: bunch of places and i was like it it looks like you know it looks like stuff
Sam: is really gone okay yeah that's what.
Ivan: I that was my thing i kept going into different.
Sam: Places you know it should but stuff.
Ivan: Should be and.
Sam: Nothing was there the one weirdness that
Sam: i noticed that led me somewhere and like i
Sam: also spent several hours on on the phone and on
Sam: screen share with her okay okay um you know so that so i am significantly abbreviating
Sam: this story but one thing that i i noticed at one point that got me suspicious
Sam: there were a bunch of empty folders that nevertheless reported they had multiple gigabytes in them.
Ivan: Oh what the fuck.
Sam: So you would look at finder and the folder would say you know seven gigabytes
Sam: or whatever in the folder but you went in and.
Ivan: There was no no files showing up.
Sam: Right exactly so i i
Sam: had looked at a variety of different things and i was like
Sam: okay and also at the moment we later got it to work but at the moment i could
Sam: not get her screen sharing to let me have control so i'd been reluctant to try
Sam: this earlier but i'm like okay i i need i need you to go into terminal.
Ivan: You need control.
Ivan: Oh, you had her go into terminal. Okay.
Sam: Right. But I couldn't type. Okay.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: So I had her go into terminal and I was, you know,
Sam: saying out loud, okay, now type L S space hyphen L A space.
Sam: And now I'm going to need you to, I'm going to need the path to a directory.
Sam: But luckily I knew, you know, you can drag that from finder into terminal instead
Sam: of typing it. So I'd have her find the folder.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Yeah. So like, if you've got a folder or a file in finder that you want to access
Sam: in terminal, you can just drag that into terminal and the name of it will show up good.
Ivan: To know i.
Sam: Didn't realize.
Ivan: Okay all right.
Sam: So i had her do that i started looking and then i saw like i listed the directory
Sam: of one of the empty directories and boom it's full of files whoa so i had her
Sam: copy one of the files onto,
Sam: i had her plug in an external drive you know copy it onto there and check it
Sam: and it was there The file opened.
Sam: It was successfully there. So I'm like, Oh.
Ivan: Fucking hell.
Sam: I'm like, okay, let's do this then. So I set her up from terminal to copy documents,
Sam: desktop, and like one other place recursively, just copy everything it could
Sam: find onto the external drive.
Sam: Now this was going to take many hours. It would run overnight.
Sam: So I let it run overnight, but I warned her as well.
Sam: Like, Because we spot-checked a few things. There are still some things missing.
Sam: And here is the other thing. And this applies to the time machine backups,
Sam: because we ended up checking this as well.
Sam: And, you know, if any of our listeners know better, feel free to chime in,
Sam: because maybe Apple's gotten smarter. But it used to be the case.
Sam: ICloud also does not play well with Time Machine, okay?
Sam: Because fundamentally, Time Machine will only back up the files that are actually
Sam: on your hard drive at any given time.
Ivan: You mean, okay, so let me see if I understand what,
Ivan: What you mean by this, because you've got an option for Time Machine,
Ivan: I mean, for iCloud Drive to either optimize your storage or to have all the
Ivan: files copied in both places.
Sam: Yes.
Ivan: Are you saying that if you're in optimized storage mode, basically,
Ivan: if the file is not, there's just an alias, but not the file, it won't get backed up?
Sam: Correct.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: So, and on her old machine, which was... It was set to optimize.
Sam: It was set to optimize because there just wasn't enough space for everything.
Ivan: There just wasn't enough space.
Sam: Her new machine was set to download everything. But it hadn't finished.
Sam: But the time machine backup had never been attached to it.
Ivan: Correct. And also, it hadn't finished downloading everything.
Sam: Correct.
Ivan: Because her connection is not that fast either. So, yeah. Yeah.
Sam: So, so anyway, so I was like, look, when we're going to copy over all of this
Sam: stuff, but there's still clearly stuff missing.
Sam: So we, we caught, you know, it went overnight. I talked to her briefly in the morning.
Sam: She confirmed lots and lots of stuff was there, but there were things missing.
Sam: You know there were things that just weren't there and then we checked her backups
Sam: from like october same well same thing but the the problem is there because that one was on optimize,
Sam: right just the fact that it wasn't in the most recent time machine backup doesn't
Sam: mean it's not in any Time Machine backup.
Sam: Because, you know, Time Machine lets you, you can look at last week's backup
Sam: or the week before or the week after.
Sam: So it's very well possible that some file might be in the backup from two years
Sam: ago, but not the backup from last week.
Ivan: Right, but not in a recent one. That's right, correct.
Sam: So like to fully search for this stuff, you would have to comprehensively look
Sam: through all the backups, not just the most recent one.
Sam: Okay um and so i was like look i'll help you do that if if i have to so but
Sam: i was like look your next step i'm sorry just just call apple like hope and pray,
Sam: that they have a backup of your iCloud from before you corrupted it okay because
Sam: and i guess we didn't say explicitly what happened was when she turned on iCloud
Sam: the google sync Like, it just started deleting all kinds of crap.
Sam: My best guess was it was deleting stuff that wasn't locally present on her Mac
Sam: and making it not present anywhere.
Sam: Like, it was deleting those aliases or something.
Ivan: Yeah, okay.
Sam: That's a complete guess. I don't know. I don't know exactly what was happening,
Sam: but things were disappearing.
Sam: And just hope that Apple actually has a backup. I'm sure this happens to people
Sam: and they do whatever. Anyway, she eventually did call them.
Sam: And we had checked, by the way, online on iCloud.com. We'd looked at it recently
Sam: deleted. There was nothing there.
Sam: But what Apple told her, hey, look, we used to do this all the time.
Sam: We used to like, you know, we actually kept things for 30 days and we could
Sam: restore. But we don't do that anymore.
Sam: But, but they said the reason we don't do it anymore is because we made it available
Sam: directly in iCloud.com.
Sam: There is a restore feature.
Sam: That, and we don't guarantee how long things will be available.
Sam: Like it might, it might be a couple of weeks. It might be a few days,
Sam: but as soon as possible, go check there.
Sam: And I'd looked at the recently deleted, but I had not known to go look for a store.
Ivan: I did not. And she, she actually texted and asked me that. And I'm like,
Ivan: I, I'm like, I said, I didn't know about this.
Sam: So, so that That is the thing that she theoretically is going to be trying tonight
Sam: and, and will be potentially screen sharing me again to see.
Sam: And I'm like, well, cross your fingers, hope it's there because like,
Sam: then, then you just like, you know, restore everything to the state it was in
Sam: like three days ago or something.
Sam: Of course, with her luck, there will have been a new backup made after the things
Sam: were deleted and you can't get to the old backup or something like that.
Sam: Um, Anyway, we'll see. But, you know, the moral of the story,
Sam: as always, is backups are not backups unless you test or restore.
Sam: And you have to take them seriously. And you have to sort of understand where
Sam: things are going and why.
Sam: And synchronization is not backup. It's not the same thing. and I'll say,
Sam: I'm pretty obsessive about this too, but I have gaps too.
Sam: Like I was just, I was going through an exercise the other day.
Ivan: Here it is. I just, by the way, I just went to iCloud.com and I just saw this
Ivan: and they do have this very prominent thing there that is called data recovery.
Ivan: And it says, recover files deleted from both iCloud Drive and other apps within
Ivan: the last 30 days or restore an earlier version of your calendar contacts and Safari bookmarks.
Sam: Nice.
Ivan: Huh. And it's...
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Now, I will mention one other thing with her scenario, and I'm sure we've bored everybody.
Sam: But, like, apparently there was stuff that was on Google.
Ivan: Well, we have a lot of nerds that listen to us.
Sam: Yeah. So what the fuck? But apparently there was also stuff on Google Drive.
Sam: She apparently is on three Google Drives.
Sam: One is a personal drive, and then there's one for one organization she's involved
Sam: in, and there's another for another organization she's involved in.
Sam: She connected all three of them and told all three of them to sync. Okay.
Sam: And apparently things that were on those Google drives for those organizations
Sam: that had nothing to do with her personal files also have gotten deleted.
Sam: And I have no idea what was going on there or what to do about that.
Ivan: The thing is, I'm telling you right now, I had heard horror stories about the
Ivan: fucking Google drive synchronization.
Ivan: I probably shouldn't look for it online, but I had heard these and how it just
Ivan: basically made shit just disappear.
Ivan: And people were very frustrated that, you know, you would contact Google and
Ivan: whatever. And even though they say a whole bunch of different things about,
Ivan: well, you can do this, do that to restore. How basically you just couldn't.
Ivan: It was it was a waste of time. Well, you just lost the stuff.
Sam: Anyway, what I was going to say about myself is I am also fairly uptight about backups.
Ivan: I know. And that's the thing that gets me. She is very uptight about all these fucking backups.
Sam: But let me say, let me say, I, I, I am missing stuff anyway.
Sam: Um, because, because of, you know, every once in a while I slip up,
Sam: like, I'll, I'll tell you what I was doing recently.
Sam: I was trying, I, I, I've developed, I set up a new way of doing stats for curmudgeon's
Sam: corner downloads. Okay.
Sam: And I was going to be like, okay, I will reconstruct the entire history all
Sam: the way back to 2007 using this. I just have to like, you know,
Sam: have it analyze the old log files.
Sam: So I went looking for all my old backup log, backed up log files of curmudgeons
Sam: corner download logs going back to 2007.
Sam: Well, guess what? I've got gaps.
Sam: Like, basically, 2007 and 2008, I have no record of whatsoever. Can't find them at all.
Sam: In 2018 or 19 or something like that, I've got, like, a six-month gap, you know?
Sam: And these are all places where I know what happened is at one period of time or another, I got slack.
Sam: There was something that wasn't working, and I didn't. And I probably had an
Sam: alarm going that told me, hey, your backup's old, your backup's old, your backup's old.
Sam: And I'm backing up the log files from the server that only keeps them for like a few weeks.
Sam: And I let it go more than a few weeks before I fixed it.
Sam: And so a gap ensued, you know, and so I can't reconstruct the entire history.
Sam: I can reconstruct most of it, but I've got a few gaps.
Sam: And i know other things over the years have
Sam: probably gotten gone missing and there have been gaps at various
Sam: points and there there was one
Sam: time uh recently i i you know
Sam: i i probably never gave the follow-up on this there was one of alex's drives
Sam: that you know he keeps his videos on for his youtube channel that the drive
Sam: died okay um but and i'm like it's okay i have backups I went to check the backup.
Sam: The backup was old. The backup had like, was missing...
Sam: I actually went, I paid to restore the backup. The backup ended up having about
Sam: half of what I expected on it.
Sam: And I was like, oh crap, there's a bunch of stuff missing.
Sam: And what am I going to do? So I looked into like disk recovery services.
Sam: So I'm like, I'm going to like, I'm going to actually send this disk off,
Sam: do disk recovery. One place gave me an estimate, but it was like insanely high.
Sam: It was like thousands of dollars.
Sam: And I'm like, I cannot justify thousands of dollars for this right now.
Sam: I found some other place that was like going to be like less.
Sam: It was still expensive. Okay. It was still many hundreds of dollars,
Sam: but it was three digits and not four. Okay.
Sam: And I'm like, okay, maybe we can consider this, but I will hold off for a little
Sam: bit. I did a little bit of more research, different places.
Sam: The place I got that had the multi-thousand dollar estimate,
Sam: I found out had an online reputation of just gouging people for like,
Sam: people are desperate for their data, so we're going to charge them a lot more.
Sam: And there are other services that'll do the same thing at the same quality for
Sam: better prices, et cetera.
Sam: And so I did some research and I was finally ready.
Sam: And it had been, it had been probably at this point, two to three years since the drive had died.
Sam: And I was like, okay, I'm finally ready. I'm going to send this sucker in.
Sam: And on a whim, I'm like, let me plug it in one more time just to see.
Ivan: Oh, get the fuck out of here. It worked.
Sam: It worked. And I'm like, holy fuck.
Sam: And I immediately started copying
Sam: everything off that drive onto a fresh drive. I restored everything.
Sam: You know, it just needed a little rest. It was tired.
Ivan: It was tired, Sam.
Sam: Exactly.
Ivan: You know, we're all tired.
Sam: You know, and I had been, I had tried multiple, before I even thought about
Sam: I'm going to restore to drive, I'm going to send it to disk recovery, whatever.
Sam: I have, of course, tried everything. I had tried everything.
Ivan: That's absolutely hilarious.
Sam: You know, but like three years later, I plugged the drive in and kaboom, it's there.
Sam: Holy shit anyway I got everything that's hilarious anyway okay whoa it's been
Sam: 30 minutes should I even do movies should we move on.
Ivan: We could skip the movies for this week we did a whole bunch of movies let's go I.
Sam: Will preview what they will be for next time Murder by Death from 1976 have you heard of it.
Ivan: I've heard of it but I don't.
Sam: Think I've...
Ivan: Who is the stars of this movie?
Sam: Oh, let's see. Starring Eileen Brennan, Truman Capote, James Coco,
Sam: Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Elsa...
Ivan: I've heard of it, but I don't remember it right now.
Sam: Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith.
Ivan: I probably watched it, but I don't remember it right now.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: Now that you mention all the... Yeah, it rings a bell now that you read the actress list.
Sam: And movie two, a small little movie that you have probably not heard of from 2002 yeah,
Sam: Star Wars Episode II, Attack of the Clones.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Yeah, obscure.
Ivan: Now, of course, that's a classic.
Sam: Yes. Anyway, we'll save them for next week. Let's take a break.
Sam: I once again owe an Apple dream that I did not do because I suck.
Sam: So instead, you get some other random thing.
Sam: And so here's a break, and we'll be back, and we'll talk newsy stuff. Back after this.
Sam: And we are back. Welcome, Yvonne.
Ivan: Okay, so, by the way, I did go in to the restore property there.
Ivan: It's got a list of files that I deleted.
Sam: Good.
Ivan: Recently. Delete it March 8th. Delete it March 8th. Yeah.
Ivan: It seems to be possible.
Sam: Good.
Ivan: That that could work.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Okay. so okay crossing fingers cross yes let's cross fingers okay and.
Sam: Toes whatever else yeah okay so what's our first actual serious thing of the uh week ivan.
Ivan: Hey how's that iran war thing going sam what i mean some people were making
Ivan: were making comments that it's a misnomer to call it the Iran War, but I am like...
Ivan: I guess because Iran didn't start it.
Ivan: Okay, I get that. Well, what should we call it?
Sam: The War of Northern Aggression? Oh, no, wait, that was what the South called the Civil War.
Sam: No.
Ivan: I mean, it seems fitting, actually, but... The Trump War? The Trump-Epstein-Files War.
Ivan: I like that name. This should be the Trump Epstein files distraction war. Yes.
Sam: You know, on the one hand, I am fully on board with the idea that part of the
Sam: motivation of this probably was distraction.
Sam: But I think that also understates it. I think there...
Sam: There, there's real stuff going on here.
Ivan: I think it's a motivator.
Sam: They're real, they're real people dying. It, it, it, you know.
Ivan: No, no, no, but, but I'm not talking, I'm not trying to minimize that in any
Ivan: way, but the, what I'm trying to do is like, the reality is that what is the
Ivan: driver that caused this stupid thing,
Ivan: this barbaric act to be done? I mean, there's a.
Sam: I mean, one, one of them is that.
Ivan: The other one is that he's, I don't know. Yeah. BB as well. Yeah. The BB War. There you go.
Ivan: BB's Revenge and Destruction Tour.
Sam: Look, in terms of how it's going, I think you've got...
Sam: Different ways of looking at it. The administration would like you and the Israelis
Sam: would like you to just judge it based on how much shit have we blown up.
Sam: We've blown up a bunch of shit. Okay.
Ivan: That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, yeah, that we,
Ivan: we, I mean, yeah, we've blown up a bunch of shit, Sam, like a lot.
Sam: And, and, you know, Hey, that's a success in its own right. Right.
Sam: And they can say once again, like they did a few months ago,
Sam: that we have success as we've put them back decades. Let's be clear.
Ivan: We're not saying that's a success. You're saying that they claim it's a success.
Sam: Yeah. I mean, look, they can say just like they did a few months ago that they've
Sam: ended Iran's military capabilities forever.
Ivan: Forever, Sam. for.
Sam: A few months anyway you know look and there's no question they killed a whole
Sam: bunch of the leadership you know and in fact like one of the.
Ivan: Yeah and and has that improved the the leadership of iran is it is it now uh
Ivan: uh you know the kind of leadership that and i quote he he was saying And Iran's
Ivan: leadership goes out on the streets and kills its own people.
Ivan: And many people were saying, hey, is he talking about Minnesota?
Ivan: Is he talking about Iran?
Sam: Right. Well, before we even get there, let me state something else.
Sam: We had talked about how much of the Iranian leadership was killed here.
Sam: One of the things that came out about this is that there were people that we
Sam: were actually thinking about as potential new leadership to take over that we
Sam: thought we could work with better.
Sam: We accidentally killed them, too.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: It's like we had people specifically pointed out that said, after we killed
Sam: Ayatollah, hopefully this guy will become the leader and we think we can work with them. Oops.
Ivan: We killed them, too. We killed them.
Ivan: You know, a friend of mine sent me a, I think it was, it was actually today,
Ivan: talking about the situation that the word of the day is fucktangular.
Ivan: And it seems appropriate.
Ivan: Yeah, fucktangular. And it's a noun. And the definition is when a situation isn't just messy.
Ivan: It's fucked up from every angle.
Ivan: You fix one problem and three more pop up. Likely they're awaiting their turn.
Ivan: And this is, definitely, this fits the bill.
Ivan: Because they think they fixed stuff. All they've made is everything way worse.
Ivan: What is the improvement in the situation for the people of Iran?
Ivan: None that I can see. Are we safer, Sam?
Sam: I don't believe so.
Ivan: Nope. Okay. Right. Have we achieved any tangible success that you could point
Ivan: to other than the blowing up that you mentioned? We blew shit up and killed people.
Ivan: Yeah, we blew shit up. Is that a success?
Sam: Well, the problem is with answering that question is nobody's defined what the
Sam: goals even are. So how can you measure whether or not...
Ivan: Exactly. You don't even know what the fuck we're trying to accomplish.
Ivan: So how the hell do you say that it's been...
Ivan: And, okay, I mean, the other problem is, what's the endgame?
Ivan: Like you said, nobody's set to success.
Ivan: Nobody's defined an endgame. And like right now, we're just,
Ivan: hey, we're just going to send more bombs.
Ivan: Just more bombs. ah, okay, and what now?
Ivan: And the other thing that shows the...
Ivan: The number of dead U.S. military compared to other military campaigns that have
Ivan: not involved boots on the ground is astoundingly high, okay?
Ivan: The other thing is just, it is very obvious that we have, once again,
Ivan: with this administration, they put in charge just people for their loyalty,
Ivan: not for their knowledge.
Ivan: They don't understand much of anything. They fail to prepare for any contingencies.
Ivan: Because if you were going to attack Iran, what was the number one threat that
Ivan: you should have prepared for?
Sam: Clowns.
Ivan: Oh, clowns. Oh.
Ivan: Flying clowns? That would have been interesting.
Sam: Yeah. The Iranians are known for their clown militias.
Ivan: For the flying clown. Oh, wow.
Ivan: Okay. Well, it's not the clowns. It's these dumbass fucking drones that they've
Ivan: been selling the Russians.
Sam: Oh, I thought you were going to say closing the Straits of Hormuz.
Sam: Okay, we'll get to that in a second.
Ivan: No, or the Strait of Hormuz. It's my theory decided. Yeah, the theory decided
Ivan: that it's not the Strait of Hormuz.
Ivan: It's the Strait as the S-D-R-A-I-G-H-T, Strait of Horror Moose.
Ivan: I didn't realize that we had moose that were running in horror in the middle
Ivan: of the water. But anyway.
Sam: Right.
Ivan: Well, no, the whole drone attack, which, by the way, also forced that closure.
Ivan: But the reality is that you're launching million dollar missiles against $50,000
Ivan: or cheaper fucking drones.
Ivan: And that is just idiotic. I mean, the Ukrainians have developed,
Ivan: obviously, much cheaper ways of defending these, and nobody prepared for it.
Ivan: Nobody spent the minute preparing for it. You started this thing,
Ivan: it's just asymmetrical. We send these massive bombs.
Ivan: They counter with these smaller devices that are plentiful and cheap and can cause damage.
Ivan: Obviously, not the same damage as these massive bombs that we sent.
Ivan: But it doesn't need to be to to cause the fucking Strait of Hormuz to be closed.
Ivan: I mean, you closed off the oil traffic.
Ivan: Oil is now at over one hundred dollars a barrel.
Ivan: They keep saying, oh, you know, what was Pete Hex that said?
Ivan: Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, any ship can go through. The problem is just,
Ivan: you know, the Iranians are shooting. I'm like, I don't know shit, Sherlock, really?
Ivan: And I'm like, I don't know which tank or company.
Ivan: Is going to go and say, you know, hey, let's just go through there anyway.
Sam: Well, that's what Donald Trump said they should do. Just man up and go.
Ivan: Man up and go. Yeah. Now, today, he said something about that.
Ivan: Everybody should send their navies over there to reopen it.
Ivan: And that doesn't that doesn't. I mean, just because we send a whole bunch of
Ivan: military ships over there doesn't reopen it.
Sam: I mean, the volume of ships. Wait, someone pointed out like in the past,
Sam: like in the 80s, I believe we did have a situation where at one point the American
Sam: Navy and some others escorted some tankers through the state.
Ivan: But it wasn't it wasn't this kind of threat.
Sam: Well, no, here's the thing. Here's the fundamental thing. The reason why having
Sam: American warships around the shipping was protective was the Iranians would be like,
Sam: oh, if we hit the Americans,
Sam: then the Americans will attack us. And so it's a deterrent.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: The Americans are already attacking. There's no deterrent there anymore.
Sam: Right. There's no deterrent.
Ivan: But it was beyond that. Remember that back then the threat wasn't these types
Ivan: of drones and things and whatever.
Ivan: The threat was small boats that were approaching the tankers and attacking them with small weapons.
Ivan: The reality is that with the Navy being there, there were threats that could
Ivan: be easily disabled by these ships. The reality is...
Ivan: You know, they had fast boats that would go around and stop them.
Ivan: This threat was a lot smaller.
Ivan: This is, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of drones all of a sudden
Ivan: being launched by air against ships.
Ivan: And you can't just, just because there's, I mean, how many Navy,
Ivan: you probably, what I said is if you're going to want to defend these,
Ivan: you're probably going to have to, like, what,
Ivan: one Navy ship with the type of weapons needed to stop this, basically by tanker?
Ivan: Because most of the weapons that I saw that are effective against this are the
Ivan: type of closed weapons that these ships have to defend against threats that,
Ivan: you know, that use bullets, basically.
Ivan: All right? That is ideally what you want to do. You don't want to be using missiles
Ivan: or whatever. You want to be using guns.
Ivan: The guns only really work at close range.
Ivan: So that means that the ship, the Navy ship, needs to be right by the damn tankards
Ivan: escorting in order to be effective.
Ivan: If there is a significant gap between them and the other one,
Ivan: yeah, they'll be able to stop the Navy ship from getting hit,
Ivan: but not the fucking tankard they're escorting.
Sam: And there are two things there, too. One, we don't have enough.
Ivan: And we don't have enough ships.
Sam: Two, and I've heard this specifically called out as well, is that those defenses,
Sam: you know, they're not perfect.
Sam: And so the Navy is actually worried that if they did this, they'd get some Navy ships sunk as well.
Ivan: That's right.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Damaged, at least.
Sam: At least damaged. Yes.
Ivan: At least damaged. Yeah. It's not as easy as it sounds. My anti-strike. Rich.
Sam: So look,
Sam: Again, like in terms of, there are a lot of folks on the right who were not
Sam: enthused about this in the first place.
Sam: And maybe we can talk a little bit about the divisions on the right coming out of this.
Sam: But who are desperately trying to get Donald Trump to just declare victory and go home.
Sam: You know, call it, we won, we succeeded, we got everything we needed, we're done.
Sam: So far he is refusing now i see the speculation being you know that he's just he's still assuming,
Sam: that any of the disruptions that are caught coming out of this will be short-lived,
Sam: and the iranian iranians will collapse at any moment and it'll just be over
Sam: in a couple weeks as he originally said.
Ivan: They have no incentive to collapse. There is nothing. What is the incentive
Ivan: that they have right now to...
Sam: Well, you know, kill a few more of them, you know, things change.
Sam: But like, but the speculation is that if it doesn't collapse immediately,
Sam: then it's only a matter of time till we do get Trump collapsing.
Sam: And basically saying, okay, the stock market is down too much.
Sam: Oil is too high for too long.
Sam: This is my approval ratings are going down even further.
Sam: Although I believe it was Tucker Carlson who said that based on his conversations
Sam: with Donald Trump, he doesn't believe that Trump is actually seeing any of this.
Sam: Like he is being completely isolated to
Sam: any negative opinions about this like so
Sam: nobody is telling him that this is unpopular nobody
Sam: is telling him the negative things people are only telling
Sam: him yes sir it's going great everything's wonderful and so he doesn't believe
Sam: it but that at some point the pain will become obvious and he'll just like literally
Sam: declare victory and go home He never will admit he was wrong, but he'll say,
Sam: we've decimated them, we've destroyed them, everything's great, and we're done.
Ivan: Great. Fantastic.
Ivan: And so we wait.
Sam: And so we wait. So let's, you know, let's talk about some of that pain.
Sam: Because this again, like the theme to intro it is that,
Sam: and we talked about this last week, but it really, really does appear and more
Sam: and more has come out basically validating this over last week,
Sam: that the Trump administration really honestly thought that the Iranians would
Sam: react in some sort of tepid, half-hearted way,
Sam: maybe throw a couple missiles out with no severe consequences and be done in a few days.
Sam: And that basically would just take it while we attack them and,
Sam: hey, maybe the people would rise up and we'd have a new friendly government
Sam: there. They really thought this.
Sam: And so they were absolutely shocked when the Iranians actually fought back and
Sam: attacked civilian infrastructure all over the region, et cetera.
Sam: And now, you know, as we sit, the horror moose is closed.
Sam: Price of oil has gone up significantly.
Sam: What, it's almost doubled, hasn't it? Isn't it close to doubled at this point?
Ivan: Yeah, it was about $60, $70.
Ivan: It's over $100 a barrel right now. The thing is that...
Sam: Stock market's down too, et cetera.
Ivan: But the thing is that gas prices in the last 20 years, because of refinery capacity
Ivan: being significantly diminished,
Ivan: are far more sensitive to oil moves.
Ivan: And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that 20 years ago,
Ivan: $150 oil, which we did get in some brief moments, okay, like it was well north
Ivan: of $100, caused gas prices at $4, okay?
Ivan: Now, $100 oil gets you $4 or $5 gas, just at $100, okay?
Ivan: And so the impact is way worse. Look, I'm looking at recent gas prices that
Ivan: were updated, like, on the GasBuddy app.
Ivan: I mean, regular is, right now, north of $4, like, in most places that I see
Ivan: that recently updated prices.
Sam: I think we're over $5.
Ivan: Yeah. As high as $4 at $80. This is for regular.
Ivan: I saw premium already at places at over $5, okay?
Ivan: In a lot of places It's You
Ivan: know It's crazy Okay And so This is something that You know Oh We didn't expect
Ivan: this But this administration Is populated by Idiots Who never expect anything to happen I just,
Ivan: You think people are thrilled that gas is at $4 or $5 a gallon right now?
Sam: I just checked GasBuddy here locally. The spread near me is pretty widespread
Sam: for regular, from $4.45 to $5.49.
Ivan: Depending on which gas station you're going. By the way, I noticed that a lot
Ivan: of the lower prices on GasBuddy are gas stations that haven't reported prices recently.
Ivan: And so it's you know the lower.
Sam: Ones i just reported were 20 hours ago the higher ones were also 20 hours ago so.
Ivan: Okay so that's that's actually pretty recent but you're yeah but but yours
Ivan: are all over four dollars okay all right i
Ivan: mean yeah i mean it's just this is it's a shit show man i mean i i none of these
Ivan: guys expected any of this uh and let me just share it yeah I just shared this
Ivan: thing on Bloomberg where in December,
Ivan: Trump had this rally, and the background on the rally was lower prices, bigger paychecks.
Ivan: That was the banner. He was awed in December.
Ivan: How's that working out?
Sam: Look, you mentioned gas prices. One of the things is if we have a temporary
Sam: spike that's like one or two weeks and then it goes back down again,
Sam: fine. But wait, wait, wait. But here's the thing.
Ivan: But these spikes are never temporary.
Sam: Right. But if it is, then things will go back to normal.
Sam: But like you said, they never are. But what people don't automatically recognize
Sam: is the follow-on effects.
Sam: Okay. Gasoline In the US A very high proportion of products Are transported by truck.
Ivan: Diesel prices are at oh my god the the price of diesel you think gas diesel
Ivan: has been over five dollars.
Sam: So the point is that what
Sam: that means is because gas prices are high everything else is going to increase
Sam: in price too because oh god guess what that thing you buy at your local walmart
Sam: did not grow in the walmart parking lot it had to be it had to be shipped No.
Ivan: You're shitting me. So it isn't just a big farm outside in the Walmart parking
Ivan: lot growing shorts and, you know, T-shirts and, you know, sporting goods.
Ivan: There isn't like a farm section out there growing sporting goods.
Ivan: That would be quite interesting, I would say.
Sam: You've got the orchard full of basketball trees.
Ivan: Oh, my God. That would be wonderful.
Sam: What.
Ivan: Are you doing today oh i'm gonna go you go oh no do you like to pick apples
Ivan: no no no i go pick basketballs.
Sam: Yes anyway so this all has you know knock-on effects like you can't,
Sam: and this gets me back to and i hate to be redundant but it's just this it's
Sam: so stunning the level of ignorance and lack of foresight.
Sam: I mean, this is what people have said about, you know, potential consequences of,
Sam: Doing things in the Middle East, going back generations.
Ivan: All right, so, by the way, I checked the diesel price. The national average
Ivan: price of diesel has reached $492 a gallon today. That was yesterday.
Ivan: By the end of the weekend, we will likely see an average of $5 a gallon national
Ivan: average for diesel, which will likely re-accelerate inflation the longer it sticks around.
Ivan: And the revised inflation measures. Look, I just shared the news about it earlier this week.
Ivan: The PCE, which is the, oh my God, the damn, the PCE,
Ivan: it's the personal consumption expenditure index, which is basically what you're
Ivan: spending, not looking at prices, but how much you're actually spending. Okay.
Ivan: Are you having to spend more for stuff on aggregate? Okay.
Ivan: That went up 3.1% in January. Okay.
Ivan: And that's, you know, that means that for the same basket of stuff that you're
Ivan: buying, it's going up at an annual rate of 3.1%.
Ivan: That was like before this shock.
Ivan: Okay they revised fourth quarter gdp to be down 0.7 we are 100 percent in stagflation
Ivan: territory right now which.
Sam: Means high inflation low growth correct.
Ivan: Right that's.
Sam: Good though right.
Ivan: It's good if you're, like, half nostalgia for the late 1970s with,
Ivan: like, high unemployment, gas lines.
Sam: It was a good time.
Ivan: You know, interest rates over 10%. If that's your, you know,
Ivan: make America great again theme, then okay.
Sam: I'm sure that when Donald came up with that slogan, he was thinking about the
Sam: Carter administration.
Ivan: Yeah, that was what he was looking at. It was the Carter administration.
Sam: Which, by the way.
Ivan: A lot of those things were not Carter's fault.
Sam: I mean, including, you know, Iran stuff, just to be clear.
Ivan: Including Iran, yeah. Fuck me.
Ivan: And by the way, a lot of that stuff was not Jimmy Carter's fault.
Ivan: He inherited a lot of this from the Nixon and Ford administration,
Ivan: from shit that happened before the Arab oil embargo, you know,
Ivan: other policies that were that were done in the past, the fucking hangover from
Ivan: the Vietnam War and all the spending happened with the Vietnam War.
Ivan: I mean, there was it was a bad hangover of an economy that he inherited.
Ivan: OK, with all these things happening at the same time. And and Iran.
Ivan: And fucking Iran again.
Sam: So I don't know, like in trying to predict the future for this,
Sam: because Trump is so unpredictable, you have the whole range of possibilities here.
Sam: You have him declaring victory and going home within a few days.
Sam: And of course, people have pointed out, even if he does, Iran has a vote.
Sam: You know, like Iran doesn't have to stop hostilities because we decide that we're done.
Ivan: Correct.
Sam: You know, that's very.
Ivan: That's totally correct. You know, I know that the, the, a lot of the countries
Ivan: in the Persian Gulf that are getting shot at are actively trying to make this
Ivan: stop. It's costing them billions.
Sam: Well a whole lot of the area
Sam: i mean they were trying to build brands around how
Sam: they're safe and friendly and they're
Sam: not like the rest of the middle east they're like you know it's a good place
Sam: to do business hell it's a good place to go on vacation you know all this kind
Sam: of stuff and and that brand is somewhat diminished by drones coming in and blowing
Sam: things up somewhat Look.
Ivan: Recovering from this will be quite painful for them.
Ivan: I mean, a brand, like you said, that had been tried to be cultivated over decades...
Ivan: Has been shattered by this.
Sam: So the happy side of the equation, I guess, is declare victory and go home and
Sam: then live with the fact that you actually didn't make anything better for anybody.
Sam: In fact, it looks like you probably made things worse.
Sam: Like you killed some of the moderates that were potentially the hope for doing
Sam: something better after the Ayatollah died naturally.
Ivan: And instead put into place somebody about venezuela
Ivan: and i was yesterday at the airport with my boss who is from venezuela by the
Ivan: way and he was we we were talking about this and you know what the you know
Ivan: what the deal is with venezuela and you know we've all forgotten about venezuela
Ivan: already okay by the way and how it's,
Ivan: It really hasn't improved as of now, the situation in Venezuela,
Ivan: even with this whole thing with them capturing Maduro.
Ivan: Has it really improved that he could go back to visit?
Ivan: No. As a matter of fact, one of the problems that he has, like,
Ivan: right now is that as many Venezuelans that are not in Venezuela is that they can't get passports.
Ivan: And if you try to get a passport i've seen people like brokering them and you
Ivan: have to pay like five thousand dollars for a passport and they can't they are not allowed to go home,
Ivan: without a venezuelan passport so these people are not can't go home.
Sam: Well look here's the thing and
Sam: i know we've said this before we're always very repetitive
Sam: on the show repetitive on the show repetitive on
Sam: the show but donald trump's
Sam: goal in venezuela was never to make things better
Sam: in venezuela ever that wasn't part of his plan his plan was at best it was i
Sam: want somebody in there that i can make deals with to benefit me me that's it
Sam: that's it and you can argue that he's potentially achieved that.
Sam: Like, is he getting something out of this?
Sam: Like, you know, I'm sure he is. Right. And that was, that was the goal goal achieved.
Sam: Maybe he's got something similar going on in Iran. Have we checked out what
Sam: kind of deals Kushner's got going on yet?
Ivan: Yeah, I mean, I think that's always the first thing to look at is what the hell?
Ivan: What deals does Kushner have?
Sam: You know, anyway, the best scenario was the backing off, like, whatever.
Sam: The worst case, of course, is we get sucked into something prolonged here because,
Sam: you know, Iran continues to expand it. They have no reason not to.
Sam: And we continue to get increasing chaos that lasts for an extended period of
Sam: time, like years, not months, you know, it'll probably be somewhere in between that. Who knows?
Sam: But like, that's the range of possibilities here.
Sam: I mean, I saw one report, I don't know if this was confirmed yet,
Sam: but that Iran, you know, there were negotiations happening between the U.S.
Sam: Administration and Iran up until like literally days before we attacked them, right?
Sam: And I saw one report that basically said, look, the Iranians had realized that
Sam: all Donald really cared about was...
Sam: Or at least what they thought all he really cared about, was bragging rights
Sam: to be able to say, that deal Obama did was shit, and I got a better deal.
Sam: So the Iranians were actually starting to offer things that went beyond the
Sam: Obama deal in the hopes that Donald Trump would just do exactly that.
Sam: Obama's deal was shit. I came up with something better.
Ivan: I got a better deal.
Sam: Give me the Nobel Peace Prize again, please. You know, but that, no.
Sam: Like, in the end, even though the Iranians were there and starting to offer
Sam: stuff that was at least comparable and maybe better to the previous deal,
Sam: the other voices got in Donald's head and convinced him that doing this would be better.
Ivan: Ah, nice. Well, I think, well, the voice that got to him was one.
Sam: You're going to say Bibi?
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: I mean, I think he was definitely part of it, but I think we shouldn't pretend
Sam: that there aren't a lot of folks on this side of the...
Sam: Yeah, I think Bibi was very loud, but there are certainly people within his
Sam: administration that were cheering that on.
Sam: Now there were some that weren't like
Sam: supposedly vance was not thrilled by this at
Sam: all but was donald gonna pay attention to
Sam: jd vance fuck that no of course
Sam: not you know i mean and you know apparently there were people that were saying
Sam: be careful donald straits of hormuz be careful donald iran can cause trouble
Sam: be careful donald this won't be like your little attack before,
Sam: this will be a big thing, and they were all just completely ignored.
Ivan: Well, so here we are.
Sam: So here we are. Anything else to say, or should we take a break and move on?
Ivan: Nah, let's take a break.
Sam: Okay. Break, break, break, break, break, break.
Sam: And there's the end.
Ivan: Okay here's an interesting thing yes i
Ivan: i i had mentioned that when i went to uh
Ivan: on the slack i'd mentioned and when i went i got
Ivan: to miami all of a sudden me just
Ivan: well it was quite early in the morning it was
Ivan: 4 45 in the morning i'm getting to the airport i'm like seeing this qatar
Ivan: airways plane parked there and usually in a
Ivan: location where it's never parked and i'm like why the fuck is
Ivan: this plane parked here and i'm like oh you idiot of course it
Ivan: can't go home right uh but then
Ivan: when i got back last night there were two of them okay okay so i'm like what
Ivan: the fuck well i just saw that one plane did come down from london from from
Ivan: qatar airways to miami yesterday but right now i i checked to see what aircraft
Ivan: are in the air for Qatar Airways right now.
Ivan: There are two aircraft right now that, according to Flight Radar,
Ivan: are supposedly flying to Doha right now.
Ivan: I don't know if they're carrying passengers, but there are, yeah,
Ivan: there are two flights that seem to be trying to land in Qatar today.
Ivan: So I'm not sure if they're just risking it and saying, fuck it.
Ivan: Or is there a material change right now in the situation that is allowing this right now to happen?
Ivan: Because there's one from Dallas, and there's one from Miami.
Ivan: They're both heading there, according to the flight plan. And they're in the air right now.
Ivan: So I just thought that was interesting. But anyway, all right.
Ivan: So I had picked that subject. So what do you want to talk about, Sam?
Sam: Ah, geez. You know, you had mentioned...
Sam: When we first started recording, I hadn't put anything on the list.
Sam: Yeah. And there are two reasons for that. One, I will fully admit,
Sam: I was not paying as much attention to this this week.
Sam: I'm not going to give a full update here, but basically, I had my surgery thing on Monday.
Ivan: Uh-huh.
Sam: Right. And as it turns out, there's one more step I have to do.
Sam: It's just a doctor's office visit in a few days, but there's one more step I
Sam: have to do. And so I still have, crap inside my body.
Sam: And it's actually hurt more this time than last time around.
Sam: So I've been spending a lot of time just sitting, doing nothing,
Sam: watching TV with the kid, trying to avoid moving because moving hurts.
Sam: So I haven't been paying as much attention to other things.
Sam: And also just, you know, this goes to what we were talking about last week.
Sam: You know, okay, war in Iran.
Sam: Okay, big. but other than that how many
Sam: big stories have there been this week they're not
Sam: that many i'm i'm looking at like you know google news right now scrolling up
Sam: and down and like let's see i i on the home page okay i ran stuff i ran stuff
Sam: we did have you know a shooting and a synagogue attack.
Sam: So we did have that kind of stuff.
Sam: We, we have, Hey.
Ivan: But I, you were, you know, I tipped an election.
Sam: I, I, I've thought about literally tipped an election.
Sam: Okay, fine. Tell, I was going to talk about a few of these other things that
Sam: are nothing, but since go ahead and do this one, then I can talk about more nothing.
Ivan: Basically, look, there was an election for mayor over here, the city of Boca, city of Boca Raton.
Ivan: Now, the reality is that this is a nonpart, a partisan election,
Ivan: the people we know, so theoretically, but no, but the reality is that I've been
Ivan: through these elections.
Ivan: Most of the time, there's no talk about the candidates have not in the past
Ivan: identified themselves as aligned, that they're doing this with the party or whatever.
Ivan: Most of the stuff that they do is pretty innocuous.
Ivan: But there was a controversy here related to a very big bill,
Ivan: a very big project that had been pushed by the previous mayor,
Ivan: who, he wasn't up for re-election, and he's actually in recent weeks declared
Ivan: himself as a kind of MAGA,
Ivan: I'm going to go MAGA-like guy, but he's more a rhino.
Ivan: And so he was going to run for the House under by the Republicans.
Ivan: As a matter of fact, I had no idea. Honestly, he had kept his political leanings pretty silent.
Ivan: I had no idea until recent times that he was even a Republican.
Ivan: Okay. I'd met this guy personally every time. I had no idea.
Ivan: But this development bill was passed by the city council downtown.
Ivan: A lot of people very loudly were opposing it. and a group of people were rallying,
Ivan: you know, people to vote against the development, okay?
Ivan: It was going to give a whole bunch of a big tract of public land,
Ivan: a 99-year lease to a developer.
Ivan: The city was going to make a significant amount of money, but a lot of people
Ivan: were opposed to the deal to the developer.
Ivan: And this caused, like, huge turnout.
Ivan: And when I'm talking about turnout is my wife, who ran a polling station,
Ivan: told me that in recent city elections, they had had, like, about a hundred voters show up.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: In this one, she had 450 people vote in her polling station.
Ivan: I mean, like four times the normal amount of people.
Ivan: So it drove turnout significantly.
Ivan: This coalition that was pushing for, I guess, to vote against the development,
Ivan: also had put a slate of people to be on the city council, but not actually someone to run for mayor.
Ivan: They hadn't endorsed anybody.
Ivan: The guy who is a Democrat on there that I believe he had been on the city council,
Ivan: he was he had come out and was personally against the development.
Ivan: But what he had said is, look, this is the will of the people.
Ivan: It's being put up to a vote.
Ivan: If the people want to do it, I'm going to follow the law and I'm going to,
Ivan: you know, do what the people vote for, even though I'm personally against it.
Ivan: But, you know, but that was his position. The other two were for what actually
Ivan: now that there's the other guy who came in second place. He was also against the project.
Ivan: I don't know. He was a Republican. So bottom line is that the deal,
Ivan: so much turnout, the slate in the city council that the Save Boca Coalition,
Ivan: as they're called, put up, they all swept their seats. They won. Okay.
Ivan: They won the seats. And then for the mayor, the guy that won was a guy that
Ivan: I think a lot of people do was a Democrat and he won and he won.
Ivan: Well, the first count came out.
Ivan: It was by one seat, by one vote.
Sam: That was already a machine recount of the original count.
Ivan: Yeah, that's right. And I, shit, I didn't.
Sam: One vote. One vote.
Ivan: One vote. And I almost didn't go to vote. Because I was like busy.
Sam: There was only what?
Ivan: It was like 15,000.
Sam: 15,000 votes total. So this is like a relatively small election with not that
Sam: many people voting to begin with.
Ivan: Right.
Sam: Still one vote.
Ivan: It was one vote. But I almost didn't go, Sam.
Sam: How would you have felt?
Ivan: Oh, my God. I would have been like, and I was voting for the guy,
Ivan: you know, for Andy Thompson. I was going to go vote for him, okay?
Ivan: I was like, no, no, no. I was like, no, fucking, I got to go vote. I got to go vote, okay?
Ivan: And so I went and I fucking went to vote. And when I saw that, I'm like, holy shit.
Ivan: Apparently a second recount that I think they did it came out that he was ahead
Ivan: by five so I guess he found like four you know four votes are you sure you'll have those in.
Sam: The right order and the five was.
Ivan: After the one and not the one after five was after the one yeah five was after the one.
Sam: That's still pretty close.
Ivan: That's still very close I mean occasionally you.
Sam: Do get these exact tie elections that they like do coin flips and crap for.
Ivan: Yeah,
Ivan: I don't I do think that people make an ad a lot about this being the Democrat
Ivan: Republican or a thing or whatever.
Ivan: I think that this election doesn't really didn't really carry that.
Sam: Well, the one thing I don't know, the one thing also, though,
Sam: this was this was a final election, not a primary. Right. This is he's won.
Ivan: This is an election. This was the election. Yes.
Sam: Right. And so what's what's interesting about this is another this is another
Sam: one of these cases where you don't have.
Sam: You know a rank choice you don't have a runoff you
Sam: don't have a whatever because nobody got
Sam: a majority here like basically and
Sam: i know you say don't don't really count this as partisan because it's not quite
Sam: the same thing but like if you add up the quote-unquote republicans they were
Sam: way ahead there were more of them there were more but they were split and and
Sam: this ties to i guess i I guess here's another topic that's related,
Sam: since we're talking about split votes and that kind of stuff,
Sam: which is the California governor's race that's happening right now.
Sam: And for those who haven't been following that, California does have a primary.
Ivan: The jungle primary.
Sam: But it's a jungle primary. And so what that means is the top two candidates
Sam: end up in the general election regardless of party.
Sam: So, like, if the top two are Democrat, you have a general election with two Democrats.
Sam: If the top two are Republican, the general election is between two Republicans.
Sam: And so what is happening right there in California right now is the Democrats
Sam: are actually somewhat—California is a very Democratic state right now.
Sam: You know, they tend to win by large margins in statewide elections,
Sam: but there are like a thousand Democratic candidates and there's like two Republican
Sam: candidates, maybe three or four, but two big ones.
Sam: And if you look at recent polling...
Sam: The two Republicans are coming in in the number one and number two slots because
Sam: all of the Democrats are splitting the rest of the vote.
Ivan: Oh, God. With what percentage of the vote? Like with 30%, 30%, 40%, 35%?
Sam: Less. Oh, God. Let me see if I can find some.
Sam: I'll see if I can find some polling on this to actually get you. Hold on. Let me look.
Sam: As I look this up.
Sam: Let's see. Here we go. 270 to win. Blah, blah, blah. That UX sucks.
Sam: Latest polls from RCP. Let's try this.
Sam: Okay. So this one poll I'm looking at, well,
Sam: just looking at the latest two polls, one has a Democrat in the lead,
Sam: one has a Republican in the lead and it's not the
Sam: ux is not helpful here but it has the
Sam: the the leading candidate is just under 20 in
Sam: these polls and with by the way something like 25 undecided okay so man so like
Sam: people have been begging like democrats who are polling at like five or six
Sam: percent to please drop out drop out.
Ivan: Drop out, drop the fuck out.
Sam: You know, and we don't have, I forget exactly when this election is,
Sam: but it's coming up before too long.
Sam: And so, yeah, the worry is that two Republicans, neither one of which could
Sam: ever, ever, ever win in California normally, might be up against each other
Sam: with the Democrats shut out of the general election in California.
Ivan: Hmm.
Sam: Now, 25% undecided, all they have to do is consolidate around some of the higher-ranking
Sam: Democrats, and this problem goes away. So that may still happen.
Sam: But still, you know, this is where, like, I like in general the idea of open primaries.
Sam: Jungle primaries, things like this where it could be Democrat versus Democrat
Sam: or Republican versus Republican, and if that's what the constituency is.
Sam: But the straight-up jungle primary, I think, is the stupidest way of doing this.
Sam: Like, if you're going to do something like this, you want something like rank-choice
Sam: voting or instant runoffs or something like that where you take the people at
Sam: the bottom and you redistribute their support and you keep doing that until
Sam: somebody has a majority.
Sam: You don't just say, okay, top two in the jungle primary go against each other
Sam: Because then you get this kind of situation where where the top two got like
Sam: 17 percent and 13 percent or something like that and are not representative at all.
Sam: And so I don't know. You may get some craziness here.
Sam: I mean, I believe this is how Schwarzenegger won, too, in this kind of split
Sam: where where the Democrats split and you ended up having a Republican sneak in.
Sam: Now, in that case, you got a fairly moderate Republican.
Sam: Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a crazy MAGA type. In fact, in more recent days,
Sam: he's been very anti-MAGA.
Sam: But I don't even know about these people at the top.
Sam: I mean, I guess you should look into it, but I don't know. Crazy stuff.
Ivan: It is crazy stuff.
Sam: Okay. Should, should, should, should, should I find something else to talk about to finish things up?
Ivan: Uh, let's see. Uh,
Ivan: yeah.
Sam: Yeah.
Ivan: Because I picked that one too.
Sam: Yeah, you've been picking everything, you know, and I feel like I have a duty to pick something.
Sam: And look, I'll be a lighter, fluffier thing again.
Sam: Just an off news. Yesterday morning.
Sam: It was announced that, and this hits one of my special interests,
Sam: Alex and I, amongst the other shows that we're watching, we're making our way through Doctor Who.
Sam: From the very beginning, the 1960s Doctor Who's.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: We're actually into the 70s at this point. We're into the third Doctor in the 1970s at this point.
Sam: But it is somewhat famous that a significant portion of the episodes from the
Sam: 1960s, the first and second Doctors in Doctor Who, are missing.
Sam: Because the BBC, at one point, to save costs...
Ivan: Trashed them?
Sam: Yes. Well, not trashed. They reused the videotape. they're like oh.
Ivan: Yeah and that's a common thing it wasn't just a bbc that's a common thing that happened.
Sam: Yeah like a lot of the tonight show
Sam: is missing for that same reason yeah a lot of american shows but you know basically
Sam: they were like oh we we're we need to make this new show go get some scrap tape
Sam: from that room over there and you know so they they taped over a bunch of these
Sam: episodes so they're lost.
Sam: And, you know, some were able to be recovered because they'd been distributed
Sam: overseas and people found them in archives in Australia and Africa and wherever.
Sam: But there were...
Sam: It had been 13 years since the last one of these missing episodes had been found.
Sam: But yesterday, it was announced that two more were found. Two more of these
Sam: lost episodes. Oh, cool.
Sam: And as it turns out, this was not in some TV station archive overseas where
Sam: these things were shipped for broadcast in some other country.
Sam: This was a private collector who had had these in their personal stash along
Sam: with thousands of other, you know, they were a collector.
Sam: They were a collector of rare film and videotape and other stuff.
Sam: And they apparently were reluctant to come forward while they were alive.
Sam: But once they died because there's some
Sam: question on the legality of having possession of some
Sam: of these things okay oh now
Sam: now the bbc has said you know don't
Sam: worry about it if you've got these things we'll be grateful to have them back
Sam: just give them back you know but right but there's some question um anyway the
Sam: guy died and his estate was going through his archives and got in touch with
Sam: some film archival organization that's dedicated towards saving,
Sam: you know,
Sam: historical stuff like this.
Sam: Okay. And they'd been going through his archives and finding stuff.
Sam: And there may be other things as well in here, but amongst them were two of
Sam: the archival, or two of the missing episodes. And let me be specific.
Sam: It was from 19...
Sam: Oh, come on. You know, if you're going to write an article about this,
Sam: put the specifics in here. Let me find a better article.
Sam: This one has some of the information, but not the specific information that I wanted to say. Okay.
Sam: You know, websites suck. I go to another news site and it's full of pop-ups
Sam: and like subscribe here and doesn't even have the article that I want. And okay.
Sam: Oh, and I have to say I'm okay with cookies. That's important.
Sam: Okay, these are from the third season from 1965. It's the first and third episodes
Sam: of the 12-part epic called The Daleks' Master Plan.
Sam: And so, like, more than half of this story is missing.
Sam: Alex and I already watched this story. We watch reconstructions and stuff because
Sam: people have made like take surviving snapshots and and put put put it together
Sam: with because all of the audio survived because people at home would turn on
Sam: their tape recorders and record the audio.
Sam: So 100 percent of the audio survived from all of these.
Ivan: But it's the images.
Sam: But it's the images that were missing. And for some of them,
Sam: they had like production pictures where, you know, there were still images available.
Sam: And sometimes there were little
Sam: clips because a clip was used in a trailer and the trailer survived.
Sam: So there were a few seconds here and there. And so people have made reconstruction.
Sam: So we watched the reconstructions of the missing episodes as we went through these.
Sam: But anyway, so private collection, they found this. They're restoring them.
Sam: They will be available to the public in April.
Sam: And yeah so cool news i
Sam: guess it's one of those things where you
Sam: know people had people had been starting to give up hope that
Sam: any more of these missing episodes would ever been found but would ever be found
Sam: because there were 13 years but with this people are like you know they're probably
Sam: more in private collections still out there that people are just you know they
Sam: don't want to give them up while they're alive but once they die maybe they'll
Sam: come to light you know whatever.
Sam: And, you know, so we'll see.
Sam: Now, you know, these 1960s episodes...
Sam: You know, it's a, it's an acquired taste. This, you know, the special effects were horrible.
Sam: The acting was not super great. Like, you know, some people,
Sam: some of the actors were better than others.
Sam: The plots were relatively thin, very slowly paced. Like this is a 12 part episode, 12 part story.
Sam: Each episode is like 20 something minutes long. and, you know,
Sam: these artificial, like, cliffhangers to draw it out.
Sam: And, you know, Alex and I have been enjoying them because you can make fun of
Sam: the things that are bad about it.
Sam: But anyway, they found two new episodes. So that's exciting.
Sam: And maybe someday somebody will find those Johnny Carson episodes,
Sam: those, you know, early Tonight Show episodes, you know, or other things.
Sam: But it is amazing to think about how, you know, these aren't that long ago.
Sam: And it is hard to find some of this stuff.
Sam: I remember there was another story in the U.S.
Sam: And I forget which shows this impacted.
Sam: But there were a bunch. There was some lady that just literally VHS taped everything
Sam: she watched for like 30 years before she died.
Ivan: That's a lot of tapes.
Sam: That's a lot of tapes. She had rooms full of VHS tapes of like everything.
Sam: And her collection her collection ended up being the only remaining like and,
Sam: archive tape of some like critically important historical episodes of like several
Sam: TV shows and some news events and some other stuff that turned out nobody was
Sam: keeping this shit, but she was, you know?
Ivan: Look, I, I, I still, I remember that back then.
Ivan: And I, I, I, I, I don't know what happened with all the tapes that I made, but I, I had,
Ivan: collection of stuff that i taped that
Ivan: was there were several hundred tapes there okay
Ivan: of many different things like that and some
Ivan: of them were in one tape there probably had been like multiple episodes of things
Ivan: because the tapes were multi-hour tapes and so you know you you just wouldn't
Ivan: use one tape for something maybe i recorded four or five episodes of a tv show
Ivan: on on a tape or something. Oh, my God.
Ivan: Oh, my God. You have a tape. What the fuck is on that tape?
Sam: I've got a case full of tapes here. I'm picking out two at random.
Sam: Well, this one's not labeled, so who knows what that is. Let's find.
Sam: These are labeled only with Roman numerals, so I don't know what those are.
Sam: But the one I picked here, It has a November of 1988 edition of a TV show called
Sam: World Monitor that apparently my dad was a guest on,
Sam: and The Wizard of Oz taped off TV.
Ivan: There you go.
Sam: Let's see what else we got. Let me try to pick up another random tape here.
Sam: Oh, that's off a camcorder, something with my dad. Oh, this one's a classic.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: November 26th, 1988. My appearance on the It's Academic game show in the Washington.
Ivan: D.C. area. Hey, we got to digitize that. Come on.
Sam: And also on the same tape, Dallas, the early years.
Ivan: Ha ha!
Ivan: Anyway, hey, we got to digitize that one.
Sam: I think, yeah, I think somebody else digitized that already,
Sam: but I don't know if I know where to find it.
Sam: I have some still pictures from it, but I haven't seen that video in a while.
Ivan: Of course, he also has these digital audio tapes of our old Curmudgeon Corner
Ivan: podcast somewhere, which, you know.
Sam: Someday maybe it'll be found or or you know maybe it was lost in a move someday i don't know.
Ivan: Like or maybe they or maybe we'll go put pop the tapes in like as happened with
Ivan: like old backup tapes that i i had that once happened i popped in the tapes that they were blank.
Sam: Right that would suck.
Ivan: Yeah all right well i think we we can end it we.
Sam: Can end it early we don't we We don't have to stretch it out to make our.
Ivan: Two-hour money. No, you didn't have things.
Sam: I was ill-prepared. I was ill-prepared.
Sam: We did have that plantier guy making comments about how AI would marginalize,
Sam: like, smart women or something.
Ivan: No, smart people.
Sam: Smart people in general. Well, he specifically called out women, too.
Ivan: Oh, he did. I didn't hear that part.
Sam: Oh, yeah, yeah. He was like, this will, this will enable the,
Sam: this will increase the power of working class men and diminish the power of
Sam: like those uppity women.
Ivan: Yep. Awesome, huh?
Sam: Very much so. Anyway, shall we end? Are you looking for anything new?
Ivan: No, no, we don't have anything. Let's just wrap it up.
Sam: You know, you were complaining just like last week or the week before about
Sam: all these crazy weeks with so much happening.
Ivan: You know, I already picked a couple of subjects. It's okay. We can end it early.
Sam: Well, you know, but the thing is, like, I honestly don't feel like there was.
Sam: I mean, obviously, the war in Iran is huge, but I don't feel like there was
Sam: anything else really big and exciting.
Sam: I was looking through lists of news, and I was like, I don't care about that.
Sam: I don't care about that. I don't need to talk about that.
Ivan: Okay, that, you know, okay. So we can end it early.
Sam: You know?
Ivan: It's good. It's not a big deal.
Sam: Could go back to murder by death. No, we'll leave that for next week, like we said. Okay.
Sam: Thank you for joining us for Curmudgeons Corner again. go to curmudgeons-corner.com.
Sam: You can find all the ways to contact us. You can find our archives,
Sam: you can find transcripts, you can find all that fun stuff.
Sam: You can also find a link to our Patreon where you can give us money and at various levels,
Sam: You can get us mentioning you on the show, us ringing a bell,
Sam: us sending you a postcard, us sending you a mug, all these exciting things.
Sam: Or at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask nicely, you can get invited to
Sam: our Commissions Core Slack where Yvonne and I and others are chatting and sharing
Sam: links throughout the week.
Sam: So Yvonne, I guess for our one last thing, what's something fun and exciting
Sam: from the slack that we have not mentioned on the show.
Ivan: Well, Sam went to the post office and there's a sign there, okay,
Ivan: about what to do to get your packages ready.
Ivan: Is your packages. Is your packages.
Sam: Yes, is your packages.
Ivan: Is your packages. And returns ready to mail. Tapped up. Packaged. Label tapped down.
Ivan: Written addressed. Tape is for sale on the retail wall.
Ivan: Please only service pets allowed inside. Thank you. So you tapped it,
Ivan: huh? Did you tap your packages?
Sam: I tapped it at the post office, indeed.
Ivan: Nice. Nice. Very nice, Sam. Very nice. Very good.
Sam: You know, they needed to see my package.
Ivan: Yes, they needed to see your package.
Ivan: Make sure it was tapped up. Another thing
Ivan: that I found kind of funny was that Musk actually somewhere admitted that his
Ivan: whole thing that he's done with XAI and how he's decided to try to make it into
Ivan: some kind of like unwoke chatbot.
Ivan: I guess it's led to an exodus of employees that he really doesn't have.
Sam: Surprise.
Ivan: Yeah, that they don't really want to work over there to do the shit that he
Ivan: wants XAI to do. How shocking.
Sam: You know, but isn't his whole mode of operation to fire everybody anyway? So what's the big deal?
Ivan: Well, the thing is that, you know, there's a thing of like him wanting to fire
Ivan: people. The thing is that he started this company himself.
Ivan: So he had been doing the hiring. The problem is that he can't keep the people he wants to keep.
Sam: Well then you know he didn't really want them after
Sam: all right although apparently from what you sent over to the slack he is going
Sam: through he is ordering people to go back through old interviews yeah for people
Sam: that they turned down to reevaluate them and right maybe ask them to come after all.
Ivan: Yes it's so stupid i don't know how the hell he keeps any but i it's just it's just,
Ivan: It's amazing that any he runs actually runs.
Sam: Yes. And I don't know.
Sam: There's just so much that right now I feel like, I mean, not only his companies,
Sam: but other companies too, are trying to figure out a lot of things.
Sam: Specifically in response to ai but also in response to trump also in response
Sam: to other things and there's a lot of there's a lot of flailing going on i mean
Sam: some of the stuff will stick and work some of it will not and i don't know it
Sam: seems like we're it's a very chaotic time,
Sam: and i feel like we're in for more chaos before things stabilize again i don't know.
Ivan: I think a A lot of it is just a lack of understanding what things are and what
Ivan: they can do and what they can't do and so forth.
Ivan: And, you know, and we have had like waves of tech that have been confusing in this way before.
Ivan: I mean, look, remember the dot bomb, the dot bomb, the dot, the dot,
Ivan: the dot, the dot com crash in part was because we kept building shit.
Ivan: We didn't really understand what the fuck we were doing.
Ivan: We're just playing with it. We didn't know what could make money,
Ivan: what didn't make money, what was value, what was not value.
Ivan: It was just a lot of that. I think that you've got a lot of that confusion in
Ivan: a lot of different places.
Ivan: And the one thing that I might take away from all of this shit that they were
Ivan: talking about recently, most people, is this lack of understanding that tools are tools.
Ivan: And that, you know what, if you give an idiot a tool, it doesn't matter how
Ivan: good a tool is, the idiot is not going to get value out of the tool because the guy's an idiot!
Ivan: It doesn't matter how good a tool it is.
Sam: But, yeah.
Ivan: But a lot of people over time, I mean, this is historical.
Ivan: Keep thinking that the tool will overcome the stupidity of the person there.
Ivan: I still remember this was a big thing in the 1980s with GM with robots.
Ivan: They were going to robotize the entire production line, blah,
Ivan: blah, blah. We're going to, you know, we're going to take the people out.
Ivan: This is the whole thing. And it turned into a fucking disaster.
Sam: Okay.
Ivan: It turned into a complete disaster where a lot of the robots had to be scrapped.
Ivan: Because even still, the robots depended on a proper process,
Ivan: somebody telling them what to do correctly, managing it, doing it.
Ivan: And in the end, the robots just were not that as efficient as they thought they would be.
Ivan: So it was but it was another thing where it's not that the robots didn't have their place.
Ivan: It's just that everybody overestimated what the robots could do and then wound
Ivan: up having to scrap a whole bunch of that automation because the automation turned
Ivan: out to be more expensive, wasteful, and stupid.
Sam: Well, and it's also a question of timing, too. Like, some things that were not
Sam: actually practical and the best way to do things at point A in time,
Sam: three or four years later actually were.
Ivan: Correct.
Sam: You know, because people were just getting ahead of where the technology actually was.
Ivan: Yeah, they were getting ahead. They were getting behind. It's one of those things.
Ivan: I mean, shit. Yeah, I mean, it's just engaging that.
Ivan: Look, it's part of what's happened with the EV industry like right now.
Ivan: It's not that electric cars are disappearing or like people.
Ivan: People get all the wrong impressions.
Ivan: Oh, my God, nobody's buying an electric car. That's not the case.
Ivan: That's not what's happening.
Ivan: It's a thing of like where the market is and whether you're trying to sell too
Ivan: many of them or too little of them.
Ivan: We had a period where there were not enough cars. There was more demand and
Ivan: prices went up. And now there's a period where all of a sudden the man does not cut up to where...
Ivan: Production is and so it creates
Ivan: these these issues with you know with companies right now where they're over
Ivan: you know they overbuilt and now they're scaling back and then i'm going to tell
Ivan: you right now with gas i can guarantee you one thing gas at this price guess
Ivan: what's going to get a boost yeah.
Sam: Like i i i'm i haven't i haven't pumped gas since i bought my car in july.
Ivan: Yeah.
Sam: And I'm quite happy with that. I don't miss it one tiny bit.
Ivan: Nope. My wife's just said the same thing. She doesn't miss the fucking going
Ivan: to a gas. I mean, she was always, like, horrible about running low on gas regularly.
Ivan: And that the fact that she doesn't have to worry about it anymore is just.
Sam: Like, so liberating. Yeah. And just plug it in overnight. I'm good. You know?
Ivan: It's here at home. And you just plug it in over there. And the car's ready to go. That's it.
Sam: Yeah. So. anyway.
Ivan: All right.
Sam: Okay. We are done. Thank you everybody for joining us for yet another Curmudgeon's
Sam: Corner. Stay safe. Have fun. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
Sam: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Happy Pi Day.
Ivan: Pi, Pi Day.
Sam: By the time you listen to this, it won't be Pi Day anymore. It won't be Pi Day.
Sam: But you know, we're recording it on Pi Day and that's all that really matters, right?
Sam: Our experience is what matters, not your experience as a listener.
Ivan: Exactly.
Sam: Who the fuck cares about you? That's, it's all about us.
Ivan: Oh, actually, as a matter of fact, as I just finished saying that,
Ivan: there's an article like right now that came out on Bloomberg.
Ivan: Surging gas prices reignite EV interest. No shit.
Ivan: Maybe that's what Trump is trying to reignite the EV industry. That's what he's doing.
Sam: Well this.
Ivan: Is this is he's playing chess sam it's 5d chess that's.
Sam: What it is the 5g 5 5d chess
Sam: theory that i heard about
Sam: this is that he is intentionally raising
Sam: oil prices because that will put
Sam: additional first of all you know he
Sam: relaxed some of the sanctions on russia
Sam: uh so they could sell some oil so that helps out
Sam: putin also the increased the increased
Sam: oil prices will put a lot of pressure on europe and
Sam: further weaken them and cause them
Sam: to reassess their positions vis-a-vis ukraine and russia and nato and everything
Sam: else and so and also while he doesn't like oil prices are not popular amongst
Sam: the high oil prices are not popular amongst the general populace,
Sam: he has a bunch of buddies who own oil companies who will enjoy the higher prices.
Sam: And so that's what matters here. And that's the 5G chess that's going on here,
Sam: or 5D chess, not G. 5G is a different thing.
Ivan: He'd probably play 5G chess, actually. What are we talking about?
Sam: So it's helping all the people he cares about. It's helping Putin.
Sam: It's hurting the Europeans. It's helping his buddies at the oil companies. Done.
Sam: There you go. Okay, we're done.
Sam: Yes, sure. Okay, goodbye, everybody. We'll see you next week.
Sam: We're out of here. Yeah, bye.
Sam: Okay, that's it. Heading stop. Later, Yvonne. Have a good weekend.
Ivan: Okay.
Sam: Bye.
Ivan: Bye.