The Chat
The Chat
#39 Face Off
Chatting about rising chaos, fantasy football drafts, things that bring the TSA down on you, the radicals of the sixties, and how Robert is allergic to his own face.
All right, and we're here. We are here. We are here. It's been. When was the last time we got together?
Speaker 2:Two weeks ago.
Speaker 1:Was it really? Yeah, I was out of town. I was out of town last week, ever. I thought it was okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know it does. Well, I think you and I we were talking about it beforehand. There's We've been a little busy. Mucho chaos, yeah yeah, what was going on with you? Oh, just get stuff crazy.
Speaker 1:No, so yeah, it was. I had a Dentist appointment this week. A friend came in out of nowhere. I've rearranged my office. Yeah, I didn't know if you saw that.
Speaker 2:I like it. I get to stare at books now that shelf collapsed.
Speaker 1:Oh, right after I got everything fixed, everything in place. I moved a, moved a bookshelf, I assembled a new bookshelf, I moved three whiteboards to different locations, moved every book in the place which is like there, like 600 books in here, and as soon as I got that one all lined up and perfect, the shelf collapsed at the top and collapsed down all the way through. So that is a that one. We ordered another replacement to To fit the current well done.
Speaker 1:Well done. So that was part of this week. Monday was a holiday and I don't know how you feel about holidays. I used to hate him because I like to work a lot and now I love them, but Monday holidays put my whole week behind.
Speaker 2:Oh, dude, it totally put me behind this week. Yeah, I've been playing catch-up since Tuesday, and it's not that I didn't have a good time on Monday.
Speaker 2:No I do you know what? What happened, though, was at the end of the day. I started not dreading the next day, but I'm like, oh geez, I have so many things because I was gone on the weekend, because I usually dabble on the weekends and get get some things done, so during you know, in the beginning of the week, I'm ready to rock totally. Yeah, I was totally behind this week.
Speaker 1:I'd see fantasy football drafts this weekend, which I'm not even a football guy, but like I'm friends with people who are football people and I just love them, so I'm like you know, this is fun, let's oh, it's fun, I'm gonna leave with my boys, my sons is that new, or have you always done that?
Speaker 1:That's. This is the second year We've done that one and then I've been in a league with my neighbors like Lorenz and, and Prestigard runs it friends of podcast, and that's been years and it's just a blast like trash talking with those guys, yeah, really fun and the drafts always good.
Speaker 2:All mine went to funk the same year Did you really like three leads and they all went, they all disappeared.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, I was. I was hoping to finish a first draft this week, but as I'm like, proceeding along, I had to revise my word count down. I was gonna do 20,000 words again.
Speaker 2:This week working on right now girl in the box 56.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll finish it next week. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm at the last Act turn right now. I've written some stuff ahead. I have a pretty good idea of what's going on. It's just it's been all over the place. Oh, and I found out I'm allergic to my own face. What does that mean? So I went to the dermatologist because I've had this rash on my forehead where it's kind of like red and it's been annoying and it Kind of goes in and out. Sometimes this worse, sometimes is better, and it turns out that I am allergic. This section of my skin is allergic to the mites that are in the skin. What, yes, I I'm like I just thought it was some sort of contact dermatitis. So I like changed soaps, changed shampoos, changed sleep masks, and it's still just kind of red, itchy and annoying. She takes one look at it. She likes scrape some stuff off of it and goes and puts it on her microscope. She's like you are allergic to the mites in your skin. She's like it's okay, you're not lousy, you know.
Speaker 2:Everyone has these mites?
Speaker 1:It's just this particular patch.
Speaker 2:I'm just a guy in Asheville, wasn't it? It was a guy in Asheville.
Speaker 1:I wish this is pretty pretty. What do you call it? It precedes that, but I was like I'm just gonna say I'm allergic to my own face.
Speaker 2:What do you?
Speaker 1:do about that? You have a cream, yes, it involves an ivermectin ivermectin, yes, which is a Nobel Prize winning Nobel Prize for medicine, winning Dwarmer oh, my other things. Oh right, it basically kills the Whatever. And will it kill your ringworm too? Well, let's hope so. I think you have to take it internally in order to kill ringworm.
Speaker 2:Mmm, delicious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. So, anyway, that was my chaos allergic to your own face.
Speaker 2:I thought you were gonna say like I keep looking in the mirror and cringing or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do but for different reasons. But all that happened this week it was just like one thing after another where it's like a point meant this and none of it was. I wrote it up in my my mighty networks community yesterday because I've just kind of been half laughing this week or it's like I cannot Get ahead. Like my buddy calls me up literally yesterday he's I haven't seen him but like twice in the last seven years, since I love Minnesota, he's like hey, I'm in Nashville for like 24 hours and I got a meeting this afternoon in a town called Franklin I don't know if you've heard of it. It's like one of the suburbs like Jacket. Come on over and we had a great time and it's all been, you know, good and fun. But it's like when you're trying to get a regimented, ordered schedule executed, the more chaos, the harder it is to like.
Speaker 2:I think that's my biggest stressor these days. Yeah, like, I'm typically Pretty okay with having tasks throughout the day. Like you know, I take my kids to school, and all that although next week my oldest starts driving. Oh yeah, like for real driving which will be which, which will be good for her, good for she and my son. But I don't know I'm gonna miss it. Yeah, cuz I kind of I like it that's why I do it, you know.
Speaker 1:Put a governor on the car where it's like you cannot go faster than 30 miles an hour.
Speaker 2:Well, well, she, she has a Tesla, so we can see exactly what's going on, oh, really. Yeah, and you can like, she can't go over a certain certain speed limit, and I mean it's not.
Speaker 1:You know, speed limit is 60 and I'm going 60 in a 20 mile an hour zone now.
Speaker 2:No, but it's.
Speaker 1:I mean, she's a, she's a safe driver, she's, she's good and hey man, we were all safe drivers when we were driving with our parents. It was when me and my buddy got out on our own that we would find out that his car could go 125 miles an hour.
Speaker 2:That's the thing is she's got. She's one of those that she has skin in the game, yeah, and she is very particular about her stuff Mm-hmm, about her stuff getting messed up. So I have a feeling that she will take better care of her car than I would. Yeah, she's just that's how she's wired. Now number two I have no idea if he's ever gonna have a car under our house.
Speaker 2:I, I don't even know, I don't know. But yeah, you know. Going back to like, it's funny when these random tasks pop up in my week, right, because I have I in my head. It's like I know what my week looks like. And then it's like, oh, I gotta take the dog, like I gotta take my dog. I took my dog in last week. Yep, she has like a little mass on her tail that has to be removed. And, of course, nowadays I'm sorry to all you animal lovers out there you can spend a fortune on dogs. Yes, but an animal to me is still an animal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay and she's like you know, we can get this thing taken off.
Speaker 2:We can send it off for path pathology and do all this stuff. And and I look at the woman, I'm like I wasn't mean. I was like, look, just so you know, we don't go to extremes with our pets. So I just want to put that out there, like we'll get the thing cut off and give her anesthesia while all that. But I'm not having all this sent off and because, like what if you do get it back and it is cancer? So what am I gonna do? Send her off or chemo or whatever?
Speaker 1:Like no, I was just talking to a guy about that the other day because he was telling me that he's he takes that same approach. He's like we love our dog, but you, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars on dog chemo. Yeah, and I've seen it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've seen it. I mean, I, you know, I don't think my brother and sister in law listened to this, but they had bulldogs. Yeah, and bulldogs have problems, man, cause they're super inbred or whatever. Yeah, and you talk about like like take taking them to Knoxville for a special surgery on the shoulder and like I don't know how much that dog was worth at the end of the day. Um, I, I just I don't know, it was just funny. The other day.
Speaker 1:A hundred thousand dollar dog by the time they were.
Speaker 2:No, I'm just like yes, do I love my dog? Yes, but the dog, the dog in the hierarchy of our house, is not the equal to human beings. And it's funny because nowadays a lot of people have the opposite feeling. Absolutely Like I remember I have have you. Do you have animals in your books at all? Yeah, like pets and yes. Have you killed one or have.
Speaker 1:No, I know better than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I, we there was a close call with a very popular character who happens to be a dog, and um, I got some emails after that I don't even do anything to like the Sienna has dogs in Girl in the Box and I like I don't even there's never a threat to them, cause I'm like I know what these dog people are like and I don't need that kind of hate mail. I've killed every kind of close to her character under the sun. And people don't blink. No, they do, they get mad, but like it would be nothing akin to I know what would happen if I kill a dog. I mean, it's just pet people are. They love their pets, they love other people's pets. I, you know that's one of those things where it's like do I want to stir emotions? Yes, do I want to beat a hornet's nest with a stick until they all explode out and sting me to death? No, I don't really want that. That's pet people. Pet people are hornets.
Speaker 2:All right so so let's stir the pot a little bit. Yeah, all right, I have a question for you.
Speaker 1:And plus non-pet people if I killed the pet, are going to be like oh, that's a shame and move on. So it doesn't produce the emotional reaction.
Speaker 2:No, it really doesn't. It really doesn't. Animals in stores how do you feel about that?
Speaker 1:I mean Petco, they're fine If and if they're really well trained, I mean I don't have a huge issue with it. Like there was a case I was coming back from Italy into the Minneapolis airport and this girl had her dog and a little thing under the seat. It was the most annoying fucking dog on the face of the planet. It crapped in the Minneapolis airport line. She headed out and was like walking it along and it just took a big dump in the middle of the thing. One of the things I've never been a fan of the TSA. But this TSA agent who was there like reamed her a new asshole and made her clean it up. It was the most I was like oh, yes, yes, this finally the TSA has done something worthwhile, cause they don't catch terrorists, but they, you know, but they get poop. They get the teenage girl who brought her stupid dog to take a crap on the middle of the airport floor while I'm waiting in line to pass customs.
Speaker 2:I had an interesting experience at Reagan national this past weekend, so I got an earlier flight to come home. Oh, because, long story short, my wife tore her hamstring no Four, which so I was. I was with my brothers. No sale, sell signal. We're in the middle of nowhere, like you have to drive 30 minutes to get sell signal anywhere.
Speaker 2:So as soon as I hit sell range again, I get this text hey, by the way, you know I'm fine but I tore my hands string. So I'm like, of course my brain just goes on overdrive at that point and I'm like gotta get a new flight and it was fine, but I get to the airport how?
Speaker 1:do? I want to know how she tore her hamstring.
Speaker 2:Like running injury or playing pickleball.
Speaker 1:I thought pickleball was supposed to be low in that.
Speaker 2:Well it is, but some, some. She said it was like a freakish thing, Like her foot, her right foot slipped out of her shoe. Oh, oh. And so when she went to, like you know, she was like reaching and as it slipped out, then basically she did the splits. Oh no, unintentionally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what happened. It wasn't like she didn't fall there's anything like that.
Speaker 2:It was just, it was a complete overextension. So she's doing better now, anyway. So I'm at the airport and I go to my gate, I'm early and there's like seven TSA agents at the gate. So you know, I'm a curious fella. So I just kind of stand, I'm like watching and they're like looking around and I just I'm like what are they looking for? What are they looking for? And they, you know, sometimes they'll pull out a cell phone and they'll look at it, whatever.
Speaker 2:And then I see this gentleman get up and he has a ball cap on and he looks like a fit guy, you know, trim and probably six foot three, and he goes to the gate agent, then goes back to his seat, goes to the gate agent again and and I'm like what's going on here, and then said man goes and get his two friends who are, you know, athletic looking fellas, and one of them actually has a bag that says, like you know, united US track and field team or something like that, like black guy. So it's like two white guys and a black guy, one guy's obviously older than the other two, and the plane, the plane before us, the plane that comes in, that we're going to take is debarking like people are getting off. These three guys I've never seen this walk straight onto the plane. Nobody says anything, just go straight on. It must be Marshall's or something.
Speaker 2:So when I get on the plane I'm like they're sure enough, they're, you know they're sitting there. Yeah, I'm going. What is going on? Do these two things together? So of course, I go over and I stand next to the TSA agents and I'm like see if I can hear anything. Well, I think what it was. I saw the picture on the one TSA agents phone. Yeah, I think it was a picture of a male and a child. I think a child had been kidnapped.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:So that's what they were like. So they actually announced and I've never seen this either they announced that hey, before you get on the flight, we're going to have one more TSA check. Please have your ID out and your boarding pass.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:And of course they didn't give me two looks at all, yeah, and, but it was just, it was bizarre. That's interesting. I love that stuff. Yeah, I mean not for the kid, but I'm just like it's a story.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like I want to know, like what's going on. I really want to go over to somebody. I want to go up to the dudes that were on the plane. Go, hey, what are you guys doing? What's going on? I almost because two guys were sitting together and then one guy was sitting apart I almost went and sat next in the middle of the two dudes, yeah, so I could find out what the hell was going on.
Speaker 1:Hey, hey, hey, what's going on? Just like first on the plane. Just sit right between them like hey guys, what's up?
Speaker 2:Oh, and the other thing too, I totally forgot. So I I'm looking around, I'm like there's some interesting looking people here, what's going on? And then I see their shirts and they're all. You know I say this as someone in recovery they're all in recovery, they're all part of the Oxford group recovery like recovery homes or something, and they're from everywhere, like Florida and all over the place, and they're coming to Nashville I don't know what, for there are a hundred of them on my flight, holy crap. And so they announced them. It was really cool. They had like a chant that they did before we took off and a chant when we landed. And so, like I'm putting all three things together, I'm like, did somebody in recovery Like, are they smuggling drugs or something? You?
Speaker 2:know, so I'm like putting all these pieces together, and my novelist mind is just was just worrying. At that point it's like if you had been sitting next to me, you and I probably could have written a book as we were standing there.
Speaker 1:You know that's happened before. You have a moment and you're like what if there's a novel idea? People always ask me where do your ideas come from? Stuff like that. Yep, mm, hmm, stuff like that.
Speaker 1:In the ironic not to change the subject too much, but in the irony department I saw an article this morning about a Minneapolis city council woman and I don't want to sound like I glorying in this because I'm not. I think it's terrible. She got carjacked and assaulted in her driveway and she posted a picture of herself and she has like blood running down her face and went on. It was awful, awful picture. But she was really big on the defund, the police movement in 2020. And so it's one of these things where it's like her post was very much like you can't let these kids because there's a juvenile carjacking problem in Minneapolis. And you know me, I love criminology and I used to live in Minneapolis and it was one of the nicest cities, really cool city, and it's just gone absolutely to hell. All the people I know that were in the area, including my friend who was in town yesterday. I said the same thing. It's like there's certain areas that were vibrant before and you just don't really know there anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's a pretty city.
Speaker 1:It was. It was. There was an area called Lake Street, which is a little lower scale or whatever, that I used to go down all the time and like there are still burnt out husks of buildings there, really, yeah. So I mean I'll digress here for a second and get back to the point, which is in the wake of the riots of 2020, 1500 buildings were damaged and like 750 were totally destroyed, and insurance would pay you know, 100,000 or 50,000 to have you clear the building. But because there were so many buildings destroyed in Minneapolis, the price to clear a building went up to 400,000 or something like that, and so people couldn't afford it like literally couldn't afford it. And these were not. I mean, these are not wealthy folks whose property got demolished. It wasn't.
Speaker 1:Edina is the wealthy suburb of Minneapolis you joke about. You know, edina is like the cake eaters or whatever. The Marie Antoinette area of Minnesota, minneapolis, that wasn't what was touched. It was the lower scale areas that got burnt, all the shit. So you know, you have these minority owned businesses that were just burned to the ground and it's like people were whinging for the last few years about how there are food deserts in poor neighborhoods. Like, yeah, when you burn down the grocery stores and the you know the convenience stores and whatnot, then people are like I don't want to open a business there, put all my money into it.
Speaker 1:One of the guys whose business was destroyed is this I think he was a firefighter, this black dude. He put all of his money into a sports bar and it got destroyed, just destroyed, and they picked up a GoFundMe and he made like millions because it went viral. Because he's just crying as he's sitting there in the ruin of his business like, oh my gosh, I've put everything I had into this and it's just gone. What did he do to deserve that? Not a damn thing. It's just we decided that order was going to, you know, not be the order of the day and let the entire city get burned down or you know large swaths of it. So, anyway, I'm glad this city council woman has come around on it, but it just it sucks because it a lot of people got hurt a lot worse than a bloody face. Yeah, because of this absolute idiocy, and a lot of us at the time were sitting there going. This is a terrible idea.
Speaker 1:Like I understand being very angry by what you saw in that video especially. There was really no excuse for it, but like destroying order and the service that's there to protect innocent people in some sort of mad crusade. To like there were people that were just thinking like okay, well, there's no such thing as criminals. I guess the police are just the bad guys. Like I don't understand it at all.
Speaker 1:One of our listeners, paul Kerbo, was I don't hope I pronounced your name right, paul, but he pointed out he's like this was just crazy to me at the time. It's like reform the police if you have to, but like get rid of them. Like how are you going to deal with the really bad people out there? And there are some really bad people out there. Like I don't understand these folks that are like we need to decarcerate the. The only thing that creates criminals is the prison system. And it's like have you never met it? Like I've looked in the eyes of a person who is I'm pretty sure he was a psychopath, like the kind of person that the only thing keeping him from doing something terrible to you is the knowledge that he might get caught in that moment.
Speaker 2:Right, and once you see that, you don't really forget it, because it leaves you with that kind of pit in your stomach, but I think maybe that's part of it is that people haven't experienced that or haven't seen it Right, and so to them it's it's the world is Lottie Dottie, I can kind of do whatever I want until somebody puts a gun on my gun, on my face, or steals my kid or what you know it's like. Again, I think that's why and I think about this a lot, actually about you know there's a reason why a lot of the people doing that sort of thing are younger, right, yeah, young angry, yes, angry, not as much life experience. And I would love to, I want to hear, like some people who were, whether it was part of the war protests back after Vietnam, who did things, you know, not just protests, but like actual radicals and bomb building and how they feel now right, like 3000 bombings in the US during the 19, and we know we don't talk about that.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, this is the weird part. There's a great book by Brian Burroughs called Days of Rage, where he really details the movement from start to finish, like every step of the way. There are things like the I think they were called the family which was one of the last waves of the like bank robber terrorism, where they murdered two or three people and Chase a Boudin who was the newly now recalled district attorney of San Francisco, let the whole town go to shit. They recalled him because he was doing such a bad job. He was just not prosecuting anything, he was a non. This was back then. No, this is like in the last five years but I'm tying it back.
Speaker 1:Got it, got it, got it His parents were two of the bank robbers that did one of those last robberies from those radicals, really, yeah. And one of the more notorious radicals in this was Bill Dorn and Bernadine, or sorry, bill Ayres and Bernadine Dorn. They were part of the, the Chicago kind of section of the, the radicals, I guess you could say. I forget was there was a during the 1968 convention and Democrat convention in Chicago. There was a riot where the radicals clashed with the police. It was a whole thing. But after that they became part of the the weather underground, weather underground, the weather underground. Yeah, they were a radical underground sect of essentially extreme leftists. They participated in bombings. They set off bombs. One of the most notorious ones was the bomb that went off in Greenwich Village. That actually it was their own safe house where two or two or three of their people were I think one was like sleeping and two of their other people were working on a bomb and it blew up the whole townhouse just like killed them.
Speaker 1:Dorn and Ayres were wanted people for a long time. A lot of these people went underground because they were wanted in connection with these bombings and where they now that's funny, you say that they are professors in Chicago tenured. Yeah, almost all these radicals came out of prison. If they went to prison and were immediately hired into academia, holy crap. Oh yeah, burroughs does a great job of tracing like what happened.
Speaker 1:I actually wrote a book called Underground where I kind of played with it in girl in the box terms where, like one of the victims of a bombing of a fictional underground organization, his father had gotten killed in it and he decided to take revenge by blowing up these people because essentially what happened is they were involved in all these bombings. People got hurt, people got maimed, people got killed. They in most cases paid little to no price and then, if they went to prison for a few years, they came out to cushy jobs, to academia and they taught the next generation. It became this sort of. It's the roots of the woke problems that we have in academia to this day, where it's like there's an intolerance for free speech, there's all this anger and I've said it before, I think people over assign the word wokeness to stuff when you should really focus it on the things that are real excesses. Yeah, a lot of it came from the fact that people went from the radical underground organizations right in academia and then into the seats of power in academia.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because then that directly feeds those kids that we were talking about a second ago, right? Because you hold these people up as mentors and heroes and people that you're supposed to respect and then they mold you and that's just wow. I didn't realize it was that. I knew there were some of that. I didn't know how deep it went though.
Speaker 1:Burroughs who wrote the book. He wrote another great one called Public Enemies, about the rise of the FBI, the first major crime way of the gangsters of the 1930s. Oh, really yeah like Bonnie and Clyde and all of them.
Speaker 1:Those two are great books but if you had to pick one of them, days of Rage is just phenomenal and the interesting thing about it to me is, I mean, it's very nuanced portraits of these folks. Almost all of the underground was driven by the injustices that were causing the civil rights movement at the time. They chose more of the Malcolm X path. Where it's like you're going to do violence to my people, I will show you violence kind of thing where it's like you can have a little sympathy for where they started from, but then, like what they started to do in the process and the things they did in the process, it's like, oh my gosh, what was the author's name? Again, it was Brian Burroughs, b-u-r-r-o-u-g-h-s.
Speaker 1:Days of Rage and Public Enemies. I think Public Enemies might actually have been the genesis of that Johnny Depp movie about what's his name? Which one? It was Public Enemies. It had Christian Bale, as I forget. I forget Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent. It was basically the start of the FBI and how they were cracking down on these. Dillinger, dillinger it was the movie about John Dillinger. Really a substandard movie, but great book.
Speaker 2:Okay, I gotta check these out. I want to do a deep dive on Hoover.
Speaker 1:Oh really yeah, that one's got Public Enemies has a pretty good intro on Hoover. Really I'd say Days of Rage sort of glances off of him. At the end I walked away from Public Enemies with almost no respect for the FBI as an institution because you can see how much of what happened Even back then. Those two books are kind of like the bookends of how the FBI built its reputation and then maintained his reputation, even though they were utterly clueless and in the face of what they were dealing with and Burroughs I mean I guess you could say maybe he, he, I thought he had kept a pretty impartial Tone for the most part but it doesn't seem like he had a lot of respect for the FBI. But one of the things he pointed out repeatedly, and public enemies especially, is how much of the FBI mythology of how good they are at the time came down to Hoover Manipulating events and manipulating the press and kind of pumping up their reputation.
Speaker 2:essentially well, so he gets mentioned a lot in. You know, thanks to you, I found eight books and I've been going back through W E B Griffin novels again. Yeah, and Hoover plays a fairly significant role. Right, because? Because the pretty much every, every book that I love of Griffin's is the talking about, you know, bill Donovan starting the OSSC IA and Donovan's relationship with Hoover, which was significant. Actually, donovan was the one. Donovan was supposed to be the head of the FBI, really, but then recommended Hoover to FDR. Yeah, but then once Roosevelt said, hey, we're gonna do this OSS thing, and before it was the Office of Strategic Services but before it was like the Office of Information something.
Speaker 2:Anyway, hoover didn't like it. He was like that should be our job, and that's when the the distinction between FBI is domestic, cia is International. That's where that whole thing came, because of two. What?
Speaker 1:happened to that distinction? I wonder it doesn't feel like there's as much distinction?
Speaker 2:anymore. Yeah, yeah, I think we've. I think we've definitely muddied those water really the last 20 years. I think is totally thrown that out.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. What was interesting about. There's a lot of criticism after 9-11 and some of it rested on the shoulders of a lady named Jamie Gorlik. I don't know if you ever heard this. No, they called it a mistress of disaster for a while, because she was. She wrote a memo talking about how there needed to be a firewall between the FBI and the CIA and, in fairness to her, she wasn't entirely wrong. But because they built that firewall that Did not allow for the sharing of information that would have allowed us to attribute right the hijackers to the appropriate motives, let's say so. That was one thing. She did. This. The next thing she did is she moved on to I Think it was Goldman Sachs and wrote memo about. Wrote extensively. I could be Misremembering I. I know she was tied to it somehow. I think what happened is she was one of the ones responsible for saying, hey, we should get into the subprime mortgage business.
Speaker 2:Oh really.
Speaker 1:So there's like there's like this internet subculture where it's a meet, almost a meme, where it's like a Jamie Gorlick's involved in something get the fuck away from it. Like I think now she's a board member at Netflix, where it was just like she just continuously failed her way up.
Speaker 2:Let's subscribers because of the Gorlick effect. Yeah she's.
Speaker 1:She had been there for several years. I haven't checked in on her in a few years. I don't know. I have a bad feeling about what's gonna happen to Netflix in the next few years though, so, wow, I don't know if she I don't think she has anything to do with it.
Speaker 1:At this point, I feel that I feel a little bit bad for her. Like you know, she was just having an upward career path that she just got tangled up in a couple places, and, honestly, the firewall idea between FDT, bi and CIA does not seem like such a crazy idea anymore. Like there, there should be a line between what you pursue with your domestic counterintelligence operation and what you're pursuing with your international foreign surveillance operations, and there's unfortunately not as much. I mean, it came out recently that Whenever the I think it's the FBI Wants information on a American citizen, they just go over the British and they're like hey, we're not allowed to spy on this person, can you go ahead and give us all you have on it. Brits are like sure, and then they need something from you know, from a British citizen. We just do the spine form. It's like, no, no, that was not how this was supposed to work, but that's happened for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll tell you the other one, though the ones that are really good at it are the, the Israelis.
Speaker 1:Oh, they're dynamite. And what's more interesting than that is there's a Private group of X massage that runs. I think it's called black cube or something like that. Oh yeah, it sounds, sounds terrible, doesn't it? It's they. They were working for Harvey Weinstein. I mean, they have some very high-profile clients and they'll like run kind of prop PI, slash dirty tricks, slash Whatever you need done, wealthy person. I think I heard of them, yeah, recently, and because it's all classified, they could be the most noble operation you've ever known, where it's like we'll do private investigation work but like morally, we're not going to do this kind of shit. But it kind of sounds like they might be willing to blur that line maybe a lot.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I'm not in that rarefied air.
Speaker 2:But do you ever wish that you had your own, like private investigator, at your service?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, sometimes it'd be kind of cool to be like I would like to know this about this person or this, you know whatever. You know what I would really like them more than a private investigator is personal assistant.
Speaker 2:Oh, oh, what. What hold on what would you use a personal assistant?
Speaker 1:for? Well, that's. The point is that I don't have enough for a personal assistant to do, but it would be stuff like why don't you go ahead and deal with this dinner reservation for me See?
Speaker 2:cuz, yeah, cuz. I've heard that at first you don't think you need one and then they start kind of digging you know, because, especially if they're my shopping, they just they know, so they start asking questions.
Speaker 1:You're like oh, you can do that too, go pick up that prescription cream that will save me from, you know, itching my face off, since it's allergic to itself. Pick up some groceries while you're out there, you know. I mean, there's just all these little things. Go pick up my kids from this thing. I actually I would probably still go do that myself because I like the time I spend with them in the process. But you know, there's all these other little things that I would like to not have to worry about on my day-to-day.
Speaker 1:I had to do correspondence with KDP, which is Amazon's Kendall direct publishing. I'm trying to change the description on my very first book, defender, and I hit the submit button and like, within 24 hours it changes the description. If you change the verb, it won't, wouldn't change. It was locked. It wouldn't change the Description at all. Like I had this whole bold print thing about how the series is now finished and Review stuff, and I'm like, okay, what's going on with that? And I'm corresponding back and forth with with Amazon and they're like we don't know, we'll have technical services look into it and get back to you. And did they? They fixed it, but they did not tell me what was wrong.
Speaker 2:Did you, do you remember a while back? You could either change the description in your KDP dashboard or author central, and if you did it in author central, it overrode the KDP.
Speaker 1:I don't know you can still do that. I don't know that I ever did that, but that would probably explain it if I ever did?
Speaker 2:I suppose I don't know, because I know I don't Again, I haven't thought about that years, that's. You just said it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was like, yeah, I mean I Don't know if, like what we were talking about for forwards, like, oh, they finally did bring the hatchet in and really just chain, saw out a bunch of people from KDP and they just had a long queue of these are the projects we have to deal with and there are only five people dealing with them now, or?
Speaker 2:from Everything I've heard, it is the team is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, cuz it took them over a week. Yeah, and I'm, and they kept sending me emails. I like we'll get back to you in three business days. And the lady ladies like I'm so sorry, we have not gotten this taken care of yet. We do not know. We're still looking into it. I'm like what happened?
Speaker 2:I don't know, I don't know where they're going. Anymore, dude, I just don't.
Speaker 1:Don't worry's me. Yeah, I mean, I think they could run it at a lesser you know rate of people there, but I Don't know how much lesser. I have a feeling that the back end of Amazon is Incredibly complex at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know. I mean because you know it's probably fine If you don't have a bunch of scammy stuff going on. Okay, but I always have a lot of scammy stuff going on and they very seldom cared about it. Well, exactly, but where they try to fix it and that just keeps them. That keeps them super, super busy. Yeah, the AI stuff's been keeping them very busy recently. Oh, cuz I was coming Well, because people are doing like AI generated books that are like complete, just nothing.
Speaker 1:Well, Lisa told me yesterday that you have to identify now on your dashboard if it's an AI. I created book. I didn't even see it yet publishing. Yeah, no, yeah, I've got a book to publish here soon. And is that AI generated? Well, um, only if I'm people used to say I'm clearly a robot. So in that sense, perhaps.
Speaker 2:Well, hey, I got a wrap early, a little bit early today, just because I gotta go get a haircut, because I'm feeling really scruffy you. So any last thoughts today, get those sideburns trimmed, you look like oh, I know God, I keep playing with him, going like this. I mean you want to just shave him off.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna do the mr Burns thing. You ever remember that episode of the Simpsons where he has Don Maddingly? He's like madding. Yes, get those sides, we're madding. We finally shaved like a strip across the top of his head and burns. Like I told you to take out the sideburns, he's like I don't know what you want for me, I've got nothing.
Speaker 2:Oh, I forgot about that episode, so it's great. Oh my gosh, I haven't watched the Simpsons in so long.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you're not missing it, it's still going. Yes, yeah. I don't think that I haven't watched an episode in years, and they weren't very good when I left.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, all right, well with that, we're out. The Simpsons are out. I.
