Aug 7 Check-In: Transcript
Our first Monday Morning Check-In of ... many to come?
Doug French (00:04):
Wait, so what did you do?
Magda Pecsenye (00:05):
Well, I literally just dumped a cup of coffee on the floor here. I put my coffee cup down on the floor and there was something, I don't know, a cat toy or something here, and it flipped over.
Doug (00:18):
So you wanna go get some more?
Magda (00:20):
I don't have anymore. I only made one cup of coffee. I live alone. For the time being.
Doug (00:25):
Wait, you don't make a spare?
Magda (00:27):
No, I don't. I don't. What am I gonna do with not hot coffee?
Doug (00:32):
Reheat it.
Magda (00:33):
I'm not a "reheat coffee in the microwave" kind of person.
Doug (00:36):
You can reheat it all kinds of ways. <Laugh>.
Magda (00:39):
I don't know. What, I'm going to build a fire underneath it. Like what?
Doug (00:43):
Just get a saucepan.
Magda (00:46):
Mike and I get into this all the time. Mike loves leftovers. Leftovers are his passion. If he ever leaves me for anyone…
Doug (00:54):
There's nothing wrong with leftovers.
Magda (00:56):
…it's going to be leftovers.
Doug (00:57):
I have leftover pizza for breakfast.
Magda (00:59):
Oh, I don't, I like new food.
Doug (01:01):
So you're ageist.
Magda (01:03):
I am ageist. But I after we record this, I have a doctor appointment, so maybe I'll reward myself for going through the gauntlet of the doctor's office with a takeout cup of coffee on my way home.
Doug (01:19):
Well, you know, Thomas doesn't like coffee, so in fact he had a whole diatribe. We went for breakfast. We got some hippie hash in town and he went on this whole rant about how people fetishize coffee <laugh>.
Magda (01:32):
I mean, he's not wrong. People do fetishize coffee.
Doug (01:36):
Well he came from my sister's house because everything, all the decor in my sister's
Magda (01:40):
Your sister fetishizes coffee.
Doug (01:41):
But yeah, he was just off on this whole thing about fetishizing coffee and, 'cause I went and ordered a cup of coffee, I was really groggy because I'd driven 11 hours the day before and slept for 11 hours after that, which was shocking to me.
Magda (01:55):
Well, that's an accomplishment, you know. Like, over the age of 40, sleeping for 11 hours, I feel like is a real accomplishment.
Doug (02:04):
Yeah, I gotta say, if you are having trouble sleeping, go out and drive for 11 hours. <Laugh>. Especially since there was a huge pileup for roadwork in the middle of the route. And so we had to take these side roads that were supposed to save us time and probably didn't.
Magda (02:20):
What were you on? 80?
Doug (02:22):
Yeah.
Magda (02:23):
Yeah, that's, 80 is the most -tucky of Pennsyltucky.
Doug (02:27):
80 is free for a reason.
Magda (02:30):
<Laugh> <laugh> 80 is something. Yeah, I thought you were talking about getting stuck in the construction here in Michigan because every two or three days I have the exact same conversation with someone. Which is, "I'm happy that Big Gretch fulfilled her campaign promise to "fix the damn roads." But <laugh>, I wish she wasn't
Doug (02:55): You're getting little Minnesota there.
Magda (02:57):
I know. I gave the governor of Michigan and Minnesota accent. "To fix the damn roads." Everybody wishes that she wasn't fixing every road in Michigan all in the same six-week period this summer.
Doug (03:09):
Well, downtown Ann Arbor is utterly impassable. We had to get to the diner on the other side of town and we had the most circuitous route. But you know what, I'll take it.
Magda (03:19):
Ann Arbor roads needed some work.
Doug (03:22):
I mean, it didn't make any sense for that brief period of time where the road in front of your house was in better shape than the road in front of my house.
Magda (03:30):
<Laugh>, right? I mean, I think that was the case for over a year, in which Detroit had better roads than Ann Arbor did. That's not normal.
Doug (03:39):
That did not add up. That defied all manner of logic. So shall we just say what this is or what we're deciding to experiment with here?
Magda (03:45):
Oh, yeah. People have told us that they like the part where you and I are talking with each other because we have such an odd relationship. So we're experimenting with just doing a short little you and me thing.
Doug (04:00):
You know, nothing says love like being told they like you because you're odd.
Magda (04:12):
Right. Well, I was thinking about it the other day that like, I think you and I get along better now than we did at any point after we got married.
Doug (04:27):
Well, it's come full circle. This is like, this is channeling 1997, you know?
Magda (04:31):
Yeah, exactly. Like I think you and I got along really well as friends, but we didn't do our best work married to each other.
Doug (04:40):
That's a whole other vibe, though. I don't know. I can't explain or quantify why one works better than the other, but it just did. And you have to just stop putting good money after bad at some point.
Magda (04:50):
Well, it's the sunk cost fallacy. Right? And I have talked about that with a lot of people who are trying to figure out if they should get a divorce. I'm sure you've talked about it with a lot of people that are trying to get divorced. You know, people will say things like, "but we've been married for X years" or "we've been together for X years." And they think that if you've invested that much time in it, you have to be able to make it work out. But that is, I mean, there's an actual name for that, the sunk cost fallacy, which is you think that if you've put so much money or time or energy or whatever into something that you're coming out ahead if you keep going with it instead of just cutting bait.
Doug (05:30):
Well, these are the same people who kept buying Iomega stock.
Magda (05:35):
I don't even know what Iomega stock is. So there. I think I've proved your point.
Doug (05:39):
I'll tell you what, I'll start over because yeah, that's too obscure. But Iomega at the time, they made the first huge storage boxes. It was like when the Motley Fool came about and personal investing became a big thing. And Iomega was the big part of their portfolio. They rose to fame because they called Iomega and Iomega had this meteoric rise and then suddenly became completely useless and fell off the table.
Magda (06:05):
All right. I don't think you need to backtrack on this 'cause I think this was a point in time. And this, to me, is very intrinsically tied to the early days of our marriage. So for people out there who have not intensively researched who we are, we got married in 1999 and we split up in 2006 and the divorce was final in 2008. So to me, so much of our early marriage was that big internet boom. Like it's all just tied together for me.
Doug (06:43):
The Motley Fools was a stock bubble.
Magda (06:46):
Who's even thought about the Motley Fool in so long? And they were astronomically big.
Doug (06:50):
They're still working. They're still there.
Magda (06:51):
Interesting. But now it was, I remember being an investment club in undergrad and we would get the newspaper from the previous day, and I might have done this in high school, too. You'd get the newspaper and it would tell you what price your stock closed on.
Doug (07:10):
Pages and pages and pages of just open and close price, change volume. Absolutely.
Magda (07:16):
Wow. We're old. We are very old. <Laugh>.
Doug (07:21):
Well, I mean, when you think that the New York Times just kiboshed its entire sports section.
Magda (07:26):
I don't really understand what they're thinking. Like they kibosh their sports section, but they keep David Brooks. Blech.
Doug (07:34):
Well, David Brooks makes people angry and that's what gets people engaged and that's what gets people money <laugh>.
Magda (07:41):
I don't I just, I yeah,
Doug (07:44):
See engagement is a good thing in some cases, but it's also a bad thing in some cases.
Magda (07:48):
<Laugh>, I don't understand what people think is going to engage people and hook other people and all that kind of stuff. And I think we're having a through the looking Glass moment with this whole Twitter X thing where it's like, is there a strategy there? Are they trying to shoot the moon? Like, I don't know what's happening.
Doug (08:13):
Well, it's clear that he just has a board full of Yes people. And he has no guardrails. He just does what he wants.
Magda (08:20):
I know it's gotta be really
Doug (08:21):
But that's the thing, and that's the issue I think we really need to consider is that there are people, there's so much concentrated wealth now that people can decide to buy something on a whim and then do anything with it on a whim. I mean, that was a social good. That was a utility.
Magda (08:36):
Yeah.
Doug (08:37):
And now it's just people throwing rocks. Yeah. And broadcasting. There's no engagement left. Even with Threads. I mean, Threads tries to beat Twitter and its activity is down like 80% since people first signed up for it.
Magda (08:50):
Well, I just am opposed constitutionally to the idea that a whole bunch of people who have felt really hurt by Facebook and Instagram and their weird policies and all of this stuff would suddenly just be like, "oh, hey, hey, let me jump onto this other product from this same guy who's essentially the same as Elon Musk." What's the difference between the two of them? One wears his weirdness on the outside and one wears his weirdness on the inside. Right?
Doug (09:21):
So Mark Zuckerberg's in better shape. He's been doing mixed martial arts, so he's kind of ripped right now. <Laugh>. That's about it. So here's the question all of America is asking right now,
Magda (09:30):
Right?
Doug (09:31):
Is this entertaining?
Magda (09:33):
<Laugh>? I don't know.
Doug (09:35):
Can you download this to hear this nonsense from us every Monday morning? <Laugh>,
Magda (09:38):
Right? We had a specific point in mind that we were gonna talk about and we just haven't gotten to it. <Laugh>.
Doug (09:44):
Well, that's the point though. These conversations fly all over the place. Yeah. And you might have an idea of where we're going to go because we were going to talk about Sinéad and Pee-Wee. But that's not how our conversations work. We are all over the map and then we, you know, wake up in a daze and wonder, wow, what, what was that <laugh> and where did this hour go? <Laugh>.
Magda (10:09):
Right. Well I was going to ask you how Harry is doing. The cat that was at my house for over two weeks but was returned to…
Doug (10:19):
Oh, he hasn't left my side.
Magda (10:20):
…his testosterone-filled home. He likes being at your house.
Doug (10:24):
He slept on my head.
Magda (10:25):
Dudebenergy. And Staś, my cat, who is delighted to be an only cat again, did not leave my side all last night.
Doug (10:33):
Excellent. So that's the way it should be. Well, what I didn't like was the fact that it was pretty clear sailing until I got home when the heavens opened. And I was torn between, all right, here's the cat who's, you know, meowed the whole way home, very upset about being in the carrier, very upset about being in the car in the carrier. So I'm like, all right, it's pouring down rain. Can we wait out this rainstorm or am I just gonna bring him in and get soaked?
Magda (10:55):
Right.
Doug (10:56):
And guess what I did?
Magda (10:58):
<Laugh>, you got soaked because he's your baby
Doug (11:01):
Absolutely soaked.
Magda (11:02):
He's your enormous bobcat-sized baby. Like to me, the real problem is, you can't explain this stuff to a cat. Like I would like to explain to him, and I have been trying to promo it, but there, I know he has really good receptive language, but for specific words, right? Like he understands
Doug (11:21):
This is the other thing that you and Mike are gonna have to work out. The fact that you think you can talk to cats and actually communicate with them to the point where they understand what's happening.
Magda (11:30):
<Laugh> okay, but I'm going to dispute that. But maybe if you talk to cats more, they would be more receptive to you too. You know, Harry, you just,
Doug (11:41):
I talk to 'em all the time. Nothing happens <laugh>, you might as well just throw water on the patio. But it it's the noise, it's the pattern. It's the voice patterns.
Magda (11:50):
Harry understands a lot more words than you think he does.
Doug (11:53):
Well, sure he does. But you can't just say, and now we are going to drive 12 hours and we're gonna stop at Dinky Donuts. You say things to him and Staś is like, "I don't care. All I know is I hear your voice and I like it."
Magda (12:04):
Well, okay, but Staś knows your name.
Doug (12:07):
He knows my name?
Magda (12:08):
Yes. When I say "Doug," he, well,
Doug (12:09):
I guess when he comes at the big, the great Western vacation, you know, in the outpost,
Magda (12:14):
So when I came home, he was looking around for Harry and I said, "No Harry." And I said, "Harry's at Doug's house." And then he just shook it off and was like, oh, okay.
Doug (12:32):
And he went and sat in the corner and got his Kindle and read.
Magda (12:35):
<Laugh>. Right. He popped out of the house and yeah, <laugh>,
Doug (12:42):
I wonder if you chip him, can you like follow him around on an app or something?
Magda (12:46):
It's not like, it's not like an air tag.
Doug (12:49):
That would be awesome.
Magda (12:50):
It's not
Doug (12:50):
Like I wanna know where he's going.
Magda (12:52):
People who have cats who wear collars, which my cat will not wear a collar. Harry will not wear a collar. Cats who have collars, sometimes owners will put air tags on them to try to follow them around. But the problem with that is that the air tag technology isn't constant. When it's close to an Apple device or a receiver or something, it'll ping it, but it's not pinging constantly. So you can't track, like, you can't watch your cat walking around in real time.
Doug (13:23):
I think that would be fun just to trace his steps. Especially if if the neighbors think he's crapping in the rose bushes, we could debunk that pretty quick.
Magda (13:30):
It's true. 'cause I think he goes and craps in the nature preserve
Doug (13:33):
Or he craps under the big evergreen under my window. I think that's his private bathroom maybe.
Magda (13:38):
Maybe.
Doug (13:39):
Anyway, so Monday check-in. This is kind of what this is gonna be. We're gonna check in Monday morning and ramble for 10, 15 minutes <laugh> and see where it goes and see if anybody's interested. But I I love these conversations, I have to say.
Magda (13:56):
I would like something to be a little bit more focused possibly than this specific conversation we had. Well, I know we were planning on talking about Sinéad and Pee-Wee, but then I think a lot of that conversation just had itself. Like I think people are starting to come to terms with the fact that Sinéad was essentially killed by the system. And I think people did some research to figure out what actually happened with Pee-Wee Herman with the whole, you know, the vintage photographs and that he was buying all these lots of magazines and not– Am I allowed to say this?
Doug (14:29):
People had some really adverse reactions to him. They were saying, "yeah, I love PeeWee's Playhouse, but he's a monster." And whoa, I mean.
Magda (14:37):
What I knew was that I hadn't paid any attention to the actual case. And so I was like, oh, I have this lingering sense that something bad happened, but let me go research it. And so when I dove into it, I discovered that the charges were public exposure, which he was a gay man at that time period in an adult theater. And it was not uncommon for cops to come in and just round everybody up who was there. And so I kind of don't care about that.
Doug (15:08):
But he paid for that. He spent three years just getting pummeled by late night comedians.
Magda (15:12):
Would you want to tell your grandmother that you had done that? No. But on the other hand, I mean, how many of us have had some kind of sex or exposure in a place that wasn't like inside a locked room? I mean, I don't want to
Doug (15:26):
"A locked room." That's interesting. <Laugh> with the lights off and a hole in the sheet, that kind of thing.
Magda (15:32):
Yeah, exactly. Hole in the sheet. And then the other charge was that he possessed child porn. And that one was more interesting because he collected vintage porn magazines, adult porn magazines.
Doug (15:52):
Weird kitschy erotica. Yeah.
Magda (15:54):
Yeah. Which, like, you can think is weird. But on the other hand, like, I don't know, I collect gay cardinals, right? So what <laugh>, I don't know.
Doug (16:05):
You know, people collect all kinds of weird stuff for weird was a crime, you know, it was this, right. It was a titillating thing because he is a children's entertainer. Right. Doing a very adult thing and people just hopped on it and fucked him over got the rest of
Magda (16:18):
Yes. So he was buying them in huge lots at auctions. He was buying them in lots of like thousands of magazines, that kind of stuff. And so there was some illegal, immoral, unethical stuff in those lots. But he hadn't realized it because he was buying the lots, putting them in his storage space and not looking at them. That's why he pled guilty. And that's also why the case was ultimately dismissed against him. I think there's a conversation to be had there about his emotional state and his mental health when he was buying huge lots of things and then not even looking at them. Right? Like I think he had the same emotional mental health problems that people who buy a whole bunch of clothes and then they leave them in their closets and never even take the tags off. Right? There's something going on at that point. But it wasn't the horrible issue that people thought it was.
Doug (17:17):
When you think about the difference of time, like the punishment that Paul Reubens suffered for this innocuous thing in an adult film theater. And now you look at this crowdfunder for the Sound of Freedom movie, which is about child trafficking.
Magda (17:32):
Oh, yeah.
Doug (17:32):
And he's arrested for child trafficking. I mean, I just, I don't know where to begin in terms of the, I mean that should be a so much bigger story, but it's just a different time. And now we're just so numb to all the outrageous, awful shit that happens every 45 seconds in this world. Here's a man doing severe damage to children. And it's a story that people, they glance at and I kind of believe in this idea of innocent until proven guilty, but he's probably guilty as hell.
Magda (17:59):
Right, exactly. So we gotta give lip service to "allegedly. " Journalistic integrity.
Doug (18:03):
'cause that's what we're here about.
Magda (18:05):
What I've heard from people I do know is that people are saying, "oh, this guy wasn't a major funder. There are so many crowdfunders as part of this project that it doesn't matter what this one guy did. " It's like, what? I don't <laugh>, I mean, see,
Doug (18:22):
I gotta say, if we're gonna spend our Mondays riling each other up and riling people up to the crap that we see every day, I don't know if this is gonna last. Anyway, so if there's anyone wondering what we're talking about or why we're even still talking, here's the issue. And what makes sense to me is the fact that this started out as a plan to be like a 10 minute podcast at most. I don't know how much of this has gotten, how long this is going to end up being, but it's already almost 30.
Magda (18:46):
Oh, okay. Well then we should stop.
Doug (18:48):
You can tell if we're told to talk for 10 minutes, we are 30 pounds of speech in a 10 pound bag.
Magda (18:53):
<Laugh>. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's the case.
Doug (18:57):
So anyway, this is our Monday check-in and we'll post this and email you and put a poll or something in there. I don't know, we'll get some feedback to see if anybody's interested. Let's see if our subscriber count plummets.
Magda (19:10):
Hey, the poll should be like, should we talk more about our cats? Should we talk less about our cats <laugh>?
Doug (19:18):
All right, well we will see you Wednesday with our discussion with Emily Swan. I really enjoy talking to her. She's gonna be my new best friend. We're gonna get beers. It's a very interesting story about trying to stick with religion in her life, even though she's had plenty of reason not to. I really think her fortitude is extraordinary.
Magda (19:35):
She's one of the smartest people I know and she's one of the most nuanced people I know. So yes, I think she has a lot of fortitude, but I just think of her in other ways first.
Doug (19:48):
Right, and she could easily have been an academic, you know, she was an academic for long and then came into the clergy and is now committed.
Magda (19:53):
And she talks about that in the episode.
Doug (19:56):
Yeah, she's a quality person. I want to subscribe to her newsletter because she is a sharpie <laugh>.
Magda (20:02):
You actually can, she sends one out every Friday by email <laugh>.
Doug (20:06):
Alright, well you're l coming out Sunday, so we can both go, right? Because we were supposed to go yesterday and then didn't do it. All right. Thank you for listening this far. Good lord. And we'll see you again the next time you tune in. I appreciate attention to this palaver <laugh>.
Magda (20:22):
It's an evolving experiment.
Doug (20:24):
It is. I guess we should probably be a bit more upbeat about this. Anyway, thanks for listening to the Monday check-in. I enjoy this, but we're gonna have to check in like this anyway, because you're moving away. We're not gonna see each other in, you know, face to face for a long time. But it made sense to us that since we have to get used to checking in with each other in a way that's more than just texting. Let's just check in once a week and hey, let's record it and see what happens. So thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Or maybe not <laugh> and really your call.