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So in today's episode Robert mentions that they had previously talked about Discordianism. fnord Some googling indicates that might have been in the series on the Illuminati. Is that right, or is there anywhere else it comes up? I'm putting that series at the top of my queue right now, though I'm very worried that I'll learn something about Malaclypse the Younger and/or Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst that will make me deeply sad.
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Jan 23, 2024 22:52
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 02:35 |
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Binged the entire Illuminati series between my last post and now. I was 14 when I first read the Principia Discordia, and sure enough there was a lot in there that made me really sad. Ultimately, though, it really filled in a lot of gaps and was an extremely enlightening listen. Also, I've got a hardcover copy of John Higgs's The KLF arriving at my house tomorrow.
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Jan 25, 2024 23:20
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Ugly In The Morning posted:What did you think of the Margaret/Garrison combo? I thought she balanced the Garrison and Robert dynamic perfectly. Well, I'll start with two caveats: 1) I'm fairly new to the podcast and don't know any of the other people involved, and 2) I'm not the best at distinguishing voices when I can't see faces. To me, Margaret & Garrison sounded similar enough that I was having a hard time figuring out who was who (especially if Robert doesn't bring up a name). Like, I distinctly remember thinking during one of the later episodes that Garrison must have missed the recording and it was just Margaret the whole time (then suddenly at the end of the episode he was doing his pluggables). That said, I do think they did work really well as guests as their particular niches meshed really well with the material.
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Jan 26, 2024 02:41
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Annath posted:
 One thing that kinda got me about the last episode in the series on the Finders was Jamie thinking that the computer training stuff they did for the CIA was suspicious. And like, I understand how it can see that way on first blush. But as someone who used to be based around DC with a company that did a lot of consulting for various federal agencies, I think the whole thing was actually pretty normal. Like, the feds were so starved for computer people over the last few decades that they literally changed the political trajectory of the entire state of Virginia because of all the jobs that were opened for people who could do computer-related consulting work (causing Northern Virginia to get flooded with tech-savvy workers who were more liberal and eventually turned the state blue). Like, the only weird thing I could see is that anyone doing computer consulting for the CIA would probably need some level of clearance to do the work. But that's also a pretty standard thing in the area, too. I've been a reference for a friend who needed to get Secret clearance to get a DBA job for some company that did consulting for the government. Maybe being in a weird cult would be enough to prevent some people from getting clearances and strings were pulled to keep that from happening, or maybe some of the members who were doing the work were folks who already had their clearance from previous jobs (or maybe in the 70s and 80s the restrictions around consultants needing clearance were a lot looser).
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Jan 28, 2024 20:17
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The anecdote about the kid who was usually 15 minutes late to class and clearly dealing with some poo poo was an interesting bit of texture for the episode. And the way they were cracking each other up about Light-Horse Harry being such a deadbeat was pretty funny.
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Feb 14, 2024 21:27
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Prop had some really good moments this episode: “Respectfully, you’re the loving devil” was a highlight. I was kinda waiting for some kind of wrap up to the story about doing a book report on Nat Turner in the almost-all-white middle school, but the anecdote kinda petered out. Also, when he mentioned his mom being from DC I was hoping there would be some more talk (from him or Robert) about just how close all these early civil war spots were to each other. That was the thing that really struck me when I lived there. Like, the Lee land in Arlington was literally right across the river from DC. Hell, his house was less than 2.5 miles from the White House. Harper’s Ferry is barely 55 miles away. (Meanwhile, Brownsville, TX might as well have been another planet given how far it was.) So yeah, I’d say he’s been a pretty good guest so far. Looking forward to this series continuing.
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Feb 16, 2024 06:30
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Apple Podcasts is working just fine for me, though it has taken a while for it to stop being the terrible mess that it was for several years after it was broken out from iTunes. It also has the advantage of being able to load stuff onto my watch so that when I go out jogging I can just play the audio to my headphones from the watch and not have to carry my phone with me.
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Feb 27, 2024 16:48
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I was at Apple during the last 5 years Jobs was there (in fact, my "5 Years of Service" certificate was in the last batch that was sent out that still carried his signature). Never actually met the guy but did (remotely) attend some company Town Halls he hosted. The Q&As for those were always really interesting. One of the moments I remember most clearly was someone saying that they had seen iTunes Gift Cards on sale at some other retailer, so they asked if might ever be possible to get the gift cards at an employee discount. His reply was essentially "No. Those stores are selling those gift cards at a loss for some reason. Good for them. But this company does not sell anything at a loss. You want discounted gift cards, go get them from those stores." I don't think the leasing a new car every 6 months is some big waste of money (especially since leasing is the smarter financial decision for those depreciating assets once you get to that level of wealth anyways). Now, I wonder if the "Park Different" thing will get a mention. That is definite bastard behavior and one of those weird anecdotes that shouldn't be lost to time (especially if it includes the fact that some employees did literally slip a piece of paper under the windshield wiper saying "Park Different" after he kept doing it.) It was kinda hard to convey the mix of reverence and fear that Jobs inspired when he was back at Apple. On the one hand, he was so infamous for firing people at the drop of a hat that if someone ended up leaving unexpectedly people would say they "must have gotten on an elevator with Steve". This is because when he first came back to the company he was known to ask anyone who happened to be around "what exactly do you do for me?" If you didn't have a good answer, describing your job and justifying why it was necessary, he'd fire you on the spot. Some friends in HR who went to the Cupertino campus for training told me about how the person who lead their training, who was one of the higher-ups in HR, had an office literally next door to Steve's. Every day she would walk around the building to take a side-entrance, just to decrease the likelihood that she would end up running into Steve or walking past his office while getting to her own. And like, yeah, that is hosed up. But also that's a story the woman felt comfortable telling a bunch of new hires in training. People at Apple were weirdly proud of how scary Steve was. I don't think there was a single person at the company while I was there who didn't think that Apple would have gone out of business and cease to exist if he hadn't come back and turned the place around.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:22
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All the god complex stuff might have been accurate for pre-exile Jobs, but y'all forget that the dude spent an entire decade being considered one of the greatest losers in all of tech. He dropped the ball with Apple, got kicked out of the company, and Apple then lost the "PC wars" so badly that when Michael Dell was asked (around the time Jobs was returning to Apple) what he would do in Jobs' position, he said "I would just dissolve the company, sell all the assets, then pay the proceeds to the shareholders". There was this PBS documentary from 1995 called Triumph of the Nerds, which went into a lot of detail about the rise of the personal computer and how Microsoft had beaten Apple. They interviewed Jobs for it (that interview later got released after his death as Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview), and the most notable thing about it is that Jobs is practically incandescent with rage. One quote I still remember: "The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. They don't bring a lot of innovation. They don't push culture into their products. They make really third rate products that have no spirit in them." (Sadly the trailer only includes the first part of that quote.) If you want to delve into psychology, I'd be more inclined to see that rage as the motivator behind everything Jobs did post-return. Dude was the laughing stock of Silicon Valley, the prime example of what not to do as a founder. So every success that Apple had after he got back was another chance for him to get revenge.
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Mar 7, 2024 04:30
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Okay, between this Steve Jobs series and the episode of Better Offline that they dropped on the Behind the Bastards feed, I'm kinda over Ed Zitron. He's giving intense "early Jimquisition episode" energy. Just wallowing in one-note anger that has a kind of sugar-rush joy when you first encounter it, but gets tiresome the longer it goes on.
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Mar 14, 2024 16:23
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I do have to say that, while the Dennis the Menace guy is clearly a minor figure to be the subject of a BtB series, any time they get Randy Milholland on as a guest to talk about cartooning and the comic industry it is always a good, informative time. Really enjoyed these episodes.
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Mar 22, 2024 16:08
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I'm putting the over-under at 2.5 for "number of BtB listeners who try to get a fake NPI number after listening to this week's episodes". Place your bets, folks.
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Mar 28, 2024 18:16
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This was a bit of a weird episode. It felt like Robert made a few mistakes (maybe due to the massive hangover) that didn't end up getting a correction inserted. Like, the Pentagon Papers weren't written by Heritage Foundation guys. Ellsberg was famously a RAND corporation guy before he leaked them. However, David Bell was a really good guest here. His reminders about the need for nuance in this kind of discussion were much appreciated. Beyond all that, I did hit the algorithmic ad jackpot this time around. Something clearly bugged when I downloaded the episode and as a result there were no ads during any of the ad breaks. So overall, I'm gonna rate this one 10/10.
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Apr 3, 2024 04:28
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Okay, finding out that Ace of Base were Nazis was not something I expected to learn this week. That said, Robert got Françoise Dior mostly wrong (or, at least, got all the details of the Dior family wrong). First, no woman started the Dior line, that was Christian Dior. And Dior had no Nazi sympathies, he literally hosted meetings for the French Resistance in his apartment (organized by his sister, the resistance fighter and eventual holocaust survivor Catherine Dior). Françoise was the child of Christian's older brother, and she was a complete bastard, but the rest of the Diors recognized this too and basically told her to gently caress off.
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May 2, 2024 15:00
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Well, the Ace of Base thing was just an aside and referencing a Cracked article one of his friends wrote. So that wasn’t really one of the sources for the episode. The Dior thing is clearly a case of him mixing up Coco Chanel and Christian Dior. It seems like this episode originally aired 3 years before the Chanel episode, so he probably wouldn’t make the same mistake again. But it also probably wasn’t in the original source (just that Françoise Dior was a big Nazi, which is true and well-documented).
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May 2, 2024 20:19
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 02:35 |
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Annath posted:I mean, personally I think if you're going to accuse someone of being a nazi, you should maybe make sure it's an accurate statement, especially if your source is a Cracked article. I mean, if it was something one of your coworkers wrote, that the legal team at your employer approved, and didn’t get you sued for defamation, then I could understand taking its findings at face value if you hadn’t really thought of it since.
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May 2, 2024 20:46
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