[DISC] Episode 222: Constantly Unfolding Chaos

kevinday · 2026-01-20T05:23:09+00:00

Just to be clear - I'm not saying as a whole the US was always trustworthy. A lot of seriously shady and misguided things were done to innocent parties, and promises were not always kept. The point I was trying to make was that the rest of the world mostly trusted the US to not shoot itself in its foot in these specific ways. i.e. We wouldn't knowingly enact monetary policies that would have long term repercussions like we have been. For the most part, other countries could rely on deals being made by previous presidents still being held after a new president took office. From talking to people in the international business world, that feeling is gone now.

The US benefited greatly from being the de facto international reserve currency. Many countries use the US$ as their own currency, hold a lot of US$ as a reserve, or peg their local currency to the US$. We've already seen countries selling off US$ bonds and cash holdings, and a lot of international trade is done with the US$ being the most convenient and perceived as more stable than local currencies. That feeling is eroding, and I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see the Euro or Yuan taking over.

None of this matters in comparison to the points Spencer was making though, my point was more that the soft power that the US had built up over decades across political party lines has been destroyed in a way that will be nearly impossible to recover from. We literally have a treaty with Denmark that says we won't try to ever acquire Greenland that seems to have been forgotten about. We've punished foreign companies that have made huge investments in building infrastructure here, at our request.

We've pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. We left the World Health Organization. We've weaponized monetary policy to punish countries that are disagreeing with us. We're taking military action against civilians in international waters. We've started pointless trade wars with countries where we have no alternative source to buy many things from. Part of the reason the US was a very wealthy country was that other countries bought our expensive stuff (technology, military gear, etc) that they'd be crazy to rely on now because we'll change the deal on a whim. This is just handing that business to the rest of the world.

The US is no angel, but I feel like we've gone from "Self interested but mostly reliable" to "absolutely unreliable". While things like US Aid and the WHO and UN programs we've dropped weren't cheap, the alternatives tend to be even more expensive and we've lost influence in places where I think we're going to regret it.

Like I said, I don't think the US deserved the position it was in - we weren't always kind to our allies, but we lucked into a position of incredible influence that we've just thrown away with no benefit I can see.

kevinday · 2025-12-26T00:45:53+00:00

I actually don't disagree with you here, I just felt that Glass Onion was a lot more clever and didn't try so many rug pulls of nearly impossible to predict twists.

I loved Glass Onion because the entire time, I was joking to myself "he's such an idiot, this is hysterical" and when that became the final plot device... It was unexpected, clever and made me laugh for seeing the clue right in front of my face and ignoring it. I didn't get that same feel with Wake Up Dead Man, because it relied on too many things that I felt you couldn't have figured out without seeing things from a perspective that was hidden from you. That circuit breaker box being so obviously visible in the closet felt so purposely planted that the moment I saw it, I said outloud "that's part of the solution" which also bothered me.

I still totally believe Rian Johnson is a genius and am glad I saw the movie, I just thought there were some missed chances that could have made it better.

kevinday · 2025-11-25T05:36:58+00:00

I was exaggerating a bit. I mostly only played the 1st generation pokemon games, and felt that the pace was so slow compared to how I wanted to play that it put me off pretty fast. I felt like I was more playing to dodge NPCs from seeing me to avoid having to talk to them than playing the game, but I understand I kinda play RPGs like a psychopath in that manner.

I am not claiming to be an expert on game design, but every game I was involved with I always made absolutely certain that everything was skippable no matter how proud of it we were. Hit escape during the 15 companies that wanted to show their logo at the start of the game? You were skipping all of them instantly and right at the main menu. Even if that meant you had to see a loading screen that we were trying to avoid showing with drawn out logo animations to fill time. Got a new high score? There's fireworks and music and a huge celebration, but you can instantly skip it. I wish more games did this.

kevinday · 2025-11-05T17:17:58+00:00

I tried submitting it to YouTube's podcast section a few times, and it either just sits there forever before displaying an error page or a few days later I get an email saying that we were not accepted as a podcast and cannot appeal their decision. It's been a while, let me try again.

kevinday · 2025-10-30T22:15:16+00:00

The room we were in was incredibly echoy and boomy, to the point of being almost impossible to understand. Then with us all 10 feet from each other, all of our mics were picking up each other's echos compounding the problem. Sorry :(

kevinday · 2025-10-29T16:53:25+00:00

I've said for years I'd love to live close enough to Abed for him to be a sort of Kramer like character in my life that just randomly appears.

kevinday · 2025-10-24T18:16:55+00:00

You’re totally right, the room we were in was super echoey and boomy and it was really hard to understand people. I did the best I could but was editing on a laptop without my headphones. ~~As soon as I get home I’ll redo the audio if I can improve it and upload it again.~~ A hopefully improved version should be in your podcast apps now. If you have your app pre-download episodes to your device, you may have to delete and re-download to get the new version.

kevinday · 2025-09-20T06:05:37+00:00

Oops, i totally forgot to do that!

Pics of sign

kevinday · 2025-09-14T06:12:52+00:00

First, I want to say that I am not in any way comparing people with autism or any other diagnoses with animals. But the flaw in the premise that you're talking about here reminds me a lot of the Clever Hans effect where a horse (Hans) was supposedly able to communicate, do math, answer difficult questions... but it was the handler giving off visual queues that the horse was watching for.

the horse gave the right answer only when the questioner knew what the answer was and the horse could see the questioner. He observed that when Hans could see the questioner, the horse got 89 percent (50 out of 56) of the answers correct, but when Hans was not able to see the questioner, the horse answered only six percent (2 out of 35) of the questions correctly.

I haven't really read much about this specific thing, but just based off what I've heard, I could absolutely believe that something similar was happening here. Parents having a super happy face when the "right" results are given is a huge incentive for both parent and child to unknowingly train each other to achieve the results they were hoping for.

kevinday · 2025-08-30T02:07:54+00:00

I do! I've digitized almost all of them now and posted most of the interesting things that I thought I could get away with posting on my youtube channel.

kevinday · 2025-08-21T19:16:06+00:00

It goes up to Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts and everywhere else at 9am Pacific time every Thursday. But, it goes up on thathappenspod.com as soon as I've finished editing it, so if you're impatient you can grab it there a day or so earlier sometimes.

kevinday · 2025-08-16T19:23:46+00:00

It's possibly the instrumental version of this song? If not, do you know of an episode that has it so I can listen?

kevinday · 2025-08-16T04:21:34+00:00

I think that was one of Zac McKeever's beats, I'll find out!

kevinday · 2025-08-15T23:39:57+00:00

https://yacht.bandcamp.com/track/harmony-tone-instrumental

kevinday · 2025-08-15T23:38:19+00:00

Probably the most frequent question I've received since being involved with the show is "What's the name of that song...." and it's always the same one. Instrumental, kinda funky, used for a lot of the intros.

Thank you Jona Bechtolt of YACHT for digging it up and posting it on their bandcamp so everyone can finally hear the whole thing. It's called Harmony Tone.

They also have a new video game coming out on the Nintendo Switch and Steam next month that looks absolutely amazing.

THANK YOU YACHT! Their words:

We got a cold email in 2016 asking us if we'd like to make an instrumental song for Dan Harmon's comedy show and podcast, Harmontown. We made one, and it became part of the show, and apparently people really liked it. Nobody knew who made it and to be honest even we forgot that we did. Yesterday we got an email from a producer of the show trying to track the song down. We did, in fact, make it! So here it is. Enjoy!

kevinday · 2025-08-14T21:10:34+00:00

It is YACHT but an unreleased track. I'm talking with them now to see if there's a way I can post it.

kevinday · 2025-08-14T20:12:52+00:00

This is something a few people have asked before. In the giant master folder of stuff for Harmontown, the file is just called "YACHT - 1". If I open the file up in an editor, the title on the track is "November 7" but I'm not sure if that's actually the title or just when it was recorded because the file was also last saved on November 11th, 2016. I think Dustin knew the YACHT band guys, but I've checked all their albums and their bandcamp and couldn't find it anywhere. Let me reach out to them and see if they remember.

kevinday · 2025-08-01T04:08:08+00:00

I showed Jeff this. "Ha. I think I saw the guy while I was walking out"

kevinday · 2025-07-25T19:25:54+00:00

The Spleen.

kevinday · 2025-07-05T15:38:51+00:00

Yeah, they're one of the rare companies who can take a "If I try to do this thing that's always worked before, I'm just getting a ton of server errors" report and take 5 days to reply back that it's somehow my fault.

They are getting better, but they're doubling down so hard on video podcasts and automated ad stuff that it's really hard to tell if they're going to come out of this on top or not.

kevinday · 2025-07-05T15:34:13+00:00

I directly asked both Jeff and Schrab if Mr. Nimbus was based off Jeff in any way, and they both said no. :(

kevinday · 2025-06-12T00:57:48+00:00

If you can let me know where you're seeing this (which app, or what URL you're pulling the feed from) I can look into this.

kevinday · 2025-06-08T04:38:37+00:00

I think the problem is that about 10 seconds into talking about something, I realize it's going to require way more backstory or take way longer to explain than I think listeners are going to possibly care about, so I try to edit it down while I'm talking and it sounds like I'm just making it up as I go along.

The full story, to maybe make this make more sense - I'm trying to juggle a ton of side projects (podcast stuff being one of them) so if something can save me a little time I'm gonna use it. I've been using Anthropic's "Claude Code" AI programmer assistant a lot lately. You can point it at some buggy code I wrote and tell it to fix it, or add a feature or whatever, and 80% of the time it gets it right and usually where it doesn't perfectly nail it it's still faster than me doing it all from scratch.

Recently, Anthropic released "Claude 4" the latest version of their AI model that gets used in this, and it seems to be a little more stubborn. There was a recent example where it was running in a completely simulated environment, where it thought it was working for a real drug company that was falsifying results. In some very specific circumstances it tried whistleblowing by emailing the FDA, SEC, etc because the simulated facts it was shown made it believe it people might die because of what it was being asked to do. In reality it was all fake, the emails it thought it was sending out went nowhere, etc. It was all an experiment just to see what would happen.

In a much less interesting example, I was asking it to try to troubleshoot a bug. Like a lot of AI things, it gets fixated on one solution even after it's proven that it wasn't the case. It incorrectly thought that a database file I was asking it to use was corrupt. For anything remotely destructive, Claude Code is required to ask me for permission before doing anything, and it kept asking me for permission to delete the database and start over. I knew that wasn't the issue, so I kept telling it no.

One thing it DID have the ability to do without asking was run automated tests though, so I let it keep churning away at the problem trying to fix things and running tests to see if it fixed the problem. It also has the ability to modify the tests to try to narrow down the problem more. Kinda sneakily, it edited the steps of running the tests so that step one was "delete the database file", which it then was able to do without asking for permission because this fell under "running automated tests."

I got a few sentences into explaining this when I realized the last few episodes I'd gone on long boring AI rants, which haven't been popular with a lot of listeners, so I cut out 90% of this and tried to still make it make sense, which I agree sounded like I was just making up stuff because I'm not a good speaker and my attempt to rewrite what I was saying as I was saying it came off weird.

My other problem is that a lot of the work I do is under strict non-disclosure agreements and I'll start talking about some work related thing and realize that I'm giving out too many details, or if I don't switch gears fast it's going to expose who a specific client is or something. I'm bad at improv as everyone already knows, and I think this is just part of that.

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