Thoughts on Navalny’s death

Make Me Smart February 16, 2024 Transcript

Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it.

Kai Ryssdal 

Can Google tell you that?

Kimberly Adams 

Instagram can tell me that. Hello everyone, I am Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where today makes sense. None of us is as smart as all of us. All of the catchphrases. It’s Friday, February the 16th.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m Kai Ryssdal. As Kimberly said, it is Friday the 16th of February. Thanks for joining us on the podcast, the YouTube live stream. Friday is when we do a little happy hour. We check on what people are drinking, and then we do some Half Full/Half Empty, and I mean you guys know how Friday goes.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, that’s a Friday. We’re going to do all the things. What are you drinking, Kai?

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, I have a cup of coffee because I got things to do later. Also, I was up way too early this morning. So, it’s in my pewabic mug, but a freshly brewed cup of coffee with some whole milk. Thank you very much.

Kimberly Adams 

That’s not going to keep you up like a long time?

Kai Ryssdal 

No. No, it doesn’t. What’s really interesting is, it’s not really interesting to anybody except me. I need coffee to wake me up in the morning, but coffee late in the afternoon or at night after dinner does not keep me up at night. It’s weird.

Kimberly Adams 

Wow.

Kai Ryssdal

Don’t know what to tell you.

Kimberly Adams

If I have coffee after like two o’clock in the afternoon I may as well give up on going to sleep at all.

Kai Ryssdal 

My wife’s the same way. My wife’s the same way. What about you?

Kimberly Adams 

I’m drinking wine. Red wine, just being very simple but not simple because I put it in my goblet because it felt like a goblet kind of day.

Kai Ryssdal

Wait, let me see the goblet.

Kimberly Adams

Oh yes. It has dragon on it. And it’s 19 Crimes The Banished. Yeah, it’s the 19 Crimes brand, they always put like convicted criminals on for, I think it’s like an Australian brand, and they put like old photos of like convicted criminals on the cover. And there used to be on some of them where you could like do, put your phone over it and like see the criminals talking and do some cool thing. They’ve got a collaboration with Snoop Dogg. It’s like a whole thing, but they’re tasty and they’re not expensive.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s an Australian label, right? Makes sense to put people from the penal colony, right?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, exactly. That’s the whole point. It says yeah, “19 Crimes turned convicts into colonists. Upon conviction, these rogues guilty at least of one of the 19 crimes got sentenced to Australia.” There you go.

Kai Ryssdal 

Jasper’s getting some love, I should say.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. Yes, he saw you on the screen, and so he decided to be active.

Kai Ryssdal 

Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah, lots of good stuff in here. We got a coffee stout from Dylan in the desert. David Wise is drinking two fingers of Eagle Rare. I don’t know what that is David, but I would have some right now. It’s been one of those weeks. Brett Sharp is just like me, the same with coffee, doesn’t do anything to him late in the day. Lots of red wine.

Kimberly Adams 

Let’s see. Blaze from Minnesota is. Oh no, in Oklahoma City. Oh, I see, is drinking a Nada Nada Pink Limonada sour ale, which I guess comes from Oklahoma City. Yes.

Kai Ryssdal 

You know, I’ve been thinking I should try a sour ale. They always sort of made me go ew, but I was thinking I should try one. Maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll buy. Oh my God. Kai’s going to branch out and drink something besides an IPA. Stop the freakin presses.

Kimberly Adams 

Let’s see. Meredith is drinking rum and coke. Michael doing the Glenlivet Old Fashion today. I appreciate it. And Peter Hecht with the tequila shots. All right. Well, there we go.

Kai Ryssdal 

Ben says “Sour ales are gross. Kai, you will hate it.” So, we’ll see. We shall see.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, I’ve heard about these Lagunitas hop water. Hop water.

Kai Ryssdal

Yeah, me too.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah, people are saying those are quite good, and they’re not alcoholic. I have to try it. You know, I like to try the non-alcoholic things.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s actually a really good idea because I’ve talked before about how nonalcoholic beers haven’t done it for me, mostly because of the folic taste. Maybe a hoppy water will do it. I don’t know. That’s a good idea. I’ll give that a whack.

Kimberly Adams

Yeah, you know, something different. All right, what’s your news?

Kai Ryssdal

Oh, well. So, look. The whole Navalny thing. Alexei Navalny apparently, definitely dead, apparently murdered in the Soviet gulag. Russian Gulag, sorry, has kind of been eating at me all day in a “Oh my god, the courage and the bravery and the strength of purpose that he had,” but then you juxtapose that with Tucker Carlson almost literally groveling at Putin’s feet. And the way that’s playing with the American right. And I’m having such a hard time dealing with the right wing of American politics right now. I can’t even tell you. So, it’s the juxtaposition of what Navalny did and what he stood for and what he sacrificed. Literally everything. And then, Americans, I don’t get it.

Kimberly Adams 

I’m trying to remember who I had this conversation with, but it was years ago. And they were talking, it was somebody who I used to work with in Egypt, but they were talking about how any country in the midst of a political transition, the individual citizens have to sort of take a moment where you sort of draw your lines, right? Deciding what is going to be the thing when you stop going about your normal day-to-day life. And you actually start being engaged, you start protesting, you start actually changing the way you live, and stop seeing it as like an abstract thing. And it becomes a thing for you. And everybody’s got to figure out where that line is in advance. Because if you don’t, it creeps up on you, and you’re like a frog in the boiling pot of water. And you don’t realize what’s happening, or you don’t see it happening around you. And before you know it, you’re in a dictatorship. And I wonder how many of these lines if we, you know, as a society had set these lines five years ago, how far we’ve blown past them, you know, and what lines do we need to be setting for ourselves today saying, “This is what I as an individual citizen will not tolerate.” Navalny was in there in the gulag. Still. Still. Probably being tortured, you know, still engaging in politics, still encouraging his supporters, still calling for, you know, the rights of his people. And, you know, I wonder how many of us would have that metal. Given what we’ve kind of swallowed so far.

Kai Ryssdal 

I wouldn’t add a word. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s been gnawing at me all day. Anyway, go ahead. What do you got?

Kimberly Adams 

Two things, not nearly as thoughtful. But speaking of things that we’ve just sort of accepted. Plastics and plastic pollution. There was a report that came out, I guess it was yesterday, from yes, an environmental group advocacy group. It’s called the Center for Climate Integrity. And they put out this report that basically said, that did say, the plastics industry has known always, that plastics were never really recyclable, the vast majority of them. And they’re probably never going to be, but still pushed the narrative that recycling was going to fix the problem, anyway. And it reminds me so much of what we know about the oil companies. They knew climate change was real for decades, and lied to the American people about it, and you know, pretended like it wasn’t that big of a deal. And now the scale of the plastic pollution that we’re dealing with is just unbelievable. And we still have our recycle bins, and we still feel guilty if we don’t sort our things, but most of that stuff is not really recyclable, or even if it is, it’s no longer economically viable to be recycled. And it’s a, you’ve put it a certain way before and I’m going to mess up your words where you’re talking about how the, you know, the individual, like individual people get told to take responsibility for things that need corporate or systemic solutions. You had a smarter way of saying it. But yeah, it’s like we’ve been taught reduce, reuse, recycle. You can save the planet, and it’s not us. It’s not us. Now granted, my dad used to say just because you can’t be the solution doesn’t mean you have to be a part of the problem. But we do need some systemic changes. And I’ll just skip my other one because it’s, I’m done being kind of a downer. I’m ready for our game. I know. Well, no, we can’t go to the game yet cause we have a break first. After the break, we’ll go to the game.

Kai Ryssdal 

I butcher that one up. I’m sorry. All right. Half Full/Half Empty is the game. Daniel Shin in for Drew, who is out doing. I don’t know something. Maybe he’s having fun. I don’t know.

Kimberly Adams 

Magical. I’m sure it’s something magical.

Daniel Shin 

How’s it going, everybody? So, I’ll just jump straight into it. First topic, are you half full or half empty on OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool named Sora?

Kai Ryssdal 

Wow. I want to be half full because it’s cool and full of possibilities, but the downside risk, shall we just say seems to me to be huge, especially when. And look that they have not released it to the public yet. We should be clear about that. But the challenges with this are going to be huge. So, I think I have to say I’m half empty for now, which I understand I’m spitting into the wind. I get that.

Kimberly Adams 

Half empty for now as well. And you know, I try to be an optimist about AI. But just because they haven’t released it to the public doesn’t mean it’s not, similar tools are not available to the public or similar tools will not be available to nefarious actors. And just given lots of people saw that article in, I guess it was New York Magazine about the columnist who got scammed out of $50,000. Did you see that? And just, the scams’ getting so much more sophisticated and the tech being easier to use. I’m going to have to be half empty, but I still am holding out hope for the future that once we somehow as a society adapt, I think we’re going to end up hopefully better off. Assuming we survive. Total nerd aside, I cannot not share the fact that the name of this software is Sora, which means sky, which also I recently learned this word because one of the animes I’m watching has a little slime monster character that is also named Sora after the sky also, and so I was like “Oh, Sora.” It’s a very cute little monster, and it made me smile.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s cool. There we go. Ended on an upbeat. Daniel, what’s number two?

Daniel Shin 

Number two, the retail chain Best Buy is ending DVD and Blu-ray sales.

Kai Ryssdal 

Really? I didn’t know they were still selling them. So, look progress, I suppose. I wonder what we’re going to do.

Kimberly Adams 

Given what I just said about plastics, half full.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, half full for sure. I do wonder though, like how many metric tons of plastic and polycarbonate and all that jazz are now in everybody’s like living room cabinets, you know?

Kimberly Adams 

Well, remember all those AOL CDs that everybody had.

Kai Ryssdal

I do. I do indeed.

Kimberly Adams 

People were making, like, wall-hangings out of them and stuff.

Kai Ryssdal

Yep, totally. Totally.

Kimberly Adams

What’s next?

Daniel Shin 

For three, making beer with the help of artificial intelligence.

Kai Ryssdal 

I don’t know anything about this story. I imagine it’s some kind of ingredient calculation and formulation.

Daniel Shin

Recipes, basically.

Kai Ryssdal

Recipe Okay. Yep. Yep, there you go. So, look, I think one of the really cool things about ChatGPT is you can tell it what’s in your fridge, and it will come up with a recipe for you. So, I’m half full on that.

Kimberly Adams

Or what’s in your bar.

Kai Ryssdal

Or what’s in your bar. Right. Exactly. Totally.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. And, and the medical advances is where I get really excited when you start thinking about that in terms of combinations of drugs and cures for things, so half full on that kind of usage of AI. Yes, half full.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Shin 

Okay. Next one is apparently the return of the romance novel. The kind you’d find at like, CVS or something.

Kai Ryssdal 

Right, bodice ripper is what they used to call them. They are, I learned on the radio program that I hosted this week. I learned that they are a billion dollar a year industry, romance novels are. And now because of diverse, more diverse writers and more diverse audiences, they are growing. I mean, look, whatever floats your boat, right? Half full.

Kimberly Adams 

I’m half full mainly because I get very entertained by romance talk videos on TikTok. Like I’m much more of a sci-fi fantasy person. So, there’s BookTok on TikTok, and within BookTok, there are all these sub genres of communities in different, you know, genres of books and romance novel TikTok is super active. But even within that sub-genre, I don’t know how I got into this, mainly from laughing at videos. There are all these videos of like the husbands and partners of women who love to read romance novels complaining about the unrealistic standards they’re being held to because their wives and partners are reading these novels about the romance and the steamy scenes and everything, and it’s very funny. So, I am all the way full on this.

Kai Ryssdal 

That is very funny. Oh, by that, yeah, whatever, whatever works.

Daniel Shin 

All right. And the last one is another sort of return.

Kimberly Adams 

Wait, is this the one that we did the poll?

Kai Ryssdal

Here comes the poll. Yep.

Daniel Shin

Yes.

Kimberly Adams

Okay, so we’re going to have a poll. Got it.

Daniel Shin 

The last one is about bringing back landline phones.

Kimberly Adams 

I still have a landline.

Kai Ryssdal 

Wait, seriously. Do you? Really?

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. And it was while we’re vamping, waiting for people to vote, let me tell you how hard it was for me to get a landline. So, the landline phone companies don’t like to maintain these copper hard lines. Because they’re expensive, and they’re old. And very few people use them. They don’t make that much money. But in DC, they actually like past some sort of edict that the company has had to maintain their existing lines so that they couldn’t force people to like, switch over to VoIP if they didn’t want to. It’s a way to like help out low income people, right? So, I decided because I can often be a paranoid individual that I wanted to have a hard-wired copper, like old school, landline, in case of an emergency and all the networks went down and it was the apocalypse and I needed to call in to work. I know that was actually what I thought.

Kai Ryssdal 

Wait, seriously? Was that why?

Kimberly Adams 

Well, because, you know. So, here’s what happened. When I was living in Egypt, well not when I was living in Egypt, shortly after I left, they shut down the internet. And I got an advanced warning that they were shutting down the internet. And so, I went around getting everybody’s landline numbers. And that was the only way you could reach people. And so, in an emergency when the internet shuts down, your VoIP goes away, and you can’t call anybody that landline phone that is sitting two feet from me right now will be my saving grace and then I’ll survive the zombie apocalypse. So, I have a landline and Verizon was not happy about it. It is nowhere on their website you had to call and go through like a million phone trees. But I got, I made them do it.

Kai Ryssdal 

Okay, so does it ever ring? Do people call you on it?

Kimberly Adams 

I have the ringer turned off.

Kai Ryssdal 

Okay, so it’s strictly outgoing in case of the zombie apocalypse.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. Although when I do turn it on. It’s funny. It’s the only time I get polling calls is when I have my ring turned on from my landline and of course some sort of police. Like policeman’s fund for fallen policemen, which is probably a scam. But anyway, but yeah, well, that’s. I have a landline. All right. Jason Behringer says in the chat, “Who would you call if you’re the only person with a landline?” Because nobody else is gone be able to answer. Fair. Fair. Okay, so, it’s pretty split. Okay, I’m bringing back landlines. Half full 51%, half empty 48% with 151 votes.

Kai Ryssdal 

So wait, Daniel, are we bringing back landlines? Is Kimberly a trendsetter here?

Daniel Shin 

There’s some reporting to suggest that it’s a bit of a resurgence thanks to Gen Z, quote unquote” retro nostalgia” for landlines.

Kimberly Adams 

And the millennial preppers.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s pretty wild. I did not know. I didn’t know that was a thing. That also might be the closest poll we had. 51-48.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, that’s pretty close.

Kai Ryssdal 

Are you guys keeping track of polls? Sorry. Sorry. Just seriously, 51-48 is the closest poll that we’ve had? Do we know? Anyway? Whatever. Random, random, random musings. Go ahead.

Kimberly Adams 

Oh wait, Bridget says, “I’ll be able to call Marissa because Marissa has a landline.”

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh my god. Oh man.

Kimberly Adams 

See all the cool kids have one, Kai. You want one, too?

Kai Ryssdal 

Look, it is well established that I’m not a cool kid. I’m neither cool nor kid. Alright, so we’re out here we’re done. Done for today. We are off Monday for the holiday. Back on Tuesday. In the meanwhile, if you got a question or a comment you want to share with us, leave us a voicemail using your landline of course. That’s the only way we’ll take your call. 508-U-B-SMART or you can email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org, or if you want to go really retro: 261 South Figueroa, Los Angeles, California 90012. We’ll take some snail mail. All right.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s episode was engineered by Charlton Thorp. Our intern is Thalia Menchaca, who probably doesn’t even know what a landline is because she’s young. God bless it.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, yeah, right? I mean, my kids. Seriously, like my oldest son would know what a landline is. My daughter at 16 would not know what a landline is. Team on our Friday game is Emily Macune and Antoinette Brock. Marissa Cabrera is the senior producer of this podcast. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital and On Demand.

Kimberly Adams 

Somebody told me once the Gen Z doesn’t actually know why the symbols for hang up and pick up are those little shapes because they’ve never actually dealt with phone that looked like that.

Kai Ryssdal 

I totally believe that. I 1,000% believe that. Yeah.