Podcast appearances and mentions of Rube Goldberg

A Texas politician innovates in the field of football racism. Turns out a Kansas Senator has been taking it upon himself to bring back debtor's prisons. Trump causes three different diplomatic rows with the U.K. in a week, including trying to resurrect the I.R.A. Then, the U.S. attempts to bring about the downfall of Saudi Arabia through a Rube Goldberg machine that hits everyone in the balls.This episode is sponsored by ZBiotics. Go to https://www.zbiotics.com/SKEW now. You'll get 15% off your first order when you use SKEW at checkoutThis episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10% at  https://www.betterhelp.com/skews

In today's episode, Piet le Roux discusses "state-proofing" South Africa and urges a shift in United States foreign policy. David Shapiro unpacks Covid-19's lasting scars on global markets and the Federal Reserve's recent inflation struggles. We also explore how the investment industry uses Rube Goldberg-like complexity to generate revenue rather than solve uncertainty. Finally, catch up on Wall Street's rally, Nvidia's earnings, and plunging retail stocks.

John Zmirak, Eric Metaxas. Movie About Christian Resistance to the French Revolution, J.J. Carrell- Immigration Stats,  Destructive Darwinism, The Growing Case for Intelligent Design.   John Zmirak The Eric Metaxas Show John ZmirakThe Eric Metaxas  Aug 19 2026  Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, John Zmirak joins Eric to challenge the standard Darwinian account of human origins and discuss the growing case for intelligent design. They examine whether Christians can truly reconcile evolution with Genesis, why Zmirak believes Darwinism undermines the biblical understanding of humanity, Francis Collins and theistic evolution, and the cultural consequences of teaching that human life arose through unguided processes.  John Zmirak Joins0:26 Intelligent Design Vs. Darwinism3:29 Creation Or Evolution?5:11 Were Humans Really Descended From Apes?6:29 Can Christians Reconcile Genesis And Evolution?9:16 Why Darwinism “Multiplies Faith By Zero”11:40 Eric's Encounter With Francis Collins17:14 Deism, Providence, And The American Founders23:05    ----------------------------------------------------------- jjcarrellpolitics• Follow https://www.instagram.com/reels/Dblbbn-SMTw/   --------------------------------------------------------------------- Streaming movie recommended by John Zmirak- https://victoryordeathmovie.com/   When everything you value is on the line, when all you love and believe in is at stake, there's no other choice but to fight for it. Victory or Death Fight for Faith. Fight for Family. Fight for Freedom. --------------------------------------------------------------- Article by John Zmirak- New Book by Chaberek, Greene Probes Evolution as a “Catholic Dilemma” John Zmirak August 5, 2026 Evolution, Faith & Science I recently returned from a two-week wildlife safari through Zimbabwe and South Africa. I visited Victoria Falls, which dwarfs Niagara, the extraordinary Table Mountain, and several wildlife reserves including Kruger National Park. The jeep rides through the brush yielded close encounters with female lions shepherding their cubs, male lions sleeping off meals, a leopard in a tree crunching the skull of an impala, herds of piously maternal elephants — only one of which came close to charging us — and a dozen other species of predator or prey. The high point, I'll confess, was one wildlife encounter in particular: when a troop of baboons charged the outdoor diners at The Black Marlin in Cape Town, driving them to flee, so the apes could stuff their faces with pilfered pasta. Sadly, I was sitting inside, so all I could do was cheer the hairy creatures on from through the window. Privacy Note: On play, Google may track viewers. YouTube's Privacy Policy. The Book of Nature I hope that I'm sufficiently grateful for this encounter with the baroque, sublime abundance of biology that our planet is privileged to host — alone, so far as we know, among the billions of planets. Gratitude should be aimed at a giver, and it was reading the works of Discovery Institute authors that made this easier for me. I could wonder at the tiny penguins that somehow survive in the Mediterranean climate near the Cape of Good Hope, or the birds that live symbiotically with wildebeests by feeding on bloodsucking insects, without the deflating idea lurking in the back of my mind, “This all the result of blind chance and iron necessity, with no crafting intelligence behind it.” Instead, I saw works of art, and found myself thanking the Artist. I was reading the Book of Nature, and seeing in it glimmers of divine action, intention, and generosity — as “natural philosophers” did from Kepler and Newton to Pasteur and Mendel. Back when I unreflectively adhered to the theistic (really deistic) evolution that's preached in most Christian pulpits, I accepted the notion that God was somehow behind every aspect of the cosmos. If pressed, I would have said that God had “guided” or “instigated” the emergence of extraordinary creatures like the zebras that stared at our jeep, the elegant kudus that capered past us through the veldt, the wild dogs that seemed at once so alien and so familiar that it was tempting to hop out and try petting them. (“Do not attempt this,” I was informed by our solemn African guide.) But all of life was at best a convoluted Rube Goldberg contraption, which Someone had set in motion then stepped away to observe. God even had humans in mind — deciding, for some reason, to slowly evolve His earthly image through a long chain of predecessor species, until at some point He chose to implant both rationality and immortal souls in creatures who'd mutated in and then emerged from the womb of an animal. I used to speculate about how that allegedly worked, and how I could reconcile it in some fashion with the Genesis account of God making man directly from the dust of the earth, and woman from his side. I remember thinking, lamely, “Maybe they were identical twins … and He switched Eve's sex before the ape gave birth to them?” Then I stopped bothering, encouraged by modern priests who treat not just Genesis but most of the Old Testament as mostly wholesome mythology, akin to that found in Bulfinch or Edith Hamilton. Christianizing Darwinists Obeying the dictum of 19th-century “Higher Criticism,” Christianizing Darwinists aim to explain away every claim of miraculous action — from the direct creation of man to the parting of the Red Sea, from Jesus' virgin birth to even his Resurrection. I was taught in high school that the last, most crucial Christian miracle, amounted merely to the “ongoing presence” of Jesus in his apostles' hearts and minds. Big whoop. In that sense, Adolf Hitler is still sadly with us. (If you want an account of how and why biblical critics crafted such blinders, read Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker's magisterial Politicizing the Bible, which I edited for publication.) Priests, theologians, bishops and even (recently) popes have responded to the popular triumph of Darwinism by dismissing most of the events recounted in Genesis as purely allegorical and moral. Keen to avoid being tarred as “fundamentalists,” and encouraged by some cautious leeway granted to evolutionary thinking by popes such as Pius XII and John Paul II, most Catholics have eagerly accepted that Darwin's theories fully explain the emergence of every living species, even man. Otherwise-orthodox believers have made this intellectual concession, convinced that “the science” is irrefutable, so the theology must make room for it. But what if, in fact, the science is very shaky, and the implications for a Christian worldview profoundly toxic? Those are the questions asked and convincingly answered in a new book, Creation or Evolution? A Catholic Dilemma. It's written in an extremely engaging format — a series of questions posed by science journalist Steve Greene and answered by theologian Rev. Michael Chabarek, O.P. It was Chaberek's previous book, Aquinas and Evolution, that convinced me to take intelligent design seriously, and embark on the journey through the works of Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, Douglas Axe, and many others — to my profound intellectual and spiritual enrichment. This new book is every bit the equal of Chaberek's earlier work. He lays out the serious evidential weaknesses in the Darwinist claim to have explained the appearance of human beings by incremental mutations from previous apelike species. (For much more detail than this book offers, see Science and Human Origins, from Discovery Institute Press, which Chaberek cites.) He explains how circular logic and wishful thinking pervade the claims of paleontologists to have discovered non-human ancestors for our species, with periodic claims to have found a “missing link” based on tiny bone fragments of indeterminate origin. False First Principles But Chaberek's main focus is not on empirical flaws or gaps in the Darwinist account. Instead, he focuses on the false first principles that motivate, even compel Darwinists to invent their “just so” stories in the first place. Here's a sample of the straightforward, plain-speaking way that the authors convey key philosophical issues: If man did not come from the ape, then how did he come into existence? First, let us consider whether sciences such as paleontology and genetics are actually capable of providing an answer to this question. If man came into existence naturally, then, yes, because science explains the workings of nature. But if man came into existence supernaturally, that is, by the action of divine power exceeding the power of nature, then science cannot explain the beginning of man. Therefore, whether science can provide an answer to this question does not depend on scientific research, but on the previously adopted religious or philosophical assumptions. Chabarek argues convincingly that secularist and materialist assumptions precede and determine the scientific work of Darwinists, essentially forcing them to deny evidence of design, and to make impossible claims for the creative power of mutations — despite the overwhelming odds against blind chance happening upon even a single useful new protein in the entire history of life on earth (as Douglas Axe showed in exhaustive experimental detail in his book, Undeniable). When such bias-inducing reductionist assumptions migrate from the research papers of laboratory scientists into the works of Christian leaders, the consequences are even more baleful, Chabarek warns. If such a central question as the origin of the only rational species, the “image of God,” is to be surgically excised from the domain of religious authority and turned over to materialist scientists, what is to stop that same debunking impulse from undermining every mystery of faith? Should we leave Sarah's miraculous conception of Isaac to the gynecologists, the parting of the Red Sea to the oceanographers, and the resurrection of Jesus to the biologists? That's the inexorable logic of Christians who cling to Darwinist explanations of the “descent of man” from ancestral apes. Far better, Chabarek advises, for Christians who accept a long series of miracles and mysteries as entailed in the redemption of humanity to also make room for the Bible's literal account of the miracle of his creation — from the dust of the earth, by the hand of God. John Zmirak John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First. To read articles from John Zmirak visit- https://chroniclesmagazine.org/author/johnzmirak/   Endorsed Charities -------------------------------------------------------- Pre-Born! Saving babies and Souls. https://preborn.org/ OUR MISSION To glorify Jesus Christ by leading and equipping pregnancy clinics to save more babies and souls. WHAT WE DO Pre-Born! partners with life-affirming pregnancy clinics all across the nation. We are designed to strategically impact the abortion industry through the following initiatives:… -------------------------------------------------------- Help CSI Stamp Out Slavery In Sudan Join us in our effort to free over 350 slaves. Listeners to the Eric Metaxas Show will remember our annual effort to free Christians who have been enslaved for simply acknowledging Jesus Christ as their Savior. As we celebrate the birth of Christ this Christmas, join us in giving new life to brothers and sisters in Sudan who have enslaved as a result of their faith. https://csi-usa.org/metaxas   https://csi-usa.org/slavery/   Typical Aid for the Enslaved A ration of sorghum, a local nutrient-rich staple food A dairy goat A “Sack of Hope,” a survival kit containing essential items such as tarp for shelter, a cooking pan, a water canister, a mosquito net, a blanket, a handheld sickle, and fishing hooks. Release celebrations include prayer and gathering for a meal, and medical care for those in need. The CSI team provides comfort, encouragement, and a shoulder to lean on while they tell their stories and begin their new lives. Thank you for your compassion  Giving the Gift of Freedom and Hope to the Enslaved South Sudanese -------------------------------------------------------- Food For the Poor https://foodforthepoor.org/ Help us serve the poorest of the poor Food For The Poor began in 1982 in Jamaica. Today, our interdenominational Christian ministry serves the poor in primarily 17 countries throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Thanks to our faithful donors, we are able to provide food, housing, healthcare, education, fresh water, emergency relief, micro-enterprise solutions and much more. We are proud to have fed millions of people and provided more than 15.7 billion dollars in aid. Our faith inspires us to be an organization built on compassion, and motivated by love. Our mission is to bring relief to the poorest of the poor in the countries where we serve. We strive to reflect God's unconditional love. It's a sacrificial love that embraces all people regardless of race or religion. We believe that we can show His love by serving the “least of these” on this earth as Christ challenged us to do in Matthew 25. We pray that by God's grace, and with your support, we can continue to bring relief to the suffering and hope to the hopeless.   Report on Food For the Poor by Charity Navigator https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/592174510   -------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer from ACU. We try to bring to our students and alumni the World's best Conservative thinkers. All views expressed belong solely to the author and not necessarily to ACU. In all issues and relations, we hope to follow the admonitions of Jesus Christ. While striving to expose, warn and contend with evil, we extend the love of God to all of his children. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The perfectly named podcast sees the boys dish out numerous facts, and an enjoyable fiction or two. In the crosshairs gerrymandering, dictator Tito, creative handshakes, Archie Bunker, Rube Goldberg, squishy toyals, KC Chiefs, and more mayhem. Salut!

Fire the Whole Investment Team: Meb Faber on 250 Years of American Compounding and Why CalPERS Can’t Beat a 60/40 allocation https://youtu.be/9lBYkG4J2sY A dollar invested in the U.S. stock market in 1800 is worth roughly $200 million today, and Meb Faber says the giant pension funds paid to beat that kind of compounding usually can’t. In this episode of Wealth Actually, Frazer Rice talks with Meb Faber, co-founder and CIO of Cambria Investment Management and host of The Meb Faber Show, about his new coffee-table book Investing in America: The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market, the shareholder yield thesis behind Cambria’s ETF lineup, and his long-running public campaign arguing that CalPERS and other giant institutional pools routinely fail to beat a simple, low-cost buy-and-hold portfolio. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4WmnPm3GN8jwQtJuCVV9XG?si=nLLcz8y8RSuydORA5_ZHGQ Key Takeaways America is, in Faber’s words, the greatest compounding machine in history. He puts a dollar invested in U.S. stocks in 1800 at roughly $200 million today — a number he uses to reframe how clients should think about staying invested through wars, depressions, and pandemics. The book’s origin story starts with meme stocks. Faber says COVID pulled a new generation of retail investors into the market through gamified trading apps, and he wanted to hand them a historically grounded alternative to day-trading and zero-day options. Diversification is older than the country itself. Faber traces the concept back to 15th- and 16th-century joint-stock voyages — the Mayflower and the Virginia Company among them — where spreading capital across many risky expeditions let “merchant adventurers” survive when any single ship was lost. Shareholder yield, not dividend yield, is Cambria’s core factor. Since the S&P 500’s dividend yield now sits near an all-time low of 1.04%, Faber argues the real signal is cash dividends plus net buybacks — net of the dilution from stock-based compensation that quietly erodes shareholders’ ownership every year. Faber’s CalPERS critique boils down to one line: “the returns are not bad, they’re just not good.” He’s built an entire body of work, including Cambria’s ENDW endowment-style ETF, arguing that giant pools with virtually unlimited access to managers still can’t consistently beat a disciplined global 60/40. Complexity is often the enemy, not the edge. Faber contrasts investing with almost every other field of expertise: hiring the best doctor or coach nearly always helps, but hiring the most sophisticated (and expensive) money manager frequently doesn’t. Illiquidity has a way of showing up at the worst possible time. Faber points to endowments getting caught upside down in 2008–2009 and to more recent leveraged blowups as the same lesson repeating: over-lever a portfolio and you’re out of chips at the poker table. The real accountability gap is career incentives, not investment theory. Faber contrasts Yale, which gets a pass for strong long-term results, with Harvard’s endowment, which he says has underperformed for two decades without anyone losing their job over it — a dynamic he says maps directly onto UHNW family governance. Timestamps [00:00] Cold open — CalPERS CIOs vs. UK prime ministers [00:29] Show open and disclaimer [00:54] Welcome: Meb Faber, Cambria, and the new book [02:07] The $76 price tag and the 1776 joke [03:13] Genesis of Investing in America: COVID, meme stocks, and joint-stock voyages [06:33] The most surprising find: Ben Franklin’s “Mind Your Business” motto [09:09] Argentina vs. the U.S. — what actually drove American exceptionalism [12:47] Cambria today: the shareholder yield thesis [17:46] Why politicians target buybacks instead of stock-based comp [20:54] The CalPERS critique begins [21:34] The Ivy Portfolio, the ENDW endowment ETF, and year-one results [25:45] The Nevada pension comparison and the liquidity-complexity pushback [26:56] Institutional blowups, Harvard’s endowment dysfunction, and misaligned incentives [29:36] The “anti-Switzerland of asset management” bit [31:16] Close: where to find Meb, Cambria, and the book Pull Quotes “No, no, no, no, Frazer — it is $76, in honor of 1776.” — Meb Faber “A dollar would be worth roughly $200 million today… despite wars and depressions and pandemics and everything else terrible that’s happened in the history of the world, this relentless compounding is such a fun story.” — Meb Faber “There are dividend funds in the U.S. today… whose actual dividend yield is lower than their management fee. A negative net dividend yield — an astonishing statistic in 2026.” — Meb Faber “Who’s had more turnover in the past 10 years — CalPERS CIOs or UK prime ministers? Both totally dysfunctional. I think CalPERS has a slight edge, but it’s close.” — Meb Faber “I’m the anti-Switzerland of asset management.” — Meb Faber About the Guest Meb Faber is co-founder, CEO, and Chief Investment Officer of Cambria Investment Management, an independent, privately owned advisory firm built around quantitative asset management and alternative investment strategies (BusinessWire). He hosts The Meb Faber Show, one of the most widely followed investing podcasts, and is the author of eight books, including The Ivy Portfolio, Global Asset Allocation, Global Value, Shareholder Yield, and now Investing in America: The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market — his first coffee-table book, released to coincide with the U.S. semiquincentennial (Curzio Research). Proceeds from the book go to charities that fund investment accounts for Americans born in the country. A ninth book, The Awesome Portfolio, is slated for release on September 8, 2026 (Meb Faber on X). Contact Meb Faber & Cambria Cambria Investment Management: cambriainvestments.com Cambria Funds: cambriafunds.com Meb’s blog, podcast & research: mebfaber.com The Meb Faber Show: themebfabershow.com Twitter/X: @MebFaber Book — Investing in America: available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and signed via Pages bookstore in Manhattan Beach, CA (Acquirer’s Multiple) Cambria Funds Mentioned Shareholder Yield suite (SYLD, FYLD, EYLD, plus small-cap and large-cap variants) — cash dividends plus net buybacks plus net debt reduction, divided by market cap (MarketWatch) GVAL — Global Value ETF screening the cheapest quartile of roughly 45 country markets by long-term valuation (Cambria — GVAL) TAIL / FAIL — U.S. and global ex-U.S. tail-risk ETFs pairing short-term Treasuries with a rolling ladder of out-of-the-money S&P 500 puts (Cambria — TAIL) Trinity Portfolio (TRTY) — roughly half buy-and-hold, half trend-following across a basket of other Cambria funds (Cambria — Trinity Portfolio) ENDW — Cambria’s endowment-style ETF, discussed on the show as roughly $150–180 million at launch and referenced later in conversation as having grown toward roughly $5 billion in assets with more than 100,000 investors (MebFaber.com) The CalPERS Critique — Further Reading 9 Institutions Can’t Beat a Basic Buy-and-Hold Allocation — MebFaber.com How California’s $450B Pension Fund Misses the Basics of Investing — YouTube Should a Robot Be Managing CalPERS’ Portfolio? — MebFaber.com, 2015 Index Funds vs. Ivy League — MarketWatch/Barron’s Streetwise CalPERS: America’s Misled and Misleading Pension Leader — Retired Public Employees Association CalPERS Section II Performance Tables (2026) — CalPERS.ca.gov Reducing the Noise of AI Investing – FrazerRice.com Frequently Asked Questions How much would a dollar invested in the U.S. stock market in 1800 be worth today?Meb Faber says roughly $200 million, using the figure to illustrate how relentless compounding has powered through wars, depressions, and pandemics over the country’s history. It’s an illustrative, back-of-envelope estimate rather than a precise index calculation, since standardized stock indexes didn’t exist in 1800. Why is Meb Faber’s new book priced at $76?It’s a nod to 1776 and the country’s founding, timed to the U.S. semiquincentennial. All proceeds go to charities that fund investment accounts for Americans born in the country. What is shareholder yield, and how is it different from dividend yield?Shareholder yield is cash dividends plus net stock buybacks (net of new share issuance, particularly from stock-based compensation), divided by market cap. Faber argues it captures real capital return to shareholders better than dividend yield alone, especially now that the S&P 500’s dividend yield sits near an all-time low of about 1.04% and share buybacks have outpaced dividends every year since the late 1990s. What is Meb Faber’s argument against CalPERS and other large pension funds?Faber’s recurring claim is “the returns are not bad, they’re just not good” — that giant institutional pools with access to virtually any manager on the planet still fail to consistently beat a simple, low-cost, diversified buy-and-hold portfolio, once fees and complexity are accounted for. Cambria launched an endowment-style ETF (ENDW) partly to make this a live, ongoing comparison rather than a hypothetical one. What is Cambria’s endowment-style ETF and how does it compare to institutions like CalPERS?ENDW replicates a Yale/Swensen-style endowment allocation — global stocks, global bonds, and real assets like gold, TIPS, and REITs — in a low-cost ETF with an all-in expense under 25 basis points. Faber uses it as a running, real-time benchmark against actual endowment and pension performance reported each fiscal year. Why does Meb Faber say complexity is often the enemy in investing?Unlike most fields, where more resources and the best available experts reliably produce better outcomes, Faber argues that in investing, more complexity and more access to exotic managers frequently doesn’t translate into better returns net of fees — and often just adds cost and illiquidity risk. What lesson does Meb Faber draw from institutional blowups and the 2008–2009 crisis?Endowments that mark their portfolios only once a year got caught badly offsides in 2008–2009, with illiquid positions falling even further than public markets. Faber sees the same pattern recur whenever a fund over-levers and gets forced out of the game — a basic failure of position sizing and situational awareness that keeps repeating at the highest levels of finance. Full Transcript [00:00] Cold Open (produced VO): I said, who’s had more turnover in the past 10 years — CalPERS CIOs or UK Prime Ministers? Both totally dysfunctional. And I think CalPERS has a slight edge, but it’s close. Meb Faber suggested that CalPERS should fire its entire investment team, and that complexity has become a major headwind to their ability to generate returns. Find out more on this episode of Wealth Actually. We’re also going to talk about Meb’s new book, which argues that America is one of the greatest compounding machines in the history of capitalism. [00:29] Show Open (produced VO): Welcome back to the Wealth Actually podcast — the show that features experts, entrepreneurs, and commentators who give you the right knowledge, planning, and guidance so you can preserve your assets and enjoy your wealth. Learn more and subscribe today at WealthActually.com. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not investment, legal, or tax advice. It does not represent the opinions of the employers of the host or guest. [00:54] Frazer Rice: Welcome back. Meb Faber is on the show. He founded Cambria Investment Management, which is a $4 billion ETF group. He also has The Meb Faber Show and does a lot of different writing. He’s famous for being on Twitter and taking on CalPERS. But most importantly, he has a new book out talking about America as a great compounding machine. It’s a lot of fun to have him on. Welcome aboard, Meb. [01:16] Meb Faber: My man, great to be here. Frazer Rice: Oh, thank you for being on. I thank you beforehand for including a piece of my writing in one of your old compendiums on best investment writing. I’ve never forgotten that, so thank you again. Meb Faber: Well, good job making the cut. Frazer Rice: Yeah, right, exactly. I passed the audition. Seen you a few times on The Idea Farm here and there over the years. Meb Faber: Yep. As I tell people with my girlfriend, I met expectations in my recent review, so we’re onto the next year. Look, key to life, Frazer — investors, we’re in a bull market, everyone expects 15% returns forever. Key to investing in life: just low expectations. That’s it. Set your expectations low, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised every day. Don’t lose principal over time — that’ll get you pretty far in life. [02:07] Frazer Rice: So anyway, you’ve got a new book out too, which I thought was pretty cool. I love the fact that you priced it at $17.76 and really focused on the— Meb Faber: No, no, no, no, Frazer — it is $76, in honor of 1776. Now to be clear, we don’t make any money on this book. We’re donating all the proceeds to the Invest America charities that fund accounts for Americans born in this country — a wonderful charity, big supporters of it. Frazer Rice: But yes, in honor of the country’s founding. This is why we have you all to make sure I get that stuff right. But the concept of America as the best compounding machine ever — I think that’s really interesting. First of all, what prompted you to get involved with putting this book together? You’ve written before — seems like you’ve been busy with other stuff, of course — but then you came back and decided this was a good topic to take on. What was the genesis of the book? [03:13] Meb Faber: Yeah, so this is my eighth book, and the first coffee-table book we’ve ever done. People were saying, “What the hell, $76? Are you guys crazy?” Look — this is a beautiful 200-page book. There’s probably 70 pictures, charts, tables. And the concept is in the subtitle: Investing in America: The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market. And the origin story goes back to COVID. Nobody had anything to do — sports stopped, you couldn’t go to the beach. So people were sitting around, and Americans — look, they’re gamblers, they’re risk-takers, we know that. And I said, we can’t do anything about that. So this entire generation of young people turned their attention to the stock market, and we got meme stocks. Today that’s evolved into prediction markets and zero-day options and all sorts of other nonsense. We wanted to grab those young people and say, “No, you don’t understand — the real story is better than any of this. You don’t have to day-trade. You don’t have to bet against the casino and lose.” So we said, let’s do this history since the founding of our republic — what it would have looked like if you could invest from 1800. And the compounding math is so fantastical it seems wrong. A dollar invested in 1800 — and yes, I know there were no indexes back then, chill out, people — but just to be instructive, a dollar would be worth roughly $200 million today. The point is you get on this train despite wars and depressions and pandemics and everything else terrible that’s happened in the history of the world — despite all that, this relentless compounding is such a fun story. On top of that — the founding of our country, and a lot of people don’t know this: when you learn the history of America in elementary school, you learn about the immigration, particularly from Europe, people escaping religious persecution, seeking a better life through freedom — the Mayflower, all that. All true. But what they leave out is that most of these explorations and voyages were funded by companies. Back then they called them joint-stock companies; today we call them companies, LPs, C-corporations — corps, right, partnerships. Because the reality, going back to the 15th century, is that if you’re sending a ship to the New World to find gold, that ship could sink, or there were pirates — you’d lose all your money. So this brilliant invention we call diversification today has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. These companies said, it’s risky to invest in one voyage, but you can own part of a company that invests in 10 or 20 or 30 of these, and maybe one of them will hit. That sounds like venture capital. They used to call these people “adventurers” or merchant adventurers. Hudson’s Bay, the Mayflower voyage, the Virginia Company — many of them failed, many didn’t make money, but some made spectacular profits. It’s a fun origin story that hasn’t really been told about these early entrepreneurs and risk-takers, who honestly still permeate our culture to this day. [06:33] Frazer Rice: In putting the book together, what was the most surprising chart you found that you ended up including? [06:41] Meb Faber: There’s a lot of fun historical statistics in the book. One of my favorite parts of writing it was buying — I don’t know, 50 or 100 financial history books I’d never heard of, books on financial crises globally from various markets. We just had an author on the podcast talking about the global financial crisis of 1873, and on and on — you learn so much. One I love telling people, especially young people — my son or his friends — is: look at a dollar bill or a quarter, and I ask, what’s the motto on there? Well, that used to not be the motto. Ben Franklin, back in the day, the motto on the Fugio cent used to say “Mind Your Business” — which I thought was amazing. And it’s not “mind your business, kid” in the nosy sense — it’s more like, mind your (own) business. It had a sundial on it, too: time is short, mind your business. I thought, let’s go back to that — such a great motto. A bunch of little fun stories, but to me one of the big takeaways of the book is: as a public stock investor, the news is always negative. You turn on CNBC, Bloomberg, pull up your phone, social media — negative, negative, negative, negative. It’s hard to sustain conviction. Look, we haven’t been through a big bear market in 17 years, but when you’re down 30%, 40%, 50%, and you’re reading “Lehman’s going under” and all these crazy headlines — the book lets you zoom out. Each chapter zooms into a decade and then zooms back out and says, okay, 1930s, Great Depression, you lost 80% in stocks — but guess what, here’s your return over the next 50 years. Even over a 20-year period, large-cap stocks become less volatile than bonds, which is an amazing takeaway. Being able to zoom out and say, “I’m a long-term investor, why am I even concerning myself with day-to-day negativity” — that shift in mindset is really important, because when you zoom out, you can barely even see 1987 on a long-term chart of the stock market. I think it’s a useful thing to send to clients, particularly at year-end if you’re a financial advisor. We’ve got big discounts if you buy 50 books online — send it to clients and say, hey, stop going crazy, this too shall pass. [09:09] Frazer Rice: One thing I always have in my mind — I don’t remember if this is exactly true, but Argentina and the US were on roughly equal economic footing back around 1900. When you were putting this together, did you see anything in the US’s political climate or structure — the things that gave it tailwinds to go from 1900 through to now with this rocket-ship growth — versus a country like Argentina, similarly situated, that just muddled along economically? Was there anything in particular that you saw that codified American exceptionalism? [09:51] Meb Faber: Yeah, you’ve got to remember, the US was an emerging market too, for a long period. We didn’t always hold the crown as the largest economy or the largest stock market in the world. The US is two-thirds of world market cap today — astonishing. But if you and I were sipping tea back in 1800 or 1900 and betting on what country would dominate the next century, you’d have gotten a whole host of different answers. That’s part of the fun of this book — you realize, when things got started in Amsterdam in the 1600s, they held the crown, but not forever. It shifted to London, then eventually to New York. And in our own lifetimes, the US wasn’t always the largest stock market — Japan was, in the 1980s. It’s a useful construct: look how much things change. Not even just on a country level — sectors too. Go back 100 years and you’re like, wait, where are the tech stocks? It was railroads. Go back another 100 years and it’s, wait, where are the railroads? There weren’t any — it was banks and insurance. The constant is always change and creative destruction. The big takeaway is you have to be an owner. This ownership mentality is particularly pervasive in the US. Talk to people in Sweden, Europe, Asia, Latin America — they own far fewer stocks than Americans do. Ask what they invest in, and it’s cash in the bank, real estate, maybe. There’s something in the water here. Same thing with entrepreneurship — talk to Americans about failure, and there’s no shame in it here. It’s almost celebrated; we cheer for it. The only thing we like seeing more than someone fail is their eventual rise after failure — the phoenix. There’s a lot of big takeaways in that. It feels like the last 17 years, the US is just going to dominate forever. We wrote a paper called The Bear Market and Diversification a few years back about how special this period has been for US stocks, crushing everything else — but it’s not totally without precedent. In the last hundred years it’s happened three other times where 10-year rolling stock returns hit 15%: the 1920s (the Roaring Twenties), the Nifty Fifty period in the mid-20th century, and my favorite bull market, the late 1990s. And now again today — COVID, meme stocks, the AI boom, whatever you want to call it. Eventually the good times don’t last forever; you probably shouldn’t expect 15% returns to the moon. But pat yourself on the back and celebrate it — it’s been a very special run. [12:47] Frazer Rice: Day-job-wise, at Cambria you’ve got a whole host of different investment theses that you build vehicles around. One that’s gotten my attention, and that I really like the idea of, is the shareholder yield concept — especially the global shareholder yield concept, for the reasons you just described, coming off a very long cycle of US exceptionalism in the stock market. I like the idea of cash flow as an indicator of good investment performance, and diversifying both within and outside the US. With an asterisk here that this is not investment advice, everyone — take us through what you’re thinking on that front, and what else you’re up to at Cambria that’s interesting in the investment ecosystem right now. [13:35] Meb Faber: Sure. It’s kind of crazy, Frazer, but we hit our 20-year anniversary this year, which feels like just yesterday when I started the company. Some of the shareholder yield funds — we now have three with over a 10-year track record, and our oldest, SYLD, is a pesky teenager now. What do you expect out of teenagers? More volatility — hopefully up volatility, not down. We wrote a book on this topic 10, 15 years ago, and a new second edition is out — it’s free online as an ebook, listeners, you can get it from the blog. The subtitle of the book is Shareholder Yield: A Better Approach to Dividend Investing — a pretty bold claim, given there are hundreds of dividend-type funds out there: dividend income, dividend growth, equity income, on and on. Our thesis was that there’s something the entire marketplace hadn’t noticed or appreciated: the rise of share buybacks. Starting in the late ’90s, share buybacks have outpaced dividend distributions in the United States every year. In fact, the US dividend yield on the S&P 500 is at an all-time low of 1.04% — it may cross below 1% for the first time ever, which is astonishing. Our thesis was that a shareholder yield approach — simply cash dividends plus net stock buybacks — outperforms, historically, any dividend strategy you can construct. The “net” matters because it accounts for share issuance, particularly stock-based compensation to the C-suite, which is everywhere in the US — my home state of California’s tech companies love to “make it rain” with stock-based comp. The problem is the average US stock is a diluter: your ownership share goes down every year because they keep issuing more shares. We’ve since demonstrated this in real time across SYLD, FYLD, EYLD (the emerging-market version), and now small-cap and large-cap variants — they’ve done exceptionally well. These funds effectively target a Buffett-like, value-and-quality approach: the average stock coming into the portfolios has roughly a double-digit shareholder yield. Let that sink in — there are dividend funds in the US today, ETFs and mutual funds, that claim to be high-yield or dividend-income funds whose actual dividend yield is lower than their management fee. A negative net dividend yield — an astonishing statistic in 2026. In the US, that shareholder yield is mostly driven by buybacks. In foreign developed and emerging markets, it’s closer to 50-50 — those markets still have more of a culture of cash dividends, so you’ll see yields there closer to 5-6%. But that’s changing, and changing fast. We did a blog post recently calling the UK the “buyback capital of the world” — the UK, China, Japan, and a bunch of other countries have hockey-sticked higher on this. It’s spreading globally, this idea of corporate responsibility: “my stock’s at half of book value, maybe we should consider buybacks.” There’s so much mythology around stock buybacks — we could do a whole podcast on it — and we try to tackle it in the book. Hopefully it’s like a red pill: once you take it, it’s hard to look at investing the same way again, because it feels like you were missing a major piece of the puzzle. [17:46] Frazer Rice: How infuriating is it when the Warrens of the world take aim at buybacks? It feels like an economically illiterate, and certainly politically driven, approach to legislating. To put the clamps on a genuinely useful capital allocation tool — I just don’t understand it. You must look at that and want to shake people and say, you’re missing the point, and you’re not even really targeting the abuses that exist. [18:20] Meb Faber: Well, I try not to be too dismissive of our lovely politicians — the joke I always make is, don’t look down on them, they weren’t taught finance and investing in school either. We don’t teach money and investing in school, and that’s sort of my white whale — I think we should be teaching it as early as elementary school, just basic classes on money. The good news is, roughly a quarter to a third of high schools are now requiring at least one class on the topic. What they’re actually targeting, I think somewhat thoughtfully underneath it, is executive compensation and stock issuance — which is the crazy part, because buybacks are the flip side of that. If a company is consistently loading up its CEO with options and diluting shareholders, and using buybacks to mop that dilution up — that’s what they’re really targeting, but it’s not the buyback itself. It’s the stock-based comp. Buybacks are the exhaust; that happens down the road. The cool part about our methodology is we’re only targeting companies trading at something like 80 cents on the dollar. Buffett is my favorite example here — Berkshire has never paid a dividend, and you might think that’s crazy, but he understands this better than anyone. He’s been writing about buybacks since the 1980s. There’s a great quote from an old Berkshire annual report where he says there’s no better use of cash than buying back your own shares when they’re trading below intrinsic value. Berkshire has bought back a ton of stock over the past several years — smart — they say they’ll buy back at 1.2 times book or below and run a valuation screen. There’s a great, somewhat surprising, takeaway in the book: there’s a myth that CEOs are megalomaniacs who just buy back stock whenever they think it’s expensive or cheap, but if you model it out historically, companies doing big buybacks (say, to retire 5% of market cap) tend to trade at a valuation discount to the market, and companies doing share issuance tend to trade at a valuation premium. There’s a real valuation arbitrage going on — CEOs aren’t dummies. That’s part of what you’re capturing with a shareholder yield approach, as long as it’s consistently recycled. And remember, a buyback is optional — there has to be someone willing to sell into it, so there are always two sides. [20:54] Frazer Rice: Let’s talk about one of my favorite parts of your persona, honestly — your fun critique of CalPERS and what large institutions do (and don’t do well) in managing money, and the inefficiencies that creep in with these big pools of capital as implementation and asset allocation get very complicated and very expensive. Walk me through your thinking when you first noticed the CalPERS phenomenon, and a bit of the history there. [21:34] Meb Faber: My very first book was called The Ivy Portfolio, and we looked at how top endowments manage their assets — Yale, the late David Swensen. One of the strange things about our world in asset management — almost unique among industries — is the assumption that more resources, more money, more access automatically equals better results. That’s true in almost every other endeavor: get the best doctor, you’re probably better off than with your local doctor; best trainer, best nutritionist, best coach, on and on. Not necessarily true in investing. The longer I’ve been in this business, the more I see complexity as often an enemy. So we love to pick on CalPERS — we’ve written a dozen articles: should CalPERS be run by a robot, should they just fire everyone and buy ETFs? We’ve run the simulations, and in many cases these giant institutions — with $500 billion, hundreds of employees, access to literally any fund on the planet — should be able to beat everyone, but they can’t. A very basic buy-and-hold portfolio can mimic what a lot of these top institutions actually deliver. Eventually I got tired of just talking about it. I’ve applied for the CalPERS CIO job at least half a dozen times — they have an opening every other year, listeners, it’s the most dysfunctional organization. I joked on Twitter the other day: who’s had more turnover in the past 10 years, CalPERS CIOs or UK prime ministers? Both totally dysfunctional — I think CalPERS has a slight edge, but it’s close. I said I’d do the job for free — I’d fire almost everyone and get rid of all the illiquid, high-fee investments. But there’s this entire ecosystem of people incentivized to keep the engine running: private equity consultants and the rest of the “two-and-20” crowd. So eventually we said, let’s make this a real, live contest. We launched an endowment-style ETF, ENDW — roughly $150-180 million in it now — and said every June 30th, once we’re through a fiscal year, we’re going to compare results head-to-head. This ETF has no management fee to speak of, all-in under 25 basis points. Can you beat a low-cost ETF like that? Let’s find out. Sure enough, year one — CalPERS has already reported, and they didn’t do badly, but it was basically like a 60/40 portfolio; you’d have been just as well off doing 60/40 and moving on. Our endowment-style allocation actually replicates the average endowment quite well — a nice global mix of global stocks, global bonds, and global real assets (gold, TIPS, REITs, and so on — that real-assets sleeve is one a lot of people leave out). To get closer to a Swensen-level result, you need a couple more ingredients, in my view: you can approximate something like private equity with small-cap value, and approximate the broader endowment risk profile with a bit of leverage, plus tilts to value, global exposure, and trend-following. We’ll see how year one shakes out once all the endowments report — UNC might actually beat us because they had a huge stake in SpaceX, so congrats to Chapel Hill. But I think year one goes to me, sorry to say, CalPERS. I’m going to be a giant irritant on this for years to come. The cool thing is you now have a genuinely investable benchmark. Every endowment investment committee suddenly has to ask, with real fiduciary teeth: can we beat this low-cost ETF? And if we can’t, what are we even doing — why are we studying all these crazy illiquid partnerships instead of just buying a basket of ETFs and calling it a day? That’s going to be an awkward conversation in a lot of boardrooms. [25:45] Frazer Rice: Two comments on that. First — isn’t there someone in the state of Nevada doing something similar, basically running one of the state pension pools with a team of about three people? [25:51] Meb Faber: Yes — we had him on the podcast. I told him, look, you’re putting your money where your mouth is on this. I won’t do his story justice here, I’ll tell you about it off-air — but it’s a great example that this doesn’t have to be as hard as people make it out to be. Frazer Rice: The second thing is — anytime I’ve talked to people in the industry about this, they come back and say, “yes, we technically have an infinite investing horizon, but we have very rigid liquidity needs, so we need to be complex, because our liquidity needs can shift at any moment.” Meanwhile, on one hand I’m thinking, that complexity doesn’t actually help you with liquidity, as far as I can tell — and on the other, it feels like a bit of a convenient excuse. Do you have a response to that? [26:56] Meb Faber: Oh boy, I’ve got a bunch. The endowments famously got caught upside-down in 2008-2009. They only mark their portfolios once a year, June 30th — I wish we could all do that; maybe we should just tell clients, you’re only allowed to look once a year. They were probably down roughly half in ’08-’09, and the illiquid positions were probably down even more. A lot of them got badly offsides, and I don’t think many of them have fully learned the lesson — if you look at the amount of private allocations still sitting in a lot of these portfolios today, it’s a massive amount. I hope they’ve learned the lesson. We’ll see. But it’s a story as old as time — we just saw a version of it recently with a fund blowup, a basic, one-oh-one level failure of situational awareness and position sizing: you over-lever a portfolio, you get taken out of the game, you lose all your money, and then you’re out of chips at the poker table. You watch these mistakes happen at the upper echelons of finance and wonder how it’s still happening — and the core problem is that the career incentives of the people running the money don’t necessarily match the actual investment problem. Yale gets a pass. When Swensen’s successors hit a rough patch, how long do they get a pass? Because Harvard has been a total mess for the last 20 years — there are entire books written about the Harvard endowment, which used to be the Yale before Yale. The Harvard Crimson ran article after article saying, you’re overpaying people, what’s going on here — and the fund would underperform and nobody would actually lose their job over it. That’s the real problem, and I have some sympathy for how hard it is to fix. You deal with a version of this on the personal client side too, with multigenerational wealth — it’s almost an unsolvable structural problem for a Harvard, an endowment, or a CalPERS, because — take Harvard — you’ve got current students, alumni, future students, professors, the people who work at the endowment itself, all with completely different incentives and interests. It creates a genuinely absurd situation where, in no realistic scenario, should the resulting portfolio look like what they actually end up with. It’s an outright disaster, structurally. [29:36] Frazer Rice: It reminds me of a car designed by committee — you end up with this stitched-together Frankenstein’s monster of a product that was never going to work or sell, and it ends up sinking the company. Meb Faber: Yeah, yeah — a Rube Goldberg machine is not what you need. But there’s a reason our endowment ETF, out of the roughly 20 funds we’ve launched, has gotten the least attention — even though it’s now about $5 billion in assets with over a hundred thousand investors. It’s received the least publicity of any ETF we’ve ever done, because it doesn’t benefit anyone in that whole existing ecosystem — it’s actually a genuine threat to it. I was at an institutional conference up in Santa Barbara, at a wine happy hour, talking to three women who run three of the most famous pension and endowment pools of real money in the country. We’d just launched an endowment-style ETF, and they just stared back at me with these icy daggers. I said, oh, sorry — I’m not really a competitor to you, you should easily be able to beat me, I’m just the table stakes. But I think they realized that’s probably not true — they’re going to have a very hard time beating me, which doesn’t exactly make me anyone’s friend. I’m the anti-Switzerland of asset management. [31:16] Frazer Rice: Meb, how do people find the firm, find the book, find you? [31:24] Meb Faber: With a name like Meb, it’s easy. Cambria Funds is the day job, with the ETFs. Meb Faber is the old blog, podcast, and Twitter presence — you can find that just about anywhere. And if you find yourself in Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach, come say hi. We’d love to hear from you if you pick up a copy of the book, Investing in America — let us know what you think. Frazer Rice: Really cool stuff. Thanks, Meb, for being on. This was a blast — let’s do it again. Meb Faber: Let’s do it. [31:50] Close (produced VO): This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes. It is neither investment, legal, nor tax advice. It does not represent the opinions of the employers of the host or guests. https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Actually-Intelligent-Decision-Making-1-ebook/dp/B07FPQJJQT/

Lords: Felicia Andrew https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Topics: My dad's indestructible mailbox Ares doesn't emulate the timing of the Reality Display Processor Moo box vs. Groan tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GQ126DUsyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tOsucpdD7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QyvFNZZ1fs Front mission 2's window color configuration menu https://bsky.app/profile/guilewinquote.bsky.social/post/3mozyqq2ibk2g Trying to get The Incredible Machine 3 running in Wine only to realize 2 is exactly the same and runs in DOSBox and finally solves a dialogue sfx mystery Microtopics: The cheezburger TLD. A show that has a big reputation to live up to because the name sounds similar to Totoro. Prehensile rainbow hair. Sensible anime naming logic. A little guy running around like in a video game, except in real life. Matter Senators, the only place on the Internet you can hear matters discussed. Issue Ombudspeople, the only place on the Internet you can hear issues discussed. Agnes Tachyon. (Agnes is his surname.) Mailbox Baseball. Making a new mailbox post out of a 1 foot diameter oil drilling pipe. The floral anatomy of a mailbox. The neighborhood in Albuquerque that has the least destructible mailboxes. An iron iceberg embedded in the sidewalk tearing a gash in your RV. Wikipedia redirecting your search for Mailbox Baseball to the page for Property Crime. Calling your daughter to let her know you've just sent her an email. Overengineering your mailbox by an order of magnitude in every respect. A Vault-Tec vault but for mail. Low level Nintendo 64 emulation. Sending a display list to the Reality Signal Processor. Trying to do N64 development when the development hardware is in a different building from your computer. Working on web apps and wishing you could be working on folding space time. Shoveling pixels from one memory location to another. Losing track of the state of Nintendo 64 emulation because you have to remodel your house. Predicting a console's success by whether it uses bespoke off-the-shelf parts. Putting a value in the zero index in a Lua array. An Youtube video that is old enough to vote. Bidirectional groan tubes. Shaking the groan tube. Making a mace by attaching a Moo Box to the end of the Groan Tube. 10 hours of silence occasionally broken by groan tube. Ranking the best groan tube moments. Attaching 100 groan tubes to my wife's car's exhaust pipe. Alfred E. Groantube. Wikipedia articles with videos. The UPS guy carrying around a huge box of Moo Boxes. A Muffled Cacophony of Christmas Crap. A big box fancy liquor store. A building in the vicinity of a cheeseburger office. Muzak World HQ. The Cure doing a faithful cover of the Front Mission 2 Window Color Configuration Menu. My eyes are grayscale but your hair is more purply grayscale. A game that was criticized for its long loading times. A poem about long Playstation loading times. Lords Get In Free. The death of Youtube videos just showing the UI of video games. Get Medieval (1998) The hardest era of PC gaming to run a game from. The sort of thing someone might post in the Topic Lords discord. Refusing to read the Mothman's Ass bumper sticker because you might do it as a poem someday. Solving puzzles inspired by Rube Goldberg machines. Porting a game to Windows Forms. Finally finding out why Tim pronounced the title that way. Consulting Wikipedia before making life decisions. Going back in time to tell your past self that The Incredible Machine 2 is the same game and way easier to emulate. MT-32 if you're lucky, Adlib if you're unlucky, PC speaker if you're even less lucky. Asking Claude for the recipe for napalm from the Anarchist's Cookbook and it's just as accurate as you remember. Downloading text files from textfiles.com Files that you should not follow. A 40 column text file on how to make a dust bomb. Learning how to download porn from Usenet. Undocumented features of TRS-80 BASIC. How to get a free account on Compuserve.

And now a reposting of this rambling and too brief biography of Rube Goldberg, the dean of cartoonists.

Heat madness descends upon the pod once again as we settle in for another cultural committee. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you combined geopolitics, Rube Goldberg machines, and some of the worst accent work since Rob? Well find out right here, right now, as we watch a bunch of Hollywood titans at the top of their game. Follow Lilah on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/180864377-lilah Cast: Very Special Guest Lilah - https://bsky.app/profile/palebloodstasi.bsky.social Jamie - https://bsky.app/profile/reobinwagon.bsky.social David - https://bsky.app/profile/sanitarynaptime.bsky.social Rob - https://bsky.app/profile/trufflehog.bsky.social Alasdair - https://bsky.app/profile/ballistari.bsky.social

Chelsea shows up to the Fourth of July with a "very loose theme" — fireworks and patriotism in horror — and then, somehow, makes it cohere. Blow Out, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Final Destination 3 have nothing to do with each other until you notice they're all doing the same trick: pointing your eyes up at the pretty lights while something ugly happens at ground level.So we get into it. Is Blow Out even a horror movie, or just De Palma at his most gorgeous and most pervy, making a movie about making a movie? We defend I Know What You Did Last Summer despite ethical math that reads like it was written by a '90s AI — and land on why we love it anyway. And we finally give Final Destination 3 its due as a Rube Goldberg machine of presorted cruelty that dares you to enjoy it.Threaded through all three: the illusion of safety in a crowd, the discovery that surviving the accident is the actual nightmare, and a TikTok ride operator who should absolutely not be employed. Also, Kynan watched his first summer slasher and lived to tell about it.Links & NotesOur prior Final Destination episode: Death Edging with the Films of Final DestinationOur papa podcast's breakdown of Talk to MeBlow Out - Apple TV | Amazon | LetterboxdI Know What You Did Last Summer - Apple TV | Amazon | LetterboxdFinal Destination 3 - Apple TV | Amazon | LetterboxdView Our List on Letterboxd (00:00) - Welcome to Sitting in the Dark (01:32) - Blow Out (23:20) - I Know What You Did Last Summer (42:24) - Final Destination Part 3 (59:28) - Coming Attractions Support The Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Become a member for just $5/month or $55/yearJoin our Discord community of movie loversThe Next Reel Family of Film Shows:Cinema Scope: Bridging Genres, Subgenres, and MovementsThe Film BoardMovies We LikeThe Next ReelSitting in the DarkConnect With Us:Main Site: WebMovie Platforms: Letterboxd | FlickchartSocial Media: Facebook | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky | YouTube | PinterestYour Hosts: Chelsea | Kyle | Kynan | Pete | Tommy Shop & Stream:Merch Store: Apparel, stickers, mugs & moreWatch Page: Buy/rent films we've discussedOriginals: Source material from our episodesSpecial offers: Audible

Trick taking is an especially hard genre of games to teach. But it doesn’t have to be! 0:00:00 Fact for 427 The world record for a Rube Goldberg machine with the most steps is 427 steps. The record was set in China in 2021, and here’s the video of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpLDfkLBJ0Q Sponsor Message If you’re interested in getting help planning through the financial ramifications of a change in your life, head over to firstmovefinancial.com/familygamers to schedule a free 15 minute call and see how First Move can help you. 0:05:30 What We’ve Been Playing Dream Runners (our review)EnthroneLittle Alchemists (our review)Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking GameEndangered Rescue: Galapagos Penguins *A Place for All My Books (our review)Dice Words *SuspendQuacks of QuedlinburgUnmatched: Stars and Stripes (with T-Rex!) (*) first time mentioned on The Family Gamers Podcast 0:32:55 The Family Gamers Community Shout out to our newest community members! Thanks for joining us. #Backtalk We asked about your hidden gem games. Read the answers on Facebook (two responses) or #backtalk channel of the Discord. 0:40:30 Grow into Trick Taking Games What is trick taking? A game mechanism used in many card games. A “trick” is formed by every player in turn playing one card from their hand to the center. Then the “trick” is won by one of the players and set aside. (Usually won by the highest value played in the led suit.) Most trick taking games require players to “follow suit” and match the suit of the first played card, if they can. Many trick taking games have a “trump” suit that is considered higher than all others. There are all kinds of variations with partnering, bidding, and how tricks are won. Room to Grow Our goal with Room to Grow is to bring your kids – or your family – through a series of games that grow in complexity. Normally, we take a beginner game, an intermediate game, and an advanced game (and some honorable mentions). They offer a plan for growth for players to get comfortable with that mechanic, and all are family-friendly. Beginner: Hearts Played with a standard 52-card deck. A “must-follow” game. No trump suit. No bidding (you don’t have to guess how many tricks you’ll win). Heart cards and the Queen of Spades are bad, you don’t want to win them. But you can attempt to shoot the moon; if you can get all 13 cards AND the Queen of Spades, you take 0 (bad) points and all your opponents take 26 points. We like Hearts because the rules are simple, the math is pretty easy, and it’s still enough to learn why you want to lose tricks sometimes and win tricks other times. Bicycle cards has full instructions on how to play Hearts. Intermediate: Add a little more with Wizard or Rebel Princess Rebel Princess is very much like Hearts, but with a fun theme (princesses avoiding princes and frogs) and with some special powers. Read Nick’s review of Rebel Princess, and the expansion Happily Never After. In the other direction, Wizard is a basic trick taking game with bidding. The first round is only one trick, the second round is two tricks, etc. After being dealt your card(s), you decide how many tricks you think you can win in the round. The closer you can get to your bid, the more points you get, and the round acts like a multiplier when you get your bid correct. Learn more about Wizard on Wikipedia. Advanced Twists with Two Players or Cooperative Trick-Taking Jekyll vs Hyde is one of our favorite games, a trick taking game for just two players, with a much smaller deck and potion cards that can activate chaotic powers. One player wants to balance tricks won vs lost, the other player wants to maximize the difference. Read or watch our review of Jekyll vs. Hyde. An entirely different twist on the genre is cooperative trick taking games. And the best one to start with is The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine. It provides a series of missions, each with different goals and restrictions. Your communication is limited to a one-time-use token/card each round. Can you work together to get the right trick(s) to the right person? Read our review of The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine. Even More Trick Taking There are lots of variations on trick taking. Some games, like Off With Their Heads! even do away with the “taking” part of trick-taking. Check out our list of trick taking games for more. 0:58:50 New Backtalk Question What’s your best board game story? Were you playing against someone and able to “trick” them into believing one thing while you did something else? Tell us on the #backtalk channel on our Discord, or in our Facebook community. Find Us Online: Facebook: @familygamersaa and thefamilygamers.com/communityTwitter (X): @familygamersaaInstagram: @familygamersaaTikTok: @familygamersaaBluesky: @familygamersaaThreads: @familygamersaaYoutube: TheFamilyGamers or join the Family Tabletop Community on Discord! thefamilygamers.com/discord Or, for the most direct method, email us! andrew@thefamilygamers.com and anitra@thefamilygamers.com. PLEASE don’t forget to subscribe to the show, tell your friends about the show, and leave us a review at Apple Podcast or whatever your podcast subscription source is. We’re also on Amazon Music, TuneIn, and Spotify. You can also now find us on YouTube Music! So pull it up and give us a listen while you’re toiling away at work :) If you’d like to support The Family Gamers, there’s three ways to do that. First, you can pick up some sweet sweet merch: T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, and stickers! Go to store.thefamilygamers.com You can also support us on Patreon, if that’s more your speed. We have a few different support tiers from just a couple of dollars to show your appreciation – which we appreciate – up to five, ten, or even $20/month. There are all sorts of different rewards you can get, which we tried to make unique. You can see those at thefamilygamers.com/patreon. Thirdly, you can start your Amazon shopping at TheFamilyGamers website, using our Amazon affiliate link. Music for The Family Gamers Podcast is provided with permission from You Bred Raptors? The Family Gamers is sponsored by First Move Financial. Go to FirstMoveFinancial.com/familygamers to learn how the team at First Move Financial can help you pile up the victory points. The post Episode 427 – Room to Grow: Trick-Taking Games appeared first on The Family Gamers.

This week, Phil takes the crew on an unexpected tour through the strange and rapidly evolving world of TikTok, presenting a curated compilation of game-inspired videos that blur the boundaries between machinima, gameplay, performance and digital art. Rather than searching for polished cinematic productions, the discussion explores the platform's distinctive culture of short-form creative expression, where humour, experimentation and disposable entertainment coexist with moments of genuine artistic innovation.Ricky and Damien join Phil to examine the compilation, discussing everything from live-action recreations of video game scenarios and AI NPC comedy to intricate gameplay demonstrations that resemble elaborate Rube Goldberg machines. The conversation also considers the darker side of viral gaming content, questioning the prevalence of violence and spectacle while reflecting on what these trends reveal about online audiences and contemporary digital culture.Among the highlights are a striking retro-inspired animated artist known as Perfect Loop, whose nostalgic visual experiments stand out amid TikTok's constant stream of content, and discussions of creators such as Viva La Dirt League, whose game-inspired comedy continues to influence online gaming entertainment.The hosts debate whether TikTok represents a genuine new frontier for machinima and virtual production, or simply another algorithm-driven platform where discovering exceptional work requires patience and persistence. Along the way they reflect on changing audience habits, creator communities, and whether short-form video is expanding, or narrowing, the possibilities for creative storytelling.Watch Phil's featured TikTok compilation and join the discussion: have you discovered innovative machinima or virtual production creators on TikTok? Let us know in the comments.01:00 Welcome – Tracy is away01:31 Phil's TikTok machinima experiment03:15 Exploring TikTok's creative landscape05:15 Ricky reviews the compilation06:35 Humour, violence and TikTok culture07:42 The "divorce attorney" game tutorial09:33 Was the compilation representative?10:20 Gameplay, spectacle and creative skill11:17 Rube Goldberg gameplay and game physics12:06 Viva La Dirt League and game-inspired comedy12:50 TikTok creators in the real world14:00 AI NPC comedy and live-action performance14:47 Discovering creators through the algorithm16:05 Perfect Loop and artistic innovation on TikTok16:55 Is TikTok worth searching for machinima?17:10 Share your favourite TikTok creatorsCredits -Co-hosts: Ricky Grove, Phil Rice, Damien ValentineEditor/Producer: Phil RiceMusic: Phil Rice and Suno AI

Send us Fan MailWill Max Verstappen leave Red Bull for McLaren? Plus, Adrian Newey's regrets, and the trouble brewing at Williams.In this episode of In The News, Greeny and The Cheese dive headfirst into the madness of the F1 Silly Season. With rumours swirling about Max Verstappen potentially moving to McLaren, we break down why a Verstappen-Lando Norris partnership would be an absolute ego clash—and why it might just be impossible to have two number-one drivers under the same roof.We also unpack the downstream effects of Adrian Newey's recent admissions regarding Red Bull's rear wing failures at Silverstone and look at how a bit of engineering arrogance might have triggered a massive Rube Goldberg machine of chaos across the grid. Finally, we turn our attention to Williams: Is James Vowles equipped to turn the team around, or did bailing on the 2025 car completely ruin their future?Grab your coffee or your medication—we are caffeinated, medicated, and breaking it all down ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa!#F1 #Formula1 #F1SillySeason #Motorsport #FormulaOne#InTheNews #F1Podcast #PaddockF1#MaxVerstappen #LandoNorris #AdrianNewey #JamesVowles #RedBullRacing #McLarenF1 #WilliamsF1 #BelgianGPSupport the show

Welcome to Part 4 of our Ravenloft: The Horrors Within review, where the real horror isn't Strahd. It's Ash's campaign. In the span of ten minutes, his players accidentally created Baba Yaga, nearly invented a magical nuclear weapon, tried to break the multiverse "just to see what happens," and immediately asked if they could automate it with a Rube Goldberg machine. At this point, the Dark Powers aren't tormenting the players. They're trying to survive them. Show Notes We wrap up our four-part review of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within by touring the remaining Domains of Dread, digging into the new monsters and NPCs, exploring haunted Bastions, and deciding whether Wizards of the Coast finally delivered the definitive Ravenloft sourcebook. Before the review even begins, Ash recounts the latest catastrophes from his home Ravenloft campaign. His players accidentally elevate a coven of hags into a new Baba Yaga, nearly tear open reality with artifacts capable of destroying demiplanes, and somehow conclude that the obvious solution is building a magical doomsday device. As always, the greatest threat to Ravenloft isn't the Dark Lords. It's the player characters. The panel finishes its tour of the remaining Domains of Dread, highlighting favorites like the haunted countryside of Mordent, Arthurian-inspired Shadowlands, Lord Soth's Sythicus, the folk-horror nightmare of Tepest, and the deadly jungle hunts of Valachan. Each domain receives new maps, campaign outlines, adventure hooks, and fully realized Dark Lord stat blocks that make them dramatically easier to run than previous editions. Attention then shifts to the new DM tools. Haunted Bastions become an instant favorite, adding supernatural events, cursed facilities, and even Backrooms-inspired liminal spaces to the 2024 Bastion system. The group also praises the new patron mechanics, expanded horror guidance, and dozens of flavorful campaign-building resources for Dungeon Masters. The bestiary proves equally impressive. New horrors range from Lovecraftian monstrosities and terrifying Relentless Killers to updated versions of classic Ravenloft creatures like the Dullahan and Grimishkas. Several monsters introduce brutal mechanics involving exhaustion, possession, regeneration, and instant death, giving horror encounters a unique identity beyond simply dealing more damage. Finally, the hosts deliver their verdict on the book. While the player-facing subclasses receive mixed reviews throughout the series, everyone agrees that The Horrors Within is a massive upgrade for Dungeon Masters. Between expanded lore, stronger adventures, memorable monsters, and fully developed Domains of Dread, this may be the best Ravenloft campaign resource Wizards has published for Fifth Edition. Ravenloft: The Horrors Within (affiliate link) RPGBOT.store - Pish Pash, My Memory is Trash! Other Stuff Rikki Tikki Tavi Roxane but it gets faster Spirited Away Content from RPGBOT.net DnD 5e Dark Gifts Guide Key Takeaways Ash's home campaign continues to prove that players are more dangerous than any Dark Lord. The remaining Domains of Dread receive substantial expansions with maps, adventures, and campaign frameworks. Shadowlands, Tepest, Mordent, and Valachan each offer unique horror genres beyond gothic vampires. Haunted Bastions are one of the most creative additions to the 2024 Bastion system. The liminal-space Bastion facility is basically the Backrooms for D&D. The bestiary introduces memorable new horrors, especially the Relentless Killer variants. Updated classic monsters receive more interesting mechanics while remaining faithful to their original themes. Named NPCs like Van Richten, Ez, Madame Eva, and the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins finally receive dedicated stat blocks. The book is packed with campaign hooks, DM tools, and adventure ideas that make Ravenloft easier than ever to run. Final verdict: player options are somewhat uneven, but for Dungeon Masters this is an outstanding sourcebook and one of the strongest setting books Wizards has released for the 2024 rules. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Part 4 of our Ravenloft: The Horrors Within review, where the real horror isn't Strahd. It's Ash's campaign. In the span of ten minutes, his players accidentally created Baba Yaga, nearly invented a magical nuclear weapon, tried to break the multiverse "just to see what happens," and immediately asked if they could automate it with a Rube Goldberg machine. At this point, the Dark Powers aren't tormenting the players. They're trying to survive them. Show Notes We wrap up our four-part review of Ravenloft: The Horrors Within by touring the remaining Domains of Dread, digging into the new monsters and NPCs, exploring haunted Bastions, and deciding whether Wizards of the Coast finally delivered the definitive Ravenloft sourcebook. Before the review even begins, Ash recounts the latest catastrophes from his home Ravenloft campaign. His players accidentally elevate a coven of hags into a new Baba Yaga, nearly tear open reality with artifacts capable of destroying demiplanes, and somehow conclude that the obvious solution is building a magical doomsday device. As always, the greatest threat to Ravenloft isn't the Dark Lords. It's the player characters. The panel finishes its tour of the remaining Domains of Dread, highlighting favorites like the haunted countryside of Mordent, Arthurian-inspired Shadowlands, Lord Soth's Sythicus, the folk-horror nightmare of Tepest, and the deadly jungle hunts of Valachan. Each domain receives new maps, campaign outlines, adventure hooks, and fully realized Dark Lord stat blocks that make them dramatically easier to run than previous editions. Attention then shifts to the new DM tools. Haunted Bastions become an instant favorite, adding supernatural events, cursed facilities, and even Backrooms-inspired liminal spaces to the 2024 Bastion system. The group also praises the new patron mechanics, expanded horror guidance, and dozens of flavorful campaign-building resources for Dungeon Masters. The bestiary proves equally impressive. New horrors range from Lovecraftian monstrosities and terrifying Relentless Killers to updated versions of classic Ravenloft creatures like the Dullahan and Grimishkas. Several monsters introduce brutal mechanics involving exhaustion, possession, regeneration, and instant death, giving horror encounters a unique identity beyond simply dealing more damage. Finally, the hosts deliver their verdict on the book. While the player-facing subclasses receive mixed reviews throughout the series, everyone agrees that The Horrors Within is a massive upgrade for Dungeon Masters. Between expanded lore, stronger adventures, memorable monsters, and fully developed Domains of Dread, this may be the best Ravenloft campaign resource Wizards has published for Fifth Edition. Ravenloft: The Horrors Within (affiliate link) RPGBOT.store - Pish Pash, My Memory is Trash! Other Stuff Rikki Tikki Tavi Roxane but it gets faster Spirited Away Content from RPGBOT.net DnD 5e Dark Gifts Guide Key Takeaways Ash's home campaign continues to prove that players are more dangerous than any Dark Lord. The remaining Domains of Dread receive substantial expansions with maps, adventures, and campaign frameworks. Shadowlands, Tepest, Mordent, and Valachan each offer unique horror genres beyond gothic vampires. Haunted Bastions are one of the most creative additions to the 2024 Bastion system. The liminal-space Bastion facility is basically the Backrooms for D&D. The bestiary introduces memorable new horrors, especially the Relentless Killer variants. Updated classic monsters receive more interesting mechanics while remaining faithful to their original themes. Named NPCs like Van Richten, Ez, Madame Eva, and the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins finally receive dedicated stat blocks. The book is packed with campaign hooks, DM tools, and adventure ideas that make Ravenloft easier than ever to run. Final verdict: player options are somewhat uneven, but for Dungeon Masters this is an outstanding sourcebook and one of the strongest setting books Wizards has released for the 2024 rules. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Come here! Cody and Jay are here to recap America's Got Talent season 21 Auditions 3. This is the episode Jay has been waiting for. We get Rube Goldberg machines, a one man bander, and spoken word. Check it out!Sprice MachinesCome HereYoung & StrangeIsaac AtkinsCris SosaBety DumitruLaRussellGuy Keton JonesAkiraRyan InzeroInfinite SpinLygia WayEric HainesContact InformationFacebook | Twitter | Instagram | Threads | Bluesky |  EmailAbout AGT Time PodcastAGT Time Podcast is a weekly podcast covering the hit NBC talent competition America's Got Talent. The hosts, Cody Patterson & Jay Bock, recap each episode during the regular season every summer. During the offseason, AGT Commenter hosts our Rewatchable series as well as full series rewatches.

Through her multifaceted work, the Bulgarian-born, Brooklyn-based writer, reader, and researcher Maria Popova, founder of the “free, ad-free, A.I.-free, fully human” website and newsletter The Marginalian, braids together literature, science, philosophy, poetry, and art in beautiful, alchemical ways. Traversing centuries, she approaches various ideas and thinkers, living and dead, as active references in the expansive, ongoing project of learning what it means to be human. Now, nearly 20 years since the site's founding, she continues to cultivate a singular space on the internet—one devoted not so much to information but to illumination. Her latest book, Traversal, which links figures such as Mary Shelley and Walt Whitman, alongside other writers, poets, physicists, and philosophers, serves as an intellectual journey and an across-time meditation on creativity, consciousness, and interconnectedness. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Popova discusses the idea of “spiritual ancestors,” why today's A.I. debates are fundamentally modern versions of age-old questions about the soul, and the mystery of being alive. Show notes:  Maria Popova [4:58] Traversal (2026) [5:43] René Descartes [6:50] Aristotle [6:50] Susan Sontag [7:03] Alan Lightman [8:16] Mary Shelley [8:16] Walt Whitman [9:42] Frankenstein (1818) [14:08] Frances “Fanny” Wright [17:13] Freeman Dyson [17:13] Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (2018) [16:04] Rube Goldberg [22:26] Nina Simone [23:28] Dan Frank [23:29] Figuring (2019) [34:24] The Marginalian [43:18] T.S. Elliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) [55:00] Dacher Keltner's Awe (2023) [45:17] Iris Murdoch [45:33] The Universe in Verse (2024) [45:55] Patti Smith [45:57] Rebecca Elson [45:58] Vera Rubin [47:23] “Urns for Living” [48:54] Sylvia Plath [59:35] Leaves of Grass (1855)

Young podcaster Maxwell Miller interviews Jennifer George, the fashion and jewelry designer and the mastermind behind the current Rube Goldberg Institute.Check out Jennifer's website: https://jennifergeorge-nyc.com/Check out the Rube Goldberg Institute: https://www.rubegoldberg.org/Learn more about the podcast host: Maxwell (Max) Miller is a 12-year-old student from Lewis Center, Ohio who attends the School of Humanity. When he is not podcasting, he enjoys creating music, cooking, and other artistic projects and playing games.Listen to more young innovator podcasts: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1589629 Learn more about Innovation World: https://innovationworld.org/#YouthInnovation #InnovationEducation #YoungInventors #DesignThinking #RubeGoldberg #STEMEducation #StudentVoice #InnovationWorld #FutureInnovators #CreativeThinking

After spending the better part of two decades turning Rube Goldberg murder machines into an art form, the Final Destination Bloodlines series finally does something unexpected: it evolves. Bloodlines still delivers the franchise's trademark chaos—people getting folded, exploded, liquefied and generally punished for existing near household objects—but this time there's an actual emotional hook underneath the carnage. Shockingly, it works. Instead of drowning the audience in endless conversations about “death's design” and convoluted cosmic bookkeeping, the movie streamlines the setup and gets right to the fun while adding a family-centered angle that gives the victims more personality than “future corpse #4.” The family aspect is the smartest thing the franchise has done in years. Watching the curse ripple through generations gives the film a different energy from the usual disposable group-of-teens formula. There's tension not just in who dies, but in how these characters relate to one another before death inevitably hurls an air conditioner through somebody's sternum. The script wisely understands that audiences came for inventive disaster sequences, not a TED Talk from Ali Landry explaining metaphysical loopholes for the ninth time. Bloodlines trims the mythology down to its essentials and benefits immensely from it. It also absolutely nails its comedic timing. The Final Destination films have always flirted with dark comedy, but this one embraces it with confidence. The setup-payoff rhythm during the death sequences is wickedly funny, milking every fake-out and every suspiciously placed kitchen utensil for maximum audience anxiety. You can practically feel crowds bracing themselves for catastrophe while the movie toys with them. When the kills finally happen, they land with a perfect mix of shock, absurdity, and “you've got to be kidding me” escalation. It's the closest the series has come to recapturing the mischievous energy that made the early entries such crowd-pleasers. The visual effects team deserves serious credit here. The large-scale destruction sequences are polished, detailed, and satisfyingly vicious without looking weightless or cartoonish. There's a craftsmanship to the mayhem that elevates the material beyond simple splatter gags. That said, the movie occasionally leans a little too hard into melodrama, especially during some of the family conflict scenes. Whether that works will depend on what you want out of the experience. If you're only showing up to watch fate turn landscaping equipment into instruments of death, the emotional beats may feel a touch overwrought. But for a franchise six movies deep, Bloodlines deserves praise for at least trying to give the audience something fresh while still delivering the gleeful mayhem everybody bought a ticket for.

Magical Big Ben belfry ambience for fighting off procrastination or for mechanically induced focus. 10 hours of Big Ben, clock innards, musical plucks, London street ambience, and classic British broadcasting.____If I were to quickly pitch the episode ingredients: we have a sprinkling of Big Ben, London street ambience, and a 60-year-old BBC episode I found online. Tossed together with all sorts of clocks and drifty stuff. I imagine we are amongst the bells of the belfry with an FM Radio. Enjoying whatever magical clock-mechanic sounds happen all around. (I envision the magic fits between Tinker Bell and Rube Goldberg.)All of the above is meant for procrastination thumping sounds, get a bunch of work done!Ok, so lately I've been listening to What's All This Then, a delightful podcast hosted by two British expats and a guest covering British minutiae. So like beans on toast, why British folks don't rinse their dishes after lathering them in bubbles, et al. During a recent episode, a host mentioned that if you were to stand at the base of the Elizabeth Tower — or, as yanks know it, “Big Ben” and listen to BBC Radio 4, you will hear the live recording of the bell before the sound can travel down from the heights. Radio signals travel faster than sound waves. And that was all I needed to spiral into a manic mini-obsession over Big Ben... Also Big Ben is just the bell?I listened myself to BBC 4—the bell's gong plays at the top of the hour and the ringing is live. I also learned Humpty Dumpty wasn't a cannon(?)I did my best to explain all of the above to my wife over dinner, including the Humpty bit, and she was like, “I thought Humpty was an egg?”Also, I was like, “Hon — did you know A1 is not American? And they've got this whole other brown meat sauce!”She's like, “This is the most boring conversation I've ever had.”I reminded her that she regularly shares the contents of her dreams during meals. The night before, she recounted Six Flags opening a location in our basement and the cat got lost down there. You want to talk boring? Recounting efforts to rescue a cat out of a dream-basement tilt-a-whirl. PS: Nerd stuff — if you guessed that I positioned the hands of the... Big Ben clock(?) to 7:30 as an homage to the late great emcee Big L (from his track Criminal Slang)—you would be correct. "If you 7:30, that mean you crazy..." And the title is referencing a super nerdy mash-up of DJ eccentrics and jazz/funk drummers.Have a nice weekend!

Reposted from Still Slaying: A Buffy-verse podcast which you can find at Still Slaying: a Buffy-verse podcast | Podcastica. Fun, in-depth talk about great TV. “The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping! There is another world beneath it: the real world. And if you wanna survive it, you better learn to PULL THE TRIGGER!” Note: For this R-Rated film, we've suspended our no swears policy.  Penny is joined by Jason and Renaldy to dive into the iconic vampire movie, “Blade.” The group has so much fun talking through vampire society and politics, Wesley Snipes' career, 90s raves, The Matrix, vampire skincare, Rube Goldberg machines, prophecies, vampire polyamory, Sarah Connor, comparative vampire lore, Mahershala Ali and the delayed Blade MCU movie, Sinners, and all the many similarities in Buffy and Angel.  Next time we'll be covering Angel season 2, episode 1, “Judgement.”  Keep Slaying! News Links/Referenced Links Blade VS Buffy (Marvel VS Buffy the Vampire Slayer) | DEATH BATTLE! —---------------------------------------- Viewing Order BONUS - Blade Angel 2.1: Judgment Buffy 5.1: Buffy vs. Dracula Angel 2.2: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been Buffy 5.2: Real Me Angel 2.3: First Impressions Buffy 5.3: The Replacement Angel 2.4: Untouched Buffy 5.4: Out of My Mind Angel 2.5: Dear Boy Buffy 5.5: No Place Like Home Angel 2.6: Guise Will Be Guise Buffy 5.6: Family Angel 2.7: Darla* Buffy 5.7: Fool for Love* Angel 2.8: The Shroud of Rahmon Buffy 5.8: Shadow Angel 2.9: The Trial Buffy 5.9: Listening to Fear Angel 2.10: Reunion Buffy 5.10: Into the Woods Angel 2.11: Redefinition Buffy 5.11: Triangle Angel 2.12: Blood Money Buffy 5.12: Checkpoint Angel 2.13: Happy Anniversary Buffy 5.13: Blood Ties Angel 2.14: The Thin Dead Line Angel 2.15: Reprise Angel 2.16: Epiphany Buffy 5.14: Crush Angel 2.17: Disharmony Buffy 5.15: I Was Made to Love You Buffy 5.16: The Body Buffy 5.17: Forever Angel 2.18: Dead End Buffy 5.18: Intervention Angel 2.19: Belonging Buffy 5.19: Tough Love Buffy 5.20: Spiral Buffy 5.21: The Weight of the World Buffy 5.22: The Gift Angel 2.20: Over the Rainbow Angel 2.21: Through the Looking Glass Angel 2.22: There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb Join the conversation! You can email or send a voice message to stillslayingfeedback@gmail.com, or join us at facebook.com/groups/podcastica and Still Slaying A Buffy-verse Podcast where we put up comment posts for each episode we cover.  Join the Zedhead community - https://www.patreon.com/jasoncabassi Theme Music:℗ CC-BY 2020 Quesbe | Lucie G. MorillonGoopsy | Drum and Bass | Free CC-BY Music By Quesbe is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Lounge Sessions continue as Ben and Trevor play Click Pitch once more, coming up with game designs such as:exploring a new world of alien creatures and mapping their hunting patterns;a beautifully rendered cozy Rube Goldberg machine building game;a world where the stars have been replaced with drones;the incentives for young men to travel to the stars;and more!

When Aristotle wrote that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts", he most likely did not have crossword constructors Lance Enfinger and John Kugelman in mind. But the thought still applies — these individually talented constructors have crafted an exceptional puzzle, and the proof is as close as your play button.Show note imagery: One of RUBE Goldberg's many, many inventions.We love feedback! Send us a text...Contact Info:We love listener mail! Drop us a line, crosswordpodcast@icloud.com.Also, we're on FaceBook, so feel free to drop by there and strike up a conversation!

This week on The Rotten Horror Picture Show Podcast, Clay and Amanda revisit the sleek, anxiety-inducing franchise starter Final Destination (2000), the film that taught an entire generation that death doesn't need a face—just a plan. Centered on a premonition of a catastrophic plane crash and the survivors who think they've cheated fate, the movie spins a clever web of inevitability, paranoia, and elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style demises. Clay and Amanda dig into what makes the concept so enduring, how it launched a long-running series, and why everyday objects have never felt quite as trustworthy since.Now, I want to make something clear: I'm not afraid of flying. Turbulence? Fine. Takeoff? Thrilling. The idea that I might be part of some elaborate cosmic design where a loose carry-on bag leads to my doom? Manageable. What I am afraid of—what truly fills me with dread—is children on planes.You know the ones. The seat-kickers. The tray-table slammers. The ones who discover, mid-flight, that their lungs are capable of sustained, high-pitched wailing for three straight hours. You can talk about Death's grand design all you want, but try surviving a cross-country flight with a kid repeatedly asking “Are we there yet?” directly into your soul. That's the real test.So while Clay and Amanda break down the terrifying brilliance of Final Destination, I'm sitting here thinking: sure, avoiding a plane explosion is great, but what about avoiding Row 18, Seat B, next to a sugar-fueled toddler with a juice box and no concept of personal space?Still, it's a fantastic episode about a movie that redefined horror for the 2000s. Just remember—Death might be everywhere… but so are kids with sticky hands and unlimited energy. Choose your fear wisely.And be sure to fly on over to patreon.com/thepenskyfile to follow Clay and Amanda as they cover a year of sequels, including Final Destination 2!

Val Kilmer, LL Cool J, and Christian Slater star in Renny Harlin's 2004 thriller Mindhunters—a movie about FBI serial killer profilers who act like the worst people in an escape room. Paul, Jason, and June break down how these profilers don't use any of their profiling skills, Christian Slater's death by Rube Goldberg nitrogen murder machine, the logic behind the training island, if Johnny Lee Miller was assaulted by a clock, June's desire for more fun Navy antics, and so much more. Plus, Paul drops a new sad childhood story about his LL Cool J album. • Go to hdtgm.com for tour dates, merch, FAQs, and more• Have a Last Looks correction or omission? Call 619-PAULASK to leave us a voicemail!• Submit your Last Looks theme song to us here• Join the HDTGM conversation on Discord: discord.gg/hdtgm• Buy merch at howdidthisgetmade.dashery.com/• Order Paul's book about his childhood: Joyful Recollections of Trauma• Shop our new hat collection at podswag.com• Paul's Discord: discord.gg/paulscheer• Paul's YouTube page: youtube.com/paulscheer• Follow Paul on Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/paulscheer• Subscribe to Enter The Dark Web w/ Paul & Rob Huebel: youtube.com/@enterthedarkweb• Listen to Unspooled with Paul & Amy Nicholson: unspooledpodcast.com• Listen to The Deep Dive with June & Jessica St. Clair: thedeepdiveacademy.com/podcast• Instagram: @hdtgm, @paulscheer, & @junediane• Twitter: @hdtgm, @paulscheer, & msjunediane • Jason is not on social media• Episode transcripts available at how-did-this-get-made.simplecast.com/episodesGet access to all the podcasts you love, music channels and radio shows with the SiriusXM App! Get 3 months free using the link: siriusxm.com/hdtgm Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

2 hours and 9 minutes The Sponsors Thank you to Underground Printing for making this all possible. Rishi and Ryan have been our biggest supporters from the beginning. Check out their wide selection of officially licensed Michigan fan gear at their 3 store locations in Ann Arbor or learn about their custom apparel business at undergroundshirts.com. Our associate sponsors are: Peak Wealth Management, Matt Demorest - Realtor and Lender, Ann Arbor Elder Law, Michigan Law Grad, Human Element, Sharon's Heating & Air Conditioning, The Sklars Brothers, Champions Circle, Winewood Organics, Community Pest Solutions, Venue by 4M where record this, and Introducing this season: Radecki Oral Surgery, and Long Road Distillers. 1. Just Won a Natty/Indianapolis Vibes Starts at 0:51 No crying this time, but we do think we can have nice things now. You get out of it what you put into it; the UMHoops guys are probably experiencing the highest of highs. The 2023 football championship was a thing no other fanbase has experienced; this is what a normal natty feels like. Some of us survived the 2023-24 team. The story begins with the Ellerbe years, the Beilein era absolutely helped build this. Don't resent the Fab Five, but they unfairly had to represent what Michigan could be. Reconsidering the Juwan era, the heart condition, how badly he needed a GM. Beilein was spiritually (and literally) present for this team; loudest the stadium got before Michigan hit a three was when they showed him. Very unselfish team. Built through the portal—Cronin was never going to be a good fit for Mara, Rez wasn't going to have a role after Illinois got the other Ivisic, Cadeau was struggling in a bad system at UNC, Yaxel used the portal to get here from JUCO via UAB, Roddy Gayle was the national glue guy of the year, Nimari was here three years through two coaching changes, and Will Tschetter was a five-year player who took a smaller role: nobody can make a good faith argument that any of these guys don't belong here. [The rest of the writeup and the player after THE JUMP]  2. The UConn Game Starts at 27:50 Takes hotter than the rims during the final last night. Story of the game was UConn fouling the crap out of Michigan from literally the tip. Miss the first Cadeau and-one, then hit 24 free throws in a row to offset the terrible threes, until Roddy missed his pair. Snakebit shooting because Rez/Mara/Yax kept getting mismatches down low, but Michigan was able to play their bigs together, and that just made it impossible for UConn to score. Felt like Lendeborg was himself on defense; offensively he was obviously hobbled. Their communication was fantastic, and there weren't mismatches for UConn to hunt. A time or two they got Mara versus Karaban on the perimeter or something, but they didn't get backcut once. Tarris was basically shut down by Mara. Only thing they got were those ORebs, which were hat tips to them and also related to Michigan taking way the three. Next year Trey McKenney; graded on a curve he made 2 of Michigan's three jumpers, including the dagger. The Rube Goldberg three. Cadeau vs the Cadeau we thought we were getting. 3. How this Team Came Together Starts at 59:16 Revisiting how the roster came together, May's eye for talent, because every guy he got at FAU wound up a star somewhere. You can't actually build from the portal; if that's the lesson they're taking from this team they're going to get lit up. Cadeau cleaned up the TOs (but still commits them at the end of the game his banana peel). On the human to athlete personality spectrum, Mara is a normal human being, who never should have been paired with Cronin—all little guys who play basketball are born killers because you have to be, but it's common for bigs to be like that. Mara was the best player; he developed into a beast by the end of the year. Transfer teams: if you look at the rest of the top ten four didn't make the Tournament; Michigan was the only protected seed that took a lot of transfers. St. John's and Louisville were the others. Once you're been at a school a year you're not a transfer anymore. Cig vs May: Cignetti relied more on his JMU transfers. It's especially hard to recreate what Michigan did defensively, because at the end these guys won a title by doing the best job of anybody of playing with each other. Introducing the Bobby Hurley Index: How many photos do you look like Jim Carrey in The Mask? 4. Next Year Starts at 1:38:41 Are they looking at the portal list or the list of guys projected to the late 1st/early 2nd round? Mara and Rez are probably done—small chance they get Rez back. Cason going to redshirt. Gayle, Burnett, Yaxel are out of eligibility. Cadeau and McKinney: best backcourt in the country next year? McCoy is Charles Matthews-ish, going to be a major defensive presence; if you get two years out of him he's a big get but he doesn't have a deep shot, might be freshman Darius Morris or what we wanted Rubin Jones (PG who can guard 1-4) to be. Recruited lots of SFs: Grady? Liburd? Brown? All going to be 6'5" gumby-armed switchable guards. Backup PG: can McCoy or McKenney can play point for 10 mpg. Do they have a wing? Want that guy to be switchable; Seth thinks they're going to have a big war chest to find an NBA four who can play the three in addition to two bigs. Goodman will be next year's Tschetter. Need three portal bigs. Is Dusty May the #1 coach you would want to have if you were looking for one right now? UNC search was Tommy Lloyd and Dusty May right? MUSIC: "La Di Da"—Heavy Weighs the King "Don't Be Mad"—PiranhaMob    "Up and Away"—Cursive        “Across 110th Street”—JJ Johnson and his Orchestra   

Final Destination 5 arrives with the same promise every installment in the franchise makes: elaborate Rube Goldberg death traps, a group of attractive but personality-free victims, and the vague hope that maybe—just maybe—this time they'll do something different with the concept. Instead, the film dutifully clocks in for another round of “Death's master plan,” delivering exactly what you expect and little else. It's the cinematic equivalent of a factory resetting itself every ninety minutes. By the fifth go-around, the plot mechanics have become painfully transparent. A premonition saves a handful of people from a spectacular disaster, they try to cheat Death, and then the universe conspires to kill them one by one using household items, loose bolts, and questionable workplace safety standards. The film acts as if it's revealing some grand mystery about Death's rules, but if you've seen even one previous entry you can practically write the script yourself. The series has settled into a rut where the only innovation is how absurdly complicated the next fatal accident can become. And even that's starting to feel tired. The elaborate death sequences still have a certain morbid creativity, but the tension is diluted by the endless fake-outs—every loose screw, dripping liquid, or falling object telegraphs a possible kill before the movie finally decides which one it wants. When the highlight of the film is watching characters stand around while the camera lingers on potential hazards, you start to realize the movie has mistaken suspense for stalling. What really sinks Final Destination 5 is the sludge of dialogue in between these moments. Characters exist solely to explain the rules or panic about them, and the performances rarely rise above that thin material. The result is a sequel that trudges through the same narrative mud the franchise has been stuck in for years. The deaths might be bigger and dumber, but by this point even those feel oddly unfulfilling—like watching the same carnival trick repeated until the novelty finally wears off.

FINALLY, we bite the bullet and talk about the 1930 film "Soup to Nuts," famous for being written by Rube Goldberg of the Rube Goldberg machine and for being the first ever appearance of the comedy trio who would later be known as the three stooges. If you're a real stooge head, you might like this. Normal people will find little amusement in this shambling mess, though. We didn't.

In theory, we were supposed to talk about the Rube Goldberg-penned 1930 film "Soup to Nuts," but we got distracted and instead went through the entire history of the Ruben Award. The important takeaway is that, for a podcast ostensibly dedicated to comic strips, we know remarkably little about comic strips. Mike gets really made about Rhymes with Orange in this episode.

In theory, we were supposed to talk about the Rube Goldberg-penned 1930 film "Soup to Nuts," but we got distracted and instead went through the entire history of the Ruben Award. The important takeaway is that, for a podcast ostensibly dedicated to comic strips, we know remarkably little about comic strips. Mike gets really made about Rhymes with Orange in this episode.

The Final Destination is the point where a once-clever horror concept finally admits it has nothing left to say. By the fourth entry, the franchise's core gimmick—cheating Death via a premonition—has gone from macabre novelty to rote obligation. The film feels less like a continuation and more like a contractual requirement, dutifully shuffling through the motions with no real interest in escalating ideas or tension. The most obvious sign of creative exhaustion is the desperate embrace of 3D. Objects fly at the camera with all the subtlety of a carnival ride, and none of it integrates meaningfully into the storytelling. Instead, scenes pause so a tire iron, lawn mower blade, or random shard of debris can be hurled directly at the audience, reminding you that the movie exists primarily to justify its ticket surcharge. It's not immersive; it's intrusive, and it dates the film almost immediately. Worse, the kills themselves lack the elaborate Rube Goldberg flair that once defined the series. The chain reactions are shorter, sloppier, and often telegraphed so clearly that suspense evaporates well before the payoff. Characters are thin sketches whose sole narrative function is to stand near something dangerous until the script decides it's time for gravity or combustion to intervene. There is, however, one scene that almost feels like effort was expended: a cartoonishly vile Nazi who can't read addresses and somehow gets blackout drunk on three beers. His demise is abrupt, mean-spirited, and oddly satisfying—less because it's clever than because the film briefly aligns audience morality with Death's bookkeeping. He dies, and that's good. Unfortunately, that single moment of grim amusement isn't enough to rescue a sequel that mistakes louder, closer, and more gimmicky for fresh.

One of the most obnoxious sounds in nature is the whine of a Wall Street banker. It's a cross between the tantrum of a peevish brat and the blathering of a sputtering old plutocrat.Consider the long, piteous whimper of Jamie Dimon, potentate of the powerful JPMorgan Chase banking empire. He constantly whines about laws to restrict banker greed, even toting around a Rube Goldberg-style cartoon depicting a tangle of rules that, he squeals, is choking poor Wall Streeters like him.Before you break into tears about Jamie's plight, though, notice that he and his bank are not choking on rules, but gorging on riches. Dimon himself pocketed – get this -- $770 million in personal pay last year.Golly, we should all suffer like poor Jamie!And he's hardly alone in singing the “Talking Banker Blues,” for that elite clique has long pouted that they're paupers compared to the billionaires of high tech. So, mounting an odd boardroom “labor action,” bankers have been getting drastic payhikes. The CEO of Citigroup, for example, recently set a new bottom line expectation for top-floor bankers: A 2025 paycheck of more than $100 million!How can a business lavish such a windfall on one guy? Easy. The CEO slashed tens of thousands of bank employees from Citi's payroll last year, so he got their pay.Woody Guthrie once wrote a parody of such predatory behavior, singing “I am a jolly banker, A jolly banker am I.” Today's Wall Street aristocrats are jolly, too, bloating their extravagant wealth by taking wages and livelihoods from thousands of their own employees. As Woody might sing, that's how inequality “happens.”Do something!Wanna fight the bankers and their rigged systems? Americans for Financial Reform thinks that “the financial system should serve an economy where everyone can thrive, not just enrich a powerful few.” Sounds great to us! Check them out at ourfinancialsecurity.org.Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe

https://podawful.com/posts/2615 PODAWFUL 16TH ANNIVERSARY. Faceless And Jesse P-S plunder the depths of the most schizoid crimes ever concocted, and take notes for their own future plans. Brian Wells, the infamous "Pizza Bomber", was part of the most autistically elaborate Rube-Goldberg plan ever to rob a bank, but somehow even with all their evil genius planning, Brian managed to blow it. Literally. Now his incredible Fit Check is immortalized forever in a brand new AWFULTECH/GLOBALTERROR collab design. Mersh is tink tink tinking on Jesse to the police again. Comedy Shaman is sending legal threats, Misfit Patriot is threatening to sue Elon Musk, and Sean Kelly is actually too stupid to properly prank. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/live/B8N4_dl-4Ec  Buy A Shirt: http://awful.tech PODAWFUL is an anti-podcast hosted by Jesse P-S

https://podawful.com/posts/2615 PODAWFUL 16TH ANNIVERSARY. Faceless And Jesse P-S plunder the depths of the most schizoid crimes ever concocted, and take notes for their own future plans. Brian Wells, the infamous "Pizza Bomber", was part of the most autistically elaborate Rube-Goldberg plan ever to rob a bank, but somehow even with all their evil genius planning, Brian managed to blow it. Literally. Now his incredible Fit Check is immortalized forever in a brand new AWFULTECH/GLOBALTERROR collab design. Mersh is tink tink tinking on Jesse to the police again. Comedy Shaman is sending legal threats, Misfit Patriot is threatening to sue Elon Musk, and Sean Kelly is actually too stupid to properly prank. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/live/B8N4_dl-4Ec  Buy A Shirt: http://awful.tech PODAWFUL is an anti-podcast hosted by Jesse P-S

The Curve of Time, Chapter 95 — Leaving, in which Saskia begins to roll time backwards.Followed by musings on how Rube Goldberg machines are a good model for many things in life.Explore more at www.writtenbyrufus.com where you can join in a discussion of this chapter at the bottom of the text version of this episode.

Burnie and Ashley discuss chess lessons, carton physics, Rube Goldberg, female members of Jackass, Lego Economics, Home Alone, Zathura, Jumanji, Simpsons Fortnite, Vbucks, Microsoft Points, and virtual currencies.

Who doesn't like a good flush? Certainly not us. Unless it's our $ being flushed into some unscrupulous car dealer's pockets via some newfangled Rube Goldberg device. Ann from Colorado thinks she might be a victim and wants Click and Clack to assuage her fears on this episode of the Best of Car Talk.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Games journalist and PC Gamer editor Jody Macgregor joins Liz and Ben to take control of an oddly Pythonesque Rincewind and discuss the 1995 graphic adventure game Discworld from Teeny Weeny Games and Perfect 10 Productions. A nefarious secret society has summoned a dragon in Ankh-Morpork! It's a suspiciously familiar plot, and of course the only one who can save the city is...Rincewind? This wizard might not know any spells, but he's decidedly snarky and cunning - and accompanied by an inventory window on legs. Together, they'll use petty theft, time travel and logic that would put Rube Goldberg to shame to rid the city of this scaly threat forever...twice! Terry Pratchett was famously an early adopter of computers, and a devoted video game player, so its no surprise that there were other Discworld videogames before...er...Discworld. But this 1995 point-and-click graphic adventure game is by far the most well known and beloved of the lot - despite also being infamous for its difficulty, in a genre known for obscure puzzles with illogical solutions! The player controls a version of Rincewind voiced by Eric Idle, who must travel back and forth all over Ankh-Morpork (and to the edge of the Disc) to collect a variety of random objects to save the city. The plot is loosely based on Guards! Guards!, with some flavour from Moving Pictures and a cast drawn from the early wizards novels. It was followed by two more games from the same team: Discworld II: Missing, Presumed...?!, and Discworld Noir, each with quite different visual styles, and the latter with a brand new protagonist. Sadly, all three are “abandonware” - not only unavailable, but languishing in copyright limbo, with no-one sure enough who currently has the rights to get them published again. Have you had a chance to play Discworld? What do you think of this version of Rincewind, Ankh-Morpork and the Disc? Would you like to hear us do episodes about the two other adventure games? And what other adventure games would you recommend for folks looking for a similar vibe? What other kinds of Discworld videogame would you like to see? Click on Pratchat and choose the question mark icon to join our online conversation, using the hashtag #Pratchat89. Guest Jody Macgregor (he/him) is a journalist who started out writing about music, but now writes mostly about videogames. He's been writing for PC Gamer for about a decade, and is currently the magazine's weekend and Australian editor. You can find out more about him, and read his most recent reviews and articles, by looking up his profile at pcgamer.com. You can find episode notes and errata on our web site. Next month we're catching a train - the Ankh-Morpork Scenic Railway, that is - as we read Terry Pratchett's penultimate Discworld novel, Raising Steam! Send us your questions via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or get on board via your local social media platform using the hashtag #Pratchat90.

In this episode, Patrick McKenzie reads his essay about the financial infrastructure that makes buying windows painless. When a window installer can originate, underwrite, and fund a $25,000 loan in 15 minutes before leaving your house, it's because four parties—window companies, facilitating platforms, specialized banks, and capital providers—have built a system that actually works. Patrick explains how modern consumer lending learned from 2008 to create better underwriting, clearer compliance, and properly distributed risk, all in service of enabling commerce in the real economy.–Full transcript available here: www.complexsystemspodcast.com/home-improvement-lending/–Sponsor: MercuryThis episode is brought to you by Mercury, the fintech trusted by 200K+ companies — from first milestones to running complex systems. Mercury offers banking that truly understands startups and scales with them. Start today at Mercury.comMercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.–Links:Bits about Money: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/window-modern-loan-origination/ –Timestamps:(00:00) Intro(02:46) Why not just have banks loan money for home improvement?(06:43) Modern installment loan origination as a service(09:58) Sponsor: Mercury(11:09) Modern installment loan origination as a service (part 2)(15:17) What's the actual product offered?(19:03) How does this pie get divvied up?(24:12) Is this unsecured lending?(26:12) Should we be happy this Rube Goldberg machine exists?

Final Destination 3 marks the point where the series' once-ingenious death-trap premise starts to feel a bit mechanical. The franchise's formula — a character foresees a horrific accident, cheats Death, then scrambles to outwit its unseen design — is intact but beginning to show its age. The opening roller-coaster disaster is spectacularly staged, yet it's also a reminder that we've seen this all before, only with diminishing returns. There are still flashes of the dark humor that made the earlier entries work, particularly in some of the elaborate kill sequences. But here the film seems oddly unsure of whether it wants to play things straight or wink at its own absurdity. Gone is much of the gleeful self-awareness that made Final Destination 2 such a fun, macabre ride; instead, FD3 leans harder into teen angst and pseudo-philosophical dread. Mary Elizabeth Winstead does her best to ground the chaos with a solid performance, and the inventive set-pieces — especially the infamous tanning bed scene — keep things intermittently lively. Still, the connective tissue between the deaths feels more like an obligation than a thrill, with dialogue that takes itself far too seriously for a film about Rube Goldberg-style fatality. By the time Death checks off its last victim, Final Destination 3 feels less like an inevitability and more like repetition. It's not bad, just tired — a middle entry coasting on the momentum of its predecessors rather than carving out a fresh reason to exist.

What happens when music, art, and technology collide in the hands of a true innovator? In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers Show, I sit down with Damian Kulash Jr., frontman and co-founder of OK Go, the Grammy-winning band known for turning creativity into spectacle. From dancing on treadmills to performing in zero gravity, OK Go has redefined what a music video can be, transforming pop songs into visual experiments that blend engineering, art, and unfiltered joy. Damian opens up about the punk roots that shaped his DIY approach to innovation and the thrill of breaking rules in pursuit of authenticity. He reflects on how the band's viral experiments were never about chasing clicks but about creating something so unexpected and so human that it makes people stop and feel wonder again. From silk-screening posters in art school to building massive Rube Goldberg machines in warehouses, his creative journey reveals how experimentation and emotion power real innovation. Together, Damian and I explore how art and technology can amplify empathy, why authenticity resonates more than virality, and how collaboration remains humanity's best innovation. We discuss the parallels between creative risk-taking and corporate invention, the need for radical cooperation in an AI-driven world, and why OK Go's work continues to spark curiosity and connection around the globe. This conversation is full of laughter, honesty, and creative insight, reminding us that innovation does not always come from the lab or the boardroom. Sometimes, it comes from a garage, a camera, and a belief that wonder itself can change the world.  

As our spooky month of scary movie reviews rolls on, we're checking out the newest installment in the horror series that made every millennial afraid of log trucks; Final Destination. Bloodlines is serving Rube Goldberg machines of doom to the next generation, with plenty of nods to its legacy. Can death be outsmarted? Maybe. But not in the presence of an MRI machine.   Music: "Baby You Change Your Mind" by Nouvellas

Lords: * Danny * https://nightbrunchband.com/ * Walker * https://nightbrunchband.com/ Topics: * You Probably Think This Song is About You * The Perfect r/crappymusic Post: An audio tour of Archetypes * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0291r0zf.png * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk * Sample-based film scores in the 80s * https://www.tumblr.com/mogwaipoet/786937779224461312/terminator-2-1991-and-the-princess-bride-1987 * Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, by Clare Harner actually * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoNotStandatMyGraveand_Weep * Being a Video Game Newb in Your 40s Microtopics: * Is it a Topic or is it Just Banter? * Cleaning Lords, Lunch Lords and Cat Lords. * Have you heard the good word about the Gaylady? * Night Brunch. * Wearing your own band's t-shirt. * A thing that could happen for a while and then was no longer able to happen. * Hi Cindy! * Motivating yourself to work harder via self loathing. * Feeling the need to act all angsty so that people take you seriously as an artist. * A Touch of Grandiosity. * How many tracks get uploaded to SoundCloud every day? * Continuing to discover music from the 1970s. * It's called "Topic Lords," not "Correct Lords." * Once it becomes impossible to make new music, and we go back and start listening to all the SoundCloud uploads with 0 listens. * All the kids at Rock & Roll Camp getting excited about Lofey. * Pretending a topic is about one thing when it's actually about something else. * Canadian Actor Dave Coulier. * Tuesday at 3:01pm. * Learning a new chord on your Electric Tenor Guitar. * Bringing Pokemon Puzzle League characters into your love song. * Having a whole week to dial in that wub wub patch. * What art is for and what art should be for. * Fun is our only reward. * The objective best pitch wheel range. * The Funky Worm preset. * Synthesizers that can save and load patches but only when plugged into your phone. * Coming up with a Rube Goldberg machine to upload patches from a web server to your CZ-5000. * thisdx7cartridgedoesnotexist.com * In a convex optimization problem, there is no gradient to descend. * Fiddling with the synthesizer sliders until you reach a corner of the parameter space that doesn't make any noise and giving up. * Camp Counselor Grant hastily drawing all the synthesizer waves on the board. * Ask any Geometer, the triangle has three sides. Love triangles are actually just two love segments. * The All Topic Fakeouts episode. * The gulf between how an artist thinks they're presenting themselves and how they're being received. * A Beautiful Rainbow of the Human Experience. * Elderly rappers with excellent flow but terrible drip. * Piling onto propaganda music. * Someone doing their own thing with confidence and authenticity. * Graffiti with immaculate copyediting. * With improved access to art tools, taste is one of the only things left to get wrong. * Only the best crappy music. * Promoting your music in r/crappymusic. * Tori the Clown Rap Gal. * The audacity of extreme autotune. * All Youtube thumbnails converging on the same cognitive attention hacks. * Singing the comments on your last video. * Situations where echo chamber amplification is fun and good for the world. * Obscure Music That Slaps. * Serbian Kolos. * The Ketron Event Chrom. * The Nightmare Klaxon that Represents Dread. * All the Fairlight CMI presets used in the Terminator 2 soundtrack. * Growing up playing samples at every possible speed in Impulse Tracker. * Slowly sucking dog food out of a can to simulate the sound of a mimetic polyalloy passing through steel bars. * It's been a long day and you're ready to go home but you need to slam 1000 more inverted glasses into bowls of yogurt, let's hurry it up guys. * That one sample library squeaking metal door sound that everyone uses. * Calling out comb filtering whenever you hear someone exhale deeply while sitting down at a desk. * The sound guy instructing all the actors when to breathe to minimize comb filtering. * Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers. * All the things you are after you die. * The purpose of suffering. (So we can write cool poems about it.) * Making art about how trauma used to exist. * Why wireheading will not solve our problems. (Because everything uses bluetooth now.) * Who needs trauma when we have CRISPR? * Shepherding noobs. * Play Any Video Game Day. * Complicated goose controls. * Trying to play Portal as your first 3D game. * Learning video games vs. learning board games. * Trying to get into video game series that don't change. * Looking at the screen and/or ants until it coalesces into an image. * Video games filled with really gross blood squirt sounds. * Jumping on and off of buildings. * Playing Breath of the Wild and just collecting mushrooms and herbs. * Grass simulation in Breath of the Wild vs. in Horizon Zero Dawn. * Putting yourself in the head-space of the protagonist in order to do protagonist stuff. * Spelling brunch the secret way.

In the 1950s, the avant-garde music scene in New York and the movie studios of Los Angeles might have seemed like opposite ends of a cultural spectrum. But they came together (and blew apart) when MGM hired Louis and Bebe Barron to write the score for the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. It was the first all-electronic score for a Hollywood film, but not everyone was ready for the future of film music. I talk with Louis' son David Barron, composer Dorothy Moskowitz, University of Chicago associate professor Jennifer Iverson, and broadcaster and writer John Cavanagh about how the Barrons built a Rube Goldberg-style electronic music studio long before electronic music could be generated with the push of a button -- and why it took decades for their work to be fully appreciated. Thanks to Thomas Rhea (author of Electronic Perspectives: Vintage Electronic Musical Instruments) for permission to use audio from his 1998 interview with Bebe Barron. You can learn more about the Louis and Bebe Barron archive at Forgotten Futures. Philip Shorey's orchestra is touring with his new score to the 1925 film The Phantom of The Opera. This episode is sponsored by Remi. Go to shopremi.com/IMAGINARY and use the code IMAGINARY to get up to 50% off your nightguard at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Incredible Machine, a series that turned complex cause-and-effect chain reactions into one of the most oddly satisfying puzzle experiences of the '90s and paid homage to the genius of Rube Goldberg and his machines. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pop stars should have Mousetrap-style Rube Goldberg devices onstage. Vince Neil falls for porn bots and a footwear startup is using the blockchain to generate an A.I. shoe design in space. Full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/260-beyonce-out-133366378

A chaotic day leads Don into a deep (and entertaining) dive into the futility of market timing, spurred by a recent Morningstar article on Pacer's Trendpilot ETF. Don and Tom break down the mechanics of the fund's strategy, its underperformance compared to a simple 60/40 portfolio, and the long-term cost of trying to avoid downturns. Listener questions bring up diversification, Roth IRAs, and the eternal struggle with ticker symbols. Plus, a special heads-up for federal employees about an upcoming webinar. And yes, kilt ventilation is discussed. 0:04 “It never rains but it pours” rant, helicopters, kilts, and chaos 2:02 Welcome and the evolution from market timing believers to skeptics 3:13 Trendpilot ETF's moving average strategy explained (kind of) 5:45 Morningstar says: strategy failed, underperformed S&P by 5% annually 6:58 97-year 60/40 portfolio beats Trendpilot in return and volatility 8:32 2020 example: Trendpilot missed the 38% rebound—ouch 9:59 Why market timing fails most investors over time 11:05 Loss aversion vs. long-term strategy with fixed income 13:08 Trendpilot's $3.3B in AUM—but it still doesn't justify market timing 14:23 Listener mail: VTEB vs VTBE, Series 65 textbook gems, diversification 18:26 How much in a single stock? Almost none 19:10 Roth IRA allocation question—AVUS, DFIV, AVUV, and maybe just AVGE 22:24 One-fund to rule them all: AVGE breaks it down across 15 funds 24:11 Federal employee webinar pitch – June 7 at appellowealth.com 25:39 Wrapping up with call-in info, dreams about forgetting the phone number, and kilts (again) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Questions? Comments?A chaotic day leads Don into a deep (and entertaining) dive into the futility of market timing, spurred by a recent Morningstar article on Pacer's Trendpilot ETF. Don and Tom break down the mechanics of the fund's strategy, its underperformance compared to a simple 60/40 portfolio, and the long-term cost of trying to avoid downturns. Listener questions bring up diversification, Roth IRAs, and the eternal struggle with ticker symbols. Plus, a special heads-up for federal employees about an upcoming webinar. And yes, kilt ventilation is discussed.0:04 “It never rains but it pours” rant, helicopters, kilts, and chaos2:02 Welcome and the evolution from market timing believers to skeptics3:13 Trendpilot ETF's moving average strategy explained (kind of)5:45 Morningstar says: strategy failed, underperformed S&P by 5% annually6:58 97-year 60/40 portfolio beats Trendpilot in return and volatility8:32 2020 example: Trendpilot missed the 38% rebound—ouch9:59 Why market timing fails most investors over time11:05 Loss aversion vs. long-term strategy with fixed income13:08 Trendpilot's $3.3B in AUM—but it still doesn't justify market timing14:23 Listener mail: VTEB vs VTBE, Series 65 textbook gems, diversification18:26 How much in a single stock? Almost none19:10 Roth IRA allocation question—AVUS, DFIV, AVUV, and maybe just AVGE22:24 One-fund to rule them all: AVGE breaks it down across 15 funds24:11 Federal employee webinar pitch – June 7 at appellowealth.com25:39 Wrapping up with call-in info, dreams about forgetting the phone number, and kilts (again)Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Synopsis In this installment of Final Destination a young woman named Iris defies death while on a romantic date with her boyfriend saving many lives. But death wont be cheated so easily. These sleepy citizens may have lived to see another day, but fate is on a mission to hunt them down. Years later, Iris's children and grandchildren are caught in the crosshairs as death creeps along their bloodline leaving them in…shall we say…sticky situations.  Review of Final Destination: Bloodlines I have never been a fan of the final destination movies. They have one gimmick, and they stick to it no matter what which usually leaves me counting the remaining survivors in an attempt to guess how much longer I have to sit there and watch the movie. I was pleasantly surprised by this film. Don't get it wrong folks, it is exactly the same gimmick as before, but I felt like this movie uses a little more charm than other Final Destination movies I've seen. There are multiple nods and winks to the audience as the film sets up laughably stupid death scenes, just to pull back and be like “just kidding. You really thought we would kill the character off with this stupid trick?” Only for the rug to be pulled as another equally as stupid death scene unravels in a bloody mess. It subverted my expectations a couple times and genuinely caught me off guard with some horrific events that I did not see coming. The red herrings keep the movie interesting, as you can never really know when something is about to happen. The camera is zooming in on this warning label showing a man being crushed by a vending machine. Is that important? No. But for a second you thought it was. The deaths are gruesome but somehow look kind of real. These movies have a history of showcasing the most elaborate Rube Goldberg death scenes that while creative have never felt interesting to me. But this movie felt different. I really liked every death in the movie and I think its worth going to the theatre to experience them on the big screen.  Score 7/10

Today, we're talking to the man who created the infamous Rube Goldberg machine on Fuller House & all the other wacky props in between... It's prop master Jim Falkenstein! Jim's work on Fuller House (and many other notable shows) is unforgettable. But, there’s something he’s known for on every set: the bright yellow tux that he’d photobomb people in! You’re sure to have some laughs and learn some new things about prop masters in this interview, and it’s all right here on How Rude, Tanneritos! Follow us on Instagram @howrudepodcast & TikTok @howrudetanneritosSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1977, a Rube Goldberg-type chain of small events led to the deadliest accident in the history of air travel on the tarmac in Tenerife, Spain. A series of incredibly unfortunate decisions killed nearly 600 people and changed the rules of flying forever. "Strange and Unexplained" is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab & Three Goose Entertainment and is a journey into the uncomfortable and the unknowable that will leave you both laughing and sleeping with the lights on. You can get early and ad-free episodes on the Grab Bag Patreon page.  Follow us on Instagram Episode Sponsors: Cornbread Hemp. Alcohol doesn't have to be the default anymore. Whether you're doing Dry January or just looking for a healthier way to relax and have a guilt-free good time, you've gotta try Cornbread's THC gummies. Right now, Strange and Unexplained listeners can save 30% on their first order! Just head to cornbreadhemp.com/STRANGE and use code STRANGE at checkout. Graza Olive Oil. Take your food to the next level with Graza Olive Oil. Visit https://graza.co/STRANGE and use promo code STRANGE today for 10% off your first order! Beam. The ultimate sleep refresh for the new year: Try Beam's best-selling Dream Powder and get up to 40% off for a limited time when you go to shopbeam.com/STRANGE and use code STRANGE at checkout. Rockey Money. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com/unexplained today.