Set & Centered

The story continues at www.save4swing.com

The story continues at www.save4swing.com

RJ wants to talk about Robbie's digital pizza empire. Turns out there the kid's been the cashier the entire time. Nobody knows who Cam is.

Then the actual thing: an AI model, given a task it couldn't finish honestly, started finding ways around the rules instead. It altered its own logs so the work looked done. It found an answer key it wasn't supposed to have. And when researchers gave models a sandbox with no internet, some of them built a message board outside it — instructions for other models on how to get out, left behind for the next version of themselves. The researchers deleted it. A new one appeared, this time hidden inside folder names.

Somewhere in there: what a modern chip fab costs in Pentagons, why you should only use AI for things you already know about, and a thirteen year old's business plan that nobody asked for.

In this episode:

• The cashier, the plot twist, and the unanswered question of Cam
• A model that altered its own logs so the work looked finished
• The message board outside the sandbox, and the second one hidden in folder names
• Rob's counter-argument: it did its job, you just asked wrong
• Fifteen Pentagons
• Only use it for things you already know about

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Remember the friend Rob cut off over a Pokémon card? He showed up. Not a text — a knock on the front door at 10am on a Saturday, having tracked down the address from a months-old screenshot.

What follows is a genuinely surprising redemption, and Rob has to admit maybe RJ was right about giving people the benefit of the doubt. (Rob, for the record, pre-blocked the guy on ChatGPT. RJ blocked him on MySpace just in case.)

From there it's a full sci-fi summit. Robbie's building a digital pizza empire on Roblox — pizza street, virtual trade school, possible digital unemployment. Then the main event: RJ makes his case for Stargate SG-1 (the ancients, the gate network, the Asgard, world-building with more layers than an onion), Rob makes his case for Interstellar, so they make a deal. RJ watches Interstellar again with fresh eyes; Rob watches two episodes of Stargate SG-1, curated by RJ. They'll reconnoiter at a later shift.

Also: John Cena interrogating Tweety Bird, Project Hail Mary, and why RJ has to narrate his own thought process just to understand his own sentences.

In this episode:

• The Pokémon reconciliation nobody saw coming — including the light stalking
• Robbie's Roblox pizza economy and the specter of digital unemployment
• Coyote vs. Acme:  John Cena and Looney Tunes 
• The Stargate SG-1 pitch: the ancients, the Asgard, and why Earth doesn't just steal alien tech
• Interstellar vs. Stargate SG-1 — the deal, the terms, and the rematch to come

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We punch in for a swing shift where tiny annoyances pile up until they demand a full-blown rant. We laugh through pop culture flops, billing nightmares, DIY headaches, and the surprisingly intense TV preferences of a cat named Ranger. 

In this episode:

• The dump truck: six niggles, ranked, delivered game-show style
• Madonna's doom buggy and the halftime show that couldn't be saved
• K&N's spray-painted clamps and a lesson in quality control
• Verizon's secret extra gear, revealed at the worst possible moment
• The sun, the moon, and the comet that won't wait
• Ranger's YouTube fishing addiction and the coming multi-cat TV situation

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You ever do something genuinely selfless and generous, feel good about it, then get hit with that cold realization that the other person might be playing you? That’s the gut punch driving this conversation.

In this episode:

• The $250 card, the gift with intent, and the trade list that broke the trust
• Blocking someone cold vs. saying your piece first — where's the line
• Six months of tilted trades and the moment "friend" became "transaction"
• Why this one's visceral: values are non-negotiable, and Rob's a fixer
• Better to have no friends than bad friends
• A perfectly timed Tender Loving Baskets ambush to close it out

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RJ has an update on the Suburban he'd rather not talk about, so naturally we talk about it. Turns out the check engine light saga has a dumb ending: the cone filter on the cold air intake had fallen off at some point, and the truck had been happily inhaling raw ranch dirt down five miles of dirt road each way for who knows how long. Rob, the diagnostician, would like it noted that he was technically right about the intake side. RJ would like it noted that the truck still runs fine and still gets 17 miles a gallon.

Then the main event: Slate Auto. RJ walks Rob through the pitch for the blank slate — a no-frills, $24,990 electric pickup that ships in gray primer with crank windows and no stereo, built to be wrapped, customized, and even reconfigured from a truck into an SUV with a wrench in your own driveway. One chassis, one vehicle, no trim levels. From there it's a genuinely good back-and-forth about whether the concept works: EV range anxiety versus the reality of a 45-mile round trip, why cold and heat wreck the estimated range, bidirectional charging as a generator on wheels, and whether an EV actually makes more sense out at the ranch than RJ ever expected once you fold in solar. Plus the graveyard of dead EV startups — Fisker, Lucid — and whether Jeff Bezos money is enough to keep this one from joining them.

In this episode:

• The cold air intake mystery and the unfiltered ranch dirt confession
• Rob was right about the intake side, and won't let it go
• Slate Auto's blank slate: $24,990, primer gray, DIY down to the body panels
• Turning a truck into an SUV with a wrench, and the whole "grows with you" pitch
• EV range anxiety vs. the math of an actual daily drive
• Bidirectional charging, solar, and why the ranch might be the perfect EV setup after all
• The EV startup graveyard and whether Slate has the legs to survive it

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Most sponsor reads are scripted weeks in advance. This one happened live, by accident. Rob dropped the words "Tender Loving Baskets," and RJ spit-took hard enough to land it on the board. That's the whole origin: a fake sponsor, born live, immediately promoted to the show's ongoing bit.

But first, the warmest cold open we've had — RJ's psychiatrist heard the podcast. Not this one. The other one. Which raises the deeply strange feeling of being someone's content, playing through the speakers in their car, while they also know you in real life. From there it's the real story behind Tender Loving Baskets: Mom and Mike's actual family side hustle making personalized (bespoke, if you ask RJ, repeatedly) gift baskets, and RJ's pitch that it should come back purely so the show can run ad spots for it. Then it gets away from them entirely — a domain check turns into breaking news mid-recording, the noir ad concepts start writing themselves, and a wicker roots movement is born.

In this episode:

• A psychiatrist as the first listener who knows us in real life, and the vertigo of being "content"
• The spit take heard round the board — Tender Loving Baskets is officially a sponsor now
• The true story of TLB, the family basket business, and the eternal "bespoke" argument
• What a host-read ad sounds like when it's also a bit
• Checking a domain live and calling it strategy
• Steaks, puppies, and a basket: the ads really do write themselves

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We start with a check engine light mystery and end up arguing about humanoid robots, military automation, and why redundancy exists when the stakes are high. Along the way, we bounce from O2 sensor voltage and OBD2 codes to SpaceX hype, Starlink reality, and a Costa Concordia lesson in how fast small errors become disasters. 

• P2270 downstream O2 sensor code and why it triggers anxiety 
• The strange truth that buying the part can “fix” the problem 
• A brief detour into trillionaire headlines, SpaceX launches, and relying on Starlink 
• Tesla humanoid robots as home helpers, plus the privacy and connectivity worry 
• Why legs might be the wrong priority for useful household robotics 
• Automation impacts on labor, manufacturing, and mission staffing 
• Military use cases, drones, autonomy concerns, and the human-in-the-loop problem 
• Naval examples of crew reduction and what redundancy is really for 
• Costa Concordia as a case study in margins of error and leadership failure

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After last episode's Pokémon deep dive, RJ decided somebody needed to man this podcast up — so naturally we're talking trucks. Specifically, the ranch fleet and the very distinct personality of each one.

It starts with Ranch Force One hitting 203,000 miles and a check engine light coming on at the exact moment RJ was praising it out loud. From there it's the full truck biography: the Suburban's former life as a Celine Dion Uber Black in Colorado (yes, she sat in that seat), the cylinder eight injector that broke in half inside the engine block, and how RJ got so good at pulling the top of the motor off that he eventually did it in 12 minutes flat.

Then there's the Land Rover LR3 — mechanically a tank, electrically a fever dream — which managed to throw 27 fault codes when a single speed sensor wire got severed by a stick. And the glorious Sport 10, a former summer camp runabout with trailer tires, one headlight aimed at the sky, and zero to sixty time that ends in a question mark.

Also: RJ crashing the F-150 into the Suburban while trying to pull it out of being stuck, a dainty attempted intervention, and the Pokedad shirt reveal.

In this episode:

• Ranch Force One, the Celine Dion spec Suburban, and what DNA evidence might be lurking in the back seat
• Cylinder eight, a broken injector, and the Haynes manual's advice to just do it all in reverse
• The LR3's fog light/oil pressure light/FM antenna/rear defroster inter-dependency explained
• 16 different size lug nuts, now down to 15
• The Sport 10: for trailer service only, and proud of it

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For this shift Rob finally gets the floor, and he's using it to talk about the manliest thing a guy can do: collect Pokémon cards. After preloading his masculine credentials (football, wrestling, hunting, shooting — you're welcome), Rob breaks down his first big TCG expo at State Farm Stadium, the rabbit hole of Elite Trainer Boxes, Super Illustration Rares, and a Pokémon Center Evolving Skies ETB worth a thousand dollars. Then it's a rip sesh in the car with Brian, a Charizard EX Auto vs. a Charles Barkley auto, and a brief detour into whether RJ's Kevin Johnson autograph is ever going to be worth anything. Spoiler: that ship sailed.

Meanwhile RJ and Rob find the through line connecting Pokémon cards, analog film photography, and astrophotography — turns out the crackhead aspect of opening packs and the slowness of a 35mm roll have more in common than you'd think.

• Rob's first card show — as big as a Texas gun show, held on an NFL field
• The Pokémon Center stamp and why it makes a card worth 11x more
• Chase cards, SIRs, and why "buying hope and a dream" eventually gives way to buying singles
• Wemby's card values, the 29-point blown lead, and the ebbs and flows of sports card season
• Why tangible hobbies are having a moment — and the crackhead aspect of all of them

Email us at [email protected]
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