029 Just Two Good Old Boys

Gene: 0:11

Well, howdy Ben,

Ben: 0:13

Howdy, Gene. How are you?

Gene: 0:15

Like feeling like I'm five minutes late.

Ben: 0:18

Well, you are, so it's okay.

Gene: 0:21

Yeah. Good old windows decided to do a update.

Ben: 0:24

Which version of Windows are you running these days?

Gene: 0:27

I'm still on 10

Ben: 0:29

Yeah, 11 is so broken, dude. I, I, I Windows 10 is likely the last version of Windows I will ever use.

Gene: 0:39

switching to Mac app.

Ben: 0:41

No, my primary operating system's Linux and has been for a while, but. You know, it's just, there's less and less to keep me on Windows.

Gene: 0:51

That's good. It's only been 20 years since people started talking about ditching windows and going to Linux.

Ben: 0:59

I've been using Linux since the nineties, so

Gene: 1:02

Yeah. I

Ben: 1:03

Linux and FreeBSD. So,

Gene: 1:05

environment, business environment, not, you know, hobbying.

Ben: 1:09

Well, that, that is true. So as far as work computer, that will probably still always be Windows, but I'm

Gene: 1:14

Oh, really? Okay. I, I thought you meant like you're almost to the point where you can use it for work.

Ben: 1:20

generally. Yeah, I can accept Microsoft office. Office is literally, I think corporations would switch to Red Hat in a heartbeat if it wasn't for office. And a couple other things, but yeah,

Gene: 1:34

that, that must be a big company thing because almost everybody I work with and, which companies under a hundred million typically uses Google, they don't use word anymore. They don't use bill

Ben: 1:45

Google is so I, all right. So I use Google for like on the site consulting work. And so I have a paid for business account with Google, right? It's garbage. It's, it's okay. You can get by, but it's pretty. Not great.

Gene: 2:04

Well, I don't want to spend too much time on it, but what do you do that it doesn't do? Cause it does everything I do.

Ben: 2:12

Really? It's formatting. It's just ease of use.

Gene: 2:16

It's all there.

Ben: 2:18

I, I, I don't agree. It's, it's not as comprehensive as. The presentation side of things. PowerPoint is superior.

Gene: 2:30

Yeah, I guess I could see that. PowerPoint certainly has more options. Do you crank a lot of those out?

Ben: 2:35

Unfortunately, yes.

Gene: 2:38

And

Ben: 2:38

So, like, I gave 2 presentations last Thursday. So,

Gene: 2:42

Yeah. Yeah. I could see that.

Ben: 2:43

and when I say presentations,

Gene: 2:45

like Prezo or any of the online presentation things that are way more powerful.

Ben: 2:50

No, I, I haven't

Gene: 2:52

Okay.

Ben: 2:53

because I, again, I have to so, like, last Thursday, I gave 2 different presentations. 1 was a panel and 1 was a fireside chat thing. And I have to run everything through, you know, even so. At my previous employer which is a startup, that one was pretty easy. No one really needed to approve anything, but you go back to the utility I worked for and to today, everything's got to go through not only

Gene: 3:22

that's true. The government

Ben: 3:24

not only through legal, but through the you know, promo department or whatever you want to call them,

Gene: 3:30

That makes sense. And I'm sure the Microsoft, you know, charges the U S government very little per office. It doesn't make any difference to them.

Ben: 3:40

I do not work for the government

Gene: 3:44

So you did, just implied it. Anyway windows aside, I watched the video that you sent me of this one board computer thing.

Ben: 3:52

Yeah, the Well, which, which one? The little server or the nas?

Gene: 3:57

the little, well, both of them I watched. Let's talk about the little server first. That seems

Ben: 4:01

Pretty cool little device.

Gene: 4:03

from a theoretical standpoint.

Ben: 4:05

Oh, yeah.

Gene: 4:07

It, I don't need any help trying to make my desk look more like shit or a bad enough. So having a computer, which literally has every component external

Ben: 4:18

Yeah.

Gene: 4:18

is not helpful. It would be much better to have it in a Mac mini size box where all that shit is just small and inside.

Ben: 4:26

Yeah. Yeah. I get it. But it's, it's, it's basically a Raspberry Pi esque thing.

Gene: 4:33

Yeah, but at least with the raspberry PI, the intent is to slap it. Into something bigger that's controlling usually, but this thing I kind of feel like is a purely a dabblers can kind of a set up and then for most dabblers, like the guy mentioned in the video, they're going to have stuff that's already more powerful, just sitting around anyway.

Ben: 4:56

Yeah. I wasn't suggesting that I was going to buy one, just saying. It's kind of a neat little addition to the toolkit.

Gene: 5:04

Now the, the SSD mass I've been looking for, for a while. So that actually looks really cool.

Ben: 5:13

Well, and they've got two versions and for those who are listening and didn't see me posting it. At Darren on no agenda social, this is the ASU store flash store. They've got two versions, a six bay and a 12 bay one with two, 2. 5 gig ethernet NICs and one with a 10 gig NIC. And I'm pricing it out for the two point of the six bay one. And with, planning to run it in RAID 5, so, six, two terabyte drives, give me 10 terabytes of storage RAM upgrade and everything. Only 1, 270. That's really not bad.

Gene: 5:52

It's not bad at all. And a two terabyte is the price point leading right now. Cause once you get the four terabyte drives,

Ben: 5:58

Yeah, they're way more

Gene: 5:59

premium, yeah. They'll come down like everything else.

Ben: 6:04

and these are NVMe drives. Let's be,

Gene: 6:06

Right. Yeah.

Ben: 6:07

be clear. This is,

Gene: 6:08

exactly. They're not SATA drive, not SSD set us there. This is the four.

Ben: 6:14

so when you team the two 2. 5 gig NICs, you're going to get close to five gigabits per second throughput, which is insane.

Gene: 6:24

Yeah. Or you can just get the one with 10 gigs and

Ben: 6:26

Yeah, but I, I, I, everything I do is wireless. So the 2. 5 gigs is already way overkill for me. Almost none, none of my stuff is hardwired in hardly at all.

Gene: 6:38

Yeah. So my current NAS. Saturates at about two gigs. So I would very much love to get something faster.

Ben: 6:47

I would be shocked if you actually get two gigs out of a Synology.

Gene: 6:53

Yeah, I do. I'm why,

Ben: 6:54

Do you have SSDs in it?

Gene: 6:56

No, no. If you're copying files, dude, you get about two gigs.

Ben: 7:01

Okay. That's impressive.

Gene: 7:05

Hmm. I think it's not horribly impressive actually.

Ben: 7:09

Two gigabits per second is pretty impressive. So I guess it's got a 2. 5 gig NIC

Gene: 7:15

it's actually, it's old. It's got four one gig NICs.

Ben: 7:20

but they're teamed or something.

Gene: 7:22

I've got them all going to switch intelligent switch that does the bonding. And that's, that's why I originally bought it was because I had my, my old trashcan Mac

Ben: 7:35

Huh.

Gene: 7:36

had either two or four, at least two ethernet ports. And so I knew I wanted something faster than one one gig.

Ben: 7:44

Yeah, I've got an old QNAP that I've had for Jesus forever. It's nowhere near that fast, but it's hold on. It's been populated with drives for forever and a day now. And I actually replaced and upgraded the drives because I'm like, Darren, I'm not going to run them to failure. So,

Gene: 8:06

that seems kind of silly

Ben: 8:08

and second of all, I always use. NAS rated and our enterprise rated drives, but I went through and swapped

Gene: 8:15

the biggest difference I found is they just run cooler. So that's the reason,

Ben: 8:20

and generally longer lifespan.

Gene: 8:23

but I think mostly because the coolness.

Ben: 8:26

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've got better bearings in them

Gene: 8:29

deteriorates but yeah now keep in mind, mine is 12 drives. I don't know how many drives yours is.

Ben: 8:36

6.

Gene: 8:37

okay. Well, that might have something to do with the speed as well.

Ben: 8:39

Yeah. So I've got. Six drives in there. And let's see,

Gene: 8:45

They're probably bigger than two terabytes though.

Ben: 8:48

they are, they're four,

Gene: 8:49

some space,

Ben: 8:51

they're four. So I've got six, four terabyte drives.

Gene: 8:54

but I'm seriously kind of playing getting the 12 drive version.

Ben: 8:57

Well, yeah, for what you're wanting on speed wise and everything else, I see no reason not to, because you, if you have the switching capacity and you've got your desktop hardwired in,

Gene: 9:08

Yeah.

Ben: 9:09

Do it.

Gene: 9:10

Yeah. Yeah. Cause it seems like, there's definitely a price bump, but it's not double the price. So it's 400 bucks

Ben: 9:17

Well, it's actually cheaper per terabyte.

Gene: 9:20

a little bit. Not, not a whole lot.

Ben: 9:22

If you go with the two, if you go with two terabyte drives instead of the four, like the guy did on the video you can actually get some pretty decent per terabyte savings

Gene: 9:35

yeah, but my, my point is, so the raw device by itself is a little over 400 bucks for the six drive. One, which is not a bad price compared to traditional NAS technology. Or seven 80 I believe, or the 12 drive. There is a problem though, which is, I don't know, this just seems ridiculous to me. If you go and you look at the Amazon listing for this thing, it gives you the price and it says includes what's that fee called? It includes tariff fees or something like that.

Ben: 10:10

Yeah. There's they're shipping from China.

Gene: 10:12

They're direct shipping from China

Ben: 10:14

Yep. Cause they can't keep them five

Gene: 10:16

and they, they, they don't ship them for six weeks to eight weeks until after you pay.

Ben: 10:22

14 business days.

Gene: 10:24

That's not what it said on Amazon. It

Ben: 10:26

I'm looking at it right now on Amazon in my cart.

Gene: 10:29

You're kidding. Okay. Well, don't buy it at Amazon then you can get it for cheaper at new egg and they have stock. Good, good. Glad I caught you there because that, that was what I was looking at. It's like, Oh man, I hate fucking waiting for shit. When, you know, especially for a product like this, where you don't know how good a quality it's going to be.

Ben: 10:52

Well, I, I did a lot of research and looking at the reviews

Gene: 10:56

Oh yeah. I haven't looked at all.

Ben: 10:57

so. So, you know, first of all, there aren't a whole lot of NVMe NASAs out there. Second of all ASUS seems to have the best performance right now. So Synology doesn't really have one in the same price point, neither does QNAP. For the price point, this

Gene: 11:18

very cheap. Yeah.

Ben: 11:19

yeah.

Gene: 11:20

Because

Ben: 11:20

The Synology and QNAP ones are over 1, 000, just for the NAS.

Gene: 11:25

just for the NAS, exactly. And it's not like you have to load it full either. So, I'm thinking of getting the 12, but probably just start out with 6 drives.

Ben: 11:35

Well,

Gene: 11:35

then, when the 4, 4 gig drives drop in price, or the 4 terabyte drives drop in price, then I'll add those in, and then eventually upgrade the 2s to the 4s.

Ben: 11:46

yeah, I did think it was interesting that when they put 32 gigs of RAM in it, it was crashing.

Gene: 11:53

Yeah, so, you know,

Ben: 11:55

seems like a firmware

Gene: 11:56

yeah, probably. But, 16 will... For what?

Ben: 12:00

For what you're doing, 16 is overkill.

Gene: 12:03

Yeah. I think my sonology is running on four.

Ben: 12:06

Yeah, my, my QNAP is running on 8.

Gene: 12:08

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ben: 12:10

And that's because I upgraded the RAM way back in the day. But, this, this QNAP NAS that I have had for, Jesus ever in a day. It's gotta be close to 10 years old.

Gene: 12:22

I think that's my sonology is like

Ben: 12:24

And it's still getting updates and it's just been rock solid

Gene: 12:30

Well, and

Ben: 12:30

and it's, it's not fast,

Gene: 12:33

this device.

Ben: 12:34

it's not fast, but it's just worked and you know, now I'm kind of contemplating, do I want to upgrade anyway,

Gene: 12:42

I really just love the form factor. If I could turn off something that's the size of like two shoe boxes on top of each other and have something that's the size of one pizza box, like a small sized pizza, a 12 inch, not a, not even a 14.

Ben: 12:57

not even that big, but yeah,

Gene: 12:59

Oh, it's, it's less than 12 for the, is it less than 12 for the one that does 12 drives?

Ben: 13:03

yeah, they're the exact same footprint.

Gene: 13:06

Oh, they are. Oh, I didn't realize that. Okay. But either way, it's, it's very small and thin. It does have a fan and I, I, I think it's hilarious. The fan is USB powered. That's just

Ben: 13:18

the, what,

Gene: 13:20

USB powered.

Ben: 13:22

is that hilarious?

Gene: 13:23

I've never seen anybody use USB just for a fan, like nothing else plugged into

Ben: 13:28

Yeah, so it's 7.6 inches wide,

Gene: 13:32

it.

Ben: 13:32

By 12 inches by one point. 1.89 inches.

Gene: 13:37

And what's the company name again?

Ben: 13:39

Asus.

Gene: 13:40

It's not ASUS though. It's ASUS storage or something.

Ben: 13:44

Yeah. It, but it's Asus store. So it's Asus TOR.

Gene: 13:48

but it's unrelated to the company called Asus.

Ben: 13:51

No, I think it is

Gene: 13:52

I look, there's nothing from one website to the other, everywhere. There are no links back and forth. I think it's totally independent thing. I

Ben: 14:01

I think they would get sued out of...

Gene: 14:05

unless they were in business. A long time ago, they've grandfathered themselves in they're also Japanese where Asus is Taiwanese,

Ben: 14:15

Hmm.

Gene: 14:16

but I thought that originally, but I'm like, huh, the fonts off. So I went to one website and I went to Asus's website. There's, there's no reference to the other company anywhere. So I'm pretty sure it's

Ben: 14:27

Yeah, no no, no, no, no. They're both owned by Asus Tech, which is the parent company. And it is a brand name created as part of Asus and storage combined.

Gene: 14:39

So it is. What's how you spell it? Give people the info.

Ben: 14:42

So Asus store, A A S U S T O R. And if you go to thereabout, it explains it.

Gene: 14:51

Oh, okay. Yeah. I didn't see that. Well, that's good that I'm more confident about that than because

Ben: 14:58

Yeah, Asus makes good stuff. Has for a long time. So

Gene: 15:01

it's, I've used plenty of ASUS. I don't know if I would say it makes good stuff. It makes good enough stuff.

Ben: 15:08

from a motherboard standpoint, who would you rather have?

Gene: 15:12

Gigabyte. I've had the best. Success with

Ben: 15:14

Oh my god,

Gene: 15:15

one of crashes and stuff.

Ben: 15:16

No, no, no. Cause Gigabyte never uses sealed caps. And I have always ended up with motherboard from Gigabyte.

Gene: 15:24

the high end gaming motherboards and that cheap shitty ones, then they do. So gigabyte I've had good luck with. I'm running, I've had, I don't think it's a big brand, but I've had pretty good luck with as rock,

Ben: 15:38

Eh, I don't like

Gene: 15:39

right? Those,

Ben: 15:40

Yeah.

Gene: 15:41

You know, ASUS, I've had lots of motherboards, but they've generally not been anything that stands out. What am I, what am I running right now? I think it's an MSI. Where's my yeah, it is MSI.

Ben: 15:53

They have another version that's a 10 bay NAS that's either SSD or NVMe with two 2. 5 gig ports, eight gigs of RAM, but it's a 1, 200.

Gene: 16:09

Yeah. So it's,

Ben: 16:10

It's more of that traditional NAS. Yeah.

Gene: 16:14

Yeah. And that's what I like about it, is it's small size and I still have and I need to get this thing off my desk. I literally have a a Drobo six drive name sitting

Ben: 16:25

you know, other than you and Darren talking about it, I haven't thought about Drobo in forever.

Gene: 16:30

I know, I know. And I got it. Mine's not a network. It's not a Naz, it's a, it's a,

Ben: 16:35

Yeah. It's just USB storage. Yeah.

Gene: 16:38

Yeah, it was the last I don't even know if it's the last, but it was a Thunderbolt one again, purchased specifically for my near storage on the Mac trash can. You know, I don't know what the fuck I was drinking back then. Clearly

Ben: 16:51

Yeah. I don't know why you bought that. That was a waste of money.

Gene: 16:54

I bought a 10, 000 Mac. And then I bought like a

Ben: 16:58

Quit buying

Gene: 16:58

000 Grobo. And that, what?

Ben: 17:01

Quit buying Macs.

Gene: 17:03

I don't know. They're a lot cheaper now. So my, my Mac mini was 400 bucks. My, my Mac laptop was two grand, I think. And they're both M2. Well, no minis M one, the laptop them too. So I'm not buying the crazy ass expensive shit anywhere at all. I do that on the PC side.

Ben: 17:26

Yeah. There's just no need.

Gene: 17:29

Well, we'll see how much need there is. All right. So that's the stuff I want to talk about. Other bit of news on my end that I'm very, very distraught about. I'm quite disappointed when I find out had to commiserate with Adam is my favorite search engine is going away.

Ben: 17:45

Neva?

Gene: 17:46

Yeah.

Ben: 17:47

Why?

Gene: 17:48

A lot of money. Amazingly, you don't have advertising and you don't track data on users. You don't make any money,

Ben: 17:56

Well, they, they had a subscription model, didn't they?

Gene: 17:59

nobody used,

Ben: 18:01

Just use the free version.

Gene: 18:03

which I did as well. I don't, why would I pay for that? Well,

Ben: 18:07

Because you don't want it to go away?

Gene: 18:09

Exactly. So they made an announcement that I think there's a month or so left. Which sucks because I don't know what to do because I don't trust any of the other ones.

Ben: 18:20

I

Gene: 18:21

Like there

Ben: 18:23

mean, surely someone will buy them, change it up, do something

Gene: 18:27

are tracking exactly that. Well, that's what happened with the one that I was using before. What was it called? The, the, the, the, it had a really stupid name. John used it all the time.

Ben: 18:38

duck, duck, go

Gene: 18:39

That's the one. So they, they were all big about not tracking blah, blah, blah

Ben: 18:44

until they weren't.

Gene: 18:45

until they got bought and then they weren't exactly. It's like, yeah, well, we built up a nice audience of people that, you know, aren't too likely to switch off of us. Let's cash in. what happens with all of them. Bing is it, it's AI gives wrong answers. I've discovered that, which is not super useful.

Ben: 19:04

You should watch the Jordan Peterson episode he recently did about AI. I think you might find it interesting.

Gene: 19:11

not usually the guy I would turn to for AI info, but okay.

Ben: 19:14

Actually his discussions around chat and what he thinks about it, given his his research and everything else is pretty interesting because you have to think about the type of query that Jordan Peterson's going to write to something like this, you know. Well, not only academic, but very verbosely put and so on. So him as a end user and hearing his impressions was rather interesting in my opinion.

Gene: 19:46

Yeah. Fascinating. I, yeah, I'll, I'll have to add it to my watch list. I'm sure it'll pop up before too long here anyway. Usually at this point I'll start getting videos recommended to me that you're watching automatically through Google anyway. It doesn't take too long before they figure it out,

Ben: 20:05

My NAS actually has a firmware update to be applied.

Gene: 20:09

but don't do it during the show.

Ben: 20:11

It's my NAS. It's not going

Gene: 20:13

but it'll blow something up. This is the other thing about this, this NAS we're talking about the SSD one that I thought was interesting is it has. An HDMI port

Ben: 20:23

And a SPDIF port

Gene: 20:25

and a SPDIF port. I'm like, huh? And then I thought, well, I guess people like Dern use this shit.

Ben: 20:30

for audio recording. It actually makes great sense

Gene: 20:33

Huh. Cause it is a, it

Ben: 20:35

can run containers and

Gene: 20:36

is a computer. You might as well hook a monitor up. Right. I wonder if they have a remote display capability, like a RDP kind of thing, or

Ben: 20:47

I'm sure they've got something, by the way, if you want remote access tool stuff, let me know. I'll, I'll, I'll help you out.

Gene: 20:55

what do you use? What do you like?

Ben: 20:57

Well, personal or professional.

Gene: 21:00

I don't know. I've always just used VNC or RDP. That's the two tools I've generally

Ben: 21:04

Oh, no, there's lots of good things. So, first of all, you got to figure out the VPN you want to use to get back to home. And then after that, you know, a, So the way I have it set up is my VPN drops me into a DMZ and I can't get to anything except a jump host and that jump host at home. I'm running Apache guacamole. And from there I can get to whatever I need to get to. So there's a protocol break. Professionally I use something else, but similar design.

Gene: 21:40

You're not using RDP? I

Ben: 21:42

No, because RDP has several... Potential problems, including the ability to file transfer and so on. So what it comes down to is to get to my remote

Gene: 21:52

inside of your network. Like once you're through the firewall you don't RDP?

Ben: 21:56

If I'm sitting at home, I will RDP to other devices on my network. But as far as remote access, no, I do not allow RDP into my network.

Gene: 22:06

Okay, but you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. Or, I'm misunderstanding you. What I'm saying is, you don't allow RDP outside of the firewall, but do you not allow once you're inside the firewall You're in

Ben: 22:21

I VPN in, I go to a DMZ. That has a jump host in it that I can then connect to and then go

Gene: 22:29

running. REP. Okay. What are you running on there?

Ben: 22:34

I told you Apache Guacamole.

Gene: 22:37

I don't know. I never use it.

Ben: 22:39

So it's a essentially I go to a web page that renders and then from the web page on over HTTPS then connects. So the Guacamole server connects via RDP to a Windows box and renders it

Gene: 22:54

well, you could have just said that. Okay. So that's exactly what I do as well, except mine isn't running Apache. It's actually running on the Synology.

Ben: 23:03

Yeah, so something like that, but a protocol break. So you can't copy and paste. You can't transfer files through it. It's locked down and limited.

Gene: 23:11

turned down, but yeah, it's I don't know how the hell you could use a computer without copy and paste, frankly,

Ben: 23:16

Knowing how to type.

Gene: 23:18

Yeah. Good luck in that.

Ben: 23:20

So dude, if you've ever dealt with VMware at all, and you've worked on any VM amount of VM servers, where you're having to connect to the console and you can't copy and paste, you learn real quick,

Gene: 23:32

Yeah. Or you just install shit to turn that on. That's pretty essential. Even on my boy, this has turned into a nerdy episode today. even when I run my, my mouse without borders thing between my Mac and PC, I have

Ben: 23:50

what are you using for that?

Gene: 23:52

Which one am I running? I've tried all of them. I swear to God, they all suck. Except this one, share mouse, share mouse pro. I actually paid for it.

Ben: 23:59

ShareMouse, not what was it? Synergy.

Gene: 24:03

No, this one's better.

Ben: 24:05

Okay.

Gene: 24:06

I've tried Synergy. They're this one is more reliable. It works pre login. So you could, you could literally reboot your computer and then still use this to log into it.

Ben: 24:18

Now will it share the keyboard as well?

Gene: 24:21

Yeah. Yeah. Keyboard, mouse, and if you turn it on, you can paste your clipboard. It's is. About as seamless going between Mac and PC as anything I've ever tried, which is

Ben: 24:33

60 bucks for a lifetime license.

Gene: 24:36

Exactly. That includes just two computers, I believe. I think you have to buy another one

Ben: 24:42

No, the pro is nine.

Gene: 24:45

Oh, it's nine?

Ben: 24:46

Yeah. For the pro.

Gene: 24:48

Oh, that's not bad. So the Pro is 60 bucks? I thought I paid more than that.

Ben: 24:52

Yeah. The pro is 60 bucks.

Gene: 24:55

Well,

Ben: 24:55

The regular is 27.

Gene: 24:57

Okay, yeah, yeah. Definitely get the Pro. There's something the regular doesn't do. And I can't remember what it is, but

Ben: 25:03

Control, delete, size compensation, wraparound, monitors, switch prevention, sync events, those are the differences.

Gene: 25:13

Okay. And, it'll handle, Oh, I know. I remember what it was. It's such a stupid thing too. So the, the non pro version will only do multiple computers, but each with only one monitor

Ben: 25:26

Yes,

Gene: 25:27

pro version will do computers that have multiple monitors. Yeah. Which I don't have that many, you got to have more than one monitor, obviously. So, so yeah, it works pretty good. Been pretty happy with it. Once I get installed, I get rid of the other ones I was testing. If you're going for a purely. Mac based solutions. I think mouse without borders with a product and that works great, like with max only. I don't know if this does Linux, but I'm sure there's a Linux version of this somewhere.

Ben: 25:58

So

Gene: 25:59

other tech news do we have?

Ben: 26:01

actually, I want to talk about DeSantis.

Gene: 26:04

Oh, okay. What do you do about tech?

Ben: 26:07

So it looks like he's going to announce this week,

Gene: 26:12

Okay. I thought I already had, but okay.

Ben: 26:14

not officially he's made some pretty overt overtures, but yeah, it looks like he's going to, and by the way, Synergy actually supports Windows, Macs, Linux, and Raspberry Pi.

Gene: 26:26

Well, there you go. Perfect.

Ben: 26:28

So, you know, the one I've used in the

Gene: 26:30

Right. I just don't, there was stuff that didn't do well with the Mac. I don't know if it, maybe without a Mac, you don't have that issue.

Ben: 26:39

Anyway, so DeSantis looks like he's going to cost the Republicans a billion dollar primary fight.

Gene: 26:47

Good. I'm all for primaries.

Ben: 26:49

I, you know, I don't know, man. I,

Gene: 26:52

going to have a primary, and I don't want the Republicans to also not have one.

Ben: 26:58

The, the Democrats are going to have a primary.

Gene: 27:01

That's not what they're saying. They're saying that Biden's the guy.

Ben: 27:04

Well, they haven't, they have other candidates that are running. So,

Gene: 27:09

They're, they're going to have them be in zero debates, is what they've said.

Ben: 27:13

okay, well, you know, we'll see.

Gene: 27:17

I don't like that. I, I much prefer to have a contest.

Ben: 27:22

Yeah, me too. And that's why I'm a very big fan of Robert Kennedy running and doing what he's doing.

Gene: 27:29

Yeah, I am too, and I'll probably vote for him in the Democrat primary, but again, I'm going to vote for him knowing he has zero chance of winning.

Ben: 27:37

I, fuck, I don't know about that, man. He's polling it over 20, 20% right now.

Gene: 27:43

Really?

Ben: 27:44

Yeah,

Gene: 27:45

That's surprising.

Ben: 27:46

no, it's not. Everyone fricking hates Biden. Everyone looks at Biden and goes, Oh my God, did we really do this?

Gene: 27:53

Yeah, maybe, but out of those people that hate Biden, how many of them actually voted last time?

Ben: 28:00

I'm, I'm going to guess quite a few.

Gene: 28:03

I don't know, man.

Ben: 28:04

Well, anyway, let's put it this way.

Gene: 28:07

But I

Ben: 28:07

If it's between, if Trump and DeSantis are fighting it out and running a close race, if it looks like it's close, I will vote in the Republican primary. But if it goes the way I think it's going to go, which is Trump is just going to run away with it. Then I would vote for the first time in my life in the Democratic primary for RFK.

Gene: 28:31

Mm hmm.

Ben: 28:32

Absolutely would.

Gene: 28:32

Yeah, and I've never voted in Democrat primary either,

Ben: 28:35

I've never voted for a Democrat in my life.

Gene: 28:38

I wouldn't, I wouldn't ever vote for a Democrat, but I would vote for one in the primary.

Ben: 28:43

Yeah.

Gene: 28:44

Yeah, I wouldn't vote for him in the general election.

Ben: 28:47

Depending on who was running, I might,

Gene: 28:49

I wouldn't. I'd rather, if push comes to shove, I'd, I'd vote for a Libertarian.

Ben: 28:54

If it was between RFK I think I'd vote RFK Jr.

Gene: 28:59

Oh, you're crazy.

Ben: 29:00

No, not at all. DeSantis is being backed by the Bushes. Karl Rove is working on his campaign.

Gene: 29:06

that whole, that's such bullshit. Show me one shred of evidence that that's actually true. That's just life, but yeah, exactly, exactly. Next thing you're going to be telling us, we went to the moon. Thank you. WT7 never happened. Okay.

Ben: 29:21

Oh, WTC7 is definitely a thing. But No, I, I think that you know, really DeSantis has every so he's doing so many good things. He needs to stay governor of Florida and finish what he started. He, he made promises and he's breaking them and he's got the bushes behind him. So I don't trust him. That said. He's termed out, so he's got to wait a term before he can go back to being governor after this. So the way the florida,

Gene: 29:52

Yeah, no, I, go ahead and finish your thoughts

Ben: 29:56

so the way the florida term limits work is you can only serve 2 consecutive terms, but there's no cap on how many terms you can serve. So he could go back to being. Governor again that said, you know who I think really needs to run for governor after DeSantis in Florida,

Gene: 30:14

you after.

Ben: 30:16

Don jr

Gene: 30:17

Yeah, I agree. Well, I was the one who told you that when I watched and watched his video when he was on Timcast, I'm like, dude, this guy's better than his dad. I honestly like him more

Ben: 30:27

Well, he he's more blue collar than his dad and he's not quite as

Gene: 30:32

how he literally grew up a billionaire.

Ben: 30:35

but somehow he is,

Gene: 30:37

His dad only grew up a millionaire. Yeah,

Ben: 30:40

but he, but he's not into the, the limelight the way his dad is.

Gene: 30:45

not. He like, I see the guy wearing flannel and cotton all the time. He's he's going on and on about his fishing trips, his hunting trips.

Ben: 30:56

Gun guy.

Gene: 30:57

very down to earth for a billionaire,

Ben: 31:01

Mm-hmm.

Gene: 31:01

well, a billionaire kid, very down to earth. Amazingly. And the one thing that he shares, I think, with his dad is the time between when he hears a

Ben: 31:11

the womanizing.

Gene: 31:12

Well, no, no, I, I'm not a big fan of his wife, I'll tell you that,

Ben: 31:15

No, I him married Kimberly Gilfoyle is the biggest de attract to John Jr.

Gene: 31:20

Yeah. Yeah.

Ben: 31:21

You know, marrying the fox tranny was not the smartest move.

Gene: 31:25

But but his, the thing he shares with his dad is the amount of time between when he hears a question, when his mouth opens up is zero milliseconds. And I really like that because he's not, he doesn't give him time to sugarcoat. The answer just spits it out. And it's like, it's, it's the stuff that I'm sitting here nodding my head with. It's like, oh yeah, we ought to, we totally need to pardon what's his face. Yeah, Assange and, and even I'm like right on. Absolutely. And even Tim's like, well, hold on now. I don't know about Snowden, Assange for sure, but maybe not. So

Ben: 32:04

Well, Tim can go Rotten Hill.

Gene: 32:07

yeah,

Ben: 32:08

Snowden was a hero in the fact that that did not kick off. A revolution in this country is disappointing.

Gene: 32:14

it's very disappointing. The, the thing is from Tim's perspective is Assange. Was doing what

Ben: 32:22

Asange Jesus

Gene: 32:23

journalist, yeah, has always done, which is you, when you get something interesting from any source, yeah, publish it, that's it. That's the, that's literally the definition of journalism. And, you know, I've, I've said this years ago, I kind of made a joke out of it I think Adam even used it on the agenda, which is, you know, the word journalist is identical to the word blogger. It's literally just a medium difference, but it represents exactly the same thing. If you look at when that word originated and when the word blogger originated, that's all journalists were and frankly, kind of still are, is they're just bloggers. They're just bloggers of old school blogger. That's what a journalist means. And if you get enough audience reading your shit, I guess then, you know, you become Fox and then you fire your, your main. Hand that lays the golden eggs, and then you drop below even CNN

Ben: 33:21

CNN and MSNBC. Which is just funny.

Gene: 33:27

man, I don't care whether it was the lawsuit that said he gets fired or they did it independently. It's...

Ben: 33:35

Doesn't really matter.

Gene: 33:37

It doesn't matter. It's this is no different. What Fox did in my mind is absolutely no different than what Budweiser did.

Ben: 33:44

Oh no, no. They, they're not as bad as Budweiser.

Gene: 33:50

No, I think it is. I think it's the same thing. It's, it's completely not understanding your audience and doing something because somebody else told you that it would be the right thing to do. That's the

Ben: 34:04

Did you see that Budweiser is going to redesign the Bud Light can and logo in response to this? Thinking that might save

Gene: 34:10

whatever they're done, there's

Ben: 34:13

Bud Light as a brand

Gene: 34:15

it's done for the next, at least 20 years. Every time some dude, actual dude with balls sees a Bud Light can, they'll have to mandatory make a gay joke. It's not optional.

Ben: 34:31

yeah, yeah. So, here's the thing. I don't know that it'll be that prominent, but at, what I would say is that,

Gene: 34:38

You remember Zima?

Ben: 34:40

yes.

Gene: 34:40

Okay. Can you, can you resurrect that brand 20 years later?

Ben: 34:44

No, even though all the hard seltzers and everything that are popular now

Gene: 34:49

it's all the same type of shit. And I enjoyed Zima. I was definitely a Zima drinker back in the day. And I don't mean that as a, you know,

Ben: 34:57

Huh. Huh.

Gene: 34:58

not at all. I'm just saying, I like the taste

Ben: 35:00

admitting to some things now.

Gene: 35:02

in my wilder youth. Yeah. I was a Zima drinker.

Ben: 35:06

So tell us what it was like with Buck.

Gene: 35:08

Exactly. You know, Buck was a pretty hot chick.

Ben: 35:12

Huh. What's your excuse? It's not when you y'all

Gene: 35:16

Back when Zima was popular. Buck was a hot chick. Exactly. Huh.

Ben: 35:22

Gene drunk on

Gene: 35:24

was,

Ben: 35:25

Ziva.

Gene: 35:26

you know, it didn't make sense the amount of backlash against Zima. This is worse. I think this is Completely made this brand the butt of a joke, Hardy Hart.

Ben: 35:39

Well, and the, the thing is the last sale stats that they released year over year. So not just week to week, but compared to this time last year, sales are down over 30%.

Gene: 35:53

Most companies cannot survive on that.

Ben: 35:55

No, that, and this was the biggest, most popular beer brand in the world.

Gene: 36:01

Right. Which I frankly is very disappointed by humanity.

Ben: 36:06

Well, they, it, but here's the thing. It's not just Bud Light. If you look at a lot of Anheuser Busch, InBev's, Holdings You know, Budweiser is down, Michelob Ultra is down. This has knock on effects. I've seen it so bad that they have, there have been ads and they're at the grocery store here. They have cut prices tremendously. So right now, if I wanted to go get a 24 pack of Bud Light, I could get it for 12 at the grocery store here. I've seen ads other places where they're offering a store. 20 rebate for a 19 pack of beer because they get to count that as a sale.

Gene: 36:46

Yeah, I can't.

Ben: 36:47

this is the, in Anheuser-Busch InBev stock has taken a huge hit over this. Their, their revenue numbers are, I, I will not be surprised when they put out the Q2 revenue numbers that they're down 40% to last year. Well,

Gene: 37:07

Yeah, I think so and well deserved. But now Miller Time has a new meaning as well now.

Ben: 37:15

so that, that ad actually predated the Bud Light ad and

Gene: 37:19

I came out, just means we missed it.

Ben: 37:22

Yeah, but I, I, I, I actually think that maybe InBev is the ones that.

Gene: 37:27

Could be. Could be. Yeah, they're like, those motherfuckers, they are not getting shit for their ad. Let's make sure people see it.

Ben: 37:34

Yeah, but it's just not as cringeworthy.

Gene: 37:37

I think it's as cringeworthy. It's, it is literally rewriting history. Women have nothing to do with beer. Never have.

Ben: 37:45

Yeah, they

Gene: 37:46

Beer was not invented by women,

Ben: 37:48

No, it wasn't invented by women, but women did brew

Gene: 37:51

made by women. They did not. The only people authorized to brew beer, For antiquity were men because beer was always tied to religion. And even this was true in pre Christianity, this was true in Egypt. And there were brewmeisters not brew trowels. And this was tied in the Christian world. Beer was the venue of the monks, the abbots, because they were the ones that that both were in charge of growing the grain and making the beer. And, and, incidentally, had no women.

Ben: 38:28

Gene. It's our genespeaks. com. I, I, I think you're not a hundred percent correct on this. But

Gene: 38:35

Show me proof.

Ben: 38:37

Ale houses during colonial times.

Gene: 38:40

What, it was all a bunch of women instead of Sam Adams making beer?

Ben: 38:44

Well, they were both, but

Gene: 38:45

saying about selling beer? You mean women sold beer, is that what you're

Ben: 38:49

women have always sold beer, which is funny because, you know, they're, they're sitting there saying that, you know, we put women in bikinis, really? They didn't do that themselves. And I'm, you know, and not only that, bring back the beer ad with the babe in the bikini, please.

Gene: 39:07

Yeah, exactly.

Ben: 39:09

As your, as your sales target, as your demographic of the straight American male, you know, I, I don't mind a little bit of something to see

Gene: 39:20

Exactly. So I just think that Ed is typical of the modern,

Ben: 39:27

bring back the frogs, you know, before they, here's the thing before they started putting atrazine in the beer and stuff like that and leading to the Dylan Mulvaney moment. The Budweiser frog ad was pretty funny.

Gene: 39:40

Yeah, I'll go with the babes instead of the frog.

Ben: 39:42

Come on. That was a pretty good meta joke, dude.

Gene: 39:45

Yeah, the, the Atrazine making the frogs gay. I

Ben: 39:48

It leading to Dylan Mulvaney.

Gene: 39:51

know. He does look a little froggish, doesn't he? Gotta get a big mouth. Yeah, it's I just don't like history being re written. It's one of the things that happens to you when you start getting old is that you start realizing, hold on here, I was alive when that happened, and that shit wasn't the way it was. Now, I definitely remember in the pre colonial days, there were no women making beer. It's a hard job. It involves moving large barrels, man. They were not making beer.

Ben: 40:17

Yeah, so brewing beer is definitely a talent and can be easily screwed up,

Gene: 40:22

What part of making beer could women do pre technological advances?

Ben: 40:28

Making the mash and putting in the yeast and so

Gene: 40:31

No, you couldn't. No. Because you're making... Unless you're making it for your house... And you're making five gallons of it, but if you're making 60 gallons or more, no, hell no,

Ben: 40:44

Anyway,

Gene: 40:45

it's going to be

Ben: 40:45

it's funny that they're going to make compost to grow hops to do this. It's.

Gene: 40:52

They're not going to do dick. That's the other part about it. It's just pure lies. No one's doing anything.

Ben: 40:56

I agree, which is why I don't think it's as bad as the domain of anything.

Gene: 41:01

I, look, there's, there's a, an aspect of pedophilia thing to Dylan, which I, I'm not a fan of. I also think it's a total mismatch because I don't see gay guys drinking Bud Light. They were drinking Zima back in the day.

Ben: 41:15

well, here's the funny part. So, since Bud Light has not stood up for Dylan Mulvaney, now the gay bars are ditching Bud Light. A

Gene: 41:25

ditching Bud Light, which I don't think was.

Ben: 41:28

big seller for him?

Gene: 41:29

so there, I, most gay guys that I've known drink martinis and fruity drinks, not beer.

Ben: 41:37

You know what? If I'm going to get a drink, like a nightcap, well, not even a nightcap. If I'm going to get a drink for, let's say I'm waiting to pick up dinner or something like that, I'll do a dirty martini. So, what are you saying there, Gene?

Gene: 41:52

Yeah. Exactly what I said.

Ben: 41:55

Thank you.

Gene: 41:56

I'll drink, I'll drink my Zima. You drink your dirty martinis. Anyway. So, technology news we got through, we got through Ron DeSantis, even though I don't see any proof whatsoever that your allegations coming out of the mainstream media are true. But I do want competition. I don't want it to be assumed that Trump is the nominee.

Ben: 42:21

That's fine. I think you're, I think Trump's going to run away with it regardless. I think DeSantis, if he really, if this really gets heated you know, then DeSantis is done. The only hope is that it doesn't get too heated and that this is a negotiating tactic for him to be a VP. Because that's, that's where he's going to get.

Gene: 42:46

Honestly, what would be better for him? I think it would make him look better if he ran again is if he was the secretary of state

Ben: 42:55

Okay. Well,

Gene: 42:57

lacking the international experience

Ben: 42:59

giving him some sort of cabinet position. Sure.

Gene: 43:03

Yeah. Give it, give is probably going to be a chick for a VP is my guess.

Ben: 43:07

Yeah. Kristi Noem or someone like that.

Gene: 43:10

or, or the Carrie Lake or somebody.

Ben: 43:12

Kristi Noem would be better.

Gene: 43:14

I agree, but Carrie Lakes in the media

Ben: 43:17

Not in a positive way.

Gene: 43:20

well, it depends who you look at, man. Yeah

Ben: 43:23

anyway, I, I think if, if DeSantis really, really fights Trump,

Gene: 43:28

we'll

Ben: 43:29

he's going to nuke himself.

Gene: 43:32

see. That's a good test for him. Like he needs to be able to come across presidential. And if he can do that against Trump, then he's got a very good chance.

Ben: 43:42

Yeah.

Gene: 43:43

And I still, I stand by to what I said originally, which is that I think Trump will draw a lot more. Anti Trump voters then would otherwise be voting in the general election. If somebody, it doesn't matter who anybody other than Trump ran, those people would likely just stay home. They're going to show up and vote because they're going to still vote against Trump, regardless of who the democratic candidate is, even if it's Biden I don't think there's nearly as many people that are going to vote against Biden, no matter who the Republican is. I think the people that want to vote against Biden are going to make a showing at the primaries, but they're still going to vote for Biden or just not vote. But for Trump, I think he draws in a lot of people that just have never forgiven him for being a Nazi.

Ben: 44:38

I don't know, man. I think a lot of people who reluctantly voted for Biden are looking at the Biden presidency and going,

Gene: 44:47

Not far enough. This guy is

Ben: 44:49

don't know.

Gene: 44:49

a true socialist.

Ben: 44:51

No, I, that's a minority. That is a minority.

Gene: 44:55

it's the minority that votes. There's a lot of, a lot of Democrats that just don't really vote and they don't need to, because the party does it for them.

Ben: 45:04

Mm hmm.

Gene: 45:06

What are all those vans doing driving around right after elections with a bunch of boxes?

Ben: 45:10

Yeah, well,

Gene: 45:12

Just saying.

Ben: 45:14

yeah, there are a lot more people admitting to the issues than

Gene: 45:19

Trump is the nominee, I will definitely vote for him, but I think he's going to lose.

Ben: 45:26

we'll see. I don't,

Gene: 45:28

Obviously, that's why we're having, this is why this conversation is fun, because we don't have the same opinion on these topics.

Ben: 45:35

so I, I just don't see. So, first of all, in the primary, maybe, maybe Vivek comes out of nowhere and makes a decent run, but I

Gene: 45:47

no one's gonna vote for yeah, no one's gonna vote for an Indian guy.

Ben: 45:50

I would,

Gene: 45:51

I, I don't mean you or me, I would too, but like, normal middle American ain't voting for no Indian.

Ben: 45:57

I dude, I don't know. He is. Making the rounds

Gene: 46:01

seen what happens with an Indian running England. So,

Ben: 46:06

First of all, London and

Gene: 46:08

Pakistani, I know, I know. I'm trying to

Ben: 46:10

after, after the great, after the day of division, you're really pissing some people off Eugene.

Gene: 46:17

I know, right? I would vote for him. I like him. I like what he's got to say. I think he's a little bit young and a little inexperienced on the international trade. I'd love to see him, You know, maybe exactly a little too young to be president.

Ben: 46:31

Nah. Biden and Trump are too old,

Gene: 46:35

here's what I think. The ideal age is 45 to 60. Nobody over 60, nobody under 45. In that age, you're, you've seen enough of the world to make good decisions and your brain hasn't yet slowed down by 60. And I know there's always exceptions, right? But by 60 I know for a fact that it's noticeable in men that are over 60 that their, their brains take longer to process things. It's just, it's reality. So, again, there are exceptions, but it's, it's a pretty good baseline, but I want the competition. I let's see how good Vivek does against DeSantis.

Ben: 47:18

I think the Santas, which again is why I think the Santas is doing nothing but hurting himself by running.

Gene: 47:26

then let him hurt himself. That's fine too. If he, if he can't be in that league, then he needs to wash out.

Ben: 47:34

Okay,

Gene: 47:35

I can't stand the idea of people just making these decisions in backrooms. And saying, well, this year it's Trump, next year it's DeSantis, the year after... Because this is the problem with the fucking Republican Party for the last 20 years. Is they've had a bunch of candidates... That nobody likes, that nobody wants.

Ben: 47:54

so assuming you're

Gene: 47:56

Guys like John McCain.

Ben: 47:57

for the Democrats, right?

Gene: 47:59

Unless the California guy can manage to push him out, but I don't think that'll happen.

Ben: 48:04

you don't think anyone else is going to step up.

Gene: 48:06

From the Democra Well, obviously Kennedy's gonna be in there, but I don't think the Democratic Party can allow Kennedy to win.

Ben: 48:15

I don't

Gene: 48:17

They, they will use the same techniques they used against Trump against Kennedy.

Ben: 48:22

Probably, but here's the thing. It's not a given that Biden survives to 2024.

Gene: 48:29

know, that's why the real question's gonna be, who's the Veep? Cuz it, I don't think it's gonna be the same one.

Ben: 48:34

No, but yeah,

Gene: 48:36

you I'm sorry, Indian chick. Sorry, slave owner chick.

Ben: 48:40

Cackle. Anyway.

Gene: 48:43

Cackle chick.

Ben: 48:44

Yeah. So let's see, who was it? She was supposed to have slept her way to the top

Gene: 48:49

The mayor of San Francisco.

Ben: 48:51

Yeah, I can't remember his

Gene: 48:53

Jimmy Dean or something like that. Willie Brown.

Ben: 48:56

Willie Brad,

Gene: 48:57

Same thing.

Ben: 48:58

talking about sleeping with someone. You immediately go to sausage. Interesting.

Gene: 49:02

Oh Jimmy Dean's a musician. What are you talking about?

Ben: 49:06

Sip your Zima a little

Gene: 49:07

you're eating.

Ben: 49:09

Yeah, well, outside of politics on another note, I sent you a, a, a link you might find

Gene: 49:15

see that. All right. What's, what's the latest with NERCs?

Ben: 49:19

So, North American reliability Corporation, which is part of the electric industry, just put out their reliability assessment for 2023. if you'll scroll down to page 6, there's an interesting map there.

Gene: 49:35

I'm looking at

Ben: 49:36

So, all of California. Taxes all but just a little bit of

Gene: 49:44

Women.

Ben: 49:45

and so on. Most of the United States, including Toronto, by the way,

Gene: 49:51

That's part of it. Yeah.

Ben: 49:53

is it significantly elevated risk of blackouts and literally they are. Pointing out the rise in reliance on renewables and the lack of baseload coal and natural gas power.

Gene: 50:09

Same shit you've been talking about forever.

Ben: 50:12

NERC is publishing it.

Gene: 50:14

Looks good.

Ben: 50:15

So, the state of Texas the state legislature has finally approved. The state is going to... Invest in some of their own power plants, instead of just leaving it up to commercial reliability

Gene: 50:29

I'm looking at this map, is part of Texas actually handled by Louisiana?

Ben: 50:34

part of

Gene: 50:35

Really?

Ben: 50:36

where my parents live is not part of our car

Gene: 50:39

Oh, I didn't know

Ben: 50:40

then and stuff like that is not part of our car.

Gene: 50:42

SBP. Huh. Does that mean they're better or worse off?

Ben: 50:48

It depends. So, so here's the thing you have these different. So the map you're looking at is coordinating entities. So this is. That's a compliance, not an actual grid map. So, if you were to look at the grid, there are there's the West Coast grid. There's the East Coast grid and then there's. So, all of the East Coast is tied together via a C. All the West Coast is tied together via the West Coast and East Coast are tied together through some ties stands alone with ties to the West Coast grid, the East Coast grid in Mexico, but we have very limited ties.

Gene: 51:31

Well, now we buy or we sell to Mexico. Which one do we do

Ben: 51:35

Usually sell. Usually we are exporting power to Mexico.

Gene: 51:40

now? If I was Mexico, why would I not just build up a power stations along the border and sell to the U S I

Ben: 51:48

Will

Gene: 51:48

have any environmental regulations. I have relatively cheap petroleum.

Ben: 51:53

I don't know. They just haven't. We export natural gas, Texas exports, natural gas to Mexico.

Gene: 51:59

Yeah. That just seems so bizarre to me.

Ben: 52:01

So it's ironic because during Yuri, the first time Texas stopped literally first time in history, Texas stopped exporting natural gas and electricity outside of the state. So normally we are a net exporter, but here's the thing. The DC ties that Texas has are very limited. You're not doing more than a few megawatts of power going out. So it's, it's the DC ties are not there for any amount of energy coming in. It's just really not. And by the way, the reason why they're DC is so that the grids don't have to be perfectly synced.

Gene: 52:36

you don't have to sink them. Yeah, that makes

Ben: 52:37

Yeah. So

Gene: 52:38

they high voltage DC? Like how high

Ben: 52:42

It depends on the D. C. tie their varying designs.

Gene: 52:47

are they like a 1200 volts? Or are they like a million volts?

Ben: 52:51

They're in the thousands of volts. I would have to go look at the actual specs. It's been a long time. But anyway, regardless, the, the conditions are rife. The T. R. E. has put out for Texas some reliability concerns for this summer. It would be my recommendation if you do not have at least a small generator capable of handling a little bit of a load, maybe in up to, including your AC that you might want to get 1, because I, you know, a few Augusts ago when I was still working for the utility pre pandemic actually we saw for 12 hours in August. 9, 000 a megawatt prices and rolling Brownouts. I don't know if you remember that across the state. And it was basically over a hundred in the entirety of the state

Gene: 53:50

Mm

Ben: 53:50

for an extended period of time. And here, here's the thing in Texas, when it gets really hot in Texas, usually the wind dies down and ERCOT is already predicting that we will exceed the thermal generation capacity this summer. On demand, meaning there will be more demand than there are power plants to produce power.

Gene: 54:15

Why is nobody getting fired?

Ben: 54:18

What do you mean?

Gene: 54:19

Well, this is all poor planning as far as I'm concerned.

Ben: 54:23

Yeah, the entire board of ERCOT got fired after Yuri.

Gene: 54:27

Oh, okay, good. But then nothing changed.

Ben: 54:30

Nothing is well, again, the state is talking about building some more thermal power plants, but here's the thing. We're subsidizing wind and solar still today. We are subsidizing wind and solar

Gene: 54:42

Yep.

Ben: 54:42

not subsidizing base load. Base load capacity and not giving a fuel storage subsidy. So one of the issues we saw in Yuri was the natural gas power plants couldn't get fuel because of various reasons, but because of issues with natural gas delivery, they couldn't get power, they couldn't get fuel. So therefore they had to de rate or even shut down. Cole and South Texas project in Comanche peak stayed up and running for the most part, you know, we need baseload capacity. You want to do wind and solar for peak and everything else fine, but that is not a reliable predictable form of power.

Gene: 55:24

Exactly. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Ben: 55:28

Anyway, we're in a position

Gene: 55:29

how big of a

Ben: 55:30

over two thirds of the country,

Gene: 55:32

do most people need to run an AC?

Ben: 55:35

I would say get if you can get a, you know, at least. 7 plus KW generator, you should be alright, but it's going to depend on your house and what all you're wanting to run in parallel. Remember to, you know, you can run things minimally and swap what you're running.

Gene: 55:57

Yeah, because it doesn't take much. My biggest concern has always been the refrigerator. And it doesn't take a lot much to run that.

Ben: 56:04

Refrigerator and freezer, depending on when the compressors kick on can be quite a bit of a load spike. Again, you're not talking about the peak or you're not talking about the running condition. You're talking about that initial hit

Gene: 56:17

Sort of. Yeah, that's a good

Ben: 56:18

and depending on what all you're running at the time could be problematic. So my recommendation, if someone wants to go with a cheap generator and get a 5, 6 KW generator and do the suicide plug style connection, which I'm not recommending you can do that. But remember to a disconnect from the grid B make sure you're going through and load balancing. So if I hypothetically were to go the suicide plug route myself and try and backfeed into my panel you know, first of all, I'm going to go to the breaker box and I'm going to shut off everything, but. What I want to run. So if that's the AC, probably the AC is the only thing that's running the fridge and freezers and stuff like that are shut off. And then once the AC is run to a point where I can kill it, then I'll enable the fridge and freezers and stuff like that.

Gene: 57:19

And one of the things that I'm kind of, I was surprised by when I found out is just how horrible houses in the South are insulated. It's I understand, the rationale for it, but it still sucks. So the next step house, all houses, brand new houses, everything here just sucks.

Ben: 57:39

Uh, 38.

Gene: 57:40

The inflation ratings here are less than half of what they are up north. The, there are value requirements. I went through this with a client recently.

Ben: 57:49

Ask insulation. So, you know, no, that

Gene: 57:53

Good, but that's

Ben: 57:54

what would have been put

Gene: 57:54

not going to be what's in your walls though. That's your ceiling. It it's, and again, there's exceptions to every rule, right? But in general I went through all the Southern states and then I compared that to new England and the Northern states, Minnesota.

Ben: 58:10

we're not dealing with cold

Gene: 58:12

And that's the problem is that yes. And I, and that's why I said, I understand the rationale,

Ben: 58:17

water heater is in my attic.

Gene: 58:18

it is stupid. I would next house I built is going to have insulation. That's not based on code, but based on saving money. I

Ben: 58:28

I, it doesn't pencil out, but okay.

Gene: 58:31

mean, it doesn't pencil out

Ben: 58:33

What insulation are you going

Gene: 58:35

half your air conditioning bill, whatever that monthly amount is, is just going to heat the outside of your house. I'm sorry. Cool. The outside of your house, because the insulation. Is so crappy

Ben: 58:50

I

Gene: 58:50

your house

Ben: 58:51

My house

Gene: 58:52

your house

Ben: 58:53

R15 in the walls.

Gene: 58:55

Yeah, you got our 15. I had our 28 in Minnesota.

Ben: 58:59

Okay,

Gene: 59:00

That's why it's just like,

Ben: 59:02

with cold. We're not here.

Gene: 59:04

that's, but it

Ben: 59:06

also living in Minnesota.

Gene: 59:07

point is, well, guess what happens in Minnesota when it's a hundred degrees outside your AC barely turns on because your house doesn't release or it doesn't absorb all that heat. I was going to say release the cold. Your house doesn't absorb all that heat because the insulation is better.

Ben: 59:23

Gene, do we need to go back to chemistry 101 and explain endothermic versus exothermic?

Gene: 59:28

this is why I corrected myself before you did do the endothermic reactions are awesome. I, I've always loved those.

Ben: 59:35

They're pretty fucking cool.

Gene: 59:37

Yeah, boy, you're on top of it today. Look at that, zingers and everything. Yeah, portable air conditioning. Careful with the chlorine gas coming out of there.

Ben: 59:48

You know what this, these jokes just went over everyone's fuck.

Gene: 59:52

I know, right? I've always enjoyed chemistry, but I, I was not horribly good at doing all the equations for chemistry.

Ben: 1:00:02

The problem I have with chemistry is it's the math is just so crappy. That's what I like about physics. Is it nice, nice round numbers

Gene: 1:00:12

No, it's A chemistry always kind of felt like it was a bunch of estimating and then, you know, it seems right, must be right. Oh, speaking of science, he shit for topics. So I've got a bunch of friends that seem to not agree with me that the age of fusion is coming and based on what I've seen recently, I think we're probably five, five years or so away. From the first commercial fusion reactors being up.

Ben: 1:00:44

from your lips to God's ears, but I don't think so

Gene: 1:00:48

Yeah, that's what everybody seems to think. My other buddy is like, yeah, it's been five years for 25 years now.

Ben: 1:00:54

Pretty much.

Gene: 1:00:55

I don't know, man. I've never seen the, the test reactors that have been anywhere near what they are right now. And they're building a lot of them in there. Their ability to not have to use heat as an intermediate for electrical generation is really cool, like they're actually generating it from plasma. It's

Ben: 1:01:15

Again, like I said last time, I don't think that's going to be as efficient as you think it is.

Gene: 1:01:19

well, it releases a lot of energy, so we'll see,

Ben: 1:01:23

It sounds like I'm not the only one telling you

Gene: 1:01:25

no, you're like, literally everybody's telling me this, but I'm not buying it.

Ben: 1:01:29

you should

Gene: 1:01:29

going to, I'm going to stick. I just, I don't trust people that have high grades in school, so I'm just going to go. With my own opinion here

Ben: 1:01:39

Gene explaining away why he was a D student. I'm more trustworthy.

Gene: 1:01:43

I was already a D student, but I was always like a B plus student. It, because the, the problem with the A student people is they just have no lives.

Ben: 1:01:52

That's not true. Literally, I only had one B in high school and that one B was in a college level course and I had an 89 and the bastard wouldn't round up

Gene: 1:02:06

Mm

Ben: 1:02:07

give me an A.

Gene: 1:02:08

Mm hmm.

Ben: 1:02:09

So, and it was at a local community college, so whatever, but I wasn't all a student and I had a life and I wouldn't, you know, did plenty, probably more than I should have.

Gene: 1:02:24

Well, that's probably true. And certainly more than kids these days.

Ben: 1:02:28

Oh, Jesus.

Gene: 1:02:30

Yeah, it's, it's pretty bad out there.

Ben: 1:02:32

Well, I, dude, what is going on with teenagers today? Like they don't, they don't go park. They don't go sneak around and do stuff.

Gene: 1:02:41

Well, they sneak around, like, by not letting their parents know what they're doing on the phone. That's the extent of sneaking around.

Ben: 1:02:51

I remember, you know, telling my parents I was going to the football game with my girlfriend at the time and we ended up in a rock quarry somewhere, you know, stuff like that.

Gene: 1:03:01

Oh, exactly.

Ben: 1:03:02

Who, who, why don't kids do this anymore? I don't understand.

Gene: 1:03:07

The number of times that I risked physical harm to myself that my parents didn't know about is, it was a weekly, not a yearly occurrence.

Ben: 1:03:18

Hmm.

Gene: 1:03:20

It's just like, it's the age where most animals, including humans learn their boundaries by pushing them. And I think this current US generation at least is so fucking medicated. By their parents that they, they've completely beaten off that very natural experience, you know, that, that desire, frankly,

Ben: 1:03:48

Something

Gene: 1:03:48

agree.

Ben: 1:03:50

Well, I'm just sad,

Gene: 1:03:52

I really do think that this is the most medicated generation ever that's coming in like teenagers right now.

Ben: 1:03:58

well, and I think it's for males, definitely the lowest testosterone generation.

Gene: 1:04:04

Well, when on the one hand, you're being told that you're the root of all evil. And on the other hand everything you eat and drink has estrogen. What are you going to do?

Ben: 1:04:15

Take some super male vitality and

Gene: 1:04:18

Superman. Yeah, exactly. All right. What are you showing me here?

Ben: 1:04:23

I just going back to the ERCOT report. I don't know if you saw this table in here, but so you have the anticipated reserve margin, whether they should be what they think they're going to be with outages and With higher demand where they think they're going to be. So, if you look at ERCOT, they want to be at 23%. They think they're actually going to be at 16. 5. If demand hits where they think that's going to be, we're going to negative 1. 6.

Gene: 1:04:49

That's actually like the best of the negatives.

Ben: 1:04:52

It is if you look at California. 12%.

Gene: 1:04:57

Yeah. But like Southeast is going to be 33% over margin. Go Ron DeSantis.

Ben: 1:05:03

Well, they just haven't shut down. So, but the problem there is like Florida power and light and all that is regulated utilities. So Ercot is unregulated California's market is unregulated to a large extent, but you have such a pg e monopoly there and pg e is just a criminal organization. And before any PG and E lawyers come around, remember you had seven felonies from the San Bruno incident alone. So I was actually giving a speech once and I brought up the San Bruno pipeline issue and how it was just an utter failure. And literally, there was a guy from PG and E in the audience that got pissy and during Q and A said something to me about hearing from their lawyers and I said, well, please do, but remember you had 7 felonies from it. Anyway, it was hilarious. It was a big laughing moment for the crowd and needless to say, I never heard from them.

Gene: 1:06:02

Yeah, exactly. Remember if we've talked about it, but somebody, I was watching some, something on YouTube. I'm sure that's mostly what I watch, but there's a guy that mentioned, you know, Oh no, it was on Tim cast. In fact, maybe we did talk about it that somebody was talking about how corporations are treated equivalent to people by the laws of the United States, like they have same rights.

Ben: 1:06:28

Don't go to jail.

Gene: 1:06:29

but they never go to jail. So that like the only way to to deal with corporations breaking the law, it seems to be a financial one. the idea was, and I kind of liked this idea. I know from practical standpoints, it'd be equivalent to just killing off the corporation. But maybe not. And the idea being that, you know, the, like, if a human would go to prison for some action, then the corporation loses its license to do business for that duration of time. So the corporation, the government doesn't take any money from them. They don't, you know, they don't do all the shit they're doing to Russia right now. They just they say, great, you're on hiatus now for the next three months, you're 90 days. Penalty for this action means you can resume operations in 90 days.

Ben: 1:07:19

So literally, anytime the government wants to punish a corporation, they go bankrupt.

Gene: 1:07:24

Yeah. Which right now the government extorts corporations rather than go bankrupt.

Ben: 1:07:31

Yeah, how about instead that the CEO has to serve the time actually in jail

Gene: 1:07:37

Well that would make for interesting selection of CEOs because you're, then you're one of your qualifications will be, if you're interested in that job is your ability to.

Ben: 1:07:49

to not drop the soap?

Gene: 1:07:50

To create a shiv to know how to, you know, basic jail etiquette, be a required course.

Ben: 1:07:57

So what we're saying is Dylan Mulvaney would volunteer to be CEO of Enron. I

Gene: 1:08:02

Oh God, you went there. Jesus Christ.

Ben: 1:08:06

can't help

Gene: 1:08:08

Yeah, it's bad

Ben: 1:08:09

it. Come on, that was somewhat funny.

Gene: 1:08:12

no. I, that's, your, your imagery that you're bringing up in my head did not need to exist in my head. Thank you very much. That is bad. But something, something more than like, Oh, God, assess what the find, which will just simply be an item that they're going to, you know, have on their, you know, and then they're just going to show a lot. So effectively the stockholders. We'll, we'll lo, we'll lose money on this.

Ben: 1:08:42

And the perfect example of this is Pfizer, right? Pfizer creates a drug that causes havoc, causes lots of side effects, and the government fines them. And what it comes out to is, Oh no, we made 12 billion, but we got fined for,

Gene: 1:09:01

Yeah,

Ben: 1:09:02

we made 8 billion.

Gene: 1:09:03

exactly. Exactly. And I think for a lot of companies, that is

Ben: 1:09:07

That's the

Gene: 1:09:08

the calculation. Yeah, exactly. And it's, this is the kind of thing that Ralph Lader back in the 70s started his whole campaign on.

Ben: 1:09:17

God. Don't tell me you're a Nader fit.

Gene: 1:09:19

No, but I, I, I look, I like gadflies, right? I like people that stir the pot. So even if they're on the, the, the socialist side, I think that they create a benefit out of doing that.

Ben: 1:09:33

Ralph Nader did nothing but destroy jobs and the economy.

Gene: 1:09:37

And, and the industry needed to get a kick in the ass at that

Ben: 1:09:41

He, no bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The, the job safety rate was going just fine before Ralph Nader. The trends didn't improve after Ralph Nader. Ralph Nader

Gene: 1:09:56

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Ben: 1:09:57

hurt the

Gene: 1:09:58

But the industry needed to get a kick in the ass. They were

Ben: 1:10:01

Which industry?

Gene: 1:10:03

the automotive industry, which industry are you talking about?

Ben: 1:10:05

I'm talking about just his general stuff on OSHA.

Gene: 1:10:10

Oh, no, I'm talking about automotive industry.

Ben: 1:10:13

Seatbelts, really?

Gene: 1:10:14

Mm hmm.

Ben: 1:10:15

Why?

Gene: 1:10:16

Not that I think that seatbelts have anything to do with saving lives. Although they, I think like I wear one, but I, I think the U. S. automotive industry was operating in too much of a the, it's, it's the same thing. It's a lack of competition. It's a lack of, if you don't have anybody pushing against you, you get weak and you start taking things for granted and you cut corners and you do things. Poorly. And that's exactly what was happening to the U S auto industry in the seventies. They made shit product.

Ben: 1:10:49

Yeah, completely agree.

Gene: 1:10:51

Yeah. So the two good things that happened, I think were competition from Japan and Rathinator

Ben: 1:10:57

Okay.

Gene: 1:10:59

that gave them two different kicks and two different sides of their ass. And I think the industry is better

Ben: 1:11:04

think the competition from Japan did more than

Gene: 1:11:09

It didn't seem like it in the seventies though.

Ben: 1:11:11

I don't know. You had the gas crisis and everybody went to their little rice burner. I

Gene: 1:11:16

was making fun of the Japanese cars in the seventies. Dude, they didn't start being seen as legitimate alternatives. Until the mid eighties, if not the late eighties, because in the

Ben: 1:11:28

know. The Datsun.

Gene: 1:11:29

yeah. The dots and yeah, all those cars were seen the same way that probably you remember, like Hyundai having a reputation now, Honda actually makes really good cars, but like 20 years ago. If you heard Hyundai, you'd be laughing, you'd be like, Oh yeah, what are you

Ben: 1:11:45

know what? So here, here's the funny part. A family friend. Ken Hall, rest in peace. He, he passed away a little while ago, but he was a hell of a good guy. But I remember him in the early two thousands having a Hyundai and he called it his Korean Beamer, but

Gene: 1:12:03

trying to say? Yeah, and everybody laughed.

Ben: 1:12:06

it was still a nice car. It was still a nice car. Feature wise. It was,

Gene: 1:12:11

It was just, yeah, it was pretty good. I, I've almost bought a Hyundai. Like I think they, they,

Ben: 1:12:17

why do you say Hyundai?

Gene: 1:12:20

how do you

Ben: 1:12:20

you're emphasizing

Gene: 1:12:21

I'm sorry. Hyundai. Let me say it in Korean for you.

Ben: 1:12:25

Please don't.

Gene: 1:12:27

No, it's, it's, if you want to say it in Korean, it's Hyundai. I say it, I'm very Americanized, which is Hyundai. How do you say it?

Ben: 1:12:34

Hun Hyundai, Hyundai, whatever.

Gene: 1:12:37

Okay.

Ben: 1:12:39

I generally don't.

Gene: 1:12:40

Yeah, exactly. There you go. So I think, and in the, in the seventies, that's exactly the way that people looked at Japanese cars. You know, Honda, Toyota, they were all seen as like shoddily made cheap crap that nobody would drive. Maybe teenagers would, that'd be about it. And then Californians started buying them. And that's really what kind of started making people think, well, well, you seem to run longer than American cars. That's interesting. They, they don't break down all the time.

Ben: 1:13:11

It's interesting to me that Subaru only has the cult following that it has.

Gene: 1:13:17

I have a Subaru. I like Subaru. I, I had my my WRX, it's

Ben: 1:13:23

WRX was a cool car. That little rotary engine in it?

Gene: 1:13:27

not rotary, it's a boxer.

Ben: 1:13:30

No, you're right. It was the Lancer that had the rotary engine. Sorry.

Gene: 1:13:34

Well, and then the the Mazda RX 7 had the rotary. Yeah. Now where you or somebody else sent me some videos of there's new advances in engines, or maybe they're not even advances. Maybe these are older designs, but they're starting to manufacture. So there's a. One that looks like an inverted rotary.

Ben: 1:13:54

Was not me, and I'd be interested to see

Gene: 1:13:56

Oh, okay. I'll dig out who sent it to me and I'll forward to you, but that's the easiest way I can describe it as think of a rotary engine, but kind of like the inside out because it, it still has a rotating component like that. But but instead of being like two circles spinning inside the other, it looks like more like a triangle. I'll send you the video. I I'm going to butcher the description no matter what, because this is not my area of particular interest, but it was interesting because the size of this thing size two horsepower rating was insane. It was off the charts. It's like a, an engine that weighs a hundred pounds. Puts out several hundred horsepower, which is crazy. I don't know what kind of efficiency it had, or, you know, any, any other stats about it, but the weight to power rating was off the charts.

Ben: 1:14:54

hmm. Interesting. So I did something stupid yesterday.

Gene: 1:14:58

Oh, tell us.

Ben: 1:15:00

So my wife wanted me to, we've had a lot of rain here in Texas and needless to say, it's been a little muddy and everything else. So the back porch was pretty muddy from the kids and dog and everything else. So she wanted me to get the pressure washer out and clean off the porch,

Gene: 1:15:16

Okay.

Ben: 1:15:17

which I did. And it's been about a, huh?

Gene: 1:15:21

You strip it as well as exactly.

Ben: 1:15:23

No, no, no. So it's been about a year since the pressure washer has been used and So last year I had to go through and tear apart the carburetor and clean it out and all that, because it had been several years since it had been used. So I did that last year and I go to start it this year and it won't start. It won't start. It won't start. And I'm like, Oh God, Jesus. So I get some carb cleaner on spraying it in there, trying to get it to start, trying to get the start, trying to get the start. Finally, I remember that there's an all switch.

Gene: 1:15:56

Jesus Christ. So you were just trying to, is it, is it manual start or electric

Ben: 1:16:01

Oh, it's a, it's a pull start.

Gene: 1:16:02

full start? So you got a little exercise, shoulder, shoulder exercise.

Ben: 1:16:07

Yes. Anyway, I finally get it to pop and turn over a couple of times, but it still won't go. Now the gas in this tank is less than nine months old, but I had to dump the gas. I had to go get new gas.

Gene: 1:16:19

I, I might have to do that as well. Cause I I've got

Ben: 1:16:22

shocking to me how quickly gas is destabilizing these

Gene: 1:16:26

Is it worthwhile buying the stabilizers? Don't they do shit?

Ben: 1:16:30

So for my boat, I always use the ethanol treatment and the stabilizers. But anyway, for this little engine, you know, I, I immediately took the gas can and filled up, put. Tor ported in my truck, you know, cause my truck's got a big enough tank that it'll mix in and it'll be fine. But I went and got some high octane gas and it started up and ran fine after a little while, but usually theoretically unstabilized gas should be operational in most engines for at least a year. However, this was not,

Gene: 1:17:04

Yeah.

Ben: 1:17:04

to say, with a little carb cleaning fluid in the intake and some fresh gas, I got it started and running and cleaned off the porch.

Gene: 1:17:12

Okay. That's good.

Ben: 1:17:14

The amount of mud was just astonishing because, you know, it's a rough concrete, so you don't even realize how

Gene: 1:17:20

oh, how much does it have? How much it holds? Yeah. Okay. Ca I thought you had like a wood porch and I was like, it's really easy to strip that shit if you. Mm

Ben: 1:17:28

No, no, it's concrete. The funny part is with this pressure washer. So he had it at the old house. And we had a little above ground pool, we had set up in the backyard and over the winter, we hadn't taken really care of it, you know, stuff like that. And it kind of got some algae on it and Lindsay wanted to clean it and I was like, okay, be careful. And she gets with the pressure washer and I, you know, stop, stop, she. Do holes right through it. she goes, get to clean. Yeah, I had to page it, but it was hilarious cuz she was poking right through that.

Gene: 1:18:06

Oh, man.

Ben: 1:18:07

She was like, oh, don't do that.

Gene: 1:18:09

Yeah, really. Jesus.

Ben: 1:18:12

oh,

Gene: 1:18:13

Yeah, it's I haven't had a pressure washer in a decade, but I remember I used to love to play with that thing.

Ben: 1:18:20

oh. They, they're, they're handy cleaning windows and all sorts of stuff,

Gene: 1:18:24

I remember I would clean the garage floor with it like at least twice a year. That was always a fun experience.

Ben: 1:18:31

man. Mm-hmm.

Gene: 1:18:32

The combination of like, you wash it all down, dry it, and then put degreaser on all the spots you need to degrease, wash it again, and and then I was always trying to get Right to that original color of the concrete on the garage.

Ben: 1:18:48

Yeah, which if you want to take that much time, you can, but one of the things I find interesting is when you're washing, like I was watching off the back deck, you have to hit multiple passes. So you hit it and it takes off the top layer. You hit it again, it takes off the next layer and so on until you get down to it. But

Gene: 1:19:06

Yeah, no, I think

Ben: 1:19:08

anyway, I just thought you'd find it funny that I was sitting there for probably a good 5, 10 minutes sitting there trying to start the damn thing with it switched off.

Gene: 1:19:16

it's, we've all done that stuff and I probably do it on a weekly basis, something that I, you know, I, I spend time on and then I realized that, oh shit, I forgot something, whatever that thing is. Hey, can I bitch about something real quick here?

Ben: 1:19:32

Can

Gene: 1:19:33

shipping internationally has gotten outrageous.

Ben: 1:19:37

yep.

Gene: 1:19:38

I had to order a bracket, literally a piece of metal from China,

Ben: 1:19:45

for what?

Gene: 1:19:46

you know, things and all right. It's a part for my joystick and and okay. Yes. The left one. It's, it's for two of them actually. But anyway, so it's, it's literally a 5 part that I got to buy the last time I put an order in. And so I needed to get this and they, they have no distribution in the U S there's, you can't get an Amazon, you have to order it from, it's actually a Russian company that makes the joysticks, but but they make them in China and the fucking shipping on this 5 part that probably costs about 5 cents to make, but it sells for five bucks with 38.

Ben: 1:20:29

Now you're sending this via air?

Gene: 1:20:31

Yeah, I guess FedEx. I mean, it's like, it's not like fast there. It'll take at least a week and a half to get here,

Ben: 1:20:38

Oh, and

Gene: 1:20:39

it's not by boat,

Ben: 1:20:40

customs will take forever.

Gene: 1:20:42

but it's a 5 fucking part and it's 38. It's the cheapest shipping option.

Ben: 1:20:48

Well, when I was in Greece looking to try and ship stuff back it was going to be a hundred euros per half kilogram.

Gene: 1:20:57

No way. Holy

Ben: 1:20:59

Well, I ended up just getting another suitcase.

Gene: 1:21:01

Yeah. You might as well just. Check another suitcase at that point. Yeah. So you bought another suitcase there.

Ben: 1:21:07

Actually one of my colleagues in Dubai, he had he was buying quite a bit of Johnny Walker and literally it was coming in this suitcase from, so he gave me one,

Gene: 1:21:19

That's too funny.

Ben: 1:21:19

the only hard shell suitcase I have, but it was nice

Gene: 1:21:23

It's a hard shell. Okay.

Ben: 1:21:24

yeah, I don't like hard shells.

Gene: 1:21:26

Yeah, I, with the one exception I would say of Pelican cases, cause I've shipped plenty of those.

Ben: 1:21:32

Oh, well, yeah, I've got Pelican cases for technical stuff, but not for like clothes and travel.

Gene: 1:21:37

No, you could put clothes in them, but kind of a waste

Ben: 1:21:40

would be ridiculous and overkill, but sure.

Gene: 1:21:43

a, a 18 pound weight suitcase for five pounds of clothes. Yeah, I've got like, I should really get rid of these things. But I've got, I think four four of the size four Pelican cases, which is the, the largest carry on Pelican you can take.

Ben: 1:21:59

Yep.

Gene: 1:22:01

And I had them all when I was doing a lot of photography and

Ben: 1:22:04

Yeah. I've got my forensics kit is my forensic stuff is all in Pelican.

Gene: 1:22:08

Yep. And then I've got a a gun case that is hard sided that is

Ben: 1:22:16

I've got some gun cases that are hard sided too.

Gene: 1:22:18

metal, metal on all the corners. It's very true. I don't know what that style is called, but. Traditional looking, it's like green with the metal edging and it holds three handguns and I have a big red cross sticker on it and it says med kit which. I kind of like because it generally means people aren't going to be trying to steal it because it's a med kit.

Ben: 1:22:45

So changing the subject a little bit, but you probably told me to watch this six months ago, but I finally watched the Babylon B Californians

Gene: 1:22:59

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Isn't that hilarious?

Ben: 1:23:02

Hilarious. And I love the ending in the last episode.

Gene: 1:23:06

Yeah, yeah. It's, they did a great job with it. I didn't realize when I was watching it that it was only originally supposed to be the one episode. The first one, and it got such a huge, overwhelming viewership numbers. They're like, okay, we, we need to do a series of these and they tied it in beautifully. It was just like, it looked to me as though it was already a planned like four series or four or five, whatever it was series of episodes that are all tied together, but yeah, everybody does a great job. The, the hilarious thing is. They're all Californians.

Ben: 1:23:50

With the exception of Cruz,

Gene: 1:23:53

Well, yes, yes, sure. He's, yeah, he was a guest, guest actor, guest spot in there. But

Ben: 1:24:01

hilarious thing is in the, in the show, they're going through and canvassing for Beto for governor or for Senate and they knock on Ted Cruz's door.

Gene: 1:24:13

right, exactly. So the Ted Cruz, like, no,

Ben: 1:24:16

Yeah, no, that's funny.

Gene: 1:24:18

But like even the guy that played the Texas, the main Texas dude, he's a California actor. So all these, all these people were, cause they're, they're based out of California. So everything's shut in California. And the the chick's been in a few other things for them. She does a great job of playing that sort of like a true believer, liberal, like somebody that unironically believes all the bullshit, like double masking and all that stuff, you know, And I think she's, you know, slightly conservative, but she's, I would not say that she's a she, she's not somebody that would be on Glenn Beck's network. She is an actress first and foremost, and she'll act whatever character you need. Acted. But she does, she doesn't seem to mind doing the true believer liberal. Which is obviously where the biggest laughs come from. I love her hair too. There's something about her hair. It's just like, Oh man, I love that.

Ben: 1:25:23

What? Curly?

Gene: 1:25:24

I've always liked like really girls with yeah. Curly hair, but like just a lot of hair, you know, like really thick hair. Kind of like that.

Ben: 1:25:35

I think it's just follicle envy.

Gene: 1:25:37

Who's that? No, I'd say, I think you're absolutely right. But I think it's genetic predisposition towards it because you're always looking for. Somebody that has a genetic trait you don't, right? So... Who's that cartoon character, redhead? Disney character?

Ben: 1:25:52

Ariel? I don't know.

Gene: 1:25:54

The one with the, she's like Irish or something with the curly hair.

Ben: 1:25:59

You're talking about from Brave. I've never actually seen it, so I have no idea.

Gene: 1:26:02

Okay, okay. But yeah, like that character has...

Ben: 1:26:06

Literally, the only reason why I even know that is because my kids have watched Wreck It Ralph and... That there's the Disney princesses alluded to in the second one. It's the only reason why I'm even mildly aware of that.

Gene: 1:26:20

Well, I haven't seen the cartoon, but I certainly have seen the ads for the cartoon, so I know what the character looks like.

Ben: 1:26:27

Have you ever watched the Wreck It Ralph? You should. I think you'd enjoy it.

Gene: 1:26:32

she's not. Don't need to watch any, any more cartoon shit. The only cartoon that I will religiously watch whenever a new episode comes out is South Park. Really, other than that, I just don't need to.

Ben: 1:26:48

You should watch Wreck It Morty.

Gene: 1:26:49

Nah, nah, don't need to.

Ben: 1:26:53

Dude, one of the best, best lines, and Tim uses it all the time. You know, your booze mean nothing because I've seen what makes you cheer.

Gene: 1:27:04

Mm hmm. Yeah, I don't smoke enough pot to watch Rick and Morty.

Ben: 1:27:08

I don't smoke any pot and I watch Wreck It Morty.

Gene: 1:27:11

Yeah, well, you're gonna smoke hookah, even if it's not pot. If you weren't doing that, I don't know if you'd be watching Rick and Morty.

Ben: 1:27:18

I don't think I'd watch any TV if I didn't do that, to be honest with you.

Gene: 1:27:23

Yeah, just think how much smarter your, your brain would be.

Ben: 1:27:26

Yeah, well, we all need some vices to calm us down every now and

Gene: 1:27:31

We do, we do, but I, I'm kind of getting used to my whole temperance thing and, you know,

Ben: 1:27:37

then.

Gene: 1:27:37

Anti drinking now.

Ben: 1:27:39

Well, you know, the way I look at it is I could go the way majority of Americans and take a Xanax or I can have a drink or... You know, have a cigar or something and do something to calm me down and deal with it. You know, it, it's all self-medicating in one form or another.

Gene: 1:27:57

It is, it is but so we're going to do something later today, it sounds like,

Ben: 1:28:04

Mm-hmm. which,

Gene: 1:28:05

which is, and I wanted to definitely mention it on the podcast

Ben: 1:28:08

which you're gonna owe me for.

Gene: 1:28:10

which I will owe you for, yes, yes, you'll get a nice meal or something out of me for it.

Ben: 1:28:15

You're gonna make me buy a video game.

Gene: 1:28:16

I'm going to make you buy a video game using my promo code, which is in

Ben: 1:28:22

Oops. Sorry Jean. I just bought it to myself.

Gene: 1:28:25

You better not have not used my promo code. That's the whole point of you buying is to use my promo code.

Ben: 1:28:29

Does anyone else have a promo?

Gene: 1:28:31

my God, so, we're talking about star citizen here. I know I've mentioned it on this and other podcasts in the past as well. Twice a year, star citizen has an open play event. Which means anybody can set up an account and not even have to spend money to try it out, to play it for about two weeks, I think we can have something like that. And right now, we just started on Friday, the... Events that happens in the spring. There's another one that happens in late fall as well. And during this event in game, it's basically a festival of military ships. So it's kind of like their version of the 4th of July parade or, or V day or whatever.

Ben: 1:29:13

Now, let me ask you this. Do I actually have to install it?

Gene: 1:29:17

So there's, we can get around that. If you don't want to, you can buy it and I'll just log in with your ID and I can play as you. But what I need to do for this is I need to have you buy it with my affiliate code. And then to get some bonus crap, I'm going to walk you through what's called a, I don't remember if they call it an introduction or tutorial. I think they call it a player tutorial. So it's basically a program where you can. You can volunteer to be the host for a brand new player to walk them through and help them not make mistakes initially. And the game has gotten a lot more user friendly over the years, but it used to be like you, you get in the game and you run it the first time. And the first thing you see is a view of the ceiling and you're laying in bed. And there's no directions, no instructions. You're like, wait a minute, this is a spaceship game. What the fuck? And they don't even, they used to not even tell you how to get out of bed. So a lot of people spent their first 15, 20 minutes of the game, trying to figure out how to stand up. How do you get out of bed?

Ben: 1:30:28

And by the way, this is a video game that's been in beta for, or alpha for how long.

Gene: 1:30:34

decade. It's been an alpha for decade.

Ben: 1:30:37

And why am I spending money on this?

Gene: 1:30:40

So I can get some some points anyway. So, so Ben and I are going to go do that today. I would encourage anyone that has not signed up for star citizen, but does play video games. If you don't play video games, just ignore this whole segment, but you play video games and you have not signed up for star citizen, do this, grab the code. That's in the the show notes for this episode. It's actually in the show notes for every single episode. Grab that code. It's updated now to be in every episode and sign up

Ben: 1:31:11

totally believe that you did that.

Gene: 1:31:14

and go ahead and sign up for it using the code. Make sure you use the code when you sign up, even if you don't buy the game, just use the code that'll lock you into my account. So if you ever buy the game for the next decade, then I'll still get points for it. But some of you may end up playing the game and the advice I would give you there is. If you want to play the game, the best thing to do is To watch some videos or reach out to somebody like me that does play the game so that you can avoid a bunch of frustration early on because it is an alpha, at least that's their excuse. And therefore, a lot of things are not obvious. A lot of things are maybe different than what you think they are now on the pro side of this game and why I would encourage everybody to watch a video, just type in star citizen, there's, you'll find a bunch of them. It is the most photorealistic looking, looks just like a sci fi movie, video game out there. There's nothing else that, that has this level of fidelity. It's the kind of thing that when you're walking,

Ben: 1:32:23

gigabytes is this going to take up with my

Gene: 1:32:26

About about a third of a terabyte

Ben: 1:32:30

Oh,

Gene: 1:32:31

gigabytes, please. It is the kind of game where when you're walking into a room, if you really wanted to, you could look down at your feet and then zoom in on the carpet and you'll see the individual fibers in the carpet you're walking on.

Ben: 1:32:49

you know, playing video games for the graphics is about like watching porn for the story.

Gene: 1:32:56

It's the best reason to do it. I know, right? So why, why else would you watch porn where you get the funniest comedies and the best storylines and the tear jerkers there of all those, you know, sad events happening? No, I, I, I'm a big fan of realism in video games and this game. Absolutely in its genre dominates all other games with spaceships have more fantasy ish look to them, or at least not as photorealistic. So they just lower resolution. This game is absolutely photographic. Sometimes you forget that you're in control of what's happening in the game, because it looks like you're just watching a movie on sci fi channel. So that's why I would say, but the reason it's still an alpha is because. They, they're very ambitious and they still have an awful lot of things to do to really flush it out before it's fully

Ben: 1:33:55

People are paying them and they're so what difference does it make?

Gene: 1:34:02

Ultimately. It's, there, there have certainly been games that have come out as pre release that have been virtually fully releasable, but you can't tell that

Ben: 1:34:12

it should be noted that this started as a kickstarter in 2012.

Gene: 1:34:17

Yeah.

Ben: 1:34:17

over 2 million raised.

Gene: 1:34:19

for the Kickstarter. And at this point they've now raised over half a million, sorry, half a billion. Yeah. And they still call it raising money. They don't call it selling units because technically they're not released yet. So they're still getting donations for people from people for the game when it's fully released. And then for your donation, you get to both have the release version of the game and a current, not yet released playable version. That's how they get around. Bye. People not suing them for having too many bugs. So

Ben: 1:34:59

So can I do this on steam or what do I

Gene: 1:35:01

no, you can't do it on steam. They have their own website and it's horribly it's, it's the word. So the game is called star citizen. The website is Robert space industries. com. They don't even have star citizen. com. That's how stupid this is.

Ben: 1:35:19

Who does

Gene: 1:35:20

is why I said, I don't know who it is, but this is why I said before you buy it, let me walk you through it. Cause this shit is easy to get lost. Now, if you click on the link in the show notes. It automatically takes you to the buy page right on Robert's space industry. So that, or at least the

Ben: 1:35:36

your universe? Invictus

Gene: 1:35:41

is the in game event that's happening. And it's basically a military parade slash show in game during this event, there is the equivalent of a car show. So at an event center. But with spaceships, so you can see all these different spaceships parked in the event center. You can climb inside. That's the other big distinction in this game for people that have played games with spaceships in the past. In most games, and not even just space games, but you walk up to a vehicle, you hit a button like E, and boom, you're magically driving the vehicle, or you're flying the vehicle. Not in this game. In this game, which is much more realistic, you walk up to a vehicle, you have to press a, open the door button, A door will open up and then you walk in and there's a full flushed out interior. And then you walk through it and you get to the pilot seat and you get in the pilot seat and only then can you fly this thing.

Ben: 1:36:41

2023.

Gene: 1:36:42

The different components within the vehicle are user replaceable. And so you can actually go and be a spaceship mechanic.

Ben: 1:36:52

You know what I think of every time. I come across this and you, or you talk about this Invictus parade out of the night that covers me black is the pit to the pole. I think whatever gods that may be for my unconquerable soul,

Gene: 1:37:10

Who is that?

Ben: 1:37:11

William Ernest Henley Invictus is a poem and that's the 1st Anza

Gene: 1:37:17

Yeah. So in what does Invictus normal meaning like outside of the video game, what's

Ben: 1:37:22

undefeated unconquerable.

Gene: 1:37:25

In the, so in it's the. In inconquerable or unconquerable. Yeah, that makes sense. I should have known that

Ben: 1:37:32

Well, Victus would be,

Gene: 1:37:34

victory.

Ben: 1:37:36

Yeah, or conquered Invictus means not to be conquered. Yeah, in Latin,

Gene: 1:37:41

So it makes sense.

Ben: 1:37:43

in as in the negative, not

Gene: 1:37:45

Mm hmm. Yipper. Yeah, so the game is fairly rich in its mythology too. And that's one of the things that, you know, some people care about, others don't, but it, it's. Yeah,

Ben: 1:38:01

so when I buy this, is it a lifetime license? Is

Gene: 1:38:04

yeah. It's not a yearly. It's not a yearly. That's the, that's the good part is it's not like most software these days, which is like, Oh, thank you for your 49 as you have a year for the

Ben: 1:38:14

since it's in, you know, I

Gene: 1:38:17

pre release. Yeah.

Ben: 1:38:18

well, no, I was just thinking this is kind of like, what was that multiplayer game, massive multiplayer game that everyone no Jesus. Huh?

Gene: 1:38:30

That was the last game I got you to buy.

Ben: 1:38:32

No, no, no, no, no, no. The online massively multiplayer.

Gene: 1:38:36

Has anything to do with space or just talking a game?

Ben: 1:38:39

No, it's more like wizards world of Warcraft. There you go. I not my thing at

Gene: 1:38:45

No, not my thing either. No, not at all. I just, I don't. I don't have a problem with all the spell casting and shit like that, but it's just

Ben: 1:38:54

And by the way, I apologize to the audience for the nerdiness of this episode.

Gene: 1:38:59

this episode has been a lot more in the nerdy sale all the way around. There's much less politics and a lot more computer and game tech, but people like that. I think they like the little variety. They don't want to hear the same thing every time, every week,

Ben: 1:39:14

Maybe,

Gene: 1:39:16

the people that I, that I care about, like a little variety. I don't know. We'll see. Well, I'm sure we'll get a nasty note from a CSB saying he doesn't care about video games.

Ben: 1:39:26

No, but I bet CSB will listen to the Jordan Peterson episode on AI and tell us what he thinks.

Gene: 1:39:32

Oh, I'm sure he will, because he'll, he'll have an opinion on that for sure.

Ben: 1:39:35

By the

Gene: 1:39:36

Anyway, get the, you get the code and episode, you get the game. We'll do that later today.

Ben: 1:39:42

way, just going back to that. Peterson is actually doing some experiments with a I on his own, like, and, you know, you sit there and said something like he's not the kind of person I would normally go to for opinions on this. Well, his brother in law is 1 of the used to be a chip designer for Intel and. Yeah. Oh yeah. He's pretty high end guy and they've been experimenting with putting his books and Nietzsche and others into a large language model and using that as a corpus of knowledge. And it's pretty interesting to hear about what he's done.

Gene: 1:40:21

I think we're going to have that. I think we're going to have a,

Ben: 1:40:24

The whole episode focuses on personalized AI.

Gene: 1:40:27

oh, cool. Well, I will like that then I'll, I'll watch it for sure. But I think we are going to have a dominant conservative AI and dominant progressive AI. And then you know, the, some of the companies like Google will pretend like they're a middle of the road. Even though they're definitely left leaning, but I think it's, it's, it would be shocking if somebody doesn't come out with a conservative based AI doing exactly what you just said, a model trained all classical literature.

Ben: 1:40:58

Well, a model trained on classical literature, I might use.

Gene: 1:41:03

Well, I think everybody's going to use, cause it'll provide the best answers. Regardless of your politics, it's just, it's not going to be based on people's opinions. It's going to be based on history.

Ben: 1:41:17

Well, and I think Adam is right on his summarization that you can run this locally on your hardware, but

Gene: 1:41:25

Oh, totally.

Ben: 1:41:26

you know, I, I think it does take quite a bit of hardware to do it.

Gene: 1:41:30

Here's the thing. You don't need to hold the entirety. Of the dataset on your own hardware, you're going to have that be remote, but you can still run the AI on your hardware.

Ben: 1:41:43

Well, I, so said differently and what Peterson and his cohort we're talking about is the AI runs on your hardware. And then if it needs to query, it uses. Essentially a search bot or something to go out and query. And that would also help to insulate and quite frankly, isolate the AI, especially if you're going hyper personalized. So 1 of the things that this guy that he has on, which I can't remember his name is working on is basically a. AI that reads everything you've ever read, watches everything you've ever done, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Gene: 1:42:23

I already have one of those. It lives in my head.

Ben: 1:42:26

Yes, exactly. But if you go the hyper personalized route you know, then you're going to want to protect that, to say the least.

Gene: 1:42:38

and I think an AI that is hyper personalized like that is going to be a it's going to be the ultimate companion because it is the kind of thing that we all look for in mates.

Ben: 1:42:53

Well, and that's going to be the scary thing is how many in cells are going to be like...

Gene: 1:42:58

Yeah, I think we'll probably end up with a post sex world at that point, because you can trigger the same release of chemicals without having sex.

Ben: 1:43:08

Yeah, is it just me or was Demolition Man way too prophetic?

Gene: 1:43:13

There's a, there's a lot of movies that came out back then that are too prophetic. I posted a clip of Brazil yesterday, last night. I'm like.

Ben: 1:43:21

stand Brazil.

Gene: 1:43:23

You're, you're crazy. It's one of the, one of the best futurementary movies out there. What the hell? How could you not like

Ben: 1:43:31

Netuliav? I'm sorry, but I could not find any relevant information about a person named Gene Netuliav.

Gene: 1:43:36

yes, I, I'm excluded. That's correct. I'm not a celebrity. So, I am not

Ben: 1:43:43

Let's see what comes up with me.

Gene: 1:43:45

popular with information. It'll find somebody with your name that's not you. Nothing?

Ben: 1:43:50

Nope.

Gene: 1:43:51

Yeah, most of the data sets used by these things are from years and years ago. There's, not much with current. This is what I liked about Niva is that their data set is actually constantly being updated. I don't know. I think we're coming to a very interesting time. The quickening is, is definitely here and it's going to be, it's going to be exciting to watch and it's going to be sad for some people and very, very happy for others. You know, some people would say that the end of humanity may be a bad thing, but I would look at the bright side.

Ben: 1:44:30

Awww, content violation.

Gene: 1:44:33

What'd you do?

Ben: 1:44:34

I asked ChetGPT, is two trans women having sex homosexual?

Gene: 1:44:39

Yeah. See, that's the thing. It's like the conservative version would not have a content violation.

Ben: 1:44:44

The fact that that's a content violation is just so... This content may violate our content policy.

Gene: 1:44:51

Content policy. What the fuck is that? All right, dude. You got anything else?

Ben: 1:44:56

no, not really. I can't recommend Agenda 21 enough to people. I'm not normally a huge Glenn Beck fan, but I've gone back and re read sections of this book. I think it's sadly prophetic and well worth reading. It, it, have you ever read the Gulag Archipelago?

Gene: 1:45:19

No, I know what it is, but I, I just, I don't like reading depressing shit, man.

Ben: 1:45:23

Okay, Gene, you have to read Solzhenitsyn. You just...

Gene: 1:45:29

You and my dad, I swear to God.

Ben: 1:45:31

Yeah, you should read Solzhenitsyn. I'm sorry, I have all three volumes that I have read and... Anyway, this

Gene: 1:45:38

Oh, he was a

Ben: 1:45:39

very similar. Very, very reminiscent of it.

Gene: 1:45:43

Yeah, it, it's, I don't know, there's there's issues with that. If I read it, I would have to read it in Russian. I couldn't read it in English.

Ben: 1:45:51

Why?

Gene: 1:45:52

If I read it in Russian, it would, it would go much slower.

Ben: 1:45:56

Why, why would, why can't you read it in English?

Gene: 1:45:59

Because it's unethical to read a writer in a language that you understand. They're in a language that's not their language, if you understand their language. I think if, if you know language, you ought to, you ought to be reading in that language things that are written in that language originally. So if you understand the Aramaic, you got no business reading the Bible in English.

Ben: 1:46:20

I, I think you read in the language that you're most proficient in.

Gene: 1:46:24

But you're not reading the words of the person, you're reading an interpretation of those words.

Ben: 1:46:29

Okay.

Gene: 1:46:30

And some people, I know,

Ben: 1:46:32

So, are you saying that you haven't read a book until you've read it in the original language?

Gene: 1:46:35

yes, you haven't understood a book in the way it was written until you read it in

Ben: 1:46:41

if you've read multiple translations and gone with a concordance and looked at things

Gene: 1:46:45

You can read multiple translations, that's fine, but you understand that of those multiple translations, one represents the thoughts of the writer and the rest represents the thoughts of translators

Ben: 1:46:57

So, here's where I disagree. So I grew up doing... A lot of in depth Bible studies, right? And I grew up on the King James. It's my preferred. I have, if I look over here, I've got a Strong's Concordance on my bookshelf. And, you know, I would go through and we would go through and break, we'd be studying a passage and we'd literally have the Strong's Concordance out and looking at the meanings and the definitions of each word and parsing what the translator. chose versus what the meaning really was. And part of the reason why I like. King James is because, for instance, you know, everybody knows the Bible verse that gets quoted at every frickin wedding. Love is patient, love is kind. Eh, eh. So, in King James, it's charity. But, in the Greek, if you look at it, it's agape, which...

Gene: 1:47:49

different meaning.

Ben: 1:47:50

Well, charity is much closer than love, because love has a romantic connotation, whereas agape or charity is

Gene: 1:47:58

I don't like, I wouldn't say Gappy's charity though.

Ben: 1:48:01

sure. Unconditional love is

Gene: 1:48:04

That's not charity.

Ben: 1:48:06

God's love. It could be. But anyway, I think it's closer than just saying love. It's weird because English language, and by the way, you were wrong on unrelenting, and I'll

Gene: 1:48:19

What was that wrong?

Ben: 1:48:20

Number of words in a dictionary. So, you know, in English, you know, in, in, can't, in, you know, Mandarin for instance, 6, 7, 000 characters and you're fluent. English, you have to be around 20, 000 word vocabulary to be fluent.

Gene: 1:48:39

Well, that means half of America isn't fluent.

Ben: 1:48:41

huh?

Gene: 1:48:42

Half of the United States is not fluent. Then

Ben: 1:48:45

How so?

Gene: 1:48:46

this is most Americans don't have that big of vocabulary.

Ben: 1:48:50

Oh, I'm sure they do.

Gene: 1:48:52

Okay. Let's you keep talking. I'll tell, I'll tell you what the number is.

Ben: 1:48:56

Anyway, the point is, English is a very verbose language, yet we only have one. So yeah, average vocabulary in the United States is between 25, words. By age

Gene: 1:49:12

I don't know where they find these people, but these are not typical Americans. I think most people's vocabulary. I'd be shocked if it was over 12, 000 should,

Ben: 1:49:21

By age eight, you should have around a 10, 000 word vocabulary in English.

Gene: 1:49:26

but do you use them?

Ben: 1:49:28

It's not about use. It's about understanding.

Gene: 1:49:31

Okay. Okay. Okay. So that's the distinction then. Because

Ben: 1:49:35

Not, not common use, but being able to understand.

Gene: 1:49:39

yeah, because common, well, it's not even common to use, but general use, I would say maybe that is common use is it can be more than 12, 000 words.

Ben: 1:49:49

The words that most people use would probably be less than that. Yes, but

Gene: 1:49:53

how many different words do you think we've used in this episode? If we do a word count and we separate each word into a unique word, how many unique words do you think we've said in this episode? Like, I know for a fact we've used the word 720 times.

Ben: 1:50:07

So, for instance, a great example of this, I don't use the term autodidact in my everyday vocabulary very often.

Gene: 1:50:16

You probably use it more than most people do.

Ben: 1:50:18

Yes, but when

Gene: 1:50:19

I use it all the time.

Ben: 1:50:21

yeah, but we understand it. You know, I, I'm a big fan of the word ameliorate. Most people use remediate. Well, they're, they're two different things, and I think we have a habit of making things a little less

Gene: 1:50:35

And there are people that use the wrong word quite often as well.

Ben: 1:50:40

Yeah. Like you and Penn Ultimate

Gene: 1:50:42

Yeah. Yeah. What's the deal with that? I always, I, I am always willing to fess up and say, I don't know something if I don't know it. I just took penultimate by its usage as meaning the super ultimate.

Ben: 1:50:56

because most, it's like decimate. Most people get it wrong. So Penn Ultimate means, and Darin got it wrong by the way.

Gene: 1:51:02

okay, good.

Ben: 1:51:03

pin Ultimate means the, just before the.

Gene: 1:51:07

That's a second place basically.

Ben: 1:51:09

Yeah, or the next to last. So if the ultimate

Gene: 1:51:13

the difference between next

Ben: 1:51:14

episode of a series would be,

Gene: 1:51:15

Oh,

Ben: 1:51:17

it'd be this episode before the end

Gene: 1:51:19

I see. So it's the almost end pen ultimate ultimate being the end. Okay. Ah, interesting. Interesting. Okay. What is, is there a word for what I was thinking of like super ultimate?

Ben: 1:51:34

that I know of.

Gene: 1:51:35

Okay. So yeah, that's, that's interesting. But like I said, I, I'm always happy to have. Both negative examples and positive examples, because, you know, if you, if you don't, if you don't acknowledge mistakes, you'll never learn,

Ben: 1:51:51

Absolutely.

Gene: 1:51:53

but

Ben: 1:51:53

Anyway, no, I'm just laughing because most people like use for instance decimate wrong decimate means to reduce by 10%.

Gene: 1:52:04

by, again, by its root makes some sense. Yeah, it's what was the word I heard? I've been watching a lot of house

Ben: 1:52:11

Mm

Gene: 1:52:11

picking up a lot more medical vocabulary,

Ben: 1:52:13

hmm. Mm

Gene: 1:52:15

um, which I'm sure they're using incorrectly quite a bit. But they repeat things often enough that I'm starting to pick up these words. I'm sure my doctor will notice next time I come in and see him. I'll start speaking doctorish,

Ben: 1:52:31

Ha ha ha.

Gene: 1:52:33

Which I enjoy doing anyway. If I have something that I need to complain to him about, I'll usually look up all the Latin or meaning or Latin words for it so that when I talk to him, I use that.

Ben: 1:52:46

so here's Yahoo News that University of Belgium did a study. The average native English speaking American will know around 42, 000 words by the time they are 20 years old.

Gene: 1:52:58

Yeah, I've read that. I don't believe it.

Ben: 1:53:00

48, 000.

Gene: 1:53:02

I don't believe it at all. They're, they're, they're gonna probably, they're, did their,

Ben: 1:53:07

have a selection bias.

Gene: 1:53:08

yeah, where's their sample coming from? It's probably from one of the universities. Probably the average university professor has a vocabulary of 43, 000 words. There's no way that people have a vocabulary that large. No fucking way, man. Not the average American. Some people, of course, but the average, no fucking way. How can, if you have a vocabulary of 42, 000 words at 20, why would you only use a thousand of those words during any 24 hour period?

Ben: 1:53:39

I don't. I

Gene: 1:53:40

No, not you, but an average 20 year old doesn't say more than a thousand different words per day.

Ben: 1:53:46

I don't know.

Gene: 1:53:47

It's back in my day, like the word gay had about 20 different meanings and used it a lot when you were in college,

Ben: 1:53:55

No homo.

Gene: 1:53:56

the word douche, yeah, no homo was your generation. My generation didn't have the no homo. We're just like, that's totally gay.

Ben: 1:54:03

And as Brian Brushwood and everybody put it, no hobo.

Gene: 1:54:07

No hobo?

Ben: 1:54:09

When Austin started getting a lot of homeless.

Gene: 1:54:11

Oh, right. No hobo. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's funny. I gotta fuckin watch, like, get together with that guy again. My last two text messages you wanna come out? Yeah, last two text messages were like, Dude, it's been a long time, let's get together. And he's like, Oh yeah, man, totally, let's do it. And then neither one of us does anything. And then another year goes by. Yeah, I, I'll, I'll make a point of reaching out to him and then I'll let you know. When he's available and if you want to come out here and that'd be cool. What are you available? Send me your info.

Ben: 1:54:43

What do you mean?

Gene: 1:54:44

I don't know when the government's got you flying all over the world.

Ben: 1:54:47

Nothing right now. I'll be in Houston again next week, but just for...

Gene: 1:54:54

I guess I should also mention and apologize for missing the Houston meetup a second time. The first one was Ben's fault. This one's my fault. I neglected to actually take my car in to get it all the service taken care of, but it

Ben: 1:55:09

do you have a car that will rate limit itself? Like, why, why, why do you purchase these things?

Gene: 1:55:15

I don't have a problem with it.

Ben: 1:55:17

think you were a masochist,

Gene: 1:55:18

I like the reminder. It doesn't happen very often. This, this just. Is the 50, 000 mile checkup shit and the car doesn't keep

Ben: 1:55:27

didn't know, apparently Gene is now a masochist.

Gene: 1:55:30

I've always been a masochist. Also a little bit of sadist too.

Ben: 1:55:35

See you being a sadist, I can't really see you being a masochist.

Gene: 1:55:39

you know, any good sadist needs to understand masochism. And the best way to do it is to actually partake a little bit.

Ben: 1:55:46

Mm.

Gene: 1:55:48

Oh, come on. Like you've never shocked your balls with electricity before. Come on.

Ben: 1:55:52

No,

Gene: 1:55:52

That sounded like I made you fall out of a chair.

Ben: 1:55:55

almost.

Gene: 1:55:56

Yeah, that was a cold opener. I

Ben: 1:55:57

Yeah. I, I was gonna go with something about you being pegged, but sure. That works too

Gene: 1:56:02

well, no, no homo, dude.

Ben: 1:56:05

Well, thing is, you could do it without it being Homo

Gene: 1:56:07

Getting pegged. Yeah, you can pretend like,

Ben: 1:56:11

Oh,

Gene: 1:56:12

we had this conversation last time. It's kind of like, if you're going to go down in a, in a masculine. Okay. I don't care what you tell yourself and the home, how much the girl enjoys it, but it's a, it's a very submissive act and it is not. At all in, in the masculine name, the Italians have this right. The Italians have this right. No, they do. They consider going down on a chick to be a gay act.

Ben: 1:56:42

uhhuh Well, on that note,

Gene: 1:56:46

Yeah. Let's let's wrap this bitch up.

Ben: 1:56:48

all right, gene, we'll catch you

Gene: 1:56:49

All right. Catch you next week.