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Read Ben's blog and see product links at namedben.com
Check out Gene's other podcasts -
podcast.sirgene.com and unrelenting.show
If you have comments drop at
Email: gene@sirgene.com Or dude@namedben.com
or on
X.com: @sirgeneTX @dudenamedbenTX
Can't donate? sub to Gene's GAMING youtube channel (even if you never watch!) Sub Here
Weekend Gaming Livestream atlasrandgaming onTwitch
StarCitizen referral code STAR-YJD6-DKF2
Get EMP protection for your car using our code sirgene
Howdy Ben, how are you today?
Ben:Howdy Gene, I am doing all right. We're starting six minutes late because I decided before the podcast to try and jack with jacked again. And it's, dude, that. That program has no documentation. I even talked to a buddy of mine who is a major Linux guy, and I was talking to him about it. He's yeah I'd make sure that the, you know, hardware supported. I'm like I bought the hardware before I committed to moving to Linux on all my laptops. So I either keep one Windows machine around for this. Or I figure out this out and he's yeah as long as you're not having to go into Jack, you're fine. And I'm like, that's exactly where I'm having to go. And he just started laughing at me. And I'm like, this is not a good sign. This
Sir Gene:is not a good sign. I told you the fricking solution last time. I think all you got to do is just treat this as a stereo interface instead of a 20 channel interface. Just use channels one and two.
Ben:Huh. That's what I'm doing. Like right now on the Motu. Oh, I hit the mute button accidentally. If I hit on if I look on zoom and windows, I'm using moto in one and two moto out one. And two, I've already tried that configuration. It's working here. Isn't working there.
Sir Gene:Hmm. yOu probably have to recompile the kernel.
Ben:There is a low latency kernel that is supposed to fix a lot of audio issues. The problem is it's a five dot something kernel and you're already
Sir Gene:on six. Yeah that's welcome to Linux.
Ben:Yeah, no shit, I know, but I, I've been on Linux for a long time. It's just trying to use it 100 percent as a desktop, right? Yeah. So I've always had windows as kind of normal desktop operations sort of thing. I've always had Linux servers. I've always, I actually, if people follow me on no, just social, you'll notice that my icon is actually a free BSD demon, and there's a reason for that. Right. I. I like FreeBSD
Sir Gene:a lot. Yeah, because you're not very creative. Because that's usually what happens when people just take icons that already exist. Okay.
Ben:Yeah, it's been an icon of, I mean, that's been on word chats. It's been just a representation that I've used for that particular one for probably close to a
Sir Gene:decade. How many dudes named Ben do you think use that icon? I don't care. Okay, just
Ben:saying. There's a little bit of that, you know what, fuck it, you don't need to know exactly who I am sort of vibe, even though, you know, I'm not very, I'm really not that worried
Sir Gene:about that. Yeah, even though somebody with that icon pretty much self identifies what field of work they're in.
Ben:Yeah I already do that. So, anyway so I was jacking around with Jacked and Claudia and trying to get those working and I only spent about... 15 minutes on, which wasn't enough time. Really? I need to probably dedicate a couple hours to sitting down and just messing with it. But I haven't yet. And then I spun up my windows 11 VM as my backup and I selected audio inputs, everything else. The microphone was going to the VM just fine, but the output, even though the sound card was selected as the motive for the VM, the output was still coming out the laptop speakers and that's when you texted me and I just said, screw it and booted up the Windows laptop. Yeah, that was that more, that was this morning.
Sir Gene:Got you. Okay. By the way, I was, I was going to watch, just grab the, the kernel, the 5. 0 first code off GitHub, and then just crank out your own six. With all the libraries built in, you can recompile the kernel Linux. That's one of the beauties of it.
Ben:Yes, you, you can I think you guys fair week or two, don't you? I think build world is a lot easier in BSD. Mm-Hmm. I jacking with Linux kernels gets. It's not actually BSD is way easier to do that. And I don't know if you ever build world in BSD. Okay. That that's something I think you, everyone should do at least once. Cause it is building and compiling your system from whatever source code you want. And it is Actually, a lot easier than you'd think the problem with modifying a lot of these libraries and the Linux kernels and part of the reason why they haven't updated past five is because there are dependencies and those dependencies change and it breaks stuff. So, you know, that's with anything. I think BSD handles things a little bit better because it is, you know, it's a, it's a distribution. It's an OS. It's, it's meant to do this a little bit more eloquently. The problem with Linux and the open source community is everybody's got their own way of doing everything, which is part of the brilliance of it. But at the same time, everybody's got their own way of doing everything. And as a result, we end up with these just hodgepodge kludge make it work sort of things like. Jacked and Claudia, I'm sure for the use case that whatever hardware that they were using to develop this and then abstract and try and make it work on a whole bunch of others. I'm sure it works perfect in that one guy's use case. Here's how this
Sir Gene:goes. One guy in some particular function. Yeah, he writes it. He sticks it up on GitHub. Yeah, I know. Somebody else has been searching forever, couldn't find it, and then runs across and goes, fuck, I can just modify this to work with my version of things. Yep. You've got seven guys that do each of those, and somebody takes and brings all that into a unified code, and now you've got something that not a single person knows exactly
Ben:what the hell it does. Yeah and here's the problem I am fine with that as long as you're doing some decent documentation, like most of the things to most normal mainstream things in Linux these days are very well documented and it's easy to figure out and find without having to literally just jack with it all day long until you figure out exactly the syntax and everything
Sir Gene:else. I like how you keep using the word jack.
Ben:Anyway, that's enough belaboring the point. And you know, I put out on Nogen social, if anyone was familiar with Jack. And of course, uh, CSB comes back and it's like here, chat GPT. And it's yes, that is the extent of the the details that are on. The Jack homepage. Thank you. CSV. Yes, I can go browse that, but I don't know, maybe if I asked it deeper questions, it would have some, you know, repository of knowledge that I don't. But GitHub gi dude, the gi the, the official track on Jack GitHub has no major. There are just very few there are very few, any branches of it. A ton. That's part of the problem. I mean, this is used all over the place and a whole bunch of different things. Linux musicians has a whole thread on getting the moto to work. Everybody says that when I get to the point where the drivers are recognized, it's registering as a multi channel input and everything else. It should work. And it's not, so I don't know, I'm, I'm about tempted to blow away and start over and start with the older kernel and see if that fixes it. The problem is this is, I'm trying to migrate to this as my main machine, and this is one of the last things I'm trying to migrate over. So blowing this way means. Redoing a whole bunch of work, like VMware is already installed, functioning. Everything's functioning there. All the system is set up for me to use. And the only thing that's not working is a Stan moto, which I'm tempted to sell the moto, get rid of the moto and get like a podcaster the road device, because I think it will work better with Linux from what I hear.
Sir Gene:Possibly. Yeah, maybe
Ben:that, or I can go to just the using the blue Yeti and, you know, that'd be okay to,
Sir Gene:Yeah, it
Ben:definitely sounds worse. Does it sound worse than silence?
Sir Gene:I Mean. So Windows
Ben:12 is coming out. Oh, I, I, I don't care. I really don't like, I, I will have a Windows VM for the ancillary use cases,
Sir Gene:but I'm Why can't you use the Windows VM with the
Ben:I, that's what I was trying right before you text messaged me and I got the input. Going in, so the mic was working, but the output was still going through the computer, the laptop speakers, instead of the MOTU for some reason, even though the only sound card attached to the VM was the MOTU. So that was a little weird. I've got to play around with that
Sir Gene:a little more interesting. Yeah. Yeah. First word problems. Mhm. Mhm. So you're still alive. That's good. People were worried that you were dead on your business trip.
Ben:Dude, I have been traveling. I got stuck in the airport for ten and a half hours the
Sir Gene:other day. Wow. Did they do a full body cavity search?
Ben:Is that why? No, it was literally from my from where I was at to back home to Houston, out of all the flights that they had going from this destination to Houston over half of them, three fifths of the planes did not leave on time. And one of them was delayed over over
Sir Gene:12 hours. I mean, I could see that Israel's not exactly in a state where they're going to have a whole lot of planes flying back
Ben:and forth. Yeah, it wasn't in Israel, but hey, have you ever heard a, this is how bad it was, Gene, the gate lady announced if you are in the back of the line in group one, you will not have overhead baggage. Wow. There are over 80. There were over 80, there were over 80 global services and 1k on this plane. That's how bad this was is everyone was backed up. So you had literally planes of nothing, but people with status. So even if you were platinum or gold, you were fucked. 81 K and global services on one flight. Wow.
Sir Gene:Yep. So tell people what
Ben:that means. 1K and Global Services is the top of the top with United. You have flown a shit ton and you have all the pre boarding. You, like, when you hear people pre boarding we're gonna welcome aboard active military in our 1K and Global Services. That's what that is. So, Group 1, which is Gold, Platinum, etc. Normally, if you're in Group 1 or Group 2, or even Group 3 or Group 4, you're fine. With overhead baggage, right group 4 is getting a little iffy depending, right? Sometimes group 3 is a little iffy, but group 2 is usually good. So you've got your pre board, your group 1, your group 2 and yeah, so they, it was crazy because they were basically saying if you're in. The back of the line on group one, you're not getting baggage. I've never seen that before. I've never heard them announce. I've never seen that either. And be 81k closer. 80
Sir Gene:on one blade. Yeah. That's insane. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. There's usually like zero or
Ben:one. Yeah, there are a handful, right? I mean, I've seen like up to ten at
Sir Gene:a time. Global services. So, I don't worry about the 1K people because I get in before them. But the global services do get in before me.
Ben:How do you get in before them?
Sir Gene:Because I pay for my ticket. That doesn't matter. Oh, yeah, it does. Absolutely. No, it doesn't.
Ben:No, it doesn't. I pay for my tickets all the time.
Sir Gene:First
class
Ben:tickets. I Pay for first class tickets all the time. That just puts you in group one. Nope. No, you do not. No, no.
Sir Gene:1K goes first. You're not flying American, that's why.
Ben:Okay. No, I'm flying an actual
Sir Gene:airline. Yeah. You're flying a, yeah. Actual. Okay. Yes. Let's
Ben:put quotes around that. I mean, let's, I will say that United and then American, then Delta and then, you know, then you get into Southwest and everybody else.
Sir Gene:Yeah. I think there's a couple more between Southwest is pretty much like the only one I know that's worse than Southwest is Spirit. Frontier. Are they worse? Really? They didn't used to be. They, they, they were better than the United like a decade ago.
Ben:Oh God. No, they're nothing
Sir Gene:but better than better than
Ben:Southwest. No, they're, they're, they're, they have some of the worst on time ratings ever. Frontier. Yeah. They've, um, Alaskan is better. I would say
Sir Gene:still Alaskan, I think is better than American. I like buying
Ben:Alaskan. Yeah. Alaskans got pretty good. But you know, they're only really West coast
Sir Gene:and Northwest. Yeah. But if you're flying to Seattle, I would prefer Alaskan over any other airline. They've got a great hub up there. They they've got awesome
Ben:facilities in there. Because I am actually flying to Seattle. Oh, there you go. Next. No, no, no. I need a, I need just a couple more flights on United. So,
Sir Gene:Mileage around, got it.
Ben:No, this is totally legitimate business. I actually have to be up there for, for
Sir Gene:partner meeting. Of course it makes total sense. Yes,
Ben:I did upgrade to first class for that flight though, cause I've got I've, you know, I'm going from Houston to LA, LA to Seattle, and then back. Yeah. And then back is Seattle to San Francisco.
Sir Gene:So this is the other reason to fly Alaska is because they I mean, I guess from Houston, you'd probably have one anyway, but Alaska has direct Austin, Seattle, everybody else I have to fly through a connection.
Ben:Yeah, so I, but that's okay. I need the hops anyway for status and realistically, it's just, it, I'm, I want to fly United
Sir Gene:and keep that status quo. So in, in the lounge, in the Alaskan lounge in Seattle, they have a pancake making robot.
Ben:Okay. Cool. That's cool. Yeah, you should see the Polaris Lounge in Houston. Yeah. Pretty good. Yeah. Look it up. It's like one of the top lounges out there, rated wise. It's fantastic. Nice. Now it's Polaris. So it's
Sir Gene:only international. I have not been to one of those since 2005 or six, probably six.
Ben:lEt, let me, let me just share a travel secret that a lot of people don't know and for people who fly really any amount, why it's worth having a club membership. Or they pass. Huh? Or they pass. Yes, our day passed, but when you're traveling for something like and something like what happens to what happened to me where I was delayed and there were lots of issues with the planes, you can go to the front desk at the club and they will help rebook you. Yeah. And you're dealing with an actual airline representative, not some just random gate person and they have a lot more power than the random gate person. And guess what? That way. And guess what? Not everybody is mobbing them. So you're, you would get way better service. Like I was rebooked. They actually rebooked me on four different flights simultaneously. And they're like, whichever one goes first, you can get on and then we'll cancel the rest. You're good. You know, we'll make sure to route your bag. Call the baggage room, I was flying with a gun, so they call the baggage room and say, Hey, you've got this bag? Yes? Okay, we're gonna put it aside and hold, I'll let you know what plane he's getting on and then you can put it on there. My baggage followed me, got there perfectly. You do not get that normal service with a normal gate agent. No. Having that membership or a day pass where you can go talk to them? Mhm. Lifesaver.
Sir Gene:Yeah. And you Although if If you're in a hub The number of people in that lounge gets bigger and bigger.
Ben:The airport I was in had a significant amount of people in there, even though it's not a hub. buT yes, but they also have more gate agents and everything else. It's still better than talking to the gate agent. It's still a benefit. Now, if you, if you end up with a 1K or global services phone number you can call, that's probably the best. But if you don't have a lot of status with an airline or your. You know, that that's where you're at, where you don't have the status to pick up a phone and call. That's, that's a shortcut to get there and it's a privilege you can pay for.
Sir Gene:So that's all I'm saying. That's true. You could pay, what are they, 75 bucks now for day pass? 60, something, 60, something, and then just bypass that huge line of people. Yeah. It makes sense. I, I endorse that tip.
Ben:Thank you. It's a good tip. Just the
Sir Gene:tip. That's what he said. So other than you getting lost at airports let's see what else is going on here. So there, there seems to be an interesting phenomenon happening that is putting a splinter into the walk movement. dUe to the the people that typically supporting woke, all of a sudden realizing that the woke want to kill them and
Ben:the people being Jewish. Yeah. It's, I think the Israeli thing has been beat to death in lots of ways, but I will say this, watching the left eat its own and fracture in this way is very satisfying.
Sir Gene:Yeah, I would agree. I think that this is, in fact, I posted somewhere, I said, I think the whole silver lining 1400 people getting killed in Israel just may be that Jewish people will finally stop supporting fucking liberals because it's a it is insane to, how do I phrase this? It's insane. I expect stupid people to hold up signs that say trans people for Palestine.
Ben:Like I expect that from people. Yeah, that's hilarious. Right?
Sir Gene:Yeah, that's hilarious. It's literally like the you know, if you have a, if you're going to make a cartoon the way that CSB has been making cartoons using AI, it'd be like, and unfortunately a lot of AI have filters, so you can't actually do it unless you've got a clear AI. Is to make a cartoon with a a bunch of chickens standing around in the chicken yard, uh, saying you know, or no, let's make it turkeys because we have Thanksgiving coming up. Bunch of turkeys standing around in a turkey farm, holding up signs, talking about how I support pilgrims. You know, it's like you're, you're literally somebody that would be high, if not first on the list to get eaten or killed. Or thrown off a building and you're the one walking around with those fucking signs.
Ben:Yeah, what I would just say is, easy answer here. Give them, anytime you see someone I'll support this. I will donate. Free tickets? I was about to say, how much, how many miles can I, I'll donate one ticket to Israel for someone like that. You know, I mean,
Sir Gene:that would be great. You know, Vivek talked about how he chartered a flight to bring 200 people from Israel. Yep. The, you know, might as well fly around trip and do 200 people from college campuses out there. That'd
Ben:be great. By the way, did you, you watched the Pierce Morgan interview, right?
Sir Gene:Oh, so good. So
Ben:fucking good. So I, interesting that he says on a good day, he's worth over a billion dollars, which is interesting.
Sir Gene:Yeah, on a good day. I think he's, there've
Ben:been, I think it's a little bit of an
Sir Gene:exaggeration. No, no, no, no. He is confirmed. So he, he is on a bad day worth about 980 million. So the fluctuation is well within daily changes in the market. Yeah, he is, he is definitely a billionaire, but barely. Do you ever see that's okay. Silicon Valley. Yeah. Do you remember that character
Ben:that that was club worried about Club Yeah. The B Club. Yeah, the, the, the three comic club. The three comma Club. There you
Sir Gene:go. The three comic club. It's just so super every time he was above it, he was like, yeah, let's go party, do whatever. And as soon as he dipped below it, it's like he's broke.
Ben:Oh, that was such a good show. They ended it so
Sir Gene:poorly though. They did. They, they, I think it ran one season too long.
Ben:See, I think they should have kept it going, but they should have, you know, have his startup fail and then move on to something else. I mean, that's, that's real. That's what
Sir Gene:happens. They didn't have that happen. That was season three. Not really though. They ran out of money. They had nothing. They had no ideas. And then they, they, somebody came up, I can't remember who even, right. And then it became the data on other
Ben:people's phones. Yeah, I, I understand, but my point is he was still trying to do the same thing over and over again, which is somewhat real. But the successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley take the idea, scrap it, move on to something totally different, or at least
Sir Gene:different enough that it can be successful. I mean, they had nothing to do with phones and they had nothing to do with storage initially. It, it was a, a video protocol, a video compression. Yes, I understand. So it was a significant shift. So, I don't know, I mean, maybe, but I still say, I think it
Ben:was still Pied Piper though. Oh, the name. It would never still be called Pied It would be totally shifted. It would be totally done.
Sir Gene:Plus, Pied Piper should have no vowels in it,
Ben:in their domain name. Yeah, and, and, there's no way he would have been allowed to keep the intellectual
Sir Gene:property. By the way, is this the most nerdy conversation we've ever had
Ben:in the past? Oh no, we've had some Star Trek conversations that have got to be
Sir Gene:worse than this. I don't know that Star Trek, Star Trek is more mainstream than talking about Silicon Valley. Yeah. And then arguing about. What should have happened in the real Silicon, oh no, this is by far the nerdiest. Alright, Ethan. And Mike Judge is fucking awesome, I love everything that guy's ever done. Yeah,
Ben:right up there with who did the saving Amy and, er, chasing Amy and...
Sir Gene:Oh, I think he's a lot better than the fat dude. What's his name? Oh, God. And he's not even fat anymore. I mean, pot, kettle. Oh, what is his name? No, I'm still fat. He's not fat anymore. That's, I'm making a distinction here cause he also used, always used to wear the hockey jerseys. Kevin Smith. Yeah. Yeah, I think Mike Judge is significantly more talented than Kevin Smith. I think Kevin Smith made a lot of movies that. Represented a certain time and place or a certain attitude and time now, but I mean, I know a lot of guys that, that really connected with chasing Amy because. Did we talk about this on the podcast? We talked about it, I don't know if it was on the podcast or not on the podcast, but we did talk about it.
Ben:I know we talked about it, but I don't know if we would've rehashed it if we were
Sir Gene:to talk about But it's, it's a good show. I watched it when it first came out, and it was probably about a year after you know, I had a similar incident happen, not as stupid as, as, what's his face had like I, I found out she was a lesbian a lot sooner in the course of things, but I, I also didn't fall head over heels in love with her, but the idea of God damn it, how not fair is this? She would be somebody I'd be a lot more interested in were she not a lesbian. So, yeah, I think it is a fairly common experience and I think a lot of chicks that age, they are, you know, they're just about confused.
Ben:Yeah. Yeah. And at first he thinks she's a gold star lesbian too, so yeah, which,
Sir Gene:and I, I always kind of said jokingly, but only partly that I think all women are lesbians. It's just a matter of whether or not they've met the right guy. Okay. Interesting. I'm most women I know they, even if they haven't had like full on scissoring sessions, they do like to be a lot more touchy feely with other girls. You're not going to catch guys doing this unless they're actually gay.
Ben:Yeah, I,
Sir Gene:okay, I But girls are perfectly fine doing sleepover
Ben:parties. Oh, I know several that are just like, totally not.
Sir Gene:That are not into doing sleepover parties?
Ben:That are totally, that would just be prudish and be like, oh my god, no, I would
Sir Gene:freak them out. They've just not been exposed to the right kind of evil influence, that's all. Huh. Mm hmm. College was
Ben:a fun time. Anyway! It was!
Sir Gene:I... Huh. Yeah. And? Yeah.
Ben:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you don't have an excuse to not be still having the fun
Sir Gene:times. Yeah I, yeah, I've done my part.
Ben:Other than age. I've, I've. Getting old. Gene, do we need to get some donations for some Cialis?
Sir Gene:Goddammit. I've brought Austin college girls together into a lesbian incident thing several times. It's, it's fun. I do my part. Mm-Hmm.
Ben:Yeah. All. So, back to Vivek.
Sir Gene:Yeah. Vivek was I thought he was
Ben:good. You know, there's some bizarre, you, you just a quick pronunciation note. He has even said it's Vivek like cake, Vivek. Vivi vi's pretty good too.
Sir Gene:So, anyway, in, yeah, I mean, nuclear. Anyway if, if we have, one thing I'm surprised by is there are people that, upon watching that video, have taken the time even to bother posting on Nas that. Yeah, he's like I mentioned in Canada. He's too perfect. His answers are well too are way too good. I don't trust him What what the fuck man? These are people that I think in the real world, we call them self sabotaging. Somebody that says, yeah, this woman's way too pretty. There's no way in hell she's ever gonna go on a, go on a, go out with me.
Ben:Yeah I mean, so some of those people, some of the perspective, especially did you watch, watch, watch, did you watch the Jewish APAC, uh, speech he gave? Yes. Okay. So, you know, he talked about being in Jewish fraternity organizations at Harvard as a Hindu and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. He's Christian. I'm sorry? He's Christian. That's not what he says there, but okay.
Sir Gene:I mean, he's on the record
Ben:being Christian. Okay. Maybe he's converted, but maybe at the time he wasn't anyway, not relevant. Don't really care. A lot of people who will say Manchurian candidate or something like that, we'll look at that and say, Oh, the Zionists control him or whatever. And, but that, that's a whole thing is that people are going down rabbit holes as well. I actually like his take on Israel saying, Hey, Israel, go do whatever the hell you want. Just don't spend our money to do it. We're not going to get involved. Yeah. And I tell Iran to stay out of it. We'll threaten Iran and say, Hey, you stay out of it. We'll stay out of it. I'm good with
Sir Gene:that. Yeah. And I don't even know that we need to threaten Iran. Like I've said the same thing for over 30 years, just for good measure, us needs to not be involved in wars or supplying people with military gear. Now, somebody wants to buy military shit and pay their own money. I have no problem with that. I don't. If Israel wants to buy weapons. I have no problem with it, but U. S. has no business, exactly, I've got, I've got friends that, that are very illegitimate businessmen and make good money off of giving people what they want. I, of course you'd want that, wouldn't you given your job anyway that I have no problem
Ben:with. Cyber security. What? Yes.
Sir Gene:That's, that's, that's not even a good cover anymore. So, when we have... When we have people that espouse a belief in certain principles and then immediately shoot down somebody that talks about those principles as being ones that they also share and say, yeah, yeah, no, that's way too convenient that the guy has the same ideas as the same viewpoints as me. He's gotta be compromised. Yeah. I, I, I have to point out the fact that acting that way, uh, certainly seems like. You're the you know, the designated opposition here. What the fuck, man? You don't, you don't stand in front of the White House telling people or the Capitol telling people to go in and, and the election was stolen from us. And then at the same time go, yeah, I don't trust those people because clearly somebody that's gonna go to the Capitol is that they've got to be working for the government. It's dude, that's literally you. You're, you're pointing a finger. That's going in a big circle, 360 degrees at the back of your head.
Ben:I mean, having been in the Patriot movement for a long time, there is a justifiable paranoia about feds and agent provocateurs, um, that has been a thing for a very, very long time. Is
Sir Gene:it a justifiable
Ben:one though? Yes, yes, yes, it is. Having, having witnessed shit personally. Yeah,
Sir Gene:I think it is. And what what makes it justifiable?
Ben:Because the feds have sent in agent provocateurs over the years to stir shit up and to arrest people. We see it in the six week cycle today in a different manner. Back in the nineties and early two thousands, they were doing it differently, but it was no. Fundamentally, no different where they were sending agents in to, you know, talk up people to doing something stupid or making statements or just tracking shit IE, look what they did to Randy Weaver. And when he didn't play along, there you go.
Sir Gene:So there were people that Randy was hanging out with that were agents, product
Ben:tours. There were people who Randy was hanging out with that were at the time, confidential informants for the feds that, you know, said, Hey, let's get him to do this. The guy who's shotgun, he cut off was a CI for the feds.
Sir Gene:That's a pretty good indicator that he probably was a CI for the feds. If he asked somebody to cut off a fucking shotgun. It's a good indicator. The thing that's missing, unfortunately, I think, in this movement, and I'm not saying it covers everybody, but it sure as hell seems to cover a lot of these people, is fucking IQ. Okay, no disagreement there. Paranoia, I think, is directly related to the inability to perceive reality clearly. And so, when you have people that see things that, uh, That agree with them. Their first response is it seems to get to be true. Probably not true. There's more than one way to, to move forward from that position versus just saying everybody that agrees with me. Is probably the most suspicious person that I'm going to run into.
Ben:You're, you're not going
Sir Gene:to get an argument from, you know, that's cause you know, firsthand what I'm talking
Ben:about. Here's the thing that here's what you have to realize. You have to, the only way we win this is by coming together and having some trust. And yes, that makes us vulnerable to those outside agents or the people who would be infiltrators. But this is why. You know, if you're really, truly worried about that, you should accept new people in, but you should have a cell
Sir Gene:structure. Absolutely what I was going to say. You, you literally took the words right out of my mouth. You, it's a matter of organization, not a matter of just blindly saying you can't trust anybody. This is a solvable problem. It's been solved in most, hell, it's solved in Hamas. It's, it's something that anybody that needs to have a certain level of. Dealing with the opposition has to figure out, or all you're ever going to be is, you know, a movement of doubters. And there, there's nothing
Ben:that's going to come out of it. And then you get into analysis paralysis, right? And who's what and everything else. And yeah, you can't do that. No. So what you do is you just accept that. You have to have an error correction. Exactly.
Sir Gene:You have to have an ability to work with an understanding that there is a certain percentage Of people you're working with that can't be trusted, but nonetheless, the way you build your systems allows for that. Yeah. So that's, that's all I got to say about that. I was just kind of starting to, it kept being repeated by a number of people. I was like, Oh my God. You guys are literally going to make sure that Joe Biden wins by not trusting
Ben:Vivek. Again, I think Vivek is a very good candidate. I am very aligned with him. He's literally my age. Actually literally my wife's
Sir Gene:literally the only thing I
Ben:hold against him. Yeah. Him and my wife have the exact same birthday. Oh wow. Like literally the exact same birthday. How
Sir Gene:weird is that? Hmm. Hmm. Okay, I'm gonna self correct here. I just looked up Vivek, and apparently he's not Christian. I could have sworn I heard him saying something blah blah blah Christian blah blah blah, but apparently he is Hindu. That's
Ben:crazy. He believes in one God, not the polytheist He's a unitheist.
Sir Gene:How do you... monotheist. Damn, you're gonna have to read up on that I didn't realize that you were allowed to be a Hindu if you don't believe in the rest of the Hindu gods
Ben:There are different sects of Hindi Clearly. All right. They're Hindi. The language is Hindi. Anyway. nO, it's Hindu. Right. But the language is Hindi.
Sir Gene:But I'm not talking about the language he speaks. I'm talking about the religion.
Ben:I know. And I was just correcting myself because I misspoke and said Hindi. Nevermind. You apparently were not
Sir Gene:listening to me. I'm sorry. I wasn't paying attention to you. I was too busy listening to myself speak as usual. Huh. And that's a self effacing humor right
Ben:there. So on my trip, I did pick up a new backpack. Oh, nice. What'd you get? I got the vertex gamut 3.
Sir Gene:0. I heard, I heard that you or somebody else was telling me about a vertex is a really
Ben:good brand. I probably told you about it cause I've got a couple of bags now. And man, I really like it. It's the perfect size for me. I'm going to get a body armor panel to put in it given the state of the
Sir Gene:world and hold up. You're going to put one in the back. You're more worried about being shot in the back. That's interesting.
Ben:No one. It's just an easy place to put a body armor panel because I'm not going to wear body armor around and on the airplane. I'm just not going to do that, but it's one of those things that I can
Sir Gene:grab allowed to wear body armor. As you go through the X ray machine. Yeah. I mean, I guess there wouldn't be a reason you wouldn't be, it just seemed wouldn't that pop up and set off alarms?
Ben:No. First of all, I don't go through an x ray machine. I just go through the magnetometer at worst. Oh, right. Right. And I don't do the whole naked body scanner. neVer have, never will. Anyway, the. The whole point here is that it's got a place for a good panel insert. I'm trying to decide between level three plus three or three
Sir Gene:a are you putting it into the slot that usually the camel back goes into?
Ben:No, it's got a dedicated slot for it. Really? Wow. Holy cow. This is in premier body armor makes panels specifically fit
Sir Gene:to this backpack. Jesus. Okay. I've, I've not heard of. Backpack body armor stuff at all. So this is all brand new to me.
Ben:Oh, yeah. It's pretty cool. And, and the, the luggage pass through is designed so you can use it as a shield and put it in front of you, if need be like, you gotta look at these backpacks. Dude, they're pretty cool. Yeah, anyway, they've got concealed carry stuff for off body, which is another major part of this is because when I'm wearing a suit and tie, you know, it's hard to do concealed carry with a tucked in shirt. So off body becomes a good option. Yeah. Anyway yeah, I carry a lot of weight in this backpack. Like I said, I was in the airport for hours and hours and hours the other day with. Two laptops, chargers, battery, notebooks, everything that, you know, needs to be in my backpack and it was very comfortable and it was fine. What did you have two laptops for? A personal laptop
Sir Gene:and a... And a government issued one, got it.
Ben:Makes sense. A
Sir Gene:company issued one, but sure. Right. I'm glad you're admitting you work for the company
Ben:now. Yeah, I do work in a company, a corporation.
Sir Gene:Sure. Yeah. That sounds like you, you're having quite the fun time
Ben:flying. Yeah. Anyway, the, the Vertex stuff is, is, it's good. I carried a five 11 tactical rush
Sir Gene:backpack for years. I'm going to assign this to you.
Ben:Oh, hold on. Okay. Go ahead. Go, go ahead. Assign away before you forget.
Sir Gene:Cause you will. Yeah. Before I forget, here's what I'm going to assign to you. Go to Amazon and get an affiliate link. Fill out the pay, the paperwork to become an affiliate. Why? Because there are a lot of products that we talk about that are sold on Amazon that we could be simply putting links into the actual show notes with the affiliate code. And I used to do this back in the day and I made maybe three, 400 bucks a month off links very easily. Darren used to do this back in the day and he was making like 30, 40 grand a year off of this. So affiliate links on Amazon work quite well and people are interested in looking at shit that we're talking about anyway. And we talk about a lot of products and the reason I'm signing it to you is because I got kicked out of that program. So I like, it would take an appeal for me to get back in. Whereas you having never bothered doing this before, it could just fill out a form and boom, and then use the links with the affiliate shit for anything that we talked about in the show. And our listeners who are listening right now to this are going, yeah, that's a great idea. We don't care because it costs the same amount of money. And if you guys get something out of it, if we end up buying something, then why not?
Ben:Okay. Anyway. So I carried a five 11 rush bag for years. I don't even know how long I had it. And it went all over the world with me and everywhere else. But you know, it's very tactical looking and I wanted something not so
Sir Gene:tactical looking. I thought you'd never been out of the U S. What do you mean? How did it go
Ben:all over the world with you? Because I've been out of the U. S. We've talked about my international travel. So for years Gene, are you having a stroke? No, I'm saying I had it for years and it went all over with me for years, including overseas.
Sir Gene:Right. But a year ago, you'd never
Ben:been overseas. I had been over, I had been out of the country, just not, you know,
Sir Gene:Europe or the Middle East. Okay. Okay. Just clarifying, because I thought you were just admitting to something that you told me was not the case. Oops. I meant no, not ever.
Ben:Okay. Go ahead. Anyway. I'm just saying the, the 511 tactical bag was great, but it just was to look too tactical for me. This is more discreet and I like it.
Sir Gene:Okay. Cool. Send me a link to the bag. I'll check it out with you. Right. I will. Sounds interesting. My problem with backpacks just honestly is they don't work well on fat dudes because you know, you put a backpack on, on somebody who's 180 pounds, they basically start to get roughly the shape that I am anyway. So adding a backpack to me right now is it's, it's, it starts to look comical.
Ben:They've, they've got some side satchel bags and things like that. Oh,
Sir Gene:that's, that sounds way better. I, I prefer the rolling luggage. That's, that's more of my,
Ben:Rolling luggage for a
Sir Gene:laptop. Oh, hell yeah. Rolling laptop bags. I think I got two or three, including a two me one. That's
Ben:a
Sir Gene:new level of lazy, Gene. No, no, no, no. I switched to that. I'll tell you. I can tell you exactly when I first switched. I stopped carrying laptops without wheels in 2006. Okay. Yeah. And because Because I, honestly, the reason I stopped having a bag for my laptop to carry Is because I was working at Target at the time and I observed a couple other people had rolling laptop bags. And I was like, what is this? Because I thought that was luggage. And then I realized, Oh, hold up. People are using these for daily laptop schlepping back and forth between their houses. And I was like, Oh my God, that is such a great idea. I don't know why I haven't been doing this. So I switched to a rolling laptop bag. And,
Ben:Because it's totally unreasonable and looks like it. Dang it. The only people I have ever seen do that are mildly or majorly
Sir Gene:disabled. All, all the urban professionals I worked with were doing that. It was, it was the standard thing.
Ben:The only people I have ever seen in an office building doing that have literally been disabled. Like they have a back issue or they have some reason they can't
Sir Gene:just carry a laptop. I suppose you're going to tell me you don't see people like riding around little carts all the time where you work. What do you mean? I mean, you, you know, you've got a big building you, you, you have, especially in the IT department, you've got a lot of, uh, a lot of racks downstairs. And so everybody had little motorized scooters. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know where you work, dude. Cause that sounds bizarre. Okay. I mean, what you're describing sounds like 1960s version of America without all the wheels.
Ben:Okay. Maybe I just worked with fewer lazy people.
Sir Gene:Sure. I'll, I'll give you that. That's just in my experience working in American Fortune 500 companies, that doesn't seem to be the norm. Okay. Anyway. Anyway, so, yeah, but I'll check out the bag, it's sounds
Ben:good. Yeah, they've got, and their jeans, I really like their jeans, they also make, Vertex makes some jeans that
Sir Gene:Amazon had on. Rip proof, some kind of special
Ben:something? A, they're good denim, yes, and then B, just the pocket arrangement is fantastic, so in between the pocket on your butt, your back pocket, and your front pocket, they've got a pocket kind of on the side of your hip, that is the perfect, uh, I'm sorry? Knife pocket? Knife pocket? Perfect cell phone pocket or cell phone or magazine or whatever, because you can put it and you sit down and it does, you're not sitting on whatever's in that pocket and it's easily
Sir Gene:accessible. So this is, this is why I've always liked cargo pants or cargo shorts is because when you fly it's easy access from a sitting position to those pockets. Yeah, absolutely. It's duh. If you're going to be sitting for a long period of time, especially in a confined space, like an airplane. Where you're not just going to stand up every time you want to pull something out of your pocket, uh, putting things into cargo pants or cargo shorts makes a lot of sense.
Ben:Now, are you an aisle or window seat guy?
Sir Gene:sO I'm a appropriate for the destination guy. So anytime I'm flying to Austin, it's always it's, I usually will be in seat. So it's or one C rather one C. Yeah. So it's, it's the right side aisle seat is my preferred seat in the front row. And if I'm flying to someplace I've never been, I'll usually take the window seat to watch out the window as I'm landing there. So it's really, it has more to do with. If, if I've been there, I usually take the aisle if I've never been there or I've only been there once and I'm still curious to see what it looks like from the air, then I'll take the window. And I'll, I'll tell you one time I flew back to Austin on July 4th and it was perfect timing because I got to watch fireworks from the window seat over Austin at the height of the fireworks because it was right before landing. I mean, it was just like, man, the only, the only way you could get this view is from a drone or an airplane doing what I'm doing. Okay. What are you? Are you an isle or a
Ben:window? I am an isle. I am as far forward as possible, and
Sir Gene:an
Ben:isle, I just want to get off the fucking plane.
Sir Gene:Yeah. It was I think I used to always take the window when I was young. And then as my flying 000 miles a year, then I started doing primarily isle. And,
Ben:as long as it's not the middle, I'm okay. But yes. Yeah.
Sir Gene:Yeah. Yeah. But I'd say it's probably 80 percent aisle, 20 percent window with the 20 percent being the places that I've been to the least, like on this last flight to Cancun that I had, I'd been to Cancun many times, but I haven't been there in over a decade. So I did take a window seat because I wanted to see if I could see anything different. So Hey I'm going to see you next Wednesday. Next
Ben:Wednesday? Yeah. aS in the 22nd? As in the 22nd? That's
Sir Gene:why
Ben:I'm driving through town. Yeah, but I won't be here. That's, I'm literally leaving after we get done doing this to go hunting. Oh, you
Sir Gene:didn't tell me that. Okay. I told you last week I was going to be driving through
Ben:town. And I said, okay, we'll see what the plans are. Okay. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm going. to be hunting next week? Yeah, I haven't gotten the hunt at all. So I am taking my happy ass to East Texas early and the kids and everybody are coming later during the week. But I'm, I'm going over there sitting in the deer stand
Sir Gene:all week. Wow. So I'm just going to hang out with Josh, I guess. Sure.
Ben:Yeah. Make sure he's not working.
Sir Gene:But sure. Oh, he is working, but I'll, I'll stop by his restaurant thing. Yeah. Okay. Which I'm going to be doing another episode of Sergini speaks with him.
Ben:Okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, you, you realize that that's literally the Wednesday before
Sir Gene:Thanksgiving. So I know that's why I need to go and get rabbits for my snake so he can celebrate Thanksgiving. You gotta be joking with me. No. Why?
Ben:What is your
Sir Gene:snake doesn't give a fuck no, but you know It's a holiday and I'd like him to be eating and full and I'm out of rabbits. Hmm. Okay I mean could he stand to not eat at Thanksgiving sure But then he's gonna be looking at me eating a turkey and going you motherfucker
Ben:I mean, you could just give him a piece
Sir Gene:of turkey. No, he doesn't like cook stuff. He likes raw I guess I could give him a raw turkey. That's true. So just well, I'd probably give him a raw chicken. There you go Yeah, I could do that
Ben:Just give him a Cornish game hen,
Sir Gene:there you go, that might be too small, that's not
Ben:too
Sir Gene:small, come on, I mean, he eats like five, five and a half pound rabbits, okay, whatever, so, yeah, but either way, so this is my biannual, semiannual, like twice a year, my twice a year trip to go stock up on rabbits for the snake,
Ben:yeah, so, yeah, Yeah, this is my one week off from travel for a while. So I was traveling last week. I'm off. I'll be traveling the week after. And then the week after that, it looks like I might be traveling again as well. Yeah.
Sir Gene:I'm going hunting this week. So we're not doing our gun range thing that you want to do in November as well then?
Ben:Yes. I wanted to do that weeks ago in November. Yeah. So, okay. You have wanted to push it out and we haven't
Sir Gene:set a date. I wanted to push it out. I said, okay. Every time you said. I'm thinking of doing a third week. I'm like, okay, this doesn't matter to me. I can drive out there anytime. You're only two hours
Ben:away. Okay. Then I will set a I will set a week in December and do
Sir Gene:December might be tricky. Oh, Jesus. I'm starting to get busy.
Ben:aLl. I'll set a week and you'll either be there or you won't.
Sir Gene:There we go. Could do that. I know for a fact that the second week of April's open Okay. Just saying.
Ben:So we're
Sir Gene:going to wait till April. No, we could do it before then. I just, you know, I'm just saying if you want to do something where you could put it on your calendar and know that you're not going to be hunting. Yeah. Or we can do both. And, oh yeah, we could do both. I'm up for that. And we could have, in fact, we could do three. We could have you come out here and check out the cool range that I'm a member of out here. Okay. I sent you photos. Do you see those?
Ben:When did you
Sir Gene:send them? Oh, it would have been a week ago. I think that was out there. Oh, um, so. The, the range out here that I'm a member of is called the range and I was a member. I was actually a founding member of the range in Dallas and which was actually not in Dallas. It was in in I don't think you sent me the nice. I could have sworn. I sent you both. It would have been in signal. Yeah, I'm looking in signal and there's probably 30 and
Ben:I've gone back. Pages worth to scroll up. Yeah. I've gone all the way back to August and I haven't seen anything.
Sir Gene:Oh, really? Okay. I'll, I'll definitely send you those. But
Ben:oh wait, I went to the, oh wait, you sent me from the store, the inside of the gun store, not
Sir Gene:the range. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, that's the ranges. Yeah. Okay. I did send them Good. So. So I've been a member of this thing for almost a year, and I didn't even realize they had a VIP section and somebody have I not been invited to this? God damn it all fucking eight. And so clearly I was like nobody told me that you guys had a VIP area and they're like, yeah, that's the upstairs. I'm like, what? So I get a tour of the VIP range at the range. And which is literally the entire upstairs of the building. And it is fricking awesome. It is a private range. I mean, the whole range is a private range, but this is like a exclusive private range. It's got a cigar humidor like Florida ceiling. It's got a pool table. It's got I mean, it looks like what a nice house for a how do I, how do I even phrase this? Somebody that's in the oil business has, it's very nicely appointed with things outside of the range itself. Now the only tricky bit is I there's more than one tricky bit, but one of them is I just don't know how long I'm going to be in Austin. And I, I hate to pay an initiation fee. And then leave because I literally did that with the range in Frisco. I, I, I paid the fees before it was built. That's why I got to be a founding member. And then I moved to Austin before they finished building it. And so I never got to use the range. I actually ended up giving away my membership to a buddy up there. But yeah, I'm, so I'm, I've been debating on whether or not I should join the VIP range at the range or not. So it is seven and a half thousand to join, uh, and then 200 bucks a month. Okay.
Ben:So it's actually 200 bucks a month. Isn't that bad? No, it's,
Sir Gene:it's cheaper than the boat club. I was in
Ben:still seven grand is a lot
Sir Gene:to put down. Yeah, but not if you amortize it over like a decade. Sure. So that's what you're going to do, but you're already talking about moving. Exactly. That's my whole point is if I was in a position where I liked where I was, Um, let's, and it's kind of like, I want to say it's about 10 miles south of me and I'm on the south. If I was south, 10 miles south of the range outside the Austin city limits, I would totally do it because you know, it's still a close distance to it and I was outside the city so I wouldn't have to deal with all the bullshit in Austin. But since I actually live two miles from downtown Austin, uh, then, you know, I don't really want to stay here long term. And so paying a big initiation fee and then leaving kind of sucks. So that's, that's the dilemma, but I'm still there. Normal level peon member. Which I think is only 700 bucks a year. And then I shoot there and it's a very clean range. It's nice. It's just, I can't believe they didn't tell me they had a VIP section. Maybe I just don't look VIP. I look like riffraff. You don't, you do. But you didn't have to agree quite that fast. Jesus,
Ben:Sam. It's the beard and, you know, everything, I mean, the, the, of the AI images that you sent me, since I'm going back and looking at your signal, I think the one that's the most apt and hilarious, they're all hilarious. Yeah, but the homer version,
Sir Gene:the homer one, you like, yeah. Yes.
Ben:Oh, yeah. And why am I black?
Sir Gene:What the hell? I mean, the AI knows best, man. I don't know why you were in blackface that day, but apparently the AI decided you were in blackface. I'm sure most people maybe not necessarily everybody listening to this is it, but people that are on NAS certainly have seen these because they got a lot of responses. But one of the people that mentions our show a lot, and in fact, donates money in our name, CSB. So we should probably tell people where to go check out CSB. It's at csb. lol. He's a cartoonist and and, and, and AI aficionado, uh, also I think works with AI, but he, he did a cartoon where Darren and I seemed like we were slightly overweight. Which you both are. Possibly. And so consequently I thought that's not very accurate. And so I thought how hard is it to get an AI generated cartoon that, that has Darren and I talking on microphones. And so I started plugging in a bunch of terms and cranked out a bunch of these. And the first set that came out were actually the anime style and which had, you know, very androgynous looking two people. You can't tell if they're male or female, but they don't have any breasts. So there could really be either talking in microphones. And then I was like, okay, I need to tweak this a little bit. So then I started going through different styles of those images. And like other cartoon styles besides anime. And then I thought, Hey, I wonder what if I say the word South park in there and then I generated a South park version, which is, I have to say that's my favorite one is the South park character version of the podcasters. I'm sure. Then I thought, okay let, let me try a Simpsons version. So that's the one that you like that it generated is the Simpsons
Ben:version. Just you looking like a fat Homer is, you know. A beard,
Sir Gene:a fat homer with a beard. That's somewhat redundant, but okay.
Ben:Oh, no, no. I mean, you're, you're clearly bigger than Homer in that. So,
Sir Gene:okay. That's, you realize this is not real life photography. This is, this is a cartoon that's generated by a computer.
Ben:I don't know, dude. Look pretty accurate to me. Fuck
Sir Gene:you. It was, it was remarkably Simpson esque to the point where Oh, it was copyright infringement. Yeah,
Ben:I think so.
Sir Gene:That's copyright infringement. It had the look. But we'll find out. Because I'm going to start using these on our not that one, because you're not in it. That's one with Darren. He's probably too chicken shit to use it as cover art. But I will definitely start doing it. Oh, come on. As
Ben:much as he pirates?
Sir Gene:Are you kidding me? This is the crazy part. I know. You just said exactly the issue. The guy who literally, not just pirates, but has a pirate radio show twice a week where he plays bootlegged, you know, stuff. Allegedly. That he, no, he'll say that it's bootlegged. This is his excuse. He didn't steal it from anybody because it was recorded illegally in the first place. Dude, how does that nullify the intellectual property ownership of either the musicians or the label? Come on, so, but whatever, I mean, he, he makes no qualms about the fact that he just, you know, he's one of those people that still uses torrents and I. I don't think I've used the torrent in a
Ben:decade. I mean, I have used torrents in the past.
Sir Gene:These days I mostly
Ben:just use GitHub. I mean,
Sir Gene:GitHub, you know, I only do intellectual things online. I don't torrent thing.
Ben:I mean, I don't either for the most part, just because the streaming services have become so good.
Sir Gene:Ubiquitous. Yeah, exactly. And anyway, so. I, but the irony is when it comes to doing things like putting a song into a podcast or putting a image into a pod, like he's super, do
Ben:you remember the pod safe music network thing that that was so I I remember some of the songs on there that were really pretty good, heard it on a podcast and a bunch of others that I ended up playing on to my stuff back in the day. And it was a whole. Website dedicated to music that you could put on a podcast that was licensed appropriately. Mm hmm. Yeah. And this was also in the days when people were getting really nasty letters and, you know, sued.
Sir Gene:Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I, I, I don't know. I don't think anyone's been sued for music infringement in a damn long time because frankly, the, the biggest thing they worry about is YouTube and YouTube has an automated system that if it hears music. It assumes you pirated it and just redirects any funds that you would have received to the music owner. And then you have to file a claim saying, no, I actually have the rights to perform this. I've paid for those rights. Turn the funding back to me. And I, I've had to do that a number of times. So, but YouTube, in fact, our song at the start of this podcast is a licensed piece of music. That I pay for every year because it's a license, not a purchase. So yeah, well, you knew that it's 130
Ben:bucks a year, right? But it's interesting that you did a license and not just give me there.
Sir Gene:If I would have found something that somebody would have been willing to just sell me, that'd be great. But unfortunately we went for six weeks or something with no music. And I finally said, fuck it. I'm going to pick one. And then you were like, yeah, it sounds pretty good. Yeah. You remember that? I do.
Ben:Fuck, someone took the associate ID I wanted, so now I'm going to have to figure out how to change it. Oh, really? Yeah, I got a dash 20 added onto it.
Sir Gene:Oh, yeah, that sucks. You know what, you could try srgene. No. Srgene
Ben:20? No. Okay.
Sir Gene:Anyway. So let's see what else is going on. Yeah, I don't know. I think that I'm, I'm getting a little tired of the whole I mean, I was already tired of the Ukraine crap. Now we're getting, starting to get tired of the Israel crap, but I guess there, we got to have something, right? It's either COVID or Ukraine or Israel or something. It's, we can't, we can't have nice things. We can't just go for three to six months with nothing happening that just shows the stupidity of people. It would be nice. Speaking of the Ukraine war, which, which is amazing how, how fast this is concluding now that the PR has been shifted away from it. Yeah Russia is literally capturing like 60 miles a day right now, 60 kilometers I
Ben:should say. Yeah, so, okay I mean, I thought they were just gonna stop at the Donbass. What happened
Sir Gene:there? Why would they stop at the Donbass? I've said the same thing since day one. From Odessa, along the I can't remember the name of the river, um, to the north of the country. It's the Kyiv is on the left side, everything to the right is Russia.
Ben:So they are going to have a landlocked
Sir Gene:nation? Yes. That, that was assured from day one. And anybody who didn't think that was the case doesn't understand politics. So, and I think at this point, so,
Ben:what do you think is going to happen to all of the the grain then? Is it just going to be off the market now
Sir Gene:for forever? No, no, no, no. It's going to be sold just like it's always been sold. It's just that it's going to be sold to China now. So China has now secured the entirety of their food supply. Okay. Because the, the regions that are grain producing are, is not Kiev, it is the South and the East.
Ben:Okay. Again, I think it's gonna have to get out. Somehow, and usually that's been by ship. So now... No, no,
Sir Gene:there's been, I've posted about this, there is a a new railroad that has been in the process of being built.
Ben:Yeah, but the problem is the rail gauges aren't the same between Kiev and the rest of Europe. So literally they have to move off of different cars or have to go to
Sir Gene:cars that... No, I'm talking about Russia. The grain is Russian. It's not Ukrainian. That's what I'm saying, is the grain growing regions are part of Russia. That's why China secured it. Oh, okay. They don't, if you look at the map, an agricultural map overlay, you will see that the grain fields, the actual like the Midwest, if you will, of that area, is the South and the East. Which is not Ukraine. That's Russian. We'll see.
Ben:We'll see what ends up happening.
Sir Gene:Yeah, I know. People will see. He's just said exactly what's going to happen on day one, and I'm getting extremely close to being completely right. We're not quite there yet. Odessa is still not Russian yet, but it will be. Okay.
Ben:We'll see. And I, I have no doubt that Russia will take whatever they want from Ukraine at this point. I think that everyone really realizes that this is, I mean, it, it, there is no way Ukraine is going to get back their territory. It's not gonna happen. The best case scenario would be for Ukraine to sue for peace now and freeze the lines as they sit.
Sir Gene:They're not gonna get frozen. There will not be any peace until Odessa's part of the deal.
Ben:Hmm, okay. I don't know. Depends on if the U. S. steps in and... Makes a, makes a good deal. It's not gonna happen. Oh, yeah. You and Vlad talked, talked
Sir Gene:it over. We actually did. Yes. Yes, this is one of the advantages of, of understanding Russian, is I can actually watch Russian TV and hear what they're saying. What they're saying is Odessa's always has been and always will be a Russian city. Okay. So, doesn't matter when, who sues for what, the, the, there's no freezing, like asking for a, uh, a freezing of the current boundaries right now is akin to asking for a ceasefire in Israel. Ain't gonna happen. Okay. It's, you, you can't wait until. You have completely no power and then ask for a concession. I mean, people do, but that's, I mean, Either you actually have more power than you think in that situation. If you get what you want or you don't get what you want.
Ben:I understand. I'm just saying people are asking for a ceasefire right now with Israel. And I know they are, but they're not going to get, I think they're too dumb. The fact is Ukraine should have asked for a ceasefire and sued for peace a long
Sir Gene:time ago. Remember like a year ago, they had those meetings to negotiate peace. Yeah. And all of a sudden, no more meetings because Ukraine is going to strike at the heart of Russia. They're going to win. They can win. All right, guys. That's sure. And right now Putin's popularity is at an all time high. Like the, the support level inside of Russia from the average Russian person is higher than it's been in decades. Because their, their lives are better. The economy is doing much better. You know, a lot of things have improved in Russia ever since the U. S. and NATO decided to start putting in, um, what do you call them buh, buh, buh, buh, these sanctions. Like that, that's been the best thing to happen to Russia. It's kind of like, to me, it reminds me of the Breyer patch, you know, the story. Oh, just don't throw me in the briar patch, that'd be the worst thing you could possibly do. That would suck. Don't do that. The Peter Rabbit, I think, was
Ben:saying that. Yeah, okay. I mean, I've read Peter Rabbit, but it's been, you know, a long
Sir Gene:time. Yes, I read it in the original Russian.
Ben:Yeah. Did you also read Shakespeare in
Sir Gene:the original Klingon? That's where it came from. Absolutely. In the original Klingon. If you have to, if you really want to understand something, you have to read it in the original language. Yeah. So it's a thing.
Ben:So I'm looking at watches. Oh, okay. And I have been looking at watches for a while now.
Sir Gene:We did talk about that citizen watch that I found, I remember.
Ben:Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there's a there's a couple different garments that I've got my eye on. But damn, they're
Sir Gene:expensive. I know what you mean, man. There's one that I'd like to get, but there's no fucking way I'm spending that much money.
Ben:Why don't you get it and I'll buy yours off of
Sir Gene:you. I know that would be convenient for you, wouldn't it? It would, it would solve my problem. It would totally solve your problem. And then, while I'm at it, why don't I, I sell my my Tavor to you too. Yeah,
Ben:sounds good.
Sir Gene:Yeah. Yes. And I, I think I'm probably at least partly responsible for you getting the bug to start looking at the garments.
Ben:Yeah, you are and anyway, so the right now I, my cart on Amazon of all things, I've got the Garmin Phoenix seven solar, the tactics pro ballistic edition, the Phoenix six pro solar, the Garmin, the Garmin instinct to solar and the Phoenix seven X solar. Yeah.
Sir Gene:Yeah. So, so first of all, you did see my message to you that said there's 200 bucks off buying a direct
Ben:from, yeah, but it, you had the wrong one and it was nowhere near cheaper. I
Sir Gene:have the one that you sent me in there. The the feed, the Phoenix seven. You didn't have the Sapphire Solar. That's not the Sapphire Solar. I read the one that you emailed me. The one that you sent me. That does not have the Sapphire Crystal. That's not, that's not that version. That's the Solar version. Okay. Not the Solar Pro
Ben:version. Okay. Anyway, Amazon has just as cheap now. Yes,
Sir Gene:they do. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think they, I don't know if it's meant, if they're doing it on purpose, just to confuse the market or what, but there are probably as many Garmin watches now as Casio watches. It is insane.
Ben:And they have different lines that cross over on price. So for instance, like I can get the Phoenix six pro solar, which is a touchscreen. Pretty advanced watch it's last year's or whatever model, but whatever for 399, the Garmin instinct to X solar tactical edition is 399, you know, and there's just not clear lines. Like they don't have, okay, these are our sport watches. These are our tactical watches. These are our dress. There's so much overlap and ambiguity. This version has this and this version has that, even though they're
Sir Gene:and here's what the most of them just to make things extra confusing. Most of them share about 85 percent of the features, but have 15% Yeah. Of course. Of course. But they're slightly different sizes and some of them have things like Sapphire and others don't. Some of them are titanium, others are not. Some of them come with a metal band. Some of them come with a plastic band and they're, they're all over the place. And I experienced what you're experiencing about 18 months ago. Because I got sick and tired of charging my Apple watch and I was like, fucking a, this, there's gotta be something better. And I started doing research and I came across all the Garmin stuff and I was about ready to buy, I think a Phoenix six or something. And then I started looking at their website and going, Oh, what else they got? Oh, what, Oh this is interesting. And where I ended up with 1600 bucks, right
Ben:now they've got that 1, 600 watch on sale for 1, 400. Yeah.
Sir Gene:Yeah. They've got 200 bucks
Ben:off everything, but the Phoenix seven solar or the Phoenix seven X solar is 90 percent of the way there to the tactics. Seven. Absolutely. Like they're, they're essentially the same hardware. It's just slightly different features. Anyway, 90 percent the way there. I can get it for 5 89.
Sir Gene:Yeah. I don't think that one has for 5 99.
Ben:For 5 89. 5 89.
Sir Gene:No, that's not true. Mm-Hmm. that one does not have sapphire crystal. No, it does
Ben:not. Description. It is not the sap. You're right.
Sir Gene:Yeah, you're right. That's not, that's not 90%
Ben:there. That's feature wise. It sure is dude
Sir Gene:feature. Okay. Feature wise. But there is, there's more than just a 10% feature differences to make up the thousand dollar difference in price. Okay.
Ben:What is the difference then?
Sir Gene:Sapphire, for one. Don't care. Okay. Really? I always want Sapphire, because I've banged my watch into door handles too many times. Yeah. Okay. It's not Sapphire. You get a scratch.
Ben:I don't know. Whatever is on my Casio hasn't gotten scratched.
Sir Gene:So maybe here's the thing. I don't know which Casio you got, but Casio has a recessed glass. Usually under, this is true. Like the level of the plastic is above the glass. So that helps. This is true. This watch does not. The glass is the outside most thing. Okay. So just letting you know, keep that in mind. I mean, I don't care which one you get. I think Garmin makes an awesome product. I love mine. I would love to get the one that I would really want to get is their aviation marquee model. But I, I, I can't pay as much for a Garmin as, you know, half the price of a Rolex. That's just nuts.
Ben:Dude, I'm having problems potentially spending as much as I am. So
Sir Gene:you're having mental problems, not wallet
Ben:problems. Okay. Am
Sir Gene:I right? Oh, okay. I mean, if you wanted to buy a 1, 500 watch, you could buy it tomorrow. You just feel bad. I mean,
Ben:it would be a bad financial decision for me,
Sir Gene:but eh. Not really. The other way to look at it, and this is the problem with all electronic watches. Check your signal. Okay. Bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup,
Ben:Yeah. The problem is they get out of date.
Sir Gene:Yes, exactly right. As the problem is they age out and the PR and this is, this is the problem I had with the Apple watches. Like I would buy an Apple watch every other year. So every two years I get a new one and it had significantly more features than the previous one, and it was the same price as the previous one, but the resale value on the previous one was like 10%. It's Oh, you want to go from a five to a seven? Okay. Your five's worth 110 bucks. It's shit, I paid 500 for that just two years ago. So in some sense I think switching to this Garmin for me is means it's a longer term watch or at the very least it holds its value more. It has a, it has significantly more features in the Apple watch. And so it, you, it can depreciate, but
Ben:they're not adding features as
Sir Gene:fast. Yeah, they're not, they're, they're really not like the
Ben:Phoenix six, excuse me, versus the Phoenix seven. It's pretty comparable actually
Sir Gene:in a lot of ways. That's true. That is true. But either way, if anyone wants to spend in the neighborhood of 500 bucks or more for Garmin, I highly recommend that watch. I've always been a SUNY watch fan back from the old days. And I think SUNY, S U U N I, I believe, or S O U N I, something like that. Let me try and, Sunto, Sunto, Sun, Sun something, it was a Finnish company. S U U N T O. Suunto. Okay. I know I said Sunni. Brain. Brain no worky. I like their watches a decade ago. Cause they, they were, they had large oversized watches that had a compass. And they, they kind of had the same shit the Casio's had. But their watches were like 500 bucks plus. And they were meant either for sports. Cause you know me, I'm Mr. Sports. Or they were meant for diving because I'm Mr. Diving and so I was like them, but Garmin has eaten their lunch. Why?
Ben:Oh, when, why is Garmin eating their lunch? Just because the electric on the electronics
Sir Gene:capabilities, probably a hundred times more watches. Yeah.
Ben:I have a Casio protrek smartwatch from several years ago that I no longer use cause it's too, too slow and shit battery life and it's huge.
Sir Gene:I'm going to grab a drink,
Ben:keep talking. And then I have a Casio protrek that's from over a decade ago that is just a regular watch, solar powered, and I use that. And then I've got some nicer watches for when I need to dress up, but I would like to have a nice nicer watch, but you know, that's the thing. The question I have and what I can't seem to decide or see about, uh, and really the problem is you can't, there's no place that has all these watch options that you can actually. Hold and say, oh yeah, this is the one I want, unfortunately. You know, the, there's just no place to go and see these in person and play with them, which is the problem. REI? No, REI does not have a lot of the different versions because no one keeps that many SKUs in stock. Oh
Sir Gene:sure, sure. I see that, but I know REI carries Garmin because I've seen
Ben:them there. Yeah, so, so does Best Buy, and they don't have actual functional stuff. They just have markups. This is about the size. Really? I want to push it and play with it, yeah. That's weird. So anyway, I'm between getting the Phoenix 7 because that's reasonable Phoenix 6, or the Instinct Tactical. I like some of the features in the Instinct Tactical, and the real question is do I want something that actually has topo maps on my wrist or not? Yeah. The, the thing I like about the Instinct, though, is it can run basically forever on solar. Give me a lot of the health information and display messages, which is like
Sir Gene:25 Garmin watches that are you out of here? Okay. It in Austin
Ben:online or
Sir Gene:actually in store in while they're showing up with in store. Okay,
Ben:I guarantee you go in and take a picture of the display for me and see what you have. Maybe I will because if you really have that, maybe I'll drive over there to go see it and we
Sir Gene:can go out the. I'll tell you, most of the feature differences are not going to be the software because you can load in new watch faces into all these watches. There there are certain elements that only come on certain watches. Like mine's got the, the bullet camp, you know, calculation computer. And not all of the models obviously have that. Actually,
Ben:there are several different ballistic models now. Yeah, there are.
Sir Gene:But from the line, from the line that I have, this is the one with that. bUt the differences between the lines tend to be the size of the watch, the material that's used and the solar performance.
Ben:Like the instinct to tactical, which has the ballistic calculator, it has the, you know, dead man switch, all that stuff, all the performance tracking stuff has gloss NOS Magellan and GPS and has basically infinite solar capacity and it has the flashlight on it is 400 bucks. Yeah, but it doesn't have the maps. Oh, right, right, right. Okay. It just has a compass and way points and stuff like that, but it doesn't actually have like topo maps. But if you have a printed topo map, this
Sir Gene:would be useful. I would look at the Phoenix 7S Pro. But
Ben:the Phoenix 7S Pro does not have some of the features of this watch. That's the problem.
Sir Gene:Right. But I think it's probably the best bang for the buck. Phoenix S7 Pro Sapphire Solar.
Ben:Yeah, I think this is, I think the the instinct
Sir Gene:is more in line with what I it's selling for 699 right now. Huh. So I don't know, anyway, it's hard to say I first world problems. Absolutely. First of all. And did you look at that other watch brand? That's a lot cheaper than they sent you? Hmm.
Ben:The Chinese one. Yeah. The what's it called? Yeah. But what's it called? I can't remember if I
Sir Gene:was in the market for a watch, I'd probably just buy one of those just to see if I, you know, if I like it at all, cause it's cheap enough.
Ben:Yeah, one second. Let me see what it's called. Anyway, it's something fit or whatever. But the problem is you have to use their app and the like I, I looked at them and they've got some really cool hardware. They look cool. Yeah. Yeah. But the problem is the app that you're using literally sends everything
Sir Gene:to China, especially your Social security numbers. Yeah. I
Ben:mean, contact information, browsing, like the, if you look at the required permission, it's a maze fit, by the way, a maze fit.
Sir Gene:Right, that's right. A mafit
Ben:a Yeah. I mean, if you look at the required permissions, it's insane. Right, right, right,
Sir Gene:right. Yes. What
Ben:does the government have for required permissions? Less, it's a US company at least. Yeah. Less. And it is a US company, so Yeah. You know, that, that, that's a pretty big differentiator for me actually. It's no data privacy guarantee, but it's better.
Sir Gene:I agree.
Ben:So geopolitics and domestic politics, what's going on?
Sir Gene:I've been traveling. We talked about domestic politics, Vivek, Vivek, is that how you're supposed to pronounce it? Vivek. Vivek. He really shouldn't have an I in his name if he wants people to pronounce it that way. bEfore the K, Vivek. But it's kind of like, it's always pissed me off is. If you want your name pronounced Win, don't spell it like New Yen. Okay. You know what I'm talking about, right? The the Vietnamese
Ben:name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pronounced Win. Yes, I've known several Wins in my day. Same
Sir Gene:here. And it's really dude? Did they not know how to fucking spell? Or did you mispronounce it? I'm a big fan of phonetics. I think that it is. Asinine to have things be spelled. This, this is why it took French by the way, because it's the worst fucking language in the world. Because no word is actually pronounced the way it's spelled. English is probably a close second, but anyway, pet peeve. I like phonetic things. When you can just sort of say
Ben:it, let's talk about your last name.
Sir Gene:My last name is absolutely phonetic. It is literally spelled exactly how it's pronounced. Yeah.
Ben:That is not how I would spell your last name. Really? Okay. That's I don't know. Just not that way.
Sir Gene:Yeah. You're just making a bit. Okay. No. I always tell people my last name is pronounced. Your
Ben:first name. Isn't even spelled. Right. So
Sir Gene:Jean isn't spelled.
Ben:Right. No, you use a G instead of a J.
Sir Gene:Why would I use a J I don't
Ben:know.
Sir Gene:Is this the way I've seen a J is pronounced a J is pronounced. Yeah. It's a yuh sound. It's not yeen, it's a jeen. If anything, it should have a D at the beginning. Why would it have a D? Oh my god. Jeen. DJ. The jeen. It's, it's, it should definitely not have a J in there. It's a, most places pronounce J as a
Ben:Y. Alright, so moving off the phonetic. But as funny as it is, but Hey, did you watch any of the Jan six tapes that got
Sir Gene:released?
Ben:No, I haven't. So I've just watched a little bit and mostly what's on X and floating around and it's dude, I first of all, I know there's tens of thousands of hours and people are probably cherry picking and stuff like that. And it's going to take a while for everybody to pick through and put out the good, the bad and the ugly for each side and everything else. But, I, I just, A, don't know why this wasn't released sooner, and B, it's really shitty that they did it on a Friday, right before holiday week, but, whatever. That said, this should exonerate a lot of people. There are videos of cops cutting off flex cuffs and walking people around, shaking hands, taking selfies, like just clearly not threatening. Right. So this should not be a thing. Okay, and on appeal, they should
Sir Gene:win. Nope, all of that, all those videos have been excluded from evidence. Yeah. Doesn't make any difference. We'll see. Yeah, we'll, we'll see. But I mean, that's the thing is, you remember, this is not, these are not criminal cases that people are being targeted for. These are political vengeance cases. And the political vengeance cases, as we've seen with Trump, they, they have a different set of rules. Their rules are judicial activism and draconian restrictions on the constitution. So, yeah, I mean, that's why you get 20 years for not being at the event because there's YouTube videos of you saying we should do something that that saying. Our country should have rules and laws, and we shouldn't let people steal elections, is enough to get you 20 years in prison now. And that's just literally a fact of America, today's world. Yeah, don't disagree. And that's why it's amazing to me how many people still think that what America does is the good guys. It's like we've been... As in that meme from the British comedy show of the Nazis talking to each other, one of them asking, Do you think we're the baddies? That meme has been the way the U. S. has been acting ever since George Bush. I don't disagree. Am I right?
Ben:I don't
Sir Gene:disagree. Oh, should be no surprise, no surprise at all. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if we decide to go and bomb Iran out of the blue while Israel is doing its own thing as they should be doing their own thing. But we're just going to on ourselves without being, you know, involved in something else. We're just going to go start another war that so that there could be a war. In the middle of a Democratic presidential election. And so it, it no, it just doesn't surprise me. I mean, I've been,
Ben:I think a lot of people when you go through these tapes and I have a feeling that there isn't gonna be a whole lot of violence to pull out of this. Mm-Hmm. And I think it really was a bunch of bumbling dots walking around to a large degree. Mm-Hmm. I think this is going to be a big deal as the dust starts to settle, but we'll see. Yeah,
Sir Gene:It should be now again, the good news out of all this, because I, I am a believer in the the prediction from the book pendulum that we have, we have now peaked, like the pendulum is ever so slow. We're already on the way back, dude. We are on the way back, according to that book,
Ben:yeah. And it's moving
Sir Gene:fast. it Feels that way because it's moving in the opposite direction, but it's going to keep accelerating until we hit the midpoint 20 years from now. So the next 20 years should be a lot of wins for individual freedoms, a lot of wins and less, fewer and fewer wins for collectivism, but we're coming off a period where collectivism just could not lose like anything they did, they have a great. Odds of winning it. And so it's, it's one of those things where it's some extent, I'm, I'm very happy that we've gotten through the worst of it and we can now slowly start to come out the other end. But the flip side is, um, I've, I've, the majority of my life has been spent at the diminishing of individualism and the expansion of collectivism, which is, I wish it was the other way around. I wish the majority of my life was. Made up of, of witnessing the expansion of individualism and the shrinking of collectivism. Okay.
Ben:That's not what we got.
Sir Gene:No, it's not. I'm just bitching the wrong time. That's all.
Ben:You're bitching about being born in the wrong time?
Sir Gene:Yeah. What are you saying, Kettle?
Ben:No, I was absolutely born in the wrong time. Mm
Sir Gene:hmm. So I did another musical DJing session of videos last night. Yeah,
Ben:I know I kept, I was trying to go to sleep and you're like, beep,
Sir Gene:beep, beep. Oh, I turned the alarm on mine awful long time ago. I don't want those messages waking me up.
Ben:Hey no, I'm talking about the what you're dumping in the
Sir Gene:text messaging too. Yeah, I turned that alarm off. Yeah. Okay.
Ben:Hey, all right. So I've got an affiliate set up. Oh, good. How do I add items to that?
Sir Gene:So the easiest way. Is to install the browser extension that just lets you click one button. Anytime you're on an Amazon page, you click on that extension and it gives you the short link. If you don't want to do that, there should now be also somewhere on every Amazon page, you have a little bug that lets you click on it and say, create a link for me.
Ben:I'll have to figure that
Sir Gene:out. Yeah. Cause obviously once you buy the watch, we should probably post the link. Maybe even before you buy the watch. Put the affiliate link in there. Mm-Hmm. for sure.
Ben:All right I did set up an affiliate program. Good. Even though I just, I doubt I will actually do this. Dude. I'm just, I, I don't, I don't know. I don't do shit like this.
Sir Gene:I just don't. I, yeah. It's just a matter of getting in the habit. Like it's, it, it's something that costs them. People nothing to use and it could generate money for, and I, I did not have a huge number of people back when I had my YouTube channel, I did not like the most recent one, but back 10 years ago when I was doing YouTube I had very few people I've had under a thousand views per video under. And I was getting a few hundred bucks a month, every month. I was just like, here's some free gifts that I can buy on Amazon and not have to pay for in cash.
Ben:I mean, you know, a few hundred bucks a month and that add up to me being able to get the,
Sir Gene:whatever. The watch. Yes, exactly. Dude, it's like Darren's doing this whole. You know, also he's been stealing my money by funneling
Ben:everything to himself. You say that, but I tried to set you up on splits for boosts and you didn't care. So I don't know what the
Sir Gene:real story is. I know what the real story is. He's been stealing my money, but anyway, the, Oh, he, he gets probably, and he's talked about it. So it's not like I'm outing him or anything, but he probably gets somewhere in the neighborhood of thousand bucks a month. Okay. Okay. Bye. That adds up dude, and it means you can, you can think less about which watch you buy and just click on the buy button. Yeah.
Ben:we'll see.
Sir Gene:We'll see what happens. 80 percent of that is going to come out of stuff that's already on gift cards. But the main thing is about this watch that or Apple watch or any of the fitness watches that I want is I want to watch that is constantly monitoring my oxygen intake and to a lesser extent, the heart rate. I don't care about that as much. But the, the oxygen content of the blood, your SpO2, um, that is very
Ben:useful. All right. So I figured out the affiliate links. Good. I'm going to throw this on
Sir Gene:the signal and I'll put them in the episode.
Ben:Yeah. I'll also just throw this on Nudge into social to see what people think how to get
Sir Gene:which watch. Yeah, exactly. So I agree. That's I would probably just go for the Phoenix seven S pro Sapphire solar myself, but if you don't want Sapphire, save a hundred bucks.
Ben:I, I'm more, I think I don't care about the maps and the touchscreen. I'd rather have some of the other features of the instinct.
Sir Gene:Okay. I get that it's even cheaper. Yeah, that's, that's what I'm looking at doing. Jean, I, I'll tell you, I don't think I've used maps more than a handful of times, but I definitely want that feature because the beauty of having the maps preloaded into the watch is it doesn't require a network connection, unlike my phone. To show me the graphic maps.
Ben:Oh, you don't pre download maps on your phone? Nope. Oh, see, I keep several regions pre downloaded on my phone at all times.
Sir Gene:Yeah, I, I used to do that three or four iPhones back, but... Huh. With the speed of internet right now, I just don't
Ben:bother. Yeah, I still download a couple areas and especially when I'm traveling to a new area, I will definitely go in and like any, oops, sorry, bumped the mic. Anytime I'm flying somewhere, I will preload I'll preload
Sir Gene:maps. You used to do that, but... Good for you.
Ben:I mean, on Android it's really easy to set it up so that anytime you know that you're going someplace. Mm-Hmm. it just downloads.
Sir Gene:I think that's also pretty easy in ways. I think that's built in. I don't know. I guess I don't really, I don't travel enough, dude. I just don't travel enough to really even think about that stuff these days. Okay.
Ben:Anyway, so affiliate links, if Gene does his job will be in the in the show notes. Mm-Hmm. And I will post them on no agenda social for the watches I'm looking at. I doubt anyone will buy one of these, Ben decide
Sir Gene:which watch to buy. Yeah. Yeah. He's definitely leaning towards the cheap one. Of course.
Ben:Does it do the job? I'm, I'm not an ex dude. It's like, why don't I have a Rolex? I mean, I've got friends who have Rolexes and everything else that make way less money than me. I'm not that kind of guy. It's the same reason why I'm driving an old pickup truck. I'm not that kind of guy. Same here. hUh. You are way more concerned about flash and show than I am.
Sir Gene:Definitely not. Definitely not. I just, I'm, I'm more interested in feature set.
Ben:And I'm more interested in feature set for the money.
Sir Gene:I sold my Rolex as soon as I got divorced. Not because I needed the money, but because yeah. I don't really need the Rolex and so I, and, and I'm still driving right now. I'm down to just a a single car. That is the 2014 monthly year. Yeah.
Ben:I'm on a 2013 F one 50 and the 200 and some odd thousand miles on it. You say, I didn't think your Jeep was that old. Your Jeep looked way nearer than that.
Sir Gene:I know it does look, but it's, it was the it was a 2014.
Ben:There you go. No, no. And I recognize that I'm also going to have to buy a truck here pretty quick. So, because I'm, I'm getting, it's getting up there on miles and issues and everything else.
Sir Gene:Yeah. Yeah. The problem is truck prices are insane right now. I got a buddy that's just bought one and I think he paid like 94, 000 for really what would have been like a 55, 000 truck. Like not even 10 years ago.
Ben:Yeah. I mean, there, yes and no. So the features that they've added in, you know, they've decided to add in all these features, even on base models where you've got huge touch screens and leather and this, that, and the other, it's like you almost have to custom order a truck. And if you do, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like if, if I were to get something comparably equipped, modern version of comparably equipped to my truck today, it would be a custom order. And my truck isn't nothing. Truck. I mean, it's got voice interaction, it's got lots of, plenty of stuff. But you know, the infotainment system isn't tied to the engine. Something I don't want you know, I don't care about all the electronic parking. I don't care about
Sir Gene:you anymore. Cause that there's actually a law that says that all new cars starting in 2024 have to have a kill switch. No,
Ben:it's not what the law says.
Sir Gene:Sure it is. I just read that article not too long ago.
Ben:They have to be able to have a kill switch. They have to have it.
Sir Gene:Oh, really? So they don't need, they have, they don't need the actual switch enabled?
Ben:So here, here's the thing, the, the way the law is written most companies will just comply in a way similar to what you're saying. Yeah. However, that is not technically what is required. They just have to basically have an interface where a kill switch can be added.
Sir Gene:Oh, interesting. So now you look for cars that don't have that.
Ben:Part of this is because if you end up with some DUI restrictions and everything else, the way they install breathalyzers and everything, it can be janky as heck, right? I've had buddies who have. Gotten stranded because of this, or you have the other method where stuff fails and I can start my car without doing any of that. So what difference does it make? So that, that was well. Okay. Anyway, the whole point is that they are trying to get a standard interface added for this so that, and this was done under, you know, mothers against drunk driving and ostensibly to say we want to stay industry standard interface so that this is no longer an argument or a problem or whatever. It's just easily done. And I think consumers aren't going to accept it. Quite frankly, I think the consumer,
Sir Gene:the average American gives a shit.
Ben:I think if breathalyzers start becoming standard the way mad wants it to, yeah, I think that they will give a shit.
Sir Gene:Yeah, you, you have a higher view of the average American than I do,
Ben:apparently. I think, I don't know, I just know how many people drink. They're sheeple. They still drink. They don't get in line. No, they won't. We'll see. No, they won't. The first time they have a beer at dinner. And go and blow in and because they just drank it or whatever, even though they only had one and they're not drunk or whatever, and their car doesn't start, they're going to get fucking pissed off and
Sir Gene:it's not going to go well. There's an easier solution for that. What's that? Islam. If they become Muslims, they don't have to worry about it. Because they don't drink?
Ben:Exactly. Yeah, that's not going to be an option. Anyway, um, yeah. Which, by the way, not drinking. When you're at an airport for 12 plus hours, Oh my
Sir Gene:God, that was hard. Oh, that's right. You're not drinking
Ben:right now. I forgot. Oh my God. That was hard. Like seriously, that was one of the hardest, that, that, that was probably one of the hardest things I've done. I
Sir Gene:mean, you're basically job at this point.
Ben:Fuck, dude. I mean, I, I could have, I was in the United lounge a lot. So free booze there. I mean, there's just, Oh, that was hard. I mean, when you're spending that much time just with your thumb up your ass at an airport. Yeah, I, I, that is the time
Sir Gene:to drink. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I always been a social drinker. So I rarely drink by myself and that includes airport lounges. I'd say starting with my thirties, when I was in my twenties, I drink happily anywhere, but in my thirties, it was more like, eh, I just don't feel like like getting into that atmosphere. Unless I'm, you know, with other people and everybody's drinking and everybody's kind of going through the same thing and it's actually kind of fun. But yeah, yeah, it's weird. I, I was in an event last week where I was actually there with a bunch of people that are into like life extension stuff, uh, including a couple that was a, uh, like they raise money for, uh, conservative candidates. And I think they've raised over a billion dollars including money to Trump and stuff. Damn. Yeah. We
Ben:should run for office.
Sir Gene:Now that I can be president, that's, that's actually a good idea. Yeah. No, you can't. I'm pretty sure that now that I've understood the correct interpretation of the constitution that I can. No, you can't. As much as you think that I can't, trying to hold the man down, hold me back, I, I think you're going to open my eyes. Yeah. He's wrong.
Ben:And Hey, I'm fine with repealing the 14th amendment entirely and the whole incorporation doctrine and everything that came out of it.
Sir Gene:I hope this court case goes, goes through, cause I would love to see what happens there. I
Ben:dude, I'm serious. That court case goes through, let's repeal the 14th then. Yeah, let's get rid of the
Sir Gene:incorporation doctrine. Yeah, no, I'm all for that as
Ben:well. But there is no one there. Let's put it this way. There is no one living currently that was, that would have been affected by the 14th amendment. That isn't already a citizen, right? The 14th amendment can go away and not affect the daily lives of Americans. Except for me, except for president. Yes. Yes. Which, you know, I'm okay with that. And getting rid of the incorporation doctrine would solve so many issues.
Sir Gene:He would imagine the number of court cases that would spring up instantly as a result of getting rid of the 14th, because so much of our country now is built around the federal government. Yeah.
Ben:It would take it back to the States. Yeah. It would, it would literally take it back. And here, if you're liberal, if you are liberal like Darren and live in, you know, Chirac and you want Illinois to have stupid gun laws, now Illinois can have those stupid gun laws. So can New York and Texas can have the silencers that we want. And the NFA fucking goes away in so many different things because it goes back to the state
Sir Gene:law. Your, your argument is built for, it's not even an argument. Your, your point is built from an assumption of, uh, conservative values, which, which is let people live as they want to live as long as they don't affect me. But you gotta understand that the liberals do not have that same concept. They want to affect the entire world. California doesn't not want to have guns in California. California doesn't want anyone to have guns except for the government. Period. They don't care if it's outside of their state. They just want that for everybody. I don't even know that it stops at the border of this country. I think they would prefer that no countries have a population of citizens that have guns. And only governments ought to be allowed to have guns.
Ben:Okay all I can tell you is that... Going back to a more federalist system is the only hope for saving this country. If you don't want to go back to a federalist system of, Hey, the 10th amendment actually means what it says and get ridding, getting rid of the incorporation doctrine. And what this means is the, and a lot of people don't understand this, but the way the constitution was set up and what it was meant to be was that. The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments of the constitution. And specifically, let's talk about the 1st and 2nd and so on. They don't apply to the states. They apply to the federal government, as does your 5th amendment rights applies only to the federal. Government. This is why in your state constitution, you have a guarantee of rights. This is entirely designed so that if California wants to be California and say, Hey yeah, no, we want shitty gun laws. We want this, that and the other. They can do that and they can, it can apply to their citizens. And everybody else can enact what they want to enact in their states.
Sir Gene:Yeah and you're not coming up with this or making it up because you like it. You're actually basing this
Ben:on the time. No, that's historically the way it was written. This is what it was intended.
Sir Gene:Right. And then, but that's what I'm, I'm just clarifying. The intention is not pulled out of your ass. The intention is based on documented communication between the actual
Ben:framework. And it's the interpretation of the constitution up and until the 14th amendment. And then later on, Supreme court saying that the 14th amendment changed the interpretation of the constitution and that the equal protection clause extended to the states. And therefore we have, what's known as the incorporation doctrine, meaning that the U S constitution and the provisions of the U S constitution must apply to the states as well, which previous to the civil war, previous to the incorporation doctrine was never what was intended and is a huge problem with the devolution of power from the states to the federal government. And what has to be resolved, we have to go back to more local law. I mean, the
Sir Gene:only ironic though, don't you think that.
Ben:This is what the Civil War was fought over. This is exactly the fucking problem. And people want to sit there and say it was over slavery, it was over this, that, and the other. Fuck you. Okay? Sorry. Slavery was an issue, but it was not the issue. If it was the issue, the South could have stayed in the Union, never admitted another non slave state, and guess what, there would not have been enough In the constitution to ratify a amendment to abolish slavery, had the South just stayed, that wasn't the issue. You had the abominable tariffs, you had financial issues, you had states rights, and you had these statists and these tyrants like Lincoln who wanted to go down the road of exactly where we went, of enacting the incorporation doctrine and everything else, and taking the power from the states, and devolving it to the federal. Government. That was the point. That is what that wall war was fought over. You can say slavery was an issue and part of that. Sure. Fine. Don't care. It was not a moral war over that. Not for the North, not for the South. If you read history and understand it, there is no other interpretation. I'll get off my
Sir Gene:soapbox now. No, I was happy to let you stand on the soapbox. That's the, that's the kind of Ben has been waiting for for the last two hours. You know,
Ben:it just annoys the shit out of me that, you know, people want to sit there and say, Oh, slavery, slavery, slavery, very few people in the South even own slaves. Yes, for the planter class, for the planter class in Georgia and some of those states, maybe for the rest of the South. No, not a big deal for the North. You think the average Yankee soldier was fighting for the freedom of the slaves. Because if you read their diaries, if you read what was written, that's not the case. I have a book on my shelf that was given to me as a present. And it's one of my most prized possessions. And it's literally the war correspondence it's the War of Rebellion. And the only real complete copy, first edition copy, is in the Library of Congress. But you can get some of the reprints, and I have a first edition, but it's a hundred... This letter is from Nathan Forrest. It's a hundred and twenty volume set that you can get. And the library of Congress has it. It's digitized. I actually have a first edition, one of the volumes for the trans Louisiana armies, but it's literally all the correspondence between the various units, letters, everything. It's what the library of Congress did after the civil war to have a record from the war. And it's a great resource. And all you got to do is go through and read Northern and Southern sides, read their letters to their To their officers, both directions, read the war reports, read the letters to their home and see what they cared about. Listen to the music of the time. Just anyway. Again, off
Sir Gene:soapbox. Keep going, it's fun.
Ben:The point is, we have to get back to a more representative form of government. The fact that a single member of congress currently represents a hundred and some odd thousand people means they don't represent anybody except special interests. We need more representation. We should have never allowed Congress to cap its number, and we should have never allowed the Senate to be directly elected. Those are things that have to change, and they have to change pretty immediately, in my estimation.
Sir Gene:Yeah, I, I, I certainly agree with that, but certainly the Senate, if you look at it, has created something really awful as a, almost a permanent class of people Whose job is to maximize the donations coming into the party.
Ben:Here's the big thing and what people don't understand the Senate was to represent the states. We are the United States. Capital s for a reason. Meaning you're Texan. You're not American saying you're an American is like saying you're European. Okay. Yeah. Okay. You're from Europe. Great. What country? That's what really matters. But the states, the reason why the Senate in this change is so insidious in such a problem is because what does the Senate do that the house doesn't okay. The house controls the money. But what does the Senate control? It controls treaties. It controls appointments to the judiciary. The states were supposed to control that the state legislatures. One of the one of the things that I think that yeah. Is a premier item as part of the constitution that is a federal power that must be enforced is the constitution says that the federal government must ensure a republican form of government. Okay. Little are republican. What does that mean? It means a representative republic. It means that all these states that are enacting winner take all, which means the delegates all go to the winner moves us closer to a popular vote. Are not a Republican form of government that is not representative for public. The federal government, the election commission should immediately go in and declare those laws unconstitutional. There you go. Anyway I'm, I'm, I'm. Why
Sir Gene:do you keep apologizing for it? Because it's just. You enjoy listening to that stuff. I know, but that's people like that. That's, it's, it's rants they're not going to get anywhere else.
Ben:Yeah anyway, it's a nerve and it's something that really bugs the shit out of me because what it comes down to, and this is a conversation I was having with a friend of mine the other day, you know, the Constitution, if it were being followed, has its flaws, but is a pretty good document. Realistically, the Constitution is an illegal document. And what I mean by that is the, we're under the Articles of Confederation. And the framers of constitution went into Independence Hall and decided to come out with something totally new that they had no mandate or authority to do. And the ratification and the ratification system was not great. I tend to agree with Patrick Henry. And if you read the ratification debates, if you read the Virginia ratification debates, particularly Patrick Henry was that just vehemently opposed to the ratification of the constitution. And I don't think anyone would question his patriotism. So maybe if you're interested in this, if, if you want to know why I get so pissed off about stuff like this, go read that. And I tell you what, one of the things that my parents did for me that I plan on doing for my kids, and I think is, Something everybody ought to do is go read the fucking ratification debates, read, read what they were saying when they were arguing over language for these amendments, for the actual text of the constitution, when the states were considering ratifying it, what they thought the pros and cons were. Don't just go read the fucking federalist papers. That's one side of it. There were also the anti federalist papers that no one talks about. You know why? Because everyone The Federalists won, and I don't think in history, that was a good thing. There you go.
Sir Gene:Perfect. And with that, we're going to wrap up this episode. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. I'm going to stick in some watch links for you help Ben decide which watch he should get. We all know he leans towards the cheap stuff, but you know, maybe you can convince him better than I can the benefits of getting something that's a little, a little better. Get any last parting words, Ben?
Ben:You know what? One of the topics that I think a lot of people like us to cover and that we haven't. So let's talk about it just for a few minutes before we wrap up is the books, the books. Yeah, the books that we've
Sir Gene:been reading that we've been reading. Yes. Yes. I'm on book eight. I've gotten two more people to start reading the series of books.
Ben:It's a cult man. Everybody who starts reading it, enjoys it and shares it. Huh. Yeah. So my parents are almost finished with the Charlie's Requiem series and the new book for the main series that you're reading is coming out here this month. Oh nice. And everybody is just addicted. I'm addicted. You're gonna, when you start on Charlie's Requiem, you'll be addicted. Now your buddy recommended the One Second After books to you? I read those when they came out they're, they're pretty good. They are a little more polished than this, but I will say that this is a better series politically aligned to us as far as that goes. So thank you for what it's worth, but they're similar.
Sir Gene:And then, and my buddy is actually decently high up in the army. So he's, he's one of the sort of guys working inside. So, I think he's going to enjoy this series as well. And I think it's going to reinforce his his current positions anyway, but it's a, uh, it's definitely, I think a book that hits on a lot of topics that you and I've just talked about with our friends, with other people in our lives, and. And puts it into a fictional setting, but a very realistic fictional setting.
Ben:You know, on the realism, there's a couple points in the main series where I call bullshit on a few things because he does take some liberties here and there. You're gonna love Charlie's Requiem when you get there, dude. It is everything that is good about the main series, but way more raw.
Sir Gene:Okay. Yeah, and we've talked about some of the issues that I've had in the book aside from the, the first book, which was his first actual first time first book he ever wrote. Right. So that, you know, that, that excuses a lot of the negatives in that book, but there's certain items, other things like there, I think there's a little too much reliance. Basically having a platoon of soldiers at your beck and
Ben:call spec ops. And yeah, they have magic
Sir Gene:equipment. Yes, they have magic equipment. They can call down a strike from an Apache whenever they need one. I mean, it's just kind of like, okay, all right. The guys that you were either Uber lucky. And incidentally wasn't Thad his connection initially in the first book to Sarge and yet somehow Thad is just not really doing anything with Sarge.
Ben:But Thad's connection to Sarge no spoilers really here, but Thad's connection to Sarge was because Thad was a trucker. Yeah. And he was on the ham radio Yeah. All the time. Mm-Hmm. And Sarge is a ham. He's a, he's a in a lot of ways, Edgar or whatever you call him. And that's how they met. So. Dad's relationship with Sarge is kind of incidental and the relationship that Morgan and Sarge now that and Sarge are still friends, but the relationship that Morgan and Sarge. You know, build up is more of that warrior kindred spirit type, whereas that is just, you know, that's the he's the libertarian at the group. Really? He wants to be left the hell alone, and he only engages in violence when he absolutely has to. Morgan Morgan's a little
Sir Gene:more proactive. Yeah, absolutely. There's no two ways about that. But it's, you know, it's like the books are very enjoyable and the continuity is good and just the, the amount of harm that the characters come to is also good. He doesn't magically have everybody have a A force field around
Ben:the main character. No, there, there are main characters that are getting hurt a lot and killed. Yeah. Yeah. He, he does not spare main
Sir Gene:characters. Yeah. It's not quite like Red Weddings, but it's, there's definitely main characters getting killed off. So,
Ben:You're, you're not quite there yet. Okay. All right.
Sir Gene:All right. Fine. Get me, get me ready for a massive massacre.
Ben:I assume you're already passed like bombs going off in the shopping areas and stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, let's just say that's a preview.
Sir Gene:Okay. All right. Interesting. The other thing that I, I'm not sure that I would have if I was writing this series, I don't think I would have had the regular or really the army Essentially be on the side of the good guys. I just don't buy that. I think reading. Okay. All right. I'll not all of them are mine. I'll keep reading,
Ben:especially when you get into Charlie's there's, there's a lot more nuance. Okay. So I think that really what I like about this is he's maintained the primary series and he hasn't. He hasn't corrected course on the primary series and created a continuity problem or a character problem. He's just kind of said, okay, the mistakes I made or the more idealistic version of this is going to be the main one. And then in Charlie's Requiem, I'm going to go through and I'm going to correct a lot of the mistakes I made in the first series in the same universe and add to it. So it's. Canon it's in genre, it's in the same thing, but I'm going to add to it and correct a lot of those problems without creating continuity problems in the main series. I fucking love that as an author. And it gives us more books. So,
Sir Gene:that's it. Yeah. And he, does he still live in Florida? I believe so, yeah.
Ben:Okay. He looks like you. Quite a bit. Fat dude with a
Sir Gene:beard. His, his main character in the book looks kinda like I used to back when I was younger. Back when I was about 8 inches taller. How are you 8 inches taller? Ba dum pum pum. I'd like that just went right over. DeSantis,
Ben:I mean, I
Sir Gene:guess. DeSantis, what? No, cause he starts off, his, his, his book starts off as this guy who works basically in IT in the, in the tech field. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and he's 260 pounds and he's a prepper and he's into guns and all these fun toys. And it's you know, it's, but my point in saying eight inches taller is. I was expecting you to instantly chime in and was like, yeah, except you weren't 6'4 like he is. Ah, got it.
Ben:So, I mean, the other joke could be, Gene, you've never been 8 inches in your life, but you know, hey.
Sir Gene:That's not what she said. Anyway. And on that note. Yeah, let's, let's wrap up. We started doing that 20 minutes ago, so let's actually go ahead and do it. This is a good, good break period. The book we're talking about is called,
Ben:It's the, Yeah, it's the Going Home series by A. American. And the A stands for angry.
Sir Gene:A stands for Angry American. I love that. By way. It must be a pseudonym. It's, it's, I don't think that's his given name. Yeah. Probably not. bUt yeah. Good, good series. I'm still working on it. There's how many? 11 or 12 in the name
Ben:series? I think there's 11. The 12 book is about to come out. And then there's several in, I'm on book three of Charlie's Rec
Sir Gene:Williams. So it's, it's a lot. And how many in that series? Five.
Ben:Five. Okay. And still writing. So, I mean, this, this is, this is, this is picking up game of thrones in a lot of ways. Now, these are not as long as the game of thrones books, song of ice and fire. But it's, it's, it's pretty
Sir Gene:expensive. A hundred bucks on add ons on the audible in buying all these fucking books. They're addicting. They're addicting. Usually, usually like 12 books a year last me a year. And now you've got me buying like 15 books after I've already bought the 12 books that I bought this year. Yeah. They're that
Ben:good. All right, Gene. We'll catch you next week. All right. The other side of Thanksgiving. Let's do
Sir Gene:it. And hopefully we'll, for the next few months until New Year's, we can crank out one a week.