Gene 0:24

Howdy Ben, how are you doing today?

Dude Named Ben 0:26

Gene, I we, we decided to get started a little early this morning,

Gene 0:30

Yeah. By three

Dude Named Ben 0:31

up, yeah it would have been more than that, had, when I walked up here, my computer, Not be presenting me with a lovely screen indicating that Windows had done something and restarted and took forever. Windows is just atrociously

Gene 0:46

And, and on top of it, did it expect to get some money out of you?

Dude Named Ben 0:50

Yeah, yeah, I sent you a picture. There was a fucking ad during the reboot for, Hey, why don't you buy more Microsoft stuff? And fucking, hey, you bastards, you're forcing me to reboot a computer that I don't want to reboot. And it, it Anyway, I, I, I use this machine once a week to talk to you and record this podcast and I, I'm, I'm telling you, man, I've, I've got to move away from windows

Gene 1:16

Just get a Mac mini, man. That's all. That's This thing is gonna be my recording only device for ever now.

Dude Named Ben 1:23

I really don't want a Mac. I don't, I'm

Gene 1:26

You're just

Dude Named Ben 1:27

I like real operating systems

Gene 1:30

You racist?

Dude Named Ben 1:32

against a Mac. Sure.

Gene 1:34

You're racist against apples.

Dude Named Ben 1:35

No, no, I'm, I'm, I'm racist against the fact that you know, Apple took the free BSD kernel and bastardized it and did nothing to get back to the community,

Gene 1:46

Yeah, I made it better.

Dude Named Ben 1:48

they're right. They, they were legally allowed to do that. It's just.

Gene 1:51

Mm hmm. That's how they got to be the number one company in the world.

Dude Named Ben 1:57

I mean, my problem is, and this is a, this is a fault this is a philosophical fault with the BSD license. So the BSD license means that anyone can use it for anything, including commercial use, can take it, can take it closed source and then not release it under a free license. It's not like some of the other ones that are out there

Gene 2:17

Yeah, but you don't why.

Dude Named Ben 2:20

why?

Gene 2:21

Because it was developed by a university, which gets funding from the government.

Dude Named Ben 2:26

Yes. Berkeley.

Gene 2:27

They can't sell it.

Dude Named Ben 2:30

Correct.

Gene 2:32

Illegal.

Dude Named Ben 2:34

Okay. But the point is there are other Linux distros developed by universities and so on since then that use different licensing schemes where once it's open source, the open source components have to stay open

Gene 2:50

Nah, but it's not Linux, is it?

Dude Named Ben 2:52

No. And it's there anyway. It's just, it's sad.

Gene 2:57

Mm-Hmm. Yeah. No, I get it. You're just a next hater. That's all.

Dude Named Ben 3:03

Yeah and I've gone down kind of a nostalgic road over the last shit, few, since December really on video games and

Gene 3:13

Yeah. I've noticed that. Yeah. You,

Dude Named Ben 3:15

and I'm like, I'm like

Gene 3:16

of nostalgia,

Dude Named Ben 3:17

missing the good old days when Windows would You know, function for long periods of time you know, the days from now, skip me and, you know, but really all the NT variants were great. But if you, if you really think from like windows 3, 1, 1 through windows 7, we're awesome.

Gene 3:45

I'm old enough to say none of windows was awesome. There's problems with every fucking version,

Dude Named Ben 3:51

Yeah. But not what we're dealing with today.

Gene 3:53

That for me, windows 10 has been the most stable of any windows for games.

Dude Named Ben 4:00

yeah, but again, the forced reboots, there's, there's issues there.

Gene 4:04

Yes, yes, there are issues. However, I will take a forced reboot over a blue screen.

Dude Named Ben 4:10

Yeah. Okay.

Gene 4:12

I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying, of all the variants of Windows, and I've used Windows literally from 1. 0. It's, it's probably, I don't know how 11 is, okay? I've never moved to 11 because I don't want to move off something that actually works.

Dude Named Ben 4:29

yeah, I, I have, I, I will let you know my, uh, I'll be having to be moved to Windows 11 here

Gene 4:37

Oh, for the work machine? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then I heard they're talking about 12 now.

Dude Named Ben 4:44

Yeah. Wow.

Gene 4:46

Let's see if that, If that was any better.

Dude Named Ben 4:49

We'll see. I, I, I, I'm, I'm ready to just demand and Microsoft entirely. I, my, my daily, my daily workstation is a Linux machine and it.

Gene 5:00

think you can, other than

Dude Named Ben 5:02

than the fucking Motu. Yeah,

Gene 5:04

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 5:06

and if I, if I want to spend the time sitting up here plugged into the Motu and that's the problem is I never do. Playing with Jack, I can probably get it to work and then it'll be fine. It'll be set it and forget it. But I just haven't done that. Anyway,

Gene 5:24

I hear you. And it's a Even, I think you mentioned this, that you can run just about every video game now using the the stuff that seems put together the emulation. Mm

Dude Named Ben 5:40

So Steam has a compatibility layer and you can force it. Which I was in. I mean, it's just a setting. And obviously, sometimes it's buggy, sometimes there's issues, you know, hey, this is doing this, you know, but yeah, I was able to, I, I started watching the new Halo series. It's actually in season two now and I went back and watched season one and kind of got me nostalgic for Halo because that came out when I was in college on the original Xbox and I was, you know, in PC and I actually started, did you ever watch red versus blue?

Gene 6:15

Yeah. I love that. Rose versus blue is awesome.

Dude Named Ben 6:18

it's on YouTube and I started re watching that as well. So that's got me like, fuck, I want to play Halo.

Gene 6:26

See the, the tech support video for the messy desktop?

Dude Named Ben 6:31

oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep,

Gene 6:33

playing Red vs. Blue the whole time he's giving advice.

Dude Named Ben 6:36

yeah, yeah.

Gene 6:38

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 6:39

yeah, the, the, yes. There's no sort by penis option.

Gene 6:45

Yes, exactly.

Dude Named Ben 6:48

Oh God,

Gene 6:50

Yeah, that

Dude Named Ben 6:51

every it guy is, oh my God, it says, do not reboot the server on the server, going into his boss's email, deleting the notes that are, oh

Gene 7:04

that was classic. That is a move that was done way too many times by way too many people.

Dude Named Ben 7:09

Yeah.

Gene 7:12

yeah, that was, so you were in college and I was still doing security it shots. So that was very much a video that was floating around and everybody was sharing and laughing at good times. But

Dude Named Ben 7:25

Anyway. So I, I got the master chief collection which is windows only. But if you force compatibility. If you enable force compatibility, then you can install it and run it.

Gene 7:37

And, and that's the re imaged version, right? So they've

Dude Named Ben 7:41

yeah, yeah. And you know, it's up to date more up to date graphics and stuff like that. And it includes all of Halo way through Halo 4 and all those other games. Yeah, it was nice to be able to go through and play a

Gene 7:56

Play it on Linux. Mm

Dude Named Ben 7:59

and getting, you know, really good frame rates. So they'd like no issue with the emulation lagging things down.

Gene 8:09

Mm. No, that's very good. Yeah, the I think Steam is both hated by game developers because they take a huge percentage of running it, but also it's the best thing that's happened to gaming ever. Because they standardized so much shit and they're continuing to do things like have the simulation and when they created their portable product, which runs on Linux.

Dude Named Ben 8:37

And that's what a lot of this emulation stuff has come out of is because they want to be able to run things on there.

Gene 8:44

Yeah, but, but there's two ways to do it. They can do it through emulation. They can also, you can also compile it natively. Yeah, exactly.

Dude Named Ben 8:52

I think a lot of games they are trying to compile natively, but they want the flexibility.

Gene 8:58

yeah. And both unity and unreal engine. Back last year said that, that all future versions will be operating system agnostic. So they're going to run on Mac, they're going to run on Linux, or let's put it this way. You'll be able to compile for Mac and Linux when you compile the game. And so you won't have this huge disparity between only Windows gets to play video games.

Dude Named Ben 9:27

I, I think a lot of this is changing. You know, I've been able to run granted not the latest and greatest graphics of all time or imaginable, but very, very proficiently on a laptop that has a, you know, discrete GPU. And yeah. I'm happy. It satisfies my rare and infrequent gaming itch

Gene 9:53

you're occasional gaming itch.

Dude Named Ben 9:55

yeah. My nostalgic gaming itch.

Gene 9:57

Yeah now you did buy a cyberpunk I thought right?

Dude Named Ben 10:01

Yes, I

Gene 10:02

That's not that's not old. That's fairly recent software

Dude Named Ben 10:06

Yeah, and that was running on this Windows PC that's my older laptop that isn't as good as the other one that's on Linux. Which,

Gene 10:14

out analytics

Dude Named Ben 10:15

I actually should. I should do it through Steam and force the compatibility and see what it does, yes. Cause that game is definitely capable of taxing hardware.

Gene 10:25

Oh yeah, yeah. Now I've got what, at this point, would have been top of the line three years ago. So I'm definitely coming up for a refresh this year. And that game on my computer runs at about 60 frames. But it, it's, with the latest hardware, it'll run 180. I'm definitely about three times slower on that game with the same settings than the current top of the line hardware.

Dude Named Ben 11:01

Yeah.

Gene 11:03

Yeah I ran into something accidentally the other day that was interesting.

Dude Named Ben 11:09

What's that?

Gene 11:10

AI generated porn.

Dude Named Ben 11:12

Okay. So you finally saw the Taylor Swift photos.

Gene 11:16

No, I did not. No, I, you know,

Dude Named Ben 11:18

You didn't really look those up.

Gene 11:20

I did not. I, I, I casually did some searches the first couple of days and

Dude Named Ben 11:26

Oh my God. Have Darren send them to you. You know, he has them.

Gene 11:28

Oh, of course he has them. He probably has autographed copies of them. Knowing, knowing him. yeah, yeah. No, this was full motion AI generated porn. And what kind of led me down that road is I was watching a video by one of my favorite YouTubers, Sasha Gray. And she was doing an episode on AI. And you know how the algorithms work. There you go. Sasha Gray, you're doing a search for it. Great. Okay, let's get you some stuff. You ended up running across some AI generated porn. And it was, of course, it was like Japanese crap, which is not something that I really enjoy as far as porn is

Dude Named Ben 12:10

Now was this like cartoonish video game ish

Gene 12:14

It was somewhere between video game ish and normal photorealistic. The, the faces looked a little bit blank. A little,

Dude Named Ben 12:24

lifeless?

Gene 12:24

I'm not, it's hard to say that because in most porn, the faces look a little lifeless, let's just face it. There's a little, little vacuum in there. So I guess in that sense it was emulating porn correctly based on the data it had been fed. But no, it was like Japanese tentacle porn stuff.

Dude Named Ben 12:44

I

Gene 12:45

And which is, you know, it's a subcategory of not popular in this country. But I was mostly just looking at it for the technology

Dude Named Ben 12:53

Huh. Huh. Sure.

Gene 12:55

let's put that right along my stack of Playboys that I had great articles. And I think it's coming along. It's not there yet. There's a little bit of Uncanny Valley shit happening. But, you know as well as I do, that porn embraces the first technology. Or they're the first out

Dude Named Ben 13:12

Oh yeah, they're an early adopter. I mean, the, you want to know why VHS beat beta max porn?

Gene 13:19

porn. Exactly. Consequently I think this is probably the year that a lot of porn that's coming out will transition from using porn actors, porn stars, to being generated in the computer, because I think they've got enough I cat knows they've got enough raw data to be able to feed into the AI systems to to be able to generate any type. But we'll see, we'll see if that prediction holds or not. But honestly, I think if I'm starting to see some stuff like this at the beginning of the year, it, it probably means there's going to be a whole ton of it by the end of the year.

Dude Named Ben 14:03

You know,

Gene 14:04

And is that good or bad? Let's think about that philosophically.

Dude Named Ben 14:07

from a moral standpoint. It could be

Gene 14:10

Yeah, there's, if, if no one's actually working in porn,

Dude Named Ben 14:14

I mean, you're, you're still theoretically selling your image, right?

Gene 14:18

but it's not yours.

Dude Named Ben 14:20

What do you mean it's not

Gene 14:20

it's, it's it's a, it's digital, you know,

Dude Named Ben 14:25

It's a digital composite. Okay. Yeah, I think what's gonna end up happening is there'll be some of that, but it won't. I think people are still going to want to have a real human involved at some point in time, not just

Gene 14:39

get so real looking.

Dude Named Ben 14:42

we'll see.

Gene 14:44

Yeah. Oh, I think it's, there's two areas where AI generated stuff is gonna be huge. That's video games. And in porn and in video games, you know, we kind of went from hand drawn, hand created cartoonish looking to using 3d models based on actual humans with a bunch of dots on their faces and 3d modeling of that. So they look more and more and more realistic and more human. And. I think that like we've gone over that mountain now and we're going to go into the the, the computer knows enough to just be able to generate stuff because it's a different reason for video games for using AI to generate the human characters then porn porn is volume. Volume, volume in video games. It's not so much volume as it is that it takes years to make a game and they're tweaking what these characters are doing up until the last minute.

Dude Named Ben 15:50

And not only that, but hey, we want to be able to, when we update things and send it out, you know, Oh,

Gene 15:56

Yeah. Or imagine selling a video game where the main character's race is whatever the country of sale is, right? You sell them video game in India. The main character is Indian. You sell it in China. The main character is Chinese. So then, you know, the U. S., the main character is black.

Dude Named Ben 16:16

Sure. Yeah.

Gene 16:19

Good. Yeah,

Dude Named Ben 16:19

I would say American and, you know, not throughout the whole race based thing, but you know,

Gene 16:24

Mm hmm. Yeah. But we know from watching TV ads what Americans look like. It's usually a a Latino woman married to a black man with children that are completely of indistinguishable race.

Dude Named Ben 16:37

Yeah. You've been talking to a horrific energy too much.

Gene 16:42

I don't know, man. If you watch TV ads, it's, and somebody actually posted a thing Disney, Disney had a, Document, I think it was a slide or several slides from a presentation where they outlined the rules for all new media that is made by Disney. And it had things like, that there are no white male characters unless they're the antagonist. That's literally a rule in their PowerPoint. I don't understand how anyone would let their kids watch Disney, it's insane.

Dude Named Ben 17:21

I mean, because there's limited kids entertainment and BendKey is eh at best right now. Hopefully the production value and things will change

Gene 17:31

I'd pay for it.

Dude Named Ben 17:32

I, I, I pay for it too,

Gene 17:35

Darren steals it you know,

Dude Named Ben 17:36

tried to get my kids to watch it, but anyway. Know, we'll,

Gene 17:39

take away their iPads, they'll be bored enough, they'll watch

Dude Named Ben 17:41

My kids do not have any sort of tablet phone technology of any kind. Thank you very much.

Gene 17:48

That's good. Yeah, you'd probably make them have an Android tablet, wouldn't you? Hehe.

Dude Named Ben 17:55

tablet, the only tablet we have for them at all is for long car rides to watch videos. That's the only thing that has ever been in front of my kids.

Gene 18:06

what I used to watch on long car rides?

Dude Named Ben 18:09

The back of your mother's head. I don't know.

Gene 18:11

No. Outside the back window.

Dude Named Ben 18:14

Okay. Yeah,

Gene 18:15

had station wagons back in my day, and the kids sat in the back, facing the opposite direction.

Dude Named Ben 18:21

Anyway, we have that that we've used a couple times on different long car rides and stuff like that in the past. And I, I, when it's, you know, if it's just me, I don't use it, but anyway, long story short. Yeah. No, my kids don't. Don't get a lot of tablet time or phone time or anything like

Gene 18:45

Stay, watch the Disney on an actual TV. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 18:51

But only stuff that is put on for them. It's not autoplay is off on everything. And, you know, we are making conscious decisions theoretically about you know, I, they can't control what others do. But, you know, we're making as conscious of a decision as possible, or I am at least to go through and. You know

Gene 19:14

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 19:15

to select what my kids watch. Hey cool. I have to show you this later.

Gene 19:20

What'd you find?

Dude Named Ben 19:21

Just an email. I got

Gene 19:22

Oh, okay. What else going on? Trying to think of I've sent you a whole bunch of stuff over the

Dude Named Ben 19:28

and I sent it to you too. Yeah,

Gene 19:31

what happens. I send you something and you send it right back to me a day or two later. Let's see. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 19:38

Huh.

Gene 19:39

Your, I took your dumb Persally test thing.

Dude Named Ben 19:43

it wasn't mine. That was something that Tim had talked about on Friday's show that

Gene 19:48

Oh, I didn't see it.

Dude Named Ben 19:50

and he, he's definitely authoritarian. So

Gene 19:53

Tim is.

Dude Named Ben 19:54

Oh, yeah.

Gene 19:55

Oh, really?

Dude Named Ben 19:55

Comparatively, compared to me or you, yes.

Gene 19:58

Interesting.

Dude Named Ben 19:59

Yeah, I, I, I, shocker people. I score a little higher on purity than Gene does.

Gene 20:05

Like twice as high. Yeah. But authoritarian, I think I scored higher than you on. Or are we the same? No, we're pretty close to the same. And then I was down at 95 percent Liberty. You were at a hundred percent Liberty. But

Dude Named Ben 20:20

I'm a liberty loving libertarian.

Gene 20:22

yeah, but you were at like the one that surprised me was the loyalty. You were, you were at like 30 percent loyalty.

Dude Named Ben 20:29

Yeah, why does that surprise you?

Gene 20:31

I don't know. I was like 50.

Dude Named Ben 20:33

Yeah, but the questions were, oh, you know, so and so's friend takes their shift and says, no strings attached, and then asks if someone can take their shift, do you feel the need, no, they said no strings attached, and if something else is going on, no, I am not obligated. Now, if I can, will I? Sure. Do I feel that compulsive obligation? No. That's the loyalty scores there.

Gene 21:01

extreme version of the answer. The technical black and white version is what you put down. Cause I, I put down for

Dude Named Ben 21:09

There were some questions that were definitely uncomfortable to answer.

Gene 21:13

Oh really? For what?

Dude Named Ben 21:15

The one about the brother and sister for a while.

Gene 21:18

Oh, whatever. It doesn't matter. It's I watch Game of Thrones. I don't care if they

Dude Named Ben 21:23

Okay and I, I was having this conversation with another friend. Okay do you interpret this as adults or children? Because that changes the answer.

Gene 21:30

Not really. Kids will play. I don't really care if kids play.

Dude Named Ben 21:35

I,

Gene 21:36

As long

Dude Named Ben 21:36

have moral

Gene 21:37

as they're the same age, man, that's the bigger issue for me. I don't want some sister that's actually I probably do, but No, I, I, okay, let's put the, the male is like 25 and the female is 10. That's a bad combination. No, no pedo, but yeah, I mean, it's, I just, I don't have the morality thing going on in there. It's whatever people do, whatever the hell they want to do, it doesn't matter. Doesn't affect me. Does it?

Dude Named Ben 22:29

No, and I, again, I, so like the purity score would've been different for me had I thought about the question and interpreted it differently. Because what two adults do, I don't care what a group of adults do, I don't care.

Gene 22:43

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 22:45

And,

Gene 22:45

Yeah, exactly.

Dude Named Ben 22:47

is to say using protection and so on. That that's irrelevant. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about the morality of something and

Gene 22:55

Yeah. No. Yeah. And, and it's just one time to see what it was like.

Dude Named Ben 23:03

yeah, again,

Gene 23:04

who cares? I don't care if they had kids.

Dude Named Ben 23:08

I mean,

Gene 23:09

me. Doesn't affect me. Yeah, they're, they're creating people with lower IQs. That, that means my kids will win against them. Good deal.

Dude Named Ben 23:19

yeah,

Gene 23:20

So it's but it, it is very. Very much a chick thing to take Cosmo quizzes, which basically is what this is. But since you went and posted your Cosmo quiz online

Dude Named Ben 23:34

Yeah, for, for which you called me a fed.

Gene 23:37

before which I called you a fed cause he deserved a little ribbing for posting something like that online. But,

Dude Named Ben 23:43

I was more doing it as a joke, but, you know, you're, you're the 1 bringing it up and taking it way

Gene 23:48

That's because it was hilarious. It was pretty funny. But we did both come out to be very strong libertarians.

Dude Named Ben 23:54

Yeah, liberty minded libertarians.

Gene 23:57

Right, I wonder what other kind of libertarians there are.

Dude Named Ben 24:00

Just the alliteration that he used on some of this was funny to me.

Gene 24:05

Authoritarian minded libertarian type. Mm hmm. No, so Tim Pool posted his?

Dude Named Ben 24:12

yeah, yeah, he talked to, he actually did it live during the culture war.

Gene 24:16

Really? That would take frickin ten minutes.

Dude Named Ben 24:20

I don't know if he finished it live, but he started or whatever. Anyway, during the culture war, making a point.

Gene 24:26

Hmm.

Dude Named Ben 24:27

I did something this morning that I never do because, you know, I just don't watch TV in the morning or.

Gene 24:35

Sure. You watched Disney, didn't ya?

Dude Named Ben 24:37

No, I watched Fox News.

Gene 24:39

Oh, god. That's even worse.

Dude Named Ben 24:41

I I haven't watched Fox News in A very long time. I don't watch any of the news networks. I go, I read stories. I'll watch clips here or there, but I, I just don't ever just turn on the channel, but it was interesting because the money honey Maria Bartiromo was on there and she was doing a investigative piece on Russiagate and its origins and she had George stuff. What are Papadopoulos? Yeah. On there and telling a side of his story that I was aware of, but had never really seen in the mainstream on how they were trying to set him up by handing him 10 grand. And luckily he was smart enough to hand it to his lawyer and say, yeah, I don't know what's going on with this, but I'm not taking that across the border.

Gene 25:33

hmm. Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 25:35

when he landed in Dulles, they were searching his bags and doing everything, trying to find the 10 grand. And

Gene 25:39

What?

Dude Named Ben 25:40

yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there was lots of bits like that that came out. But what struck me about

Gene 25:46

I have not heard of this.

Dude Named Ben 25:48

so I had heard some of this, but I had never again seen it on the mainstream.

Gene 25:53

Hmm.

Dude Named Ben 25:54

It goes to that. We are in a season of revealing idea and that the tides are turning

Gene 26:00

You mean Revelation? Yeah,

Dude Named Ben 26:08

but yes, slightly anyway,

Gene 26:11

end times are a turning? Is that what you said? What?

Dude Named Ben 26:15

anyway, it was just very interesting that you're seeing a lot of this play out in the

Gene 26:21

isn't he a Democrat? Isn't he a Democrat?

Dude Named Ben 26:25

What do you mean?

Gene 26:27

Stephanopoulos. Why would he be

Dude Named Ben 26:31

This is the, this is the, the guy who, yes.

Gene 26:34

Yeah, yeah, okay. It's the wrong Greek.

Dude Named Ben 26:38

Yeah, anyway, so anyway, it was just going through all the crossfire hurricane stuff

Gene 26:43

Remember kids, never bring 10, 000 with you across the border without declaring it.

Dude Named Ben 26:47

That or use Bitcoin and your recovery key in your head so that no one can know.

Gene 26:54

Yeah, I meant real money.

Dude Named Ben 26:55

I mean, to me, the utility of Bitcoin, one of the best uses of Bitcoin is crossing international borders with large sums of

Gene 27:02

you're not really bringing 10, 000 because you're going to take a chunk out every time you do a transaction with it.

Dude Named Ben 27:09

Okay, but the whole point is I can dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into a Bitcoin wallet here in the

Gene 27:16

also do a transaction while you're traveling to your bank through a wire transfer, and you don't have to carry anything with you.

Dude Named Ben 27:26

Yes, but there's, government can stop that.

Gene 27:31

Okay, sure, if you're a known narco, I guess, sure. I

Dude Named Ben 27:37

I mean, I don't know if you've ever tried to transfer large sums of money, like even between IRAs and everything else, but it, it's a process, man.

Gene 27:46

mean, I've done wires for 180, 000. That's never, never had any hiccups at all. Usually takes about an hour, but

Dude Named Ben 27:55

Are you talking from a business transfer or a personal account

Gene 27:58

No, business is business, obviously.

Dude Named Ben 28:00

business to business is very different. Than an individual

Gene 28:06

Man, don't be discriminatory. Businesses are individuals.

Dude Named Ben 28:10

uhhuh anyway. The other funny thing did you actually watch the Acorn B COP videos? Uhhuh?

Gene 28:17

Yeah! I was the one who posted it originally. you, you watched it on Twitter after I posted it.

Dude Named Ben 28:25

no. I actually saw it on YouTube on the original stuff.

Gene 28:30

Oh, okay. That, yeah, you must have gotten that recommendation because I watched it.

Dude Named Ben 28:35

Regardless, it was just hilarious in so many ways, but in

Gene 28:39

It was disturbing, but hilarious, yes.

Dude Named Ben 28:41

Yeah, I, I mean, it, it, it's one of those things that you watch and you go, oh my God, this is real. This is not Reno. 9 1,

Gene 28:49

Exactly. It looks totally like redone 9 1 1. This man literally does a roll. In fact

Dude Named Ben 28:57

two combat

Gene 28:58

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 28:58

Two. Two, not just one.

Gene 29:01

And I think in the process of doing the combat rolls there was a, like a pebble on the road or something that pressed into his back, making him yell, I got shot, I got shot. Man down.

Dude Named Ben 29:12

Let's back up, because if you watch the full video, not just the cut videos on that a lot of people are watching, which is just the action scenes, but if you watch the full body cam footage, they roll up, this girl is saying he's threatened me, he's Said this, that, and the other. And she says, I know he has a gun. Where would the gun be usually be in his vehicle? His vehicle's not here. So all this is establishing, Oh, this guy's a bad guy and he wants to beat up his girlfriend and he has a weapon and therefore he's a danger and not a terroristic threats, yada, yada, yada. But they pat him down

Gene 29:47

Right.

Dude Named Ben 29:48

in the cop that screams and does all this is one of the cops that pats him down and puts him in literally put him in the cruiser handcuffed. Buckled into the cruiser,

Gene 30:00

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 30:00

here's the acorn, hit the roof of the car, Screenshots fired, does the combat roles, act like he's hit, And empties a magazine into the vehicle.

Gene 30:12

Two, two magazines. Because he, he does his magazine change, so he, and he should literally just shooting at his own Coptic vehicle

Dude Named Ben 30:23

With the guy in it.

Gene 30:25

with the, with the Yeah. Guy who's a prisoner, apprehended. In the back of the vehicle with handcuffs on and he's shooting at that vehicle.

Dude Named Ben 30:34

And given what this guy was accused of, and everything else, I hope he walks away a millionaire after this.

Gene 30:42

The fact that he never got hit is a

Dude Named Ben 30:45

Oh, he did. He did. If you read

Gene 30:47

they said that, they said nobody was hurt in the video.

Dude Named Ben 30:49

Yeah he, he was, it wasn't bad and he was able to be okay. He, he, he survived,

Gene 30:56

Okay. If he got hit, yeah, he's going to be a millionaire.

Dude Named Ben 30:59

he should absolutely be a millionaire. And quite frankly, the two officers. So the partner runs in and goes where.

Gene 31:08

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 31:08

Over there, and just starts emptying without being able to identify a target or anything.

Gene 31:13

Yeah. It's just the car, the car shot him. Shoot the car.

Dude Named Ben 31:17

Dude, I don't know about you, but this gave me a lot of hope that if we ever have to fight the cops, it's gonna go pretty well on

Gene 31:25

There's been a lot of incidents like that though. That maybe this would have been probably 15 years ago, maybe 20 now. There was an incident in New York where there was five cops that emptied a total of 65 rounds at a perp and not a single one hit him. I mean, they, it was insane. It's like, how can you shoot this many times and not randomly have one actually hit the guy?

Dude Named Ben 31:55

No, it's insane.

Gene 31:56

yeah, there, there's lots of stuff. Now this does not take the cake for the worst. And it's probably the worst this year. There was one last year that was way worse though, which was when cops pulled a woman over for DWI offense.

Dude Named Ben 32:14

Mm hmm.

Gene 32:15

Arrested her, put her in the cop car. The cop car was behind her car

Dude Named Ben 32:23

yeah. On the

Gene 32:24

tracks. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 32:26

Yeah. Yeah, I saw that one

Gene 32:27

So you have a woman who is literally sitting And can't get out of the vehicle on the train tracks as the cops are talking amongst themselves not paying attention to the fact that there's a train coming and the fact that she survives. It's a miracle.

Dude Named Ben 32:45

Oh yeah, and those cops, again,

Gene 32:48

They're murdered. They should have. They should have been arrested for murder, frankly.

Dude Named Ben 32:53

attempted, yeah, because she survived attempted, yeah.

Gene 32:58

Yeah

Dude Named Ben 32:59

I mean, I really think we need to end qualified immunity.

Gene 33:03

absolutely.

Dude Named Ben 33:04

a lot of reasons, but the fact that

Gene 33:06

defund. The police is what we need to do.

Dude Named Ben 33:08

And the fact that again,

Gene 33:12

the thing. If the population was armed, we would not need the police.

Dude Named Ben 33:17

I think we would need the police a lot less. Yes. I, I still think you need a sheriff or someone to execute warrants and the will of a jury,

Gene 33:27

Sure. That's fine. I'm okay with that. But what you don't need is these Yehoos, who I've talked about in the past, whose personality profile is identical to criminals because the only difference between them and a criminal is that they're wearing a badge.

Dude Named Ben 33:45

ultimately, and, you know, I have family that are in law enforcement and that have been in law enforcement, but what I'll say is, yeah, There are no such thing as good cops because the cop has either seen something that violates their morals, has ignored it or participated in it.

Gene 34:04

Mm hmm. Yeah. And the cop unions ensure that that's going to happen.

Dude Named Ben 34:09

well, and then what do you do? You can't, if you're a moral

Gene 34:13

Then you can't be a

Dude Named Ben 34:15

person, you can't be a cop, you have to stop, you have to quit. So if you stay in law enforcement, any amount of time. I gotta think you're morally compromising yourself. Maybe you think you're good and they're bad or whatever,

Gene 34:27

The

Dude Named Ben 34:27

there and tolerating it at the very

Gene 34:29

the incidents of spousal abuse amongst police is like three X of what the normal population is.

Dude Named Ben 34:36

Yeah. I sent you that meme about the cop that says I'm not racist. My wife's eye is black.

Gene 34:42

I did not see that. That's

Dude Named Ben 34:44

I totally

Gene 34:45

Cause it's true. That's why it's hilarious. Cause it's true. Yeah. Wow.

Dude Named Ben 34:51

We've got some lawyers in the audience that are very anti cop that we get along with well, so it's okay.

Gene 34:58

I don't know if I can't imagine anybody who's pro cop that would be listening to this.

Dude Named Ben 35:04

Mmm. I don't know.

Gene 35:07

It's, it's really hard to imagine because, I mean, everybody's pro fireman because firemen come in to save people's lives and put out fires. There's, there's not a bad thing that they do. You, I guess you could argue they make calendars. That's probably the worst thing that firemen do. But

Dude Named Ben 35:27

and drink a lot.

Gene 35:28

I don't care about that.

Dude Named Ben 35:31

I don't either. Yeah.

Gene 35:32

they can be fucking their sisters for all I care. Hey, it's a fireman. It's a good person.

Dude Named Ben 35:39

Oh, it's good

Gene 35:40

What they do in behind closed doors

Dude Named Ben 35:42

episodes.

Gene 35:44

it's, it's totally their own thing. Yeah yeah, we're gonna have to put a disclaimer there. Remember kids, we do not give sex advice on this show.

Dude Named Ben 35:52

Yeah, remember kids I don't have a sister. Gene does.

Gene 35:58

True, true story. Yeah, but she's way too old for me.

Dude Named Ben 36:04

Now,

Gene 36:05

better. That makes it better. So I think, I think what we need to do is come up with some some topics for this year because I, here's the thing now that I'm kind of bouncing three podcasts around, I, I'm trying to

Dude Named Ben 36:22

remember what, what

Gene 36:23

Yeah, exactly. I'm thinking who the, who did I talk to about what? And it's easy with Darren, I think for the most part, because we just talk about nothing. It's it's usually Taylor Swift.

Dude Named Ben 36:37

Yeah, there's a lot of

Gene 36:38

There's a lot of Taylor Swift conversation. It's either me making fun of Taylor Swift or Darren you know, fawning all over her. And I, I love incidentally that that picture of a plush truck. With the rainbow truck. Yeah, that was like all plushy.

Dude Named Ben 36:55

too

Gene 36:56

is what Taylor Swift and fans who are men drive. Yeah, I think it's fairly accurate. But yeah, somebody mentioned as far as Taylor Swift is that she seems to have figured out how to target a demographic that a lot of college men would like to start targeting. Or maybe I shouldn't even go to college. A lot of high school men would like to target. Which is women from 16 to 24 who all seem to be just following her like they're in a cult.

Dude Named Ben 37:33

Yeah cool. I don't really care about Taylor Swift, to be

Gene 37:37

Yeah she's gonna get Biden reelected.

Dude Named Ben 37:39

We'll see.

Gene 37:40

You know, those people

Dude Named Ben 37:41

I don't think very much is going to get Biden elected. In fact, I see nothing but evidence of them going to either remove him or make him look so inept that they guarantee Trump's win. If you, I sent you the daily

Gene 37:57

But they don't need to remove

Dude Named Ben 37:59

watch the Daily Show?

Gene 38:01

No.

Dude Named Ben 38:02

You didn't watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Gene 38:05

No, it's a, it's a fucking liberal show, man.

Dude Named Ben 38:07

You should watch, yeah, you should watch it because A, he ripped Biden a new one. He also ripped on Trump, but he ripped Biden a new one. And one of the reporters at the end, I'm going to spoil it, was wearing a Joe Biden for President shirt, but that looks Velcroed on. What is that? What's underneath there? And it was Taylor Swift for President.

Gene 38:27

oh, that's hilarious.

Dude Named Ben 38:28

linked it all in, you really should watch that first segment on the elections.

Gene 38:34

Yeah, she's

Dude Named Ben 38:34

know how old she is, but regardless, you should Huh?

Gene 38:38

she's 33,

Dude Named Ben 38:40

Oh, she misses the cycle by one.

Gene 38:44

yeah,

Dude Named Ben 38:44

Because if she was thirty five, you know, thirty

Gene 38:47

might run against Vivek Ramaswamy at some point.

Dude Named Ben 38:51

Hey, that would be hilarious.

Gene 38:53

She's a very popular female and Vivek only got five percent.

Dude Named Ben 38:58

Yeah. So anyway the, the daily show, that first episode, at least the first part was worth watching. I didn't want to watch it, but a friend of mine was like, no, you have to watch it. I did. And it was worth watching. Good for him.

Gene 39:15

Yeah, I mean, that show really kind of festered without Jon Stewart at the helm.

Dude Named Ben 39:21

Yeah. Yeah. And they,

Gene 39:23

I think he needed

Dude Named Ben 39:24

self aware jokes on that too,

Gene 39:26

But I think he needed to take time off. It's kind of like, there's a point where if you're constantly on for years and years and years No, South Park is still very relevant. I

Dude Named Ben 39:38

Yeah. But South Park took the break during the pandemic kind of thing.

Gene 39:42

I was thinking, I was thinking more like Larry King because you know, after Larry King left the Larry King show on CNN after 20 some years, maybe 30 years for all I remember. But it didn't take him very long. It took him like three, four years off and he had basically the Larry King show on RT. And I think had he immediately gone from CNN to RT, I don't think that his show would have lasted, like people wouldn't have watched at all. If you're gone for a while, then coming back gets people interested in watching you again. plus Stuart is coming back after a bunch of really crappy hosts were on. And so it just makes him look that much better. Which I think he is a pretty good host. He's fairly quick witted. I think he's wrong about a lot of political things, but he, he is quick witted. Mm

Dude Named Ben 40:39

You know, he, he's, he's definitely got some good writers and has some good writers that work with him and I'm sure that he is highly involved in some of the joke crafting process because you can see a large difference between him and other people. So that's a good thing. But yeah, it was just interesting to see him come back and take a swing at. Biden based off of his age and mental faculties immediately. Literally the first segment he does as his return to the show.

Gene 41:11

is that,

Dude Named Ben 41:12

Yeah. So that to me is if I'm reading the tea leaves is politically significant. Cause he doesn't do that without permission from the DNC.

Gene 41:19

If this was back in the day, then Saturday Night Live would have been making fun of Biden.

Dude Named Ben 41:25

Okay. But no one is, and no one's going to do that without permission right now. Or they're going to get canceled and

Gene 41:32

Yeah. But I I remember Saturday Night Live making fun of Carter back in the late seventies.

Dude Named Ben 41:39

Okay I mean, that's like shooting, you know, that's like shooting a baby duck in a pond, dude. It's just a target rich

Gene 41:47

I don't know, man, compared to Biden, Carter is more of a statesman.

Dude Named Ben 41:53

Ugh,

Gene 41:55

It's not saying much at all about either one of them, but

Dude Named Ben 41:58

I mean, as someone who's from the South and has the same major in college as him,

Gene 42:06

What, peanut farming? Were you a peanut farmer too?

Dude Named Ben 42:09

was a physics major, dude.

Gene 42:11

Yeah, but he was a peanut farmer.

Dude Named Ben 42:13

Okay anyway, I like I like peanuts. Especially boiled ones.

Gene 42:21

Huh.

Dude Named Ben 42:21

I do,

Gene 42:23

What's with all the peanut allergies with the kids? It can't be random. It's gotta be

Dude Named Ben 42:28

Over vaccination,

Gene 42:30

I think so.

Dude Named Ben 42:31

Yeah, I mean it over

Gene 42:33

in other countries don't have these allergies that people in the US have.

Dude Named Ben 42:36

So autoimmune one of the, so if you do any research and you go down the, the rabbit hole on this, you come to one of two conclusions, a it's, it's gotta be something environmental and vaccination certainly seems to be a possible thing, whether people want to admit it or not the fact that you're introducing things that Overload your immune system potentially and cause this autoimmune reaction, which is what an allergy is.

Gene 43:05

Yeah

Dude Named Ben 43:05

but if you, if you stop and break there and go, okay, let's look at autoimmune syndromes more holistically as a category across the entire spectrum of age and everything. The developed world as a whole, it has far more autoimmune disorders than, than the developing

Gene 43:26

Yeah. Mhm.

Dude Named Ben 43:29

Maybe our immune systems are quite frankly just bored because we live in a very clean environment and there's not enough to fucking do so it turns on itself. That is a possibility because kids don't eat dirt anymore. Kids don't go out and get dirty, eat mud pies, play, do lots of shit that they shouldn't do. Kids, kids aren't wormed anymore. And when my parents were in school, that was a regular thing because they were exposed enough to worms that that was a necessity, not just a, Oh, we're going to do it.

Gene 43:58

mean dewormed, yeah.

Dude Named Ben 44:00

Yeah, that's my point. Yeah. Wormed as in removed. You know, we,

Gene 44:04

I think it's called dewormed.

Dude Named Ben 44:07

okay. Anyway, my, my point is you, you have this massive shift in literally a generation. From, you know, from my parents to my kids of their exposure rates. Now, my kids go out, play, jump in muddy puddles, do all sorts of stuff. You know, my daughter will feed the dog ice cream and then take a lick off of it and go back and forth. It's Oh God, don't do that. But at the same time, you know what?

Gene 44:38

They say dogs are super clean.

Dude Named Ben 44:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah, huh, sure. I've seen him lick his butthole. I'm not, I

Gene 44:47

Yeah, I don't know. I, I would prefer not to kiss a dog either.

Dude Named Ben 44:51

Think it's gross, but whatever.

Gene 44:53

yeah, it's a little gross. But, at the same time, but except for puppies. I mean, if you ever pick up and smell a puppy, they just smell

Dude Named Ben 45:00

They, puppies stink.

Gene 45:03

No they don't. Puppies have this sweet kind of

Dude Named Ben 45:06

No, puppy breath is just disgusting. Anyway,

Gene 45:11

Puppy breath.

Dude Named Ben 45:12

oh Jesus. Anyway, the, the point is that there's, there is something in our society that is making us and our kids sick and whether it's the increased vaccines or increased cleanliness and less exposure to things you know, it's all all problematic and we need to we need to figure out what it is.

Gene 45:33

Yeah. I, I totally agree. Not a whole lot more I would add. I just, it always amazed me how many people have allergies in the U. S. and it's something that you know, I was born in Russia and I was, grew up there as a little kid and nobody I knew had any allergies at all to anything. And if somebody had an allergy, it was considered like, oh, that's a diseased person. And then again, nobody had depression either. So yeah, go figure. When you, when life is hard, you don't have time to be depressed.

Dude Named Ben 46:11

Yeah, you, you have to deal with it or, you know,

Gene 46:14

You got real

Dude Named Ben 46:15

you commit suicide and you're no longer depressed. So there's

Gene 46:19

Yeah. Suicide is for rich people. Normal working class. People don't have time to commit suicide. You're too busy working. This is, this is the issue is that A lot of these, I think mental related issues are the result of similarly to living in too clean an environment are the result of living in too easy a lifestyle society. It's when you have time for introspection and thinking about I could be happier. I, you know, I don't feel like I'm totally fulfilled. Let's see if the doctor has any drugs for me.

Dude Named Ben 46:58

There is that

Gene 46:59

do you think people are in Ethiopia?

Dude Named Ben 47:02

I'm sure there's a lot of people that are depressed,

Gene 47:05

No, they're all dead.

Dude Named Ben 47:06

That, or they're depressed and just dealing with it like most people

Gene 47:10

Yeah. Yeah, at least to men. Yeah, I, I just think that a lot of these things that we've been seeing, if the US keeps going down the path that it seems to be going down politically they're gonna self regulate themselves out as the quality of life gets worse and worse.

Dude Named Ben 47:28

and you know, so I started a new book series that I sent you. Yeah, I finished the other one and started, and I'm already almost done with book three.

Gene 47:37

One's that?

Dude Named Ben 47:38

The American Apocalypse, it's only a four book series I sent it to you.

Gene 47:42

yeah, yeah.

Dude Named Ben 47:44

Anyway there is a character in there that's, you know, made their way through life through antidepressants and those are no longer available.

Gene 47:53

Yep.

Dude Named Ben 47:54

Oh, that's

Gene 47:55

You know, that's a good point. I, that's something that the American dude didn't really cover is all the people that take drugs on a regular basis for things like depression or, you know, I mean, you name it. There's a whole

Dude Named Ben 48:13

kind of covered it more with Diabetes, and he covers more of that in the Charlies series.

Gene 48:19

Yeah, it's still not that much. I mean, I'm, I'm on book four of that right now.

Dude Named Ben 48:24

Okay.

Gene 48:26

And it's, it's does seem to be turning into an interesting series. It had a kind of, definitely a kind of a, boy, I don't know if I want to call it a slow start because it was a very aggressive start, but it, it, it has multiple plot lines that took a while to develop, I feel.

Dude Named Ben 48:44

Charlies is much more a la Game of Thrones type narrative

Gene 48:48

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's not just following one character. And that's it, which for the most part, the narrator character in the first series is the guy we're introduced to at the beginning of the first book.

Dude Named Ben 49:02

Yeah, there's some plotline deviation there, but yes, this is, there are multiple parallel plots going on that all link together, which is much

Gene 49:12

chapters could be in different people's voices. So still recommending people read that and now it should be done with book five is the last one, right?

Dude Named Ben 49:22

For now, yeah.

Gene 49:23

Yep, so I should be done with that soon. Maybe I'll start your series. Although, I still really want to just read some good sci fi.

Dude Named Ben 49:31

I mean, this is sci fi in a way. It's post apocalyptic.

Gene 49:35

I mean, space shit.

Dude Named Ben 49:36

Yeah whatever. I I don't know why I've been on H h have you read Red Rising?

Gene 49:43

No, I don't think so.

Dude Named Ben 49:44

There you go. There's your space shit to read. Red

Gene 49:47

Oh, okay.

Dude Named Ben 49:48

Yeah, Red Rising

Gene 49:49

It sounds familiar. I think you made me buy it already, so I'm pretty sure I own it.

Dude Named Ben 49:53

The first book is it's it's in two trilogies. The first trilogy is very good. The second trilogy, book two, kinda lost me and I didn't finish, and I haven't finished the second trilogy yet. I will probably go back to it, because I hear that, oh, he pulls it out and it's really good and it's all worth it, da da da,

Gene 50:15

The, the, the

Dude Named Ben 50:16

But the first one is awesome.

Gene 50:18

That I was thinking of starting, cause I already bought it, is the second one after Altered Carbon.

Dude Named Ben 50:26

Mm. Mm hmm. Mm

Gene 50:27

Cause I liked the first one.

Dude Named Ben 50:29

hmm. Eh, I didn't like it very much, but, go ahead.

Gene 50:32

Hm. Did you watch the TV show at all?

Dude Named Ben 50:34

I did.

Gene 50:36

What did you think of the TV show?

Dude Named Ben 50:38

Eh.

Gene 50:39

Yeah? I don't know, I liked the book it's, it, it, I felt like it definitely tried a little too hard to be a 1930s detective novel. Like kind of like characters were little vignettes of gruffness and stuff the women are all dames and the men are all you

Dude Named Ben 51:01

Yeah, it's just a stupid premise to me, though.

Gene 51:05

Altered carbon really like that you could transfer a person from body to body We're literally on the verge of doing that right now.

Dude Named Ben 51:13

I do not think so at all.

Gene 51:15

You just keep watching What Elon's doing?

Dude Named Ben 51:17

Huh. Yeah, memory engrams and being able to

Gene 51:20

Mm hmm Mm hmm. I

Dude Named Ben 51:24

human brain is not a fucking hard drive. It is not something you can just re write and easily do. Literally you're talking about n nerve pathways that have to be generated. It's, anyway, it, we're a long way away from that. But, regardless of that one thing I do want to talk about and bring up so you sent me a video of a sheriff kind of calling Gloom and Doom. You want to talk about what that video was since you sent it? And then I want to tie it into a couple other

Gene 51:54

it was the Ohio Sheriff dude, right?

Dude Named Ben 51:56

Yeah, it was Ohio, but it was a lot of different sheriffs across the nation that went to this event. And came back telling the same story.

Gene 52:03

Yeah. I wish I would have rewatched it before you asked me that. But, but, but basic I guess I'll start summarizing. You jump in from what you saw in it. But the sheriff basically is saying that the federal government, the current administration. Does not want to give them the time of day. They don't want to meet with sheriffs. They don't want to interact with sheriffs They don't want to take suggestions from sheriffs. They're they're basically Treating the country as though it's it's a completely federal How do I phrase it like? Local shit doesn't matter. It's a the federal government is the only thing that's important.

Dude Named Ben 52:45

Yeah, the takeaway that I had and what I'm going to tie it into is he got scared shitless in a lot of FUD. fear and certainty and doubt about China hacking and hacking local governments and they're getting hacked several thousand times a day.

Gene 53:01

Oh, yeah. Yeah

Dude Named Ben 53:02

Shit like that. Okay. So he, he was told in this briefing that, you know, they got to prepare and we got to figure it out and we got to figure out how to do drones. We got to figure out how to do this. Like very, oh, it's, it, the federal government's not going to help us. It's on us. We got to figure this out. Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Hold up there. Some friends of mine,

Gene 53:23

They finally found the video

Dude Named Ben 53:25

so some friends of mine were called to a hearing by the Homeland Security chair.

Gene 53:31

as feds are, go ahead.

Dude Named Ben 53:33

two people, no, these are private individuals that own businesses. Thank you. I knew 2 of the 3 witnesses in this and I put a post up on my website about it, but Homeland Security chair wanted to talk about do a deep dive into operational technology in the water sector

Gene 53:51

Hmm

Dude Named Ben 53:52

and. It was so much fucking FUD from the congressmen. One guy was talking about AI and this, that, and the other and just being a complete moron. But they, they kept hammering on Volt Typhoon.

Gene 54:08

Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.

Dude Named Ben 54:10

Attributing it to China. Attribution is very difficult.

Gene 54:16

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 54:17

WikiLeaks Vault 7, which a lot of these guys that are talking about attribution aren't allowed to read,

Gene 54:24

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 54:25

attribution even harder. But here's the thing. The sheriff was talking about China, and, you know, he specifically brought up China in his rant.

Gene 54:38

He did.

Dude Named Ben 54:39

This is bringing up China all the time. It's worth people going and looking. And then CISA just the other day put out another statement that tied back to the sheriff's comments about China or well, hacking of local state and local and state governments. But the interesting thing is, and CISA has been very bad about. And allowing others to, if someone else gives any attribution, they will report it without necessarily endorsing it. And what I find very interesting is we have the Sheriff saying this publicly. We have testimony in Congress about similar items. And then we have CESA putting out this new thing about state and local governments, including water utilities and everything, being targeted by this threat actor. And then there's no attribution.

Gene 55:36

Right. Right.

Dude Named Ben 55:37

interesting, but

Gene 55:40

Yeah. It's attribution is bullshit. I think I had a bumper sticker that said that

Dude Named Ben 55:45

but, but we, but we have several scenarios. We have it where they are almost gleefully doing it and just saying, oh yeah, no, we, we know who it is. How dare you question our our findings on attribution. No, it's obvious who it is. I mean, the arrogance that some of these

Gene 56:04

Oh, it, it's, it's the same arrogance that said Ukraine has been winning the war for the last two years. It, it is, it is just,

Dude Named Ben 56:14

why did they suddenly stop? Why did they suddenly put out this new notice

Gene 56:19

yeah.

Dude Named Ben 56:21

that they've been building up to say, Oh, China, China, China, China, and then no attribution?

Gene 56:27

Yeah. I, I think that there's a. There's a point at which just blaming China for everything is going to start backfiring. And maybe they've hit that point where it's no longer as beneficial to create attributions. I don't want to say they're actually attributing, they're creating attributions to China. You know, if you, if you listen to what a lot of the agencies, the federal government are saying, About hacking related activities. First of all, they're calling port scans hacking, but which is like 99 percent of everything they're reporting. The, the other thing is you would think that there are no American hackers at all. There are no kids that just want to fuck around and play and see what's out there because everything is either attributed to Russia or China. That's like the old or Iran or Iran, Iran, China, and Russia. That's where all the hackers live.

Dude Named Ben 57:31

yeah, I got to tell you, there are a lot of open proxies in Russia, not so much China, but

Gene 57:37

Hmm. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 57:39

just saying,

Gene 57:40

My VPN

Dude Named Ben 57:41

I've ever used one or anything.

Gene 57:43

Yeah. It's a, if you want to watch programming that isn't available in the U S you can VPN into Russia.

Dude Named Ben 57:51

I'm not even talking about a VPN, but yes.

Gene 57:54

Right. But my point is that they're like saying that a certain set of IP addresses are within a certain country. Is not the same as knowing who perpetrated a particular action. And, and most of the time that's all they're looking at.

Dude Named Ben 58:13

no, no, no so what, what the, what the threat intelligence analysts will tell you is no, no, we, we look at lots of things. We look at the time of day things happen. Oh, okay. Yeah, because that's, you know,

Gene 58:26

Okay so basically

Dude Named Ben 58:27

happening nine to five Moscow time, that's an indication that it's Russians.

Gene 58:31

or

Dude Named Ben 58:32

No.

Gene 58:33

kids at night, which is usually what happens.

Dude Named Ben 58:36

Yeah. Anyway, I, I'm just telling you what they do. Oh, we, we see letters that are associated with a Cyrillic keyboard.

Gene 58:42

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 58:43

Oh, we see this and we build this pick and I have no doubt that people can identify a group and their activity based off of commonality of what's happening. Meaning I can say there is a group A that acts like this and there's a group B that acts like this. That I absolutely believe you can do. I think you can say, Group A, whoever the fuck they are, cause we don't know, Group A has done these things based off of, we see these similarities in the behavior. That you can do with some confidence. Fine. Now to say, Group A is Russian, and Group B is Chinese, Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit,

Gene 59:25

but even the group thing, I mean, it's one of the things

Dude Named Ben 59:28

group thing is about as nebulous as you can get, is my

Gene 59:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's one of the useful things in the dark web is that there are huge repositories, including training videos on hacking. So you can learn that you, you gotta get that first step down on your own is like how to actually be able to access stuff in the dark web. Once you do that there's a bunch of friendly, helpful people. And videos and documents that will help you learn the rest of it. And it's you know, having been around back in the old days of the internet where there, there was no help and you had to figure shit out on your own, it is much easier these days to learn all about penetration hacking and where to get the newest root kits and everything else. I mean the kids just have it

Dude Named Ben 1:00:25

didn't have to tie it back to the first story. Yeah. Yeah,

Gene 1:00:32

I'm, I'm just grousing about age, you know, that's the main point. The main point is the kids have it easy. That's the main point. And that's why they're all allergic to everything.

Dude Named Ben 1:00:45

back in my day.

Gene 1:00:47

Back in my day, damn straight, when we drank water from a garden hose. Mm

Dude Named Ben 1:00:51

you, yeah. Back in my day, we had www. squat. You

Gene 1:00:59

Exactly.

Dude Named Ben 1:01:01

know, drinking water from a water hose, again, I think is a perfect example of shit that modern parents would never let their kids do because, oh, it's dangerous, and

Gene 1:01:11

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:01:12

good God, what is wrong with you?

Gene 1:01:15

Yeah. Yeah. Now, having said all that. I don't fucking drink water from the kitchen faucet.

Dude Named Ben 1:01:23

Eh.

Gene 1:01:23

Fluoride bullshit in my brain.

Dude Named Ben 1:01:26

I mean,

Gene 1:01:26

Even though we're not, Austin's no longer fluoridated, but

Dude Named Ben 1:01:29

a lot of, very few municipalities in Texas have ever fluoridated their water

Gene 1:01:35

from what I read, Austin didn't until two years ago.

Dude Named Ben 1:01:38

Oh, okay.

Gene 1:01:41

But I just,

Dude Named Ben 1:01:42

even DFW area didn't.

Gene 1:01:44

No, I believe that. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:01:46

yeah. I yeah, I, I filter my water you know, largely because my fridge has a built in filter. But

Gene 1:01:52

Which I would not trust. That's, those are bullshit.

Dude Named Ben 1:01:55

Actually, some of them are pretty good.

Gene 1:01:58

Mmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:01:59

where you get them and what you do. I mean, they've got some good

Gene 1:02:02

the only filter I

Dude Named Ben 1:02:03

some money on them, but

Gene 1:02:04

osmosis. Anything else is bullshit.

Dude Named Ben 1:02:07

Oh, God no, I've got big Berkies that are fantastic. You're wrong

Gene 1:02:12

I, you need to watch some videos, my friend. Berkeys are total bullshit. They don't filter for nearly the stuff that they claim to.

Dude Named Ben 1:02:22

Okay.

Gene 1:02:24

But, ultimately, all of it is total bullshit, because the only way to get clean water is through distillation. You have pure, clean water.

Dude Named Ben 1:02:35

Yeah,

Gene 1:02:36

No viruses, no bacteria, and I've been drinking nothing but distilled water for over a decade now.

Dude Named Ben 1:02:42

Huh. And you're the picture of health. Yep.

Gene 1:02:48

when you drink clean water, you're healthy as a pig. In mud

Dude Named Ben 1:02:53

I, I, I think the big Berkey's are fantastic. Actually, I've used them

Gene 1:02:58

they're not, that's the thing dude is like, what basis do you have to say that? What, what qualifies you to test water? First of all, and how often have you tested them for a variety of chemicals?

Dude Named Ben 1:03:12

I haven't worried about doing a lot of the chemical tests. I will say that the Berkey filtering that I do is the charcoal filter on top and the ceramic filter on

Gene 1:03:24

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:03:24

It's the, you know, heavier duty filter set. And I have tested parts per million, which is a drastic reduction and beats a lot of other filters out there.

Gene 1:03:37

Both true statements. I don't dispute either one of those

Dude Named Ben 1:03:40

Yeah,

Gene 1:03:41

for the cost. They, they talk about doing way more than they actually do.

Dude Named Ben 1:03:46

so I will say I, you know, chemical removal, maybe. I haven't taken a water sample

Gene 1:03:54

For what you pay for a Berkey, you could buy a reverse osmosis system,

Dude Named Ben 1:03:59

I don't like

Gene 1:04:00

which will literally filter to a molecular level.

Dude Named Ben 1:04:03

Yeah, and there, there are so many issues with reverse osmosis though. The waste

Gene 1:04:08

Okay, you want to qualify that statement? Oh my god, the waste,

Dude Named Ben 1:04:14

of issues

Gene 1:04:15

Who cares about the waste?

Dude Named Ben 1:04:18

People who have to get rid of the brine. And

Gene 1:04:21

that would be the municipal water system.

Dude Named Ben 1:04:25

Any, anyway, if you're, there are issues with the reverse osmosis as a filtration method, and we'll just leave it at that. I

Gene 1:04:35

because you don't know what they are, you're just full of

Dude Named Ben 1:04:36

for one. So

Gene 1:04:38

Does not require power at all. Nope.

Dude Named Ben 1:04:42

Okay. How are you going to do it without

Gene 1:04:44

Water pressure.

Dude Named Ben 1:04:46

Which requires, which requires.

Gene 1:04:49

require power.

Dude Named Ben 1:04:50

Oh, really?

Gene 1:04:51

Nope.

Dude Named Ben 1:04:53

How does that pressure get generated, Gene? Is there something that violates the laws

Gene 1:04:57

yeah, the water power, the water tower has water that's gravitationally at a higher plane than your house.

Dude Named Ben 1:05:04

Yes, they got up there through an electric pump doing work to set up

Gene 1:05:08

some point, something obviously put an energy into it. Sure. Doesn't have to be electricity.

Dude Named Ben 1:05:16

yeah, so what I'm saying is a standalone reverse osmosis system isn't a thing. There has to be some sort of energy, either you have a pump priming and forcing it through, or water pressure can potentially force it through if that exists. My point is,

Gene 1:05:30

For the 99. 99 percent of the time that there is pressure in your incoming water lines and you have water to be able to pull out of there, you can have reverse osmosis working without any electricity to your house. If you're talking about emergency scenarios where you can't have, yeah, and I agree, you can't do reverse osmosis if you don't have energy in your house.

Dude Named Ben 1:05:55

Now I will say, at my river property where we have a where we have a artesian well that has pretty good pressure coming out of it, We could definitely set up a RO system.

Gene 1:06:08

With literally nothing.

Dude Named Ben 1:06:10

pretty much. Yeah.

Gene 1:06:11

That would be cool. You have a property with a fucking artesian well? That's cool as fuck.

Dude Named Ben 1:06:17

Okay. I'm sorry.

Gene 1:06:18

No, they're rare, man. At least in my experience. Usually you just have to drill a well and then have a pump.

Dude Named Ben 1:06:24

Property is below Toledo Bend on Sabine River, which is between. Texas and Louisiana, it's actually the border between Texas and Louisiana, but to lead a bend is upstream of us and it's the, I mean, it's an 80 mile long lake. So the amount of head pressure that that like puts on the water table and everything else is tremendous. Now, this is good, deep well water, but it's still putting water pressure on artesian wells. They are not naturally formed. If that lake were to go away, first

Gene 1:07:00

That there'd be no

Dude Named Ben 1:07:01

my property's gone, but the artesian would likely go away,

Gene 1:07:05

Now it's an actual riverfront property or not.

Dude Named Ben 1:07:09

yes, I have riverfront property.

Gene 1:07:11

Oh, you do. Okay. So then you would have more property if the water went away.

Dude Named Ben 1:07:18

But

Gene 1:07:18

Cause usually your property line goes to the middle of the lake, but, but it's by use of the government, if it's underwater. So if it dries

Dude Named Ben 1:07:28

so my, I'm not on the lake, I'm on the river,

Gene 1:07:31

okay. All right.

Dude Named Ben 1:07:32

and anyway, we, we've got some, you know, property down there that's, that's neat,

Gene 1:07:38

hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:07:38

But yeah, I always thought about si

Gene 1:07:40

there?

Dude Named Ben 1:07:40

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gene 1:07:42

Oh, cool, dude. Let's do a gator hunt.

Dude Named Ben 1:07:44

We can talk about that offline, but getting a tag is a pain in the ass,

Gene 1:07:48

Is it really?

Dude Named Ben 1:07:49

through the

Gene 1:07:49

I would think it wouldn't be that hard in Louisiana, or at least in, or in Texas near Louisiana. Hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:07:55

We can walk you through the process.

Gene 1:07:56

I mean, I think gators are really cool animals, but they also taste good.

Dude Named Ben 1:08:01

Mm hmm. They do. They really do. Yeah. But anyway the artesian I've thought about also looking at using it for, in a shit hit the fan scenario, for generating hydroelectric power, which it produces enough that I could produce just under a kilowatt.

Gene 1:08:19

Pretty cool.

Dude Named Ben 1:08:20

yeah, pretty consistently now that would require violating a lot of laws and dumping groundwater into the river. But. And I should hit the fan scenario. Do I

Gene 1:08:30

Where, where's it going now?

Dude Named Ben 1:08:32

It's capped right now.

Gene 1:08:33

Oh, it's capped. Okay. Okay.

Dude Named Ben 1:08:36

So it's only when we're using it.

Gene 1:08:37

Got it. Got it. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:08:39

there, there were other wells. So this property is kind of interesting because we're down in this river basin that FEMA has given the county grants to buy back the land and return it to the wild. And we're 1 of very few landowners still in Wisconsin. Down there that, you know, hold the land and haven't let it go back to the county or FEMA and they make it hell on you down there. Trust me, because they want you out of there. But, you know, there have been multiple wells that over time have degraded and started running and. They've done nothing about it, even though it's a, it's a major environmental issue because it's, you know, water just running out on the ground, creating a new pond and shit like that. That was never there

Gene 1:09:27

But it would be naturally anyway, right?

Dude Named Ben 1:09:29

No, no, it wouldn't because the well hadn't been, if the hole hadn't been poked, the water wouldn't be coming out.

Gene 1:09:35

Oh yeah. I guess,

Dude Named Ben 1:09:37

anyway yeah, there's just lots of things about that, but Jasper and Newton County are very interesting places politically to say the least.

Gene 1:09:48

yeah. It's most of the artesian wells that I've been, that I've seen. Have been unplugged. So there's always water draining the whole time. Continuously.

Dude Named Ben 1:09:58

Yeah. Anyway, in that case, because of the river level head pressure difference from where the well is to the amount of fall to the river below putting a generator there, the amount of flow we get from the well and doing all the calculations, I, and a decent amount of loss to get everything up, I think I could get right at, you know, right at about probably 700 Watts of

Gene 1:10:24

That's it's free. We'll free power, man.

Dude Named Ben 1:10:27

And if you had a sufficient battery storage system and you just let it run 24 seven, it would be more than enough to run the average home, including AC and everything else.

Gene 1:10:37

You know, I've looked at those battery systems out there and boy, the prices go up fast.

Dude Named Ben 1:10:43

Oh yeah. Lead acid is the most economical.

Gene 1:10:46

Yeah, probably.

Dude Named Ben 1:10:47

You know, everybody wants lithium and this, that, and the other, and that's great for storage density, but I mean, if you're, if you're going to build a big battery array for an off the grid situation, whether it be solar or hydro wind, whatever, if you're, if you're serious about that, you're looking at golf cart batteries or big Marine batteries and that's it. That's what you're doing. Period. That would be dumb, but okay.

Gene 1:11:09

I'll get a Tesla wall. Eh, I don't know. Yeah, that's cool stuff. I I remember very fondly my my great uncle's house in Crimea where he had an artesian well that was Providing water for all the, the grapes, the grape plants. That's very cool.

Dude Named Ben 1:11:32

I thought Crimea was a pretty arid peninsula, and they had to bring in water.

Gene 1:11:37

It's not really tropical for sure. But, I mean, it's mountainous. It's, I remember going hiking on mountains there. But the grapes grow naturally there. It's, it's a, it's very similar to Greece. That's probably the best way to describe the climate.

Dude Named Ben 1:11:55

Okay.

Gene 1:11:56

Just think of a, of a kind of a mountainous Greece.

Dude Named Ben 1:11:59

Greece can be pretty mountainous.

Gene 1:12:01

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Dude Named Ben 1:12:03

I, I like Greece a lot.

Gene 1:12:05

yeah, yeah. And it's you know, the whole region, because you watch that dude that cooks, that, I mean, that's just another side of the, of the, the lake, or the, the sea.

Dude Named Ben 1:12:15

It's on the other side of mountains, but sure.

Gene 1:12:18

Yes, fair enough. But it's on the other side of the, of the sea from Crimea. But it's The whole region is quite mountainous, like the further south you go, the more mountainous it gets, the further east, I should say. You, till you get to the Ural mountain ranges. And then on the, of course, then you start having the the actual Himalayans there as well.

Dude Named Ben 1:12:39

Yeah, and the Caucasus, but yes. So something interesting happened on my website, and I'm trying to figure out what, and I wish I had had better analytics.

Gene 1:12:49

people your URL.

Dude Named Ben 1:12:52

Nametobin. com, so looking at my average traffic numbers, right? And I've got some spikes where I will get, you know, double the average traffic for something here or there. That's, that's somewhat normal, right? You know, I, I'll go from a one to a two that's, or a 2. 5, you know, that, that's, that's the biggest spike I've seen thus far. Yesterday, I went from a baseline of, let's say a one. to a 4. 6.

Gene 1:13:27

Okay. What does that mean?

Dude Named Ben 1:13:29

That's what I'm trying to figure out. Why did that spike? I wish I was tracking things better.

Gene 1:13:36

Did you put up a story that was good?

Dude Named Ben 1:13:39

I yeah, but I don't have per posting stats. I, I ended up installing some to track a little bit better, but just to see, but yeah.

Gene 1:13:50

Yeah. Ben's been putting a bunch of stuff up there, his thoughts and links and whatnot. Are you are you posting links to all your stuff on X? Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:14:02

Ah, some, yeah. Not, not everything. I, I, I don't do well on Twitter or Mastodon. I like Mastodon just because I, it's more of a personal just fuck around thing for me. But I'm, I'm not an influencer poster type person that's gonna drum up my support for my web page or something like that. I just don't do that. I'm not good at it. Don't want to be. And I think we should all be thankful that I don't want to be.

Gene 1:14:27

Ha! Ha!

Dude Named Ben 1:14:28

We did get an email though.

Gene 1:14:32

Yeah? We got a donation too, didn't we?

Dude Named Ben 1:14:34

Yeah, we, we, we did get a new subscriber. So there's that I don't have that pulled up and I'm assuming you do since you brought it up.

Gene 1:14:42

I did not, but I can pull it up while you're talking.

Dude Named Ben 1:14:46

Ah, Gene. Yeah. So got an email from from a gentleman that I can find it here. That says Gene broke the RSS.

Gene 1:14:58

Oh, yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:14:59

It wanted to start it off by thanking us for sharing our knowledge, experience reasoned opinion and solid moral and ethical stances. So I appreciate that. So you need a podcast and publishing tutorial on RSS because there's an intervention that you need to, you know, stop messing with your feet. Apparently,

Gene 1:15:24

Yeah, I have no idea what that means.

Dude Named Ben 1:15:26

Apparently something's broken. So I don't know.

Gene 1:15:28

Yeah, nothing is broken. It's working fine.

Dude Named Ben 1:15:31

Also, apparently you should stop adjusting your volume during

Gene 1:15:36

I don't ever touch my volume during show. If you hear a difference in volume, and by the way, it's normalized, so you shouldn't hear a difference. But if you hear it, it means that I probably got up to grab another ice tea or something. And I shouldn't have been talking, but I may have been talking while getting up. So that's the only volume difference you're going to hear is Physical distance from microphone that was big enough for the normalization to not fix.

Dude Named Ben 1:16:04

yeah. And Cam, one of the things I'd say is if you'll email me again, let me know what podcasting app you're using and what aberrations you're saying. We'll look into it because

Gene 1:16:13

think I replied to him and I told him everything is working fine and it's on your end. And then try turning it off and on.

Dude Named Ben 1:16:18

yeah. I, I, I think there are some of these podcasting apps that are out there that are kind of

Gene 1:16:24

Wonky? I will agree with you on that. But we are on like one of the most standardized

Dude Named Ben 1:16:30

No, no, no, no. I'm not talking about on hosting on our end. I'm talking about the actual podcast

Gene 1:16:34

themselves. Yeah, but that's my point is like we're on one of the most standardized hosting. Like we're on the Apple of podcast hosting. There's not much I can tweak on there. There's I can't, I don't have access to the raw RSS. I wish I did, honestly, and I've been thinking of, for one of my shows, of pulling it off off of there. And then, and it's Buzzsprout is what we're using and what I use for all shows. But I've been thinking of going to one of the other competitors just to see what the difference is. Uh, Blueberry. And the only reason I would go to Blueberry is because I know Todd and, you know, I, I would prefer to give business to friends than Random companies, but the last time I check, which was about three years ago blueberry was, didn't have as nice a feature set for all the podcasting 2. 0 stuff that buzzsprout did, which is why I kind of ended up on buzzsprout. And then when we started doing this show as a separate show, we just kept being on buzzsprout as well.

Dude Named Ben 1:17:44

Yeah, which now with our latest subscriber, we no longer pay for, so thank you for

Gene 1:17:50

Right. So there, and what you mean by that, of course, is that the monthly donations are adding up to cover the hosting fees, which is great, which

Dude Named Ben 1:17:59

Yes.

Gene 1:18:01

is very awesome. And we're very appreciative. So did you find the, I still can't find that email.

Dude Named Ben 1:18:09

I don't want to necessarily say it on you know, outing fully, but Mark, thank you

Gene 1:18:14

Yeah, that's as long as you get the first name, that's

Dude Named Ben 1:18:16

doing the, doing the donation monthly. It's appreciated. That's the

Gene 1:18:20

Yeah, and it, and honestly, this is the best way to do it, guys. It's neat to be able to send sats and all that jazz. However it's way cooler just to click on the link that says donate monthly because that goes directly to the hosting company. And then the way it works is they just lower the bill until it gets to zero, at which point then they actually start sending money back to us. So it literally fully is applied to the hosting service first and foremost. And that way we don't touch the money, like it's literally 100 percent of what you're sending is applied to the cost of the podcast itself,

Dude Named Ben 1:19:04

And if you want to donate directly to GeneRI, if you go to NameBin. com, there is a link to my GitLB

Gene 1:19:12

Yeah, yeah, if you think I'm an asshole and then Ben said something really smart, you can just donate directly to him and bypass me altogether. That's totally a thing.

Dude Named Ben 1:19:22

I'm a fan.

Gene 1:19:24

I've not done anything to me. I bet you are.

Dude Named Ben 1:19:26

Yeah, same.

Gene 1:19:29

Yeah. Yeah. And then none of it goes through Darren O'Neill's grubby hands, the way that it does with my podcast with him, which I have no idea what's coming in, how much, and just occasionally, randomly I'll, I'll have to send him an email and say, Hey, we've had a bunch of donations in the last six months. Haven't we? It's Oh yeah, let me I'll, I'll I'll send you your share.

Dude Named Ben 1:19:51

yeah,

Gene 1:19:51

And then some random amount shows up that I have no way to verify one way or the other. So I'm just saying, think we do it a lot cleaner. It goes directly to the hosting first and foremost and then,

Dude Named Ben 1:20:02

Yeah, we also have basically no funds to worry about splitting. So there's that.

Gene 1:20:08

That's true. I mean, but look, the, the money that comes in for Unrelenting, which is my show with Darren is mostly from two people, which is CSB. You can go to csb. com, I believe. No, what the hell is his domain? I forget his domain. lol. com. No, csb. lol, right?

Dude Named Ben 1:20:30

If I go to the friends of the show,

Gene 1:20:32

Or a comic

Dude Named Ben 1:20:33

there, there's comic strip strip blog, which I, I have linked

Gene 1:20:37

one thing I know for sure is it's what? Say it again?

Dude Named Ben 1:20:39

And so comic strip blog, which if, if anyone wants to look up CSB's website, one of the easiest

Gene 1:20:45

You got a link to

Dude Named Ben 1:20:46

go to the friends of show and it's there.

Gene 1:20:48

Exactly. And then the other thing he's got, I know for a fact, because I actually text him this way is on X. He's just at CSB, which is fricking impressive because getting a three letter name on X means you did it really fucking early.

Dude Named Ben 1:21:06

Yeah, he also has, like I said, csb. lol

Gene 1:21:10

Yeah. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Good. And he's got cool cartoon art and and he didn't donate to the show. So we're just talking about. You know something that he that's kind of cool

Dude Named Ben 1:21:20

You're doing a make good.

Gene 1:21:23

No, I'm not for what?

Dude Named Ben 1:21:25

For your scrap on unrelenting.

Gene 1:21:27

There was no screw up on unrelenting He bitched about the fact that I talked over his donation and I had to point out to him that it's my fucking show and The nation is a donation. It's not an advertisement And therefore, if I want to walk over a donation, I'll walk over a donation. Don't complain because you're making a donation for something we did. You're not buying airtime with a donation. Hopefully he understood that. And he didn't hear back. So I'm assuming he did. But no, I look, I don't mind talking about here's the irony, right? What he doesn't realize is we probably still be talking about him, even if he didn't donate at all.

Dude Named Ben 1:22:07

I think it's, I think he understands that.

Gene 1:22:10

Then he shouldn't be complaining about. Getting walked over on donation

Dude Named Ben 1:22:16

Anyway,

Gene 1:22:18

because then, you know, if we got mad, we wouldn't talk about him.

Dude Named Ben 1:22:22

Too much fun. He's too much fun to you know, I mean there was a poll ran on Node No Authority Social about abusing csb.

Gene 1:22:30

Was there really?

Dude Named Ben 1:22:30

Yes.

Gene 1:22:31

What, what did it

Dude Named Ben 1:22:32

what you're missing? Oh, no, no. Hey, you're not in the club, man.

Gene 1:22:36

I'm not in the club.

Dude Named Ben 1:22:37

You're not in the club.

Gene 1:22:38

Yes, I'm, I'm in the adult club. You're the kids table club.

Dude Named Ben 1:22:42

Uh huh, huh.

Gene 1:22:43

That's what Macedon is, by the way. It's, it's the kids table version of X.

Dude Named Ben 1:22:50

Okay,

Gene 1:22:50

for people that like to grouse about service unavailability while they don't donate a dime to pay for the service.

Dude Named Ben 1:22:57

hey, Aaroner did God's work by setting up a separate

Gene 1:23:00

Mm hmm. If I was there, I would have just banned everybody, but that's just me.

Dude Named Ben 1:23:07

Yes, and you'd

Gene 1:23:08

I've been telling Adam for five years, I can't believe you haven't banned all these fuckers.

Dude Named Ben 1:23:13

Eventually did. He made it

Gene 1:23:15

yeah it takes a while, but eventually he listens. Mm.

Dude Named Ben 1:23:19

So you sent me some videos on Thermal, and you are,

Gene 1:23:24

any?

Dude Named Ben 1:23:25

I did, I did. You are very much in the Thermal is King camp.

Gene 1:23:29

I am it's that, Thermal, if you're gonna pick one, Thermal is better than Night Vision, yes. And this last video I sent you is called, it's a stupid title by the way. It'll say, Thermal will get you killed, and then you would think, through a normal interpretation of that title, what they're saying is, don't do thermal, or you'll die. But if you watch the video, what they actually mean is, if you do night vision, and somebody has thermal, you won't see them, but they will see you.

Dude Named Ben 1:24:02

Yeah, I think there's a lot to it. I, I am very much of the camp. Of both is better. I think, I think the answer of doing 1 PVS 14 and 1 thermal monocular versus doing 2 night vision is better. Some of the infrared stuff where they have clip ons that'll go in front of your night vision and do thermal outlining and stuff like that. That is very intriguing to me. And infrared, by the way, even though they are a Chinese slash Canadian company, they, they. They are a leader in this, let's, let's just say that in, in the helmet mountable consumer

Gene 1:24:42

In the consumer space, yes.

Dude Named Ben 1:24:44

Yeah. Yeah. They, they are pushing the envelope. So yeah.

Gene 1:24:48

I I'm really close to just buying one. I'm really close. I even got my, my tax certificate sent over to them.

Dude Named Ben 1:24:59

Yeah.

Gene 1:25:00

before too long, you'll, you'll hear a review.

Dude Named Ben 1:25:04

yeah. What I, I mean, so have you looked at the infrared Jerry 14 and Clipon combo.

Gene 1:25:11

I like it. I think it's a, it's a

Dude Named Ben 1:25:13

So it, it's essentially generation two plus night vision with thermal overlay,

Gene 1:25:18

And it's a reasonable price. I'm, I just, I won't buy Chinese. I'm buying American.

Dude Named Ben 1:25:24

And what American thermal are you gonna get,

Gene 1:25:27

Flir.

Dude Named Ben 1:25:30

Okay a helmet mounted

Gene 1:25:31

you're going to get, no, it's helmet mode. If you're going to get something that works I think you, like the bias for me at least is towards American products. If I was getting night vision, I want to get an L3 Harris tube.

Dude Named Ben 1:25:46

Why L three? There, there are other American manufacturers.

Gene 1:25:51

well, from all the videos I've watched that seems to have the highest what's the measurement? F O F O R F O V. No, it's not F O V. It's basically a combination of resolution and detail brightness.

Dude Named Ben 1:26:08

the, if, if you're talking about the L three Harris Unfilmed, yes. But the, there are a lot of debates on thin filmed versus unfilmed and what performance gains you get and is it marginally worth the ungodly price difference and so on.

Gene 1:26:26

But I guess there's two ways to buy this stuff. I mean, it's true of most things you get into. It's true. Gaming PC is true of anything else. You can get something that isn't top of the line, but that feels like it's good enough, or you can get something that's top of the line.

Dude Named Ben 1:26:47

The, but

Gene 1:26:48

I found for me personally, and this maybe does not apply across the board to everybody is that if I buy something that's not top of the line. I will inevitably end up buying top of the line eventually. And then I've spent one and a half times as much money as if I would have if I would just bought the goddamn top of the line.

Dude Named Ben 1:27:12

Okay I mean, I think there's trade offs to everything and, you know, you've got to make decisions on that. And 1 of the things I would say is when you look at the, the difference in. The amount of lux that can be taken in and then amplified to reasonable usable light, the percent difference between thin film and the L3 Harris unfilmed is marginal. There's some other like coronal aberration stuff and things like that that when you get into the optics matters,

Gene 1:27:46

hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:27:47

all of that said, why are you even then looking at thermal?

Gene 1:27:52

Because I think they're most better.

Dude Named Ben 1:27:55

Okay, but thermal introduces lag period

Gene 1:27:59

It doesn't introduce lag, but that lag Is

Dude Named Ben 1:28:04

getting to be manageable,

Gene 1:28:06

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. The, the issue, and I like, I wouldn't get anything less than 60 Hertz.

Dude Named Ben 1:28:12

but that's not always guaranteed and depending on the environment and what's going on, it'll drop frames. They'll do stuff that that that is not

Gene 1:28:21

well, and that's why I want to get a good one. And

Dude Named Ben 1:28:23

And this is any digital technology versus the analog night vision tubes. This is an argument that's going to come up. That's why I'm kind of playing devil's

Gene 1:28:30

You know, I, I know. The, the thing is that so you're talking about dropping frames. It shouldn't be dropping frames because there's no reason for it to drop frames.

Dude Named Ben 1:28:40

Oh, but there is

Gene 1:28:42

What's that?

Dude Named Ben 1:28:44

so any of the reviews that you look at on thermal and if you really get into the nitty gritty of what they're doing 1 battery life is an issue. You know, with a modern. EVS 14 running on either, you know, like the, what I'm looking at, the Nocturne Industries with the dual fuel and running a CR 123 versus the AA is about 50, 75 hours, depending on the battery.

Gene 1:29:08

hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:29:09

Digital night vision is five or six hours. Digital

Gene 1:29:14

Yeah, it's a lot,

Dude Named Ben 1:29:15

five or six hours and that's about it. So you've got battery life, you've got processing issues.

Gene 1:29:22

or six dual CR 123s. Yeah, and that's why I think running on a helmet makes a hell of a lot of sense because you've got the battery pack in the back to counterbalance the weight of the optics in the front.

Dude Named Ben 1:29:36

Yeah, but you're still not going to get the runtime that you are out of analog night vision and then

Gene 1:29:40

need to. How often are you awake for 50 hours? I

Dude Named Ben 1:29:45

I mean, it's being able to walk

Gene 1:29:47

continuous hours, then I'm assuming you're going to be awake for that much,

Dude Named Ben 1:29:51

no, because I can turn it off and do multiple operations without changing a battery.

Gene 1:29:55

Okay. All right. You could do that with a battery pack, too.

Dude Named Ben 1:29:58

Yeah. Okay. Anyway, the point is, any digital technology, why does a video game ever lag? There should be no difference in, I mean, oh, wait, there's different action going on. There's things that happen while rendering that cause it to lag. It's the same exact story.

Gene 1:30:13

Not really. A video game would. Quote unquote lag. That's not what we call it, but if I know what you're talking about, because the complexity of the models is taking too long to render in whatever the frame rate of the previous frame was.

Dude Named Ben 1:30:29

Yeah. So what ends up, what ends up happening is, as, let's say a herd of hogs runs into frame, and you have outline mode turned on, And it's struggling to do that because there is an algorithm that's running and it is a digital processing that has to take place to render the image to you. Because if you were just taking a thermal image sensor and hooking it up to display, you wouldn't see what you think you would see, right? If you look at the early, early flare footage. Where it's just temperature gradients is all it shows it. There is no image that you can see what they're doing is they're taking that and doing digital processing and rendering an image that you can then make out and go, Oh, that's what that is.

Gene 1:31:15

Yeah. Yeah. I will tell you firsthand once I get the thing.

Dude Named Ben 1:31:21

All I can say is you got to spend a lot of money on a thermal right now to get anything even close to PVS 14 latency sort of stuff. And

Gene 1:31:32

never going to get close because the N log latency is a thousand times faster.

Dude Named Ben 1:31:38

Right, there, there is no rendering of an

Gene 1:31:40

not, yeah, your, your latency is basically

Dude Named Ben 1:31:43

my, my point is, I don't think thermal is a standalone technology yet. I think it's an augmenting technology.

Gene 1:31:49

then if you watch that video I sent you that's poorly titled, they actually talk about how people think that that thermal can't be used. Self sufficiently, and the reality is right now it absolutely can.

Dude Named Ben 1:32:04

Yes, that

Gene 1:32:05

now there are certain things that you can't do with thermal, like you can't drive with thermals on.

Dude Named Ben 1:32:11

Oh, why is that?

Gene 1:32:12

Because the, that, that frequency range of light does not go through the windshield.

Dude Named Ben 1:32:20

Oh, interesting. You mean you can hide from thermals through glass?

Gene 1:32:27

Yeah, exactly. You can hide through. So if you're walking around with a glass shield in front of yourself, then

Dude Named Ben 1:32:32

anything. Anything. Anything until it heats up. Yes.

Gene 1:32:37

Yeah. Yeah. And but again, what you're, what you're trying to do with thermals is different than what you're trying to do with night vision.

Dude Named Ben 1:32:46

Agreed. Which is why I think the combination makes more sense than the individual technologies

Gene 1:32:50

I agree as well. I just, I'm not going to spend 30 grand all at once. Mmm. Mmm. Mm

Dude Named Ben 1:32:57

You don't have to, if you're, if you're getting a, you can get a L3 Harris top of the line, unfilmed PBS 14 or four grand.

Gene 1:33:09

No. No,

Dude Named Ben 1:33:10

I can send you the

Gene 1:33:11

not with the right FOV or whatever the fuck that

Dude Named Ben 1:33:14

I 100

Gene 1:33:15

send me a link. Send me a link because I've never seen them that cheap. The cheapest that I saw, so the one that I, that I got was not an L3. That was a foveon tube or foveonics or whatever. Photonis. But the cheapest I've seen the high end L3 Harris tubes was about 5, 400 bucks.

Dude Named Ben 1:33:34

Yeah I've, I've got a source where you can get it cheaper

Gene 1:33:37

All right, what's that

Dude Named Ben 1:33:37

anyway. So you get that, and this is with the Nocturne Industries housing, like I'm talking about and everything else. And the one I will probably get is much cheaper and probably around the 2, 700 mark.

Gene 1:33:51

hmm. Mm

Dude Named Ben 1:33:52

because again, I don't need the ultimate. PVS 14 if I'm going to also augment with thermal and then you can get some reasonable thermal with decent refresh rates that isn't going to just kill you. For around that same five grand ish mark. Now then you got to get your bridge and everything else, all the other

Gene 1:34:11

another thousand

Dude Named Ben 1:34:12

do it. Yeah. Point

Gene 1:34:14

you already have your helmet on, so that's part of it. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:34:17

Yeah, but point is, you can get by with some of this and figure it out. Anyway, we can talk, we, I, this is the second episode in a row we've gone down this rabbit hole,

Gene 1:34:26

People like hearing this shit though, because it's, it, a lot of people are considering spending the same, they're spending money on the exact same shit we're talking about. So

Dude Named Ben 1:34:35

Yeah, some of them are.

Gene 1:34:36

it's a, and I think between the two of us, we've probably spent over a hundred hours of researching these products and what's currently available.

Dude Named Ben 1:34:44

spent over a hundred hours of, personally, are you kidding me?

Gene 1:34:49

Yeah. And I've probably sent you over a hundred hours of video, so I've probably watched more than that as

Dude Named Ben 1:34:53

yeah,

Gene 1:34:54

but I

Dude Named Ben 1:34:55

one video, Yeah, one video that you sent me that I do disagree with by DirtyCivilian to give a shout out to him is on the ballistic helmet versus bump helmet.

Gene 1:35:06

Mm. Yeah. And I, that was the main reason I sent it is just because I figured you would disagree with it. But his point is similar to kind of what my point is, which look, you're going to end up buying a ballistic anyway. So you might as well buy one right away instead of fucking around and getting the one that's not first.

Dude Named Ben 1:35:23

I mean, you could say the same thing about body armor, but I don't Buy body armor. I don't run a chest rig. I run a chest rig, not a plate carrier. And the reason why is my entire thought process is there are very few scenarios where I'm ever going to put on that chest rig outside of just fucking around at the range, LARPing,

Gene 1:35:41

hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:35:42

that I'm going to be able to wear a plate and plate carrier. Get shot and have the medical team required to actually take care of me and have it

Gene 1:35:52

What you done? You didn't just brush it off like nothing happened.

Dude Named Ben 1:35:56

Yeah, no, that's not real. This is not a

Gene 1:35:58

know, you're going to be fine just walking around with broken ribs. No

Dude Named Ben 1:36:00

Yeah, yeah. Or, or, you know, if you get shot in the head wearing a ballistic helmet and the amount of traumatic brain injury that you're going to suffer, assuming, assuming the ballistic helmet totally defeats the round,

Gene 1:36:13

Right.

Dude Named Ben 1:36:14

which may or may not be the case. So anyway, my, my entire point is it's just not something I'm going to spend thousands of dollars on, which is what he did. And, you know, the amount of money people spend on their plate, plate carriers and everything else. I will buy a lot of other shit in that timeframe.

Gene 1:36:32

What? Go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry.

Dude Named Ben 1:36:34

I'm just saying the, the use cases are almost minimal. And quite frankly, I'm not planning on going in. I'm not going to be kicking indoors. I'm not going to be doing CQB. I'm going to be out in the woods. Doing recce shit, which even the U. S. Army doesn't then send plate carriers because it's a pain in the ass and doesn't really work.

Gene 1:36:53

Right. There's another video where they talked about how if you look at actual army usage, like out in the field, out in the danger zone, danger zone it says almost, almost all the soldiers take their helmets off. Because they're uncomfortable. It's too, too much shit on your head. And unless you're using night vision actively, if you just look around, whether it was in Iraq or Afghanistan, you'll see most of the guys don't have their helmets on.

Dude Named Ben 1:37:23

and the army's trying to change that

Gene 1:37:26

Yeah, I mean,

Dude Named Ben 1:37:26

you know, there,

Gene 1:37:27

there's a reason they spend money on the goddamn things. You know, those helmets are a couple thousand bucks a piece.

Dude Named Ben 1:37:33

yes. And they're, they're making them lighter. They're doing lots of different things, but really the helmet. It at best is not no helmet in that the US military deploys is considered a rifle rated helmet. It is for ricochets. It is for shrapnel. It is

Gene 1:37:53

I think shrapnel's the biggest actual real use of that helmet is for shrapnel

Dude Named Ben 1:37:58

a mounting platform for other stuff.

Gene 1:38:01

Yep. Exactly.

Dude Named Ben 1:38:03

So all that said, the scenarios in which I will ever use a helmet. All encompassed night vision. Yes. And in scenarios where I will not have medical care needed to help me survive what that's designed to help me for. No thank you. I, I will save my money and I will just go the non ballistic route. Personal.

Gene 1:38:24

Yeah. Yeah. That's, I, I totally agree with that. I mean, I, like I said, I, I kind of cinched that video just because I knew you'd, you'd disagree with it.

Dude Named Ben 1:38:32

you just wanted to provoke a reaction out of

Gene 1:38:34

pretty much. But

Dude Named Ben 1:38:35

What is it with certain people in my life lately just wanting to piss me off and get a reaction out of me? You for this, other people for other things. It's just ah, jeez. That's

Gene 1:38:46

don't know, dude. I, I tell you after I spent some time with your parents, I definitely enjoy provoking reactions from you.

Dude Named Ben 1:38:53

Because I sent a meme to the group text that exists between you, me, and my parents.

Gene 1:38:59

which surprised the hell out of me.

Dude Named Ben 1:39:01

yeah, go, go on and tell the people what the

Gene 1:39:03

I, you know, so there's a group message that we have with Ben and his parents

Dude Named Ben 1:39:09

because y'all were going down to the border, you know,

Gene 1:39:11

yeah, and, and I'm in there, and, and he sends a you know, everybody kind of posts stuff that they think other people may be interested in, but and Ben's been posting a bunch of acorn pictures. He thinks that's the funniest thing on the planet. And we already talked about

Dude Named Ben 1:39:29

dude, I think the, the way the internet has responded is just brilliant, but go on.

Gene 1:39:33

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's good. And I don't know if it was because I sent, or no, I didn't send you that video of such a great delay.

Dude Named Ben 1:39:40

No, this was before.

Gene 1:39:41

this is before this size, before I sent out a video of Sasha Gray talking about AI, which she did recently. And I'm definitely a fan of Sasha Gray. Ben posts a picture of Sasha Gray holding up a dummies book called Triple Penetration for Dummies. And I'm like, okay, that's kind of funny, but 3 out of 5 people on this list are older relatives of Ben. I sure as hell would not be posting that. And I I'm You know, I'm old enough to be a grandpa, but I'm not going to be sending something to my parents that has any kind of sex related stuff. That's certainly not something that says triple penetration.

Dude Named Ben 1:40:24

Yeah, the, the top of the meme was someone explained state federal, state and local government to me. And then the answer was triple

Gene 1:40:32

Yes, that's okay. So you wanted the joke actually told. Yes. So Ben's joke was. Can you explain federal, state, and local government how they work? And then the answer is, they work by fucking you, is the answer. So triple penetration for dummies.

Dude Named Ben 1:40:48

Yeah, so the, the actual funny part of this entire story was gene text me and goes, Hey, you know, you posted that to the

Gene 1:40:55

Yeah, I'm trying to warn a friend here. I'm like,

Dude Named Ben 1:40:57

You're like, you're like worried about it.

Gene 1:40:59

Yeah, hell yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:41:00

what you don't know is I was laughing so hard at that that I actually had to call my mom and tell her genes worried about this

Gene 1:41:09

hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:41:10

because you have no idea the family I grew up in. But yes. Yeah.

Gene 1:41:14

Look, and I'm, and I'm the one that has the the lower, uh, score on that test. What

Dude Named Ben 1:41:20

Yeah, yeah, purity.

Gene 1:41:21

Purity, yeah, I'm the one with Laura Purity, please.

Dude Named Ben 1:41:24

Hey, nowhere on that test did it measure deviance, okay?

Gene 1:41:28

I think deviance and purity is kind of on the same scale, isn't it?

Dude Named Ben 1:41:32

Yes, but they are very opposite things to measure, because I can know something is morally wrong and have these principles and ideals, but then what, you know, are you gonna be a deviant and deviate from that?

Gene 1:41:46

Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:41:50

I just thought it was humorous.

Gene 1:41:51

It was funny. No, I agree, and had you just sent that to me directly, I would have, you know, replied with a little ha ha. But the fact that you sent it to your parents, I was like, Jesus fucking Christ, dude, what the hell?

Dude Named Ben 1:42:05

Yeah,

Gene 1:42:06

Yeah that was good. Yeah, you've got probably like a dozen of acorn things here.

Dude Named Ben 1:42:13

dude, there,

Gene 1:42:14

they just released a photo of the Russian nuke satellite, and it's a giant acorn

Dude Named Ben 1:42:18

that one was awesomely the, my favorite one is getting pulled over and cop asks you, do you have any weapons on you? And it's the black guy sweating me with three acorns in my pocket.

Gene 1:42:31

Huh. Yeah, guess that'll get you shot, apparently.

Dude Named Ben 1:42:35

dude. Hey, the acorns is going to become a new. Diss towards police officers. I guarantee it. It's, it's, it's done. The internet has spoken, you know.

Gene 1:42:50

Yeah. Yeah. You, you saw that little video clip that I did of the cop down in Eagle pass. When I asked him that guy, I swear to God was like, he looks

Dude Named Ben 1:43:03

on Reno 911.

Gene 1:43:04

He, he looks just like that deputy that always wore the, the vest.

Dude Named Ben 1:43:09

Yeah, yeah.

Gene 1:43:09

He looks just like him. It's that standard kind of cop mustache cop, right? Shiny sunglasses and you know, aviators or whatever, and just a blank stare. There's nothing happening upstairs. Just move along, sir. Move along.

Dude Named Ben 1:43:26

Why are you closing it? My boss has told me to.

Gene 1:43:29

Yeah,

Dude Named Ben 1:43:30

That's why. I'm just following orders.

Gene 1:43:33

yeah, just following orders. The phrase just following orders is a good indicator of the mental acuity of these folks.

Dude Named Ben 1:43:42

Oh, all it, all it takes, all it takes is the next Nuremberg and people will learn the historical references very quickly.

Gene 1:43:50

absolutely. Absolutely. Let's see, what else?

Dude Named Ben 1:43:54

speaking of historical references Putin came out and basically endorsed Joe

Gene 1:43:59

Endorse Biden. I saw that. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:44:01

Yes, I want the Biden to win. I want Biden.

Gene 1:44:04

Yes.

Dude Named Ben 1:44:05

Which this gives the liberals, I really want to watch how they handle this

Gene 1:44:10

I thought he was kidding. I thought he was making a joke because that sounds like a

Dude Named Ben 1:44:14

was fucking with

Gene 1:44:16

If you look at his face, he looked completely drop dead serious.

Dude Named Ben 1:44:20

I'm sure.

Gene 1:44:22

Yeah. He was like, no, I, I think yeah, I'd like to have Biden win again. Yeah. It was like, holy shit, dude. Ha ha ha. But from a practical stance, Biden's way better.

Dude Named Ben 1:44:34

for him, yes. But my question is, how are the liberals going to handle this? Are they going to be like Putin, you

Gene 1:44:42

I'm

Dude Named Ben 1:44:42

is going to break

Gene 1:44:43

a ways like clearly this is a conspiracy between Trump and Putin. For him, because he's so evil and bad, him endorsing Biden. It's exactly, they're going to spin it as a reverse psychology. It's it's clearly just meant to, to do that. You know, versicology thing. But I don't, I think everybody, most governments, maybe not the European ones, but most governments in the world have kind of enjoyed having in the United States that Is

Dude Named Ben 1:45:14

Inept.

Gene 1:45:15

yeah, I was gonna say limp, but yeah. Yeah,

Dude Named Ben 1:45:22

I

Gene 1:45:22

it's not the Team

Dude Named Ben 1:45:24

metaphor use after this Sasha Gray stuff this week, Gene, has just been all, you know.

Gene 1:45:31

Ah.

Dude Named Ben 1:45:32

when Gene and I have been talking and then I'm just like, Do I need to go and leave you alone?

Gene 1:45:38

You have said that, yes, and it's I'm really, I'm not, I haven't watched a Sasha Gray porn video for probably five, six years. Maybe even

Dude Named Ben 1:45:51

recently.

Gene 1:45:52

No, no, I really haven't. No, I watch Sasha Gray all the time on YouTube because I think she's awesome. She is the total girl next door nerdy chick. Who's also done gangbangs. I mean, what's there not to love?

Dude Named Ben 1:46:09

Aye. And on that

Gene 1:46:13

purity score, purity score.

Dude Named Ben 1:46:16

Yeah.

Gene 1:46:17

Huh.

Dude Named Ben 1:46:17

Huh. On that note do we have anything else we need to talk about?

Gene 1:46:21

I'm trying to think. Let me just scroll through the, the thing. I know there's some shootings, but I think

Dude Named Ben 1:46:28

Yeah, there was we haven't really talked about the one that happened at Olsteen's church.

Gene 1:46:33

Oh, that's true. Yeah. That was crazy. That was like a trans person or something.

Dude Named Ben 1:46:38

Ish. Yeah there's some ish

Gene 1:46:41

I mean, to be more accurate, that was a mentally disturbed person that needs to be in an asylum.

Dude Named Ben 1:46:48

But took the kid with them. Kid is in critical condition and I don't think they were supposed to survive. I don't know if they did or not, but. Yeah, that

Gene 1:46:56

The kid or the perp?

Dude Named Ben 1:46:58

The kid that the perp had with

Gene 1:47:00

Did the cops kill the perp?

Dude Named Ben 1:47:02

Off duty. And other people in the church carrying guns because they were allowed to.

Gene 1:47:07

Okay, so the perp was killed, not captured. Okay, I wasn't sure about that because I kind of stopped paying attention the next day after it happened. But

Dude Named Ben 1:47:16

also had free palestine on their rifle.

Gene 1:47:20

oh, the perp did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Dude Named Ben 1:47:23

And had a, I think a 12 year old with them that ended up getting shot when

Gene 1:47:28

Right, I heard about that.

Dude Named Ben 1:47:30

And yeah.

Gene 1:47:31

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:47:32

some interesting things there for sure.

Gene 1:47:34

it is insane. And this was a female to male trans

Dude Named Ben 1:47:38

Which, you know, testosterone Will make you more aggressive.

Gene 1:47:45

They say that.

Dude Named Ben 1:47:46

Yeah. You know, you are more. I know that it makes me more aggressive. I know that,

Gene 1:47:55

How do you know?

Dude Named Ben 1:47:56

uh,

Gene 1:47:57

your production of it?

Dude Named Ben 1:48:00

we can talk somewhat, but I've been through scenarios where I was exposing myself to things and I had gained weight and I was eating a bunch of canned vegetables and stuff like that and BPA

Gene 1:48:15

not good for men.

Dude Named Ben 1:48:16

No, no, no, but I mean, essentially same thing exogenous estrogens and I cut that out and it was amazing the difference

Gene 1:48:22

Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:48:24

I know my personality shift based off of hormone imbalance versus not

Gene 1:48:28

yeah,

Dude Named Ben 1:48:29

so I can only

Gene 1:48:31

I my, the, the smart ass point I was trying to get at is that it's estrogen, actually, that is the problem, that, that turns everybody to be less violent, but more moody.

Dude Named Ben 1:48:43

Yeah. Anyway the, the point is this, this person, I don't know that they were on HRT or anything else. Cause they'd kind of gone back and forth on whether male, female, what is it, et cetera. And

Gene 1:48:56

It's one of the men with the uterus things.

Dude Named Ben 1:48:59

you know,

Gene 1:49:02

Mm hmm. A breastfeeding person.

Dude Named Ben 1:49:05

chest feeding,

Gene 1:49:06

Chest feeding person. Yes. I said the wrong word, didn't I? Yeah. It is. It is kind of nutty. But we've seen this consistently now over and over and over when they're going to people start realizing and wising up here that there is no gun problem in the United States. There's a, a psycho problem in the United States. There are too many people are not getting treatments. In full time facilities, the way they ought to be. And they're the ones that are running around and shooting up places.

Dude Named Ben 1:49:37

Yeah, but you know, the female to male is a bigger problem in a lot of ways for me because

Gene 1:49:43

That's what we had in that school shooting, too.

Dude Named Ben 1:49:45

Yeah, it is. And it's more of the social contagion because historically. Female to male just didn't exist. Right? They, they were super, super rare. And you and I both can think of Buck Angel

Gene 1:49:58

Angel's the only one, exactly.

Dude Named Ben 1:50:00

but I mean, that's fucking it. And you know, the, it was, first of all, all transgender was extraordinarily rare.

Gene 1:50:11

There was no transgender. That's just more accurate to say there was zero transgender, there was transsexuals. Which is what Buck is, and he corrects people on that all the time.

Dude Named Ben 1:50:21

And, and here, here's the other thing. The, the, the rate of gender dysphoria. Overall was under 1 percent

Gene 1:50:31

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:50:32

you know, for female was under, I think, 0. 2%. I mean, it was just fucking non existent in the population, virtually. And that gender dysphoria rate includes, oh, I'm uncomfortable in my body because I don't like this. Not going through transition. The rate that went through transition, historically, well under 1%.

Gene 1:50:57

Yeah, there used to be way more transvestites than transsexuals. Now,

Dude Named Ben 1:51:03

There still are.

Gene 1:51:04

I don't think there's a whole lot of transvestites anymore.

Dude Named Ben 1:51:07

I, I would qualify. I'll Admiral Rachel Levine. There

Gene 1:51:13

You're right, that's a transvestite.

Dude Named Ben 1:51:15

you know, there's lots that want to LARP around and say this, that, and the other, and they can use whatever label

Gene 1:51:21

Dresses women. Yeah. Okay, let me ask you this theoretical question. Is it worse for a Rachel Levine type to dress in just a normal women's clothing? Or, to have one of those leather dog faces. Know what I'm talking

Dude Named Ben 1:51:37

look, yeah, based off of the look of her

Gene 1:51:40

of sad that you know what I'm talking about.

Dude Named Ben 1:51:43

Why?

Gene 1:51:45

Because that should never be mainstreamed at this point.

Dude Named Ben 1:51:49

You underestimate the amount of deviant shit I've grown up seeing,

Gene 1:51:53

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:51:55

Remember, I grew up in the internet when the internet was full of a lot of stuff

Gene 1:52:01

A lot of advertising according to you.

Dude Named Ben 1:52:04

Yes.

Gene 1:52:05

I learned everything I needed to learn about sex from pop ups. Uh

Dude Named Ben 1:52:09

ha ha.

Gene 1:52:10

Huh. Huh. Huh.

Dude Named Ben 1:52:14

you know, yeah. There's a reason why my kids will not have the exposure to technology. I did. Thank you very much, Danny. Why can't we do this? Why? Because daddy grew up in the

Gene 1:52:28

playing Tom Sawyer when you were a kid.

Dude Named Ben 1:52:31

Oh, I did that too. But that doesn't mean I wasn't sitting up there on my computer.

Gene 1:52:35

Huh. Uh

Dude Named Ben 1:52:36

you know, I was the kind of kid that I was, you know, doing Linux installs and playing around with stuff at an early age and dual booting my computer I played around with. I mean, I remember OS2 warp. I remember BOS. I remember just a shit ton of different things. Fuck, the very first certification I ever got before I even graduated high school was a Solaris admin cert, right? I've been, I've been in computers and doing shit for a very long time. Point

Gene 1:53:07

happened to Solaris? Who bought him?

Dude Named Ben 1:53:09

Son,

Gene 1:53:10

Oh,

Dude Named Ben 1:53:10

what do you mean?

Gene 1:53:11

yeah, but. I mean, they they don't, I guess, yeah, I guess, who, who am I thinking of? I'm not thinking of Solaris. I'm thinking of, starts with an R another

Dude Named Ben 1:53:23

Red Hat?

Gene 1:53:24

no, no, workstation.

Dude Named Ben 1:53:25

Red Hat.

Gene 1:53:26

No. Who was Sun's main competitor back in the day? There's another workstation company that went out of business.

Dude Named Ben 1:53:33

I don't know.

Gene 1:53:34

Okay. Nevermind. Yeah. Cause you're right. Solaris is Sun.

Dude Named Ben 1:53:37

Solaris was awesome though, because it, the originations of ZFS, Solaris. The origination of containers, Solaris. The origination of virtualization, Solaris. I mean, there was a lot

Gene 1:53:48

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:53:48

run on PowerPC and multiple architectures and there was a lot of cool stuff. But, yeah.

Gene 1:53:55

Yeah. It was just expensive.

Dude Named Ben 1:53:58

Yeah, yeah, and that, and you know, it was one of those things that if you wanted to do any serious video rendering at the time or lots of different things, Solaris was the way to do it. It was the only real professional multi threaded operating system you know, out there.

Gene 1:54:18

Oh, next to us

Dude Named Ben 1:54:19

that had a user land, let me rephrase.

Gene 1:54:21

okay. Anyway, so What were we

Dude Named Ben 1:54:27

Anyway, I'm just saying I grew up in a era where, yeah, I went outside. I did a lot, but I also was a big nerd and, you know, had land parties, did all those things, but keeping things from my parents wasn't a problem for me,

Gene 1:54:40

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:54:41

which ended up probably being a problem for me, but yeah, needless to say, my kids, they are, they are not going to have that advantage

Gene 1:54:51

Yeah. Yeah. Make them anti tech. Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 1:54:56

as much as possible.

Gene 1:54:57

Yeah, yeah, that's true. Now, are you going to homeschool them or what?

Dude Named Ben 1:55:02

That would be my preference, but you know, their life. So we'll see.

Gene 1:55:08

Mm hmm. Yeah, there's I know some of the people I know that have homeschooled. They, what's getting more popular now is these little co ops

Dude Named Ben 1:55:20

I, I did a co op when I was a kid.

Gene 1:55:22

five, six families kind of together, kind of deals. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:55:26

we, we were bigger than that. And, you know, we, we had especially like during the summer when people weren't doing their normal curriculums we had these co op classes where like my dad, who has a. You know, his degree was in marine biology. He would teach a biology course and meet for a couple weeks and go through and, you know, do a big course for a bunch of people or,

Gene 1:55:49

you in biology in school?

Dude Named Ben 1:55:50

Fine. Why?

Gene 1:55:51

Yeah. That was one of the hardest things I found.

Dude Named Ben 1:55:55

Oh, God, no, biology is

Gene 1:55:56

It didn't shit just didn't make sense. You have to memorize shit.

Dude Named Ben 1:56:00

Yeah, I mean, biology, O chem, all that is nothing but memorization. So there's, there's no understanding that it's going to

Gene 1:56:07

That's what I didn't like about it. Or didn't back then, I guess I should say. But I didn't realize That I could learn things by memorization until I was in my late 30s.

Dude Named Ben 1:56:18

Oh yeah, I, I, I have a hard time with things that I have to memorize because I don't like it. You know, why is this this way? It just is. Just memorize it. No, but why is it that we don't really know? This is just the thing you have to memorize. That's not acceptable.

Gene 1:56:33

Yeah, and that's my default position. And that's why I think for most of school and college When it was pure memorization, I didn't do very well when it was logically deductible. I did really well but Yeah, it was always an issue. And then the first time I really realized that I could just memorize shit without caring was when I did my studying for my ham license. And, and what I discovered is unlike all the Microsoft certs which have, you know, in the infinite number of questions out there,

Dude Named Ben 1:57:07

Eh.

Gene 1:57:07

The the ham license is based on 300 questions and you're going to have 30 out of 300, I believe. I think it was 30. But 30 or 40, somewhere in that range. So basically they're going to have about,

Dude Named Ben 1:57:22

questions. I thought it was even easier than that.

Gene 1:57:24

I think it's, I think it's more than that. No, it's definitely over a hundred for sure. But all of those questions are publicly available. And so you can either learn why a certain antenna has to be a certain length, or you can just memorize it, which is what I did. And so I, I did the The two out of the three ham license certs on the same day, just by memorizing the questions and answers. And yeah, and I wish, I wish I would have known that I could do this back when I was in college, cause it was solved so many problems,

Dude Named Ben 1:58:06

Yeah.

Gene 1:58:07

nobody ever, it goes back to just having shitty teachers. No one explained to me that this is all you have to do. Right.

Dude Named Ben 1:58:20

the, I think the hardest part for my entire schooling That I struggled with was like irrational numbers and some of the negative numbers and why adding negative numbers moves in a positive direction and things like that, which are just concepts that you just have to accept that, you know, your teachers are not going to be able to explain to you very well at that age. You know, it's, we're teaching a tool earlier than we're teaching the mathematical concept for understanding. And most people just accept it and move on. Okay. That's what it is. I was like, no, why, why does it, why is this like this? And I obviously didn't learn until much later on, but yeah.

Gene 1:59:06

Yep.

Dude Named Ben 1:59:07

I, I, I don't accept things blindly.

Gene 1:59:10

Exactly. And this is where I think we have a lot of similar paths in our past is because I think our root personality types are fairly similar.

Dude Named Ben 1:59:22

Yeah, I mean, you have to, yeah, the fundamental unwillingness to just blindly accept anything is, yeah.

Gene 1:59:34

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:59:35

you know, which is why I don't get indoctrinated very easily.

Gene 1:59:40

Yeah. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 1:59:42

Alright man,

Gene 1:59:45

I said, except for Linux.

Dude Named Ben 1:59:46

what do you mean?

Gene 1:59:47

Nothing.

Dude Named Ben 1:59:48

I'm not a big Linux fan, I prefer I mean, Solaris is a Unix product, BSD is a Unix product, I, but,

Gene 1:59:55

anti Windows more than you are pro Unix.

Dude Named Ben 1:59:58

I mean, I used Windows The majority of my life for a workstation, because it was a good workstation OS they broke that for me.

Gene 2:00:08

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 2:00:08

And it's really only in the last few, you know, five years or so that I've really moved away from Windows,

Gene 2:00:14

really? I thought it was way before that. Okay. That's, that's interesting. I thought you've been like on

Dude Named Ben 2:00:19

for a workstation, Right. I, I run a lot of, you know, everything I run at home from a server or, you know, work standpoint

Gene 2:00:32

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 2:00:33

you know, running on some variant of Linux or Unix. But from a workstation, I mean, I've had a, you know, a Windows workstation for a long, long time. Again, Office and everything else. Now, LibreOffice has gotten good enough that it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. I can open

Gene 2:00:52

question there. I've never used LibreOffice, but I don't I don't use Microsoft office either. I just use Google for everything

Dude Named Ben 2:01:00

God, Google sucks.

Gene 2:01:02

in what way

Dude Named Ben 2:01:03

Goo I mean, no one can beat Excel. I

Gene 2:01:08

no one needs Excel. There's like a 0. 0001

Dude Named Ben 2:01:12

Oh,

Gene 2:01:12

percent of the people that actually need functionality. The Excel has that

Dude Named Ben 2:01:16

okay. And for those of us that do, you can't get away from Excel

Gene 2:01:21

Yeah. Okay. Mr. Statistics person. Okay.

Dude Named Ben 2:01:24

it's not just that it's just, there, there are lots and lots of uses for Excel, but Google sheets sucks in comparison. It's just sucks. Libre office is okay. It's a good interim. It does 99 percent of what you need. Word processor wise, it's fine. Google docs. I don't like the formatting of Google docs and there's several things. And I don't like Google reading everything. I like offline copies of

Gene 2:01:47

I do, yeah, I agree with you on the latter there, but I do that Google Docs basically has forced people to stop trying to fuck around with fonts. Because that has been a major distraction with Microsoft Word, making it way too easy to have all kinds of different fonts and looks for everything. You have to go out of your way to do it in Google Docs, and most people don't, which means you have a nice, clean, readable text.

Dude Named Ben 2:02:14

Yeah. You know, one of the things I'll say is LibreOffice does most of what Office does. The, the exceptions that I find notable right now that I have a hard time finding a good replacement to is Visio. I use Visio way too much in my professional life. And there is no, so there is no 100 percent replacement for Excel. There is no 100 percent replacement for Visio that I have found. People have pointed me to a couple different things, but I have some use cases that break them pretty quickly. And.

Gene 2:02:50

not using Vizio's automated networking tools, right? You're just using it to make diagrams.

Dude Named Ben 2:02:57

Diagrams, but multi layer diagrams, additional information connected, connecting to a database for information, various things. Yeah.

Gene 2:03:06

Oh, so you're, you're using its database connectivity.

Dude Named Ben 2:03:10

For different aspects, yes, of tying to an asset list so that if something changes you're, yeah

Gene 2:03:17

Then you're, yeah, you're, you're, it's hard to replace that because I mean, I remember Vizio back 20 years ago when I was doing this shit and there's nothing that you could use other than Vizio and it was always Hard to try and justify the cost of it because it was basically the same price as all of Microsoft office put together. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 2:03:40

more expensive than that now but, and then the other thing is my Microsoft project. Microsoft Project Professional is the other thing that I cannot find a good standalone replacement for. So yeah.

Gene 2:03:54

Liked project. I was using it from very early on in its life and you get used to a lot of the short of shortcuts in there. But you know, I, I always try to Like I never got into the, all the Agile crap. I always did very traditional project management stuff. Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 2:04:15

the other thing is I've used, I've used Agile because I've been forced to in a lot of ways. But anytime you're doing anything in an industrial environment where an outage window is what you have to hit. Agile doesn't work. You do not want to become critical path. It is waterfall. It is, and anytime you're doing stuff that has dedicated prerequisites, this has to happen before this. Guess what? You're using waterfall. Period. End of story. Full stop. Shut up. And I, I I'm thankful. Agile is finally falling out of favor even with programmers.

Gene 2:04:49

Okay, good

Dude Named Ben 2:04:50

People are finally getting that this is a fucking moronic millennial bullshit thing.

Gene 2:04:55

Yeah That was my take but I wasn't gonna say it too loudly

Dude Named Ben 2:04:59

and you'll get ostracized for saying that opinion, but fuck you, I know what I'm doing and I actually produce work versus sit there and spin and, you know, finger myself with my thumb. Rant over, but yeah.

Gene 2:05:13

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 2:05:14

I fuckin hate Kanban boards. I hate Kanban boards. Anytime someone brings up, Oh what's the size of this? This is how many hours? No, no, no. We just want an estimation of effort. Fuck yo!

Gene 2:05:25

Yeah. Yeah. It's,

Dude Named Ben 2:05:29

Sorry.

Gene 2:05:29

felt like we already had project management solved. We didn't need to resolve it.

Dude Named Ben 2:05:35

Oh no, but it doesn't work, Gene. It doesn't work.

Gene 2:05:39

Yeah. It doesn't work if you hire the wrong people. Yes.

Dude Named Ben 2:05:42

It doesn't work because we need to produce a minimum viable product.

Gene 2:05:45

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 2:05:49

the minimum viable product other than just enough to get it going. If you don't document now, you'll never document it, so that causes problems for a later part No, it doesn't. This is all we're focused on. Eww!

Gene 2:06:01

You sound very natural doing that.

Dude Named Ben 2:06:04

I I I It's because I've been involved in too damn many fucking projects going down that exact road and some project manager telling me that this is what we need to do and I'm going, No, you're gonna fuck me later on when

Gene 2:06:16

I mean,

Dude Named Ben 2:06:16

the documentation to go down and fix this.

Gene 2:06:19

a lifelong consultant, I generally don't mind not having documentation because more work for me later.

Dude Named Ben 2:06:27

I understand, but as the person actually maintaining systems and

Gene 2:06:30

Yeah, yeah, you're fucked.

Dude Named Ben 2:06:32

I, I want, fuck, documentation had, I, I have not paid contractors because they did not meet my documentation

Gene 2:06:41

Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 2:06:43

We have this. That's not good enough and that wasn't what was spelled out in the PO. Fuck

Gene 2:06:48

Mm hmm.

Dude Named Ben 2:06:49

Now I've got to go reverse engineer your shit and figure it out and do my own documentation to be able to actually maintain this.

Gene 2:06:56

Yeah, but don't you generally end up doing that anyway?

Dude Named Ben 2:06:59

Yeah, but give me, give me at least a decent starting point because, and here, here's the other thing documentation is always wrong. Okay, so there is that. Let's say that documentation is always wrong. Humans suck at it. And anytime I've ever walked into an environment. I that some administrator or some developer thinks, Oh, I've done all this documentation.

Gene 2:07:21

Yeah.

Dude Named Ben 2:07:21

Bullshit. You're lazy and you fucked up here, here, here, here, here. Here's where your documentation is wrong. Let me fix it. That is extraordinarily common. But it's at least a better starting point than than not. One thing I'll say is anyone who's ever done any of the INL red team, blue team exercises. Knows what I'm talking about when I say documentation can be cor 100 percent correct, but incomplete. You know, and there's, there's a lot to be said for that, especially when you're talking about network security.

Gene 2:07:54

Yeah. Documentation

Dude Named Ben 2:07:57

By the way, anyone who has an opportunity to do the red team, blue team exercise with INL, it's one of the best out there and you should definitely do it and it's free.

Gene 2:08:06

Yeah. Who's that put on by?

Dude Named Ben 2:08:08

DHS and CISA. That I was ragging on earlier,

Gene 2:08:12

Yeah. That's kind of what I thought.

Dude Named Ben 2:08:16

it's it's great training. It's fun. It's a fun game.

Gene 2:08:21

Yeah. It's definitely something that brings you out of the theoretical or the Fix it later into very much an immediate kind of

Dude Named Ben 2:08:33

It's incident response

Gene 2:08:34

yeah, it's exactly, it's a triage mode on the one team and like break, break everything on the other team.

Dude Named Ben 2:08:43

Yeah, but the point is I, I tried to send all my lower level analysts there because they don't have a lot of incident. It's a great thing to do early in your career or even midway in your career for fun. But early in your career, I think you get the most out of it that and sending non technical. You know, other people there is also fucking hilarious.

Gene 2:09:11

Yeah. And I've done a variety of those exercises with a lot of different types of people. Yeah. From NSA to FBI to private corporate stuff. And I think everybody always gets a lot out of it. Exactly.

Dude Named Ben 2:09:33

set up and the more you can kind of gamify it, even in your normal, if you're running a practice for a large company and you can break up into teams and kind of. Gamify some of the work load of, Hey, let's do a firewall rule review. How can we do that? Let's go into the lab, load some firewall configs, and I want you to try and break it. Really? Yeah, really, what you're doing is fucking doing a firewall rule review for me, but you get to play pentester and go do what you think is fun. So cool.

Gene 2:10:07

Yeah. Cause then on a large corporate firewall, you get into a point where the, the rule set is so huge that you have no idea which of those rules are no longer needed, which ones are actually. Important and which ones don't exist that should be in there.

Dude Named Ben 2:10:24

And I mean, you can look at logs and you can look at you know, oh this has traffic going through it and this, this doesn't, or this is getting blocked and maybe that should be allowed, but ultimately you're then trusting. The status quo, so you can either bake in the status quo, which may or may not be a good state, or you can actually apply a level of critical thinking that then takes quite a bit of effort when you're talking about a long, long, long firewall rule list, especially when you start getting into with the next gen firewalls and application specific stuff because one of the things you'll learn, especially on Palo Alto or FortiGate, which are the two top of the line Next generation firewalls the way they do their app ID and everything else is they initially allow traffic. They have to have a session established and then you have to then question, okay, how good is your app ID and everything else? Um, there's a lot of interesting things with the next generation firewalls that you know, is probably way too nerdy for this podcast, but

Gene 2:11:25

Yeah. More importantly, I think we're, we've gotten long enough, so we should wrap it up. I know we were kind of getting to that point 20 minutes ago, but then we got on some topics you had opinions on.

Dude Named Ben 2:11:34

yeah you know, who knows I may or may not. You know, broken a lot of things in my life. You know,

Gene 2:11:41

That's, that's a good thing. I think when somebody can break things, it demonstrates

Dude Named Ben 2:11:46

I mean, as soon as you can get a, as soon as you can create, make windows blue screen, you're halfway there. Right.

Gene 2:11:52

Yeah, yeah, no, that's absolutely right. It's cause once you do that, then your next step is to go into the disassembler and figure out exactly why.

Dude Named Ben 2:12:00

well, or, you know, you can do code injection, you can do lots of things. So anyway, the, the, the point is All people have to do is look at the Fortinet exploits that have come out recently. And I will tell you this, right now, Fortinet's getting picked on. Palo Alto, it does the exact same thing.

Gene 2:12:18

Hmm.

Dude Named Ben 2:12:19

interpreter may not have gotten hit, but just wait.

Gene 2:12:22

Hmm.

Dude Named Ben 2:12:23

That's all I'm gonna say.

Gene 2:12:25

Sounds good, Ben. We'll catch you next week.

Dude Named Ben 2:12:28

See ya, man.