Just Two Good Old Boys
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Just Two Good Old Boys
105 Just Two Good Old Boys
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Get access to our entire back catalogueEver wondered how Elon Musk, Dogecoin, and the Pentagon could end up in the same conversation? Brace yourself for an episode where we test out our new podcasting rig and celebrate fan interactions while throwing in some humorous discussions about the campy charm of "Miami Vice" and our favorite TV show, "Community." We ponder the potential for streaming on X, examine the curious world of everyday spies, and share a good laugh over the entertaining speculation around Trump’s latest announcements. If you’re ready for a blend of nostalgia and engaging conversations, this episode is for you.
Our chat takes a serious turn as we explore the future of U.S. politics, the intriguing concept of expiration dates on laws, and the ever-relevant debate around government term limits. Imagine a world where laws retire unless Congress votes them back into relevance—a tantalizing prospect for those weary of legislative stagnation. We also focus on the role of platforms like C-SPAN in shaping public awareness and the evolving culture of gun ownership advocacy, as well as the implications of high-profile political figures and their policy positions.
In a nostalgic twist, we share personal stories about the gaming worlds of "Red Dead Redemption" and "GTA," reflecting on how video games mirror our real-life experiences of choice and consequence. From the technical hurdles of upgrading home NAS systems to the heartfelt musings about a YouTuber possibly retiring for family life, this episode offers a heartfelt reflection on balancing personal and professional endeavors. With humor, insight, and a promise of thought-provoking ideas, this episode is a journey through sound quality, politics, and personal anecdotes, all under one podcast roof.
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Howdy Ben. How are you today Doing well, Gene, Coming to you from the new podcasting rig.
Speaker 2:Nice, so we're going to have perfect sound. Today it sounds like.
Speaker 1:Well, you and I spent an hour on the phone yesterday making sure of it, so hopefully, yeah, and the conclusion was it's magic was it's magic, it was the. So somehow the sample rate got changed and when that sample rate got changed it stopped a few things from working apparently on the Motu, I don't know. Anyway, changing the sample rate back fixed it, Got it.
Speaker 2:It's funny, as we're recording this, we just got a message that came in from fan mail, or a fan mail came in, you know. I mean a message for the podcast came in and uh, it said so glad y'all are watching community, one of my all-time favorites okay, and a minute later it says this is will dude from houston. Good, so people are remembering to add their damn names, because otherwise we don't know who it's from yeah, and you had a solution for that I do, and I might as well talk about it right now.
Speaker 2:So the solution is I created a group on x, so fan mail still gonna be there. You know, it's built into our, our podcast provider and you can send notes that way. But I think it truly is meant to be like fan mail, like the little people sending a big, huge podcast notes. But we're not that big guys. So we're happy to interact bi-directionally with you and we can do that through x.
Speaker 2:So just look for a group. Very easy, it's uh, just gob, good old boys. So all you got to do is just go and search for it and then sign up. Alternatively, if you're already following me actually both of us, this should work for it, not just me just click on our profiles and you will see that group listed as one of the groups that we're following. I've actually pinned that message to my profile, so I'll recommend you do the same thing, ben as well. So it's right up top and easy to spot and then just click on it. It'll take you to the group and, uh, there's. There shouldn't be any kind of a sign up or anything. I mean you have to want to be in it and click on subscribe or whatever, whatever the term x uses if it's not subscribed, um, but uh, I don't have it set up to approve people.
Speaker 1:People just come into it automatically with no approval yeah, and you know, hopefully we'll get better about posting stuff there, but the idea is it's a place for you to send us messages or send the group messages and interact yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:If you have suggestions, questions, etc. Um, or if you're lazy and you don't want to like specifically post to either one of us, post it to the group and then we'll both see it anyway, yeah um, you know, it's one of those things as we go, one of the things I'd like to see us do is start doing some spaces as we record. Yeah, yeah, and we've attempted to stream on X's recording. I think, right, we have.
Speaker 3:I'm pretty sure I don't think, so I think for this show.
Speaker 2:I thought I did.
Speaker 3:Well, maybe maybe not, Maybe I don't think so, not for this show, I thought.
Speaker 2:I did. Well, maybe maybe not. Maybe I just didn't tell you. That's possible too. I was live. No one listened. We had one person that showed up. So it because I feel like everybody's on X, but also I don't know that everybody that listens to us is on X, because I've not received many messages from people. Um, I I certainly see a lot more of these fan mail things coming in than I see just somebody doing an at Sir Gene on X. So I don't know, do people not use? So that's a question I'd like to pose and maybe you guys can answer that question in the group on X. Are you on X?
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:To all our thousand listeners, let us know.
Speaker 1:I think you're being a little generous there with the number, but that's fine.
Speaker 2:Over the course of a month about a thousand downloads.
Speaker 2:So there you go yeah, yeah yeah sure, so I I think it is going to be interesting to see, um, how many people do that and and again it this. This is really like I've posting on X, I will continue to post on X, but this is more specifically for people talking about something that we brought up or Ben wrote and posted, or something like that. That, you know, isn't just general news Nothing wrong with general news, but that kind of already exists. Like, plenty of people are posting about general politics and other news related stuff, but, um, I just wanted to have an area where, uh, y'all could specifically relate things to something from the podcast, like, for example, the message that came in today talking about community and how are you enjoying community, ben?
Speaker 1:uh, pretty good. I I don't know why you thought I would like the last episode. I watched the what was the? Last episode you watched it was the doctor who.
Speaker 2:Convention knockoff one oh, um, what was it about that one? I can't remember anymore. I'm too many ahead of that. But yeah, there's occasional episodes that I've mentioned to Ben. It's like oh yeah, yeah, I think you're going to like it when we get to this one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the last one.
Speaker 2:You said that about was the oh no, I knew why you were going to like it, because you noticed who the actress was that was flirting with what's his face I.
Speaker 1:I didn't pay attention to who it was. No, you gotta be shitting me.
Speaker 2:Who was it? It was the, the uh, the woman in the red dress from battlestar galactica cylon oh okay, yeah, uh, whatever, oh my god like. Of all the people that have been popping up on that show, probably the most beautiful one, uh wow okay, I'd take annie over her really yeah wow, that's well. Yeah, I guess annie's young.
Speaker 3:I shouldn't be sexualizing her.
Speaker 2:I have a type okay yeah, you have a type that that is called don't look at the face.
Speaker 1:Yes, no no, I look at the face, I look at the face.
Speaker 2:Face is important. No, I think the, uh, the silent chick's pretty damn hot. Okay, god, what is her name? Was she six? No, what number was she?
Speaker 3:I don't remember.
Speaker 1:God damn, it's been a long time since I watched that show. Maybe that's a show I need to re-watch. In fact, I have not re-watched that show since it probably originally aired.
Speaker 2:I think I'm in the same boat. I think that I don't think I've seen it, since it was actually on the first time. Yeah, and that's over a decade, right.
Speaker 1:Yes, we should that should be our next one, Although you're talking about Miami Vice. So yeah.
Speaker 2:Have you seen Miami Vice vice? I have not and I have no intention of watching it it's a, it's a classic man.
Speaker 1:I just don't like cop shows like that.
Speaker 2:It's just like the thing about it is it was shot as a, you know, a very realistic, dramatic show. If you watch it, I guarantee you, to you it's going to look like a parody of a cop show, because it has a lot of that can't be serious type moments you know okay like the main character, uh don johnson's character. Uh has a pet alligator, of course, and it's totally normal, like it's not a comedy. So that's what I mean. It's like uh has a pet alligator, of course.
Speaker 2:And it's totally normal, like it's not a comedy. So that's what I mean. It's like watching Miami vice today. People are going to say, no, this, no, this was a parody, right, they were just making fun of cop shows right, yeah, I think that would be the impression. Well, let's, when we get done with community, let's do a vote and see if we're gonna watch uh miami vice or uh balestar galactica next.
Speaker 1:okay, and people are welcome to join us on these.
Speaker 2:Uh, binge watchers, yeah, adventures, yeah, my vote's definitely going to be for balestar galactica, but you know, hey what can I say? We'll do a poll in the X community and see what people tell us.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I'm willing to be bound by such things?
Speaker 2:Oh, of course you are.
Speaker 1:Hey, I fell for the peer pressure to do the grok roasting. Enough, okay, uh-huh.
Speaker 2:All right, so should we jump into politics? Sure, where do you jump into politics?
Speaker 1:Sure, where do you want to start?
Speaker 2:I'm laughing my ass off, which is good. It's a good feeling with all the fears that are being displayed by the government servants of the united states. The fbi is threatening to quit as a whole agency if cash patel is approved. Um, cool, right, that's. My reaction is like wow, this is don't threaten me, there's not gonna be anything left to do for doge.
Speaker 2:If that happens, I mean that job well done. They get to hire brand new people for the fbi. That would be amazing. Uh, yeah, the. The attitude that these people have is very similar to an attitude that tenured professors have both groups, frankly, are shouldn't be because, uh, they're like, well, it's a government job, well, I shouldn't get fired. It doesn't matter what I do or don't do, it's not up to anybody to fire me. It's my job. I own this job. That's the attitude.
Speaker 1:I think we've seen a lot of stuff extended to various agencies that neither one of us saw coming. I know the CIA being offered a buyout, for instance.
Speaker 2:Now you sent a guy that says, well, it's only really about 40% of the CIA that would be associated with this, but I sent okay, who is in the CIA?
Speaker 1:yes, that's the video that I sent you. Yeah, um, my experience with people in the CIA is once you're in the CIA, you're always in the CIA yeah and so I don't think he's ex-cia as long as I know, I didn't say he was ex-cia, since he's cia so I think he definitely has his agenda.
Speaker 2:I'll put it that way uh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, um, and we're talking about the uh everyday spy guy, so that's, that's, that's, his company is everyday spy, which, uh, interestingly, he put a plug in to hire people that are going to be leaving this year. Yeah, if you're looking for your next thing, just come talk to me and he kind of went from describing the everyday spy company as just something. My wife and I started to you know, do something after we're retired, to like we're hiring hundreds of agents it's like whoa, which money.
Speaker 1:How did? How is he funded that? He has that yes I mean apparently not through usa id, but you know no no, no, they figured out that.
Speaker 2:You know, maybe the cia is smarter than you think. And they actually figured out before the trump election that usaid is going to go away. So they need to diversify.
Speaker 1:Let's start up new little companies like everyday spy you know it's possible, but I think, you know, I think the reality is we're just scratching the surface so far yeah, and that that's fine, it's a good scratch, but we've got to go way deeper. Did you see that trump announced that elon and doge will be going and auditing the Pentagon?
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, yeah, it's great Well it's kind of scary, because last time that happened we got 9-11, so, yeah, yeah, fair enough, but I think, well and the last president that wanted to do that drove through Dallas but I think that there's a wave that is building and it's going to be harder and harder to stop that wave as more of these people are like go.
Speaker 2:I think there's going to be more fear or more of a feeling of like we're fucked by the people that are left in the agencies that are left and haven't been reviewed yet and I think there will be way more voluntary um, you know, people leaving it's. Initially I think it was more like well, let's see if we can just resist what these guys are doing. Then it was sort of like well, let's, let's see who voluntarily wants to leave, maybe that'll alleviate the issues.
Speaker 1:And now it's like whole agencies are planning on quitting well, with usa id, you know um, there was a call for like 600 employees to stay yeah, and marco rubio, as the temporary administrator, cut that down to like 200 64, the last number whatever, it was a ridiculously low number and the reaction was well, the agency might as well not exist correct.
Speaker 2:Okay, no argument. Yeah, yes, yes, and yeah, and like I'm just I'm I'm reminded of that spider-man meme.
Speaker 1:I'm already sold on it. You don't have to keep selling me right right, exactly.
Speaker 2:Um, there's a there. Term limits is something that I know we've discussed previously, that I've always been a big fan of, because term limits prevent long termization. That's a word I just came up with. Long-termization of the government. When you know that you're only there for some fixed duration of time, then you're not going to be planning to build structures that will exist for the rest of your life. So that's a good thing. But combined with that, I think that there should be a default condition and this is unfortunate that this is not the case, but a default condition to all congressional bills that say they expire within X period of time, and that period can't be excessively long. Maybe 10 years should be the limit for everything, and it would have to be an extraordinary type of law that doesn't expire within 10 years.
Speaker 2:Because, thankfully, we saw this with the Clinton gun ban, which you know, I lived through the whole thing.
Speaker 1:What the assault weapons ban?
Speaker 2:yeah, Sure, the whole thing. What the assault weapons ban, yeah, sure, um, it's a. You know, we pushed really hard back against it, but not hard enough. There was not nearly as much of a, uh, a gun culture by the general public back then as there is today. Uh, today I don't know that necessarily a whole lot more people own guns, but a whole lot more people who own guns are willing to participate in letting their interests be known.
Speaker 2:I, I feel like in the 90s, certainly the early 90s, the, the group of people that were gun enthusiasts, uh, was the only one like it was. It was just the guys that you see at the range that even knew about the clinton assault weapons ban, gun ban, whatever you want to call it. Because the average person didn't know and didn't care and I, I think, including people that should have cared simply because they're republicans or they're conservatives or libertarians, like all those groups, independently of being a part of the nra or whatever gun group you were in back then, um, like they should have cared enough to let their voices be heard. But that was definitely not the case. It was a, it was a small group and, again, maybe more people are into gun state. That could very well be the case, but I just feel like it's that people are more vocal in what they support and don't support today than was the case 25, 30 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's more of a cultural difference from generation to generation. So I think, as the millennials Also, the internet helps. Yeah, yeah, but as the Internet has come on and the millennials have picked it up, you've got millennials being far more vocal as we tend to be than boomers ever were. So I think that's a fairly common thing yeah.
Speaker 2:And we had C-SPAN so we could watch debates and see how awful the politicians were back then. Watch debates and see how awful the politicians were back then.
Speaker 2:But again, I think the percentage of people watching c-span back then was tiny compared to watching clips on x today okay you know what I mean like there's clips of politicians being awful all the time on x or you even just youtube, and it's easy to catch those. C-span was one channel, so they had to choose what they're broadcasting and they didn't focus only on the negative shit, and so it was just like oh, for the next hour you can watch a debate about funding a squirrel preserve in Tennessee, a squirrel preserve in Tennessee, and then next hour we'll have 15 minutes from the wrap-up or the end of the session of the Senate. It was much more limited Now. I think our access is way better. By the way, if you pressed mute I heard you that didn't work, yeah.
Speaker 1:I've got to work on this because if I'm clicked off the window it's not working on zoom, so sorry about that. Oh really, yeah, so if the zoom window is highlighted. It works, but if I'm highlighted in the browser, for instance.
Speaker 2:Like I was, it didn't so well, yeah, you, you should be able to. Well, we'll talk about it offline, but, um, I know that you, you should be able to map the mic itself, not zoom, so you're just muting the mic completely regardless of app as well. So, anyway, um, back to back to this stuff. So who is and I'm I'm asking because I haven't actually checked either last night or this morning um, who got approved and who hasn't yet been approved? What are we waiting on?
Speaker 1:uh well, pam bondi got in. I saw that, yeah. And then Kash Patel and Kennedy got out of committee, so now it's the floor vote.
Speaker 2:Okay, so it's just Tulsi that we're waiting on then. Yes, okay, from the big sort of well-known people. Yeah, I mean there's been a ton of others and a lot of minor functionaries, if you will, but yeah, yeah, I know that they have their official little graph that shows, of the 26, or whatever, who's in who is not in. Yeah, but I haven't seen the latest updates on it, I guess, by the way, did you realize.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe you didn't, but we hit 80 degrees yesterday we've been above 80 a couple times here yeah, that's uh, yeah, so if you've been watching the gun tube um pam bondy everyone's getting very nervous about because she's historically been red flag laws, all sorts of stuff, yep, red flag laws.
Speaker 2:her first actions with the atf is to say that we need to hire more people, so we need a strong ATF director in there that will be able to convince Trump to put a muzzle on her, because otherwise we're going to have a Republican administration that is good for saving money and a bunch of other things and it's going to be horrible for guns.
Speaker 1:We will hold her feet to the fire is all I will say. Well, I mean, I don't know what that means. Not let her be horrible on guns. She's just the attorney general, it's not like she's the atf director or anybody else.
Speaker 2:So um, yeah, well, she's directing the atf right now sure and we'll see.
Speaker 1:And now the executive orders that trump has signed recently on you know the atf specifically, I think, are positive. Uh, one, one of the things that someone put out there on twitter that I thought was actually a really good idea and I I just sent you the Trump nomination.
Speaker 2:Okay cool.
Speaker 1:Um, so one of the things that, uh, the person on Twitter was encouraging Mike Johnson to do and I think this is a brilliant idea is just bring every executive order as a one page bill to the house floor and have them vote on it so that it would be codified in law and not be able to be just overwritten. So even if we got, let's say, 30% of these executive orders that he's citing in codified in law, that would be huge.
Speaker 2:That would. Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on which one, because some of them doesn't matter if it's a law, because it's so completely 100 within purview of the president anyway well, except that then the next president couldn't just change that directive uh, okay, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, the entire point here is by.
Speaker 1:If the House passes it, Senate passes it, President signs it, it becomes law. Then to change it, you have to do that again, which is a much harder task than just the stroke of a pen and you know the pen on the cell phone, as Obama had.
Speaker 2:The problem with that is that the assuming history repeats itself, which usually does, and the second half of trump's term there is no majority in either the house or the senate, because the other party always gains seats in midterms.
Speaker 1:In that scenario, I guess they still wouldn't have enough to overrule him Well, they would have to have a veto-proof majority and that's just not going to happen. Yeah, they'd have to have a veto-proof majority.
Speaker 3:Yeah it gets to be worth doing?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I think the days of massive amounts of executive orders flip-flopping is like the jeans being let out of the bottle. The next democrat president will absolutely cancel with a single executive order, all previous executive orders of the previous president. Like this is going to be a normal thing now that as soon as four years are up or eight years depending that all previous executive orders, regardless of what they were for, get canceled.
Speaker 1:And I don't think that too broad in in their scope because I mean you could have something pretty impactful getting shifted back and forth every four years, theoretically under that, and that's the lessons got to be learned by the voters man well, you know I, I hope it is yeah, because that's the thing is.
Speaker 2:the tax code is about 28 times bigger now than it was in 1988. It's grown tremendously since the 80s and it wasn't that small in the 80s, mind you. But if you look at all of USC, all the laws that have been added on, it's growing at an exponential, at a logarithmic rate. It's a craziness man. People can't comply with all the laws that currently exist.
Speaker 2:No, I mean the statistics have been out there for a while and I'm sure it's not even up to date that the average person commits multiple felonies a day without even knowing it Right this is something that would have to be passed by the house and Senate into law is to put a an expiration law for federal laws Like they have to have more accountability than somebody passed something in 1967. That's now going to affect the lives of people for the next hundred years, even though the rationale for passing it doesn't exist. Like that is just retarded. There's no better word for it. That is a retarded way of thinking that a politician who may have only been in office for a few years, maybe longer, managed to get something passed based on events and criteria that happened that year, which has been around for 80 years now and affecting people negatively. It's ridiculous and I'm not saying that about one particular law.
Speaker 2:There are thousands and thousands of laws that have been created like that as a result of some singular event that captured the imagination of the country Enough for politicians to say, oh, we got to do something about that. Oh, we can't have a tractor company be able to compete with John Deere, we have to have these tariffs in. And now we've had tariffs for 70 years on tractors. It's like it's retarded. Nothing should last an excessive amount of time and I think 10 years is a good beginning. For how long a maximum amount of time something could last Doesn't mean those laws can't get re-upped, right it's still up to the politicians For an additional 10 years immediately, yeah, but they could do it indefinitely, but they would have to have a vote on it.
Speaker 2:They couldn't just leave it alone and not touch it. If everything had an expiration period and I'm just using a decade as a simple example at the very least that means a slightly different set of congressmen would have to vote on it. You know and mostly the same senators probably, but still it's it would. It would force them to make those evaluations, and something that was passed in the 80s, looked through the lens of 2020s, may be seen as well. No, this is actually not what we want. This is not what our constituents would be for. But if you never have that expiration, then you're kind of hoping that the politicians are going to take this on themselves and then actually make a new law from scratch that reverses some old law, and that happens very rarely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am fine. I completely agree with you that we should have expiration dates on our laws and that they should be re-upped. But the reality is is really jury nullification. So anytime a law is being tried and it's a crap law that shouldn't exist, the jury has the ability to override it, and they should know what the constitutionality of a blanket bill saying. All bills previous to this are hereby amended to have that expiration.
Speaker 2:Well, they can do that well, I don't see a problem constitutionally with that well, except the.
Speaker 1:The issue would then be then you would have all the laws that are over 10 years old, let's say have to come up for immediate re-ratification well the way you would do it, obviously to avoid that and you have to put something in the your original law saying congress has to vote on each bill individually, otherwise what they're going to do is just like an omnibus reauthorization, totally I, I.
Speaker 2:But again, even an omnibus authorization every decade is better than what we have today, which is laws on the books that nobody wants.
Speaker 2:But they don't rise high enough in interest level to be voted on, to be canceled individually, because it's so simple for them. If they, if we had expirations on laws, if the there's a general realization of like, oh, our constituents ridden me, didn't like that, all they have to do is literally do nothing, do not have a vote on it and it goes away and it gives you a pressure point every 10 years to apply to a Congress critter by saying hey, you're voting for this.
Speaker 1:Why are you voting for this?
Speaker 3:This is a dumb law.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't, I don't dislike it.
Speaker 2:I think it's a good idea. Yes, there's some challenges, since we have so many previous laws, but I think there would be a way to do it and you could do it by decades. You don't have to say that you know everything becomes null and void tomorrow until and then we better hurry up and vote on it the next 24 hours. You could spread it out over the course of the first decade, literally, where you say all laws, uh, that were enacted in years, starting with a one, they become null and void in the next decade's first year. So effectively you could grant everything a 10-year lifespan retroactively, and that 10 years starts at the passage of the bill and now it's going to be in force for the next decade, but then it'll expire after a decade. That gives them plenty of time to figure out what they want to keep and what they don't want to keep.
Speaker 2:But right now there's zero incentive for any politician to go back and start looking at old law and start to figure out what to cancel.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I agree that it's zero, but it's a pretty small number. I will agree with you there.
Speaker 2:you know what? Remember? The politician's goal for all of them is to just get re-elected. So they're going to do whatever they need to do to get re-elected, and generally that means sticking your finger in the air, catching to see which way the wind's going and then, um you know, coming up with uh, uh, with votes that coincide with the way the wind's blowing. So, yeah you. This is why we have so many like the Lake and Riley Act. I think it was probably a good thing, right, it's appropriate. However, how many laws have we had that have occurred as a result of some person getting killed? Probably over a thousand, right?
Speaker 1:I don't know the number, but it would be a high number.
Speaker 2:It's the it's the reactionary exact reactionary view yeah, it's it, that is exactly it, instead of going through and saying, well, what laws could have prevented this? That are already in the books and weren't followed, which I guarantee you, they exist. It's just no one cares or knows about them, so let's pass a new one, okay? So I, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I, I always felt like you're not, you're not, uh, you're not shocking me here saying something that I think is absurd.
Speaker 2:So there you go. I think it's a good idea. I, I've, you know, I've. I've been frustrated a lot about politics because to me there are solutions, and I'm very happy in the current administration because of Elon Musk, because I'm finally starting to see some of the solutions enacted. But for too damn long the inertia has been winning. This monolithic government has grown. I remember this Literally. When I ran for Minnesota House, I had as one of my campaign items this idea that when we were young the top employers in Minnesota were 3M blah, blah, blah. I don't remember what they are anymore Blah, blah, blah and blah, blah blah. Today, the top employers in Minnesota are the state government, the federal government and the University of Minnesota. Those were the top three employers when did I run 1994. Of minnesota, those were the top three employers. When did I run 1994?
Speaker 2:well, 30 years ago that was the case.
Speaker 1:It's only gotten worse so, when we look at the overall numbers of employees the federal government you and I were doing this the other day the federal government, when you count the military, is something like six, a little over six million people between somewhere in there. Um, the largest employer in the united states other than the federal government is walmart at 1.2 million, like the the. Anyone who sees this as sustainable is just I don't. I don't know what to say because this is how rome?
Speaker 1:absolutely not uh, yes, and you know, right now everybody's like, well, you know the the amount of money being cut by doge and these efforts is, uh, pretty minuscule right now, and so on. And to that I say, to an extent, yes, you're right, but let's look at this in aggregate and this is just getting started, and scratching this itch now is a good start. We'll see where it goes.
Speaker 1:If this is where it ends, I will be very disappointed If this is where it ends, I will be very disappointed, but the fact that we are already seeing steps to resolve this and move the needle in any way, shape or form is huge.
Speaker 3:Doge.
Speaker 2:I agree, I don't care who does it A Doge is doing it, which is great but ultimately the key here is to remove jobs, not to just find wasteful spending. Wasteful spending is good to find, but any job that they can remove is a savings for the next hundred years. Because you know for a fact, if those wasn't here, if this wasn't happening today, there would be some person in that job for the next hundred years. Like no federal jobs have ever disappeared, they've. Some of them have certainly been temporarily, temporarily, uh, gone and then came back. But when, when the federal government, historically, has created a position, that position will now be a position forever. And the government only grows, it never shrinks. And um, did you read, by chance, uh, john c dwork's article on taxes? I reposted it. No, I didn't. Yeah, you never read x um, I read x.
Speaker 2:It's just you and other people post a ton and there's only so much time in a day I limit myself to no more than 125 posts a day, uh-huh, so it's not that hard to skim through, anyway. So John wrote a great article. John really is a great writer and this is not a surprise to anyone. I've literally been reading John since I was a little kid. He has always had a very good flair with words, had a very good flair with words. Um, he was like back literally when I was a you know, a teenager. I was getting mac user magazine and the back page of the mac user magazine was john. So he had basically it's the page opposite the back cover. I don't know what that page is called, but it's basically the last thing in the magazine. And then you have an ad on the inside of the back cover and then you have the, the actual back of the magazine and so I always flipped to read that first because he was the, he was the contrarian, he.
Speaker 2:He was the guy in the Mac magazine that always bitched about the Macs and talks about how PCs are better. It was hilarious, it was very well written and you'd have to nod your head and you know, give him a, you'd have to agree to some extent with them, right? You have to say, well, yes, he has a point, but you shouldn't necessarily get rid of your Mac for that. But you know so he he was, uh, well-versed back then when he was younger, and he's certainly still is today. And so the article he was writing about the um, the IRS and taxes, income taxes and specifically, and making the argument that income taxes have always been driven by war and because it's really a war tax, this is what, why you're taxing income.
Speaker 1:I don't know that I agree with that, Philippe.
Speaker 2:You need to read the article, and so he starts back in the 1700s and that this has created a cycle for the US to where the US has to be always involved in some kind of military actions abroad, and that is always a justification for the income tax. So, uh yeah, read the article, see what you think I agree with him.
Speaker 1:I'll open it up and read it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, don't do it during the recording.
Speaker 1:Well, just send it to me on signal and I'll get to it. I it or not, I actually look at your signal pretty often I read most of the stuff you send me.
Speaker 2:What do you mean most?
Speaker 1:No, most. There's only so much time in a day and you send me like five videos a day and I listen at 1x, not whatever you listen to oh, you poor boy.
Speaker 3:1x.
Speaker 2:As a result, I have the podcast I want to listen to and, yeah, yeah well, YouTube now lets you listen or watch videos at 2x, which is great um why would you want to do that? Because you, you, because your brain is capable of it, and why would you slow yourself down?
Speaker 1:because pacing and how someone is communicating matters. So as I say this sentence, I am pacing it in certain ways to show you my frustration Like molasses. Yeah, and when you've okay.
Speaker 2:Pacing stays dude, it's just everything's twice as fast. That's all Uh-huh, uh-huh, it's all good, it's all good. Anyway, uh, read his article, see what you think. I'm curious. If you do end up disagreeing with him, definitely let's chat about it, because I'd be curious, uh, to see what your thoughts on there were. But anyway, there's two, two things I I like reading john's articles and I always make sure that I post, because I don't know if he posts him on X.
Speaker 1:Frankly, but I always he has been, so he's been posting a few things on X.
Speaker 2:I saw he retweeted the last one, that that I last, when I potted, he posted, he retweeted, so I don't know if he is posting himself well, some of it is.
Speaker 1:he is like he put his treatise on land man up there, which is a show I still haven't watched, so I have have very little opinion on it, but you know.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, if I have pictures of puppies and kittens, I send those to him too.
Speaker 1:For use in the newsletter. Indeed, All right, man. So we've got this massive takedown of USAID, which people are flipping out. Takedown of USAID, which people are flipping out. And now really the news media being exposed for selling these premium subscriptions to you know Us Right To the American public.
Speaker 3:To the.
Speaker 1:American public. Yeah, was it secret, I mean some of this is just not.
Speaker 2:Did you know that the New York Times had a $36,000 subscription? I did not.
Speaker 1:I totally didn't. I did not, but what I would say is okay, you know, seems to me that this is rather well known and has been there for a while Now Politico. The interesting thing was when that got canceled, apparently they couldn't make their payroll. That's a significant thing Now was it that they couldn't make their payroll, or was it just a glitch that happened very serendipitously? I don't know what to believe there.
Speaker 2:Well for Politico it's interesting. But what's more interesting to me is that the BBC receives 8% of its overall funding from USAID.
Speaker 1:It's their charity arm. It's not the actual BBC.
Speaker 2:Well, the BBC, it's a different organization. Are you sure about that?
Speaker 1:yes, it is a subsidiary, charitably funded uh thing for work outside of britain and so on, is not the official bbc okay so but yes, they were still receiving a retarded amount of income from that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 8% of their annual budget. It's insane and, incidentally, the Brits are not happy about this.
Speaker 3:Okay, good, good.
Speaker 1:Let them be. Yeah, they shouldn't be. This is all building to a crescendo a the the us federal aid.
Speaker 2:So we basically stopped all foreign aid, right and now marco rubio and team are going back through and granting waivers for certain programs at least temporarily and can I go on record and just say that I think the uh funding should have been stopped for every country with zero exceptions good I there's no reason for egypt to be getting money or israel oh yeah, but egypt, israel? Well, of course you'd say that we know, we know all about how you look at the jews oh god, yeah, yeah you have a video of of what you have nothing of that guy that started a podcast that I sent to you.
Speaker 1:Yes, that has nothing to do with me.
Speaker 2:Well, that is the name of the last episode of Unrelenting. By the way, in case you didn't see, yeah, I listened to it last night Fishing with Hitler.
Speaker 1:I made sure and listened to that episode because I knew shit would come up today. So here we are, yeah, and I think y'all are overblowing the fight with CSB just a little too much.
Speaker 2:I have no fight with CSB. I'm just a bystander sitting there laughing cordially. Okay, look, both of those guys have hot tempers.
Speaker 3:You think?
Speaker 2:I don't you know, when I, when I uh blocked csb, I did it because he was just annoying the crap out of me with insults about the russian war, allegedly uh, there's no war there, it's just special military operation. And uh, I'm like I just don't need to listen to this. It's not that I hated csb, I just I just didn't need to listen to him, that's all that. I hated csv, I just didn't need to listen to him, that's all well, I, I think, uh, you know the feud.
Speaker 1:Here's what it comes down to. Csv appreciate your support, everything you do for us, thank you. But you know we don't read notes on this show for donations. What we do is if someone sends us a note and we want to say something about it we will say something about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even if that note has no money attached.
Speaker 1:Right, that's not going to change. So it doesn't matter if you send us a ton of money, it doesn't matter if you send us no money, if we find it interesting, we'll say something about it. Otherwise we're just not going to yeah.
Speaker 2:And I it, otherwise we're just not going to. Yeah and but and I think that's fair. Yeah, yeah, but but also I kind of explained the whole thing is csb. I guess he is technically mad, even though he, you know like he talks to me. He's sending messages on a regular basis, but he is mad at me for calling him a racist or, as he says, the r word. So apparently racist is a word, kind of like the other words, that you can't pronounce because you'll get banned in wherever he lives. But here we can say racist without any uh issues. But it's like I explained on that show, it's like dude ben's a racist you know, I have no problem saying I am not a racist, totally a racist.
Speaker 2:There's no two ways about it. Everybody that listens to our show knows ben's a racist, so I don't see a problem. I don't see a problem with why you would be offended with being a racist. You know, I don't care. Just because ben's a racist doesn't mean that I'm not gonna do a show with him. I like him, he's a good guy for being a racist go ahead yeah, uh-huh, yeah.
Speaker 1:What can I say here? I I I disagree that I'm a racist. Yes, I disagree with. Well, you'd be wrong.
Speaker 2:But okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, anyway, I am not a racist, but I definitely think that we have chosen several things poorly as far as how we have progressed as a society. But that has nothing to do with race. Like I judge anyone's race, I judge their individual character and one of the things I would say is that we have long let individual characters slip, and that is a problem yeah, yeah, and the the distinction there is simply in making decisions based on race instead of other factors.
Speaker 2:That, to me, is what makes somebody a racist Right.
Speaker 1:Or makes actions racist. It's like oh, what decisions have I ever made that are based on someone's race?
Speaker 2:Well, look, I don't want to insinuate anything here. You don't want to back up't want to insinuate anything here. You don't want to back up what you're claiming at all I'm just saying that if anyone wants to listen to our podcast, they can make their own decisions. See, I'm all for freedom of choice for people like that, um our whole catalog is available.
Speaker 2:Our whole back uh, two years of episodes is up there available for the public. Make your own decisions, but I just don't think it's a bad thing. It's my point, like it's not a condemnation, to say that ben's a racist. It's just different than having you know like if you have a, an opinion of something, forget about people of a technology based on the country of origin of that technology. Are you a racist?
Speaker 3:Like, do you think?
Speaker 2:Chinese stuff is as good as some other countries' products.
Speaker 1:I think you can't be, and I'll tell you why. With very few exceptions, China being one of them, there are no mono-ethnic countries anymore. So how can you be a racist when a country no longer represents a race?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that goes to another point, You're absolutely right, because the term racist isn't necessarily applicable, in its modern context, to a race. Literally, it's a joke anyway, because the human race is the race Like whether you're Asian or white or black. Those three are not races scientifically speaking. The only one that's an actual race is is homo sapien, and all three of them are homo sapien, so racism doesn't actually mean something about race it has to do with.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is being very pedantic, it is absolutely colloquial. Meaning is very well, that's what I'm getting to.
Speaker 2:So the colloquial meaning is really more countryist or regionalist, if you want to be accurate about it. So racist is a uh, an assumption that you're making based on location of something, right, okay, well, I, I think that kind of generally falls. So there's a rationale for doing that, and that is you tend to, as a human, generalize about things you're less familiar with. If you're more familiar with the country you live in, you can generalize in a smaller group and you can say that Oklahoma sucks. Texas is great Right, it's still regional, but it's like you're more aware of surroundings that are closer to you and the choices that people make in each locale. But the further out you go, like halfway around the world, and you know you don't say that, um, I don't know that hong kong is great, but shenzhen is horrible, because most people couldn't find them on the map and they just look at them as china okay, well
Speaker 3:you know, what I.
Speaker 2:Hong kong is not part of china, but anyway oh, I'm sure next thing you're going to tell us is that taiwan is not part of china either.
Speaker 1:Correct and based off a treaty. I would say that the UK needs to nut up and take Hong Kong back.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, Good luck on that one.
Speaker 1:Hey, I can be very pragmatic at times and say, hey, this is what I think.
Speaker 3:We'll see.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what it comes down to is I don't think that people would say what you're saying and look well, no, because it does racism in the colloquial term uh, exist, yes, is it? Um, is it what the democrats, the left and a lot of people would have us believe? Uh, right now no, and the reason why I would say that is because we're going a little extreme here by saying um well, what's your definition of racism?
Speaker 2:Cause it's obviously not mine, cause I just explained mine and you're disagreeing with it.
Speaker 1:Racism is the uh, the judgment of a person based off of immutable characteristics that are associated with specific genotypes.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, now, there you go. That's equally pedantic. But what do you mean by that?
Speaker 1:So, for instance, you don't like people with X color skin or X color hair or X color eyes or from a certain region of the world which is part of the definition you said. But what I would say is you know you have people who share genetic characteristics spread out all over across the world. So I would say my definition is a little less specific than yours. I think that people often have reactions to people's immutable physical characteristics over where they're actually from.
Speaker 2:Right. Right that, for example, people with red hair, regardless of their country of origin, would be perceived as negative because they lack souls or they're incredibly attractive, depending on which way you fall. Yes, yes, some people prefer a soulless person yes, that's true but,
Speaker 1:in either way. It's an irrational judgment not based off of the individual, and that's the problem with it.
Speaker 2:That's why I would judgment.
Speaker 1:It's a group judgment and that's my point and that's why I don't like it or fall into that or believe in it, because I I believe the right level of analysis is always the individual, not the group.
Speaker 3:Okay, all right so you would never this is not new you would never say a country is a certain way.
Speaker 1:You would just say that there's certain people in the country that are certain way well, I would say that the country may have policies or actions that the country is taking, but that has nothing to do with the individuals in the country it is what the country is doing as a whole, as itself.
Speaker 1:This is what they're doing and I can judge that and I can say you know, the US is doing this, russia is doing that, the Americans are doing this, the Russians are doing that, and that is the level of analysis is at the country level, but that has very little bearing to my feelings towards any individual in that country, right? If I can dislike what a country is doing. Go find a citizen that doesn't like it either and agree with them and be okay. Yeah yeah, hence why I'm not a racist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, well, people can decide on their own looking in their back catalog. But yeah, it's um. I think that maybe there's a difference here is I think that racism is absolutely normal and natural, like every other method of sorting that human brains do sure it's normal and natural to be ignorant and not to apply the proper level of analysis.
Speaker 1:I agree that is incredibly normal proper level of analysis.
Speaker 2:Uh, depending on the information available and racism is part of that spectrum people who are unlike you, that you know less about, you're going to have to generalize more on. And the difference here is that people on the other side politically from you and I they are more racist than you and I, but their generalization is that if that person has different skin than them, they are better than them.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Right, you see who I'm talking about here, like the white women in California. Sure Is that to them the big differentiating factors can only swing in one direction, which is better than me, because that's the story that they've been sold and they've, they've bought it hook, line and sinker and uh, and so they're acting in that way. So I don't think like people that would call themselves the least racist. I think are actually the most racist because they they just reverse the uh, the benefit analysis, but they still view through the lens of race okay right.
Speaker 2:So I just I think that it's time to uh make racism great equally. Yeah, exactly, make racism great. That's a show title, isn't there?
Speaker 3:make racism great again. No, it's time to do the same thing with it no, it's time.
Speaker 2:Well, you didn't like fishing with hitler? Now, that was a great show.
Speaker 2:Title uh but I I think it's one of those things where, uh, you have to do the same thing that has been done with the word nazi, which is, take all the power out of it, just make it meaningless. It means literally means nothing anymore, and and I think racism needs to be going in that exact same direction. It's, it's literally one of those things that I think you and I can agree shouldn't be used as a sole criteria for for anything. But it is stupid to think that a a level of analysis where other information is unavailable should, how, somehow exclude race.
Speaker 2:Okay, like we should be able to generalize. This is how how human brains work. This is how probably other animal brains work too.
Speaker 1:And again, I'm not against generalizing, I'm against generalizing at the wrong level of yes, I totally agree. You know the wrong level of thought here if you will. Yeah yeah, even lobsters have hierarchies in in theory, sure, yeah, I guess in analysis.
Speaker 2:Um speaking of, have you? Uh, you said you've been reading jordan's new book. I?
Speaker 1:have, I'm about halfway through it. Um, I'm about halfway through it. I I would uh like to be moving a little faster, but you know, you've got me watching this show and doing other things layman on me, of course yeah, so it's.
Speaker 1:It's definitely slowed me down a little bit, but it's dense dude, it really is and he's going through and really enumerating a lot of really good thoughts and how biblical stories can relate to modern society and the underlying, the underlying um, how do I put this? The underlying psychology that exists in our society, whether we're cognizant of it or not.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:So yeah.
Speaker 1:Any earth-shattering ideas? So far in there, nothing earth shattering, but definitely, uh, some interesting stuff.
Speaker 2:I think it's reading and nodding your head and going, yep, Makes sense, Uh no.
Speaker 1:I you know I don't necessarily do that, um, but what I would say is it's I'm, I'm listening to it and then I'm going back on the Kindle app and rereading the passage and thinking about it.
Speaker 2:And so it's a slow process. That's so much more work than I would be willing to do. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, that's why we have you to do it. This is. I'm doing that because I think it's valuable.
Speaker 2:It is I'm not disparaging it, I'm just basically trashing myself and saying I'm too lazy and you're taking it as somehow an insult to you. What the fuck man?
Speaker 1:I'm not taking it yeah, no it's. It's just, it's a lot of work, but it's a lot of dense material. So I would put this book up there with maps of meaning on the ideas, the structure and the density I mean, you said it was pretty big too right yeah, it's a fairly large book. It's not Maps of Meaning big, but it's right up there.
Speaker 2:Okay, have you added it to your list of books Ben's reading or recommends people read? I haven't yet.
Speaker 1:I need to update the website. I haven't done that in a while.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:But thank you for reminding me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then you can post on the X group with a link to the website so people can go check it out.
Speaker 1:I've got a lot of books to add to that actually, but it's dense enough material that I think it's worth reading. I think everybody's going to get something out of it the way you would actually reading the Bible. I think everyone will get something out of reading the Bible if they take their time to do it.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, especially numbers. Will get something out of reading the bible if they take their time to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, especially numbers the most interesting part of the bible, oh god, and for those who don't know, for those who haven't read the bible yeah, it so, and so begat so and so livedand-so many years. And numbers is rough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, obviously I'm saying that sarcastically. It's probably the most boring book of the Bible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's also not a bad thing.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:At least I don't think so.
Speaker 2:Boring doesn't mean bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway. I think there's a lot to be said for going through and actually reading the Bible, and the level of analysis if you've read the Bible that Jordan is bringing in this book is pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:He's also going through multiple translations so he's going through and saying okay, translation here, translation there, this is different meanings, this is this, this is that you know and that has become more I will say uh, from my observation has become more popular as a more acceptable well, but more popular, like it happens a lot more, where people that have conversations about biblical meanings tend to reference multiple translations. Now, where uh, 20, 30, 40 years ago it was all uh, the new james, what's the? What's the? What's the cult NIV.
Speaker 1:New King James the.
Speaker 2:Living Bible, all that is where people have gone.
Speaker 1:I am personally much more. I'm a King Jameser, and I know there's lots of people who will sit there and say, oh well, can you really understand that language?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I grew up reading that I liked it, that I you know. I I liked it. Uh, you know, I think that there's some very specific things that are right in the uh king james that aren't in, like the niv like everybody quotes the scripture about love is patient, love is kind.
Speaker 1:well, in the king james it's charity is patient and charity is kind. And if you go back and look at the actual greek word, the word that's being used for love there because there are four types of love in the Greek language is agape, which is unconditional love, and I think charity is a better fit than the colloquial love that people think. I mean if you were thinking about unconditional love, you wouldn't be reading that at your wedding. So I grew up with, when we were doing Bible studies, we had King James and then a Strong's Concordance right there and we would read a passage. We'd think about what we thought it said and then we'd go to the Strong's Concordance and actually look at the underlying languages and really go through and say, okay, what was actually meant by this how would we translate it today?
Speaker 2:When you were taking your Latin classes did you ever use the Bible in Latin as one of the books? Nope.
Speaker 1:Why no? Because it just wasn't one. None of the classes I took had a Latin Bible as part of it Interesting. Well, the Bible was never written in latin, so it's a translation. So why would I be reading a trend like if I, if I were reading greek or aramaic or you know, hebrew you know going to those original source languages makes more sense.
Speaker 2:But going to a translation in latin, why you know I'm not cath, fair enough, but it was one of the earliest translations. It certainly predated English by millennia. Okay, so it's an earlier source translation and for somebody that's actually learning, Latin. I would think that that would be something that practically could be used.
Speaker 1:What were?
Speaker 2:you reading, Because I've never taken Latin. What were you reading? Did they assign actual books to read?
Speaker 1:Yeah, in fact I've got some of them on my bookshelf. I'd have to go back and look at what all was on there on my bookshelf. I'd have to go back and look at what all was on there. But shit, what was the Roman emperor who wrote his treatise, marcus Aurelius? Yeah, stuff like that. Poems poetry is pretty interesting in Latin, because Latin doesn't have a enforced order.
Speaker 1:So Latin is a more purely conjugative language, so there's a preferred order, but you can say the words in any form you want, which makes it very good for poetry yeah and this is why russian's the same way, which is why there's a.
Speaker 2:There's a uh, commonly repeated phrase that I've heard lots of times by people, but I think they're saying it because it's cute to say that, uh, if you really want to feel shakespeare, you have to read it in the original russian, because, uh, it just sounds so much better than it does in english. Um and I think klingons kind of stole that from russians as well but, the.
Speaker 2:The idea that a poem written in one language could actually be better in a different language seems counterintuitive. But when you're going from a language where you do have order of words to a language where you don't, it is actually possible.
Speaker 2:Or a different order yeah, well, different, you'd have to get lucky right. It could be worse or better. But if you have a language that's more freeform, then it is possible to actually improve on something that just wouldn't linguistically work in the original. Like, original doesn't have to be the best, it's always going to be the original, but it doesn't have to be the best.
Speaker 1:Eh well, anyway, what I'll say is language is an interesting subject and it's fun to play around with, but you know, I I don't know that I've ever gotten to the point where I could think in another language uh at the right level to really appreciate stuff the way I can in english.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's hard to do that without speaking every day?
Speaker 1:Well, yes, and I'm someone who you know I've done quite a bit of, you know, linguistic stuff, like I'm at 200 and some odd days of practicing Spanish in a row.
Speaker 2:And I'm, you know, I can.
Speaker 1:I've've been to Spain. I can get by in conversation. Does that make me fluent? No, no. And can I think in Spanish? No, no, am I pretty quickly translating and swapping back and forth?
Speaker 2:yes, but you know.
Speaker 1:Let's be honest about you. Know where you're at.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that there's definitely a biological component to languages where some people just have way less effort involved in being able to learn a brand new language and converse very freely with it, regardless of how bad their accent is, where other people would take way longer and feel way less fluent. And again, the level of accent both of these groups of people have may be identical. It's just some people seem to kind of connect with a new language much quicker in their heads and be able to transition into using it, even if it's not perfect from other people that are just translating words from English to the other language.
Speaker 1:So, now that we've bored everyone with our linguistic talk, Mm-hmm. What's next? Well, so the push for Brandon as ATF director is not over. Like Pam Bondi has said, she wants to see a cop in that position and she got roasted for it.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm as she should yeah, and I I think if, if pam and the trump team want to really kind of think through and talk through what they're doing and making sure that it's in line with what the people want, then then you know, as a result, I think that it would be great to see someone like Brandon put in there.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I would love him to be in there. I just I don't know. I really have never heard his name come up even once by anybody associated with Trump come up even once by anybody associated with trump. Not by musk, not by uh. Well, really, anybody on x like. The only people that are posting brandon are guys like you and me that are not part of the millions of followers club.
Speaker 1:Uh no, I think I we've seen some pretty like who oh god, you're gonna make me go back to twitter um do you not have it open all the time? Why would I do that to myself?
Speaker 2:how else are you gonna know? I don't know, man for me it like. Obviously I'm a big fan of his. I I gave him money when he was running for office. You did as well. Um, he's semi-local here, he's the next city south of me. Uh, I love his attitude.
Speaker 2:I love the gum meme stuff like there's so much good stuff about him and I think he would figure out how to do that job and well, but I just feel like you know, he is perceived as one of those youtuber twitch type people, by people that are actually people, by people that are actually making the decisions on. Yeah, so gun owners of america have thrown his name out there. Okay, um, I'm looking for what we need is yeah, so for gun owners of america went out and said repeal the atf.
Speaker 1:We can do this abolish the ATF, and reposting one of Brandon's videos on not having the video or killing it. It was not as late as one.
Speaker 2:But what we? What we need is to have Baron watch some of his stuff and tell his dad this is the guy we need.
Speaker 1:Exactly. But anyway, I'm just saying there have been some fairly high profile people out there pushing stuff. The Libertarian Party has pushed in lots of things.
Speaker 2:The Libertarian Party.
Speaker 1:You know what We'll see?
Speaker 2:It's full of socialists now.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't trust those guys now, yeah, I don't trust those guys. Yeah, you know, I, I don't know. Man, I think chase, uh, oliver being nominated was a gift to trump. So you know, I don't know how?
Speaker 2:how is it better for him that the libertarians had a different candidate than him? How is that actually better for Trump?
Speaker 1:Because if they are not going to get through what they need to get through to say Trump is not only the Republican nominee but the libertarian nominee, which wasn't going to happen because there are some very deep anti-Trump voices in the libertarian party. Nominating someone like Chase Oliver is just self-dest-destructive.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just not going to fly. It's not gonna work, so hey, cool I yeah I thought ron paul wasn't libertarian enough when he was nominee back then. You know, just think because remember I was pretty active in the libertarian party, I was pretty active with objectivism in general back in the early 90s and there was there was definitely a rift between the intellectual Libertarian Party that more closely aligned themselves with Ayn Rand and the other half of the libertarian party, which tended to align itself more with smoking pot.
Speaker 1:I mean I'm okay with both, whatever you want to do.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, but the point is that the intellectual side was okay with smoking pot, but they wouldn't smoke pot because it made them dumb. And the other side liked smoking pot but hadn't read all of Ayn Rand's work. And so there was definitely that rift happening.
Speaker 1:And then there's some of us that have done both. So there you go.
Speaker 2:Well, and then there's some of us that just got invited to go smoke a doobie just the other day. By who? By my black friend.
Speaker 3:Oh okay.
Speaker 2:I mean not that I care about you know what color friends I have, because I'm not racist, unlike some people Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, Gene. All right, we got to have some more topics here to cover. Otherwise we're flopping around here, Are we?
Speaker 2:flailing.
Speaker 3:Is that the phrase? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, we haven't talked about video games for a while. I can chime in on that. Um, well, we haven't talked about video games for a while. I can chime in on that. Uh, there's a new game that everybody seems to be playing that I wasn't originally going to be all that interested in, called kingdom come deliverance, which sounds very christian for some reason. Um, but, uh sorry, kingdom come deliverance 2, not the first one, this is the second one. Okay, uh, but here's how I would describe it to somebody that's at least somewhat aware of other video games is, if you played red dead redemption, think of red redemption in the 1300s in europe.
Speaker 2:If you haven't played red dead redemption, think of grand theft auto 5 in the 1300s in europe. And what if you haven't played Red Dead Redemption? Think of Grand Theft Auto 5 in the 1300s in Europe.
Speaker 1:And what if you haven't played Grand Theft Auto 5?
Speaker 2:Then you probably are not an American and you're pretending that you actually are, because everyone's played Grand Theft Auto.
Speaker 1:I've played Grand Theft Auto, just not Grand Theft Auto 5.
Speaker 2:Which one did you play? 4?.
Speaker 1:Oh my god, I three like I. I remember three was a horrible one.
Speaker 2:That was the new york one with the european dude. Oh, I I'm trying to remember the best one, I think, was vice city, which was two I played vice city. I'm trying to think of what else I played. Gta V was oh actually, was it? No, gta V was in California. That was in LA. And 6 is coming out this year. They've been working on it for a decade. Okay, yeah and.
Speaker 3:I'm not a big fan of Grand.
Speaker 1:Theft Auto. I hate third person.
Speaker 3:I'm not a big fan of grand theft auto.
Speaker 1:I hate third person. I did. I'm not a quest guy, I'm. I want to go in and shoot shit.
Speaker 2:That's it right, so grand theft auto. You can shoot shit you don't have to do be you have to be in third person I think you can switch to second person yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then there's you know, gary's Mod and all that stuff that people did. I remember that I don't know. It's just not my game. It's not my game.
Speaker 2:I get it. I get it. The thing, the difference and why I'm comparing it to Grand Theft Auto and it's really the same thing with Red Dead Redemption 2, is it's really the same thing with red dead redemption too is it's a ginormous map of an open world where there are a lot of places and areas where you're going to interact with somebody. They may sell shit, they may give you a mission to go do. They may fight you, they, they might be wild animals, they might be bandits. They might be wild animals, they might be bandits, they might be whatever. But the point is I don't want to say it's a totally nonlinear game, but it's a less linear game, and so the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 falls in that same category of a large map. Do stuff however you want, but there's still a storyline, you're still progressing, but it's kind of up to you on how quickly or slowly you do that progression of the storyline while you're doing all the general uh, you know, exploring the map and doing side quests If you want to do those, whatever you want, want so anyway.
Speaker 2:So I had a good friend of mine who actually used to listen to this show. I don't know if he still does, probably not right now because he's playing the game, but, um, certainly somebody of a similar like mind to you and I and um, in fact, I was going to have you meet up with him, uh, last time you were out in dc. But he is totally sucked into this game now, and so he got me to buy it and I'm, I have to say, a little frustrated with it because I keep getting killed. Um, so I'm not as into it as he is, um, but it's still. It's still entertaining that.
Speaker 2:This is one of the things that they have in this game that I don't like is you can't just save anytime you want to save. The way that they did the save game mechanic is you have to use a potion and when you drink this potion, it saves your progress. But it also means either you have to be buying these potions or you have to be crafting these potions, or you have to be crafting these potions if you want to do saves, otherwise that's actually kind of an interesting dynamic, because it's not even like I've gotten to a certain stage or something and you know we're good there.
Speaker 2:That's I like it and it still does the auto-saves. At certain stages, like as the storyline progresses and you do things for the main story, it'll do a save. Also, if you lay down on your own bed, it'll do a save, but not just like rest somewhere else while you're traveling, but that's kind of an interesting addition to the game dynamic I agree that it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I'm not enjoying it, that's all I'm saying. Is it's frustrating because I literally lost like two hours of crafting potions because I neglected to do a manual save by drinking one of those potions after crafting them and then ended up stealing a piece of cheese, which got me killed.
Speaker 2:Well, don't steal a piece of cheese apparently don't steal cheese, because that's the worst possible thing you can do in this game. And, uh, and I was, so I was like god damn it, that's two hours I just lost of crafting potions man. So, yeah, there is that, but it's a. It's a neat game. It looks pretty, it's good graphics, it is, uh, you know, it's probably written in that, uh, king james language that you like, so that all the characters speak with an accent okay oh yeah, it's not that, it's even such a like thing.
Speaker 1:It's just what I grew up with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fine, uh, and it it takes place in an actual location so that, like, like, you can look at videos of that city on YouTube or whatever and see the locations that are in the game. So it's historically recreating in the old city in um, uh, it's, it's not Romania, but it's one of those countries East European countries Okay, cool One of them. Things. Trees, okay, cool one of them things. So, and of course, you know your character is a good guy, which is also maybe why the game is so harsh about stealing cheese.
Speaker 2:My characters tend to be more ambiguous the game has you as a good guy, so therefore you're bad but no, I no, I just I don't see good and bad, I just see, uh, you know people and most games I can walk that line, um, and I shouldn't say most games, but games that have that type of freedom, you can, you can make those decisions. But some games kind of like, really punish you if you do bad things, like stealing cheese, okay, and I am highlighting the fact that it's cheese, because, god forbid, you do something worse than steel cheese. But you know, in my case I just felt like I wanted some cheese and so I there's you you felt like you wanted some cheese in real life, so in the video, game.
Speaker 2:You did something stupid, okay I have no empathy for you here, you know yes, I was too lazy to walk to the fridge I waste a lot of time in my life too, but, yeah, on very different things I get it, I get it and I I really I've had periods of my life where I wasted more time, and then I've had periods where I wasted less time in video games, like um, between 2010 and 2017. For about seven years I didn't play any video games at all and then so that was basically from the point I got divorced until I ended up dating a uh, a 20 year old chick who was a uh streamer on uh uh on Twitch, and she got me back into video games, and so from 17, not so like it's last five years I've been playing video games again.
Speaker 3:So I don't know, it's a hobby.
Speaker 2:I've had lots of different hobbies over the years.
Speaker 1:I've had you know that's, that's for sure.
Speaker 2:I had. Well, I technically still do have lots of guns, but I've spent a lot of money on guns over the years. Spent a lot of money on photography over the years, used to have a boat and a jet ski at the same time. Spent a lot of money on water toys. You know there's a lot of things that I've had as hobbies. Video games, honestly honestly are one of the cheapest hobbies that you can have.
Speaker 1:Okay, just saying I mean there's a lot of cost in video games, not to mention the amount of time and everything else. There's a time cost.
Speaker 2:But in terms of, uh yeah, cost, cost, money cost is very slim, and I will say that during covid and also hardware that you're purchasing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but comparatively speaking.
Speaker 2:You know, like during covid, when interaction with other humans became very limited, uh, the interaction with other people playing video games online increased a lot. Sure, like everybody started getting on to Discord and like, because it used to be just, you'd have to, like you know, twist your friends arms to to get on Discord or team speak. And during covid, like, everybody joined Discord all of a sudden, and now it was. You never had to even ask if someone's on there. They're obviously on there. Uh, it's just a matter of, you know, connecting yeah, covid changed a lot of stuff there's no
Speaker 1:doubt. But you know, for the better, for the worse. So we can argue that um. So, while we're somewhat talking about technology, you know you, you mentioned my nas stuff to darren on the other show and like the reason why I was even looking at that qnap was because I can literally take my drives out of the current nas pop them in there and it rebuild the raid and work but what?
Speaker 2:so I wouldn't have to migrate the data? What's the downside of keeping your current NAS?
Speaker 1:Speed limitations. It's old.
Speaker 2:Network speed or actual drive speed?
Speaker 1:The drive speed is sufficient that it can. The two 1 gigabit connections. They're not sufficient anymore.
Speaker 2:And yours doesn't have the port that Darren's has to plug in the no, it does.
Speaker 1:I bought a 2.5 gig NIC and plugged it in Okay. And tried to do a kernel mod to load the driver. It sees it as a real tech card. It sees everything. It will not load the NIC driver.
Speaker 3:Oh, that sucks.
Speaker 1:So, since it won't load the NIC driver either, I recompile the driver for this kernel that this QNAP is using, which I'm not effing doing because it's just a pain in the ass, I'd have to extract the kernel. Do VMs? The version of Linux that is running on this QNAP is so limited there is no way to do the recompiling of the kernel on the NAS itself, which makes it just a pain in the ass to do.
Speaker 1:Well, not the kernel, the driver, but regardless so I can't get the 2.5 gig card working, which is fine because the way I'm about to wire my house and set it up, my docking station now will have a 2.5 gig card and so will my mini PC and they'll be wired back in so and I've got some parts coming today actually to hopefully work on that. So we'll see. Um, but the, the qnap one I sent you is kind of the cheapest six bay option I found on that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an arm processor.
Speaker 3:It's, I mean it's not a super mass to run a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:And you are making fun of the AI stuff. I don't give a shit. I will turn that off, not use it, right? But, anyway, I get it the other option that is really attractive to me is the Ubiquiti Unify NAS. Have you looked at that one?
Speaker 2:I think you sent it to me, I can't remember. It's a seven bay rack mount.
Speaker 1:oh yeah, that's right for five hundred dollars yeah, yeah and it can use whatever kind of drives you want to put in there yeah um, it's got 10 gig, it's got everything. It would work with my unifier oh, I didn't notice that yeah, that's actually probably one of the cheapest 10 gigs then. Yes, exactly. But, I would have to buy at least enough hard drive to copy all the data off the NAS move the hard drives to that NAS and then recopy the data to it without losing anything. And that's just Sure.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not that much If you wanted to save money. Now, ideally you don't care about the money, you just buy all the drives, chuck them in there. If you want to save money, all you need to do is buy two drives. Put two drives. Copy two drives worth of shit from your old nas. Take out one of those drives from your nas, it'll go into limp mode. So now you have three drives in that nas.
Speaker 1:Copy the rest of that shit over and then move the the rest of the two drives over I don't know why I wouldn't just copy all the data to where I need to be, but the point is, I'm going to use a slightly more expensive way to do it.
Speaker 2:But yeah, you can totally do that well, no, I can get one.
Speaker 1:Let's see what. What's my?
Speaker 2:well, how much? How much data do you have?
Speaker 1:because that's what I was going to say.
Speaker 2:So, darren has way more than either you or me yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, he's a hoarder by his own admission.
Speaker 2:He said that.
Speaker 1:So I I've got about eight, eight terabytes used on my nas so you could literally put in a single hard drive. Yeah and exactly and well, and I, I would do it via usb though an external drive copy over and then be able to copy it back um, which is fine. You know, um, and I don't really and I've got six terabytes free on my nas right now, so I don't need to expand this drive size or anything else. The drives are currently not the bottleneck.
Speaker 2:I've never looked their stuff. Which one the uh, which one?
Speaker 1:The Unas, the Unify. I haven't used their NAS at all, but I'm using their access points in the Switch right now and I run a Unify controller locally on a Linux box. In fact, when we're done with this, if you want me to show you the unified interface.
Speaker 2:I can no that's right. The my only concern would be is it's got a single power input?
Speaker 1:yes, but what I would say is I have literally had the nas that I have. I'd have to go back and look at when it came out, but it's a 69659 Pro 2. So it came out in like 2013, 2014, something like that Ridiculous right, like it's that old of an ass. And I have had to replace the power supply on it once. Yeah, and that's the only thing, knock on wood. So far that's failed on this NAS.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:So anyway, thing knock on wood. So far that's failed on this nas.
Speaker 2:So anyway, when I was primarily using it over wi-fi. You know the speed perfectly fine, yeah, yeah because the wi-fi is the limitation, as I've gone to 2.5 gig and I'm not a bad device to get which one the unis, yeah, or the unify the unify yeah, the unify nas is nice I. I like the 10 gig uplink for 500 bucks. So what I was gonna say is I would totally get the m2 uh nas device that we've both looked at like six months ago. The problem is the six-drive version.
Speaker 1:Expensive or 7-drive.
Speaker 2:It's not expensive. It's $499,. Same price, but it's 7.
Speaker 1:M.2 drives.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the drives are expensive. However, the 7-drive version has 2.5 gig. If you want 10 gig, you have to go with the 12-drive version, which is $1,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the. Unifi NAS is a really good option for a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in a lot of ways, and the fact that it's ray or that it's uh uh shelf mountable is uh plus, not like I don't have a shelf anymore, but a rack, but for a lot of people you know, I have a plus. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's a nice NAS and it even has direct optical connection capabilities to your PC so you can run a 10-gig link from your PC to it and use it directly One of the couple of things that were missing. That was interesting to me, because even my, like I said, decade old nas that I'm using has ice guzzy. The q-nap doesn't currently.
Speaker 2:Have you used ice guzzy? Mine hasn't.
Speaker 1:I've never used it um, yes, actually I have you. I have two q-nap nases in the house and the one that I have is my main. Six bay is older, but I have another four bay, that was rack mountable and dual power supplies and everything else, and that one is um, that one has um, uh, ice guzzy on it and I've used it as a storage array for VMs and stuff. So, yes, yes, I've used so what?
Speaker 2:what are you using ice cozy for?
Speaker 1:um, so in esxi setting it up as an ice cozy target so it can show up as native storage, so that then I can put a virtual hard drive on it for like backups to go to and stuff like that but how's that going to be any different than just having be connected as a network? Significantly because the os sees it as a hard drive versus as an ass right.
Speaker 2:So where's that difference? What was it come in? What's it do?
Speaker 1:so if you have a proper sand built out, there's speed improvements there's there's lots of things. You can have multiple different virtual disks set up there because the esxi is seeing as a storage pool and then you can just do it that way, versus a file share you cannot use as a storage pool. So it's, it's a technical underlying thing with how vmware has worked historically well you can't. I've never used a virtual hard drive over samba, so um, so I guess.
Speaker 2:So you're saying you could boot off the nas.
Speaker 1:Essentially you could just have the nas be your drive yeah, if you were dumb enough to put your vm booting off of that, then yes, but it would be what you do. Is you have it as a storage drive for, like a backup server or something like that, or your email server, your database server, where you don't need a lot of fast IO but you just need bulk storage? And then you have your really fast drives in the actual server itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know. I guess there is a usage for it. I just have never needed it.
Speaker 1:To each their own. I've used it, so yeah, there you go. Alright, man, anything else we need to cover?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm Let me think, is there any other? I mean, it's just been non-stop announcements after announcements, non-stop winning non-stop of uh on x, like just you know um. Oh, you got the message I sent you about Demolition Ranch shutting down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we talked about that. We went back and forth about it.
Speaker 2:But not on the show.
Speaker 3:Okay yeah, this literally happened this week. It makes me sad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's the end of an era, that's for sure. I bet he comes back you, yeah, I do, yeah, yeah, uh, well, they're selling the ranch. No, they're selling the um the resort yeah that's not the ranch I thought it was the same property.
Speaker 1:No, it's an adjacent property.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:But you know, the gun range down there has not posted new classes, which is because I was like, oh man, I need to go take a class down there before they do this, and they're not posting new classes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I get it. I mean he kind of went through about his whole history of getting on YouTube and yada, yada, yada and I've watched them from pretty early. I watched them when he I think when well for sure, when he was still doing his veterinary channel channel, but uh, I think it was probably within six months of him starting the gun channel and it's been fun watching the evolution and he was always kind of like to me the replacement for fps russia, because he'd be doing wacky things, not your traditional kind of gun reviews. Much like FPS Russia would do wacky things like having dual spaz 12s or a sawed off.
Speaker 2:Sawed off 50 cal, or the latest one was the multiple thumpers yep, now he had a lot, well, or a lot of military uh gear that he was able to have access to and russia, or demo oh, fps russia.
Speaker 2:I'm talking, yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, I think and I don't know, I I think it's obviously it's sad because we're losing a major gun tuber regularly putting up videos. On the other hand, I completely get it because for the last probably probably two or three years, his income's probably been cut by 75 percent. Previous to that, he was making multiple millions per year off youtube. I don't know if it was two million or ten million, but he was definitely making way more than one million. And, um, you know, at this point I think he wants to spend more time with the family. The kids are growing up, blah, blah, blah blah. So it totally makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, well, you know, as someone who has kids, it's, it's scary how fast they grow up and if something, if I had made that much money and I could be financially independent, uh, just stay It'd be hard not to right, I would yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would.
Speaker 1:Now I also think that there's a bit of a misnomer here, because he's not actually retiring. He's got to do something. So you know he talked about maybe building up the vet practice again and stuff like that. I think he's going to do something. I don't think he's just going to quit.
Speaker 2:Now whether or not he puts that on youtube.
Speaker 1:That's a whole different story, but oh yeah, I think that's just goes lay around on the couch in front of you, yeah yeah, I don't.
Speaker 2:When I say retire, I don't mean retire from life, I mean retire from youtube. Yeah, I, I'm sure he'll. He'll be doing other things. He may get into new hobbies. He may end up doing more shit with brandon. Frankly, we may see him as a guest on more brandon herrera stuff as well, because they're buddies, uh, and they don't live that far apart. But, um, yeah, I think he's just the amount of effort that it takes to do videos, and especially more than once a week. It's substantial and it means that he does get less time with his wife, he gets less time with his kids, he gets less time with other projects that may not be interesting to YouTube. So, I get it. Yeah, we, we wish him well, and I would have loved to have been out there. I've missed two different times where I've had an opportunity to uh buy a ticket to get out there, and I found out about both of them after the events.
Speaker 1:So that sucks, but oh well well, you know, I I've looked at uh doing classes out there and things like that and I would really like to see us. You know, uh, I hope he continues that run that as a side business. He doesn't have to do it, he can have someone else do it. That's a neat range. It's a neat thing. I there, there's okay things there, I agree.
Speaker 2:Well, let's wrap her up. Ben Yep, gene, we'll see you all on the next one, boys.
Speaker 3:Later.
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