0093 Sir Gene Speaks with Dude Named Bem

Gene: 0:15

Hey, this is Gene, and today I've got a dude who's not named Ben, but who is a Ben,

Ryan: 0:20

am the official Noah Jetta dude named Bem

Gene: 0:23

bem. B e m. And what does that stand for?

Ryan: 0:27

Bemrose

Gene: 0:28

Abbreviation of your name. I got it. Okay. Dude, name. So you're a dude named.

Ryan: 0:32

you are literally the only person who's ever not got that immediately

Gene: 0:35

did not get that cuz I don't think of you as Bes. I I guess that's why.

Ryan: 0:40

that Yeah. Most people don't, most people are like, Hey, that asshole

Gene: 0:45

No, I, I just think of you as Darren Z Ex who got back together with them. That's all. I mean, I've got other friends that have done that, but well, you do a show other than last week.

Ryan: 0:56

and the week before

Gene: 0:57

Oh, really? I didn't, didn't notice you

Ryan: 0:59

Yeah. We missed, we missed two weeks in a row.

Gene: 1:02

Oh, I guess you're not doing a show now. You're on my show. Hey, how's that

Ryan: 1:05

Yeah. Well, clearly I'm branching out.

Gene: 1:07

Yes. Well, we pay better,

Ryan: 1:09

Yes. It, I don't know.

Gene: 1:12

We'll see how good it goes in terms of ratings here. We'll see how the Nielsen stack up.

Ryan: 1:16

show, 200 for grumpy old Bens. Darren really brought out the sad puppy and it it worked. We got, we got some big donors coming in and suddenly remembering that we are poor podcasters. But everything since has been nothing.

Gene: 1:29

But that is, I think as it should be. I, I think that podcasting, first of all, podcasting is not novelty anymore, so everyone in their grandmother's got a podcast these days. So the idea of like, oh, we wanna support those podcasts, but they've always sucked. Let's be honest,

Ryan: 1:44

not mine.

Gene: 1:45

there's a handful of podcasts out there

Ryan: 1:47

Every show that I've

Gene: 1:48

that are done by professionals. All right. Well, I know it's gonna hurt your feelings and all, but you're, you're much better when you're improving than when you're reading something.

Ryan: 2:00

Okay. Is, is this in, in reference to the question I asked on the latest Angry Tech news?

Gene: 2:05

What was the question? Remind me.

Ryan: 2:07

Oh, I, so I do, I do two shows. I do grumpy bends and I do Angry Tech News and Grumpy Bends. I generally just bring notes on improv and Angry Tech news. I script the whole thing and

Gene: 2:22

yeah, yeah. So I think, here's my complex answer. I like the content of rang tech news better, but I like the presentation of grumpy old bins better.

Ryan: 2:32

Okay. Usually I'm just sniping it Darren and he's sniping

Gene: 2:35

So if there's a way for you to snipe while providing tech info, that would be the great combo.

Ryan: 2:41

Well, that, that's why I write it out. I mean, there, there's some real zingers in there. I mean, come on,

Gene: 2:45

I, I know, but maybe, maybe get

Ryan: 2:49

sarcasm into those scripts.

Gene: 2:51

okay. Okay. So maybe, maybe the issue is you just need somebody who's better at reading those than you and maybe get that British guy who reads

Ryan: 2:59

Do you think Griff is available?

Gene: 3:00

Yeah, I know he's available because his agent reached out to me. He's got an agent. He doesn't actually,

Ryan: 3:05

I did not

Gene: 3:06

were talking about him being on, and he's like, yeah, why don't you talk to my people? They'll get a something set up and take care of everything.

Ryan: 3:12

Okay.

Gene: 3:13

I'll, I'll send you I'll send you notes for how I need to be presented on a show. I'm like, Jesus, who's this guy?

Ryan: 3:19

I too, have somebody responsible for running every aspect of my life, but she doesn't actually schedule my podcast for me.

Gene: 3:25

Ah, well, for gif, that person definitely did it. It wasn't his wife.

Ryan: 3:29

Huh.

Gene: 3:29

No, he's got, he's got a whole thing going on. He's like, he's gonna be on bbc, it sounded like when I interviewed him.

Ryan: 3:35

Okay. Well,

Gene: 3:36

So that's a big deal.

Ryan: 3:38

he came into podcasting from professional broadcasting. He's kind of a big.

Gene: 3:41

Well, I mean, I guess you could say that the bbc, I mean, he, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, sure, sure. I mean, it's not really professional. It's, it's sort of like the minor leagues, I would say.

Ryan: 3:55

my, my first introduction to the, the phrase BBC was not British television, but I

Gene: 4:00

mine definitely was, I, I don't know where you grew up, but for me, the BBC was definitely Dr. Who not porno.

Ryan: 4:08

I, I, I play the fifth.

Gene: 4:10

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I'm pretty sure that that wasn't in Playboys either. So you must have been stretching to other mediums.

Ryan: 4:19

it was, it was BBSs,

Gene: 4:21

Yeah. BBS has definitely had BBCs. That's true.

Ryan: 4:24

some of them. What, what they had, what they had was back then when, when everything was dial up and a and, and a 25 kilobyte photograph was going to take 40 minutes to download or whatever the data rate was, you basically had to grab your porn site unseen, commit the time taken to download it, and then like, oh crap. I just wasted my time. There's, this is only,

Gene: 4:51

how many corrupt files did you end up getting when you were sitting there getting ready to look at something

Ryan: 4:55

define corrupt. Do you mean corrupt in, in

Gene: 4:58

the second half of the gift file isn't coming through, it's just garbage.

Ryan: 5:02

well, I was gonna say cuz there's two ways that the files can be corrupt. One is the computer can't read it, and one is, my mom doesn't think I should read it.

Gene: 5:09

well then that's, I was definitely not thinking of your mom when I was talking about you jacking off. No.

Ryan: 5:15

Usually don't either.

Gene: 5:16

no. Well, thank God

Ryan: 5:18

She'll be happy to hear that.

Gene: 5:20

Oh, does she listen? Well, she doesn't listen to this podcast. I'm sure

Ryan: 5:23

she, she did do the laundry for me back then and I thought I was being so sneaky, but no.

Gene: 5:29

huh. Yeah, it's those times when your kid does the laundry for you and has got a big smile on his face. He didn't do it because he's trying to be

Ryan: 5:37

Yeah.

Gene: 5:38

Yeah, I know. I definitely remember those days. I remember getting caught in junior high school with a printout of a black and white bit mapped nuity

Ryan: 5:51

Oh,

Gene: 5:52

on an done on a dot matrix printer.

Ryan: 5:55

what do you mean caught?

Gene: 5:56

Teacher saw me and walked over and took the, took the paper away from me and said, you're staying after class.

Ryan: 6:03

You don't happen to remember the, the make of the printer. Do you, some of those dot matrixes could do some amazing bit mapped work. Like the one that I had was it was in the space of a character. It could have 24 bit mapped lines. It was like each character was a 24 by 12 bitmap. It was, I mean, you could get some real, I mean, images out of that

Gene: 6:27

Yeah. No, that sounds about right. I think it was around the

Ryan: 6:30

the sound made by a dot maker printer. Yeah. And bonus points, if it's tractor feed

Gene: 6:37

Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. No, it's

Ryan: 6:40

have to pull the

Gene: 6:41

there are YouTube videos. You've probably seen these of people that take old shit like printers. I know. It's, it's new thing. Printers, old floppy disc drives hard disk drives and then control them to make noise and then actually make music using these as an instrument.

Ryan: 6:59

I, I have seen such videos and in fact, I have seen for sale a box that would convert midi scuzzy

Gene: 7:09

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 7:10

of doing.

Gene: 7:11

there you go. Very cool. Yeah, it's, I mean, I guess different people have different interests. I tend to play more video games than I should. Probably, some people I guess, make musical instruments out of old computer shit. But it, it's interesting to see cuz a lot of that old gear just was noisy. We just don't have much noise noises, letting fans these days. That's

Ryan: 7:34

yeah. Right

Gene: 7:34

I have is the fans.

Ryan: 7:36

right now I'm sitting next to a, my, my graphics card which, which I don't have currently the money to replace because did I mention on poor podcaster? Is I, it's probably not coming through the noise gate, cuz I think my noise gate's ratcheted up. But it's rattling right next to my left ear, which is why I have

Gene: 7:53

Well, luckily, the, I can't hear it, so your noise gate's doing a good job.

Ryan: 7:57

Yes, I, one thing I will definitely hand to Darren is the guy understands his audio gear and so taking his advice, basically being, okay, give me links to Amazon for all the things I need to purchase for. This did not steer me wrong.

Gene: 8:13

Yeah. No, I, I totally agree with that. He, he knows his shit, even if he did rip off my formula, but That's fine. It's all good. It's all good.

Ryan: 8:19

What, what our formula is. What?

Gene: 8:22

Well, it's the

Ryan: 8:23

out and hit people in the mouth.

Gene: 8:25

No, no, no, no, no. The formula for the audio gear. No, it's, it, because what happened was and Adam doesn't use a MOTU anymore, but he did for a long time is back before Adam used a motu, I had a MOTU and I was telling Adam about how awesome these things are. And I was showing him how he could be set up the way that he likes his audio set up. But it was, it wasn't quite there. Eventually they came out with a product for about 700 bucks that actually did do everything that he needed to have done. I got one of those, showed it to him. He thought, this is great. He ended up getting the one as well. A few months later. He borrowed one of my mics and then he said, this thing's great. I'm keeping it. I'll just send you money for it. So for a while there basically no agenda was running on my gear

Ryan: 9:10

So you're,

Gene: 9:11

Darren asked Adam for a list of all his stuff before he started recording anything.

Ryan: 9:16

Well, Adam created that site a while back. Pod father gear.com.

Gene: 9:19

yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's changed like before the motu he was definitely using stuff that I wasn't a part of at all. But kind of with that, that point in time where he ended up getting the motu, I, I ended up being very uh, connected to what Adams rig was like

Ryan: 9:36

so what I'm hearing is that you are personally taking responsible responsibility

Gene: 9:41

good audio,

Ryan: 9:42

for, for Motus business success.

Gene: 9:45

Well, their podcasting success. See, MOTU was never in the podcast business. They were only in the pro audio business. In fact, they didn't really like making consumer quality devices. If you look at their lineup, 95% of their products are over a thousand dollars. So they were really a musician's company, but I've been a user of motu No kidding, since 1988. And so I've always been a fan. I always liked their products and I obviously, once I got into podcasting, I wanted to use the products I like. And thankfully that generation from about seven years ago, I think was when I first came out. It was flexible enough to do all the podcasting stuff including, you know what Darren and I have running, which is literally, we can have a 24 person conference call through the MOTU where everybody's recorded on a separate track.

Ryan: 10:37

so I was being sarcastic there, but you're, you

Gene: 10:40

Oh, I'm totally taking Oh, absolutely.

Ryan: 10:42

Okay. Well in

Gene: 10:43

They're sold out for the next year.

Ryan: 10:44

can you get them to sell the one that has the, the channel routing

Gene: 10:51

Yes. It's, it's coming. It's coming. They're, they have said that

Ryan: 10:56

because when I picked up all this gear, what I've got is they're

Gene: 10:59

Yeah. You got the cheaper one.

Ryan: 11:01

Well, it's okay in terms of audio quality, it's still good, but in terms of feature support, it has the, I've lost all audio routing and now I have loop back mix

Gene: 11:12

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 11:13

and that it, it really limits what I can do while podcasting, unless I wanna run like voice meter or so.

Gene: 11:21

Yeah. No, that's true. But they, they have said that there was an issue with the factory that was manufacturing'em shut down in China, and it took'em a while to get a new factory lined up and for the parts to be sourced. The next batch will not be shipping until March of the coming year.

Ryan: 11:38

I see. So what you're

Gene: 11:39

they will be available

Ryan: 11:40

I am going to be a stunted podcaster until then.

Gene: 11:43

Well until then, probably even a while after then, because that's wholesale shipping. So it'll take a while for him to get

Ryan: 11:49

Well, and then a while after that until people donate to my shows. Enough for

Gene: 11:53

Well, okay. Well, sure. You know what, what my other co-host Ben ended up doing is scouring eBay with some, probably had some automated alerts going until he found somebody that was willing to sell like a two or three year old unit for a basically retail price. And he was super happy to get that because a lot of people are selling these things for like 500 bucks over list.

Ryan: 12:16

Yeah. I'm not surprised.

Gene: 12:18

Cuz they're, they're somewhat unique

Ryan: 12:20

The,

Gene: 12:21

now. You can get plenty of'em.

Ryan: 12:24

is,

Gene: 12:24

get, yeah. So, sorry to interrupt there, but you, you can certainly get a box that does everything that Darren in my box does for two grand or more. It's just, there's nothing under a thousand bucks that does.

Ryan: 12:37

Yeah. Well, the, the one that I have, which was under a thousand bucks it doesn't, it's audio routing is insufficient for doing what I'm doing right now. Well, I mean, okay. What we're doing right now, we're just talking and that's fine. And, and I could even be recording this, but honestly I don't want evidence of my podcasting to be out. But

Gene: 12:59

Sure.

Ryan: 13:00

the, the simple scenario is you want to have. Channel four voice, a channel for jingles. You want to send voice and jingles to the other end. You want to have an incoming channel from another podcaster somewhere. You want to send that and jingles to your monitors, and you want to have all three go to the recording. And that is a very common scenario and seems really straightforward. And this device that they've made, I can't do that. I don't have enough endpoints. If, like, if I try to take loop back mix and send it to the other end so the other person can get both my voice and my jingles, now they're also getting their voice echoed to them and that,

Gene: 13:47

And I, I gotta tell you why is because generally for musicians, they want to hear their own instrument as part of the mix, to know whether they're

Ryan: 13:56

echoing somebody's audio right back at them

Gene: 13:59

Well, it's not really, usually the musicians aren't playing across the internet, so they're hearing it in real time within

Ryan: 14:07

there's your

Gene: 14:07

than one millisecond.

Ryan: 14:09

I, I don't care who's doing, I don't need 24 channels. What I need is that scenario right there. I need the scenario, which, by the way, I'm not alone. There are hundreds of thousands of two person podcasts who want to play jingles and need super complicated audio routing setups. I can record a podcast, but if, if I don't have any jingles, if I'm not injecting any system sounds into it, then I can get, I, I, I send microphone to the other end. I bring loop back mixed to the recording and everything's good. But I can't inject jingles because I don't have that scenario on this equipment, which was low cost, which apparently either, either you did a piss poor job with your pitch to the company or they just didn't listen to you. Cuz if this is marketed to podcasters, it's no good,

Gene: 14:54

Oh, it's not marketed podcasters. That's what I'm saying. It's, it's adapted from musicians to podcasters,

Ryan: 15:00

are you even running this company?

Gene: 15:01

I wish I was running that company, man. No, I believe me. Mal is a much bigger company than, than anything that I've run. But they're in fact, Adam and I tried to knock off a product somewhat off of Maloo. It was after we had the Motus that we decided to start our own company to create an audio device. I don't know if you were part of that Kickstarter or not. But we did the small batch audio was a company and we had

Ryan: 15:27

I don't know. The guy's running the Kickstarter sounded kind of scammy to me.

Gene: 15:30

Well, most Kickstarters are kind of scamming. You gotta be careful with those things. Speaking of Star Citizen they had their record year. You know what Star Citizen is? You're a little bit of a gamer.

Ryan: 15:39

I try not to admit it.

Gene: 15:41

Okay. Do you know what Star Citizen

Ryan: 15:43

I'm, I'm vaguely aware that it's a game, but I have not played

Gene: 15:45

Okay. So it's a game that was created by a guy named Chris Roberts. Who was the

Ryan: 15:51

Would not have known that.

Gene: 15:52

Okay, well, Chris Roberts was a game designer of like three or four different games starting from the eighties and onwards, including freelancer and what was the other one? Something else. I can't remember. Anyway, he did a bunch of space games, basically from the eighties onwards. And then each time he ended up leaving the studio quitting because he was pissed off because they were trying to rush things and put a send the product to market before it was time.

Ryan: 16:17

So, so this guy did not develop on Xbox?

Gene: 16:21

no, no, not Xbox pc. And he,

Ryan: 16:24

I,

Gene: 16:24

he decided

Ryan: 16:25

who does he work for now? Does he even have a job? Because rushing products to the market before it's time is ex, is literally the

Gene: 16:32

what studios do,

Ryan: 16:34

it's all

Gene: 16:34

So, so he decided,

Ryan: 16:37

day one updates, I'm just saying, have

Gene: 16:40

yeah, you gotta

Ryan: 16:40

ruined the game industry.

Gene: 16:42

So, so he decided to the best way to do this is to not have a game studio, but just to pitch his idea to people on Kickstarter and then have them give him money and then he could make this game. And so he pitched his ideas and he was very successful. The Kickstarter raised$3 million. And so, you know what, what he essentially sold during the Kickstarter as rewards were, once I make the game, once there's ship spaceships in this game, depending on the level, level of pledge on the Kickstarter, you're going to receive this ship or that ship or the other ship. And so people basically were, giving him money to get his company going

Ryan: 17:25

Hey, to win. Yeah, I get it.

Gene: 17:26

Yeah. So, that was 10 years ago. Games in Alpha, so it, 10 years to Alpha. Yep, yep. They just closed their latest fundraising week which netted$7 million for the week. Game Company is now raised over half a billion dollars.

Ryan: 17:43

How the fuck can you still be an alpha?

Gene: 17:45

And the game is not released.

Ryan: 17:47

Okay, well then, then somebody's getting taken

Gene: 17:50

So, well, I'm definitely one of the sums. But the the, the formula that they ran across, which is super successful,

Ryan: 17:58

apparently.

Gene: 17:59

Is to not call yourselves a game studio, but to talk about how you're working outside the studio system and solicit people for direct donations rather than selling them a game.

Ryan: 18:13

well this sounds suspiciously like value for value.

Gene: 18:16

Ken does scam alert. So, so that's what they've been doing for 10 years, is they've now created 142 different space ships. About a hundred of those actually exist in the game, and about 42 are still in concept stage and haven't been programmed yet.

Ryan: 18:33

how many of them are, are going to Elon Musk's launchpad in Arizona?

Gene: 18:37

Well, it's zero cuz it's a game. So, that's, it's purely fiction.

Ryan: 18:40

when you talk about creating a bunch of space ships, I

Gene: 18:42

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I, I said for the game. For the game. So there, the game looks absolutely beautiful. I know I've talked about it before. If somebody hasn't seen just type star citizen into YouTube, pick any random video about it. Chances are, it'll be somebody bitching about how the game is a scam. But while they're talking about how the game is a scam, they're gonna be showing footage from the game and you're gonna be looking at this and going, holy shit, this is photo realistic. It is an extremely beautiful proof of concept. Or it's a great game depending on who you ask and how much Kool-aid they've drunk. But I think it's a great case study and what happens when your idea is so awesome that. A lot of people, millions of people believe in your dream along with you and in what you're doing. But there is zero business constraint from, the business side of the business, which exists in every other company to actually get things done on

Ryan: 19:41

that says we have to shut down if we run out of

Gene: 19:43

Yeah. Yeah. The part, no, not even like, they have that taken care of cuz they just sell more virtual spaceships, so that generates more income like 7 million a week. But what they, what they haven't done is created a game. What they've done is create a bunch of space ships and then given those space ships, a few places that people can fly around and take videos that look really cool.

Ryan: 20:05

Okay,

Gene: 20:06

So it's just missing the gameplay portions

Ryan: 20:08

it's second life in.

Gene: 20:10

Yes. Minus the casinos and h hoses.

Ryan: 20:15

Get on that. It sounds like a

Gene: 20:17

I, I, I ran a casino in second Life many, many, many years

Ryan: 20:20

like a business opportunity in

Gene: 20:22

15 years ago.

Ryan: 20:23

Okay. Here's, here's a question. How many, how many statistics and attributes are there to each ship?

Gene: 20:31

So you get the base ship and you can swap out about all the weapons, a bunch of the different systems. So I'd say probably eight or nine different things that you can swap out. And there's a range of options for each one. Probably the biggest one is the types of guns you put on your ship.

Ryan: 20:49

Okay. Well, I'm just, I'm just wondering if, if it's the kind of game that I would like to play. I, there are, there are games and there are simulations and I, I,

Gene: 21:00

This is, this is definitely as pretty as a simulation but more closer to a game. Like

Ryan: 21:08

When,

Gene: 21:08

it, it's one of the reasons I bitch about it is cuz I don't think it's simulation.

Ryan: 21:12

oh, so you and I are different there because when I, the distinction I make between game and simulation is, game is something that a new can drop into and in, in, in the time that it takes to learn the controls and interface, they can hold their own and do all right. A simulation is the kind that you have to put in 50 or 60 hours just to understand what all of the, the stats on the item card mean.

Gene: 21:39

Okay. So from that range that you just described?

Ryan: 21:43

don't, I, I definitely prefer the game side for the simple reason that even though I have multiple monitors in front of me, I don't want one of them to be taken up by Microsoft Excel trying to figure out how to work the game.

Gene: 21:54

So you don't like Eve then? Okay.

Ryan: 21:56

No, not a, not a neat fan.

Gene: 21:58

Yeah. Yeah. I played Eve for a few years, but it, after a while, I was literally a job. I was in the 40 hours a week and on top of working a normal job. And then I got divorced, and so I stopped playing Eve. But yeah, this is not anywhere near that much of a game of spreadsheets. There are still some out of game tools that let you, like, figure out what's the optimal configuration of your spaceship in a web browser so you don't have to actually spend in game

Ryan: 22:25

that right there is, is an indication that you've got a, okay. Yeah. I I You don't need my rant. You, we

Gene: 22:32

Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can, you can configure stuff a lot of different ways

Ryan: 22:36

I, I'm just saying that it, if in in gears of War or Halo,

Gene: 22:41

mm-hmm.

Ryan: 22:42

Xbox games, there, there is no online tool to help you figure out the optimum configuration. The optimum configuration is get a gun and shoot the other enemies.

Gene: 22:53

But even in games, I remember like in Battlefield, or even call Duty way back when, there was still online tools that I used that showed you the optimal config. I'm a min-Max guy. I really. That has nothing to do with it. It, it's a just cuz I like spreadsheets and numbers doesn't mean that that that somehow is a negative thing for games. No, I think in most games you can figure out what is the optimal configuration for the most bang for the buck. And that part of it is something I do enjoy doing. Sounds like you don't, so that's fine. But you would probably then, really enjoy the visuals in this game and the fact that it, it completely is an open world. You can go literally anywhere and it is

Ryan: 23:33

What is there to do when you get there?

Gene: 23:35

well. What would you like to do, I mean I guess that's the question cuz it's an open the world, so you could do whatever you want.

Ryan: 23:41

I don't open a whore house.

Gene: 23:44

I mean, you probably theoretically could there are male and female characters in the game,

Ryan: 23:50

Or at least in a gambling casino.

Gene: 23:52

Yeah. And I, although that may be, that may be banned by terms of service, but yeah, I mean there's no reason you couldn't, like for example, one of the space ships that I bought is a ship created specifically for building buildings. It's a construction ship and it comes with a 10,000 acre plot of land.

Ryan: 24:11

Okay.

Gene: 24:12

So I'm, I'm, I guess I'm technically a pilgrim.

Ryan: 24:15

it's a ship. Where does the land come from? Is it inside the ship or do it, does

Gene: 24:19

they grant you the land? Well, no, no, no. There's planets out there. It's just that, it's kinda like the old West where if you go west young man will give you 10 acres in a mule.

Ryan: 24:29

Okay.

Gene: 24:30

It's that same idea

Ryan: 24:32

And do you have to, to set up fortifications to defend your land from Raiders and

Gene: 24:36

I would imagine. So like, I haven't done any of this stuff cuz it doesn't exist yet. Cuz it's where alpha

Ryan: 24:40

so No.

Gene: 24:42

Well it's, I mean, it, it may, it just doesn't today.

Ryan: 24:44

be in the game in another 15 to 20 years.

Gene: 24:47

Correct. That's exactly right. I mean, there are people that have died in the last decade that purchased a game that never got to play it.

Ryan: 24:54

yeah,

Gene: 24:54

that is a risk for sure for, for anyone that's not in

Ryan: 24:58

this game sounds like reading a Robert Jordan novel.

Gene: 25:00

Well, you're not, I mean, people do like to correct you when you get in that if, if you encounter any issues with the game, just remember you're not actually playing the game. Your alpha testing,

Ryan: 25:10

That that is such a platitude,

Gene: 25:14

isn't it? I, and, and it comes up every time somebody like me bitches about a bug. It's like, Hey, dude, remember your alpha testing?

Ryan: 25:22

that's on the level of, it's a private company. They can censor if they.

Gene: 25:26

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And for a fact, these same assholes that are saying this are going to flip 180 degrees as soon as it happens to them.

Ryan: 25:35

Oh, absolutely. They already did

Gene: 25:37

Yeah.

Ryan: 25:38

Have you been watching Twitter?

Gene: 25:39

No, no, no. I mean, I know they did on Twitter, but they, they will in

Ryan: 25:42

suddenly the government needs to step in and restrict them.

Gene: 25:45

Yeah. Because Elon Musk is a danger. He's, he's a an African, we can't allow African people to be running companies and corrupting our freedom,

Ryan: 25:53

he's a white neo-Nazi racist, obviously,

Gene: 25:56

obviously. Yes. From Africa.

Ryan: 25:58

that.

Gene: 25:59

And did you see his picture of the gun on his nightstand? Oh my God. He's boning violence. I think he's encouraging people to go and take their guns and go and raid the capital. That's what it seems like.

Ryan: 26:10

Well, I don't know if he's encouraging that, but that seems like, you

Gene: 26:13

Well, by posting an image of a gun on his nightstand, he certainly must be.

Ryan: 26:18

I

Gene: 26:19

What else could it possibly be?

Ryan: 26:21

I'm, I'm all for this. The Tree of Liberty is very thirsty.

Gene: 26:24

Well, that's true. But of course it just so happens that the gun that's on Musk's nightstand is actually a video game prop, but Okay.

Ryan: 26:33

Yeah. I haven't seen this photo, but,

Gene: 26:35

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a literally a video game revolver. Um

Ryan: 26:41

when, when I was in elementary school or grade school, or which, whatever it was called I did in fact bring a gun to school once, and I did not get suspended or thrown in jail because it was, it was the eighties and it was the Zap gun that comes with Duck hunt on the nes. And I had it in my backpack because it was just so cool. I was showing it off and everybody looked at it, like put the toy away. And I don't know, just 20 years later, I, I, I would be facing criminal charges.

Gene: 27:12

Dude, I don't think a day of high school went by when I didn't have a pen knife on me. Like, how do you, how do you be a teenage male without having a knife on you at all times?

Ryan: 27:24

Well, you live in a society where everything has rounded edges.

Gene: 27:28

And, and women rule

Ryan: 27:30

Well, that might be too, but then do the women carry knives?

Gene: 27:34

Well, no. That's why they, they used to need men, because men always had a knife around,

Ryan: 27:38

Okay. Well, you can be as sexist as you want, but I I I know

Gene: 27:42

I know you're married. I'm not. So therefore

Ryan: 27:45

I I know, I know which side of the bed the pussy sleeps on.

Gene: 27:48

uhhuh, uhhuh. It's whichever side I paid for

Ryan: 27:51

It's wherever she wants to be. Also, my wife is in the bed too.

Gene: 27:56

Right, right. Well, that's fair enough. I mean, I guess if the cats make it room for her, then she'd be allowed in there.

Ryan: 28:03

Yeah, well, the

Gene: 28:04

How many do you have? Two.

Ryan: 28:05

just two right now

Gene: 28:07

Hmm.

Ryan: 28:08

with the electric blankets, the cats have been getting a whole lot more interested in the bed these days.

Gene: 28:13

They probably think of the, the blanket more highly than they do of you at this

Ryan: 28:17

Oh yeah. They're like, you're, you're just lumps underneath my heat blanket. Get outta here.

Gene: 28:22

Yeah. Exactly right. Well, I, I don't know what it is cuz I, I had cats never had a dog. Don't have anything against dogs. I, I've met some interesting cool dogs, but they seem like they're pretty high energy. I

Ryan: 28:37

absolutely depends on the breed.

Gene: 28:40

I guess, but I don't know. Cats tend to sleep for a good 18, 20

Ryan: 28:43

Dogs are, some breeds of dogs are, are low maintenance, some are high maintenance. They

Gene: 28:48

Hmm.

Ryan: 28:49

universally are higher

Gene: 28:50

to have high maintenance.

Ryan: 28:52

Dogs are higher maintenance than cats, in my opinion, because cats, you just like a cat, you can leave the house for a week, and as long as there's an extra litter box and a steady supply of food and water, they just won't care. And then they'll, you'll come back and they'll, you'll open the door and they raise an eyebrow like, oh, it's you.

Gene: 29:10

Yeah.

Ryan: 29:11

on the other hand is gonna lose their mind.

Gene: 29:13

Oh, they're gonna go nuts. Yeah. They're gonna go literally insane

Ryan: 29:15

but there

Gene: 29:16

they've been abandoned.

Ryan: 29:17

there's certainly dog breeds that are really high energy and dog breeds that are really low energy. I grew up with dogs and that, okay, I grew up with real dogs and by real dog, I mean, if it's under 40 pounds, it's ero.

Gene: 29:30

Yeah, that's true.

Ryan: 29:32

So, the, the dogs we usually had were Labrador Retrievers. We had one Clie who was close to

Gene: 29:38

pretty high energy.

Ryan: 29:39

labs are absolutely bug fuck fucking insane for the first three years of their life, and they will chew everything.

Gene: 29:49

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 29:50

The one of, we had to replace a family room table when I was growing up because the dog chewed the leg off so much that the table fell on her

Gene: 29:58

Oh my god.

Ryan: 29:59

But after that, though, Labrador Retrievers are the greatest dog in the world because they're just so laid back. It's if, if you have small kids and you and your small kids are hyper because you're a terrible parent, and think that the only way to handle the normal activity level of a child is to drug them, then labs are absolutely great because it,

Gene: 30:20

Wear out your kids.

Ryan: 30:22

well, if you get a six, seven year old la of course they're, they'll play with'em. They'll wrestle, they'll jump around, and then when the lab says it's done, the kid can come up and grab the tail or yank on the ear and the lab is like, oh yeah, I guess I shouldn't be here. Get up and walk away. Which is a lot better than some breeds, which will turn around and bite the kid, which is generally not considered.

Gene: 30:43

Yeah. I mean, is that worse though?

Ryan: 30:45

I, I feel like a lot of kids out there need to be bitten a few times

Gene: 30:49

I kinda do too.

Ryan: 30:50

I kind of feel like, if you, if you have a, if you have something like a, a poodle or a, a dog that actually, defends themselves and a kid comes up and yanks on the ear, well, the kid's gonna get bit and then they'll know not to do that again. I feel like that's, that's how it should be. But,

Gene: 31:06

Now I've only been bitten by one, one dog in my entire life, and that was only like five years ago. And you wanna guess the type of dog it was?

Ryan: 31:14

Chihuahua

Gene: 31:16

Correct. That is accident 100% correct. The fucking ankle byer bit me

Ryan: 31:21

See that, that again was sarcasm because I don't think any chihuahuas get to be over 40 pounds,

Gene: 31:28

I think it was probably 20, but nonetheless, it, it got in underneath the sofa that I was sitting on, crawled its way forward until it could see my feet and decided to bite my ankle. I mean, that, I always, I always thought it was like a joke name that they're ankle biters, but they're literal ankle biters.

Ryan: 31:49

chihuahua tos are a high energy, poorly behaved dog. They are, they're like little psychos who think that they're 80 pound dogs and always want to prove it to people that it's one of the worst dogs. People are like, oh, it's cute. No, it's not cute. It looks like

Gene: 32:06

It's not cute at all.

Ryan: 32:07

it looks like a fucking skeleton with leather, tan, tan leather,

Gene: 32:11

it is absolutely errant. And if, if my buddy's wife wasn't there, I don't think I would've really prevented myself from stepping in the stupid thing as soon as it bit me, because that was my natural impulse reaction

Ryan: 32:27

I like how you phrased that. Not not stepping on it, stepping in it.

Gene: 32:31

because there would be a puddle once I stepped in it. I mean, it, this is a dog that is almost too small for my snake to eat.

Ryan: 32:41

Yeah,

Gene: 32:42

I mean, it is ridiculously

Ryan: 32:44

get more than one.

Gene: 32:46

Well, yeah, that's, that's what you end up doing. Now I don't feed my snake dogs. I

Ryan: 32:51

yeah. The problem, the problem with puppies is that there are a lot of work to raise for the stringy meat you get.

Gene: 32:56

Yeah, I could see that. I could definitely see that. Whereas the cat meat, that's a higher quality meat product cuz they don't use their muscles a whole lot. They mostly sleep

Ryan: 33:04

That depends whether it's an indoor or an outdoor cat.

Gene: 33:07

well. That's true. That's, but even outdoor cats like to sleep all day

Ryan: 33:10

let your cat get to be an outdoor cat, and what you're gonna get is, is a whole lot of meat from basically everything in the neighborhood that they murder.

Gene: 33:18

Oh yeah, they did. They do share. That is true. I remember I had a big orange main coon which by the way, that, that damn cartoon ripped off my superhero character, the coon. But that was, that was what I was playing as a kid. But that was an outdoor cat. So he'd be indoors all day during the day, sleeping most of the time. And then when it got dark, he'd go out hunting

Ryan: 33:42

Yeah.

Gene: 33:43

and he didn't hunt for, Mice or stuff. He wanted rabbits. He would bring rabbits home every night.

Ryan: 33:50

Yeah.

Gene: 33:51

He'd always eat the ears because I, it's, I think that was his favorite part. And so he didn't wanna share that. So he'd eat it before he brought it home. And so you'd have this

Ryan: 34:00

Easter bunnies.

Gene: 34:02

airless rack. Yeah, exactly. You have this airless rabbit that, that is right outside the the screen door to the porch and the cat's looking like, Hey, look at me. I'm providing for the

Ryan: 34:14

Yeah, I left the rest for you and, and you know what, way back in the day before the days of supermarkets, that actually, I mean, you'd grab that off the porch and be like,

Gene: 34:24

Oh hell yeah. A fresh rabbit. Fuck. Yeah.

Ryan: 34:27

People don't do that these days.

Gene: 34:30

No, I know, I know. It's like, it, it, I've taken, I've posted a photo once of my, my fridge and it's it looks, unless you have pets that eat stuff like this, I'm sure it looks completely crazy because the fridge is just chalk full of whole bunny rabbits in plastic bags in like one gallon bags and stuff. And then rats for the other snake.

Ryan: 34:53

Oh, oh,

Gene: 34:53

so it, well, no, I don't, don't eat either kind. But, those rabbits are over 20 bucks a pop. That is not cheap food.

Ryan: 35:01

Well, I believe that. How much do you think went into raising it? I mean, come on.

Gene: 35:06

Yeah. Well, I buy heirloom rabbits. So these are actually rabbits raised for four H and boy Scouts and stuff to be in rabbit shows.

Ryan: 35:15

Yes.

Gene: 35:16

not, not pets. They're competitive rabbits.

Ryan: 35:18

the,

Gene: 35:18

meant

Ryan: 35:19

of creatures that that small children would fall in love with. That's

Gene: 35:21

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. This, well, nothing's too good for the snake.

Ryan: 35:26

Well, the, the small children who would fall in love with them, that might be

Gene: 35:29

Well, I mean, I think they're probably Muslim would be safe. The, the I can't afford to feed the snake what it would be eating in the wild, unfortunately. So I have to settle for rabbits monkeys, they, they mostly eat monkeys. They have a taste for the the larger brain cavity size mammals.

Ryan: 35:49

Okay. So, do you ever worry.

Gene: 35:51

No, I, I make sure that there's no chance in hell the snake would ever consider me food by just being a fat dude.

Ryan: 35:57

Okay, Like

Gene: 35:59

snake is smart enough to look at me and go, that's just not gonna fit. There's no point in

Ryan: 36:04

but if you had a younger brother who was in shape,

Gene: 36:07

How do you know I didn't

Ryan: 36:08

I don't, I,

Gene: 36:10

Yeah, no, he's a sweetheart. He's he is

Ryan: 36:13

now. I kind of wish I'd Okay. I should have talked to you, you a long time ago. My brother was really annoying me for a while. Anyway,

Gene: 36:20

Oh, well there, there's some pets you can get.

Ryan: 36:22

the, the only problem of course with that is that

Gene: 36:24

Actually, pigs are usually the best pets for that purpose.

Ryan: 36:27

problem I have is he's my younger brother, but he's my big brother.

Gene: 36:30

Hmm. Oh, you know what they say?

Ryan: 36:33

I

Gene: 36:33

The younger they are, the harder they fall.

Ryan: 36:35

I don't, I don't listen to what they say. They're usually wrong,

Gene: 36:39

Well they do say that too, almost verbatim. So what else going on? So you're not playing high end video games in Alpha. What? Oh, I played cyberpunk recently. Have you played that

Ryan: 36:49

I, I, I have actually, I let my Xbox subscription Wayne, I got, there's, there's a couple problems with the Xbox. The, the first one, which I know I've ranted about on grumpy old bends before, but I may as well because it pisses me off so much, is

Gene: 37:05

Sure.

Ryan: 37:05

for the last couple years I haven't put a lot of time into playing on the Xbox. So it'll be every week or two that I'll just make, I'll be like, okay, I've got an hour to play right now. Let's go up and, just launch a game. Cause, and also I haven't bought a new game since 2014. I, I get,

Gene: 37:25

that, that might be why,

Ryan: 37:26

well, no, I get games for download cuz the Xbox live if you maintain

Gene: 37:30

you not buy those? Well, I guess you just get, you lease'em now,

Ryan: 37:33

Yeah, You lease'em.

Gene: 37:34

buy games. Yeah.

Ryan: 37:35

Xbox Live has a, a system, they have a, a game pass thing, which just gives you the game library. And then they have another thing that says, as long as you keep your subscription, here's a free game that's attached to your account and I play those. But as soon as you let your subscription last, all of that gets taken away.

Gene: 37:51

Right, right, right. But I think you get'em back when you

Ryan: 37:54

Yeah, if you, if you subscribe again, yes,

Gene: 37:56

Yeah. Yeah. I used to have one of those when I moved to to Austin, I decided that I was not going to get back into building a expensive PC just to play video games. I was like, fuck it, I'm gonna stick to the Xbox. And I, I did that with the 360. I did that with the Xbox One, and then I started watching videos of games that aren't available on, on the platform, and I was like,

Ryan: 38:19

Yeah, I don't, I don't think I could take that for, for a couple reasons that I will try to get into if we don't go too far off track, which we will. So only playing every 10 days or so, and I'm like, okay, I'm allocating an hour for this. I don't, don't even play that much on the pc, but I have people that I talk to in the pc. I don't have a lot of people in the Xbox anymore. Most of them wanted to rape my grandmother too many times. But

Gene: 38:44

That sounds like Call of Duty.

Ryan: 38:46

it's, it's yeah, it's years of war. It's, it's all of them. But the problem is, if you only log in every 10 days, well, Xbox One releases an update every two weeks.

Gene: 38:58

Oh,

Ryan: 38:58

Now they've got a lot of systems in place, which is that if you le, if you play your Xbox every day and you leave it in what they call standby off mode, where it's still using a trickle of power, but the network is on and the hard drive is on, and the CPU is paying attention and checking for updates all the time, then it'll update in the background, which is exactly what they want, which is why, they Okay. They love. But if you only play every 10 days, it'll only stay in standby for like, for a couple days. So you, if you don't play every day, it'll go off of standby and then you boot it up and I sit, I'll go into the room and go, okay, I've got an hour, I'd like to play a game. Oh, it's time

Gene: 39:36

half an hour downloading shit.

Ryan: 39:37

half hour to download shit over the crappy wifi and then another 10 minutes to install it. And by the end you're, you're like, okay, now I have 20 minutes to try to boot the game. And of course, the, it's, it's an original 2013 launch day Xbox One. It's not one of the, the fancy new ones. So all of the new games will take five minutes to freaking load.

Gene: 39:58

big is your drive? That thing? Cause I think I only had like a two 50 on mine.

Ryan: 40:02

five,

Gene: 40:02

Oh, that's tiny.

Ryan: 40:03

It's tiny.

Gene: 40:04

That's like one

Ryan: 40:05

tiny. It holds, no, it, it holds at the moment. I think I have eight games installed

Gene: 40:10

Oh my God. Yeah. That is

Ryan: 40:12

and it, the, because every month they're like, oh, you have access to a new game because of your Xbox Live account. And I'm like, well, I might have access, but I have

Gene: 40:21

What's the latest one called? What's the newest Xbox?

Ryan: 40:24

Well, I'm sorry.

Gene: 40:26

What's the newest one called?

Ryan: 40:27

I don't know. The, is, is there another generation after the Xbox One? I

Gene: 40:31

Oh yeah, there's at least one, maybe two.

Ryan: 40:33

Well, I know, I know the Xbox One, they came out halfway, like a couple years ago with the, the one s or the one X or whatever, which are all technically still in the Xbox One category because they're all backward compatible. They just have higher resolution and, and more memory and more hard drive space and, all the things that these greedy, multi gigabyte games need in order to function. And so my old 2013 launch day Xbox is capable

Gene: 41:01

There's a series S, I

Ryan: 41:04

Is there a series I, I dunno.

Gene: 41:07

as in Sam.

Ryan: 41:08

Well, for, for the reasons I'm giving I'm, I'm moving away from console gaming entirely. And in fact, in a couple weeks my live subscription will expire for the first time. 15 years, and I don't think I'm gonna be renewing because first of all, if you don't play all the time, then the one time, the one time when the system can be absolutely certain that you want to use your system, that's when it says, fuck you. You don't get to do anything. We're updating. And that's right. When you launch it, it it, if, if it had a, a function that said, go ahead log off and install updates, play, play without updates right now because it's a single player game and who gives a shit if you have the latest UI widget?

Gene: 41:55

yeah, they got, everything's live now,

Ryan: 41:57

but no, no, the way Microsoft does it is you don't have the latest update. You don't get to connect. And if you don't connect, then it can't authenticate and you can't even launch your single player games in your library because it has to authenticate your account before it can run anyway. So that's infuriating.

Gene: 42:16

so there, there's a series S, which is 300 bucks. there's the Series X, which is 500 bucks.

Ryan: 42:24

Okay.

Gene: 42:25

The X sounds like the one to get them the,

Ryan: 42:28

My understanding is that those are supposed to be back compatible. I mean, in

Gene: 42:33

probably are, but I know like the, when I got the one. I kept hearing Oh, 4k. 4k and it never did 4k

Ryan: 42:41

I, I think, I think that the graphics card and the connector support 4k, but a lot of other things in the pipeline, like possibly a TV don't, and too few

Gene: 42:52

I had a 4K

Ryan: 42:53

has not picked up. It is not caught on the way. So these companies are like, eh, we're not gonna put that much effort into it.

Gene: 43:00

huh, well, we're going way past 4k on, on the PC side now we're all talking about eight K.

Ryan: 43:06

you, are you kidding me? I have, I don't know how many k it is. I'm, I'm currently looking at three monitors, all of which are running at 19, 20 by 10.

Gene: 43:13

So you're not even at 4K then

Ryan: 43:14

No, why

Gene: 43:15

You're at a three quarters. K

Ryan: 43:17

I'm, I'm at, yeah. Okay.

Gene: 43:20

Well, 4K is double the width, double the height. So it's four times what your single monitor is.

Ryan: 43:26

because, do you get 4K videos from YouTube? Do you get 4K videos from PornHub?

Gene: 43:31

Yeah.

Ryan: 43:33

I don't.

Gene: 43:33

Well probably Cuz you don't have a TV that can play

Ryan: 43:36

and, and also because I don't know that not a lot of people don't have the bandwidth to do that.

Gene: 43:43

Yeah, no, it's, I get plenty bad with,

Ryan: 43:45

I'm sure you do. You're, you're

Gene: 43:47

it's Austin. Well you're in fricking Seattle. You ought have plenty of bandwidth up there

Ryan: 43:51

in theory, I actually have two ISPs here. One of them is cable, where they keep mysteriously bumping my download bandwidth up. And that would probably work just fine. My, my cable company currently says that I should get like 1.2 gigabytes down or something like that,

Gene: 44:09

you go. That's plenty for watching. High, high def.

Ryan: 44:12

and 15 mega 15 megabytes up.

Gene: 44:15

That's horrible.

Ryan: 44:16

That's horrible. It's awful. You can't, you can't podcast on that for sure. You

Gene: 44:21

God

Ryan: 44:22

I, I can't run my, talk about gaming. I can't run my Minecraft surfer on that for sure.

Gene: 44:26

Right,

Ryan: 44:27

so, so I don't use that because, well, two things. One, the upload bandwidth is absolutely pathetic. I think they might have bumped it up to 25 or something. But the other is that your bandwidth is, they only advertise burst or peak bandwidth. And if you download it 1.2 gig for an hour, you're more like getting five meg because they will throttle you. Of course, they.

Gene: 44:55

Oh, that sucks.

Ryan: 44:55

It's, this is what all cable companies do. So I don't use that isp. The ISP that I use has fiber to the house. It's one of those where the company that originally put it in had some kind of a government deal that said if you want to roll out this service that you want, then you have to supply premium broadband to such and such number of people. And I got on in on that deal and then they got their rollout done and they stopped accepting new customers. And for contractual regulatory reasons, they have to keep you on if you continue paying. But if I ever cancel the service, I will never be able to get it back. And that is fiber optic to the house, 35 megabits symmetric, and it's fucking solid. I cannot,

Gene: 45:44

Hmm.

Ryan: 45:44

it will never go over 35 megabit, but it will never go under that either.

Gene: 45:50

Interesting. Okay. That sounds like Fios.

Ryan: 45:52

It is actually, it was originally at and t Bio and then it became Verizon fis and then it got sold to a company called Frontier. And then Frontier sold off their broadband division. And then it became a company. And I think now it's a company called Simply and the division is, it's, it's a wart hanging on the side of the accounting of all of these companies where they're like, for regulatory purposes, we have to continue supplying this. We just keep hoping that the customers will move away or die or cancel so that we don't have to, cuz they never have to sign any new up.

Gene: 46:29

Yeah. The so one of the benefits of being in Austin proper is the city has a tendency to be like a test bed for a lot of companies. So we have like four or five different fiber providers here. And so I've got one gig guaranteed bidirectional, and I'm paying 60 bucks a month.

Ryan: 46:50

See, I would, I would be on that. Yeah.

Gene: 46:53

Yeah.

Ryan: 46:53

Seattle would be like that, except that the regulatory environment in Seattle is so awful that even the big tech companies around here are like, yeah, we're gonna go and look in another state to see if we can set stuff up.

Gene: 47:06

Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, it's true. But it's so the, I was talking about the X Xbox. So this X Box series X, which seems redundant get, lets you do 120 frame per second 4K

Ryan: 47:18

when have you ever known Microsoft to be good at naming things ever?

Gene: 47:21

that, Hey, what was that staple thing's

Ryan: 47:24

Microsoft Windows 3.11 for work groups.

Gene: 47:27

That's a great name. What was that little staple dude's name?

Ryan: 47:30

Clipy

Gene: 47:31

Yep.

Ryan: 47:32

Staple Dude Works

Gene: 47:33

Well, I, that was the description.

Ryan: 47:36

also. He is a paper clip, but I like Little Staple dude.

Gene: 47:39

Oh, you're right, you're right. He's not a staple. He's a paper clip. That's why his name's Clippy. That makes more sense. Actually now I think about it. So yeah, I haven't really looked at Xbox cuz just PC gaming, like a lot of stuff I play. But, but I will say that because I do like simulations more than games. My favorite space game is definitely curveball. And curveball. I don't know. I don't know if they've got it for other platforms. I know they've got it for Mac, but it is a it's, it's one of the few games about space that has real orbital dynamics and real physics, and which makes it, the learning curve goes straight up. It's hyperbolic because you start with, oh, cool, I can build a rocket to, how do I shave off an extra 20 kilograms because my thrust just can't go there.

Ryan: 48:33

It's it, and it's also a lot of fun. I used to,

Gene: 48:36

I love it.

Ryan: 48:37

way back in the day, I used to play and, and it was a stupid little game that's probably been clone 12 times, but I played one called Bridge Simulator, which was just you, you start with these materials and you have to build the right trust and girder system in order to support a train going across it. And the absolute best part of that was not building a, a perfect triangular trus going across. I mean, you, you do that and then you're bored. No, it's coming up with spectacular ways for it to fail. Some of my favorite ones were the ones where, it said you have to have a train and then a car go across, and I'd set it up with a big fulcrum in the middle so that when the train, the train would gain a little altitude to the other side. When it finally got to the other side, a couple things would snap on the bridge. The train would fall into the exit area, and the opposite end of the bridge, which just candle levered over across the fulcrum, would fling the car all the way across the canyon and landed in the area.

Gene: 49:36

Nice. Yeah. I've, I've played those I think on a lot of platforms starting with the we or certainly PC as well. They can be really fun. I've watched the video maybe a year ago. Of a, an actual bridge architect playing that game. And and it was really fun because he was, he wasn't just playing it, I mean, building the bridges for him is kinda a no-brainer, but he was that the, the version of the game that he was playing, which I've got as well on Steam lets you upload your bridge designs and the, he, he was looking at what were the top rated bridge designs and they were all non-traditional, non-standard stuff. Some of'em doing what you described, which is kind of gamifying the whole challenge so that

Ryan: 50:25

I mean, the

Gene: 50:25

goal is to get

Ryan: 50:26

the challenge was the car has to be on the other side.

Gene: 50:29

right and so it doesn't matter how you get it

Ryan: 50:31

The game was not deep enough to simulate whether or not the people inside the car survived

Gene: 50:35

exactly, exactly. So things like that. So it was fun watching this guy like, just his head, steam coming out of his ears as he watching these designs and going, no, that's not how you do that.

Ryan: 50:47

Yeah.

Gene: 50:48

no, it was pretty,

Ryan: 50:49

I'm gonna, I'm gonna get to the, the one point I've been dancing around and the main reason why I'm abandoning console gaming, and it is

Gene: 50:56

Yeah.

Ryan: 50:58

a characteristic that anymore at this point is absolutely necessary for me to, for a game, to hold my interest for more than the time that it takes to get through a play, through once, if that, and that is being able to introduce my, know, once, once I've gone through all of the rules and, and physics and the, the parameters that the developers carefully balance. I want to unbalance them. I want to be able to make mods. I want be able to install mods. Kebo does have this property. The game that I keep going back to.

Gene: 51:33

huge, huge modern

Ryan: 51:35

Oh yeah. The game. I keep going back to Minecraft, which I think is probably one of the most audible games in the world,

Gene: 51:41

Yep.

Ryan: 51:41

I, I play a lot of Bethesda games because e every single play through I'll go ahead and load up a different set of mods and suddenly I'm playing a different game.

Gene: 51:50

MA mods really make a game go from good to great. For sure. And I'm a little biased because I've done

Ryan: 51:59

and more importantly, if I can't write my own and install my own mods, then, then I've got one play through in me, and then I'm uninstalling and I'm

Gene: 52:06

And you're done. Yeah.

Ryan: 52:08

and any more, I, I have, especially with console, I have so little time to play that even, dedicating my time to learning enough about the game and understanding that and, get good. This is why I'll never play competitive online again when, you have to put in a thousand hours just to be able to hold your own against the people who are gonna snipe you with a pistol from 12 miles away. Is, is, I don't have, I don't put in the time for gaming anymore that would be necessary to get good. And so I want, my time is going to be spent doing things that I know are going to be constantly novel experiences. You never get that with competitive online, and you hardly get it with a game that's like, yeah, you just start here in one place and you play through the campaign and then you're

Gene: 52:56

Yeah. I've always liked the open world games a lot more, and certainly open the world with modding. It just makes it tremendously

Ryan: 53:04

I recently

Gene: 53:04

I, and I,

Ryan: 53:05

oh,

Gene: 53:06

yeah, can say I agree about the wanting yourself. So I've done that for three different games. I've written mods for, including Curb. And being able to solve a problem that you are noticing in game yourself without waiting for somebody else to do it is just a tremendous freedom and flexibility.

Ryan: 53:28

I, I, I, I like a game cannot hold my attention if I can't download the game. And then the next directory over download the modding tools for that game. And, and, and part of it is I'm a programmer, which, you know, Minecraft for example, Minecraft has come a long, long way with regards to their in-game scripting system and being able to, they now have a, a full on system with command blocks where you put a block in and you enter command and the command executes and it can do a lot of things, but there's nothing that even compares to being able to crack open the Java archive and start injecting your own class files, which is still how I'm mod. I have to have a Java compiler and you have to basically be a job a programmer, which is not something that I'll readily admit, but I do know how to write a code.

Gene: 54:14

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 54:14

Yeah. So I, I recently went, I started a new game in Fallout three, I think that was 2006 game of the year. So we're talking what,

Gene: 54:27

a pretty old game. Yeah.

Ryan: 54:28

Because I found a new mod to attach to it. This mod it gives you, it like has some backstory attached to it that says, through radiation exposure, cuz that's what fallout's about. You have a mutation that turns you into a giant green hulk and it's pretty simple. What it does is if your health drops below a certain level, then it increases the scale of your character. It turns your skin green. It four equips on you, a loin cloth and some brass knuckles, and it increases your defense to be almost invulnerable and your dam your hand to hand damage to be immense. And then, so the whole way the game plays is if your health drops below a certain level, you hook out and then your guns are taken away from you and you have to punch things until you, your health comes back and you calm down and then you change back. And it completely changed the game so much that I'm fi, I'm, I'm enjoying playing Fallout three at the 16 year old game again, because I'm like, I've never played like this. Like it's kind of a meta game. Like I need to, I really need to snipe this guy. So I need to not get hit so much that I lose access to my sniper. I, oh, oh, he got me. Okay. It's time to run up and just punch him in the face.

Gene: 55:48

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that's interesting. That's it's fun when you can replay a game in a totally different, see, this is one of the things I really like about Cyber Funk 77, is that they've incorporated even without mods, but they do have tons of mods for the game. But even without mods, they've incorporated enough variability for play throughs to where you're not feeling like, okay, I've done it once, now I'm done. Because not only can your character be male or female, but there are really about four different styles of play. And it makes sense cuz this, originally was a Dungeons and Dragons knockoff into a cyberpunk future. That's how that genre started.

Ryan: 56:30

Interesting that you bring up male or female because in my experience, lots of games let you choose that, but it offers almost no replayability because it's not politically correct to make the gameplay different depending on the player's.

Gene: 56:45

Well, cyberpunk definitely makes a difference because there are different characters that you can of romance, if you know what I mean.

Ryan: 56:53

Is that central to the gameplay or, or is that

Gene: 56:55

Yeah, yeah. It actually is, it, it affects on what happens towards end game.

Ryan: 57:01

Okay.

Gene: 57:02

It's an extension of your sort of friendship standing.

Ryan: 57:05

Okay.

Gene: 57:06

So if, if, if you're a boyfriend or girlfriend of one of the characters, they can assist you in the final boss battles,

Ryan: 57:15

I remember a long time ago

Gene: 57:16

kind of thing.

Ryan: 57:17

I was playing some game and one of my roommates at the time looks and says I noticed that all these games, I think I was playing like mass effect or something. My roommate says, in, in all these games, I notice you always choose a female character. Are you

Gene: 57:31

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 57:32

I said, no, there's absolutely no gameplay difference between the male and female character in most of these games. And if, especially in a third person game, I, if I'm going to have to stare at my character's ass for an 80 hour play through, I want it to be something worth looking at.

Gene: 57:48

Well, and that, that's a funny point you bring up cuz I, I generally do the opposite. I've always tried to model a character as close to what I actually look like as

Ryan: 57:56

Yeah. Most of the game options don't have, create a, a fat pudgy, bearded guy.

Gene: 58:01

well, they don't, but, but you know, I do have photographs back from when I was in my twenties to remind me of what I used to look like. But the, in fact, if you look at, if you're one of my friends in Steam, my steam avatar image is an actual photo of me when I was much, much younger. But anyway, the, the I've always just played as a male character. And then in some games I've seen people playing as females. I'm like, dude, what the fuck? And there's generally been two replies as to why. Now you just provided one of'em, which is in third person. If I'm staring at the back of something, I'd not, I'd rather stare at a, a nice chick butt than some dude's ass. The other reason is that in some games, the female characters have smaller hit boxes.

Ryan: 58:50

Yes.

Gene: 58:50

do the same damage shooting, but it's harder for them to shoot you cuz you're small and, and so that, that makes a

Ryan: 58:59

there, there is in fact a tactical advantage in some games. I think,

Gene: 59:02

Right, right. So there is definitely a difference there. But I will say that this cyberpunk is probably one of the first games, maybe, maybe second, but not many. Where I've in my initial play through was with a female character for the exact reason you mentioned, which is when she's riding a motorcycle and she's wearing those pink hot daisy dukes, it like, why would you play a male character ever for any reason, even if it's a bigger hit box. It's like this is, this is a much better view of riding around the city on a motorcycle.

Ryan: 59:39

and, and you probably spend a non-trivial amount of time riding around the city on a motorcycle, because in an open world game, you find yourself wanting to go places that are not right near where you are over and over again. Travel,

Gene: 59:52

Well, and that, and that's where the missions, the good missions are. Like, they're not next to the fast travels. They're next to like nothing

Ryan: 59:59

It, it fast Travel is okay. Total side rant. Fast travel is such a ban on open World games. It destroys immersion so much. It's only necessary if you have designed your world such that the places you need to go are really far away and it's boring to get there.

Gene: 1:00:18

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:00:19

And, and that is a game design issue that a lot of people are like, well, we notice, we notice in, in fallout this person has to go the entire length of the map and at normal walking speeds, it takes nine minutes to get there. And we haven't populated enough interesting things along the way. So you're just walking across this blasted terrain for nine minutes and people are gonna get bored. So let's just put an option in the menu that lets you click on it. Well, okay,

Gene: 1:00:43

Yeah.

Ryan: 1:00:44

you've destroyed immersion twice then. Congratulations.

Gene: 1:00:47

Yeah, no, I, I totally agree with that. The, the way, this is one of the things the way that suburb punk presents fast travel is they have a, like a subway system that goes through a city.

Ryan: 1:00:58

Okay, well

Gene: 1:00:59

you're

Ryan: 1:00:59

at least more immersive than, than click on this and teleport

Gene: 1:01:03

but it is nonetheless teleporting. So you're, you go up to the sideways, you click on the subway, and then you're teleport to the new area, which is, it's cheaty, but at least they're trying to make an attempt at it. And there's way too many stops if you ask me. There's too many ways to fast travel in star citizen. There is no fast travel. Well, you, you wake

Ryan: 1:01:23

there at least ftl? I mean,

Gene: 1:01:24

There

Ryan: 1:01:24

to, you don't have to build a generational ship to get from one planet to the other. Do

Gene: 1:01:29

no, there is a quantum drive, which is essentially ftl but it uses fuel and it still takes a long time. So I, I'll give you just a short scenario around that. You wake up in a whenever you log into the game in like a hotel you have to go downstairs, leave the building, and you go downstairs by taking an elevator while you are waiting for an elevator. Cuz you have to wait for it. You can look around and look at advertising or the scenery. And then you get in the elevator. Elevator takes probably about 45 seconds to get you down to the

Ryan: 1:02:04

the game actually have advertising?

Gene: 1:02:05

It's in game ads. It's not,

Ryan: 1:02:06

Oh, so is, is it ads for

Gene: 1:02:08

all fake product ads. No, no, no. It's all fake product. Well, it's, it's ads for things like spaceship

Ryan: 1:02:13

okay. Oh, oh, no, that's fine. That, that improves immersion without

Gene: 1:02:17

yeah. It's immersive

Ryan: 1:02:18

I've just,

Gene: 1:02:18

and then you walk outside the building and you

Ryan: 1:02:21

by the way, the, the trend very recently

Gene: 1:02:24

for real

Ryan: 1:02:24

real ads being injected into games?

Gene: 1:02:27

Now there is one game where I actually have a mod that injects real ads because I think it adds to the reality, which is American truck simulator. So if I'm driving around the country in a truck, in a video game, it's much better to see an ad for an actual McDonald's than for a fake in-game brand

Ryan: 1:02:46

as long as the developer is getting paid by McDonald's to put that in.

Gene: 1:02:50

Well, no, because this is why it has to be a a mod is because clearly the developer at McDonald's don't have a deal,

Ryan: 1:02:57

See, I would, I would,

Gene: 1:02:59

with a mod

Ryan: 1:03:00

like that to inject, porn images or something.

Gene: 1:03:03

Oh, well, I don't know. Maybe there is one like that, but I, I kinda like the, the more realistic look. But anyway, so you get out of the building, you

Ryan: 1:03:10

see a big billboard with nothing but boobs on it. I mean, come on,

Gene: 1:03:14

if you live

Ryan: 1:03:15

I would

Gene: 1:03:15

in LA maybe,

Ryan: 1:03:16

be much more interested in driving truck if that, if we could see that on the

Gene: 1:03:19

if you could see that. No, there's, yeah, there's a, you could definitely see that at a truck stop, let's put it that way. They have those. So you get out of the building, then you have to walk, find your way to the the trolley that goes to the airport, wait for the trolley to show up or the whatever method of transport. Get in there and you're in it in real time as it's driving to the airport. Gets to the airport. So then you can go and request your spaceship, be brought out to hangar, wait a little bit of time, then go to the elevator, which takes you to your hanger to get to your actual spaceship. So basically

Ryan: 1:03:57

You're, you're kind of

Gene: 1:03:59

it's 15 minutes.

Ryan: 1:04:00

you're kind of describing fast travel that, that has, multiple modes and point to point networks and, and

Gene: 1:04:06

Well, but it's not really fast travel cuz it takes you 15 anytime you die.

Ryan: 1:04:10

slow travel.

Gene: 1:04:11

It's slow travel. Anytime you die, and this is one of the gripes that people have, you can't get right back in the action because when you die, you spawn back at your hotel and it takes you 15 minutes just to get to the damn spaceship leaving the

Ryan: 1:04:24

tell the wines that if they want a realistic game, then every time you die, you get banned from the game permanently, because that's how real life

Gene: 1:04:31

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're adding Perma death to the game as well.

Ryan: 1:04:35

Of

Gene: 1:04:36

It's not fully in yet, but they're talking about doing that in the next few patches.

Ryan: 1:04:39

I don't, I don't appreciate that in a game. Minecraft has something called hardcore mode where if you, if you die

Gene: 1:04:46

the way I play most games. Yep,

Ryan: 1:04:48

and, and yeah. Congratulations. You have succeeded. This is extremely immersive and not a game I wanna play.

Gene: 1:04:55

Yeah. Well, and that's where that continuum from simulation to a game goes into force, the, the star citizen guy's motto is they have what they kind of call the rule of Cool, which is that we're gonna try and make things fairly realistic, but if, if realism gets in the way of it being cool, then we're gonna go with Cool

Ryan: 1:05:16

So, who did fast travel really well, in my opinion, and this, this is going back almost 20 years, there was a game elder Scrolls game called Morrow Wind.

Gene: 1:05:23

Hmm.

Ryan: 1:05:24

Have you played that

Gene: 1:05:25

I'd never played that.

Ryan: 1:05:26

So the way every Elder Scrolls game since has been the pull up your menu, click somewhere on the map, and you just teleport there and it simulates time passing in the game. That's, that's how fast travel works, which basically is simulates you walk there. Well, first of all, if the game was sufficiently immersive, you'd never want to do that. And secondly,

Gene: 1:05:46

You should

Ryan: 1:05:47

it's totally unrealistic on account of if you did take the time to walk there, you would get in encounters, you would fight things, you'd pick up items, you'd do things. This just simulates, oh, we just got from here to there, time passed and you didn't encounter anything at all. Which I, so

Gene: 1:06:02

Nothing tried to kill you.

Ryan: 1:06:03

I hate fast travel because I don't

Gene: 1:06:05

See? Okay. Let me ask you this. What if you have fast travel that has, let's say, a lot of 10 chance of killing you,

Ryan: 1:06:12

I don't know that I'd use it.

Gene: 1:06:14

Well, that might be a good thing,

Ryan: 1:06:15

I, I mean, I would use the slow travel that has a chance of killing me because at least then I would get to see the, the giant grizzly bear that put my face off and be like, oh, maybe I should have avoided it. But,

Gene: 1:06:28

Oh, you rolled a three. Sorry about that. Your character died in the woods

Ryan: 1:06:32

That you're, you're getting into another, another peeve of, of gaming that bothers me is, is when you have major life decisions being handed over to the r g. No, thank you, but.

Gene: 1:06:46

dude, that's like every

Ryan: 1:06:47

the, the way that fast travel works in Mara Wind is there's like six different flat fast travel networks. First of all there's boats. So the first place that you start is on the coast and you can in fact go in the starting town to a boat and talk to the vendor there. And he will take you to either of the next towns, like one of the next towns or the next big town along the coast

Gene: 1:07:17

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:07:17

okay, that's kind of immersive cuz even though it, it still teleports you there and then simulates time passing, you're at least, okay, I, my character spent time on a boat ride we're good. And then if you get farther inland, they have these giant hollowed out bug things. It's in lo but who, which are basically horses that are the size of a tank that walk across the landscape on these super long legs. And you can get in one of those and go to the inland cities. So that's a completely different network. So you can go to the, the boat person or you can go to the silt Strider vendor to be on a completely different network, goes to different places. And then there's also what else? There's, there's magical fast travel. There's two spells that you can learn if you join certain factions. One of them merely teleports you when you activate the spell to the nearest temple and one teleports you to the nearest military. And so when you wanna get from point A to point B on the map, you don't open up the map and click Okay, I wanna be here. You open up the map and go. Okay. So if I activate this spell, it takes me to the fort where I know there's a silt rider vendor that can take me to this city where I then can activate the other spell because that'll take me to the temple, north of the city. And then I can walk from the temple down the path to the boat, which will take me to my destination. And now you are gamifying fast travel.

Gene: 1:08:48

Yeah, exactly. That's a good way of doing it because it breaks it up. So it's not just point to point from wherever you are to where you want to be, but you still have to plot a course. But I'm sure it's still what much faster than just

Ryan: 1:09:00

Oh, it's much faster than walking. It's it's another scrolls game, so trying to walk across the map is, is, I hope you've got a half hour of real time.

Gene: 1:09:07

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and there are certainly games that just like, I don't know if you've ever played satisfactory, but they don't have fast travel. So the closest thing to fast travel is if you want to get from one side of the map to the other quickly, well, guess what you need to do? You need to build a railroad piece by piece, the entire thing. And once you build it, then you need to, build a train, put it on there, and then set it up to go back and forth. And then once the train's running, now you can jump on your own train and then catch it to go across the map

Ryan: 1:09:39

And, and it's reasonable and immersive to say Yes, I'm riding my own train car on the rails that I built, and I'm probably not gonna have encounters along the way.

Gene: 1:09:48

Oh, you still have encounters. I mean, it's, it's not at all fast travel. It's literally just instead of walking speed, you now have a hundred kilometer an hour train speed

Ryan: 1:09:56

Okay.

Gene: 1:09:57

or 200 kilometer, whatever it is. It's, but you're literally having to just advance technologically now that, that speed of advancement isn't realistic at all. Of course, but

Ryan: 1:10:08

do they actually simulate train crashes?

Gene: 1:10:11

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it, but, and it's not, I mean, it's not fast travel. That's why I'm using as in like alternative to fast travel or the only way to accelerate your travel. But you're still not teleporting. You're literally just creating a vehicle that goes faster before you get to the trains. You unlock cars. So cars are a little faster than the walking trains are a lot faster than the walking.

Ryan: 1:10:35

And then there's always the games that just put in an airship,

Gene: 1:10:38

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ryan: 1:10:40

right?

Gene: 1:10:41

And that's always a little cheaty for most games because I remember

Ryan: 1:10:45

I

Gene: 1:10:45

I played a lot of arc, I don't know if you ever got into arc. I did like 3000 hours in Arc and I wrote some moss for it. It was, it was it started off as a early release unfinished game on steam where you wake up on an island and nothing but a loing cloth and you know nothing about it. And so it's complete open world. You have to build survival shit, but it, but all of a sudden you notice it. They're dinosaur running around.

Ryan: 1:11:11

Oh

Gene: 1:11:12

And so that's where the danger as well as the supply of meat and leather comes from, is the dinosaurs there. And then he took that and, and kinda over the years of making the game added a lot more magical elements, which I'm not a fan of. I prefer the dinosaurs just as they were originally,

Ryan: 1:11:28

Because dinosaurs are much closer to the reality. We live in

Gene: 1:11:31

Well, they're not mythical, at least,

Ryan: 1:11:34

That's what

Gene: 1:11:35

I I do think

Ryan: 1:11:36

Don't go ask the book of Genesis.

Gene: 1:11:37

There are dinosaurs in. They just stayed in the Garden of Eden cuz they're perfect. They weren't kicked out, unlike man.

Ryan: 1:11:45

Man was perfect. It was woman

Gene: 1:11:47

the, the, the snakes were definitely kicked out. Well, clearly man was not perfect if he let woman fuck it up, a perfect man would've said, I'm gonna watch you eat that Apple first.

Ryan: 1:11:56

Be like, kick that bitch to the curb. There's gonna be another one. Come

Gene: 1:11:59

It's like, Hey, God, there's a version too coming.

Ryan: 1:12:02

Yeah. This, this one has a bug

Gene: 1:12:05

Yeah. No, she's, she's like 20 when I married her. And at this point, clearly we see there are

Ryan: 1:12:10

and she's not putting out the way I

Gene: 1:12:12

apple eating, I mean, what's up with that? Yeah. So there's so in arc everything is really hard because you realize these dinosaurs are way bigger and more powerful than you. And, and they see you as food, frankly. And there are things you can do and build up, build a little, little mud hut or a wooden house or brick house or whatever. But, but when you get that first pact, that first flying dinosaur and then there are

Ryan: 1:12:38

changes the

Gene: 1:12:39

flying ones, it changes the game because all of a sudden you can just fly over the danger instead of having to deal with the danger or avoid the danger by going around it. And that just, I mean, it's cool to fly, but it also kind of makes the game less challenging in any

Ryan: 1:12:55

I mean, what you described, I, my experience with that is way, way back in the day, I used to play a lot of J RPGs back when I didn't respect my time.

Gene: 1:13:04

game. Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:13:05

When, when we did that, there was actually a measure that, that, that I would use a metric applied to the game overall. And it was time to airship. And what it was, was the, the game is always built. In, not always, but a lot, a lot of'em follow this formula where the game is built such that there's a, a usually linear or barely branching path from the starting city to the next one you're supposed to go to, to the next one because you're following the story. And the narrative requires that you do events in a certain order. And so in order to enforce that order, you, you're on foot and then maybe you carry, catch a railroad, which is just a point to point. And then, there might be some chabos that let you cross this desert, but then it forces you off the chabos when you get to the other side. And it's very linear up to a certain point where you've reached a point in the narrative where it decides to branch out. And at that point they always give you an air ship. And now you can get in the air ship and fly off and go to any place that you've been in the previous part. And there's gonna be places that you couldn't get in any of the linear paths. You have to go to the air ship, and that's how you advance the plot from there. And it's usually near the end of the game. But it was a measure of the game to always say, well, how long to the airship, like, final Fantasy seven one that I played way too much had a time of time to airship of about 30 hours.

Gene: 1:14:33

Okay,

Ryan: 1:14:33

the tutorial in that one was about 10 hours. That's before how long it took to get outta the starting city. But

Gene: 1:14:39

sure.

Ryan: 1:14:40

you're, you're, it's two completely different games when you are on the golden path that you can't deviate from, you have to visit this city. You have to encounter these narrative events. You have to vi this, you have to fight these people. You have to beat this boss, you have to do this, now you have the airship, and it suddenly transforms from a linear adventure into an open world. Completely different game

Gene: 1:15:03

Yep. No, I, I totally agree and I relish those limiting times, and don't get me wrong, I love flying in every game that has flying, but. Before you get to flying is where you have to actually solve problems. And it's not just always a God button. Oh, well I just fly over that. There, there's sure. That could be dangers than flying too. Somebody could be shooting at you, whatever. But the dangers are greatly diminished when when you're three dimensional instead of two

Ryan: 1:15:37

See again, I feel like that can be solved with game design. It feels like what, what they haven't done is put any encounters in the air.

Gene: 1:15:45

Well, and they, they even, in our, they eventually did, they, they put in dragons,

Ryan: 1:15:50

Okay.

Gene: 1:15:51

which are faster and bigger than you, and they fly.

Ryan: 1:15:54

I mean, I,

Gene: 1:15:55

And so if you're a tdac or whatever, or any of the, the animals that fly in that game the dragon creates a very real threat to you. And it's not just dragons of other critters as well. But and certainly all of that got added later because be the, the initially when you were flying, there's just not much that could harm you.

Ryan: 1:16:14

sure. I recently,

Gene: 1:16:17

go ahead. Go ahead

Ryan: 1:16:17

I, I, I recently played a, a game called divinity, I think it was called. Where, or Divinity two or what? It, it, it, anyway the plot of this game is that you are cursed by a dragon to ultimately become a, a Dragon knight. And the first half of the game, the game is basically broken up into two main over worlds. The first half of the game is trying to awaken your dragon powers. And one thing I don't like about it is that once you do, you can't go back to the first half of the game cuz it just locks it off. But it that notwithstanding the second half of the game is you have your dragon powers and when you are in dragon form you, you don't have to worry about infantry on the, on the battlements cuz you can just roll up and breathe fire on them. That feels incredibly awesome. But now you have to worry about the ballistas on the battlements that are firing at you. And you never had to worry about the Ballistas cuz ballistas do not fire at a a, a person walking around.

Gene: 1:17:20

Sure.

Ryan: 1:17:21

so it it, it is a completely different game where you've got different things you have to think about, but you still have the freedom of flying within the constraints. Like it, it has a, there's an invisible ceiling you can't go above and there's a lot of places where the cliff walls go above the ceiling in order to box you in. But the, the whole game in, in the dragon section is built around you can, it, it's almost a two world game where you can switch and you're looking at the same place. And now all those, all those people with the, the bows and arrows and really big swords that were completely working you over when you were in human form. You go to Dragon form and you could just cook them and then they're done. But now you gotta watch out because they're gonna send airships after you. Something like that. And it, you just reminded me of that. I don't really have a point there other than there's, it's easy enough to build a game balance such that you're like, oh, you get this new power. Well now you have a whole different set of things to worry about. And I feel like the, the, like the Final Fantasy games back then, or the J RPGs I used to play were great examples of, of they didn't do that because as soon as you got the airship, you're like, yeah, you've just got freedom to move wherever just now play it as open world

Gene: 1:18:36

Yeah. Yeah. And, and there's, see, this is where I think the simulations simulation games have an edge because there are inherent risks with any upgraded te. So you, you're building airplanes. You finally conquered the flight through an atmosphere. But traveling outside the atmosphere and building a rocket presents a whole other slew of potential problems for you. You've learned how to how to actually achieve orbit around the planet. But now flying to a moon of is a whole slew of other things you never needed to worry about that you now have to worry about that all have a chance of screwing you up.

Ryan: 1:19:20

if you achieve orbit around a planet, then your first concern should not be flying to a moon. It should be how do I reenter without burning up?

Gene: 1:19:27

Yeah. Well, the, the first orbit you achieve as a non return flight, it's like, it's Sputnik, right? It's just can I get to the point where I can actually put

Ryan: 1:19:37

can you go all Kim Jong un and start randomly firing missiles into oceans and stuff?

Gene: 1:19:41

Yeah. Yeah, you could totally do that in ki I mean, it's, it doesn't really achieve much to do that. But if you find

Ryan: 1:19:47

a lot of

Gene: 1:19:48

you can certainly

Ryan: 1:19:48

Jong un isn't achieving much by firing missiles into the ocean either. I personally think that he is the only thing standing us standing between us and a kaiju apocalypse. But I may be wrong,

Gene: 1:20:00

Okay. You never know. You never know. I think that he is too easy to make fun of and that makes me suspicious

Ryan: 1:20:08

I think Joe Biden is easy to make fun of too.

Gene: 1:20:11

and that also makes me suspicious cuz who's pulling the strings?

Ryan: 1:20:14

Obama?

Gene: 1:20:15

That sure seems like it doesn't.

Ryan: 1:20:17

Well, I, it's either Obama

Gene: 1:20:19

did want a third

Ryan: 1:20:20

whoever was driving Obama, because it's exactly the same

Gene: 1:20:23

wife, Right, exactly. So I, I don't know, man. There's one other game since we've been on this game, ran for

Ryan: 1:20:30

This seems to like be like a a gaming podcast at this.

Gene: 1:20:33

There, there's not enough of those on the no agenda stream. I just don't see gaming talked about

Ryan: 1:20:38

Gaming is not a big subject on the No agenda stream. It is. There are a lot of gaming podcasts out there.

Gene: 1:20:44

Yeah. Yeah, there are, there are specialty ones, but not on this little corner of the

Ryan: 1:20:49

kinda all you get.

Gene: 1:20:50

Yeah. And, and a lot of basically advertising for only fans

Ryan: 1:20:54

yes.

Gene: 1:20:55

and there's plenty of that happening.

Ryan: 1:20:56

Well, it's

Gene: 1:20:57

Anyway, this game is

Ryan: 1:20:58

but I might be biased.

Gene: 1:20:59

this game's called Green Hell, I'm sure you've never heard of

Ryan: 1:21:02

I, I've heard the

Gene: 1:21:03

although they do, I think they, they do have a version on Xbox. Actually. I, I know that for a fact as they talked about it. Green Hill is a game slash simulation

Ryan: 1:21:13

This game is called Angela Stripper Titties. Oh, wait,

Gene: 1:21:16

that, that, that's a different game. Yes. And incidentally, steam does have an X-rated game section. You just have to check box the box that lets you view them.

Ryan: 1:21:24

I'm not surprised at all.

Gene: 1:21:26

yeah. I literally didn't know that he had that until this year and I was like, really? Holy shit. There's a lot of games in there. Anyway, so this,

Ryan: 1:21:34

you played them all

Gene: 1:21:35

haven't, I have not paid a dime for any of that shit. No, I haven't. I've seen some videos like you can find videos from those games, but I haven't, I haven't paid free any of that shit. I mean, it's kinda like, eh, I mean,

Ryan: 1:21:48

Well,

Gene: 1:21:49

you're old enough, have you done all this shit in real life? It's kinda like, how much fun is it doing in the video

Ryan: 1:21:53

of all, if you, anybody from the nineties knows that if you pay for porn in any form, you're a sucker.

Gene: 1:22:01

Pretty much. But, and the, these games I'm sure are much better than leadership, Larry. Anyway, so the Green Hill is a game where you are a biologist that goes to the Amazonian force with his girlfriend, and then the girlfriend disappears. You don't know what's going on, but she is talking to you on the radio

Ryan: 1:22:22

contracts a, a strange infection and dies. Oh, wait, it's not that. How, how, how immersive is

Gene: 1:22:27

pretty close to that. It's very close to that. So, but it, it is one of the most realistic games, I would say, in terms of survival in certainly a jungle like the Amazon and the, the things that you need to do to survive very simplified from reality, but all similar and based on reality as well. And so you have to obviously find food, make shelter there's animals as well as indigenous tribesmen that could potentially kill you if you if you don't make allowances for making sure that you stay away from them or that you are protected well. But the traps that you make to trap and kill animals, the, the way you make medicines, it's all very much simplified, but based around very much realistic videos, even to the point of how do you make clay like to you have to make clay and then you have to shape it, and then you put it into your kiln to actually fire it and make it hard. And then eventually you're even getting to the point where you're making primitive, bronze metal tools very, very realistic, super easy to die. Like, it, it, that game will kill you multiple times a day. Without even trying,

Ryan: 1:23:52

Is that like a bad end game or no?

Gene: 1:23:55

a bad end

Ryan: 1:23:55

Oh, I'm sorry. It's a, it's a term from c y a. Nevermind. I'm, I'm not gonna open up another topic on, on narrative style, but gone.

Gene: 1:24:07

Well, okay. Well, either way there's a story mode loosely that you can follow, but a lot of it is just basically survival, but done in a non, like fictional fantasy way. The way that arc is, for example, with dinosaurs running around, this is very much all actual existing critters or plants or what, like in that game you drink ayahuasca, for example, and you have visions and you know what ayahuasca is, right?

Ryan: 1:24:37

I'm not familiar with the term.

Gene: 1:24:39

Oh, well you, you don't watch enough Joe Rogan then.

Ryan: 1:24:41

No. No.

Gene: 1:24:42

it is it is, is there enough? I dunno. It is a ritualistic psychoactive drug that shamans will guide you through, and I believe in that whole Amazonian area.

Ryan: 1:24:58

instead of water in the Amazon, is that

Gene: 1:25:00

You don't drink. No, no, no. You definitely don't drink it. It's, it is essentially a combination of a psychoactive drug and poison,

Ryan: 1:25:11

okay? So, no, I, I don't drink that. I drink alcohol.

Gene: 1:25:15

this is better or worse depending on how you look at it. But a lot of people that have done that, that have gone down south and done iosco it has DMT in it. They, they have visions that make them think that they can now understand their life a lot better that they. Some people see aliens, some people see God. It all depends on what you know, who you are and what you see. But anyway, that's in this game as well. So I thought it was just a very well done game from a prepper standpoint. Essentially. You're not gonna learn recipes, but you will learn that you need to know how to do these exact same things that are in the game. You just have to learn to do'em in real life.

Ryan: 1:25:56

Okay,

Gene: 1:25:57

list is the same. Like the list of things you need to survive is the same in the game as real

Ryan: 1:26:03

if you play this game and then mysteriously get fast, traveled to the middle of the Amazon u it, it will have prepared you.

Gene: 1:26:10

Yeah. You're gonna die within probably 48 hours, but you will know what you're missing.

Ryan: 1:26:16

you have died of trench foot.

Gene: 1:26:18

E Exactly. Exactly. Cuz you're like, oh, I forgot to pack the mulkin. Godammit. That's the problem. Fun game. Anyway. We don't have to talk about any games anymore. It's easily an hour on

Ryan: 1:26:30

I, we, we've definitely

Gene: 1:26:31

plenty for most

Ryan: 1:26:32

The, you know what, back in the day, the only, I played the original survival game, Oregon Trail

Gene: 1:26:39

Oh, I remember that. Yep.

Ryan: 1:26:40

and nowadays,

Gene: 1:26:41

a lot.

Ryan: 1:26:42

huh?

Gene: 1:26:42

I died

Ryan: 1:26:43

Yes. You died of dysentery.

Gene: 1:26:45

Yeah, A lot.

Ryan: 1:26:47

No, I, I usually died because I didn't pack enough nails or something stupid like that.

Gene: 1:26:53

Uhhuh

Ryan: 1:26:54

I don't really play a lot of survival games these days. I play Minecraft, but I, it was years ago that I stopped being interested in the survival parts of Minecraft. Now it's just a, a, a platform for installing whatever really awesome mods that I have

Gene: 1:27:08

a building thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well I think you would like satisfactory. And I think they do have a council version as well, because satisfactory. Has just a little tiny bit of survival, but mostly it is a building. Cool. Interesting. I don't even know what to call'em, I guess factories. I, the idea being is you need to make a widget to make this widget, you're gonna need four different subparts. And each of those subparts is made of a number of different ingredients. And then,

Ryan: 1:27:41

is the word cuz that's in the name

Gene: 1:27:43

yeah, factory is definitely the word, but it's, it's satisfying us also. That's where that other part of it comes from. And so you have to source the raw materials, get them converted to, more advanced materials, get those converted to the little sub widgets, and then all of those together build a widget. And you do that by building different machines and you have a lot of what do you call those things? The the little belt things that move materials along. When I, conveyor belts, there you go. That's the

Ryan: 1:28:11

I'm,

Gene: 1:28:11

So you, you end up building a lot of different conveyor belts. So if you wanna see what it looks like, again, if you're not

Ryan: 1:28:16

looking at their website right now and there's the, the one thing that's bothering me is there is a giant red flag in two words that are listed prominently on their website

Gene: 1:28:27

what's that?

Ryan: 1:28:28

early access.

Gene: 1:28:29

It's

Ryan: 1:28:30

I've been burned by early access

Gene: 1:28:31

yeah, it's, it is like a 98% early access. I've had this game for about three years and they've almost finished it.

Ryan: 1:28:39

Almost. Yeah. Kinda like

Gene: 1:28:40

It's, it's missing. It's, it's, believe me, you would think it's a complete game there all the areas that used to be.

Ryan: 1:28:49

I'm sorry.

Gene: 1:28:50

All the areas in the game that used to be just sort of very basic and ugly. Now I'll have trees and critters and things. It's all, I think it'll probably, well, in fact, I don't know why it says early access cuz they're past 1.0. They're actually in release as of, I think about nine months

Ryan: 1:29:07

Huh? Okay.

Gene: 1:29:09

So I'm not sure why it's early access. It should have flipped to normal access by now, but it wasn't early access for several years for sure.

Ryan: 1:29:17

Sure.

Gene: 1:29:19

But it's just, it is kind of fun building the machinery and trying to optimize to see, where you can make things a little smoother, faster, better. And I also love the little bit of dystopia. This is kind of a happy dystopia in this game because the, the corporation that sent you owns everything by contract. So anytime like you fall and you, you lose a little bit of health, it gives you a warning that you're damaging company property, which I I love that. That's this very cute little thing. And the goal is to ultimately gather as many resources in term as much of the planet into a factory as, as is possible. But it's a, it's a completely open world

Ryan: 1:30:01

end game is a Borg planet. Is that what's going on?

Gene: 1:30:04

much. Yeah. But it's a very large area. I don't know how many miles, but maybe like 10 by 10 miles or something. So it, it would take a damn long time to completely bulldoze over everything and

Ryan: 1:30:20

This sounds like the kind of task that, that there are people out there currently

Gene: 1:30:24

that have done it. Yes. Yep. And there are videos if you search, there's a couple of guys that specialize in this game, that do exactly that where they're, it's like, oh, you, you can build like five factories, so let's build 500 factories. You can build a train set to go between different, let's cover the entire map with nothing but railroads, that kind of thing.

Ryan: 1:30:46

I mean, you only do that just to say that you've been able to do it. I,

Gene: 1:30:50

That's not, I mean, when I've played that game, and I probably play it about once every six months or so, I do a play through. And I usually end the play through at about a 90% complete mark, because then I kind of feel like I, I know what I need to do to get to that a hundred percent. So I don't really need to do it,

Ryan: 1:31:06

That's where you, you're like, I've, I've, I've figured out, I've solved, I've figured out what, you know

Gene: 1:31:12

exactly.

Ryan: 1:31:13

I, I, I think about this and, and you talk about turning an entire 10 by 10 square mile area into all factories. And, and I realize one of the reasons why I wouldn't do something like that is because the first place my brain went was going, yeah. But, okay. The much more interesting part of this would be, now take me to the city that needs that much manufactured goods.

Gene: 1:31:38

Sure.

Ryan: 1:31:38

me, take me to the place where this is, this is an important part of a supply chain. That much factory is producing goods for somewhere else much larger.

Gene: 1:31:49

yeah. Well, if it's a planetary scale, then you gotta imagine that that exists. There's plenty of those

Ryan: 1:31:55

I, I, yeah, but I don't wanna imagine, I wanna be like, okay, now you've shown me the cool factory part of the world. Now show me the, the resorts that, that use all the stuff I'm making.

Gene: 1:32:06

Yeah. Unfortunately your social score level does not allow you to be a partaking of those. So you, you just stay right here in this

Ryan: 1:32:14

I understood.

Gene: 1:32:15

Yeah. And I, I, I can't, talking of dystopian games, I can't not mention the other insanely dystopian game that is similar which is hard space. Colon ship breaker.

Ryan: 1:32:28

okay.

Gene: 1:32:29

This, this is a game. I think they're

Ryan: 1:32:31

the game is so good. It needs two title.

Gene: 1:32:34

so they're done. Yeah, exactly. And in this game, your job is, you are hired to be a guy working at a spaceship, junkyard, tearing apart space ships, cutting them up with lasers in order to recycle their parts. And you want to maximize the efficiency of those recycled parts. So you don't want to throw anything away that could be reused. But you also don't want to put into the reuse pile something that clearly could be melted down into raw metal like aluminum. And then that's a better use for it than trying to recycle it as an existing part. Super easy premise. You've got a kinda, kinda, yeah. But the dystopian feel of the game is so awesome because when you first start the game, the game adds up all the money that the corporation has spent on outfitting you to be able to do your job. And the total comes out to like three and a half billion. And so your first task is to work off your, your loan to the company.

Ryan: 1:33:41

Okay, well if it's truly distort B, and that task can never be completed.

Gene: 1:33:46

Well, it can't be completed if you follow all the rules. So that's, that's all I'm gonna say. But it is, it, it's very Brazil like, which is one of my favorite all time movies. It's that idea that you're kinda stuck into the hamster wheel and the expectation is you're gonna do what you're told, but there are elements around you that seem to be rebelling, and you always have to be trying to make a choice between sticking. Something that won't get you in trouble or doing something that may get you in trouble, but may change the situation for the better. But in general, you're probably gonna fail, but yet you still have to keep working.

Ryan: 1:34:24

kind of reminds me of a, a short game that I played called Papers, please.

Gene: 1:34:30

Mm.

Ryan: 1:34:30

Which is you play

Gene: 1:34:32

That sounds like a fun

Ryan: 1:34:33

If you play as a border guard in they, they don't specifically name where, but it's effectively, the Soviet border or, or Nazi Germany or something. A, a border guard in an authoritarian regime and

Gene: 1:34:47

Ukraine.

Ryan: 1:34:48

your Yeah, Sure. Your job is to examine the papers of everybody who comes through, decide whether or not this is, is legitimate traffic or is, somebody trying to sneak through. If you get it wrong, then you get punished. If you get punished too many times, then you get taken off to a firing squad. If you just follow the rules, you're probably going to be okay. But then there's also the, the other thing that is you have to make money and you get kickbacks for doing certain things a certain way, and you pretty much have to have the kickbacks because if you don't, then your family runs out of heating oil.

Gene: 1:35:28

See, I thought you said you didn't like simulations.

Ryan: 1:35:31

I didn't treat it like a simulation,

Gene: 1:35:34

Oh, well that's a problem right

Ryan: 1:35:35

The other thing is I got about 15 minutes in and went, this is triggering me. I need a mod.

Gene: 1:35:40

Oh, too funny. No, that's, that sounds like a neat idea. Yeah. Very much in that sort of dystopian future or past or whatever, but very much in. Dystopian type world. I, I like games like that. I like movies like that. It used to be a lot further away from reality and it was very much a escapism trial kind of thing from reality. I'm kind of feeling like the lines are becoming extremely blurred to where watching Brazil right now feels a lot like watching the news right now.

Ryan: 1:36:11

Yeah. You didn't know that 1984 was a documentary when you watched it the first time. Did you?

Gene: 1:36:15

Well, it was an instruction manual apparently. I mean, it's not what I was taught. I was taught that this is the vision of the future to avoid and, and why it's important to leave the Soviet Union and move to a free country like the United States.

Ryan: 1:36:28

Yes. My favorite political slogan from a couple years ago was make Orwell Fiction again.

Gene: 1:36:34

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Luke the guy that's on the Tim Cast, he's got a t-shirt company that has that on his t-shirts

Ryan: 1:36:42

Yeah. So

Gene: 1:36:44

make 1984 fiction

Ryan: 1:36:46

you've been listening to Game Talk with Gene and Ryan.

Gene: 1:36:51

Yeah. Apparently the two most angry and disliked people on the internet. If you believe some of the comments

Ryan: 1:36:58

I,

Gene: 1:36:59

couldn't tell listening to this,

Ryan: 1:37:00

I think that, well, that's because we were not doing a show that anybody's gonna listen to. They're like, ah, video games. Those nerds, I think, I think, honestly, if, if people hate your show and people hate my show, then there is one thing in common with those shows that really people should be turning all their eye toward.

Gene: 1:37:19

Mm-hmm. which is Oh, well that's true. I mean, he is kind of like the glue that binds all the bad shows together.

Ryan: 1:37:28

He even appeared on rare Encounter once

Gene: 1:37:31

I heard about that. I did not listen to that episode. But he does tend to have his haters. But nobody seems to hate him amazingly because every donation that comes in makes a point of saying that they like Darren

Ryan: 1:37:43

I hate him. I'll, I'll, I'll rag on him over and over again.

Gene: 1:37:46

Yes. If, if you hate Darren, please donate to this episode just to let us know that you hate Darren because otherwise, he's under this delusion that everybody loves him and just hates his co-hosts.

Ryan: 1:37:58

Nobody hates Larry.

Gene: 1:37:59

Well, I, I don't know man. I I think Larry's got his distractors

Ryan: 1:38:03

think so?

Gene: 1:38:04

Yeah.

Ryan: 1:38:05

Well, you'll, the list will be in the show notes.

Gene: 1:38:09

Of the detractors. Yeah. There you go. Yes. We'll send you a list. If you donate, we'll just reply back for your donation with the list. How's that? No, and I'm kind of making fun of the whole donating thing, cuz you were, you mentioned at the beginning of the show that the donations have been pretty high and dry lately. Which I agree with. I, but I also kinda

Ryan: 1:38:27

charity is always the first thing to

Gene: 1:38:29

Yeah, it, it, exactly, exactly. Of course, didn't stop a hundred dollars from showing up for my show with the, the lovely Darren who seems to be who everybody loves but also with comments talking about him, not me. But I don't know. I mean, I, I do my, all my shows because I enjoy the people that I'm talking to, whether it's a one off interview or whether

Ryan: 1:38:54

you don't have to worry about whether or not you can afford heating fuel, remember

Gene: 1:38:58

Well, fair enough. Yeah. I mean, I, if I had to rely on podcast income for heating fuel, I would probably not be focusing energy on doing a podcast. I'd be focusing energy on staying warm.

Ryan: 1:39:09

That's what I've got the cat on my lap for.

Gene: 1:39:12

Well that's the, and the cat's got its electric blanket for that reason as well. That's how the cat is really like a capacitor

Ryan: 1:39:19

cat is actually using me for energy.

Gene: 1:39:22

Exactly. Yes. Cats. Although they do run warmer than people, so I'm not sure how that works.

Ryan: 1:39:28

I, I, I, they're also covered with fur most of the time.

Gene: 1:39:32

Mm-hmm. unless you have one of those weird variety of

Ryan: 1:39:36

I don't think those are cats. I think those fall into the chihuahua category.

Gene: 1:39:40

I tend to agree. My ex-wife was really into that style, but to me it's kinda like, God didn't intend us to see what's underneath cat fur. It's just not Right. I mean, a naked cat is like watching a naked old man. It's just not something you ever want to look

Ryan: 1:39:56

Yes. And yet, every time I go into the bathroom before my shower

Gene: 1:40:00

Well, that's, that's a choice you're making on your own.

Ryan: 1:40:04

are you suggesting that I could have the

Gene: 1:40:06

Remove the mirror. Remove the mirror.

Ryan: 1:40:09

I'll just suggest to my wife that I'm never gonna shower again. We'll see how that Well,

Gene: 1:40:12

I'm, well, I'm sure should love that. But I'm pretty sure you can shower with your eyes closed if you really tried

Ryan: 1:40:19

You might be onto

Gene: 1:40:20

that. You can go by feel like, you get that soap in one hand and whatever you're using. In the other hand, the Lofa and,

Ryan: 1:40:28

that's what you call yours.

Gene: 1:40:29

could go by feel Well, I mean, sure. It's a, it's a European name, but why not? Right. Johnson Lofa, whatever,

Ryan: 1:40:38

Right. Okay.

Gene: 1:40:40

but it, it,

Ryan: 1:40:41

Enough sex

Gene: 1:40:42

it's a yeah, well, it's, we are getting into leisure seat Larry Territory here. So as far as tech shit, which is the main reason I actually wanted to have you on, cuz I, people told me I didn't have enough

Ryan: 1:40:50

yes, we are. So we

Gene: 1:40:51

in, in what I

Ryan: 1:40:52

the lead. Here's the interesting part. Anybody who's got this far in, now that you need to fast forward to an hour 45.

Gene: 1:40:59

That's exactly right. Because the, it was a long introduction, but now the introduction's over, so let's get to the meat and the potatoes. So Microsoft is fucked. Looks like Elon Musk wants to create a new phone and fuck Apple over. What what do you think's gonna be happening in the next two, three years? As far as

Ryan: 1:41:15

of all, I'm pleased that, that all the news is good.

Gene: 1:41:19

i I am as well. I am as well. I, I wanna make sure we take it in the right light, just because a large mega corpus fuck doesn't mean things are bad. I suppose it does for the people that work there, but otherwise, not necessarily a

Ryan: 1:41:31

So what, how, how, what, what exactly just for the people who haven't followed do, how do you consider Microsoft to be fucked?

Gene: 1:41:39

Well, windows 11 was a dismal failure.

Ryan: 1:41:42

That

Gene: 1:41:42

their, yeah, yeah. But they've got their market share has stopped growing. And I know that's, you'd think, well, so what? They got huge. Yes, they did. But generally what happens when the market share stops slowing, just look at Facebook is the demise both of stock price and of the future activities. That company is in sight. Now, Microsoft has been through this a couple times, and they've managed to squeeze out of it by creating something new and different and

Ryan: 1:42:12

of all the really huge companies, Microsoft, I think is the only one. Maybe Apple. Who have been around long enough to have experienced full cycles of market saturation and then need to come up with new product lines.

Gene: 1:42:27

Yeah. And they've made large mistakes that they've seemingly recovered from, but each of those has cost.

Ryan: 1:42:32

Windows is oh, the, the share of windows is not getting larger. Well, that happens when you control almost the whole market. There's, there's nowhere to grow when, when you run almost all the computing, all the desktop computing devices in the world. I mean, if you look at all computing devices Android is by far the biggest, but

Gene: 1:42:56

Yeah. Yep. Well, with the rise of Android, the shift both to iOS and Android and Apple now making their own processors that are running their own os I think that the I mean, Intel's another company to start watching to see what they do as, as there's some bad writing on the wall for them. But but Microsoft, if they can't sell you a new version of Windows, at least every three years, they're taking a major financial hit.

Ryan: 1:43:24

well, the Windows 10 came out what 2015.

Gene: 1:43:29

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:43:30

they, they hadn't sold anything since then.

Gene: 1:43:33

Yeah. And I think that's one of the things kinda leading to the the stagnation that could very easily start the company tumbling,

Ryan: 1:43:41

I mean, there's a lot of people out there who are like Windows 11. Okay, but what does it offer me? I'll just stick with this, especially when you want money.

Gene: 1:43:49

yeah. Well, even they're, they're even trying to give it away and people aren't taking it. I just saw a message the other day pop up when I rebooted. It says, you're all set and ready to upgrade to Windows 11 for free. You meet all the criteria. We'd love to get this started. Just click yes.

Ryan: 1:44:03

you poor

Gene: 1:44:04

And then

Ryan: 1:44:04

you've got one

Gene: 1:44:05

in a little corner, in a little corner, there's a little button that says, no, keep me on Windows.

Ryan: 1:44:10

My, my,

Gene: 1:44:11

for gaming purposes, I absolutely cannot go to Windows 11, even if I wanted to, and I don't. But a lot of games are not compatible with

Ryan: 1:44:20

well you, you're speaking with somebody who's never seen one of those popups on my machine for the simple fact that

Gene: 1:44:25

Well, I pay for my windows, so,

Ryan: 1:44:27

paid for my windows too.

Gene: 1:44:29

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:44:30

I I'm

Gene: 1:44:31

Windows and team, maybe

Ryan: 1:44:32

not running Windows 10. I'm still running Windows 8.1.

Gene: 1:44:36

they're, yeah. 8.1. You gotta kidding me.

Ryan: 1:44:39

it was the, that was the last version before Windows 10.

Gene: 1:44:42

Wow. Yeah, I didn't run Windows eight at

Ryan: 1:44:44

Yeah. Lots of people did. It's like I said, the rule

Gene: 1:44:47

ran Windows seven and then I moved to 10.

Ryan: 1:44:50

It's the, the rule of evens. People, people loved xp. Although when XP first came out, people absolutely despised it, but XP was on the market for so long. People came to like

Gene: 1:45:00

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:45:01

and then everybody's like, oh, Vista sucks. And then Windows seven came up, which is, is Windows Vista with a few UI changes, and people loved Windows seven, and then eight came out. They're like, oh, I don't wanna go to that. And then 10 comes out and people think, oh, well, windows seven's kind of old and Windows 10 and looks shiny again. It's every other operating system for whatever reason.

Gene: 1:45:22

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It could be. So what, what do you think Windows 12 will be? The one people adopt

Ryan: 1:45:28

don't know. Well, first of all, I have no idea what Microsoft's gonna call it. For all I know it's gonna be Windows 11.3 for work groups or something. But

Gene: 1:45:36

I think they've given up on work groups, but what, so what else, what else is kinda hitting your bandwidth here as far as techy shit? Because most of my

Ryan: 1:45:45

most of the

Gene: 1:45:46

is around video

Ryan: 1:45:47

most of the things that, that really get me ranty, I either, I bring up on one of my two shows, the, angry Tech News is the one for very, very technological stuff that, that has problem, like, like slipping into this

Gene: 1:46:01

so pretend there's somebody listening to this. That's never heard of that show. Give us

Ryan: 1:46:06

Vulnerabilities personal security. I harp on that a lot. I always try to, almost every episode I try to bring a story about some kind of data breach. The reason that I do that is not because I think that any particular data breach is

Gene: 1:46:20

so everybody ought to be running Nord VPN is what you're telling people.

Ryan: 1:46:24

That would be one way to help protect you, but at a very minimum,

Gene: 1:46:30

know, they're one of the biggest honey pots out there.

Ryan: 1:46:32

Okay. This sounds like a discussion to

Gene: 1:46:34

run out of Estonia. Well, I'm just saying they're run out of Estonia. I wouldn't trust

Ryan: 1:46:38

I genuinely don't know I, Darren is definitely the VPN person, but there are some really simple things that you can do. For example the number of people, I think that the last analysis I saw was something like 65% of people still use the same password on multiple sites.

Gene: 1:46:56

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:46:57

Use, use a different password, use strong passwords. Use a, the human brain is, has difficulty comprehending what a lot of people consider a strong password. Now that can be combated significantly by using past phrases instead of random characters. Random characters are easy for computers to learn and know and guess, but hard for humans to comprehend. If you use a phrase like, quantum ducks, boobys drug, then humans can understand, can, can comprehend phrases. So that is a great way to do it, that that really increases the password length, the full words, whatever it, but probably the best thing you can do as a password manager because,

Gene: 1:47:41

I, I have a slightly different take on this. I don't think there's anything wrong with using the same password on every website. The issue is don't use the same email address on every website. If every website that you log on, that you have a log into has the same password, but a different email address, there is no way to build

Ryan: 1:48:01

how are you varying the email addresses?

Gene: 1:48:04

I generally will incorporate the name of the website into the email address

Ryan: 1:48:08

Do you run your own server?

Gene: 1:48:09

for email. No, I use Proton.

Ryan: 1:48:11

okay. And you, you create a new account for each one. Is that

Gene: 1:48:17

It's just an alias. I mean, they all come to the same box.

Ryan: 1:48:20

Well, the reason I ask is that there's the, the stock gmail trick that like if your name is, is gene gmail.com, and then you could say Gene plus amazon gmail.com, gene plus PornHub email.com or Gmail, whatever. And you can do that and it gets you a lot. But there are certainly people analyzing that. So here's the vulnerability. I've never, I've never really encountered changing up emails as, as a means of changing your credentials. They do. It does help and, and using different credentials per site is good. I would still recommend different passwords as well, because the email is in plain text and is not a particularly powerful security measure. It's just a security through obscurity, which those are really great until it catches. Once people realize, hey, this person is using, gene, PornHub gene, no agenda, whatever, then they start to, I mean, it's easy enough for somebody to throw an

Gene: 1:49:21

you don't want to use Gene PornHub. You just wanna use PornHub.

Ryan: 1:49:24

Maybe, I, I actually use my own domain for a lot of things,

Gene: 1:49:28

If you Yeah, exactly. Well, you should be using your own domain.

Ryan: 1:49:32

well, yes. But that makes it really easy to analyze and, and compare somebody's like,

Gene: 1:49:37

Well, but, but what you're getting at is somebody would have to look at a list of the passwords and then order the breakdown in their list of buy the same password, and then come up with a, an algorithm that says, well, all of these same passwords seem to be coming from the same domain.

Ryan: 1:50:00

so

Gene: 1:50:01

And then that probably means something subversive it, the way these algorithms simply work, and I mean, I'm sure you've been on there if you get on the dark that you can

Ryan: 1:50:10

I've written these

Gene: 1:50:11

of passwords. Yeah. And so what you're looking for is you're looking for a bunch of emails that match, and then the passwords. And if those passwords are the same, then bingo. Now you can use that as a very easy to query way to get into people's

Ryan: 1:50:30

the, the vulnerability, the vulnerability we are concerned about here is data breaches. If a company loses their password database, now

Gene: 1:50:39

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:50:41

if the company has an IT person that is worth their job at all, then the passwords are hashed. And even better if they're salted. But that's not nearly common enough. know, The, the people who run the fuck away from, by the way, this is just a, a real quick. Is any site that, well, okay, any site that has, for example, a maximum password length, if they have a maximum password length, then the most common reason for that is because they're not storing your password hashed, they're storing the password and that's the maximum length of the sequel

Gene: 1:51:20

Well, and I'll, I'll give you another reason, is because some security professional told them that if you don't put a maximum length in, you're probably more likely to have a SQL injection attack happening.

Ryan: 1:51:31

Well, obviously you sanitize your shit or just feed it into your hash algorithm cuz you,

Gene: 1:51:36

Things that you say

Ryan: 1:51:38

hash algorithm isn't implemented in sql The only thing, the only thing that somebody should be doing with a password is hashing it period.

Gene: 1:51:46

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 1:51:47

that. You, you get a password field, the only thing you should do is hash it. So if I want to put in a 40 character password and somebody says, oh sorry, your password's too long, then you're right. There are other possible explanations, but the most common explanation for that is that you are trying to store that password somewhere. And so the vulnerability is that, the question is never, if somebody gets their database exfiltrated, it's when and when they store the full credentials, name and password, then those credentials are now out on the dark web. But even if they store just a hash, then what you have is usually your, your id, which is generally an email address and either a password or a hash password. And somebody will go out on the dark web and buy up a database of a hundred thousand of these, which is usually, somebody's,

Gene: 1:52:40

pretty

Ryan: 1:52:41

somebody's password database comes out, they're like, I'll take a hundred thousand for 20 bucks on the dark web, whatever. No, it's more like, more like, 5,000 satoshis, whatever. It's. Once they have that, they will go ahead and feed it to their bot, which will go to the login page for every site, usually whatever site they really want to get into. And they will replay the name and password from that entire breach. Why? Because if you use the same password somewhere, it'll let you in and

Gene: 1:53:11

Yep.

Ryan: 1:53:11

changing up either the name or the password defeats that attack, but it's easy enough to change the algorithm a little bit to do some analysis, throw some AI at it, the insert ad for, for CSBs account or AI show here to it's

Gene: 1:53:28

oh, hell no, no. Advertising and ad free network here.

Ryan: 1:53:32

Mine too, which is why CSB doesn't talk to me anymore. But you, you, it's easy enough to switch up the algorithm to analyze email addresses and look for common domains, common names, whatever. Now, you, you might be able to defeat this by having completely random email addresses and the same password everywhere, but how is that easier to use than having different password?

Gene: 1:53:57

Well, I, I think it is better because the most common and the most simple, which is why it's the most common way, is to sort by email address. So what's, what you're gonna buy or sell on the dark web is a, an already been presorted by tools and it's presorted by like, here's a list of 24 logins for this person. They don't care if it's the same password or different passwords. Here's what we have available through all the different breaches that have happened. With the, the email address, csb csb.com, like here's the, the 15 different breach related records that have come through. So for each of these sites, odds are that he simply changed his password to one of that he used on one of the other sites. So try logging into each one with all the variants of passwords that we know he used on other

Ryan: 1:54:53

And that works if the,

Gene: 1:54:54

odds are pretty damn good. You're gonna get

Ryan: 1:54:56

works. If the passwords are in plain text or, and there's a pattern to them, the easiest pattern is the same password everywhere. The second easiest password is a known prefix followed by the name of the site, which by the way, increases your security about a hundred fold, just doing that. But if the passwords are in plain text, that's easy enough to defeat. If the passwords are hashed, it doesn't matter. Changing one character, you've got a completely different hash.

Gene: 1:55:23

Absolutely. Absolutely. But also if you're using different emails for these websites, then there is no list to build unless somebody decides to specifically look for somebody doing what I'm describing. And there's just way too few people doing it this way for any automated tools to bother, because what do you, do you really wanna have just everybody at aol? Oh, I'll bet you it's the same person. No, it, there's a whole bunch of

Ryan: 1:55:54

I, I guess when I say, when I say it's security through obscurity, what I mean is, could this be, if, if somebody specifically wants to hack you or me, could they tweak their algorithm such that your security could be defeated simply by listening to this podcast? We're recording right now. Okay. Then that, okay, I will give you, using a different email on every site has a lot of benefits. You, among other things, if you get spam email, then you know exactly who sold

Gene: 1:56:29

You, you, what you just described is, the original reason I started doing this before I realized it's actually better for security as well, is to identify

Ryan: 1:56:39

you're only going to change one, I will still recommend you change the password. However, if you really want the best, then change. Have a different, different email and different password for each one. And again, it's, one I, I

Gene: 1:56:52

So here, here's the problem with different passwords in my opinion is you run into an issue of people's memory capacity. And so the solution that most people end up using is to trust the third party software to manage their passwords. And I trust that a lot less than I do my brain

Ryan: 1:57:10

I, you're the only one who trusts your brain.

Gene: 1:57:13

Well, I totally trust

Ryan: 1:57:14

Now the

Gene: 1:57:15

My brain is set up in a way that if my brain stops working, then there are certain triggers that go into effect that have indicated that my life has ended.

Ryan: 1:57:24

There are ano a lot of different password managers out there right now. The, the bulk of them are implemented aiming for convenience, which is, I mean, honestly, if you install a password manager, it's because you want the convenience of not having to memorize all of them. But a lot of them will aim for and, and build their system around the idea that you want access to it from multiple devices. And so when you want access from multiple devices, multiple places, what does every Silicon Valley company do? Oh, we'll store this in the cloud. That is a big, that is a red flag to me. I am not, I, I, Amazon, I did a story on the latest Angry Tech news about the number of apps which are putting their Amazon AWS credentials hardcoded into the app.

Gene: 1:58:14

Yep.

Ryan: 1:58:14

But I am highly skeptical of anybody who decides to store your password database in the cloud. Now, the responsible ones will encrypt that database locally where the only decryption key is your master password and then store the encrypted database. And now without your master password, they can't do anything with that. That's not bad. That, I mean, it's a, your level of security is always about where is your trade off between

Gene: 1:58:44

So what you're saying is when Google's web browser, when whatcha you gonna call it? Chrome? Asks you, would you like me to save this password? You should say No,

Ryan: 1:58:53

no, no. The,

Gene: 1:58:54

because it, it's gonna, for your convenience, it's gonna save it with Google so that any other device that you're running on, that you log in through that account, it'll say, oh, well, I already know what your password is. Would you like to use your pre-recorded

Ryan: 1:59:06

If you use Firefox to a lesser extent, but if you use the password management feature in your browser, you're basically asking your passwords to be taken away. Now, the password manager that I use is one called KeyPass. And it the, the reason for using that one is extremely simple. It's the best one that I found wherein the password database is kept in storage that I own. I, I use I use the sync program to sync my password database between this computer my cloud server that I control, it's co-located and my laptop and wherever else I wanna be. And, and it's in Crypted database. I think that that is, there are, there are ways that you could attack that, but I think that's

Gene: 1:59:53

how many people go to that effort to, realistically,

Ryan: 1:59:56

many. Not many, well, not many people have

Gene: 1:59:58

Most people are buying some off the shelf product and just going, okay, so it costs me

Ryan: 2:00:04

Okay. How many people though, honestly have more than one device on which they intend to use all these systems? It

Gene: 2:00:13

But most people have at least two. You got your phone and you got your laptop

Ryan: 2:00:17

into your bank from both?

Gene: 2:00:18

something. Yes, yes. I'm not a good example cuz I have 20 devices that I might log

Ryan: 2:00:23

I, I, the vast majority of places that I have passwords in my database for I log in from only one place. And that's right here.

Gene: 2:00:31

Yeah. Well we, we discovered that your phone is actually turned off today much like John

Ryan: 2:00:35

Yeah. Yes. It,

Gene: 2:00:37

clearly you're not using your

Ryan: 2:00:38

phone has about five times more usability in its current state shut off in the drawer than when it's annoying the piss out of me because podcasters can't remember what time they wanted to record a podcast.

Gene: 2:00:51

I don't know any podcasters that don't remember things at all. But but I, I think, and I, if you don't wanna use your phone, that's fine, but, but I also don't think that that's typical. I think most people do use, I mean, honestly, they probably use their, their phone, their personal

Ryan: 2:01:06

most people also log into a site

Gene: 2:01:09

a work

Ryan: 2:01:09

and say, set a forever cookie that keeps me logged in. And then, and then a, forget the password.

Gene: 2:01:16

Well, that happens to, I mean, it's, it's, I guess what's one strategy that I've, I don't like this strategy. It's not like I'm recommending it, but I've seen it used, which is to put in a completely random gal password that you have no intention of remembering and simply rely on the password reset mechanism as your entry point into

Ryan: 2:01:37

now your security is your log into your email and you're back to using one password for everything

Gene: 2:01:43

Correct. Yes.

Ryan: 2:01:44

which admittedly,

Gene: 2:01:46

should be different for every

Ryan: 2:01:47

that every service

Gene: 2:01:48

you listen to

Ryan: 2:01:49

given that every service has the password recovery, you're kind of relying on that anyway. That is the weak point. If you lose your email, then you've lost most of the services anyway.

Gene: 2:01:59

yeah. Except for Bitcoin wallets, which tend to not want to give you your

Ryan: 2:02:02

Bitcoin wallets are, are kind of unique in that if, they, they would rather, they would rather have all of your funds be permanently locked away and lost forever

Gene: 2:02:13

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 2:02:13

than give it to somebody else.

Gene: 2:02:15

Right.

Ryan: 2:02:17

So,

Gene: 2:02:18

That because there's a fixed number, limited

Ryan: 2:02:20

what other tech topics? I could go on and on and

Gene: 2:02:23

Well, I mean, that was a good example. I just wanna make sure that people have a, if they're not listening to your show, that they have a good idea

Ryan: 2:02:30

Okay. what else do I go on about? I, I have a, a particular car about a Dr. A self-driving and electric cars.

Gene: 2:02:37

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 2:02:38

I,

Gene: 2:02:38

your for or against

Ryan: 2:02:40

I drive a Buick from 2000. That came with a system called OnStar that I disconnected within the first two weeks. And otherwise it is a, a car that is made of metal. It uses an internal combustion engine. The only computers in it control the timing of the, the pistons or piston. No fuel injected. Yes. No, its pistons. I not a car person. I don't, I have a lot of issues with modern cars and, and let's, let's put aside the, the two big ones, which is self-driving and, and electric. And start with the idea that cars are going onto these smartphone model or the Xbox model and getting automatic updates.

Gene: 2:03:23

Oh, it's beyond that. They're not only getting automatic updates. If you look at the new Mercedes-Benz their features are activated at any time. As soon as you start paying a monthly subscription fee,

Ryan: 2:03:35

yeah. See

Gene: 2:03:36

this is really pissed off a lot of car heads where you can get a car from Mercedes where it will be limited in its horsepower unless you wanna unlock the high performance mode, which is 50 bucks a month forever. In which case they send a little message to your car that says, go ahead and unlock that. And your car, which is already there physically now, is allowed to utilize its high performance mode.

Ryan: 2:04:02

And if that is an argument to not get a Mercedes for me, I,

Gene: 2:04:08

If they're doing it, everybody else is gonna start doing it.

Ryan: 2:04:11

when I finally get a car that has that capability, it will be because I've figured out how to hack it. And this, this goes back to something that I decided a really long time ago with most of my software and, and it's. This has been a, a trope and open source for a very long time. And that is if I do not have the ability to modify the software in something, then it's not my device. And I, I hate that cars are going that way, but I'm not going to own a car that doesn't have software. I can modify. And, and if that means, that I, I can never take a car that has auto updates. I, at some point when the last 1972 gas guzzler has finally given up the ghost, I'm gonna have to come up with a new way to get around. But I don't trust Silicon Valley with my software. There, there are just too many examples of where, and I I use Silicon Valley. It doesn't have to be that region,

Gene: 2:05:11

right? I

Ryan: 2:05:12

it's a catch all term for big technology companies who behave in such a way that the user is a surf who will just take what you ha have and anyway, so

Gene: 2:05:26

Yeah. Well, it's the, it's the Photoshop model where they went from selling an expensive product that you own to leasing you a less expensive product, which over the course of three years ends up being more expensive when than what you

Ryan: 2:05:40

yeah, un unless you find a way to hack it. So I am against cars that have software that you don't get to control. And I know, all of these opinions are, are against the, the mainstream, against the widespread opinion against what Silicon Valley wants. And also, they've got a lot of lawyers making sure that patent law holds up behind them, or copyright law, the John Deere tractors, where farmers are not capable of fixing their own things because it's protected by copyright. That is fucked up. I definitely approve of Right to repair. And, and I feel that Right To Repair is a, an extension of the first sale doctrine, which is, you sold the fucking thing to me. Now it's mine. I get to do what I want with it.

Gene: 2:06:26

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that eventually what that'll do is either the farmers will vote with their pocket books and say, we've always bled green, but now we're gonna glean red, or it's going to result in John Deere just saying, we're no longer selling any tractors. We're only leasing tractors,

Ryan: 2:06:47

And there are gonna be a lot of people that go both ways. This is why competition is fantastic, which is why we always need competition. Every time that you have one of these technologies taking off, like John Deere, like Apple, it's always in a place where people can't just leave the platform because they're locked in one way or another. And that lock in is the antithesis of capitalism.

Gene: 2:07:12

Yeah. And you're quite right in calling it a surf mentality because that is literally what happened in Sedo in, in prior times, is that the landlords held the land. That's what they were, the lords of the land. And then the surfs would lease the land from the landlord and as part of that lease agreement, provide the landlord with their first crops, their first wives, their first whatever. So effectively they got what was left over.

Ryan: 2:07:43

Yula

Gene: 2:07:44

Yeah, yeah, exactly. End user license agreement, correct. Yeah. That, that was definitely created by the the Lords for the surfs. And We're getting, well, we're, I think we're getting back to that because a lot of companies are finding that as similar, and I've half jokingly, but half not jokingly have made this argument over the last five years that we are really getting back into a sort of a tech surf them.

Ryan: 2:08:08

It's the industrial Revolution all over again. It's company towns. It's, it's, if you wanna work in this town, you've gotta work for the mine, and then you'll be in debt for every day of your life to the company store. I mean, we've got that, but now they're all, now it's a virtual mine and a virtual company store, and we're all tethered to the little device in our pockets.

Gene: 2:08:27

Well, and then when I, when I went to visit friends at Facebook here in Austin and other companies are very similar. It is absolutely the company store and the company dining room and the company sleeping. Pods and the company, like you never have to leave. Not that they expect a whole lot of work out of you, but what they do expect is a complete giving over of your free will to the

Ryan: 2:08:52

because there are plenty of statistics that say if you don't have to leave, if, if you don't have to commute, if you don't, especially when you prefer hire people with no family, no ties, no, no outside. It, again, one of those many hiring practices that can never be proven but is widely aware, kind of right next to age discrimination is in the technological sphere. The preferential hiring of people who are single. The preferential hiring where you, you discriminate against anybody who has a family. You discriminate against anyone who has kids. For a while, early on until, at least until my state had banned the, the asking the question, a lot of people would ask women do you intend to ever have kids? Which is a big flag that says, oh, there's gonna be something more important than this person's life, than the fa, than the company.

Gene: 2:09:49

Yeah. But you can't blame the business for doing that because obviously the whole point is to be more competitive than the people you're competing against. And why would you hire somebody that's gonna disappear for nine months out of the year?

Ryan: 2:10:02

I can blame the business for it. I can blame anybody for anything I want.

Gene: 2:10:06

Well,

Ryan: 2:10:06

think It's a scummy

Gene: 2:10:07

just an irrational argument.

Ryan: 2:10:09

I, I, I think it's a really crappy scummy practice. I, I am not gonna back down from that. Now, do I think that there should be that, that the government should step in with fines and ultimately, backed up by people with guns to force the company to change what they do? That is another discussion entirely. But is, are the people who decide that they want to favor only?

Gene: 2:10:36

I don't think it's a people deciding, I think it's a consumer deciding. You have two ID identical companies that are making competitive products. One of them has leave for their employees. And during the times that their employees are gone to rear kids or whatever they're going to be, that company's gonna have less productivity because they're have to either work with fewer employees or they have temporary employees that don't know the business as well. Whereas the other company that isn't doing that is able to run more efficiently. And generally that translates into them being able to undercut the price of the other business. And the consumers are ultimately the ones that will pick, and they always pick the company that is able to provide an identical product for a cheaper price. Just look at.

Ryan: 2:11:22

You're making a, a competition argument, and I respect that, but you're only making the argument from one side because there's another market that is really important here. To consider, which is the, the market of employment of jobs. Ultimately, you're, you're looking at this from the buyer's side, the company who is purchasing the services of an employee and on the, if, if what, what you're arguing is that the company that abuses their employees and ruins their work life balance is going to succeed. And to an extent, there is definitely pressure in that direction. But also if, if

Gene: 2:12:01

I mean, Amazon is the case study

Ryan: 2:12:03

the, you, you also start,

Gene: 2:12:05

his company

Ryan: 2:12:06

you also started that with an assumption, I'm not sure I always agree on which is that you, you said that in, in two identical companies who are competing against each other, and that is, that is one thing that Silicon Valley will not abide. So I, I, I

Gene: 2:12:21

doesn't have to be. It's, it's two identical companies to make the argument

Ryan: 2:12:25

yeah, I understand it was, it. was a hypothetical situation. I'm just saying that competition is

Gene: 2:12:29

Amazon is the real world case study for this because, and I think they are not doing this as much today. I have friends at Amazon. And certainly it sounds like the current environment is a lot closer to other big companies like Google. But the way that Amazon built itself in the first decade of its life was absolutely by hiring people that would work harder. What Ian Musk just did at Twitter and what he has done at his previous companies, it says, for us to be able to survive and flourish, everybody's gonna need to stay at work for 60 hours a week moving forward. If you can't do that,

Ryan: 2:13:10

And, and

Gene: 2:13:10

that's okay. I'm not gonna hold it against you. You just need to leave this company and find work

Ryan: 2:13:14

my, my argument is that, that that position on the part of a company. Beneficial in competition to other companies for the products, but is only feasible so long as there are people willing to accept those terms. And if you have your, your competitor, not your competitor in, in the goods market, but your competitor in the job market across town who says, we're going to give you higher benefits and we're not going to, we're only going to demand 45 hours a week. And we also are, closer to where you live and have free daycare. There are going to be places where people are like, fuck this job that requires me to do 60 hours. And if enough people are like, if, if enough people say, yeah, I totally want that job, then, then the company that demands it is going to be doing very well

Gene: 2:14:12

Yeah. And, and what Amazon did in that scenario is something very,

Ryan: 2:14:17

a monopoly and put all of their competition out of business.

Gene: 2:14:20

Well, that's, that's the other smart thing they did. And I, by the way, I don't like Amazon, but I can recognize the successful steps they've taken to become what they are right now. As much as we can dislike what they are. They were successful as getting there. What they've done is very interesting, which is they first capped all salaries at, I think it, initially it was 125,000 a year and then it was 150,000 a year. But essentially everybody, regardless of your level, made less than that. Nobody in the company made any more than that. So how do you get people to work harder, especially people that are at higher levels within their careers that have more experienced and would commend a higher salary elsewhere, is you make up the difference with stock and by granting them stock instead of simply a higher wage. You're more closely tying them to the company's welfare, the ability of the company to flourish is so directly related to these people doing a better job than their

Ryan: 2:15:21

just another form of lock in, but this one is, is

Gene: 2:15:25

Of course, of course. I'm not arguing that it's not

Ryan: 2:15:28

you know, whether you get a high salary or, or more stock options or better benefits package or, or free food in the cafeteria is all just the value proposition. And somebody who is analyzing rationally will weigh them all

Gene: 2:15:43

absolutely. And,

Ryan: 2:15:44

that, that the

Gene: 2:15:45

you're kind of making my point for me, which is what I was saying initially, is that the reason that these companies are acting like the company store, that they're, they want people to stick around and, sleep at work, and eat at work, and do everything else at work, is because they, they know the outcome of having people available 24 7 on their job, even if it's not actually utilized 24 7. But just that availability gives them a competitive advantage that competitors who don't do this just don't have, dystopian future is built because ultimate efficiency in business results in dystopia. You can't have one without the other. If you take the best case scenario for every decision in business, you end up with

Ryan: 2:16:30

well under, under the monopolistic model. I agree with that. In, in theory the, the assumption, and I'm not certain this is true, but the assumption underlying capitalism being functional is that there is always somebody else willing to enter the market and, and come up with their idea. And in just about every case that there is a legitimate failure of capitalism and not, not like the, know, what the, the Reddit anti capitalist people will shout about, which is generally an intentional result of crony capitalism. But every legitimate failure of capitalism comes from a lack of competition. Whether that lack of competition was caused by some kind of natural market forces, which is uncommon, but does happen. Or more often it's caused by one of the larger companies. One of the larger existing firms is locking out all new competition. The most common method that they use to lock it out is government regulation

Gene: 2:17:33

Yep. Yeah, I don't, I don't disagree with any of that. I think that it's unfortunate that governments are so easily manipulated by companies, but again, it is completely understandable why a company would commit money into getting government to help them. Like, that's obvious. Of course you would do that. If, if it's legal, why wouldn't you do it?

Ryan: 2:17:57

the argument you've just made is not that, and I'm, I'm, I'm attacking a strawman here because you have not made the argument I'm about to approach, but a lot of people will say, well, we need to restrict the companies even further because they're using government to do awful things. That's not the solution. For one thing, you're, you're trying to fight too much government with more government, but also because you cannot temper human greed. And if you could, you would ultimately destroy humanity, which is what you see in say socialist societies. The solution though,

Gene: 2:18:33

Well, I, I, I would say you're shifting greed, not tempering in a social society. There's always somebody greed against, usually people in

Ryan: 2:18:39

well, you, because, because your, your socialist utopia cannot come without corruption because you've added humans and humans fuck up every utopia. But the solution to, oh, look, people are using government to hurt other people is not add more government to make them stop the solution is how about we reduce the amount of government that people have to wield? And nobody gets

Gene: 2:19:04

yep. Yeah, very few people. I, I totally agree with you on that. And it's, it is, the, the logical course of action in that

Ryan: 2:19:12

which is, why nobody gets it.

Gene: 2:19:14

absolutely right, because it's logical. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it unfortunately, this is a topic that I think starts to r a lot of people up because everybody thinks they're logical. Everybody thinks that all the decisions they're making. Well, if somebody doesn't think they probably are more logical than most people,

Ryan: 2:19:33

most people lead with the

Gene: 2:19:35

people who are not logical absolutely think that everything they're doing is rational and, and based in

Ryan: 2:19:41

people lead with their amygdala and follow it up with the hypothalamus, and then the hippocampus never really gets involved.

Gene: 2:19:47

Well, by that point, what's the, what's the point?

Ryan: 2:19:50

So, yeah.

Gene: 2:19:51

Decisions been made emotionally

Ryan: 2:19:52

I do a tech show. There's lots of themes that I, I harp on let's see

Gene: 2:19:56

and where can people catch

Ryan: 2:19:58

tech

Gene: 2:19:58

your show?

Ryan: 2:19:59

and that

Gene: 2:20:00

And then there's links to the

Ryan: 2:20:01

there is it, if you, the, I have, I have both the real equal alternate, which is not gonna make sense to people who aren't technical, but it means that your device can find an RSS feed automatically. And if you can't, there's a button that says Subscribe to rss. And if you wanna play it off the website, no worries there. My

Gene: 2:20:19

and if they nice. And if they want to just use their phone like most people and add it to their podcast or thingy.

Ryan: 2:20:26

you have a podcast app that knows how to speak rss, it works. If you have a new

Gene: 2:20:31

I mean, you're listed in,

Ryan: 2:20:32

that knows how to send money Satoshis to rss, that works too.

Gene: 2:20:37

That's even better. But you're, you're listed in all the directories

Ryan: 2:20:39

I am listed in, I am listed in Podcast Index. I have never taken out time to submit myself to any other directories. Now which means I'm not gonna be in Spotify, and I don't think I'm in Apple. I believe Google

Gene: 2:20:53

Yeah. Fuck Spotify.

Ryan: 2:20:54

Well, fuck Apple too. I do believe Google Podcasts has been incorporating RSS feeds from Podcast Index. So they, I think I'm in that

Gene: 2:21:02

Yeah. I think they're stealing feeds left right.

Ryan: 2:21:04

But I have never personally submitted my feed to Apple because I refuse to even create an account with Apple. I refuse to

Gene: 2:21:13

Oh

Ryan: 2:21:13

with Apple in any, any personal way. So,

Gene: 2:21:17

You and Aon Musk. I swear to

Ryan: 2:21:19

Apple and fuck their antiquated directory that needs to go away. The podcast Index is superior in pretty much every way and also

Gene: 2:21:28

It would be nice if they just adopted it, but obviously they're not going to.

Ryan: 2:21:33

if your app is worth having on your phone then it speaks rss. And if you go to angry tech news.com with your phone and click on the RSS feed, your phone will know what to do with it. And if your app doesn't know what to do with that or insists on going to some other directory, then uninstall that bitch and go to nude podcast apps.com to install something real.

Gene: 2:21:54

Yeah. And since you're listed on there, any of the dozen plus podcasting apps that talk to Podcasting 2.0 and Podcast Index will, you'll

Ryan: 2:22:04

Oh.

Gene: 2:22:04

to find the podcast

Ryan: 2:22:05

If you look up my name, if you look up my name, Ryan Bemrose, or you look up Angry Tech News, you will find it. I had, I had one other topic that I wanted to rant about,

Gene: 2:22:14

sure. Go for it.

Ryan: 2:22:15

it has to do with the donations to podcasts. And actually, I have no need to talk about it, so maybe I shouldn't. But what is your position on advertising in podcasts?

Gene: 2:22:27

Okay. So, I don't know that I have a typical position on this. I think that from a listener perspective, I enjoy consuming content with no advertising,

Ryan: 2:22:38

so you're, you're just

Gene: 2:22:39

will do what I, well, I will do what I can to get around it. Like, I pay you, I pay YouTube 13 bucks a month to never see an ad. Most people

Ryan: 2:22:48

an ad blocker to

Gene: 2:22:49

They'll take the ads, which doesn't always work, and I don't want to have that one in a hundred chance that it's

Ryan: 2:22:55

I also don't visit YouTube so that I don't see an ad.

Gene: 2:22:58

there you go. There you go. So I ensure that doesn't happen. I typical will fast forward through sections of advertising on podcasts or other things that I didn't like. I can't get rid of ads any other way, so I will skip them. The, the one oh yeah. Including host reads. With the one exception probably being no agenda is simply because. The bickering and conversation that goes on during the donation segments quite often is hilarious.

Ryan: 2:23:24

no. Agenda is unique on.

Gene: 2:23:25

they're rare. I don't think they're unique, but I think they're pretty damn rare. There are a few people that do in video ads, like, I don't know if you've seen this, but one smart thing that nor VPN's current ad agency did is they challenged the people that are signed up to be Nord vpn Shils. They, they said, don't just read our copy. We're gonna have a contest with substantial dollars behind it for the most creative Nord VPN ad that you make yourself. And so what you've seen almost overnight over the last month is everybody doing really more interesting, more creative ads for the same company that they've always had ads for, but instead of reading identical text, they're doing it the old school 1930s radio style, which is where the host actually has to come up with something witty and interesting to incorporate the product

Ryan: 2:24:26

But most podcast

Gene: 2:24:27

which is

Ryan: 2:24:28

hosts aren't witty

Gene: 2:24:30

Well true story. But nonetheless, I think stuff like that I'm okay with. But in general, I mean, if we could have a system where, and by the way, I think Elon Musk may end up creating this and like in a way that it gets adopted fast. Adam's creation of podcasting 2.0 I think is great. I think that he's ahead of the curve as he's been for most of his life and a lot of things. And I, I love the adoption that has happened with a lot of these podcast apps that allows the use of sending of Bitcoin via Satoshi. Directly and in real time. That is awesome. It'd be great if the big players adopted that as well. They're not gonna do that unless they can stick their fingers in the middle of it and get at least 30% share. That's what Apple charges for most things is 30%, which is by the way, better than what like Amazon charges for Twitch, which is they get 40% of anything that you delete.

Ryan: 2:25:27

thing is, is one of the first reasons why I will not touch anything Apple.

Gene: 2:25:31

Yeah. So Apple gets their chunk. Elon Musk is on a kind of a, a bit of a rant lately saying, this is ridiculous. 10% might be fair, but there's no way 30% is fair. We need to make sure the people creating the content are the ones getting the money, not these networks.

Ryan: 2:25:48

And and how

Gene: 2:25:48

he's sort of hinted at

Ryan: 2:25:50

creating the content and the people consuming it, being the ones to decide what's fair?

Gene: 2:25:54

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you wanna adjust the slider as to where that split is, but I, I've made that argument for Podcasting 2.0 right on. In the early days, like in, once that thing was created within a few months by Dave Jones, I said, I don't like this idea of like the breakdown of percentages being set by the either podcaster or the app.

Ryan: 2:26:16

I, I

Gene: 2:26:17

Because the way it was set up originally is, it's like, well the podcaster sets it for 10, I dunno, 10 to Toshi per minute or whatever, and they want half to go to the podcast or 10% to go to the guy doing something, the artwork, and then 10% to this person. And then that a hundred percent block goes to the app and then the app says, and we want a 10% or 15 or 20% override.

Ryan: 2:26:44

Yeah,

Gene: 2:26:44

So they'll take the first 10 or 15 or 20% as the app creator, then the, they'll send the rest, and then the rest is divided up according to the podcaster. I think the whole thing ought to be decided by

Ryan: 2:26:56

well, I, I do too. But how will the listener decide? I, the, the app is, Mechanism by which the listener interacts with that. I'm not too worried about apps ripping listeners off for the simple fact that there is competition in the app space, and this is good. I will also tell you that when, when I eventually pie in the sky write my own podcast app the listener will be in charge entirely. What it, what I'll probably end up doing because, and, and I know this is going to annoy Adam and Dave because they've very much discussed that apps shouldn't do this, but the app that I want, and therefore the one that I would write if I wrote one, is

Gene: 2:27:38

If you got you

Ryan: 2:27:39

if I ever, stopped playing so many video games, is it loads up the value block with the splits that the podcaster recommended and those become defaults and then they're modifiable by the user. Because,

Gene: 2:27:53

you're gonna write my app then, cuz that's

Ryan: 2:27:54

because the user is, is absolutely the one who needs to decide where their money is going. That's, that, that's the value for value model. I don't, if I, if I take my podcast and say, okay, actually 90% of it is going to Gene, actually I wouldn't do that, but if you hacked my podcast and made it so 90% goes to Gene, all of the apps would be e even for the people who hate Gene, they would have no choice but to send you all the money.

Gene: 2:28:19

Yep. Yep. No, and I, I, I agree. And this way you could have somebody like a CSB donating to a show with somebody he hates on it, and then designating all the money to be funneled to the

Ryan: 2:28:32

is something more structural that bothers me about the split. And, and I know that you, you know about this because you were one of the first people who really called out the problem, and that is it's an integer from one to a hundred

Gene: 2:28:47

Yeah. The rounding. Yeah.

Ryan: 2:28:49

it, it needs at the very least to be a floating point. Because if I want to say this per, if I have, say a very, very successful podcast that brings in one Bitcoin per episode, maybe, I don't think, maybe I wanna toss something to the, the guy who wrote the, the chapters app for my app, but maybe they don't need 0.01 Bitcoin for every episode

Gene: 2:29:17

Yeah.

Ryan: 2:29:18

and

Gene: 2:29:19

Well, and it's not just that, it's when you're breaking down into small time allotments, and this is where I noticed it is when you were doing literally 10 sets per minute and, and the donations started rounding you, you went from somebody getting 15% to then them getting 20% because it rounded up to the 2 cents from one and a half

Ryan: 2:29:44

that sounds like a problem that can be solved in an app. If the app start, because the app will, somebody will look at this and go, this isn't right, and the app might start batching so that it can reduce rounding errors. It's,

Gene: 2:29:56

Well, that was my proposed solution is if you start batching, then

Ryan: 2:29:58

the, the problem that I have, that I called out is actually a fundamental problem with the value spec itself, which is that field is an integer.

Gene: 2:30:07

Right?

Ryan: 2:30:07

And, and you can't fix that if, if, again, I'm thinking like a developer and, and I may never write such an app, but if I would, I always think about how would I design it and I can,

Gene: 2:30:18

Well, and it, it, it can still be an integer. It just has to be an integer, not from one to a hundred in 1% increments. It needs to be an integer in 100th of a percent. So you've got six digits that make up a 100% mark.

Ryan: 2:30:34

I think it needs to be a floating point. Because it can be, I can give somebody, a 0.000. I can give somebody a one 100000000th share for every full Bitcoin that is donated to my podcast. I will send us Satoshi to this person. But they are in the split. And that does a couple things. One, one of the things that it does is it says, I, I appreciate you, but okay, that, that particular number means

Gene: 2:30:57

For a millionth of my money. I appreciate you. Yeah.

Ryan: 2:31:00

I appreciate you, but this is such a small, it's like giving a penny at, at your waitress's table or something. But but the other thing that it opens up is the ability to have things like Boost Spot without giving them a full 1% of your revenue. You, you may not be familiar with Boost Bot. It's a thing in the troll room, which you, you claim to have been banned from. And I don't have any reason to

Gene: 2:31:21

I was banned in real time. I've never been allowed back on, I know this for a fact.

Ryan: 2:31:25

But Boost Bot is an IRC bot, which is, it's very cool. It, every time somebody boosts your channel, it announces in irc. Now, if you think that's valuable, then you put Boost Bot in your splits. And now the way that it knows this is it gets a 1% split and it gets a, a transaction en lightning every time. That's great. But what if I don't want it to have a full 1%? What if I just want Boost Bot to be notified and don't need to give money? Then I can give you, what if I say you're in my split, I'll give you a a1 or something. I don't know, anyway, that

Gene: 2:32:01

Yeah, no, I, I get it. And you want that super fine level,

Ryan: 2:32:04

want the granularity and I don't see why it should be restricted to an arbitrary precision when it doesn't have to be

Gene: 2:32:11

Yeah, fair enough. But I, I think ultimately it's still gonna end up being restricted to an arbitrary precision. It's just I propose that that

Ryan: 2:32:18

in the implementation. It will always be restricted to some precision because the precision can't be. But I don't see why in the spec that it

Gene: 2:32:27

Well, and, and honestly, I think part of it was when the original conversations before any software was written were happening about how this works. Like, I don't, like, I wasn't there when Adam and Dave were sitting down, but I was there having lunch with Adam right after that. And him talking about Exactly. And I, I remember talking to him literally after that first meeting. I'm like, dude, what's the deal? I thought you were gonna invite me to the, the planning meeting. And he is like, we wanna just kind of hash out the, the technical side of this, and I don't wanna put business level restrictions on that. I know you're really good at Gene, so you'd bring to the table right away. And he was probably right about that. In, in that I would've pointed out all the problems that I saw from business standpoint and the model, which might have discouraged them enough to just say, fuck it, we're not gonna do it. I've done that with a number of companies, so I know I'm capable of doing that. I'm, I'm a realist, so I tend to bring up real problems to people, and when they realize those actually exist, they sometimes have a change of

Ryan: 2:33:27

I'm, I'm a professional

Gene: 2:33:28

so I, I totally,

Ryan: 2:33:29

so I, I can relate.

Gene: 2:33:30

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, I think that there's a certain benefit and I'm always very careful to explain to people that, I'm, I'm not I'm not a pessimist or a cynic, I just have a capacity to envision more possibilities than what most people are capable of. And when you see more, a lot more of that also is negative. I, I'm not just going to see the glass is full. I'm gonna see the entirety of the

Ryan: 2:33:56

Yeah. That, that's kind of how I operate too. I, yeah, I, I spent many, many years as a professional software tester. It was literally my job to take

Gene: 2:34:06

You get that. You gotta have

Ryan: 2:34:07

take somebody's product.

Gene: 2:34:08

and

Ryan: 2:34:09

and break it And, and what, what that really means is, is look at the system and imagine all of the ways it can work and which ways it can fail. And then demon, most of my job was actually demonstrating to people once I, you show me your design, and I'll be like, okay, well this is a very cool design. And, and I, I'm, I'm not good at communicating. It's actually one of my weaker points. But

Gene: 2:34:33

Well, it makes sense

Ryan: 2:34:34

always thought, yeah, exactly. People always thought, oh, he's so negative. Because I would look at this design and I would look and I'd, in, in a span of 60 seconds of looking at the design or 60 minutes or whatever, I look at 10,000 possibilities of how this thing could run. And I find 9,372 where it's going to go great, and another 600 where it may or may not, but you know, it's acceptable. And then I find seven different ways that you can make it blow up catastrophically. And so I'll sit there and stare at the design, and then I'll come back and say, okay, here's the seven ways that your thing can explode horribly, and you need to fix them. And somebody comes back and say, oh, he hates it. No, I don't hate it. And in fact, the first thing I saw was all the ways that it can succeed, but those are boring. And I'm pointing out ways you can make your shit better.

Gene: 2:35:28

Yep.

Ryan: 2:35:28

think I'm negative,

Gene: 2:35:29

Yeah. No people, people do, because most people just aren't capable. Like, you don't, can't hold it against them. They're not capable of seeing all the possibilities, And so when, when you're trying to interact with somebody who can't see what you see,

Ryan: 2:35:46

And I understand that. I, I absolutely, and, and by the way, the reason why I was a very good software tester is not because software testing trained me to do that kind of analysis, it's because that was how I am. And it took really well at software testing, but.

Gene: 2:36:03

Yeah. It was a natural, natural job. Makes

Ryan: 2:36:05

okay, if, if I am in a, a position, and, and this is, this has been very difficult for me when I, I find myself nowadays, for example, in a position of telling people why I'm not gonna put their podcast on the no agenda stream. And I, I have to really force myself sometimes to say, to, to remember to point out. Cause I certainly think about them, but remember to point out, okay, this was good. This was good. You do this well and you do this. And I have to force myself to bring those out first because I know people will not respond if you don't blow sunshine up their ass in the opening statement and then say what the reason you're not making it is this

Gene: 2:36:46

One of my buddies described it as a shit sandwich is you, you have to give'em like the, the cheese and the lettuce and the ketchup and everything else on top, meaning a nice warm opening. Then you give'em the shit in the middle, and then you close it up by saying, but I know this is something you can fix, and as soon as you do, and then we'll have a

Ryan: 2:37:06

Which is a communication technique for fragile people who need their, who lead with their emotions, which I, I know I just sounded really derisive when I said that because I kind of am, but that is most people. And so it's on me to basically, I suck at communicating like that. But here's the thing.

Gene: 2:37:25

Right.

Ryan: 2:37:26

I get that I have to be overly flowery in my speech and couch things a certain way because if I just lead with, here's why your product sucks, a lot of people will tune out. I know that's how it works in the real world. But when I am at a professional software factory and devs are coming to me because they need me to verify whether their code is shippable or. I don't want to spend time on all of the, oh yeah, you did this really well. You wrote a great if statement here. This loop is very tight. No, I wanna say, of course. It's good. You wanna ship it and it better be good. Here's the ways that it's not good. Fix those and it'll be shippable and great. And it, I, I, I really hate, I really, really dislike that I had to do that at the corporation. I get having to do that in real life, because a lot of people Oh, Ryan's all negative. Oh no. Ryan is just saying it like it is and, and ignoring the

Gene: 2:38:26

Well, being, being in jobs like that always is it's difficult because you're trying to convey the truth to people. My, I I spend a lot of time in information security and I was an auditor for a lot of different companies, and when a company's trying to get something closed or pushed out the door or launched, and my audit's coming back as a, oh yeah, you guys failed this. You need to fix this. You can well, imagine what they're thinking about

Ryan: 2:38:55

next thing they think is, dammit Gene is Gene is personally responsible for

Gene: 2:39:00

I'm the one who's responsible.

Ryan: 2:39:02

blocking the product.

Gene: 2:39:03

We missed our software launch because that asshole over

Ryan: 2:39:06

Gene's fault that we didn't get our product out. As if, if you weren't there then they would have been happier shipping a flawed product.

Gene: 2:39:17

Yeah, exactly. And, and that's the thing. It's like when you have the capability to see more things than other people and you leverage that capability and to work that actually needs that type of ability quite often you are seen as the bad guy by people who can't do that job because they don't have the

Ryan: 2:39:36

And by the way, one of the reasons why I got out of the corporate software world is that it was pretty obvious that corporate software was moving into a model where yes, they would in fact rather ship a bad product and then fix it in an automatic update later. And in fact,

Gene: 2:39:55

Yeah. The, the online connectivity for all software, I think was just a, a life jacket to a lot of crap written software because they all of a sudden could legitimately say, we'll, we'll fix it in the

Ryan: 2:40:10

And, and nowadays it is. In fact the, the, the corporate line is yes, we will absolutely ship it. Bugs in all, and in fact, a lot of companies, Microsoft included after, right, right about the time I was leaving, they decided to fire all their testers or let go of their testers in Windows and say, Hey, everybody, go find new other jobs in the company. And

Gene: 2:40:33

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 2:40:33

happens? Well, congratulations. You installed Windows 10. You're the frontline tester now. And, and that's what people do. That's what they want. There's not space in that model for somebody who is, well, I'll, I'll, I'll just call it perfectionist, somebody who wants the product to be good and can be in a position very early to call out all the ways it can get better. I am now in, in that model. I am literally the person holding up the launch. They want to launch the product. They don't even care. Hey, will it boot? Okay, great. Will, will it operate just well enough that more than 50% of the users won't experience crashes? Okay, then ship it. We'll fix it.

Gene: 2:41:18

Yep,

Ryan: 2:41:19

If they ever do. And,

Gene: 2:41:21

that's exactly right. And a lot of times they don't.

Ryan: 2:41:23

despise that attitude, but it is the prevailing attitude now that we're in a connected world where everybody can just push out an update whenever they want and then we get the result like, I wanna play Xbox and Oh, I'm sorry for the next half hour, you're taking an update. Cuz they didn't test.

Gene: 2:41:42

I, I remembered my worst version of that story actually. Now of the, you waiting for the update is, I, I bought Microsoft Flight about two years ago, and I kind of made a little mental agreement with myself and a buddy of mine that I wouldn't start playing this game until certain triggers financially hit. It was kinda like a motivational thing, right? So it's like, Hey, when I finally check off this box, then I'm gonna actually play the game. Because buying the game is not a big deal. Spending the time to play it is the big time

Ryan: 2:42:15

Well, the, the, because your time should

Gene: 2:42:16

I ran

Ryan: 2:42:17

your money. Yes.

Gene: 2:42:18

E e, exactly, exactly. So I, I finally ran the game like a month or two ago, whatever it was, and I run the game and it's like, loading screen and it says loading updates. Would you like to take a guess at how many gigabytes of updates it had to load from having never been played to two years after release?

Ryan: 2:42:39

the question, the only question I have is, is it more or less than what was on the, the CD or whatever install media you had

Gene: 2:42:47

Well, it was downloaded media. I think the game when it was installed was 13 gigabytes.

Ryan: 2:42:54

and were there more or less than 13 gigabytes worth of updates to download?

Gene: 2:42:58

There was 132 gigabytes to download. So basically everything they've ever released had to get downloaded and the game couldn't be played until it

Ryan: 2:43:09

awful update

Gene: 2:43:10

even, even with my gig up and down connectivity, I tried it a couple of times where I was like, oh, I'll just leave it in the background for a little while while I'm surfing the web. And I look at it and it's like, 5%,

Ryan: 2:43:23

Well at, at,

Gene: 2:43:24

8%. And I'm like, oh my God. I finally just left it overnight just to fricking finish on its own over eight hours time

Ryan: 2:43:31

at at one gigabyte bit. If, if you manage to saturate your theoretical maximum, it's still gonna take an hour and a half to download a hundred megabit.

Gene: 2:43:41

There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it, and it had to decompress each of these updates. Once it.

Ryan: 2:43:45

nothing ever reaches a theoretical maximum.

Gene: 2:43:48

Yeah. Yeah. And each update, probably overwrites some portion of the previous update

Ryan: 2:43:53

unless the final product on how much, how much is on the disc after the updates. Because if, if you don't tell me 113 gigabytes, then there was some shit they didn't have to download.

Gene: 2:44:03

Uhhuh. Yeah. Let me, let me look. That's a good question. I didn't check. So if I go in here, it's on this drive. Drive drive's almost full. It is where did you put it? This is great Dead air, by the way. At least say something.

Ryan: 2:44:18

I'll go ahead and ask another question then, which is if you're okay with the streaming Satoshi's model that came up from podcasting 2.0, then why do you hate CSB so much?

Gene: 2:44:28

Well, first of all, I don't hate csb. I, I have a policy against people that start using name calling in conversations and

Ryan: 2:44:37

if I call you Jean, it makes you dislike me.

Gene: 2:44:40

I I might have to ban you. I mean, I'm sorry, but No, there are people I look, I've, I've, I've been a, a debater my entire life.

Ryan: 2:44:49

You're A master at

Gene: 2:44:50

debater, in fact. Exactly. And so, I don't mind that happening one bit. And I try to not get too personal with people, but I certainly never personally attack people. I might make some smirky comments on'em, but when people start saying that you're a moron for thinking this and not give logical reasons, I, at that point, there is no more conversation to be had. Because if your argument is, well, you're

Ryan: 2:45:16

That's not an argument.

Gene: 2:45:18

okay, that's not an argument, and you've just lost, bye bye. I don't need to ever waste any energy or time on talking to you again. And I guess the one difference not just for CSB but in general that I have is I don't like mute people. I actually ban people because my content that I put out there, and some would say, well, that there's zero value to it. But I know that's not true because I'm one of the highest followed people on NoJa on the social in terms of raw numbers, numbers. So clearly enough people want to be seeing the stuff that I put out there that there is value to it. And I don't want to provide any value to somebody that is on that band list that has insulted me rather than having a rational conversation with me. Like they don't, they don't need to get that. Now. I know there's ways around

Ryan: 2:46:05

the mute versus block discussion before, I think the last time we spoke on a podcast, and I, I, I still maintain that that block is just mute. Plus you're being petty.

Gene: 2:46:14

and I'm okay with that. I mean, it. Like Penny is not enough of a name calling word for me to block somebody.

Ryan: 2:46:22

That wasn't name calling, that was descriptive of a behavior.

Gene: 2:46:25

but I don't think it is. I think that you're missing the absolutely rational portion of that, which is things that I do have a value. And that value sometimes is returned in direct dollars. If I'm doing something for a client. Sometimes it's returned in, a message online saying, Hey, I really appreciated watching this. Or I, I like your opinion, I'm glad somebody said this. There is a value to consuming the product that I create and and it's open and free to be consumed, but I reserve all rights to my end product. Like, I, I don't release those copyrights into public domain, and so I am perfectly willing to limit the distribution of things to people that I don't like. It's, it's probably the same. Irrational, well, that may be, but I, I, I'm pretty sure I can find a few things for your past employers that you do that are petty as well.

Ryan: 2:47:25

I didn't, I don't claim that everything I do is rational

Gene: 2:47:29

Right. And that's, so I think being, if you wanna call it petty, that's fine, but I think it, it, it has a rational basis.

Ryan: 2:47:35

Okay. Just keep telling yourself that,

Gene: 2:47:38

It's the same Look, I'll tell you what, it's the same reason that I don't have

Ryan: 2:47:41

I, I feel like,

Gene: 2:47:42

I think Netflix went and crossed the line with releasing borderline pedophilic content. I just don't need to give any

Ryan: 2:47:51

like I have a much more rational reason for not wanting Netflix, which is that they were not giving me enough value in the, in the form of useful content to justify how much they kept wanting to charge.

Gene: 2:48:04

Well, and that's, that's fair enough. I mean, if you didn't care about what they're making and you just purely are looking at what they're not

Ryan: 2:48:10

Well, I.

Gene: 2:48:10

fine. I mean, I'm not saying everybody

Ryan: 2:48:12

mean, I understand that. Netflix is producing child porn, but I also didn't have to watch that, so I didn't,

Gene: 2:48:19

Right. Right. And I, I guess I'm going the next step further in saying that I, I choose to not spend any money with

Ryan: 2:48:29

I mean, I understand where you're coming from. This is the same rationale for a boycotting company that is a bad corporate citizen.

Gene: 2:48:38

You don't like Apple. What's, you don't have to spend money with

Ryan: 2:48:41

and I I, I will argue up and down that I have a very rational reason for not believing that Apple is delivering enough value BA or to justify the amount of money they charge. And that's an easy argument to make because of the incredible amount of money that they charge. However, I'm a little bit with you on the Apple thing. I don't like the corporate citizen that the company is being, so I get that.

Gene: 2:49:05

Mm-hmm.

Ryan: 2:49:05

I still think blocking is petty

Gene: 2:49:08

Well, I, I, I think it's exact same territory as, as you're disdain for Apple.

Ryan: 2:49:12

Well, I,

Gene: 2:49:13

I, I'm

Ryan: 2:49:14

I don't need to have this conversation. We can, we're, we're now close to over three hours.

Gene: 2:49:18

Well, we've already had the conversa,

Ryan: 2:49:20

well also, I feel like, the, this is a better conversation to have when you invite CSB onto your show

Gene: 2:49:25

maybe, I mean, I don't know. Well, it, it's not impossible that that would happen at some point, but I don't think that that will happen as long as he's so. On the Ukraine bandwagon.

Ryan: 2:49:39

Oh, yes, there is that. I have received a lot of flack.

Gene: 2:49:46

And incidentally, it's not just csb. There, there definitely is a chip on Poland's shoulder. A lot of people that are Polish seem to be a lot more gung-ho for the US to fight Russia than actual Ukrainians that I know. Like the Ukrainians are like, this sucks, it sucks that shit's happening. And like they see themselves as a lot closer to Russians. Right. So any, any family squabbles are bad. The people from Poland, they tend to like, see Ukraine as a great, let's move this pawn and

Ryan: 2:50:15

would the word you'd use be blood thirsty? I don't

Gene: 2:50:18

Ah, maybe, I mean, but they're certainly very

Ryan: 2:50:20

I, I have personally taken a lot more flack than I expected for my position on the Russia, Ukraine War or whatever it's called. And my position is, I don't know, I'm not there. I don't want it to in interact with my life. From the perspective of the average American, it is a political stunt that is being used to distract people from what is going on in America by the mainstream media who will not shut the hell up about it. Because there's so many things here that a responsible journalist would be talking about instead of Russia and Ukraine. And I get a lot of

Gene: 2:50:56

And I, I think it's now

Ryan: 2:50:57

taking a position.

Gene: 2:50:58

I think it's now crossed over the cost of being the most expensive US military

Ryan: 2:51:05

oh, I'm, I'm, yes. I'm very much angry

Gene: 2:51:08

in Afghanistan, we spent less on Iraq, we spent less on,

Ryan: 2:51:11

I'm, I'm very much angry about how my money is being stolen from me and wasted by the federal government. But at this point, if I continue to crank up the anger about that particular thing, I am in danger of an integer overflow. So there's only so much more anger I can

Gene: 2:51:31

You just need to be running floating

Ryan: 2:51:33

Yeah. Maybe there's only so much more anger I can generate over the fact that the federal government steals my money. And then sends it overseas to be laundered into a political party. That's not great. But the specifics of who fired a missile where, and whether or not tanks are moving onto what it, it from the perspective of somebody who is not located in Europe. It feels like a distraction, and I don't want to be distracted by that. There are so many places in the US that tanks need to be running over that I, I don't feel like Ukraine needs to be the top of everyone's list, but man,

Gene: 2:52:12

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Ryan: 2:52:12

so much

Gene: 2:52:13

and I'm,

Ryan: 2:52:14

for not having a position on that

Gene: 2:52:16

well, and I'm, I'm pretty much with you on all of that for the exact same reasons. However, because I was born in Russia, even though I grew up in the us nobody can separate those two things. It's like, oh, well you were born clearly. You, you just holding water for Putin. It's like, well, no. If you look at my political positions across the last 40 fucking years, you can see a consistency across the board. I was against the first Gulf War. I was protesting the first Gulf

Ryan: 2:52:47

golf

Gene: 2:52:47

I've been against all wars. The US has again, engaged

Ryan: 2:52:51

get it. I could get involved in a golf war.

Gene: 2:52:54

Yeah, well, it, it's, it's been a consistent position and right now, when the US was staging revolutions left and right and everybody with any brain cells knew about it doing the color revolutions and Hillary talking about her techno experts that were able to achieve these revolutions that the CIA wasn't able to do themselves in the past, she was bragging about her State Department people by introducing technology, were able to overthrow and topple governments. That's a problem. Yeah. And, and when this originally happened, I made a prediction. I said, this is gonna bite the US in the end because eventually, and I thought it would only take about five years. I did not think it would last

Ryan: 2:53:38

you did. Did you predict Trump that? Because that pretty much screwed up the timetable for the globalist takeover in every way.

Gene: 2:53:47

Yeah, maybe, maybe. But I thought within five years that there would be some incident where Ukraine would have a revert revolution, whatever you want to call it, where they would eventually see that, being a lap dog of the US is not really the position we wanna be in. And that it wasn't nearly as bad as we thought it was being in the family of Russia and all the the former republics because there was a cooperative, there, there's benefit from a cooperative standpoint to countries that you're physically located next to all doing commerce and business with each other, unfriendly terms. And what happened here was Ukraine essentially was able to get a government in place that would cancel those agreements and relationships. And in fact physically attacked people that disagreed with their newfound position, which was happening in the eastern regions of Ukraine, literally from 2013 until now, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths and doing it. Why? Because they saw a potential benefits financially from the west, from the United States, and they, they're absolutely realized that benefit financially in the form of money laundering.

Ryan: 2:55:07

So

Gene: 2:55:08

And so

Ryan: 2:55:09

just made the argument that it's just capitalism, which is an argument you made

Gene: 2:55:13

well, it is capitalism. People that made a lot of money got what they wanted. The, the average person in Ukraine got fucked, and now they're getting fucked even more because they're having to fight for these rich people that are making money from the us. The average person in Ukraine didn't benefit from this at all. It's not like they got freedom, whatever that

Ryan: 2:55:38

in the US isn't benefiting either, and I would venture to say that

Gene: 2:55:41

Oh, absolutely

Ryan: 2:55:42

person in Russia

Gene: 2:55:43

Russian isn't benefiting either. Yeah. Nobody's benefiting

Ryan: 2:55:46

person in Russia has just been sent back 20 years in the information age because they've been cut off from all the Western services. They're not benefiting.

Gene: 2:55:56

Yeah, exactly. No, there, there's a lot of

Ryan: 2:55:59

It's almost

Gene: 2:56:00

of downsides across

Ryan: 2:56:02

almost like the globalists are just playing games that end up hurting all of the people no matter where it is, just so that they can have their petty spitting matches and scams that make money by stealing from the public. like that

Gene: 2:56:17

Well, the globalists were very happy during Covid, wherever, regardless of where you think it comes from and what the, the source of code was,

Ryan: 2:56:26

I, the,

Gene: 2:56:27

we can agree that the, the,

Ryan: 2:56:29

the respiratory disease, formally known as the flu

Gene: 2:56:32

Right. That it, it benefited the global, they were able to fully take advantage of it to install draconian policies. And it has not since nine 11 has there been quite as much of a of a bending of the will of the people to allow the, the ruling

Ryan: 2:56:54

suppression of human rights for the benefit of the elites.

Gene: 2:56:57

Yeah. Like for Yeah, like with no tangible benefits other than allowing the elites to do literally anything they want in the name

Ryan: 2:57:08

the lockdowns and, and manufactured panic from that all falls under the Covid umbrella is another one of those things that makes me unreasonably angry to the point where I need to allocate more bits to store the integer.

Gene: 2:57:21

Yeah. And, and it's I think in a lot of ways they are getting, maybe they didn't think this would happen in Russia. Maybe they thought this would happen in China, but I, I think they're getting the pushback that was coming. And they're, they're not at a point of saying, okay, well we need to relent and, and regroup and figure out some new strategies here. They're just all sticking to their original game plan, which is, Hey man, we have taken over the us, which means that we rule the world and everybody else has to do what we say, and there's no question about it. That's the attitude right now of the globalists and through them, the us and it's a very dangerous attitude. And I know that I, I've, I've probably been putting more the nuclear war memes out there than other people, but I think that even if it's a remote possibility, it's a hell of a lot more possible. That we're gonna end up in nuclear war today than was the case a year ago or 10 years ago. Certainly. Or, or even in the eighties when we thought we were closer. I think today we're

Ryan: 2:58:29

Well, on the plus side, even if they don't get their nuclear war, at least we are on board for probably close to a billion of us dying suddenly of mis unknown causes within the next five years. So that'll help.

Gene: 2:58:42

Oh yeah. No, I mean, they've always got backup plans, So let's, let's not forget about that. There, there are plenty of strategies to minimize population and I think the whole question is like, well, who would wanna control the population? Why would they wanna have a smaller, it's very simple, dude. If your herd of cattle gets too big, they're liable to knock defense over. You gotta have manageable size herds. It's that simple.

Ryan: 2:59:10

Okay.

Gene: 2:59:10

So are we done on that note, we can wrap up. I just say, and on that note, we're gonna wrap up