Sir Gene Speaks

0015 Sir Gene Speaks Special - Interview DarrenO

February 22, 2021 Gene Naftulyev Season 1 Episode 15
Sir Gene Speaks
0015 Sir Gene Speaks Special - Interview DarrenO
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Sir Gene:

Today, I'm going to be interviewing Darren O'Neill and some of you guys know who he is. Some of you may not, but you're definitely going to find out more about him there. And how are you?

Darren O:

Doing good Jean. It's beautiful here in Chicago, the sun's out. The snow is melting, which means soon we're going to be floating and everybody's basement is going to be flooded. Cause there's a lot of snow on the ground.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, well, I'm sure that a lot of snow for you is very different than a lot of snow for me in Austin

Darren O:

Yeah,

Sir Gene:

alone, we did, we got, we had five inches, man. That's a lot of snow.

Darren O:

Yeah. I mean, that's a good day for us here too, but we know how to handle it and we have the equipment to do so. And, snowblowers, we bought one of those maybe seven or eight years ago, and that was the best thing ever. It's just makes it a whole lot more fun. Cause shoveling. Is any age it's not good. You can blow your back out. And it's, I mean, it's a good workout, but it's not a whole lot of fun. The snowblower is great. I just put it in the earbuds, put a podcast on, put the snow blower, just go up and down the driveway and you're done.

Sir Gene:

Exactly. And I remember as a kid. It was always fun to try and see how much snow you can blow into your neighbor's driveway. That was like a challenging activity.

Darren O:

Yeah. Or into the street they get wise around here with that there's ordinances. Now that you can't blow the snow. If the plow has been by you can't blow the snow into the

Sir Gene:

Oh, bastards.

Darren O:

I know. Let them come back and do it again.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. Well, and the plow was always just block off your driveway. Anyway, I remember that.

Darren O:

Yeah. That's where it's horrible. There was a blizzard a few years ago that it wasn't, I mean, you could tell there was a lot of snow, but it wasn't horrible with the snowblower until you got to the bottom of the driveway, where yet was twice as high and twice as a pact because of the snowblower had gone by and yeah, that's winter problems in the North. They're not fun. You can't see that's Texas. You don't have that problem.

Sir Gene:

right. And that's part of the reason I moved South and I've been kept on moving South until I ended up in Austin.

Darren O:

Have further South to go to

Sir Gene:

do well. I can certainly go. I tell you if I ended up over by the space X launch facility near Brownsville, that might be a good place for my next move.

Darren O:

nothing wrong with going someplace warmer?

Sir Gene:

Although they got snow all the way down to Mexico this time round. It was crazy, but let's backtrack. Well, yes, let's backtrack a little bit. So, let's start off by saying now how did you and I meet.

Darren O:

Through the no agenda community because I mean, well, one, you're a legend, a no agenda in your own. Right. Where we've heard about surgery. I mean, the guy that's bringing wine to Adam's house during shows, I mean, in a, in an emergency to how do I get on that list?

Sir Gene:

Yeah was complaining about the Hill next to his house. He's got a little dinky car. I've got a four by four, so I can actually get to his house and bring some emergency wind supplies.

Darren O:

Is too small to get up the

Sir Gene:

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, basically you and I are both fans of no agenda. And when no agenda set up their their federated community, which is running the Mastodon server I started seeing more posts from you. I'd obviously had heard of your podcast. I've listened to a couple of episodes, but there's some annoying Bemrose guy in there. So I really didn't stick with it. But seeing, posts from you rather than just your podcasts. I started realizing that, Hey, this guy's kinda kind of a cool dude and maybe we should end up. Chatting at some point and seeing if we can find some more commonalities because I think we do have some commonalities and that's what I want to explore on this podcast. And also just let people know who are on the no agenda, social a little bit more about you and for people that aren't, but are listening to this podcast to maybe listen in on your podcasts, or I should say one of your podcasts since you have a multitude of podcasts.

Darren O:

Yeah, we're just trying to keep up with Adam. I mean, you just have to keep adding more podcasts, but

Sir Gene:

Good luck with that. That's a challenging endeavor.

Darren O:

It is. But I think you're right. I think we do have a lot of overlapping interests, including the whiskeys and the audio thing. And there's always gear to be played with and new stuff to be explored, which is a whole lot of fun, which is why are the no agenda? Social community is. Excellent. Compared to what most other social media has turned into, which is just a complete crap show. It's a lot easier to post something and get a response that is well thought out from people that know what they're doing. There's so many people in that community that have tech skills. If you have any problems, that's the place to put it. But I remember, or when we started grumpy old Benz, I think you are one of the first people on Twitter that was like, Oh, you'd like to be on. And I'm like, Oh, well you're not following me. Do that so I can DM you and then you never did. And then we I guess, took a while to connect again.

Sir Gene:

to reconnect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I thought that grumpy old Benz was a a good concept. I assumed it was a. A playoff of the show that John used to be on. Yeah. Which made total sense. That was what was that called? Grumpy, grumpy, cranky geeks. I am not grumpy. Cranky. Yes.

Darren O:

Right. We changed it just enough,

Sir Gene:

Exactly. It's just the void that the trademark infringement and I mean, John, absolutely personifies, grumpy or cranky. He, he has a. I think he might actually own that personality type. If you look up that personality that has a picture of him

Darren O:

If he's good

Sir Gene:

which has been great for Adam, because they're perfect foils for each other.

Darren O:

Oh, yeah they work like the the two guys in the balcony on the Muppet show. That's how it works.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. I can't remember the guy's names, but yes, I know exactly where you're talking wherever the right age to have watched the Moffitt show when those guys were on it. I think people are a little bit younger. We're not exposed to them. And now I think there's, or by now, I mean, like in the last, maybe 10, 15 years there's been a lot of reruns of that stuff. So the younger generations, once again, getting exposed,

Darren O:

Well, and they just re they just rebooted it. And the Disney channel has labeled it as offensive, even though it's on their channel. They've labeled, I'm guessing the older episodes as

Sir Gene:

that'd be my guess. Yeah. They have the episodes that were shot, I guess, in the late seventies and throughout the eighties. And I think at this point Fraggle rock would probably be a PG 13.

Darren O:

Well, that's it. If the Muppets are now offensive in your new world, the new world is rude.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. Well, you can't be making fun of miss piggy.

Darren O:

You can't make it fun of anybody. That's that is the problem. You can't make fun of anybody at all. And that has killed comedy. I mean, there's no question about it. That it's nearly impossible to try to poke fun at anything because real comedy is only funny. If there is a kernel of truth to it that you blow up into massive exaggeration level. And if you can't have anything like that anymore, it's a, it's gonna be a very boring, scary, sad society. I think.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. And I think to some extent, comedy has just been replaced by outrage.

Darren O:

Yes. Oh yeah. Well, there's a lot of outrage. I mean, that's at least the public persona of people on most social media. I don't know if that is the case because those aren't the people that I'm interacting with on a personal level in person without being online. I don't know if this is the overall feeling for these people or if they really even exist, or if this is just. Such a an effect that social media has on people's perceptions. That it's like the old thing. I mean, I've known a few people that own restaurants and the people that are going to do reviews, and that are always the ones that are mad that had bad service, something bad happened. If you get bad service at a restaurant, there's a really good chance. You're going to tell everybody, if you have great service at a restaurant, maybe you'll tell one person, it may be nobody.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. And that's, I think where Yelp reviews, when Yelp first arrived on the scene started getting questioned was that there seemed to be a preponderance of really good reviews for some places and that like disproportionately. So, and then we found out that Yelp was actually selling that to a restaurants, selling the service of getting good reviews.

Darren O:

Well, and there's, there were third parties doing it

Sir Gene:

Oh, I'm sure.

Darren O:

hard to block, reviews. You don't know where people are coming from, cause they never want to take too much information from the reviewer. So, I mean, you always have to take any review online with a grain of salt and. Just try to read between the lines. If you're going to read the reviews a lot of times, if the good reviews are just awesome steak and that's it's probably not a real person. Look for the ones that have some detail.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, that's true. Although, of course they figured that out as well and are providing scripts to people. Well,

Darren O:

Oh yeah. And if every reviews the same, that might send up a

Sir Gene:

yeah. Yeah. Well, if you look at reviews by the same person, that's the real, I think way to identify networks or bots for any company is look at other places or other things the person has reviewed. And if they're using basically the exact same language, more than likely it's a script, because it's highly unlikely that you're going to be as excited about a restaurant as you are about a pair of socks.

Darren O:

I would hope not, but I mean, they might be really good socks.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. But they should be using completely different language around those. So let me find out a little more about the Daryl on the eel and where that particular Critter comes from. So did you grow up in Chicago? W what's your origin story?

Darren O:

Yeah. I've always been just outside of Chicago in the Southern suburbs. And then just moved up, moved a little further South. Like you accept only like 20 or so minutes so far. We have a long way to go to, to keep getting South. But yeah, always been in the Chicago area. So, it's one of those things where it's a state that is unlike Texas managed very poorly by the politician. I mean, I don't know. I, don't not saying Texas is great, but Illinois has perhaps the worst governor in the country. And I mean, that's going up against New York and California, two guys that are, probably both be recalled or impeached is with a Cuomo in New York. So. Illinois is not the greatest place to be, but when your family's here, it's hard to pick up roots and jump out. But at some point that may be in the cards because taxes are high, the weather sucks, and there's not a whole lot of fun going on.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. And to some extent you described Minnesota where I grew up and this exact same reason why I ended up leaving. W the weather sucks and the taxes are high. So what was your sort of, starting of your path what'd you go to school for? And what did you end up doing when you started your career?

Darren O:

The interesting thing was I always wanted. Too well in high school, I wanted to go into radio. I listened to Jonathan Brandmeier in the mornings who was a big guy here in Chicago, doing the wacky bits. And he finally started up a podcast once a week or so, which is interesting. But once I realized what being a radio DJ really paid the cycle, that's not going to work the, they were starting people out. Here at like, w XRT I heard from somebody who knew somebody that, just started out as the overnight DJ. And it was like$17,000 a year. And it's like, well, that's certainly not even back in, the late eighties, early nineties, you weren't going to be able to live on anything like that. So I went to college for communications, which. Was timing wise. This is, 1988 is when I graduated high school. So the internet wasn't yet a thing. And, communications was like, okay, I took some journalism classes, so I can tell you, why the journalism now totally sucks. And just used all that to go into sales for a little while. And then when the internet came around, I was always pretty good at the tech stuff. Learned how to create websites and start doing websites for different people and start making money doing that. And once I did a little program, that was one of the original sniper programs on eBay. This is going back to the time when this was basically just a combination of HTML and Java script, and people had to put the little three and a half inch disc into the machine and boot that up and leave their browser on, but then it would place the bid for whatever item you want. Whenever you told. It to do so. And that made me a few thousand bucks and I'm like, Hey, I can do this stuff. Full-time and ended up getting out of the other stuff I was doing. And since then, I've always been working out of the house, which is not a bad thing when the weather sucks.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, absolutely. And nowadays with COVID, everybody's working out of the house, but I think for some people it's a new thing for some of us, it's actually an old thing.

Darren O:

Yeah. It makes sense. If you could, if you can do what you do. Out of your house rather than going somewhere. And there are a lot of people and that's one thing John C talks about when it comes to working from home. It's like a lot of people don't have that ability to monitor themselves. And I don't know how that's all working under COVID. Cause I don't know if he could really fire anybody or how that's working, but there's a lot of people that if you don't have to be up in your chair at your computer or whatever at 9:00 AM, if you're on your own. And it's harder for a lot of people to get the work done. And I mean, I get that. It's just a self-discipline thing. And I, sometimes either you got it or you don't, I don't know if you could learn it, if you're somebody that is normally need somebody just riding yet to make sure the work gets done. I don't know if you could ever convert into a home worker that is able to do the job.

Sir Gene:

I think the people that it's been the hardest on are people that. Traditionally have Alexa, a lot of extroverts like salespeople that profession where they're used to being surrounded by other people they're motivating each other. They're challenging each other. And now all of a sudden they're sitting at home and they're making phone calls or they're sending out emails, but it's, there's nobody else around them. There's no sales bells dinging. There's nothing that's really motivating them. Unless the company is really taking a deep dive into the digital domain and as found tools to simulate all those things for their sales staff, working from home. But for, I mean, for developers, this is like a dream come true. It's you're doing the same thing you were doing in the cubicle, except now you can be in your pajamas instead of having to put pants on.

Darren O:

Right. This is, that is the greatest part of the whole working at home thing. Unless you're doing zoom calls and, Jeffrey tube and learned that yeah. You keep the pants on.

Sir Gene:

I would probably say majority of zoom calls have pants off even now

Darren O:

don't want to know.

Sir Gene:

people just are, they're thinking they're going to be careful enough to not move their cameras.

Darren O:

Yeah. And it's that relaxed environment that can get people into a lot of trouble.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I'm not a big fan of video conferencing. I think it's a waste of time. Most of the time audio can be much more effective if it's done. Right. And the only thing that video does is makes people self-conscious about being on the screen and not talking. So when you're talking, when you have something to say, it's not a big deal to have your image be up because you're focused on the message you're communicating. Not on self being, thinking about what do I look like? Why is that person looking at what appears to be me, even though they're they could be looking at anybody. So having somebody who's speaking, like if one person's giving a 30 minute presentation on video, that's one thing, having a group of a dozen people out of whom most of them will only speak for two or three minutes during the conference call is absolutely counterproductive.

Darren O:

A lot of times, it's just the boss wants to make sure you're safe. Sitting in your chair, actively listening.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's the end results should be the determining factor. They're not the image that you have. And of course, I think all those little cartoons of like a Dilbert with a, a sock puppet Dilbert or something right in front of the the camera on his computer. And meanwhile, the real Dilbert's unshaven and wearing pajamas. And the sock pocket puppet is wearing a tie just like you would be at work. I think that's a, it's funny because it's true.

Darren O:

Oh, yeah. And I mean, video has its place, but it's not always needed. Although I will say that I'm guilty sometimes of if a podcast that works just fine as an audio podcast is available on video. And there's nothing else that I want to watch either, on Roku or, I mean, I've always got a Nast full of stuff, but there's a lot of times I'll just turn on the video podcast, even though it's just like with Leo LaPorte's the, this week in tech that I was always a video watcher cause that, the weekend I would turn it on, but I would put it on the big screen and I wouldn't necessarily always sit there and be totally engaged in watching, but that was just how I consumed it, even though it would have been fine. To do it via audio. So I get why people maybe want to offer both ends of that. But it's a personal choice, I guess

Sir Gene:

Yeah, I agree. I think some people make the wrong choice and the rest of us make the right choice. So it's absolutely a personal choice in either situation. So how did you first find out about Adam and it, was it through no agenda or was it before no agenda.

Darren O:

It was totally from the w John brought me into no agenda. There's no question about it. I mean, I knew about Adam from the MTV days. I wasn't big into heavy metal then, which a lot of people may be confused about. Cause I play a lot of levy, a lot of heavy metal now on the no agenda, rock and roll pre-show and delve into all sorts of different music. But it wasn't something that I was big into MTV. So I knew who Adam Curry was, but really never. Paid much attention, but with the tech podcast, I remember Diggnation was the first big one with Adam Kevin Rose and Alex, all Brett that I remember watching. And that was when the, they still had the network tech TV, right. With Leo and Patrick Norton on the screen savers. And that's how, now that was my gateway drug to divorce and cranky geeks, which was. Was a big charm. I still wish I had an archive of all those. I'm sure somebody out there has one. I need to get pointed to an archive of all those old shows, because there was nothing better talking about a podcast that didn't need video. That was cranky geeks, except for the fact, then you wouldn't have gotten JCD with the little note cards, throwing them at the camera, like, like, David Letterman used to do. And I still remember that stick. So it was obviously memorable in the video helped that stick around.

Sir Gene:

Well, and I do have to say my impression of Lila ports. Well, he's got a variety of podcasts, but I'd even say it's probably a blanket statement for the majority of them is once it was his own show, they really didn't need video because these are all people with faces for radio. Now when Leo was on. Tech TV. And there were reasonably pretty girls being hired by the network to be part of tech TV. That was more interesting to watch. And certainly there was let's see, I'm trying to remember who the name, some of these Sarah Rose

Darren O:

Sarah Lane.

Sir Gene:

Lane.

Darren O:

Who's still doing a

Sir Gene:

Morgan Webb. I remember I used like Morgan. Who

Darren O:

Then there was the Canadian girl that was part of that Amber something.

Sir Gene:

Yes. Yes. I can't remember her last name either, but I'm now picturing her in in my head so that there was definitely a little more interest in, of course we're being totally sexist pigs at this point, but Hey, we're guys.

Darren O:

Well, that's it. I mean, guys that will get people to

Sir Gene:

I mean, no offense to Jonsi Dworak but I don't need to be staring at his face. I can just listen to his voice. And

Darren O:

And that the tech yeah, the content works in audio.

Sir Gene:

the content is amazing exactly the same. There, there's not a big advantage there for the video. And I think that the reason that, or let me say one of the reasons that podcasting has not just lasted, but grown tremendously. Is because podcasting is an activity that you can multitask with. Unlike watching something like a tech TV or anything else like watching Netflix you can have that like running in the background, but you're going to miss a part of the action. It's not possible to sit there and be programming and watching a movie on Netflix, but it is absolutely possible to be sitting there programming and listening to a podcast.

Darren O:

Oh, yeah, there's no question about it. And the audio only podcasts are way easier to edit. There's no question there either. Although I hate watching. The videos, usually on YouTube, where they have the very drastic cuts that you can tell where cuts. And they have a ton of them in the video, but it's because they cut out all of that time between them saying what they really wanted to say and all the extraneous words or whatever they're cutting out. And with audio, you can cut all that out and nobody even will ever know that you did any editing job, but in video they will because your head moved without, any reason for it too. So it's a. It is a completely different game. If you're going to do video, I think you have to be less on the editing front, which of course will take a lot of shows and make them a lot worse. And I think the other big thing for audio only shows there's that the price of entry. Is extremely low. I mean, I know we're both gearheads, so we'll spend a lot of money to sound good, but you can get by in audio with using free programs and a$30 USB microphone, as long as you're willing to take the time to edit and do the processing. And you can have your podcast up and sounding good where video, if you want it to look anywhere near decent, you're spending decent money and cameras and you have to understand lighting and the editing's way harder. And it's it's a lot further down the rabbit hole. And the payoff is, as you said, not always there.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, no video takes more discipline and. Like you said the same amount of effort that is put into an audio only recording, like a podcast generates a higher quality end product than you would get with the same effort on the video. So video either you're going to have to work harder for the video or you're going to have to be okay with the lower quality and the product.

Darren O:

Yeah. And the file sizes are smaller. And I mean, let's remember, I mean, radio has been around for a long time rush Limbaugh who just passed away, tried television. And the stories were that the network executives didn't want the show to succeed, which I believe, but he didn't need video to do what he was doing was, wow. This guy's really popular as a huge audience. Let's put them on TV and people will walk, watch, but we'll do it. Why do you need to, we saying the same thing he was saying on radio, which works just fine.

Sir Gene:

I think the video is distracting and I don't agree with John's assessment that the studios try to put in audiences that hated them. I think it's bullshit. I watched his, I liked rush. I watched his video program and it was horrible. Like I would not want to keep watching it and I didn't, I was fine with listening to him on the radio. Almost on a daily basis. I rarely skipped it, but. I really rarely ended up watching his program for the short duration and was on because it added nothing to it and his sort of facial expressions, which you can hear through his voice. Anyway, they didn't add anything to the content. They just sort of made it look like, well, I see, is he like trying extra hard to make a weird face about like faking surprise? So I think it really was more of a distraction. Same thing could be said for Howard stern. The only reason that Howard had a camera in his studio was because of the guests that he had and who he in general, tried to get to take their clothes off if it

Darren O:

I mean is that you want video?

Sir Gene:

exactly. But if it's just Howard and the rest of the guys and Robin in there. Don't really need the video. I know what they look like. And again, they've got faces for radio, all of them. So, Jackie and what's his face? The the guy with the handlebar mustache about a buoy.

Darren O:

Yes. Yeah. Stuttering,

Sir Gene:

Yeah. All of those guys, like you don't need to look at any of them. It's not going to add anything to the to the content you're getting from from just listening to it. But.

Darren O:

they just want to slap it on either online or whatever it was on

Sir Gene:

now I do think Howard did have a funny show that he did on, I think it was on the NBC for just a little bit where it was like a, I don't know if you've ever watched that. Yeah. It was like a variety show. Exactly. It was a bizarre variety show where he did like, his own version of the, a wheel of fortune and. And everything was, like the categories in his version of Oh, what's the Alex Trebek show. The yeah, jeopardy it's like his version of jeopardy was, different names for black people. It's like who the hell is going to get away with that?

Darren O:

Howard

Sir Gene:

Yeah, just how Howard Stern's the only thing. Yeah, not today for sure. This is like 20 years ago guys. So if you've never seen it, it's probably been cleansed off the internet. So you won't ever be able to see it, but it did exist.

Darren O:

the, it was like a side show mixed with a variety

Sir Gene:

Yeah. Yeah. He had the wharves, he had all kinds of strippers, obviously had all kinds of people on there. And like they did the the newlyweds game. I remember they did. And like, where they ask couples questions to see if they know each other's answers. I remember one of the questions was like, how long is your husband's penis?

Darren O:

The answer after this

Sir Gene:

it's always 11 inches, no matter what. Right. But yeah. I mean, like you can't get away with that. And it's weird because when we were young, the assumption was the world is becoming. Less and less conservative. And I don't mean that in a Republican conservative way. I mean that, like, there's just more acceptable things. When I was in college, it was just not a big deal for people to be gay like that. And that was in the early nineties. And so right now I think the 20 year olds think that somehow they're pushing the boundaries. It's like, no guys, you're like 25 years too late. That ship sailed way before you were born. And it became perfectly. Okay. It may not have been okay in mainstream back then, but it sure as hell was okay in college. It's just that as we got older, we kept thinking, well, what's the difference? Who cares? Nobody really cares about this, who you have sex with is not important. But but what has happened certainly over the last decade, maybe even a little bit longer was we seem to have gotten as a country. Into almost a new puritanism where other types of topics than maybe were thought of as taboo in the sixties and the fifties. But now there are just as many things that are taboo today as in the 1950s, it's just that the actual topics that are taboo are different.

Darren O:

Now it's all going towards being anti. The political conservative meaning now it's like, okay, it's great. You can be one of 5,000 genders, whatever you want to say, you are the trans stuff. Great. All the gay stuff. Great. Nobody cares about any of that, but Oh my God. He said, God we can't have that in the public forum. Oh, he had a Bible verse. That's hate speech. We better burn him at the cross for that. And it's weird. It is very weird. The, we want to have this great liberal society where everybody is accepted for who they are. But no, you can't say that word. That's a bad word. No, we're going to know if you say that you'll never get a job ever again. It's very strange.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, we were making fun of and thinking, Oh my God, how stupid are these people of the book prohibitions that existed in the 1930s, forties, fifties, even early sixties. To where certain books were considered to be Bantible books or books that, that shouldn't be certainly read by high school kids. And I, yeah, they were dangerous. And our generation, the gen X-ers were thinking that's ridiculous. This is crazy. How stupid were people in the past? We've come full circle. We've gotten from all book bands are stupid and bad too. Now. The opposite. It's like, no, we need to keep adding more and more books to the band list, including the history of the United States. It's like, yeah, sure. Huckleberry Finn, that's clearly a book that should be banned because it was written by an author that talked about slaves in the vernacular back in the day. And so,

Darren O:

have that. You can't have characters. That was the big deal with Kate Smith, the singer that the Yankees for years after. Nine 11 played her rendition of God, bless America at the ballpark. And then a goal. Well, look, she did this and this. And she sang a song that had the word darkies in it. Oh. And there's this bad racist past of her. So they canceled her, even though it was funny. Cause the song that they were really upset about was in a movie. Where she was playing a character and it's like, well, this is the same thing with this year. The BBC, which is hilarious because the song by the Pogues fairytale of New York had been rated the top Christmas song in the UK for like the last 20 something years. But now the language is too harsh for young ears to hear, I guess, cause they say, faggot and scumbag and all these things. And Shane McGowan was like, I guess they don't understand. Characters in a song. And how do you get to this point to where? So you can never then tell a story with a racist character. You can never tell a story about it. Homophobic characters is usually how people were taught, how bad the homophobes or whoever was. Cause you could see it on a movie. Like, wow, look, how much of a Dick that guy is because he's a homophobe, but now you can't even use language. So how do you tell the story?

Sir Gene:

well, it's whitewashing is what it is. It reminds me of what happened. To smoking in movies in the 1990s. So all through the eighties films that were well, not just dramas, even comedies had this, but you know, people were portrayed the way they were in general in life, which is, there's a certain percentage of people, mainly women who are smokers and that's the way. And in 19, I don't know, 91, 92 Hollywood had all decided they, the studios agreed amongst themselves. To get on the bandwagon of helping to get rid of smoking and the way they did that was no movie could patrol, portray a character that smoked. So in real life, there were smokers in the movie life. Nobody smoked for over a decade. You imagine Humphrey Bogart without a cigarette in his mouth.

Darren O:

Flashing back to the old camel ads, tell you how many doctors recommend camel over the other brands because they're filtered.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, they're healthy.

Darren O:

it's very

Sir Gene:

the healthy cigarette.

Darren O:

I think there was one, one, like it AIDS in digestion and all this other kind of stuff. So,

Sir Gene:

I thought those were the menthol ones.

Darren O:

Oh, well of course they're healthy cigarettes.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, no, it's nuts. And I mean, certainly you don't want to have just blatant lies in advertising which there was plenty of with cigarettes, but. There is this element of pretending that things are different when you're creating a reality and movies. And that's fine. If one studio or one director does that, it's not a big deal, but much like what's happening right now with social media companies, they all start to gang up and they all behave the same way. And so, much like all the studios agreed that every character in the movie, regardless of what was written in the script would not. Be a smoker and how do you do that? Hard-boiled detective type character without having some vices.

Darren O:

You go to Kojak. Do

Sir Gene:

yeah, you go, you put a toothpick or a lollipop in their mouth. Exactly. Who loves the baby. So it's a weird thing. Being able to observe that. And right now the social media is doing like a harsher version of that, where they decide what. Is Bantible and then everybody else jumps on the bandwagon. And I remember Alex Jones who like nobody considered Alex Jones to be a serious news reporter. Everybody thought he was a funny crackpot and he was entertaining to listen to sometimes and annoying to listen to at other times. And so the way that he was treated was as though he was being completely serious and people were assuming that he's a serious reporter. And he had to be silenced and they all did it on the same day. And if that wasn't the biggest indicator of where things were going, I dunno what it is.

Darren O:

People big and small everybody, the things. Well, I'm not as big as Alex Jones and nobody will even notice I'm here. The guys over at great America, which is another interesting show that covers some crazy topics. At times, they've been having a lot of problems staying on Twitter and YouTube because of the stuff they post it's. This is happening right now. This is censorship and you can make the case. And I get the side of the case, which is well, Twitter and Facebook are public companies. They shouldn't be forced to have any type of content that they don't want. But they have become the public square. And it's very interesting now that countries like Poland and I think Hungary are jumping on and some, there was another one I believe already that wants to these they're having legislation drafted. Now that will say if it's legal speech in that country and a social media company blocks that speech, then they can be fined for millions of dollars. That's going to be very interesting to see how that pulls out.

Sir Gene:

I think it will be interesting because I'm really very split on this. So on the one hand, I do agree that they've taken this to an extreme the tech billionaire companies to where they've self appointed themselves to be the keepers of true speech. By taking opinions. They don't like off their platforms, but I also agree that they are private entities, not government than Thies. And as a stockholder in some company, I think that absolutely that company can't be forced to do something contrary to the Stated goals and opinions of that company's direction. So it's the same argument for me as the baking a cake for people that you don't want to bake a cake for any reason. And I don't think anyone should be forced to bake a cake nor do I think that Facebook like in Australia can be forced to provide free services for Australians. And at the same time, Australia is passing laws that will. Require force Facebook to pay journals and publications for having content from those publications on Facebook. Even if that content is simply a copy and paste by an individual, not by Facebook themselves. So I totally get that maneuver, but there's a very easy solution here that the majority of the people just seem to refuse. To acknowledge, which is stop using the platform. That's what I did. When I got it suspension off Twitter my response wasn't Oh my God, what am I going to do? My response is where's the delete my account setting. And that's what I did immediately as it's like, okay, you guys don't want to play. I'm okay with that. I'm going to delete my account. So it's a free service to me, which means you're selling the content that I'm providing. And I had. I didn't have a huge number of followers. I think I maybe had I don't know between a thousand, a couple thousand or something but I'd done probably 4,000 posts and a lot of those posts were retweeted by people. And so, I just stopped doing that. I deleted my account, deleted my history, delete everything. Same thing with Facebook. I don't need to be on Facebook. That's not really an essential thing. There's a few things that I'm giving up, like my neighborhood associations on Facebook. So by leaving Facebook, I don't have access to that anymore. Guess what? It just means. I have to talk to my neighbors more like actual voice communication.

Darren O:

I mean, which is good, but I mean, that's always the case that my co-host over in grumpy old bands makes Ryan that you don't have to be on the platforms. And I agree, but that doesn't mean you should stop fighting. Against these platforms with the totally baseless censorship that they're doing. I mean, we get, there are certain things if it's endangering children or child porn or really violent content. Okay. I get that. That should be silenced. I don't understand, like in the case of one of the other, no agenda, social guys, Earl Walkman over, is he? Yeah. Earl now Walkman of Buckeye was booted off of Twitter for a post calling Alyssa Milano. The C-word. And okay, that's fine. But you go do a search for the C-word on Twitter, which I did right after that. And there were hundreds of people calling varieties of Republican lawmakers or conservative journalists, or, radio personalities calling them the C word. And that was left to stand, which I think that is where the problem really lies with the social media companies is. Their rules are not the rules. The rules are very much pointed at one group of people. And if somebody is a conservative, well, you could call them every name in the book. Then we're going to let that happen. Well, but if you call one of our favorite people, that name, then you're booted and that just can't be allowed to stand.

Sir Gene:

well, let me play devil's advocate here. I think it absolutely should be allowed to stand, because again, it's a private company. Do you want somebody coming to your house and saying you're talking way too much on grumpy old bends about conservative talking points. So we'd like you to balance that and start talking about the benefits of a communism for at least as long.

Darren O:

It's become interesting just in the fact that it's become. The public square, which is, that is the one thing it's not like in no part of your family's on Facebook and parts on me, we and parts over here. And, you can pick and choose. Usually everybody's on Facebook and everybody's on Twitter. And very few people are on things. Let them like a Mastodon instance or something like that, which is why I understand the laws like for, in Poland saying, well, if it's free speech here, you can't silence it. I mean, I can back both sides of it. I understand both concepts and the problem with saying, well, you don't have to be on Twitter. It's like, well, what's the alternative with anywhere near the amount of people using it in there is not

Sir Gene:

well, you don't,

Darren O:

Facebook alternative with

Sir Gene:

why do you need to be on Twitter at all?

Darren O:

Usually just for promotion. I mean, that's

Sir Gene:

So if you're using a platform for promotion and you're not paying for it, you have no right to it.

Darren O:

I would agree.

Sir Gene:

There's nothing. Look, you get kicked off Twitter. I guarantee you, you go to Twitter and you say, I would like to buy some advertising. They will happily take your money. They're not going to kick you off their paid platform. They will kick you off their free platform. Same thing with Facebook. If you've set up a group for Q Anon and Facebook has shut down that group, and then you say, Hey, we'd like to buy some ads that are going to talk about just how much we like Trump. They will totally sell you the advertising.

Darren O:

Yeah, there may be. The reality is in the short term, it is hard to replicate those services. But I do believe in a little bit of the longer term, there will be a competitor to Twitter, whether it may be already exist in the fed averse, where people are just getting tired of. The concept of what Twitter is doing. I think Twitter is I released Dorsey. I think, I don't know. This could be a case of his employees are even more woke than he is because Dorsey's even been talking lately about, getting more into like the fed averse decentralizing, and I could see. From his standpoint, one that would open up your business to more eyeballs and two, that would really take the weight off of your shoulders as far as, Oh, we have to moderate because it very quickly becomes, well, we can't moderate. We're just a part of this other bigger thing. So it may be the winning solution for him.

Sir Gene:

I think it's the willing solution for everybody. And the thing about the fed averse and I somewhat disagree with you in that there will be someone that will take over the. Twitter sort of be the de facto the way Twitter was. I think that's just going away. We've now are swinging in the opposite direction. The pendulum is swinging the opposite direction to where we were swinging from a whole bunch of disparate, little separate groups and services. In the nineties and early two thousands to more consolidation. And then really these behemoths, like, and I think the first one was classmates that really unified, like the whole country's worth of people. Hey, you can track people that graduated in your school the same year and got them all onto one platform. And it wasn't a horribly useful platform, but it was the first, in my opinion. Anyway, the first platform that really focused on a nationwide. A build-out. And then after that, of course he had MySpace. You had a few in between there that didn't last, as long as my space and Facebook deal an even better job of building and promoting that. And it's become a platform for really the whole world, not just the United States in Twitter, I think accomplished something somewhat unique. They basically took the concept of doing an SMS message, but. Doing it in the public forum instead of a private direct person to person format. So it's allowed people to send messages to their friends, but that any random person could see and comment on. And it was a neat idea when it started nobody really, I don't think in envision that turning into assess pit of complete shit and vile and bile, I should say that it is right now. I'm like,

Darren O:

think they did, but they keep doubling down because Instagram then this is even worse to me is that you're taking ideas out of, although Twitter has since added photos and video, obviously, but then you go to Instagram, which is nothing but photos, which is the most shallow thing of all. Then you had Tik TOK, which is basically the. Instagram of video. And I don't know, we keep going further down this rabbit hole, which is just, I don't understand ever. It's either everybody looking for their 15 minutes of fame or something like that, and which may be is what it is. It's the dopamine hit. Every time you get a, like, it's, just the dopamine hit you get every time somebody follows you or something, I don't know.

Sir Gene:

well, when you and I were young, there was a show called the lifestyles of the rich and famous with Robin leech.

Darren O:

Yes.

Sir Gene:

And a lot of, yes, caviar dreams and champagne wishes. And a lot of people liked watching that of all age groups. We were probably teenagers when that show was on, but it was interesting as a teenager, my parents were watching it. Everybody was watching it because you get to see. In what, quote on quote, real people were living like with money and seeing that it was even more grandiose than what's portrayed on dynasty and Falcon crest and all these shows about rich people or Dallas which were also on in the eighties, but those were fake shows. And these were actual houses of actual Titans of industry. And it was very interesting. And I think what Instagram became again, I don't know if that was the intent at all or not, but it quickly turned into a lifestyles of the rich and famous that everybody got to participate in. And I think after lifestyles, we had a similar shows like MTV had that something crib cribs. I think it might've just been called cribs. Yeah. And so this was like the, houses of rich Hollywood and rap crowd. So it was a slightly different demographic, but same exact concept. Wow, this is so cool. Look at your personal gym. It's bigger than most. It was in my area,

Darren O:

yeah, it's a very voyeuristic thing.

Sir Gene:

Oh, it's totally. And, but people like voyeurism and Instagram provides that warrior stick element. And because it's images rather than video, you can set up. A layout for that image and, crop out all the bits that aren't rich and famous and make somebody who's maybe living on the paltry, 150 K a year, make them look like they're living on a million bucks.

Darren O:

Oh, yeah. Well, you could Photoshop the hell out of it. There are businesses that will either let you literally get into a private plane and just take photos and make it look like you're flying. Or there are steps set up in places. I mean, this is big business, which is also sad.

Sir Gene:

It's sad and it's funny, but in the end it does come down to generating dopamine. And that's what people are looking for either in watching or in creating. I know for me, one of the things that I really only stumbled on to, Oh boy, probably six, five, six years ago. Was a Twitch, which is watching people, playing video games. I played video games. Most of my life I'm in that age bracket that I enjoyed playing games. I couldn't for the life of me understand the idea of, well, why don't you want to watch somebody playing a game? Like what, how can that possibly be as interesting? As playing the game yourself. Cause that's first person in here, this is third person you were watching and I didn't get it for a long time. And then I started watching a few guys and then I got addicted and I was like watching these streamers both on YouTube and Twitch and following along their gameplay and their stories. And then it finally hit me what's happening with Twitch and same thing with gaming videos on YouTube. Is they're using the game engine, but what they're really doing is producing a cartoon. And in that cartoon, our characters and those characters have story arcs and their successes and their failures. And you feel bad for them when they fail and you feel good for them when they succeed and you start rooting for them to win whatever they're doing. So you're not really following the human behind that channel. What you're following is their characters and the arc that those characters are going through. And I think that's pretty powerful. And so it's really, it's a very different experience than just playing the video game yourself, which

Darren O:

Yeah, it's a whole new style. It's a whole style of entertainment and there's some people that will just make jokes through the whole thing. Be horrible at playing the games and just, it's more of a comedy thing than anything else. And the beautiful thing about the live streaming stuff is, I mean, you can get thrown off the platform. It adds very hard, real time to have things censored, so

Sir Gene:

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a certain realism that happens when it's real time versus edited and in a YouTube video, there's also plenty of how to videos on YouTube, where, The person has played this through a dozen times to make sure they're super smooth. And then they record a video that shows you that here's the fastest way to run through this level. And you watch them. There's not a single mistake made. They come out exactly the way they intended. And it's like, that's useful if you're playing a game and you want to watch somebody who's better than you and see what they did that you can improve on, but that's completely different than watching. A live stream, like one of the, and I know we're getting into games here, but one of the games I still play and I love it's called Kerbal which is a a rocket simulator. And it's a very detailed one. So it has a very steep learning curve. You start learning physics pretty damn quick. And things like, orbital trajectories and how you have to plan for just the right amount of fuel to make certain calculations and and, go from one plant to another. It's a really interesting game because it brings a lot of realism to the game, which means there's a lot of failure. But it also sort of cushions that failure by having these very cartoon looking. Funny looking sort of green little green men that are in your rockets rather than humans. So when you crash your rocket, you don't feel quite as bad having little green men in there as you would with humans. Although you still feel bad. I mean, you don't want to kill off the little curve balls.

Darren O:

Right. You're while you're trying to succeed in the game is challenging and you're actually learning something it's win-win, which is rare to find.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. And it's, I think it's a great game for for older kids, because it absolutely will push you into math and science and seeing practical benefits from understanding scientific concepts and practical use for for everything from geometry to calculus. Whereas for most kids, I certainly recalling back to my days in high school. It's like, when am I ever gonna use this again?

Darren O:

Right. Never.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. It's like, I don't know. This seems like it's purely theoretical stuff.

Darren O:

remember all those teachers that told you yet, you're not like you're going to carry a calculator around with you for the rest of your life. And it's like,

Sir Gene:

Prove them wrong.

Darren O:

We all are. Now we're here. We're carrying audio recorders, video recorders, computers, calculators, everything, the encyclopedias.

Sir Gene:

devices. Yeah. It's totally true. And I had a HB 28 S calculator. When I was in high school. I was a total geek. I did my reverse Polish notation. And it's one of those things. Yeah. It was like a$300 calculator back, in the eighties. And I now have a version of it loaded on my iPhone. Mostly for, I don't even know what just cause I thought it'd be cool. I don't never use it, but it's in there.

Darren O:

Well, yeah, I remember getting a Texas instrument calculator that was like a graphing calculator, but you could also save. Text to it. So, I mean, that was like the ultimate crib note in high school. Cause that was not normal back then was like, Oh, it's just a calculator, but you can put whatever you want it on the screen.

Sir Gene:

exactly. So really stuff like that, I think. We've come a long way, but at least we can do math without a calculator. And it's, I don't think a lot of people born in the last 20 years can at all.

Darren O:

Well, no, because they're too used to just having. The information in front of them. I do think a big problem we have going on is the education system, which we could probably just do hours on a loan, but I think it's failing the students and it comes down to two, again, big teachers unions who are more interested in political ideology than teaching kids, or they're more interested in just passing them and not having to deal with the problem students. Yeah. And I mean, it's sad all the way around because nobody's winning at this point. And we could do so much better, but this whole concept now being taught to everybody, which is, everybody, it gets a trophy. We don't want a competing is bad. I remember going back almost 10 years or so. It must be now because he's about to get married next year. My nephew would have been the valedictorian of his junior high class and it was the first year. They're like, Oh, you would have been the valedictorian. But you know, we think it makes the other kids feel bad because they're not. So we're not going to do that anymore. And it's like, are you kidding me? You can't applaud the person who did the best anymore, because not everybody gets the trophy. I don't, I will never understand that mentality.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, no, that's horrible. And I think that there's no easiest solution for school because ultimately what we have right now, His children that are going to be babysat until they're 18 years old, because both of the parents are working and the people babysitting them are not interested in the future development of these children. They're not interested in most things. There it's a job. They're not really there. Because they love expanding children's minds. They're there because this is the career path that they got into. And I think it's been true for a while, but it's, it seems to be a lot more true right now because of the things they're willing to teach children that are completely backwards. So, that the idea that somehow we can abstract competition out of life. Is so ridiculous on its face that anybody even suggesting that to be fired on the spot competition is the basis of all life on this planet. If you don't know how to compete, you are already dead.

Darren O:

Oh, there's no question. I go back to one of the early grumpy old bands, which became one of our earliest memes, which was, I wrap up this whole concept in one easy slogan, which is not everybody gets to screw Adriana, Lima. You can't tell me there's not competition in life because there are things that are limited and it depends on, you can be like, Oh no, everybody's the same. No. Everybody's not the same. That's not the case. And that just wrapped it up for me. It's like, that's an easy way for people to understand when maybe this is why kids today are so depressed or maybe they don't know if they don't want to date or whatever it is, but you don't always get to go out with the person that you like. They may not like you. And this shows that life is not fair that you will have to compete. And this isn't, everybody's not the same. There's no other way around it deal with it. And if you can deal with that, you'll do a lot better.

Sir Gene:

So somewhat shifting gears, but not tremendously from that. My unfortunate take or maybe my take, which I think is unfortunate is that I'm really living in the age of the the turning of the American empire into a fall of the American empire. Like we, I think we've rounded that corner. And right now, I've made the comparison in the past. And I think that there are a lot of factors that are similar between the Britain in 1913, the us in 1993, or the, sorry, the USSR, I should say in 1993 Rome in three 18, a D like a lot of these factors that we're seeing were present. At the beginning of the end of a lot of past empires. And I think that's a natural evolutionary step that happens is when an empire gets to the point of comfort where the majority of its citizens feel like they're entitled to luxury benefits, luxury goods, luxury benefits. That empire starts to crumble. There is no more drive towards greatness. It starts to be a drive towards, I want my piece of this.

Darren O:

It would be handed to you instead of working. For what you can get. I mean, there's no more of the Kennedy, what ask what you can do for your country now it's like, Hey, where's my check.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. And it's, it doesn't even have to be from the government. It's I think part of that is the same. Attitude as the expectation is, well, your email is free coming from Google. All your communication is free because it's on Facebook. Your instant gratification is sitting on Instagram. It's like all these things that you pay, nothing for. Because you're the product that, that, that level of expectation of getting things for free, even things like Amazon, well, you get free shipping for anything you ordered now. Yes, there is a yearly cost to that, but the point is that. We have been conditioning Americans into a mentality, which is not productive for the growth of the country. And I'm sorry to say, but I'm not sure we can recover. I think we may have rounded the corner. And at this point, it's really a question of how do we make the landing towards our removal from the the top nation on the planet status, less painful rather than how do we maintain that status? I'm not sure

Darren O:

Past the tipping point yet I can see where it's possible because in just, our lifetimes, which, I mean, I know sound like the old guys, you can see the massive amount of change. That has happened. I mean, hell I remember a time before there was even cable TV. Now people are like, we don't even want cable TV anymore. We just want internet and phones. And there's all of these things that have gone from, having to have a phone that was plugged into the wall and having a cell phone at one point was like really impressive and a new thing. And the cell phones were the size of a small suitcase to now we carry these little devices. In our pocket and can shoot 4k video or better and high res audio and all of this stuff on them, but we don't quite have the concept anymore of what reality is. And I think a lot of that is because of social media and because of the way that the education system is working, that you just believe that from. Oh, well, whatever. Now, if the United States is morphing into something, it's definitely more into the communism slash socialism realm, where I think everybody believes. It's going to be a utopia that everybody's going to get the latest iPhone every year. They're going to have the greatest place to live. They're going to get the greatest food. They're going to be pampered instead of realizing what happens under those societies. Every time that it's been tried so far anyway, is everybody's pretty much penniless and has no food and is struggling. This isn't.

Sir Gene:

everybody, not the leadership.

Darren O:

a vast majority, but yes, there are a few people in leadership roles that I mean, you go to China, those people run in the country are doing pretty good. Everybody else you might be in a concentration camp.

Sir Gene:

Yeah, well, certainly if you're a weaker yeah I think that the allegory of animal farm is a very correct one it's the right interpretation and model of what happens when something that is too good to be true is actually tried in real life. And it seems like everything's going to be done for the common good. But then you quickly realize that some, some people are more equal than others.

Darren O:

I mean the concept of, and I've seen this now, I think on Yelp and on grub hub that are well, Hey, we'll help you find a black owned restaurant for, you could do your business with them. And I'm like, this is too full for me. I'm like one, we've been told that this is a really racist country. So wouldn't that keep people from buying. At those cause now you're marking them as like black owned. So let's just let that sink in for a minute. And on the other side of that, we would immediately be told we're racist. If we're like, well, you know what? I want a white owned businesses to have the same connotation next to the business. One. But so why is that racist? But marking it black owned? No, that's perfectly fine. Oh, white owned. That's no horrible black entertainment television. Well, that's necessary because the black people need their entertainment, but white entertainment television. Oh my God, that would be racist. We can never do that. It's like, this is the problem with equity as opposed to quality

Sir Gene:

Yeah. And th this definitely difference between the two words is an artificial construct to begin with because they literally are the same thing. And they're just being used as two different words now, but that's why I like Ryan Long had a video. He does comedy videos and it's probably, I don't know, three, four or five months ago where the video was titled, the. The woke and the racist are best friends or something like that. And he's basically got two characters in there that are presenting the two extreme ideologies, one being super Voke and the other one being really racist and they're agreeing on 99% of the things.

Darren O:

Right. It's the

Sir Gene:

There's no difference there. Their motivation seemingly is at 180 degrees, but the end result is identical when you start

Darren O:

have their methodology.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. When you start isolating things based on characteristics that are not chosen things like race like sexual, proclivity on w whatever it is that people are when they're. Kids when they're born, whatever is in their heads. You start using that as the criteria. You're you really are racist. You really are. The thing that I think a lot of the woke are trying to pretend they're fighting and written reality. It's Adam's favorite saying, right? If you are what you're pretending to, or you are what you're commenting about, or you are what you're pointing out, others are. I can't remember the Dutch version of it.

Darren O:

Yeah. Yeah. I've heard it a thousand times and it all just sounds like Virgin Felsher, mission malice or

Sir Gene:

Yeah. It's like

Darren O:

comes out

Sir Gene:

it's like the Swedish chef talking dirty. really? Yeah. They do talk funny yeah. Up there in Dutch land. But it's a, it's one of those things where. I think you're probably more optimistic than I am about where we are. And part of that is for me is I was actually born in Russia. And so I saw firsthand what late stage communism looks like and the, all the problems, all the the difference between the ideal, what you're taught. In school as a kid in Russia and the reality, which is what your parents are living when you're living in Russia and the us was the polar opposite of that back in the seventies. And certainly in the eighties, I'm sure as well. Basically until the fall of communism is Russia. If you take the The average sort of family in the U S right now, and you compare it to the mentality of the average family in Russia right now, you would absolutely think that America's communist or pretending to be right. Certainly socialist. And then Russia is free market capitalism because the mentality is very different in the opposite direction of what it was 40 years ago. There's been a drastic switch in what people consider to be good and normal and what they considered to be the ideal in both countries in Russia, that happened with a revolution in the U S it just snuck by, like, there was no communist revolution that happened here, but yet socialist ideas and really communist ideals and socialist implementation of those communist ideals. Are the majority opinion in this country right now. And I can

Darren O:

there was a revolution, it was just a quiet one.

Sir Gene:

well, when was that revelation? Cause I'm having a hard time putting a date on it.

Darren O:

Yeah, I think it goes back in, this was the late sixties, early seventies with the weather underground, which was bill Ayres, buddy of Obama was the GI bill. Air's house was Obama when he came out as the candidate or whatever, that was where the little party was for it. But bill EHRs and the weather

Sir Gene:

out.

Darren O:

right. Came out maybe in a different way, according to a lot of theories on that. But. The weather underground, their writings are quite telling when it comes to. Okay. I mean, they tried the violent revolution. I mean, they bombed federal buildings. I mean, if you want to talk about true domestic terrorist, bill Ayres and his bunch were, they were tried. Many of them went to jail and I mean, of course now he's a professor because that makes perfect sense. But the writings on, okay, we figured out. That this violent revolution, thing's not going to work. So how are we going to change the United States from what it was then, which was a capitalist country, strong Christian values, that kind of a thing. How do we get it to this place of socialism slash communism? And there were a few things they said they had to do. One was take over the schools, become the teachers and be able to teach them young. As Hitler said, if you teach the youth. Once you have, then it doesn't really matter what the adults are saying. Once you have the youth on your side, the weather underground also said we have to pit the white against the black. And it also said we have to pit the people against the cops. They always call them pigs in the writing. Never would say, cops are pleased. You have to get the people against the cops. And the last is you have to pit the rich against the poor and all of those have been done over the last, especially the last decade with.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. So I don't think that was really happening in the seventies or eighties or maybe even nineties. But I think that has absolutely been happening over the last 10, 15 years. So, it's not a single point in time revolution, but we've certainly gotten to where we are today, where we're a lot closer today to the way Europe has been, which is more socialists, but not quite, communist than we are. Yeah, not admitted. Well, like China doesn't have any qualms about having communist ideals and essentially they figured out a way to utilize the the capitalist model in order to be able to power their socialist system. And in the U S right now there's more sympathy and more desire for a majority of people. To live more like the Chinese ideal than there is to live, like the ideal of Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan and, free market concerns.

Darren O:

Right. Cause it's less work and you just exist and it doesn't matter what you do. Everybody's treated the same. Everybody gets the same amount of money. It doesn't matter whether you're a podcaster or a brain surgeon and you know what that does. It makes nobody want to be a brain surgeon.

Sir Gene:

Oh, absolutely. And the reality is never like that because there are still brain surgeons. It's just that they will only be brain surgeons for the people that are in power because everybody else doesn't get to have a brain surgeon.

Darren O:

Yes, we don't have equality. That's right. That's a, and it's again, this is the concept. It's very interesting. The original wording is not that if the United States does not guarantee happiness, you get. The equal opportunity for the pursuit of happiness.

Sir Gene:

And I almost wish they would have left it in the way it was in the original documents that of happiness. It would actually say the pursuit of capital, because that was the notion that. The thing that will bring happiness to everybody is being able to own the product of their labor, which is capital. And if they can't do that, then happiness isn't possible. And I think that somehow has gotten lost because in the 240 years, since those documents were ratified we don't understand as a country like you and I individually do, but as a country, what the hell? The word happiness actually means.

Darren O:

Right. This is why the black lives matter organization, even though it is very openly Marxist in all of their ideals. That's why it is being embraced rather than people going. Huh? Marxist don't believe in any personal property. Well, how does that affect me? Who has a house in a car and clothes and whatever else, how does that affect me? They don't, I don't know. People are just dumb, I guess.

Sir Gene:

well, it's very easy. You will own nothing and you will be happy.

Darren O:

I don't see those two things. Aren't going together for me.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. Well, that's the prediction from the Bilderberg meeting, right?

Darren O:

Right. I don't need anything. You won't have anything, but you won't need anything. I don't get that one either.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. And again, I think the difference here from people that have not experienced socialism themselves, their assumption, like you mentioned earlier, is that socialism is simply if I want something, then I get to have something socialism. Isn't that socialism in saying, Oh, you want this thing? Well, nobody gets that things. So now you're all equal. Congratulations.

Darren O:

Right. Everybody's the same. And I don't understand why. I mean, I understand why the media doesn't cover it because that's not the narrative they want to tell. But if you look, you can find stories from people, like you said, from the old Soviet union, you can find stories from people that came out of Cuba or Venezuela and are like, people have no idea what you're doing. You have no idea what path you're on and you really should wake up and maybe learn a little history, which I know they don't want us to do that anymore.

Sir Gene:

history is being rewritten. And I've had this conversation with the number of people that have enjoyed history is that if you read current history books, you will be shocked at how different they are from the history. That we were taught 30, 40 years ago. But even further back, if you get history books from the turn of the century and in particular I was talking about the U S civil war history. If you look at the actual documents written during the civil war, from both sides, they are they're balanced in the way that you would expect to where each side sees themselves as being justified and on the right. Path in presenting all the negatives about the other side, the way that the history books were 30, 40 years ago is very biased towards the North and really pointing towards slavery as being the main reason for the the war between the North and the South. If you read history books today, it was essentially the South trying to convert the North to slavery. I mean, it has gone to such a absolutely ridiculous. Phony extreme. That is being, it's not a sketch comedy show. It's the history being taught to children. And it's an absolutely a false history. It's no different than the, the history books in the USSR or in China that were created post communism. That portrayed everything pre communist revolutions as being just pure hell and pure evil, where the reality was absolutely different. There were plenty of people that were in the middle class prior to the communist revolutions. There were a lot of people that had jobs and careers in much more high level. Areas than they did after the communist revolution, there was a ton of educated people working in factories and sweeping floors after the communist revolution, because what was important to the communist, just like, as what's important to the modern day socialists in the United States is obedience. First and foremost, are you, if you're not obedient, we will deep platform you. If you're not a BDM, we will get you fired. If you're not obedient, we will watch you starve to death. We will reeducate your children and we will send your family to a camp that, that behavior I'm not exaggerating, that all you have to do is read Twitter, to see tons of examples of the enlightened left, proclaiming these things about the right who is not being obedient.

Darren O:

Well, right. We can't get stories from today, right. So of course you understand why they're rewriting history? I mean, let's look at the economic status of the average American up until. The time that COVID hit under three years of Donald Trump, who was a horrible racist orange man, the average person that includes the African-American, the people that were here from Mexico, the peop everybody. The lower rungs, the salaries were way up. The amount of money that people were making were way up the economy was good. This was record high employment for both the Hispanic and African American community. But no, the news media kept telling you this was a racist, bad guy, and that's not the truth. Michelle Obama said we had to rewrite our history when Barack Obama. Got elected. I mean, a lot of people didn't take her seriously. I did. I remember Glenn Beck and a few other people talking about it. Like you better watch because they're not, she's not a stupid woman. She knows what she's saying. And the fact that history books now exists more than often than not on tablets and computers. That can be rewritten instantly. If you want to change the narrative overnight, it's scary.

Sir Gene:

Wikipedia is a perfect example. It's not obviously an official school curriculum, but it is something that has completely replaced encyclopedias. There, there are no more encyclopedias that are being purchased. Everybody simply refers to Wikipedia as a concept. It's not a horrible concept that you have a document that can be modified by anybody. And then has certain people that have been. Registered as experts in their fields who get to okay. The modifications, it's not a bad concept. The problem is the exact same thing is happening. If you start looking at the changes made daily to Wikipedia. You'll start seeing changes that very much reflect the majority mindset of the country. So it's really, it's not a historical document or a definition document. It is really a document expressing the majority of opinion at any given point in time. Well, it's, I dunno, I would call it propaganda because propaganda has a specific purpose that it's intending to do and the message of the propaganda. Isn't for people to believe in necessarily the thing that they're reading or seeing it's to create a certain mindset. That's the ultimate goal of propaganda. I don't know if that's true on Wikipedia because on Wikipedia, there's plenty of things which are simply revised facts. Like for example that there was a whole series of changes made to inventors to. Increase the number of black inventors tremendously. And so were there inventions that were created by black people, which were not necessarily attributed to them? Sure. That always happens right to anybody. There could be some misattribution, but when you start. Starting with the goal of let's maximize the number of inventions that we can attribute to black people. And quite often, as we've seen, if you start examining the changes that were made, these changes are at best Alternative viewpoints. And at worst, they're just blatant lies. You have people that the one example, I just remember a thought in my head is the guy that invented potato chips is this this black guy currently that's what's in there. Because there was a customer that was asking for his fries to be fried, thinner and thinner. And this guy finally just made super thin. Fries and the customer really liked them and then other people started asking for them and it started blowing up. And he's credited right now as the inventor of potato chips. Well, that's all well and good. And this happened in the the early 20th century? Maybe. Yeah, it was, I'm pretty sure it wasn't the late 18th. It was the early 20th century. The problem is you have a British cookbook with a recipe for French fries that came out before the civil war. So if there were already people making French fries or sorry, not French fries, making potato chips slow, like the super thin ones, right? There are already people making these things throughout the country 80 to a hundred years before this person who is credited with inventing them, is it really isn't really a fair or genuine to credit him as the inventor. Well, it is, if your goal is to maximize the number of black mentors across the board, and it doesn't have to be black, it's just that right now, we're at a point where Asian people have lost their minority status. And they're being now chucked in with white people into the, we don't care about them basket. So, it's, it seems like because of the achievements that Asians have been able to make. Now they're no longer considered minorities, which is also telling, because if you're basing minority status based on a a lower financial level of lifestyle, rather than on the actual, skin color or ethnicity of somebody, well, well, if it's economic, why don't we just call it all economic from the get go instead of calling. People Asian or black or white or whatever. Why don't we just say the people that are affluent people that are middle-class people that are, lower financial w whatever terminology you want to use, but why even bother throwing it in the racist terms in there. If what you're really doing is trying to highlight the financial disparities between the classes.

Darren O:

Well, I think the case can be made that the race issue, you can go back to the founding fathers and be like, well, obviously this country was all started as a racist country. Thus, we must get rid of the whole system. So. I think there's some of that in there. I mean, we can tell this by the tearing down of all the statues and all of a sudden, well, George Washington was a slave owner, so he was a bad guy. And this concept that all people should be judged by the worst thing they did in their life. I don't think anybody pushing that understands what that's going to do to them.

Sir Gene:

well, Kamala

Darren O:

fall under the same

Sir Gene:

Yeah. Campbell Hassell was a slave owner

Darren O:

we are

Sir Gene:

She's going to be the president. Well, but that's how it works. I mean, if we're talking about reparations even if this happened 20 generations ago, you're still a slave owner today. So as far as I'm concerned, she still is a slave owner. And she's going to be, she's going to be paying reparations probably higher reparations and a lot of other people, because you can directly trace to when her family owned slaves and how many of them they did own. So I think it's a ridiculous concept to begin with. And, my retort always to that whole reparations nonsense is that if you want to start looking at who had slaves when, and for how long. I guarantee you that it's not going to be black slaves from Africa in America, because there were way more slaves in Africa, including slaves that came from other countries into Africa from the middle East.

Darren O:

Thoughts on that. And I believe the current numbers were, they believe they're still like 9 million slaves in Africa.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. Yeah. And that's right. Modern day slaves,

Darren O:

Yeah. So w where's the outrage? No, that's, it's not there.

Sir Gene:

It's not there because it's not convenient. And because you will only get to a point where these sort of superficial issues become brought to they bubble up to the top of a importance in top of conversation when the country, as a whole is just doing really well. And that is also coincidentally. The point at which empires crumble and that's that ties it back to what I said earlier. And I think you're, you may be a little more optimistic than I am in this regard. And it's not hyperbole. I'm not saying it just to, be controversial or get people riled up. We have seen the pivoting points in every empire. There's never been an empire that has lasted forever. It just doesn't happen. And even though the longest empires, like Rome, you can trace back to the point at which it stopped drawing and it started shrinking and all the indicators are that is happening right now with the United States. And it's not to say, Oh my God, what are we going to do? We should all just commit suicide. Eh, people still live in the city of Rome. People still live in England, even though it's not an empire anymore, but. The Chinese empire is absolutely growing like crazy right now. And the Chinese empire is on the path to take over every other empire, including Russia, which the United States helped to really hobble by winning the cold war against the USSR. So, everybody here thinks that somehow China and Russia are buddies. They hate each other. They've hated each other for at least 60 years. Russians don't think of Chinese as their compatriots. They, Russia is more capitalists today than in the United States. China is socialist. The Russia is guarding their border with China. With tanks and jets, they're not guarding their border near Alaska with those things. Like there's a little worry from Russia of American troops coming across the bearing stray, which is only 50 kilometers from Alaska. There's little worry of that. Maybe it's 80, but anyway, it's close. But what there is a worry of is Chinese expansionism and China is already buying huge parts of Mongolia. Because that's, right next to them and it's free land and Mongolia, isn't going to do a whole lot and it's cheaper for them to pay money than it is to fight a war. And so they're using money to do that. So I think China is on the rise big time. And the United States may have just crossed over into a into a decline status. And so the real question for me is. What do we do to minimize the speed of that decline? So we can still have our children be enjoying this country for a little while longer before it completely revolutionizes.

Darren O:

Not giving in to the new history that's being taught, which I know it can suck, but a lot of people are homeschooling their kids now. And even if you're not doing the homeschooling, you can at least. Monitor what they're learning and be like, Oh, okay. Pass your tests. But you know, here's the reality of the situation and, give them books to read that will show them the way, the reality of the world. I don't get how the woke people love China so much when China it's like one of the biggest polluting countries in the world still has slavery all over the place. I mean, I mean again, like with the slavery in Africa, if the black lives matter global movement really cared about black lives or was global, they'd be talking about Africa, but they're not.

Sir Gene:

but I don't think this is contrary to human nature. I think.

Darren O:

No, it's not.

Sir Gene:

people definitely love power, an exhibition of power. And it's not just China that the lefties love. They also love Islam. They have some cow jumped on board. The the pro Islam train as well, and both in China and in Islam socialism is. Well, it's perceived very much for more realistically, which is as a way to control people and not as some sort of a utopian future, goal the way it is in the United States. It's really perceived as a means of population control. And I think that in the U S you can blame it on the schools. You can blame it on the parents. You can blame it on whatever you like, but. The majority of the population. And right now I think that majority is quickly becoming millennials. And zoomers because as the that's, the COVID conveniently kills off the baby boomer generation and the gen X-ers are the smallest generation ever. The largest groups are the the millennials and then slightly smaller than them, but bigger than gen X are the zoomers. And with those generations, the, again, I'm not just saying these words to be controversial, but I really do think that we can argue about whether Biden was elected honestly or not. And I certainly have an opinion that there was way too many problems with the way the election. Results came in to really trusted, but the, he could easily win the next election if he's still alive with absolutely every control being in place because there'll be another four years worth of zoomers coming in voting age and out of that group easily, 75% will vote for Democrat over a Republican.

Darren O:

Well, yeah, it's it wants it again, somebody that wants the government to force feed things at Rutland with this was once a country. With a can-do spirit. And that I believe is gone. There was a story on millennials that we covered on grumpy old Benz. At one point that said the average millennial, if a light bulb blew out in their house, 90% or something was crazy, maybe 80%,

Sir Gene:

what to do.

Darren O:

I waited for help to change the light bulb. They didn't know how to change the light bulb Jeep.

Sir Gene:

we had electricity gun here in Austin while some of us did, I did for a little over three days and it was obviously annoying to have no electricity.

Darren O:

Well, you don't have a senior. I would've picked you as a guy who would have a backup generator waiting that the whole house would stay on the minute. The power went out with a wine cellar full of good wine that you could just be like, ha I'm just

Sir Gene:

Yeah, I would pick, I would also say that about myself. Unfortunately, reality has a way of sneaking in here and reality was no, I did not. And I thought about generators probably like every five years. I'm like, is it worth spending a couple of grand on this or not? And usually the answer is no. And really the longest power outage that I had 10 years ago here in Texas was 20 minutes. And even then I thought, God damn it. I'm going to just going to order a generator as soon as the power is back on. Cause this is bullshit. I can't believe that I have to live with 20 minutes of power outage.

Darren O:

First

Sir Gene:

Really, since then, like for a good five, six years, there was literally zero power outages. Not even for a minute, the clocks never needed to get. Changed. And then over the last five years, there's probably been maybe one a year of a few you minutes, maybe five, 10 minutes. And that's about it. And usually in the middle of summer, like when it's, everyone's running air conditioning, it's super hot. So it's been an inconvenience, but that's about the extent of it. So this time around when the power went off and it was freezing outside the only thing that made it, something difficult for me is that I have pet reptiles. And so I needed to keep them warm because they don't generate their own heat. And so that was a bit of a pain in the butt. I had to be awake every hour to, put some more heat in there and I basically heating them with hot water. So, I was boiling water and then bringing kettles of hot water into their into their room and then keeping the temperature of that room warmer than the rest of the house using that hot water. Does it. It was a very creative way of doing it. Yes. Yes. And I don't know if you've seen the ad for the it's not even an ad. There's been news stories about the Ford F-150 truck that is hybrid. Those hybrid trucks have a built in seven and a half kilowatt generators.

Darren O:

Talking about that on no

Sir Gene:

They were because I, yeah, exactly. So like, if you just run the truck to power, the generator, it'll run for 80 hours straight and that's a whole house worth of electricity. So I think me and a lot of other people are going, maybe

Darren O:

know what I want.

Sir Gene:

that's I just wish it wasn't a Ford. I'm not, I'm just not a Ford truck guy. But yeah, I'm a Ram guy, so I really liked those. So if Ram ever introduces that feature, I think it will be time for a new vehicle for me, but either way what I've seen

Darren O:

the reality was reading the news about what happened down there, which was, they're saying this wasn't hours or days away, they were seconds or minutes away from a catastrophic failure of the grids. And that is scary.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. If we would have completely blacked out the grid due to overload, it would be best case scenario a about a one week long duration to spin it back up. And it could be as long as a month. So I mean, what I saw happening over the course of three days, which is millennials literally crying, tears, running their faces, saying, I don't know what to do. I just don't know what to do. Like they, they can't imagine a scenario where their phone isn't working and where, like nothing electronic works because they've lived in the world of continuous electricity.

Darren O:

Okay. You know what? I have an idea, gene. Here's how we're going to fix the United States.

Sir Gene:

We're going to break the lecture.

Darren O:

Not well that sure. But we do socialists bootcamp. We make the kids go and show them what socialism

Sir Gene:

yeah. Yeah.

Darren O:

a week.

Sir Gene:

Hey, maybe we can make money doing them now. You now you're onto something. Then I'd be up for that.

Darren O:

capitalist, socialist bootcamp.

Sir Gene:

people a couple thousand bucks a week to put their kids into the environment with no electricity.

Darren O:

Yeah. With the, without the comforts

Sir Gene:

like it. I like it. How I'm sleeping on bunk beds with half inch thick mattress pads, and that's about it.

Darren O:

I mean, just leave the matches there, if they can figure out how to use them. Great. If not then.

Sir Gene:

they won't, they don't know what those are matches. What the hell are those things that's dangerous. We should ban those.

Darren O:

Yeah. Yeah. Like language is the most dangerous of all though.

Sir Gene:

it really is. That's true. I mean, I have to agree with them on that. It says what else can be more dangerous than thoughts than ideas as language is the communication of thoughts. And if you ban language, you're banning thoughts.

Darren O:

That's true. And if you can't be the foil to that if somebody says something that you find to be so hateful or outrageous, and you don't have a response for it, then. You're the problem, which is why I think everybody on the left hated rush Limbaugh as much as they did, because one, he always sounded like he was having fun and two, he could debate the hell out of any of them. And all they could say is rush lies all the time. And you'd say, well, okay, give me one solid example and I'll believe you. And they're like, I don't have an example.

Sir Gene:

Yeah. And it you're absolutely right, but it's not only endemic to the left. And unfortunately I've seen it on the right with the Q folks as well, where you have people that will be absolutely nasty to you. If you don't buy into their mythology. And it's something that I've experienced multiple times now on the fed averse is when people realize that you're not actually supporting them, but you're making fun of them, which I do on the regular basis. They start off by saying, well, you just don't know what you're talking about here. Watch this stuff first. And if I have the time I'll play along and I'll say, great. So me, it's a me what you got, maybe I'll learn something and. Almost every single time. There are certain characteristics which are a very predictable one is every image has to be low resolution. I don't know why, but that is, seems to be the queue mentality. Everything has to be down sample to four 80 by, three 20 and then some outline or shadow text added to it. And then blown back up to full page size at that same crappy resolution. So aside from low quality images and low quality video the text is interesting too, because they're so hyped up that they have to either use all caps. Or all bold or all outline like there, there is, there's no plain standard text in those documents. Everything is exaggerated and highlighted because it's so damn important that the rest of the world realized what the QRA knows. And then they also, if you watch their videos, they're full of clips of each other. Talking about something and the green with each other, and none of them provide any actual evidence. It is basically opinions being used as examples of why they're correct. And then as the being used as a basis of their own opinions, which will then be recorded and be used as a basis of somebody else's opinion to say, well, and here's why this is true. And it's amazing. I mean, to me, it's just extremely disappointing that the disease of I don't even know what to describe it as, but essentially it's the disease of belief over logic is as prevalent on the right, as it is on the left.

Darren O:

Oh, yeah. That's how the mainstream media works. But yeah, everybody, it's the same concept. You have a confirmation bias. So if somebody is saying the exact thing that you believe it doesn't matter if they have anything to back it up, you're like, Oh yeah, I'm in that's he's right. And It can get scary if nobody's bringing any facts to the party. And this is how you get to where we are today. Again, with the internet, the most advanced communications tool, any society on earth has ever had right now, and disinformation is running rampant more than ever before. So go figure that out.

Sir Gene:

well, and I don't have anything against disinformation, but the problem is a disappointment in the lack of human understanding to a much larger degree than what I assumed. I assumed a lot more people were capable of differentiating between fact. And opinion and it turns out I was completely wrong.

Darren O:

Well, you are because every newspaper and news program on television now is 99% opinion.

Sir Gene:

yeah. And that's true. I actually wrote to the editor of the Texas Tribune a few days ago. I think Adam even mentioned it on there, on the podcast. Cause I CC'd him. And I'm not like a newspaper writer guy. I could really give a rat's ass. What new business papers say, but this was an article that essentially was debunking the idea that what was responsible for the Texas power outages. We're the windmills and it's like, Oh, this is just a completely wrong. And when you read that article was first of all, written by clearly somebody in their early twenties, but it all's also edited by the editor of the paper. So a guy that was, our age and in that article, the basis for their thesis were quotes from two people that were presenting an opinion. So their article consisted of a. This is why we're debunking. The fact that Texas went down because of windmills. Oh, here's a quote from a guy saying, no, that wasn't the case. Here's another quote from a guy saying, no, I think people are missing understanding what happened and, Oh my God. Why did guys like Ted Cruz lie to all of you and say that it was the windmills and they had no proof in there at all. So I wrote to them and admonish them for not doing the job of journalism. And I was involved in journalism in my youth. I actually was a. On the university of Minnesota was a student newspaper board directors. So I was I was a, one of the higher up dudes in that organization, ensuring that students weren't using the paper just to get dates, which was pretty popular, but they were learning how to actually be reporters. And in this case, this was a Bismal, there was zero investigating, done. I forward them, the data, they should have been able to pull themselves if anybody did any actual journalism and that data clearly showed. And it's not an opinion, it's actual data from the power plants and from the grid that while the gas production of electricity was reduced by about 25%, about 24%, I think give or take which was certainly something and significant. And. The coal production of electricity went down about 15 to 16% nuclear stayed about the same. And solar was down at 50% of what it was the previous week because solar ultimately relies on sunshine. So that's not up to the not really up to the facility but guess what? The the production of turbines went through about when

Darren O:

Well, if they're frozen, it goes to zero.

Sir Gene:

So compared to the previous week electrical production of the turbines went down by 95%. So it is absolutely disingenuous to say that well, coal was responsible for the power outages that were seen because coal failed gas was responsible because gas failed. No, all of those things were certainly retarded in their output. And I use that word, not in the human definition, but in its normal definition. But what. What happened with the turbines is it's above and beyond of any other energy source. They just stop working and it doesn't even matter if they were frozen or if there was just no wind. The fact of the matter is when they went down by 95% documented the figures actually coming from the grid, how can you possibly argue that they were not responsible? For the outages that happen. That's insane. You have to deny reality and lie to people about an alternate reality, which is not based on facts.

Darren O:

But that's what you have to do when you believe in global warming, you have to say, gas is bad. You have to say that coal is bad, the solar and the wind they're going to save us. So you can't put the blame on them. It has to be the other way. And here in Illinois, as from a Minneapolis from Minnesota, that it gets really cold. We get the majority of our power from nuclear. It works.

Sir Gene:

absolutely. Yeah. And Texas has two plans that each have two reactors. So there's four total reactors and those reactors provide, I think, around 11 or 12% of the total power here. If we. Tripled the number of those reactors, we went from four reactors, 12 reactors. We would have a solid, completely unaffected by any temperatures or even hurricanes and winds and anything else, a power source that would be well three times 12. So about 36% of our power. If it came from nuclear would be guaranteed. Like then once you do that, you want to use wind and solar go for it because that's gonna, that's going to be at that point, an unreliable, but potentially cheaper source of power that, that, yeah, you can call it whatever you want. The reality is those towers take more cold to manufacturer. Then the savings in coal that they generate over their lifetimes. And this is again, a fact because the size of those towers are between a 160 and 180 feet tall. They're huge towers. And when you're manufacturing metal certainly you need something strong enough to handle the weights of the towers and the the dynamos up there. You're using coal to do that. You're using coal, both for for generating the heat necessary to melt the metal, to melt the steel. And you, of course, you're using coal also to make steel because steel is basically iron plus coal. So you're You're, I can't remember the exact number, but I want to say something like 178,000 pounds of coal per tower is what the calculation was that's utilized for in manufacturing process. And over the course of its lifetime, each of those towers will do well, they, they do. I think they peak somewhere between a hundred and a hundred. Yeah. 50 or I should say 1.5 megawatt is where they peak at. So between one megawatt and 1.5 megawatt. And so over their lifetime, they will generate less electricity than the 176 tons or a thousand pounds, whatever it was, whatever the measurement was of coal will generate. If it's burned. And again, I'm going by memory. I don't have that spreadsheet in front of my face, but this was this was something that was based off calculated figures of actual production by the manufacturers that make these things. So yeah, it is absolutely insane. It's a choice that we're doing based on a emotional response, not based on logic, if we want with a purely logical solution. We would be building absolutely nothing but nuclear power plants. That would be the sole means of energy production. It's

Darren O:

But no windmills. I mean, they make it seem like you're doing so much more for the

Sir Gene:

yeah. You're telling a lot of birds. You're definitely doing that. And then I have, I will be doing a special on the real danger of windmills probably in a month or so. I'm still gathering all the details for that because I want to make it factual, but there is a very real. You talk about the re the rationale for doing this is global warming or climate change. There is a very real connection between windmills and climate change, and it's in the opposite direction that the greens would have you think, and I'll be going through that. But it's going to take me at least another month to get all the data for it. But it's there. I know, right. That's it.

Darren O:

using logic and facts? I don't, what are these things?

Sir Gene:

Yes. I know it's crazy stuff. Well, I've enjoyed our conversation. I, certainly thinking you and I are very similar in not just in mindset, but obviously our life experiences and the things that we watched as children growing up. And and the way that we watched the world change around us, I think provides a perspective that. I certainly didn't feel like I had when I was in my twenties and thirties, but now starting to look back at right around 50 and looking back at what the world looks like, and the types of changes that have happened, things are becoming clearer and clearer. And unfortunately, what I'm seeing is that the path that we're on is an accelerating path towards a. Very different America and really not even in America that matters as much in the global world than the America that I was born. Well, I shouldn't say I was born in, but it's certainly the America that I remember growing up in as a kid.

Darren O:

I agree. I still think we can rally. I don't know. Maybe that's just being a little bit too optimistic, but I agree when you're in like your twenties you're you hear people that are in their fifties talking like how the world is so different than when they were your age. And it's like, now all the world doesn't change that much that quick, but here we are. And we've been proven wrong, I guess.

Sir Gene:

yup. That's the age of wisdom. That's ultimately what it is. And hopefully we can pass some of that wisdom on down. Although I suspect a lot of ears or close to it, but maybe if you are still open, Exactly. Well, I appreciate you jumping on. And hopefully everybody enjoyed the conversation that we were having. It was just the conversation. I didn't have a whole lot of plan for this episode. And if you want to listen to more of Darren once you go ahead and plug all the shows that you're do and how people can listen to them.

Darren O:

Guests are grumpy old Benz, which has grumpy old benz.com and the solo show I do as random thoughts, RN. D U M B thoughts.com because Ms. Hard spellings are great for podcast titles, and then you can always find me on the no agenda, rocket roll pre-show, which is two hours before no agenda. We get on play some live rock and roll music and try to rile everybody up before the show. So if you're in the no agenda community, check that out. We're always just trying to have a little bit of fun while the world burns down around us.

Sir Gene:

And if people haven't been listening to the stream, what's the easiest way for them to listen to that. Pre-show on the stream.

Darren O:

No agenda, stream.com.

Sir Gene:

And once you get there, they'll just be able to click on some things and start the stream going.

Darren O:

Yes. Finally updated from the flash player. I sent Adam A. Little bit of code to do HTML five. So that is, there's a nice, easy way to play the stream directly from that page. Or you can get the information there on the full address. If you want to use something like VLC or that to listen, podcast, addict, whatever.

Sir Gene:

perfect. And then I guess we can, pre-announce it. I'll be going on your show next month.

Darren O:

When Ryan or my co-host is having some dental work done in, which is in what a couple of weeks.

Sir Gene:

all right. Sounds great. Once again, I appreciate you being on and thanks everybody for listening.

Intro chitchat
Who is DarrenO
Audio vs Video
Always 11 inches
The world is now more puritan
Should we pass media laws?
Caviar Dreams
Twitch
Education System
End of the American Empire
Rewriting history
Bashing Q
Confirmation bias
TX power outage