0034 Sir Gene Speaks Special - Interview Sir Bemrose

Bemrose: 0:14

tell me what we're doing so we can, we can actually pull a seat sitter and just start the recording mid-sentence in, in a conversation.

Gene: 0:21

so Bemrose

Bemrose: 0:23

to talk on 1.2, five X?

Gene: 0:26

no, I will, take care of getting sped up or slowed down on my end. Mr. Bemrose, why are you so difficult to get an interview with?

Bemrose: 0:39

well, it's, it's not just, it's not necessarily that way with everybody only with the people that I don't really want to talk to

Gene: 0:47

Oh, okay. Cause in the, time, since I asked you to be on the podcast, I have booked and interviewed 14 guests, about

Bemrose: 0:56

all much more interesting than me,

Gene: 0:58

third of them from outside the United States, one of whom didn't speak English and it took this long to get you booked. So do you have an alter life on Twitch where you have millions of followers that you're so accessible or what's the deal?

Bemrose: 1:14

As far as you know, I guess so.

Gene: 1:16

Well, as far as I clearly don't know. Cause if I did

Bemrose: 1:19

lazy or, you know, take your pick.

Gene: 1:21

If, if I would've known I would've gone on twitched and then throw you some bits to get you on here sooner.

Bemrose: 1:27

Oh, that's an idea. I dunno, I guess, I guess, the things weren't working out one way or another, am I supposed to feel shame over this?

Gene: 1:33

no, I'm just curious as to why you're so difficult to book. That's all.

Bemrose: 1:40

I can't tell you,, Gene: you're on here now. That's the important part, right? I guess so.

. Gene: 1:48

saw in your reply back when you did finally accept the invite that you have a requirement of only speaking about topics that you know something about. So I'm going to let you pick the topic.

Bemrose: 2:02

Yeah. Yeah. We call that talking shit by the way.

Gene: 2:05

your topic is talking shit. Oh, I can do

Bemrose: 2:08

no, no, no. What, what, what you just described is Okay, so here's, here's where I'm coming from. I have a very strong opinion on every topic, but I don't hold those up. I normally don't hold those opinions very strongly. If, if you have something that you want to you want to pick my brain on, then I'm willing to listen. I could also go, I mean, you know, we, we could talk about some of the things that that you did on a couple of recent surgeon speaks those for example, a few shows ago, you used the quote that I, I went ahead and wrote this down. If you're not using iOS, then you should be, and then two episodes later you decided that Apple is woke and you said, do not use Apple products. And I'm, I'm trying to figure I did. Did your opinion on iOS changed during that time or? So I, I, it, it just, I wanted to know what, what messaging should I be getting from you for that one?

Gene: 3:01

Well, it depends on the podcast episode, doesn't it?

Bemrose: 3:04

I guess it does.

. Gene: 3:05

I think the fact that you bothered listening to a couple of podcasts is very good. So I think the messaging is right on target. In both those cases. I do think that Apple is an extremely old company and having both Android and iOS devices here and now testing a whole bunch of apps because I've been interviewing software developers that are creating apps for both platforms. I will still stick by my statement that the iOS is a better platform.

Bemrose: 3:36

I, from a purely technical perspective, I don't necessarily even disagree with you, but the iOS platform comes with a whole lot of non-technical baggage that is it's attached to Apple in, in very difficult to extricate ways. And that's probably my main reason why I won't use it.

. Gene: 3:55

And, and that's a

Bemrose: 3:56

I don't have a.

Gene: 3:58

I think Apple has now come out in the lawsuit with whatever that game company that they're suing or is it that yeah that sued them, I guess, they had somebody in a deposition admit to the fact that they were actually working on developing a windows version of iMessage, which is something that is absolutely a way to keep people on iOS. And it was shut down. It was tech totally technically possible they're working on it, but it was shot down by the management because. It would lessen the competitive advantage of having a walled garden by allowing people with computers other than max, to communicate to people who have iPhones. So they're definitely making bad decisions at Apple for the user. They're making good decisions at Apple, for the investors that own Apple stock,

Bemrose: 4:47

Well that that's the, the fiduciary responsibility of any corporation is

Gene: 4:51

Although they're also making bad decisions for those investors by going woke.

Bemrose: 4:56

well the, yes. And, and I think that wokeness is, is a, a new type of corporate parasite that is, is going, you know, in, in, in the hype of, of the current political climate, it is spreading like wildfire. But I think that if the system manages to self-correct and, and if, if there's a large system in the Western world that can self-correct and drag everything back to status quo, it's wall street. They if, if wall street is capable of self-correcting, then a lot of companies are going to have a whole lot of come to Jesus moments about the shareholder damage that they're doing with the new wokeness thing. The one thing that will prevent that from correcting is if if somehow the the, the, the hype, the propaganda of wokeness can push far enough to make sufficient numbers of shareholders believe that that losing money, but giving into wokeness is somehow a shareholder benefit. And I think that's, that's the point where, where corporations, it, I don't know, it tips the wrong way. But I don't, I think that it's probably going to come back at some point in a lot of corporate boards are going to have a lot of explaining to do, and I look forward to that moment.

Gene: 6:17

There have been a few instances of investment funds going green and Al Gore was certainly promoting this 15 years ago to where , it's being encouraged, that they only invest money with or effectively buy stock of companies. That are quote unquote green companies as evaluated by somebody. I believe Adam talked about it probably a year, maybe 18 months ago. When it came up that all these going green efforts lasted two to three years and then were dumped quietly. So as not to make too much of a fuss, because doing this green investing resulted in much lower dividends than looking at company's financials in a more traditional manner. And I think a similar thing may happen here where the going woke or really paying attention to an artificially created phenomenon of all the white men are Nazis that is going to end up losing money. And the smart companies are going to figure that out sooner than later, the dumb companies will stick with it longer and lose more money. I'd love to watch Delta as a prime example and see what happens there.

Bemrose: 7:31

I think you're probably correct with your prediction, that it's going to go along the same way as, as the green The only really disappointing thing is if it happens quietly, which of course there's incentive to sweep all that under the rug. Oh, we used to do this thing, but we don't anymore. Because if, if it comes out publicly that everybody running the company suffered a mass hysteria that turned them into complete retards for a couple of years, then that will harm the company. So nobody wants that. So I think it'll be quiet and it'll be disappointing that we won't have our, our, our day of Shodan frog going. Ha ha. I see what you did there. But if it recovers and we go back to something a little bit more closely resembling capitalism, where the world makes a little bit more sense and, and doesn't just run on hyperbole than that would still be a win,

Gene: 8:24

very few people know that IBM provided the equipment to catalog the Jews and gypsies going to concentration

Bemrose: 8:33

any no agenda producer

Gene: 8:35

Only no agenda that people are aware of this it's a historic fact. Anybody can look it up. But what do people know IBM for?, it's the Watson, it's the cool AI that we're building. If you know both of those things, you gotta be pretty damn scared of Watson. Because IBM has a history of inventing technology for cataloging people like cattle. This is not something that is unique to IBM by any means. I don't know if you're a much of a sci-fi reader. I used to be, I haven't been lately, but I used to be when I was in college. And I remember there was a whole category of books that were dystopian area, where the major sort of warning from reading the book as it were the plot line involved companies doing what's good for the shareholders at the expense of humanity.

Bemrose: 9:30

Well, I think that you you've just nailed the defining characteristic of corporations as they are, is, is they they'll do things for the shareholders at the risk of pretty much everybody. Who's not a shareholder or even the people who are shareholders. If they differ from the majority of shareholders. I don't think that this is, I don't think this is particularly surprising. It's interestingly, it's one of the few things that people on the left and the right can generally agree with about the evils of corporation is, you know, I've, I've got people on, you know, people on the right are looking at all of these woke corporations going, Oh, they're terrible because they're, you know, screwing over humanity and people. You know, I, I have friends who are either environmentalist or otherwise. In fact, I've got one in particular, I've talked about him, but not given his name because he don't, I wouldn't have permission of it where he is a self-avowed socialist. And he is always telling me about every, you know, every time something bad happens in the world, it is entirely the fault of corporations. And it's, it's difficult to disagree when you you've got the, I mean, there's the a classic example of say what was the deep water horizon or Exxon Valdez where you get a large, you know, oil, corporate companies are always the, the scapegoats of everybody on the left, who wants to tell about horrible corporations, but you know, a company that sacrifices safety in the interest of, of marginal profit, that that's a fine example. And there's lots of examples of that.

Gene: 11:03

Yeah. Although with both of those instances you can track it down to individuals that were not following rules and certainly were deviating from what they were supposed to be doing. So they were individual decisions that were made that ended up creating these catastrophes. But I take your point.

Bemrose: 11:25

Well, individual decisions are always made in the context of, of a culture around which various behaviors are either allowed or discouraged. And so the corporate culture is of, of a company that lets people get away with cutting corners or say a company, for example, that optimizes for minimum time to deliver and does not pay, you know, and, and the things that they will cut out are say bathroom breaks for their drivers. This, this was a story only recently, Yeah. And you're only going to get you're. You're always going to get what you optimize for. You, you know, if you only measure if you run a call center and you only measure how many minutes somebody spends on a call, then you're going to get people optimizing for what are the minimum, you know what, what's the minimum time. And if you have people running an oil rig or an oil pipeline, and you ma only measure you rate people based on how many liters of oil go through your pipeline, then that's the only thing people are going to optimize for people are very good at optimizing for the metrics. It's one of the reasons metrics tend to not work very well holistically speaking.

Gene: 12:42

And I would add that. I think It's Human nature to balance. Optimizing for the least amount of effort involved and the metric that brings the minimal acceptable levels of requirements. So if you take those two factors and you, jigger them on two axes, the sweet spot is where most people tend to operate.

Bemrose: 13:05

There's, there's certainly the, the rare breed of people who genuinely want to Excel and do a good job, but those are not the, the bulk of, I mean, that's not the bulk of people, so it's not going to be the bulk of, of corporate

Gene: 13:17

Yeah, it's a very much as a bell curve and the people that are going to be the largest segment in the middle are going to operate subconsciously for the most part based on those two metrics., I've spent a lot of time in operational efficiency., that's kind of what I've done for a living for a long time. And it is always surprising to me at how people that own and run companies. So whether you're a hired CEO or you're , the founder that is still a CEO, how people are shocked when they start seeing hard evidence of this thing that I just told you , of the fact that people tend to subconsciously optimize for those two factors.

Bemrose: 13:56

The, the ones who are more self-aware will consciously optimize for it.

, Gene: 13:59

and most people drift into it, even if they started off differently, because at some point. It just becomes a job and you, get hobbies, you get married, you get kids, you get other interests that take much higher priority. And when you don't consciously focus on what you're doing when, which is true for the vast majority of people uh, what ends up happening is you subconsciously slide to the sweet spot of those two metrics.

Bemrose: 14:25

Yeah. Yeah. Minimal work for maximal, not getting chewed out. If that makes sense.

Gene: 14:32

And so the there's a way around that by artificially changing where those two lines intersect as management, but that is typically not something most companies do because it requires sufficiently large efforts by

Bemrose: 14:49

Well, you, you can also,

Gene: 14:50

don't want to work too hard,

Bemrose: 14:52

you can also drive stress and dissatisfaction in a workplace. You know, not, not naming any names, but I know a couple of people who happen to work in the, in a hip hypothetical call center. And they are every four months they're changing the metrics by which they are gauging whether or not somebody does a good job. And the people who are especially adaptable, usually just drop into optimizing for the new metrics quickly. And they're the ones who do well and the people who are not adaptable or the, you know, the, the people who are really dependable. And once you get into your stride can be very, very productive people. But take a while to adjust. They're the ones who end up getting stress and a feeling of whiplash every single time that the metrics change in what, how they're rated changes. And this breeds some severe dissatisfaction with your job, with the company that you're getting and, and, you know, higher turnover. And so it, it can be definitely detrimental to not allow people to get into the stride of things before you change it. Which I guess is the opposite side of the pendulum than what you just described, where if you let people get too much in a rut, then you're not getting optimal. I don't know. I, there are whole books on management, which I haven't read, which probably cover all of this.

Gene: 16:12

yeah, there's too many of them out there. That's for sure. Okay. A super important question. What's the best place to eat in Seattle.

Bemrose: 16:19

Well, it can be flippant and say dicks. Just because I love the name, it's an old style drive in that they, they, I mean, they don't sell 15 cent hamburgers anymore. But they sell, you know, like a buck, 25 hamburgers that, that are all pre-made and you know, you, you, you don't get to decide, Hey, I want this with, or without pickles, you don't get to decide, I want a, you know, a bacon or, you know, you, you get like, I want a hamburger or cheeseburger and those are what's ready and they just hand it to you. It's, it's really a throwback to the 1940s. And I don't know. It's, it's a pretty cool experience. I don't think that's the best food though.

Gene: 16:52

Okay. What would be the best

Bemrose: 16:53

It's, it's tough. I don't go. I don't go to Seattle very often. I'm going to go with, because, because Seattle cuisine is is Seattle is still outside of the North Atlantic is probably the best place to get seafood in the continental us because you know, not like North Atlantic is really good for the. The warmer water, seafood, the grand banks, a lot of the crustaceans and stuff. But if you want say salmon or the, the cold, deep water fish, then the ELA, the Gulf of Alaska is really the best place to get them. And, you know, Alaska doesn't have the infrastructure. So all those fishing ships come out of Seattle. So I'm going to go with a seafood place called Ivers, which is right on the Seattle waterfront. And they have two ways of doing it. They have a fish bar where you can go in and get a fish and chips or a boiled Cod or grilled salmon. And, and I, you know, usually with, with chips, with it, which, which for the Americans in the audience means fry, French fries. But th th the other option that you have is that you can actually go in and do a sit down restaurant and order, you know, they have professional chefs from that are of course, you know, really good, and you can sit down. And the thing is in the sit-down restaurant, you can order a plate of, you know, garlic and crusted honey salmon, or something like that, and easily drop a hundred dollars on it if you want. And it's fantastic. Or you can go to the fish bar at the front, stand there, get your food in a paper wrapper. And it's exactly the same salmon cooked a little bit differently, and you're paying $9 for it.

Gene: 18:38

interesting. Now there's a place that's similar to what you described. That's that I've been to, and I think it was near Pike's market.

Bemrose: 18:47

Yeah. Actually I versus just down the Hill from pike

Gene: 18:50

I wonder if that's where I went then. Yeah, because as you're describing, I'm like, Oh, I think I've been there.

Bemrose: 18:56

Yeah. You know, the, the front of Seattle is a pretty steep Hill because all of a, you know, all, all the waterways around here were carved out by glaciation. So there's, you know, if, if all of the, the doomsaying about climate change, Oh, the sea level is going to come up by three meters. You're like okay, so we'll just pull the streets back a couple feet and then we're good because

Gene: 19:17

are there any streets that are within three feet of sea level? I doubt it.

Bemrose: 19:22

no, well,

Gene: 19:23

maybe they're not even the ramps to the fairies are that low, those ramps are probably 10

Bemrose: 19:28

no, no, they're steep. Well, we have we you know, we're not quite Bay of Fundy here, but we have a title range of about three or four meters. So a, you know, when, when the tide is low, you've got to go 12 more feet down.

Gene: 19:43

feet for our American listeners.

Bemrose: 19:45

Yes. Yes. I I'm sorry. I, I'm not European. And I use things like meters, not because of Europe, but because I have a what, what, before. Before the rhetoric around the religion of science came up, I would was actually a scientist and I trained. And as, so when you are talking, you know, doing physics and stuff, you don't normally talk in feet. You talk in meters for a lot of, a lot of parts of it just became a habit. I also drive my wife nuts because all of the clocks that I use are always set on a 24 hour time format. So people will be like, Oh, what time is it? Oh, it's it's 1428.

Gene: 20:30

got it. That's that's a good point. So you were anointed in the science religion, huh?

Bemrose: 20:37

No, no. I,

Gene: 20:39

Well, how do you become a priest of science?

Bemrose: 20:41

Propaganda.

Gene: 20:42

Ah, okay. But without the anointment

Bemrose: 20:46

I practiced the, I used and became good at the process known as the scientific method, not realizing at the time that in the future, those few people who understood the process would be the people who self anointed as scientists would be the beginning of a brand new religion. Who many of whose adherence were. Completely ignorant as to what was going on and just believed blindly that, Oh, you can do science on home home. And so when I learned how to use the scientific method as a process for gathering knowledge, it was just another tool for learning about the world in front of me. And I probably would never have identified as a scientist if I had known that years later, that the word would be used as the priests of the new dominant religion.

Gene: 21:51

and what you speak of, I believe was one of those heretical teachings that has since fallen to the wayside.

Bemrose: 21:59

That's that's exactly it.

Gene: 22:01

As a, philosophy student, myself, learned the scientific method and realized that virtually no scientists actually understand they're applied correctly because it's really something based around logic, which science these

Bemrose: 22:15

which has been abandoned.

Gene: 22:17

Yes, the logic is taught in philosophy departments. It's not taught in mathematics or science. So it's a very different beast than what it used to be. what I'm describing, isn't even the recent, like that was back in the nineties, that was already the case that you start dealing with people with scientific degrees. Uh, Now certainly people that were in their thirties and forties in the nineties, those people knew better, but people that were coming out of the departments out of,

Bemrose: 22:45

Yeah. People, people our age.

Gene: 22:47

yeah. People our age, well, I'm 109 right now. So I'm a wee

Bemrose: 22:50

I understand.

Gene: 22:51

but generally

Bemrose: 22:52

I was in college. I was in college in the early nineties and was, was learning from people. Some of whom, you know, the, the, the only a couple of psychology classes that I took. I think one of the reasons why I stayed away from psychology and philosophy, which by the way, what psychology and philosophy were taught as part of the same class that should teach you, tell you everything you needed to know

Gene: 23:18

there a class called propaganda? One Oh one

Bemrose: 23:21

kind of and it was pretty clear the, the person that was teaching understood about the idea of, of testing and the actual science of, of, you know, learning how, you know, doing experiments controlled experiments on people. And there were, you know, the book contained some of the lessons on that, but. Really the person teaching the course really just wanted to go into the persuasive aspect of it, of, of, if you use this technique, you will be able to dupe this many people. They didn't say it that way, but it, it felt fake enough to me that I ended up not being that much or that interested to truth be told. I went into computers as, as my vocation and ended up getting a computer science degree because computers were so much easier to understand that.

Gene: 24:14

mm. I

Bemrose: 24:16

And I still think that's true.

Gene: 24:17

I totally agree. And I've said for a long time that the only way to fix the judicial system is to take the human factor out of it.

Bemrose: 24:27

I heard that on one of your recent podcasts

Gene: 24:29

I bring it up every few years, but I've been saying it for probably 30, 40 years.

Bemrose: 24:33

Yeah. I mean, you went all in and I like to a point where, where if I were challenging you, I might walk you back on the 100% robotic police force. But, but I understood where you were coming from. And it definitely makes sense. There is a human element, which humans, primary infallibility, and one that we've been seeing in the last 18 months for certain is their tendency to be taken in by the persuasiveness of their other humans. And you know, a human can, can hold a belief right up until somebody else puts a new belief in their head.

Gene: 25:07

Yeah. And then very simple experiment that's been done over and over and it doesn't require, a whole lot of prep is the, everybody facing the wrong way in an elevator experiment where you get a group of three or four, maybe five volunteers that going through in the elevator, preferably one in the building with a lot of floors and you get in and everybody faces the back of the elevator instead of the door, which typically people face the door. When you do that new people entering the elevator, and this has been documented many, many times with cameras and then fun videos and things. We'll walk in the elevator and then they'll stand there facing the door and then kind of look around and see everybody faces the back. And about 75% of the people will turn around and face the back of the elevator for the rest of their ride. Now, nothing was said, no, no spoken words. There was no requirement to face backwards.

Bemrose: 26:00

That is a fascinating experiment.

Gene: 26:03

Yeah. And it's one that anybody can try and just get a few friends together and find the tall building and you can conduct it yourself.

Bemrose: 26:08

I I'm, I'm hypothesizing how I would behave if, if I was one of the test subjects of such an experiment. And I think looking at this, there's a very good chance I would, I would see this and I would see some kind of cult-like behavior of everybody facing the wrong way and be like, maybe I'll take the next one.

Gene: 26:28

Okay. You can do that if an elevator full of people arise. But what if you're one of the people that's part of the same floor that these people get in on? Like you get into an empty elevator. Everybody gets in, you're all facing the back. As you get in, you start turning around you face forward, and then you look around and you realize everybody else is still facing backwards.

Bemrose: 26:48

A secret that not many people know about, sir. Bemrose I actually really hate elevators.

Gene: 26:51

no. Oh really? Okay.

Bemrose: 26:54

My wife has mobility issues and we'll get to, there's a lot of places where we'll have to go, you know, we go into a building or something have to go up two floors and she will go and stand in line for the elevator and I'll just wave. And I'll say meet you on third and then I'll take the stairway up.

Gene: 27:09

And what does the maximum number of floors you were willing to do that with?

Bemrose: 27:14

I don't know. I don't spend a lot of time in buildings that have more than four or five and four floors. I'll be short of breath when I reached the top, but I'll still do it.

Gene: 27:23

Okay, well, that's great exercise. Honestly. I discovered that going up and down stairs definitely makes an impact when we have the three-day power outage in Texas.

Bemrose: 27:34

What do you do? You live in a tall building.

Gene: 27:36

No, I live in the house that has two stories, but what I had to do during the power outage is I had to haul hot water from downstairs to the room where my pets live. Upstairs to keep the room warm and I needed to do that about every 45 minutes pretty much for 72 hours. So I, my sleep came in 20 minute increments.

Bemrose: 27:59

Are we, are we talking like coldblooded pets, like

Gene: 28:01

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, I have I have snakes.

Bemrose: 28:04

to say, cause I never did that for my cat.

Gene: 28:06

No, the cancel keep you warm. No, these, these animals, they don't do well in cold weather.

Bemrose: 28:13

That was, that was a truly exceptional storm for Texas in terms of, you know, it's when they say there's a a hundred year weather event entertained. Yeah.

Gene: 28:22

Yeah. It was a a hundred year weather event that happens about every 10 years.

Bemrose: 28:26

That, which means well that's that's of course, because of climate

Gene: 28:31

well, yes, naturally. Cause you know, climate really needs to be measured in years. Doesn't it?

Bemrose: 28:37

more importantly the entire climate of the earth, it is totally appropriate to measure and, and construct a, an accurate model of the entire climatic system of the entire earth based on only a couple of decades worth of data, because there couldn't possibly be any cycles longer than that.

Gene: 28:53

absolutely. you have to essentially make an exception for the possibility of any external force. Other than humans could have possibly been responsible for any deviation from the norm of the climate. And that norm, it has to be calculated based on the one year out of the last, roughly 2 billion years since the earth cooled down and has been habitable. So of course the climate of the earth has not changed in that entire amount of time. We know this because in the 1920s we measured the temperature. Yeah. And, and that was the defining moment. This is my perspective on the way that the cult of climate yeah. Of climatology the cult of the church of climatology, the way that they act is very similar to the stereotypical view of the British or American going into deep, dark Africa in the 18 hundreds to go hunting for anything that moves because the whole place was full of unknowns and dangerous things. There would be dragons there. Exactly. Essentially saying, well, we know what the norm is. And anything outside of that norm, which is today in 1860 in England, anything outside of that norm is a deviation. That clearly is an abomination of God. And therefore has no soul and therefore we can kill it.

Bemrose: 30:24

Which by the way includes any species that might live in Africa, but don't do well in, in Europe

Gene: 30:29

Oh yeah, yeah,

Bemrose: 30:30

or may have just been hunted to extinction in Europe, in generations, before.

Gene: 30:35

yeah. Hunting certainly has an impact, but really, if you look at the number of species that have been alive, because we've been able to discover some sort of artifacts, whether it's bones or something else of those species compared to the number of lives today, you have to realize that the biggest factor in the deaths of whole branches of the tree of life. The biggest factor in that is the planet earth planet earth has been changing for millennia for millions of years, not just thousands of years. That change both creates new species and it destroys old species. That has been going on. It's still going on. was certainly my take on this and I, think I've talked about it before is that humans may have colonized and populated the majority of the planet, but we are nonetheless not special or different from other creatures with whom we share 99% of our DNA. That doesn't just include apes and monkeys. That essentially is going down to the common household rat. We are simply the more successful recent version, and we may end up being the most short-lived version as well, because one of the things that we've discovered how to do better than other creatures of the past is how to kill ourselves. Absolutely. That's exactly it. So we have we've stumbled up on this.

Bemrose: 32:02

I, you know, the, the, the, we had argument when you say something like that is, is that, you know, somebody will say, well, you know, humans can you know, we, we use tools, well, we're not the first creature on this planet to use tools. We might be the most advanced and we use, certainly use some of the most advanced tools, but you know, or, or humans modified their environment is an argument I've heard before. And my, my common counterargument to that is do you, do you remember the first mass extinction on this planet? Well, of course you don't because it was millions of years ago and we weren't around it did the

Gene: 32:40

Well, it was

Bemrose: 32:40

it was there was

Gene: 32:41

over 2 billion years ago.

Bemrose: 32:42

Yeah, it was, it was a couple of billion. The very first life over on the planet was all Rose and lived by consuming various organic compounds. But did not combine them with oxygen. They extracted energy directly rather than using an oxidation reaction. And in fact, if, if you don't happen to be an organism that uses oxygen for the purpose of doing controlled extraction of energy from chemicals, which by the way is a pretty efficient way to store energy. It's why all the earth on life on earth does it now. But if, if that's not what you do, you know, oxygen oxidation in general is incredibly poisonous because it's so reactive, it will mess up any chemicals. So if you've got chemicals that are part of your makeup and you don't have a means of dealing with that oxygen, then it is ridiculously poisonous. And there was a new type of life called cyanobacteria back in the day that they were kind of, sort of the inventors of photosynthesis. And they became so successful in Durham, basically converting light from the sun, inside their cells, into breaking apart molecules into long chain carbons that they could store energy with and oxygen, which they could then use to release it later. That they became so prevalent that they oxygenated the atmosphere of the planet, which not only destroyed almost all of the anaerobic life out on the surface. And the only anaerobic life we find now is in really deep places or in caves or places that have low oxygen. But if you want to say that humans changed the climate or change the world more than any other species, I will point you to cyanobacteria who literally murdered all other life that came before them by changing the composition of the atmosphere to include this chemical, which was deadly to everyone. But,

Gene: 34:45

are you trolling me right now?

Bemrose: 34:49

when do I, when did I stop?

Gene: 34:51

Well, no, I have to ask, because I literally did an episode that talked about this in the last week and a half. I can't remember which episode number it is, but that was one of the topics covered was cyanobacteria. And the first big die-off event, which was between 2.3 and 2 billion years ago, it actually took hundreds of millions of years for that to finally kill off the

Bemrose: 35:15

choices between, I honestly didn't know about that episode and hadn't listened to it or I'm trolling you. I'm going to go with on totally trolling. You.

Gene: 35:23

You can't really be trolling me. Cause if you were trolling, you would have immediately said why I've never listened to your podcast. So I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm going to take that as just a, a crazy coincidence because that is absolutely what I talked about. And I wanted to let you continue speaking uninterrupted to see if you

Bemrose: 35:42

Just in case I said anything that would incriminate

Gene: 35:46

well, first of all, , yes, because the climate is definitely a topic I've spent a lot of time researching and debunking, and it's something that comes up on a regular basis. I think I first started sending Adam papers on new research coming out about essentially changes to the way that we're interpreting the climate of the planet. Probably about 10, 11 years ago. It's been awhile and like enough that he got sick of me talking about it.

Bemrose: 36:16

I don't understand how anybody could get sick of you

Gene: 36:19

I know, right? It's, it's a shocker. I can't really understand. I, when I get bored, I just speak out loud so I can then entertainmyself. But yeah, I'm glad you said what you did cause you, you did say everything correctly and it had absolutely true. The big die-off event was the oxygenation of the planet creating oxygen, which is a erratical that really rips apart. Anything that isn't in cased in lipids is something that became the foundation of new life forms on the planet, which eventually led to us.

Bemrose: 36:55

It readily interacts with hydrocarbons in an energy releasing state, which is really, really nice if you're building everything out of hydrocarbons for the purpose of, you know, if you're storing energy using hydrocarbons. But if, I mean, if you are also happened to be made of hydrocarbons and in an oxygen environment, you need some way that it doesn't just start ripping yourselves apart in an energetic state, which, which when it's slow, it's called rust or decay. And when it's fast, it's called fire. But either way it's destructive.

Gene: 37:25

Yeah. it's interesting to see how people don't understand how chemistry works or certainly how physics works. Most people are clueless about those things, another pet topic for me that rarely. Anybody ever really wants to talk about is Venus because I'm very, very much on team #Venera, Venera, Venerais the traditional that's what most people say when they hear that as well. But Valera is the Russian version of the word Venus, which would be the Latin version. And so vinifera is by all counts. If you start looking at it without any bias, a much better candidate for

Bemrose: 38:10

Has anybody ever done that?

Gene: 38:11

settled people on

Bemrose: 38:12

No. No. It looked at a topic without any bias.

Gene: 38:15

I there've been a few people here and there, but it's rare. It's rare., the, the bias for Mars has been prominent in American culture probably for 50, 60 years. For whatever reason I don't know, people think of Mars as the place to colonize and it's ridiculous.

Bemrose: 38:30

As, as inhospitable, as the surface of a planet that receives very little sunlight and has no atmosphere to speak of might be. I think that humans would have an easier time surviving there than on the surface of Venus.

Gene: 38:45

well, that's part of the problem is that. People are hung up on this notion of surface. And the way you need to look at Venus is not like Mars. You don't get all

Bemrose: 38:55

Are you talking, are we talking like cloud city? Are we going to make a best spin on Venus? That actually that's probably more feasible

Gene: 39:02

the proper way to think of Venus is as an ocean, the world with no islands at all. So if you think of Venus as having the surface of Venus, which is what people

Bemrose: 39:14

Oh, I saw that Kevin Costner movie.

Gene: 39:16

right? The surface of Venus is just like the depths of the ocean on earth. It is inhospitable. The pressures are tremendous. There are various noxious gases bubbling out of the planet. You would not want to be at the, the depths of the, Marianne, the trench here on the earth, any more than you would on the surface of Venus. But if you think of Venus, not as a planet with an atmosphere, but rather as an ocean planet and the ocean just doesn't happen to be a H2O. It's not water. It's other gases that are heavy gases, like sulfuric

Bemrose: 39:51

it, isn't it mostly like methane and ammonia or

Gene: 39:55

there's ammonia. There's a lot of sulfur in there. A sulfuric acid forms naturally with the right combination of temperature and pressure. But what's cool about Venus. Is that at about 55 kilometers above that surface? It is absolutely perfect. And what I mean by perfect is it is roughly one atmosphere. So it's earth pressure, which means you, you don't need a pressure suit to walk around at that

Bemrose: 40:28

Well, no, but you need something to protect you from the floating acid in the atmosphere.

Gene: 40:33

That acid is not floating that high up. Now, what you do have at that level is mostly carbon dioxide, but all of the really noxious poisonous stuff is below you at about 45 kilometers and lower. So if you fall off your barge, you're in for a unpleasant experience, But if, let's say we get to the point where we have the dirigibles floating around that at 55 kilometers on the Venus, instead of having a parachute, you would probably have some type of an inflatable balloon that that's in your backpack that drags you back up in case you do fall over. So this is, these are not insurmountable problems,

Bemrose: 41:10

Well, if somebody falls off a boat in the ocean, we don't give them a parachute. We give them something that, that increases their buoyancy.

Gene: 41:18

exactly. And that's exactly what we would need to do. We need to increase the buoyancy of the person that fell off

Bemrose: 41:24

I'm on board with this idea. I too am on team vagina. Now

Gene: 41:28

Team. That's that's cool. I'm more than happy to send you some literature from the scientific community on this I know, it sounds funny to use that term, but that is a term that a lot of people that are pro exploration of Venus uses team manera. So I didn't make it up. You may, think I was trying to be funny about it, but that's not the case.

Bemrose: 41:46

making, I never attributed you to making anything

Gene: 41:49

Yeah, that's true. I don't really have a sense of humor. Fair enough. But it's, it's a cool idea. And the more you look at it, the more you realize it is, good. Venus's roughly the size of earth is just a tad smaller Mars is significantly smaller. So the gravity on Venus is lack closer to the gravity on earth. The raw materials on Venus exists in a gaseous and liquid form, and so they would be mined, but not mined by drilling through a hard layer, but mind by essentially siphoning them at various levels. So if you think of lower atmosphere of Venus is really like a it's a type of distillation where you're varying the Heights that we should distilling. What the hell is the

Bemrose: 42:33

Well, you, you, you had me at, at, you know, you can definitely get a lot of, you can get your, you know, energy from methane. You can get your, you know, anything that that's gaseous form. I don't, I don't know. I'm going to have to see some science about the idea, like if, if I can just like, send a ladle down to the surface and dip up and get a ladle full of iron or I'm sorry. Iron is denser than rock. I'm not convinced that that you're going to have it just floating in the atmosphere.

Gene: 43:01

Yeah, well, you may not have iron

Bemrose: 43:03

but, but I mean, you know, how, how do you get it without expending an immense amount of energy in filtration of some kind?

Gene: 43:10

Oh yeah. Yeah. You're, you're going to need some filtration for sure. But

Bemrose: 43:13

unless you think there's just liquid aluminum lakes down there, you can throw down a pipe.

Gene: 43:18

There are essentially as you go deeper into that atmosphere and denser, you get to that area where some things that are solid here on the earth actually become liquid in its natural state on Venus. And some things, some materials become gaseous. So you, you may actually have things that are solids on the earth that are gases on Venus,

Bemrose: 43:39

What is the surface temperature?

Gene: 43:41

Let's see. Let's I'm going to do live Googling here. Let's see what we find out.

Bemrose: 43:47

No, this is great. Cause we just cut it all out in post. Cause we're not going

Gene: 43:50

Yeah, exactly. That's the beauty of it. So it looks like from the measurements that were done, they were about 470 degrees Celsius.

Bemrose: 43:59

That's I mean, that's not warm enough

Gene: 44:00

well, I don't know. I mean, there are metals there. We can, we can do more digging into it and like I said, I'll send you more of the literature, the point of Venus's.

Bemrose: 44:10

And learning about this. I'm just, you know, I'm sorry. I, I have to apologize whenever I encountered new fact, and this is one thing that, that causes a lot of people to think of me if they think charitably as a skeptic, but otherwise they'll say, Oh, you what's the word? How about buzzkill? Is that whenever I'm encountering something new, the first thing I try to figure out is does it mesh with everything else? I know. And so I'm always probing for places where, okay, this might might not make sense. So I you'll have to, excuse me if you're presenting new ideas

Gene: 44:42

clearly a heretic of that, that scientific variety that you mentioned, because that's the only people that

Bemrose: 44:48

Yeah. Well, one once upon a time, the practice of science required skeptics like me, but nowadays there's just no space in the new religion.

Gene: 44:57

yeah., 90% of scientists agree. Therefore it's a fact. That's how it works these days. Science has become very democratic and it's religion.

Bemrose: 45:05

You know, there was a, an early episode of grumpy old bends where we had a guest. The guest was sir, Carl from who are these podcasts. And he used a line to describe me that I always thought was, was very good. He said your level of sarcasm is disturbing, and I'm going to go ahead and be stow that upon you as well, because what I'm learning is that you don't really change vocal inflection when you are employing sarcasm. And it's actually quite difficult to determine whether you're in that mode or not. Bravo, it, it actually is a, a real benefit to have that characteristic if you're going to troll things. And of course, you know, being a professional troll, I, I approve of that sort of thing.

Gene: 45:47

It's a hard life, but it's one that I fall into trolling has its ups and downs, but once a troll, it's hard to change your course. Incidentally you mentioned that you don't get out to Seattle very much. So are you Northeast or South of Seattle?

Bemrose: 46:03

I am North of Seattle.

Gene: 46:04

Okay.

Bemrose: 46:05

I am, I am in a beautiful city called Everett Washington,

Gene: 46:09

I know Everett. Yeah. I've stayed in Everett. Absolutely. So , you're not that far from the ferries up there.

Bemrose: 46:16

No. I'm, I'm only a few miles away from the from the Boeing Everett plant where most of the seven 37 and seven 47 and seven 70 sevens have all been

Gene: 46:28

And I've been to that plant multiple times.

Bemrose: 46:31

Oh, I'm

Gene: 46:32

Absolutely. Yeah. And there's an, there's an.

Bemrose: 46:34

well, when I drive by there, it's it's I hope that they're not at shifts change.

Gene: 46:37

There's an H Mart in Everett that I've been to

Bemrose: 46:41

Yeah. So I am an editor and for most of my career, I ended up commuting around the outskirts of Seattle to either that the two companies that I've worked at extensively were in Bellevue or in Redmond. Then that's East of Seattle. So that's I, I never had a lot of reason to go downtown other than it up until the recent woke, which kind of increased the homeless rate and therefore decrease the beauty of it. It's, it's still a very pretty city, as long as you're not viewing it at street level. And you any, any, anywhere that you can get a view of the sound and out across the sound of the mountains is still an amazing view. And if you are, if you're an elite in one of the skyscrapers and you look around, it's a lovely place to be, but at, at ground level, I don't go to Seattle anymore.

Gene: 47:31

That makes sense. Hey, hold on one sec.

Bemrose: 47:34

I get the feeling. This is going to be more than one second, but I'll

Gene: 47:36

I just get an alarm that pumped up here. Hold on. I didn't, I didn't expect no Jen to run as long as it had, but I guess I should have given, given that they're coming back from a hiatus, I kind of should have known that they were going to

Bemrose: 47:54

I should have expected that. And I am sorry for recommending, because I thought we were going to be starting about an hour and a half earlier, and that wouldn't be a big problem. And I was, in fact, I was when, when the show was just ending and you sent that message on, on NAS I had been just about to text you and say, Hey, if we're starting too late, let me know. And we'll reschedule

Gene: 48:17

no, we're good. I just got a text back that I needed to check on and I think I'm good.

Bemrose: 48:22

Well remember it's always 5:00 PM somewhere

Gene: 48:24

that's correct. So , you're up never, it's there's an H Mart there. Do you ever go to the H Mart?

Bemrose: 48:30

I'm not familiar with what an H Mart is.

Gene: 48:32

The H Mart is a it's a Korean grocery store, but it's not like a Mon packer in grocery store. It's like a bigger than whole foods, size Korean grocery store. It is predominantly Korean, but they also carry all Asian products obviously. And there's a few things that I really like that they do a good job of there. They're what do you call them? Prefabricated foods are Asian, mostly Korean foods that are cooked that you can just warm up at home are really good. But also they have an awesome seafood selection of all kinds of fish beyond what you would find at an American grocery store.

Bemrose: 49:10

Two big maps. It looks like it's actually in Lynwood,

Gene: 49:14

Oh, is that the closest one I could have sworn there was one of, I never, it is. Is that where the closest one is showing to?

Bemrose: 49:21

well, that's, that's what a quick sir, while it was, it was being, so I don't know how reliable that is, but, but I have Google blocked at the raspberry PI

Gene: 49:29

so Linwood is how far from you? That's not that far though.

Bemrose: 49:32

not Lynwood it's same County it's sort of the next city over.

Gene: 49:36

You know what, maybe it is that one. And I just I'm remembering how I drove.

Bemrose: 49:41

Yeah. That's welt. I, I I've been in Austin two times in my life and I assure you that if I were trying to like, Oh, I remember there was a thing in Austin and you'd be like no, that's, that's actually in Waco. Oh

Gene: 49:55

It's a good Kolachi place right off 35. I think it was Dustin, maybe a hundred miles North of there. But anyway, so if you do get an opportunity to swing by H Mart on a drive check out their seafood section and the rest of their foods, it's, it's always a fun experience and they're on nationwide chain, but generally only have a few stores per city rather than, you know, 20 stores like whole foods, Well, we've talked about Venus. What, give me another topic. You're an expert in that we can talk about.

Bemrose: 50:24

Well, as we were saying the, the fix for the current crony capitalism and, or the, the corporatism that we seem to be suffering in the world today is that we need to abolish all corporations.

Gene: 50:35

right.

Bemrose: 50:36

talking about,

Gene: 50:38

I could see that. I mean, it's, it's really a structure that, that has more problems than solutions. Doesn't it?

Bemrose: 50:44

I actually have, I have a more rational line of thought than that. I mean, I, I just gave you the, the you know, CNN or Buzzfeed explanation. But I have, you know, being here on the left coast, I, if, if I want to communicate with people nearby, I have to be at least aware of the fact that not everybody thinks like me. And in fact nobody does. So I have a number of, of friends who are well to, to describe their political views succinctly, I would say they're, I'm completely wrong. In their political views. But I get, I get a lot of, I have communicated with a number of people who think that you know, capitalism is wrong and is a problem. And is the reason why you know, the world is, is failing. And have you ever heard the term late stage capitalism? it's a lot of people will point to some ill of today's society and say, see capitalism caused this. And then they'll, you know, put their head down and start tapping into their iPhones and maybe buy some beer coin or something.

, Gene: 51:50

as they're sipping on their Starbucks. Yeah.

Bemrose: 51:52

yeah, exactly. I have to point out over and over again, that what we have is, is no more capitalist than, or, you know, it's no more the result of capitalism than you know, I guess at this point Russia is more capitalist than United States China in, if you take out the any industry or zone where the CCP wants to extend its fingers directly, if you go into all of the places where China, Chinese companies and Chinese people are not being directly controlled by the party, then they are far more capitalist than America is in, in fact to the detriment, because there are real problems with capitalism. Around the, the cutthroat nature around its tendency to eh, I wouldn't say that capital, that, that in a capitalist society, that the little guy is, is necessarily pushed down, but it's more like, the free market does not care about you. If you don't have something to bring to the market. I think that's a fair assessment of capitalism.

Gene: 52:56

no, I know you're trolling me because I literally did an episode on how Russia is way more capitalistic and even China, to some extent in the U S right now, probably about three weeks ago.

Bemrose: 53:08

how much time do you have? Cause I feel you've got a lot of episodes out by now and I feel like I can go through all of your

Gene: 53:13

I do an episode every other day. So I've got three 30, three episodes out. I've only been podcasting for two months. So

Bemrose: 53:19

it shouldn't take that long. I mean, it shouldn't take that long.

Gene: 53:23

no, really,

Bemrose: 53:24

one of your, yeah.

Gene: 53:24

I think that would be a great way to do it. And I know that you did mention to be fair to you at the beginning, that you'd be more than happy to talk about topics that I covered in my episodes. I didn't. Didn't really realize you were going to be literally doing that, but that's okay. Oh, I'm totally on board with

Bemrose: 53:41

That's the point that I was going to make and, and you, you can stop me or let me go. If, if you've already made this one is that America is not capitalist at this point. What America has is what I refer to charitably as corporatism, but what a lot of people might know is crony capitalism.

Gene: 53:57

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that literally was one of my episodes I called it a, a what was my term for it? It was, it was a, a form of oligarchy because beyond just simply having corporations, you have corporations that are exhibiting a trait, which is generally been frowned upon for multiple factors for corporations to have. And that is an emotional component that makes corporate decisions on how a corporation reacts, how it spends its money, how it directs people to act based, not on what's good for the SOC holders, but based on things like going woke and really acting more like a person in that regard, which is really where you get to the the oligopolies, because they're they're embedding a lot more irrational human components. Rather than purely capitalist ultimate reward, financial driven components. Well, if I have to blame somebody for the current direction of the United States, I'm going to point the finger at the baby boomer parents who absolutely failed being parents. This was the, the generation that believes in free love.

Bemrose: 55:19

The baby boomer was kind of a long generation. You're talking to people like, like the people who had kids in the seventies of the people that had kids the nineties, because I think that parenting styles changed

Gene: 55:28

They did, they did. They, that's a very good point. So basically the parents of the millennials, that part of the baby boomer generation is the one that I'm referring to. These were the people that were , the college students and know, young people in the 1970s. So they absolutely were not having kids in the seventies. They started calving kids in the eighties and through the nineties, but that, that style of on the one hand indulging your child. And on the other hand keeping them safe to a degree that is ridiculous and bad for the development of the child.

Bemrose: 56:07

The, the former is, is what I would refer to as the participation trophy aspect. And the ladder is depending on which way you want to go with it, you can call it no child left behind or, or I, I refer to it as the zero tolerance policies.

Gene: 56:23

Yeah, it's, it's not letting children play in a way that allows them to grow up to be adults. It's it's really, what's, been happening from a, if you look at it from a more of an outside in perspective in the United States instead of raising children, by letting them essentially keeping them alive by keeping predators away. But for the most part, letting them wrestle and fight and get hurt even, and, and eat things that are poisonous. And essentially you learn to be in the adult by surviving through childhood. That's the way that pretty much all animals on the planet work. And then with varying degrees of parental control, obviously the humans were probably the most parental controlled because we have such a long developmental cycle, but that got raised to the next power. Starting with really the 1990s, but not children born in 1990, but children born in the eighties that were six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years in the 1990s. That was the beginning of that big change as I saw it. And those children were not allowed to experience any danger, any perceived danger whatsoever when I was a

Bemrose: 57:47

I mean, I feel like, I feel like I escaped public school. Right, right. As that was ramping up.

Gene: 57:52

see if you can share some of these experience or check off some boxes that you've done. It's like when I was a kid when I got dropped off by the school bus, I came to home to an empty house. I had a key, there was no adult supervision, nobody was there. I got on my bike and I rode anywhere from five miles to 30 miles away to hang out with friends at a mall. Uh, Well, I'm exaggerating, I've walked uphill both ways too. So don't forget that part of it,

Bemrose: 58:22

Yeah. I did that in

Gene: 58:23

but it sure seemed like 30 miles realistically. It

Bemrose: 58:26

Our college was built on an MCs you're painting. I really did walk uphill both

Gene: 58:30

digit. Yeah, that's perfect. Where'd you grow up?

Bemrose: 58:33

Well, I grew up just outside of Portland.

Gene: 58:35

Oh, okay.

Bemrose: 58:36

I, in fact, I grew up in the Washington half of Portland. There's a town called Vancouver, Washington, which everybody in Oregon and everybody in Washington always forgets that it's part of Washington and pretty much everything about it culturally. And

Gene: 58:51

Vancouver is where you lived,

Bemrose: 58:53

it's

Gene: 58:53

you can go shopping in Portland

Bemrose: 58:55

Yeah, you do. I was, I was born. I I've lived my whole life in Washington state. I was born in Walla Walla, which is Eastern Washington, which is much more rural. And my dad had come from there. And so even when my mom got the big job in Portland, my dad looked at this and said, well, we still should live rural. So we were in a somewhat rural part of Vancouver, which if, if you went to the address where I grew up, it's not rural anymore because that place has expanded like crazy. But where I grew up, we were surrounded by three sides or on three sides by alfalfa and corn fields. And we had two and a half acres, which I got to mow every weekend. So of course I resented it. But when, when I got home from school, I didn't have a key, there was nobody home, but we never locked our doors. That's the kind of, of, of world that I grew up in. You know, I tell you what, here in the city and in Everett, which I think is a good city and I'm in a good neighborhood in it. And I would, you know, I still like the city, although it's not the city I moved to, we sure as hell lock our doors here. It's a different world now. But in, in 1979 in the rural part of Vancouver We didn't lock our doors. So I walked the, the street that we were on, like our, we were on a little gravel road that went a half mile up into the on the one of the Hills. And, but our local street, the, the arterial was a 55 mile, an hour speed limit. It was narrow, it was like eight foot lanes. And then about five inches of you know, there'd be the yellow line, about five more inches of asphalt. And then it dropped into a six foot deep, Ravina or like culvert ditch on either side. I mean, these were the ones where if somebody had a little too much to drink and swerved one tire off the road, their car had never be found again, the ditches were that deep. And I walked to school along that about mile and a half. And I just knew you just like, like there was no wearing headphones on that road. You have to be able to hear everything that comes in front and behind you, you gotta, you gotta pay attention. You know, the, the gravel road, I re I had a bicycle, but gravel road meant that I had more than my share of ditching off the bike because of poor traction. And I got more than my share of gravel in my knee caps. And you know, it, that, that kind of, of being outside, taking risks, playing in the dirt it's one of the reasons why, for example, I feel like our generation if. Under the assumption that COVID is a real virus and actually really hurts people. I feel like gen X are by far the best equipped to deal with it because the boomers are just old enough. Their bodies are starting to fail. So they're in risk groups and the millennials never played outside in the dirt. So they never developed an immune system.

Gene: 1:01:48

yeah, which I literally talked about on, my last episode, number 33.

Bemrose: 1:01:53

I know now I am trolling. You.

Gene: 1:01:56

Yeah. No, it's totally true. And I, I think that a, a lack of exposure to all kinds of elements not just viruses, but certainly bacterial, fungal, everything else in your youth when your body is the most capable of surviving through that and generating antibodies. You're absolutely harming the population by not allowing that natural process to go through. Our bodies are built based on generations, and, millions of generations really of evolution dealing with exposure at a young age to prevent long-term risk factors as people become adults however you like it, the reality is it is a survival of the fittest because the runt of the litter die off. They don't get to survive. They don't get to pass on their genes to the next generations. So we are the products of the people who survived all the disease for the last, however, many hundreds of thousands of years. You want to go back maybe a million years. You want to go back and

Bemrose: 1:03:08

just made me think of is what you just described the survival of the fittest and evolution and, and refining, how you adapt over that's capitalism. What you're saying is that biology is capitalist and therefore needs to be abolished.

Gene: 1:03:23

well fair. I would say the other way around, I mean, Valerie has existed prior to capitalism, so it's really capitalism is taking the rules of biology and then applying them to financial transactions.

Bemrose: 1:03:37

Well, I, you know, the, my, my philosophy around capitalism and it, and it's it's counterpart, which you can call socialism or communism, or collectivism has as several forms. They're really the two absent state. They are the two models of human interaction that we evolved with because when you are with your small village of 60 people and you have to subsist for everything, and you know that your village will die out, if you let people die, and everybody has to take care of each other, everybody knows each other, and nobody ever locks the flap on their tent. And, you know, I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with it, but that's society that tribal society is collectivist. It is socialism. And I think that when a lot of people are out here going, we need to convert the world to socialism. That's what they're thinking. They're thinking that we should, we should all just be in gene Roddenberry's ideal world, where everybody looks out for everybody else. And. The problem is that that has never worked for any group of more than a hundred, hundred 50 people.

Gene: 1:04:48

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

Bemrose: 1:04:50

So the other natural way that humanity has evolved that is, is in born into us, is how to deal with people we don't know. And that is you know, w w you, you can talk about levels of trust, but, but that kind of brings in the question of, of, do you, you know, do you trade with, or do you go to war with somebody in both of those, or are there their interactions with people you don't know with varying levels of violence, but the, the concept of, I don't know you, and I don't know if you have my best interests in mind. So rather, you know, in, in the village you do something good for somebody else in your village, because it's the right thing to do. And because you know that a month from now, they'll do the same for you. But if I am trading with you and Euro, you know, you're a wondering trader, you're a member of another tribe, and I'm, I've never seen you before, or more importantly, I don't have any guarantees that you'll be around in a month, then you want to settle accounts up for front. That means you know, I know that you're going to get my back. You're going to get my, so let's engage in mutually beneficial interactions, but let's settle all accounts right now. And that's called bartering. It's called a trade. It's called you know, doing things with, with whatever in, in that society functions as a contract that's capitalism. That is you know, you, you, you settle up what your, you know, the terms of your trade ahead of time. And any two people do not have to know each other. They don't even have to trust each other. As long as you have some mechanism for generating a contract between two people and enforcing it as this, the part where you tell me, you talked about this on one of your previous

Gene: 1:06:35

no, I don't think I did actually. And I'm glad you brought it up because that is a very good perspective on capitalism, not just simply coming out of the writings of Makaveli, but really something that's been around with humanity for thousands of years., we have capitalism in the Roman empire. We had capitalism in the Persian empire. We had capitalism in the Babylonian empire.

Bemrose: 1:07:00

it doesn't take an empire. Anytime that you have two distinct tribes of people who don't know each other, they're going to get together and exchange and add, you know, the.

Gene: 1:07:10

or just kill each other off

Bemrose: 1:07:12

Well, I, I actually consider war to be a type of capitalism and, and I'm not just talking in, in terms of the, the, the military industrial complex of today, but rather it, it, it's not a fair exchange and it's not always a mutually beneficial exchange, but it is in fact, a method of exchange between two different people who don't trust each other. And it turns out if one of them is going to do violence against the other, or they're going to do mutual violence and they have good reason not to trust each other. But, but that, that also evolved naturally.

Gene: 1:07:46

Yeah, absolutely., and looking at capitalism through that frame of a means to do business with the trade, to exchange something with an unknown quantity, with somebody who you don't know or trust as the basis for capitalism, I think is a very good way of looking at it because the basis of communism is absolutely the family unit. It is the nuclear family.

Bemrose: 1:08:12

We use the tribal unit, but a family is just a small tribe. Absolutely.

Gene: 1:08:15

Yeah. And the tribe has just the large family and certainly in the middle East where, really civilization started taking off between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. That was very much the time when humans stopped living in small family groups where everybody's related one way or another. And the only thing you would do is kick out the males when they're teenagers.

Bemrose: 1:08:38

One aspect, which I think is a biological constant having to do with humans because no amount of civilization, no amount of developing of technological development of, of civilization development of, of creating States has ever been able to change the, the biological constraint of a human being is willing to assimilate into their, their personal tribe. And this is, this is the Headspace of all of the people that you consider to be close friends that that can be considered your tribe. There is an upper limit depending on the person between 100 and 200 people. And you will never, no human is capable of ever treating more than about 200 distinct people at any given time. You can, you can fade away from one person and meet other people or something, but, but at any given time, you know, it's, it's, it's call it 150. There's going to be about 150 people that, you know, And you understand, these are people that, you know, absent Facebook you'll, you'll remember and care about their birthday. They're people you care, whether or not they are having a good day they're people that you can interact with. There are people that you can you know, get together with and go have a beer. And you know that at the end of the night, it doesn't matter which one of you pays because the next person, you know, the, the next time the other person will no human can possibly feel that way about more than 150 people. And it's different for each person. And obviously the set of who your 150 people are different from the set of mine. But that number is the maximum constraint upon which the natural form of socialism can work. once you go to 500 people, if I am in a village or a tribe of 500 people, there are going to be people in that tribe that I know I can not biologically know who these people are or what drives them, or whether or not I like them or trust them. And so I cannot function in a, everybody gets equal and you got my back. I got your back sort of way, w which is the natural form of collectivism. It can't work once you get past that population level. And that's the reason why we. You know, w we, we, as a humanity, invented things like currency, we, we invent things like like contracts and in particular, the, the idea that there would be a class of people to enforce contracts whether they be police or judges, or, you know, all of this was for the purpose of let's build our civilization beyond 150 people and still be good to each other when we can't, you know, w w you know, that 150 people, that's also the upper limit, by the way, you can't have more than that. Many people and still have no crime. You know, once, once you get to the point where there's, you know, people that I can't know or care about than if I don't know or care about you, I can do better if I mug you on the street. Right.

Gene: 1:11:41

That's a good point. I'd love to find some sociology papers that actually talk about that limit of somewhere between 150 and 200, you said, cause I have not heard that number before.

Bemrose: 1:11:50

Well, it did, the number might be off that's, that's the number that I, in fact, I think that was one of the things that I got out of, one of my few college psychology classes. But I, I honestly don't remember where I got the number intuitively that number makes sense. It could be more, it could be less, but regardless. I, I, it's pretty obvious that in, in a group of around 10 people, you're capable of being a family and therefore the number's going to be higher than that. And if you're in a city of 10,000 people, you absolutely don't know everybody. And therefore you're not going to be able to form that mental connection with them. So obviously there is a number, whatever the number happens to be.

Gene: 1:12:26

I think it'd be worthwhile to do a little research to find if there have been studies about where the exact number lies, but intuitively I tend to agree with you., it makes a lot of sense. And it's also why we have the profession of police and the army and other, functions that in a family are simply served by every single individual or at least certainly the dominant individuals and in a tribe would be served by again, the most dominant individuals. But in. Larger groups in the society like we have right now they're not necessarily dominant individuals, but they are individuals that are empowered to execute the task of force. They're essentially told that you may cause pain and harm to others and not suffer any of the consequences for doing so because you're doing it under the blessing of our group. And so that type of a vocation really wouldn't exist , in a better one tribe that has maybe a hundred and 150 people in it. Because you don't need dedicated policemen., you simply need to go and tell either the tribe leader or a few of , the guys that are in their mid thirties and have good muscles say, Hey, this guy just stole something from me in our tribe and I wanted back and they'll take care of it for you. But as you grow, you actually need a whole vocation designed around that enforcement.

Bemrose: 1:13:56

Yeah. What you just described by the way is, is actually the, the impetus and only in my opinion, only legitimate purpose of an entity called a state, which is if you will, you know, because violence is as natural, a type of human interaction as, as mutual trade as bartering as you know, the creating a family unit, you know, violence is also inherent to people, but it is detrimental to creating a large society made of, of people over your 150 person limit. So in order for a society to function above that number of people it is, it is natural to want to assign the authority and and the moral authority of doing violence to one entity. To do so only on behalf of the good of everybody. And, and that is, that is directly what led to the creation of the state. And I think it is a tremendous perversion of the idea of a state that now it's also a function of, of redistribution of wealth. It is you know, it employs that violence in ways that are given to benefit, whatever activist manages to catch the ear of the ruling class or, or even more importantly, whichever corporate overlord can purchase the most of the ruling class. Hence we get back to the corporatism angle,

Gene: 1:15:30

With corporations now, having. Enough power to be able to silence the president of the United States in Nevada, being able to create their own cities with their own laws and police departments. We're definitely moving into a version of dystopian future where the corporations are really running things and the government is merely subjugated to them. In fact, I think there was a book by Frederick poll called Venus incorporated that I read back in the eighties that was the main theme of was it was set in the future maybe today for all. I remember. I'm not sure, but it was set in the future and

Bemrose: 1:16:07

are aren't you following? This is the future. Welcome to the

Gene: 1:16:09

I have learned a long time ago to just live in the present. The future is something that only confuses things. No witty come back.

Bemrose: 1:16:20

I thought you were going to keep going. Sometimes silence is the best way to come back. Just give you enough rope.

Gene: 1:16:25

Future is something that is a figment of our imagination. That's my preferred way of looking at it.

Bemrose: 1:16:34

Well, I, we might be a little bit too far down the road of, of corporate corruption at this point. You know, now that we've, you know, we've reached the point where our, even our court system is, is compromised to serve only the overlords of, you know, whoever happens to be in whichever ruling party is, is going with it now. And you know, now that the Democrats are looking at this and going, well, we have a 51 to 50 majority in the, in Congress and therefore let's go ahead and just stomp all over everything so that we can push our, we might

Gene: 1:17:11

well,

Bemrose: 1:17:12

the point,

Gene: 1:17:12

they're doing well. They're, going to do what the human nature dictates, which is to utilize whatever means are available to achieve the goal that is desired.

Bemrose: 1:17:23

but every, every time that a particular political party had come to power, In the past, at least in my knowledge, in, in the, in the time, since I became politically aware, which would be around Brown bill Clinton, maybe Bush one every time that all, all that, that both houses of Congress and the president all happened to be the same party. They, they would always push through whatever they, you know, what they wanted, but they had at least some constraint. They didn't come out and say, we're going to we're going to throw out the constitution and we're going to, you know, ban all guns. We're going to ban all speech. We're going to push through a new voting law that makes it so that only dead people can vote in only as long as they vote for our party. They can't, you know, they, they wouldn't necessarily push through a new law that said, Oh, we're adding 12 new seats to the Supreme court. Then though, by the way, our guy gets to him to appoint them.

Gene: 1:18:17

it's not, really new stuff. All of it's happened before and it's going to happen again. There, there are examples of this in the past, , you're kind of falling for the same trap that I think the climate people are falling for. You're basing your life experience as the, the standard for the way things have always been. And, and that's not the case. You just have to look

Bemrose: 1:18:41

it's not, but that's why I, that's why I said within my life

Gene: 1:18:45

But if you start looking for the bank, you find examples of all these things. You find example, like this is something I actually researched recently which was the state of Texas. And how did Texas become a state? And why was Texas in independent country for I think 9 years. What I didn't realize is that immediately after grabbing the land from Mexico by pushing back the Mexican army to defeat immediately the organized leadership of Texas applied to the United States for statehood. But that statehood only came 9 years later. And the reason for that was because of politics because the North and the South were each trying to gain representatives to help their cause and their side. And so when Texas was applying it, Texas had a very interesting position. Their position was, we don't care. We can, we've got when Texas became independent. I think when I looked it up, there were 5000 slaves in Texas. That's it very small number, but there were slaves obviously, and that's because mostly Texas land was not developed. And so Texas said, look if you guys get us into being a state, the North, we will happily get rid of our slaves. And then we'll be in non slave state and same offer for the South. If you help us become a state sooner, we will happily have more slaves come to Texas and we will be a slave state. It was essentially the bickering of the two parties back then. And I think Democrats and the wigs.

Bemrose: 1:20:28

I did. The wasn't it, the Tories and the wigs early on. And then one of them quickly collapsed in Jefferson, founded the Democrats.

Gene: 1:20:39

Yes. I think that sounds vaguely correct. And I'm not going to bother looking it up. So it is what it is from memory. But the point is that the two main parties , in the eighteen forties were essentially holding Texas back or out from joining the union because they wanted to use that as a big Trump card. And whenever Texas tried to get a foothold like the British, who were very anti slave, they were working with the North, even though historically they had a lot more common than with the South. They were trying to persuade through political negotiation and promises of whatever each side to get in. But the balance was so close that there was not enough votes to approve Texas becoming a state from just one party voting for it. So the idea of increase it was so let me just finish the thought, the idea of increasing your, your political standing, getting more votes. It's been utilized even in this country. And by the way, our country is extremely young. Europe has cities that are much older than how old the United States is way, way older. So I think Russia just celebrated its thousandth anniversary. The,

Bemrose: 1:21:52

but, but, but those numbers are arbitrary unless you've got like continual operating under the same system.

Gene: 1:22:00

well you do have revolutions. I mean, if you discount the revolutions that it would be a thousand years, right. But it's basically a thousand years since the Vikings founded Russia, because historically

Bemrose: 1:22:09

mean, if you don't want to count revolutions and demographic replacement, then, then how long were the native Americans here? Look, you know, where our country is that old?

Gene: 1:22:19

Well, according to the latter day saints that would have been, I think right around 2,400 years ago because they, native Americans are just like all the wicked people that were sent by God from middle

Bemrose: 1:22:36

Yeah, I've, I've heard that. My, my understanding is that that had

Gene: 1:22:39

you not watched South park enough to the book of Mormon?

Bemrose: 1:22:42

I stopped watching South park around 2001 and I don't remember why other than, than I stopped watching everything. But then I tried to get back in and went, no, I don't watch things on cable anymore.

Gene: 1:22:55

well, South park has been on the internet for at least 10 years.

Bemrose: 1:22:59

I understand. And, and when, when somebody links me to a particularly good episode, I'll go watch it.

Gene: 1:23:04

And , it's one of the very few gen X programs out there. Everything else is created either for boomers or formula.

Bemrose: 1:23:10

One of my favorite facts it's that, you know, I've always been a bit of a geography nut. And one of my favorite facts that came out of the, the Texas situation you described. Yes. Asking yourself why. Why does the Oklahoma panhandle exists? That is a really dumb looking line for the state. And the reason it exists is because of the Mason Dixon line, because that whole area was going to be Texas, but a tiny part of Texas stuck past the arbitrary line beyond which thou shalt not have a slave.

Gene: 1:23:45

It's a much bigger line, Texas, actually, as a territory, as a country, really extended all the way up to Wyoming. And if you look on the no agenda peerage map, you will see that my territory goes all the way up to modern day Wyoming because I'm , the Duke of the Republic of Texas. And so , my periods is significantly higher than it would be if it was just a state, Texas.

Bemrose: 1:24:08

And that N that, and $8 will get you a cup of coffee around

Gene: 1:24:12

no. Yeah, exactly. It'll be more than that. But the the territory was significantly larger, but the state of Texas you're absolutely correct. Became a state of that size rather than its full territory because of slavery and the Mason ducks line. Yeah.

Bemrose: 1:24:30

I guess one of my questions for you in it, because you, you called me out for pointing out some real douchebaggery going on in politics today and saying, well, all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. To, to quote from one of my favorites Sciflies yeah. Is, does the fact that it happened before, excuse the fact that it is highly corrupt douchebaggery

Gene: 1:24:56

I don't think it's a matter of excusing. I think it's a matter of predictability

Bemrose: 1:25:00

and I also think

Gene: 1:25:01

human nature. Didn't evolve over the last 200 years, 250 years, the United States has been around human nature, evolved over the course of at least a million years.. Bemrose: I agree with you, but there of things that go on today, exceptional in, in terms of analyzing human nature. And that is the connectivity and the interconnectedness of people caused by the existence of the internet of, of social media, in whatever form it takes. The, the fact that I don't have to know my neighbors anymore because every single one of us is connected online to other people who think like us and we can create blocks of people. And, and, you know, I I've always thought that, that the, the. Current the way that States divide themselves is still based on geographical borders. And there's a lot of historical reasons for that. One of them is Nash, natural resources, but the other one is that if you build walls, it's actually pretty easy to get people to only interact with other people in your state. And therefore you've got you, you, you've got your population of people who are very clearly delineated. You know, it, it blurs things when you start letting them move back and forth freely, of course. And that's why, you know, governments don't like that sort of thing. But, well, it creates a problem which we can again see in the formation of Texas, why did Texas and up having to declare independence from Mexico and fight battles , and, lose the Alamo over the course of that., it became that because of a policy that Mexico had, that was really a Spanish policy. You know what that policy was enticing immigration from the United States to this vast land that was populated by natives. That they had hardly anybody living in. And so Mexico would grant people moving from the United States. And then in this case, a lot of them came from Kentucky. A lot of them came from Tennessee down to Mexico to get their free a hundred acres of land and whatever else, maybe there was a mule included in it, but these people were not Mexicans. These people were speaking English. They had more in common with England and Ireland and Scotland. Their mentality was not one of a Spanish Ditech dictatorship and Mexican rule. It was really one of the freedom

Bemrose: 1:27:35

just another application of replacement theory.

Gene: 1:27:38

yeah. Yeah. And, and so by simply trying to fill a gap in population, Mexico created a pocket of Americans living in Mexico, that the Americans had very quickly because of access to guns, decided that they wanted to make theirs and that any longer be part of Mexico and that'd be subject to Mexican laws. So it was a problem caused by Mexico, had Mexico not been trying to increase its population and its Northern territories by recruiting people from the United States to move there. Texas would still likely be simply a province in Mexico.

Bemrose: 1:28:16

Well to, to, to go back to my point about the internet the, it was always possible to draw a line geographically around a population and say, you are all our subjects now and have that become a community of people. And, and more importantly, it was impossible. Give or take varying forms of, of technology to generally control communication outside of that, which controlling communication is how you control association and you control you. You can prevent, if you can prevent communication between two different sides of a border. Then you can prevent the formation of tribes of people on both sides of the border. And the internet has brought us to an exceptional point in history that has never happened before where people, the world around are now connected and can form a tribe that is completely independent of geography. You know, the no agenda tribe is a good one and we have, we have Australians, we have Canadians.

Gene: 1:29:24

Yeah.

Bemrose: 1:29:26

And, and it, it overlays. And I have a lot more loyalty to the no agenda tribe than I do to anything in the area where I'm geologically. Can I, I have made over the last several after ma over more than a decade of living in this house, I have made friends with my immediate neighbors, the people on my street, I know all of them went out and I had to actually force myself to do that because that's actually not something that comes naturally people, but those are people that I will do things for. I will, I will look out for your house. I will watch for, you know, a neighborhood watch. It's better for everybody. I, but outside of those people, there's nobody else in Everett that I give a crap about. In fact, the people who claim their dominion over this by virtue of having. Formed an election and, and, you know, somehow votes were counted and these people came out ahead and, and maybe that's legitimate. Maybe it's not. I, I swear no fealty to these people. I swear no fealty to Jay fucking Inslee who happens to be the guy currently making all of the rules. I guess what I'm saying is up until the internet up until and precursors to the internet and anything that allows effective communication communication across borders, effective enough to form tribes between people independent of geographical States. This has allowed people to generate alliances and, and B J know what am I thinking of where anyway, it, it allows people to, to build your own group that is completely independent of the geographical area, where you live, and yet States are still enforcing their edicts on a geographical area. And I think that because of the interconnectivity afforded us by a rapid increase in communication technology, the idea of forming a state based on geography is now becoming an anachronism and

Gene: 1:31:34

you're saying is you're a globalist now

Bemrose: 1:31:36

I don't, I did not identify

Gene: 1:31:39

that, that is the the end result of what you were just describing is that

Bemrose: 1:31:43

no, but I think that the dichotomy, I, I think that, that presenting it as a false dichotomy, like that is disingenuous,

Gene: 1:31:50

it's not a false dichotomy., literally what you just described as globalism. It is that, that physical borders, aren't an anachronism. They, they have no real function to modern society and they should be gotten rid

Bemrose: 1:32:02

Okay. Do you, do you want me to explain, or do you want to put me into a box?

Gene: 1:32:06

What you just did explain it. I mean, I'm just summarizing the outcome of what you just explained.

Bemrose: 1:32:10

I make a distinction between globalization and global governance. I, how about this? Ah, I believe in globalism the same way that we had globalism in the 25th century BC, there were no borders. There were very, you know, there were very few, there were almost no nations. There were no borders. Nobody took the map and partitioned it. Bay in carved arbitrary lines and said, you're entitled to the natural resources here, and you're entitled the natural resources here. And everybody that appears in this block is now subject to your whims and laws. And if that's the case, then yes, I will go ahead and identify as a globalist, although I don't identify as anything other than sir Bemrose Beck. My pronouns are sir in Bemrose.

Gene: 1:33:04

I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to make you identify , anything. I'm just saying that what you described

Bemrose: 1:33:10

but using a word like globalist has a very strong connotation, especially in communities like ours.

Gene: 1:33:16

it only has that for the last 10 years. If you look at the meaning of the word globalist, what you described is globalism. And it's not a bad thing. I don't, I don't know why. Well, it shouldn't, globalism has existed way before people started listening to no agenda and way before. There were people that were wanting to use globalism to effectively create more wealth and control more people for themselves. Globalism is the internet. That's globalism. That that is a, what allows people to go outside of physical borders and not even borders, but outside of their physical distances, separating them from others and still be able to internet.

Bemrose: 1:34:06

If you're living in the present, the present is 2021. You drop a word like, so you're saying you're a globalist. And are you, you can't just ignore the connotation attached to that,

Gene: 1:34:17

I'm going to choose to not change the meaning of words. I've been, I've been saying this for many years. Just because there's a fringe group out there that are using the word Nazi to refer to any white male doesn't mean that the word Nazi has changed its meaning I'm going to go by the traditional definition and same thing with globalism. Globalists is a shorthand shortcut word. For a particular type of rich elitist a-holes that we both know from no agenda, but you have to admit that that word has been around. And I had a meeting way before that became a short damp,

Bemrose: 1:34:52

but you don't have to redefine a word in order to recognize that the word has been redefined by special interests and choose not to use it. I'm not going to use the word globalist.

Gene: 1:35:01

then give it

Bemrose: 1:35:02

can go ahead.

Gene: 1:35:03

I'm going

Bemrose: 1:35:03

You can go ahead and paint me with a label if you'd

Gene: 1:35:05

I have no problem using words as they were intended to be used, even if they've gained some new fangled meanings that in my opinion, that are not correct. Glow glows of globalism. Yeah. And by the way, racist is another one. So racist simply means it simply means that you can identify and discern based on races of people, but it shouldn't even be limited to people. It could be dogs could be other things like you're discerning and making a judgment based on what race these things are that is not in and of itself bad. If you make that distinction and you identify something or somebody based on their race and then you treat them poorly because of it that's racist. And by the way, this, you probably do know two episodes ago. I did a big grant on racism, where I talked about what racism is and why companies like Apple. Are absolutely racist in what they're doing by the traditional definition of racism that's existed for hundreds of years, certainly in the last 50 years, that definition still had that same meaning today.

Bemrose: 1:36:17

But I, I will say that that using, using the, in fact, I use that very word using the definition you just described of in, you know, when you take people and you choose to sort them into bins based on something as pointlessly, superficial, as skin color, then that is a form of racism. And having used that term in the troll room, I think is in in particular, in context to a show that runs on the stream is one of the reasons why I don't think Adam talks to me anymore. Because

Gene: 1:36:52

talk to you. Why.

Bemrose: 1:36:54

I've never had a conversation with Adam, not once I've had you know, a couple of lines back and forth. I've, I've had an occasional email with him that was always directly on point to, with regards to managing the stream. And I've certainly, you know, I, I get, I, I get direction you know, for, it was such as it is for how the stream should go, but no, I don't think I've ever had a conversation with Adam.

Gene: 1:37:20

well, let's just put aside your globalists and racist notions for the time being. I want to talk more about this. They say she with Adam, you're having, so what, what

Bemrose: 1:37:28

I'm not sure. I'm not sure it's an issue, but I just suspect that one of the reasons why that had never happened is because there was one point where he was talking about Mo facts and about how they, they analyze the, the plight of the black man in America. And I have listened to the show, although I don't regularly. And they do a pretty good job of identifying the, the particular features of being black in America. But I reject the notion that there should be I, how do I put this? The only way that you will ever get to a point. Where there is not racism where people do not hate or discriminate against each other based on race is if people stop thinking about race. And I honestly believe that the only way through the racial issue is colorblindness. And, and that has to start with everything. It has to start with your communications. It has to start with I guess every time, every time

Gene: 1:38:35

You're now quoting a show three episodes ago. Thank you. Bravo. Good job.

Bemrose: 1:38:39

every time that you go and make a distinction, every time you use the phrase, black people, this or white people, this, you are through your language, making a distinction between groups of people based on race.

Gene: 1:38:55

that is racism. And that's that's the point is it's

Bemrose: 1:38:58

and, and one of the reasons why I've never been able to get into Mo facts is that that is one of the root conceits of the show

Gene: 1:39:06

Huh? So I've reached out to Moe facts to be a guest on and I never heard back. So I don't know if I should take that as simply. He has no clue.

Bemrose: 1:39:18

on the show, then really you should cut out everything. I just said,

Gene: 1:39:22

Well, I mean, you've been a hard guest to get and you finally managed to get out of here. I don't, I don't see that as a limiting factor for anybody. Although Adam still hasn't come to the show either. You know, to the point where I actually had to make an interview with

Bemrose: 1:39:35

Adam's a very busy guy and you also are

Gene: 1:39:37

claims to be.

Bemrose: 1:39:38

you're very pushy. I will point out,

Gene: 1:39:40

Why I try to be, thank you.

Bemrose: 1:39:44

well, congratulations. Mission accomplished.

Gene: 1:39:46

I don't have a Booker. I have to do my own booking, which means I have to make sure that people accept my invites. Even if it means I show up at their house with a sushi

Bemrose: 1:39:55

Hey, you can take this as feedback if you'd like it, use it for constructive for the future. The first 12 or 15 times that you asked me to be on the show the, the first time I wasn't. Sure. And then you know, w with a, when you started asking hourly, I was like, well, the, the, or you get the, the more, I'm going to find other things to do. I'm just saying that, that, that does rub some people

Gene: 1:40:20

you're around right.

Bemrose: 1:40:21

I'm on it worked.

Gene: 1:40:22

you go at work. So

Bemrose: 1:40:23

Yeah. I apparently Lee I'm, I'm both a globalist and a racist you've decided and

Gene: 1:40:30

haven't decided anything. I'm just letting you talk. That's all.

Bemrose: 1:40:33

Well, there's the problem.

Gene: 1:40:35

yes. You're not used to just being able to talk uninterrupted. Right? Okay.

Bemrose: 1:40:39

Usually Darren cuts me off or something. Like if I, if I ever say something bad about police, then he yeah.

Gene: 1:40:47

Darren's a bit of a liberal I've noticed that

Bemrose: 1:40:49

I don't think I'd go that

Gene: 1:40:50

he's, well, I said a bit, I didn't say full on and.

Bemrose: 1:40:54

you, unless you're choosing not to change the term, the definition of terms, in which case, a liberal would be somebody who believes in Liberty and in that case, he is absolutely a liberal. And I also, yeah,

Gene: 1:41:07

Yes, that was, I think shows seven shows ago. I, I think it's interesting that you're, you're passionate about these things, as you said at the beginning of the interview or that really conversation. I mean, I'm not even so much interviewing. And so we're just jumping topics all over the place here. But at the same time, I haven't heard you say anything particularly disagreeable, most of my comments have been yes or yes, that was several episodes ago that I said that.

Bemrose: 1:41:36

so maybe the reason why it, it was so difficult to get me

Gene: 1:41:40

even when I called you a globalist and you got offended it wasn't because I was trying to offend you or that globalism was something bad. I just don't see globalism as a bad thing. I think it is, like I said, it's the internet is, it is the ability for people to transcend physical borders, to have meaningful exchanges of good services and information that is not limited to their physicality. Those are good things.

Bemrose: 1:42:10

I I'm with you on that. As long as you acknowledge the difference, which is not usually acknowledged between globalization of human interaction, which I am in fact for, because I feel like the only, the only legitimate division, the only legitimate partition of human beings that doesn't cause inequality or injustice is treat everybody as individuals. And if that's globalism, I'm all for it. But I need to make sure that there is a distinction written between that and global governments, because there's one thing that I absolutely am against in all forms. And it usually comes along with the word globalism, and it's a reason I had a knee jerk reaction, and that is the idea of global governance. The idea of one global state, the idea that anybody should be in charge of everybody in the world. And I reject that notion in all forms.

Gene: 1:43:09

That's sort of American exceptionalism though. Yeah. American exceptionalist doctrine is to essentially say we have it. Right. And we will fight against those that have , a viewpoint. That is different from ours. So this is this, this is the reason, this is the reason that so much effort, energy and human capital was spent on fighting Nazis and fighting communists on fighting all the other regimes that America's fought. Some of them certainly have been in retrospect, poor decisions on America's part, but that is generally , the rationale is saying that , we know we hold the beacon of what is right and wrong in the world. And we buy that knowledge and American exceptionalism are willing to go and insert ourselves in the middle of this.

Bemrose: 1:44:06

I, I guess, I never, there was nothing about America that I intended to bring into this. My perspective is significantly more simple than that. And that is if you are outside of my tribe, whatever, that means my personal collection of people. Whom I know and trust if you are outside of that group, I don't want you telling me what to do. I don't want to take your orders. I don't want my shit stolen from me by that. And pretty much everything about government at every level is telling the public what to do and stealing the public's worth and value usually in the form of taxes. And then tell him, you know, and again, telling them what they can and can't do. And you know, if you wanted to label me as an anarchist for this position, I would gladly take that. I, it never occurred to me that that was globalist and it never occurred to me that that was an American exceptionalist position to take. I don't, I don't have any strong opinions about America one way or the other, other than it happens to be where I live and seems to be doing all right. And I'd rather like the constitution as a great idea as a foundation of government, but the place where I'm coming from is, is I don't want you know, Jay Inslee or Joe Biden or, or you, or anyone to come up. It is an injustice for anybody to steal my money from me. Without any kind of consent and it is an injustice for you to tell me how I can live my life or use my own property, or you know, and all of these things happen with a state. And the reason I'm against a global state has nothing to do with America and everything to do with the, the problem with a global state is that there's nowhere outside of it. If, if I hate America that much, you know, that it's the old, the old argument that, that always has pulled out by status. Whenever they say, well, if you don't like the state doing something that you hate, just leave. And that is theoretically possible. I am, I am currently as much as I like effort and I like the Pacific Northwest. And I lived in the state of Washington all my life. And I think it's beautiful here. And I like fresh air motherfucker. I absolutely hate the direction that the local government is going and how they are perpetuating injustice. And I am looking at what are my options and making plans to leave and trying to find out, is there another geographic location I can move to that I will. I be outside of the jurisdiction of, of these groups. And

Gene: 1:46:46

it's an interesting point. You're

Bemrose: 1:46:48

if it's a global government, there's no outside.

Gene: 1:46:51

Okay., I think there , you're, assuming that globalists government is somehow, it's what's the phrase, it's not monotheistic. It's mano, like , it's the one world government. And I think that, , yeah, kinda , although , it could be in elected government too, right? It doesn't have to be a monarchy per se, but I

Bemrose: 1:47:14

Yeah. Yeah. The lines are a little blurred. I'm a little fuzzy on the lines between those two concepts right now in America.

Gene: 1:47:19

Run something by you just taking taking what you just said about not wanting to be governed by those who are not like-minded and not part of your tribe. Is that fair to say that you kind of said that?

Bemrose: 1:47:32

Well, I didn't say like-minded. I just said not part of my

Gene: 1:47:35

Yeah. I added like like-minded because I'm assuming the tribe is based on the way you think and not based on genetics

Bemrose: 1:47:43

well,

Gene: 1:47:43

or is your

Bemrose: 1:47:44

no, the tribe is based on the group of people for through whatever circumstance that I have come to trust and to care about whether or not they live in die.

Gene: 1:47:56

Okay. But, but it's not

Bemrose: 1:47:57

this goes back

Gene: 1:47:58

based, I guess my point, it's not a geographically

Bemrose: 1:48:00

it doesn't have to be no.

Gene: 1:48:01

Okay. So if your tribe is spread around, like no agenda using that as an example. So going anywhere these days, any country, pretty much. And then looking up on the calendar for where there's a no agenda meetup, that in whatever country you're in or whatever state country, city, that if you go to a no agenda meetup, there will be certain similarities about those people. And you're more likely to find them agreeable and interesting than you are other people. Would you say that's correct.

Bemrose: 1:48:32

That's unlikely. Yeah.

Gene: 1:48:33

Okay. So given that, would it not make more sense rather than to have a local geographic based government? Do you have a global government based around these people who happen to live in different physical locations, but if that government allowed you to essentially all share a set of laws and rules that you agree on, regardless of your physical location, would that not be the preferable government

Bemrose: 1:49:06

I'm not sure that the word global is the right way to describe that. And, and maybe this comes from from a programming background. The, the concept of the word global just means it means a single namespace accessible

Gene: 1:49:19

that's exactly right. Yes. And accessible to anywhere, which means not bound by geographic limitations,

Bemrose: 1:49:28

But,

Gene: 1:49:29

but a global variable is not like the only variable, right? The global variable is a variable that is accessible from anywhere.

Bemrose: 1:49:37

well the, in, in most programming context, the word global implies a single unique namespace, which means that if there is a variable that is global in scope called no agenda people, there's only one of those, it's a Singleton. And, and so saying global government suggests that there is a Singleton government. So I guess what I was getting from that is, is the idea that there's only one and,

. , Gene: 1:50:06

and that's the word I was trying to come up with because I dunno, I still can't think of the right word, but essentially that there's one government versus simply a global government, but there could be many global governments. All of them would be global because they're all accessible from anywhere that

Bemrose: 1:50:23

anywhere geographically.

Gene: 1:50:24

They're not bound by geographic context. And, and there, there are so many reasons why current political systems are across the earth. We're all created based around geography it's because our ability to transcend geographic boundaries was very limited until fairly recently.

Bemrose: 1:50:41

Yeah. And, and I, I characterize that as, as the, the rate of communication between people, because I do feel like the natural, the natural boundaries of whatever your government and structure is, are the natural boundaries of that is limited by communication.

Gene: 1:51:00

can I give you an example of that type of global governance Sharia law, which can be applied in the middle East just as easily as it is in England and France right now. And in fact, it's being recognized as an alternative method.

Bemrose: 1:51:15

or in Washington, DC? Yeah.

Gene: 1:51:16

Well, I don't think it's quite recognized in DC yet. It may be informally, but in England is absolutely recognized. And Francis is absolutely recognized that somebody could go through Sharia court in lieu of going through the courts of the actual state. That would be an example of a globalist government. So it's a government that is not bound by geographic limitations and carries out laws. It provides for certain, not all for sure, but certain government responsibilities of the population that adheres to it, regardless of where that population happens to live. Now, there may be many problems with Sharia law that listeners can recognize there may be problems with aspects of that. And I'm not trying to argue for Sharia. I'm just using Shri as an example of what I would classify as a global governance. It's a global government that is not bound by geographic limitations.

Bemrose: 1:52:15

I, I think I understand your example and let me just ask one clarifying question. And that is when you are bound by Sharia law in one of the, in whatever, the context that you're arguing one of these places are you, are you bound by Sharia law willingly or is it being imposed on you?

, Gene: 1:52:36

that depends. Did you become a Muslim freely of your own accord or were you born into it?

Bemrose: 1:52:43

Well, even if you're born into it, if you have the option of, of leaving, then that's still willing. I guess if, if Sharia law is being practiced in Everett, Washington, And I don't have to be bound by its tenants and I don't have to be impacted by it then I don't care. And, and I don't, I don't want to say that dismissively so much as I am well aware of what my own attention span is. And there is the vast majority of things in the world are outside of the things that I need to dedicate my attention to. And so if, if there is a system of justice in place and I am subject to it, then I need to think about, is this just, or not on, I've looked at Sharia law, but not very deeply. And my knee jerk reaction is I don't believe it's just, and that's okay. As long as I'm not being involuntarily, subject to Sharia law.

Gene: 1:53:40

The way you would be subject in voluntary tertiary law is if you were geographically in one of the countries in the middle East where the state religion is Islam, and there you have no choice, but to be

Bemrose: 1:53:53

And, and hence we get back to geography being a poor proxy

Gene: 1:53:58

And that's, again, I'm not trying to argue for Sharia. I'm trying to use that as a practical, currently,

Bemrose: 1:54:03

I understand.

Gene: 1:54:04

Happening example of what

Bemrose: 1:54:07

But what the,

Gene: 1:54:08

so

Bemrose: 1:54:08

example that fascinated me was, was Sharia law in France, for example, because what it sounds like, you know, because I know that there exists such a thing as French law imposed by the state. But if, if you can in the particular line you used is, is you can choose to go to a Sharia court instead. And right there is an active choice. And introducing that to the individual immediately evaporates every one of my objects.

Gene: 1:54:36

I think you're misunderstanding the choose chooses. Let's say for example, that if you feel like you were wronged, you may not have been wronged for the court in France to do anything about it, but you may have been wrong religiously and therefore Sharia law may be applicable within your community. And so you can actually get your grievance taken care of through that. So I, again, I'm not arguing for sure. I'm just saying, imagine if there was, for example, the ability to create something similar in the sense that there's now a no agenda political system, and if you happen to be a no agenda listener member, whatever. That you would be able to live under the laws of no agenda, regardless of where in the world you lived, rather than under the laws of that physical location. Now, the laws have no agenda with have to be similar enough that they would still make things like murder illegal. You could, this was not be an excuse to be able to simply participate in activities that most of society does not

Bemrose: 1:55:42

From, from the perspective of, of creating a moral and just society. I agree with you, but there's nothing inherent to the idea of creating a body of law that requires that other than it's an incredibly immoral act. And I think even today, when we have our moral relativity that spreading like wildfire is some kind of a psychological cancer amongst the people, even today, most people generally acknowledged that killing someone else's not adjust act unless of course, unless of course the government does it and it's, and it's in a foreign country and San, in which case it's totally cool.

Gene: 1:56:16

Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing is , we're willing to relinquish our moral compass to the government. Historically you've been forced to do that because you didn't get to elect your government. Your government was. Hereditary or perhaps one by a show , of physical force when your locale that you lived in was taken over by somebody else, and now they're your government. But right now we, at least theoretically can choose our government, but nonetheless, we somehow have still kept that power assigned to them of being able to dictate or change morality which you have to do in order , to take the young men of your country. And then tell them, okay, now it's okay for you to go kill other people.

Bemrose: 1:57:10

I want to, I want to clarify one thing, and that is you mentioned you know, choosing which government to be an under the authority of, and I don't think that that's quite the right concept. I think that the, the right concept, that just concept the only one that's truly equitable is the ability we get, because you, you, you, you pointed out that. Yeah. You know, if you're in England and you've committed a crime, you don't get to shop around for which court to try you. That's not, that's not how that works. But, but what is equitable would be being able to shop around as it were for which code of laws should I be bound by? And, and with that, you know, and then once you have a set of, of laws, you can have a government that exists to enforce such laws. And then you're, you can be bound by that government. But, but I think it, it goes, you know, the, like the warriors code, the samurai code or whatever you, each, each individual, whether we admit it or not always decides which code of morals, ethics of laws, you want to be bound by to live by. And if I choose to be, you know, a, I mean, you've, you've put up such a passionate defense of, of Sharia law and, and, you know, seem to be really pushing for it. So I'll, I'll go ahead and bring that up. If I choose to be bound by Sharia law, then at that point, you know, if I then become accused of a crime that becomes the method by which I, you know, this society gets resolution for that in that case then, then yes. You know, I, I could choose to be bound by the. No agenda society code of laws. And once I do that, then I can be ruled over by the government that adheres to those laws. And I can be allowed to join the society of people who all adhere to those laws. And that's that's, by the way, the, you know, the stick is, is your government enforces the laws. The carrot is you are allowed to join a society which agrees with the same principles as you, and, and be those principles, be the moral or be the written down. You know, the one I'd like to be bound by is a society that follows the United States constitution. But I, I can't find any of those anywhere

Gene: 1:59:38

I would agree. I don't think there's one available right now, unfortunately., and it's something that , is a bit of a blip on the radar because , it's fairly unheard of in any other countries to codify into law, the idea that people ought to be able to create a new government as needed and not simply by voting well That's why we have the second amendment that is literally why we have the second amendment

Bemrose: 2:00:11

Do, do we though?

, , Gene: 2:00:12

we do for now what COVID has taught us from a sociological standpoint

Bemrose: 2:00:18

I, I might be I'm. I may or may not be scheduling a boating accident soon in order to protect my second amendment rights.

Gene: 2:00:25

exactly. A lot of people I think are, but it's either that or just buying a boat and then moving at 50 miles off shore and then fuck everybody, you keep all the guns you want.

Bemrose: 2:00:34

Yeah. If you think that that would work.

Gene: 2:00:37

I might have a boat to sell you. It's something that we've discovered and I don't think it's horribly surprising, but we certainly discovered that the elevator experiment that I talked about earlier demonstrates people's willingness to follow the herd and that exact same mentality has been utilized with COVID to first create some Seeders some initial compliance with people that are either particularly susceptible or just are on that side of the argument from the get go. And once you create those Cedars, you put them out there, then you just let human nature take its course, which is to simply say, , I really don't want to stand out. I want other people to like me. I want to be like other people. I'm okay with doing something now and then asking questions about it later, just to make sure I really understand what the hell we're doing, but I'm not going to stop people from playing a baseball game when they say, Hey, do you want to play? I'm going to join. And even though I don't know the rules, I'm just going to pretend that I do until I learned them. And I think , this type of human nature is absolutely something that's been utilized by the politicians to push through things that were not able to be pushed through traditional legislative methods who five years ago, even, but certainly 25 years ago, who in this country would have guessed that putting people on lockdown, shutting down businesses and forcing people to have medical procedures or to be at least identified as to whether or not they've had medical procedures would be something that happens in the United States. Other than in a Hollywood movie. Nobody would've thought this.

Bemrose: 2:02:30

No. And you said 25 years ago, I'm thinking w what would Americans from 80 years ago say about that?

Gene: 2:02:37

Well,

Bemrose: 2:02:37

think they'd be against it.

Gene: 2:02:39

so Americans from 80 years ago would have been the 1940s where we had Japanese interment camps. So maybe not so

Bemrose: 2:02:47

Well, there's that

Gene: 2:02:49

like I

Bemrose: 2:02:49

70, 70 years

Gene: 2:02:51

has happened before and everything will happen again., it's a repeating cycle.

Bemrose: 2:02:55

that's racism

Gene: 2:02:56

Well, truth in itself can not be racism. Racism requires a judgment value. Truth does not require judgment value.

Bemrose: 2:03:03

a good point.

Gene: 2:03:05

I think the best thing that we can do as individuals, not as a community or society, or even though a generalist there's I think the best thing we can do as individuals is figure out the path, not of the least resistance, which is your human nature, but the path that puts us into the smallest amount of compromise with our ethics and standards, and then use that as the baseline to determine your actions and what has helped many people do that in the past has been religion. And I say that as an atheist,

Bemrose: 2:03:42

no argument from me and I'm not, I'm certainly not. I don't even identify as an atheist. I, you The existence of religion is, is precisely because it has been, it has fulfilled two major needs that humanity must have. And one is, is a need for spirituality, which is, is just something inherent in people. They need something to believe in whatever that be. And it fulfills that, but religion has also fulfilled the need for creating a societal structure of, of moral values, which I think is something that modern. Western society is sorely lacking.

Gene: 2:04:21

in the ideal version of religion. You do not need any laws outside of religion because the law of thou shall not murder would be enough to prevent every single murder from ever happening. But we know that that's not realistic. That's the theoretical maximum point, right?

Bemrose: 2:04:42

It is, it is, it is realistic. If we go back to our little tribe of 150 people where we live in pure perfect socialists and men are, everybody knows each other, and everybody cares about each other. And you can have your religion as your code telling you that, you know everybody and therefore you care about everybody and you give to this person and they'll give to you next month. And, and that works the, the place where it doesn't work is again it fails to scale in that way. And therefore we need, you know, the reason why a code of laws began to supplant religion is not because religion was, was bad in some way. In fact, religion is better than code of laws in terms of instilling morality into people, but it doesn't scale. And our code of laws does.

Gene: 2:05:32

no, that's true, but , I will also have to bring up the fact that the first murder was actually committed inside of a family unit which is of course the story of Cain and Abel

Bemrose: 2:05:42

Yes, allegedly.

Gene: 2:05:43

allegedly. Yes. Well, whether it's fictional or not the idea that people are capable of murder , and having evolved from more primitive organisms, which all absolutely do commit murder. I think it's, it's pretty easy to see that it having the capability to do so means that at some point that capability could be utilized. So , the code of ethics, whether it's a religious one , or some other method is one means to achieving that goal. Now, the other means, which can work in parallel with the code of ethics is the enforcement, which is, let's say you had a police robot on every single street corner. The crime on those streets would literally be zero.

Bemrose: 2:06:31

Well you mean the crime committed by anybody other than the police? I understand.

, Gene: 2:06:35

yes. I mean, the police are the robots. The robots would not be committing any of the crimes. You, you can certainly say that the robots could be programmed

Bemrose: 2:06:45

You're, you're telling this to a programmer.

Gene: 2:06:48

Yes, but put a lot more trust and value in a program that I can audit than in the human being, who I can have a interview with

Bemrose: 2:06:58

I am with you there, but the place I am not willing to put, all of my trust is in the person who is doing the programming, unless I can

Gene: 2:07:07

but that's the point is as long as you can audit it, you should be able to trust. And this is the problem I have with all these voter machines, which their code is not audible. It's not subject to being audited it and that by

Bemrose: 2:07:17

the same problem that I have with robot cops. And, you

Gene: 2:07:20

no, cause their code should be auditable. There's no

Bemrose: 2:07:23

listen to your, I did listen to your episode where you were all in on a hundred percent robotic police force.

Gene: 2:07:30

all in on that.

Bemrose: 2:07:31

if, if that a hundred percent robotic police force can be a, if the code for those robots can be created in a way that is both auditable and just whatever that means, then it is theoretically workable.

Gene: 2:07:48

there's, there's no reason

Bemrose: 2:07:49

what I just described as not a scenario that would come into being in any society based on today's because the, you know, the way that a robot cop would be introduced in today's society is first of all, there would be a private vendor who owns the copyright to the code. Who would come out and say your robot, he would, you know, in public, he would say this robot stops crime. And the police chief would be standing behind him and give a thumbs up and everybody would be thrilled. And in the private meeting with the cops, he'd be like, and also if you happen to need some crime here's the little key that overrides it, just in case you need to do a little extra police brutality on the side. And that's not how the sales pitch would go, but that's what the gist of it would be is that there would be place for human corruption to enter into the, the system.

Gene: 2:08:46

okay. Well, the obvious answer to that is that the robots need to be controlled by a non-human entity.

Bemrose: 2:08:54

Okay. So how high up do you go? Do you,

, Gene: 2:08:57

do you want to know the end game? I can tell you what the end game.

Bemrose: 2:09:00

your police, the chief of police, do you replace the, you know, the, the mayor of the city? Do you, , at what point are we now live?

Gene: 2:09:06

game. If you want to hear it,

Bemrose: 2:09:08

I robot overlords. Okay. So now we're back to a theme that we had on grumpy old Benz, very early on, about a year and a half ago, where I pointed out that every single utopia breaks down the moment you add people, but if you have no people, then you can have your utopia

Gene: 2:09:28

Yeah., and I think it's the only possible version for us to preserve. What humanity has created is to get rid of the things that are most likely to destroy it.

Bemrose: 2:09:41

In which case my response to that is that it's not worth preserving.

Gene: 2:09:45

Well, that's not true. There are plenty of things that have been created by bad people that nonetheless in of themselves are good things. I'll give you an example of

Bemrose: 2:09:53

I, what I'm saying is if preservation of preservation of what humanity has created requires the removal of humanity, then I don't need that presence.

Gene: 2:10:04

Humanity is not an internal, there's nothing magic about humans. Humans are only going to

Bemrose: 2:10:07

as a human, as a human, I personally would like to be around for as long as possible,

Gene: 2:10:13

Yeah. Individually, you can have , that desire, but you realize how short your life is on the grand scheme of things. You're a blip on the radar. Barely.

Bemrose: 2:10:21

but I'm not making decisions for the planet and I'm not making decisions for the rest of the cosmos. I am only qualified and, and I am, I am only responsible for decisions made on behalf of me. And as a person, I think that people are important and should be kept around.

Gene: 2:10:39

do you think when Voyager is discovered by an alien civilization with , the gold record and the little picture of a man in the moment, do you think there'll be actually any people for the aliens from our standpoint, the discover Voyager to go and find this tell? No, no, we'll be gone by

Bemrose: 2:10:58

I intend to be here.

Gene: 2:11:00

Well, you may be old enough that you will die prior to any, any sort of a singularity event happening.

Bemrose: 2:11:10

I intend to live forever.

Gene: 2:11:12

Well, then you do believe in the singularity because obviously you can't live forever in your current body.

Bemrose: 2:11:16

I intend to die trying.

Gene: 2:11:18

Well, you will die trying. Biologically, we know that's happening literally every day, more and more of your body is dying.

Bemrose: 2:11:26

I'm just saying that the limits of my value judgment are by definition, the, they are limited by what is capable of being within my human experience. And if you know what happens when Voyager encounters in alien species, I don't know, cause I won't be there. And more importantly, I'm not neither qualified nor capable of deciding on the morality of that situation.

Gene: 2:11:51

Okay. You can take yourself out of the mixing,

Bemrose: 2:11:54

I don't think anybody else is qualified to make decisions about my morality either.

Gene: 2:11:58

okay. But that that's a self-referencing statement. So you're not qualified to make any decisions about anybody else's morality than either going by your own

Bemrose: 2:12:06

I, and I make every effort not to.

Gene: 2:12:09

But that statement makes a judgment. So you're using circular reference here. My point is that humanity in its current form is a transitional form that if humanity survives conceptually, like the things that we create, the thoughts that we have that will happen without these biological bodies, these are simply a way. For us to go through this phase of our evolution. And if we end up killing ourselves before we're able to transition to the next phase, then this was simply a failed experiment and the simulation can restart

Bemrose: 2:12:51

Yeah. Oh, I got nothing.

Gene: 2:12:54

Okay. And on that note, I hope you guys have enjoyed this very interesting episode that jumped all over the place, but nonetheless, I think was horribly entertaining. I want to know what element of this episode do you disagree with the most? Because my guess is different people will be disagreeing with different parts of this since we touched on so many things

Bemrose: 2:13:20

who agrees with everything I say is probably wrong.

Gene: 2:13:23

I think for the first two hours or so everything that you said I kind of had to agree with, and if we finally got to robot actually running the police department, and I finally found something we can disagree on. I appreciate you taking the time to record this with me. I do want to leave you with that question. So let me know, and either no agenda, social or gene@sirgene.com. Um, But don't stop listening yet. What follows is the after show of the recording of the podcast for your enjoyment?

Bemrose: 2:13:55

It's it's, if something is not good, it's difficult to enjoy it. So if I want to enjoy it, if I want to put on something mindless here's, here's my standard podcast listening, or, you know, especially like if I'm doing a Netflix video I have three screens in front of me. The left one will have Netflix or maybe a podcast or something. The middle one has my code editor and the right one has my company.

Gene: 2:14:21

is hilarious. Cause I've got three for the screens in front of me, , my right one that has YouTube videos. My left, one's got a web browser and my middle one is got my dev environment.

Bemrose: 2:14:31

yeah, I'm pretty much the same thing. And, and that, I mean, it is not only, you know, I, I have trouble focusing on one thing at a time, unless it's absolutely riveting. If it's a really good show, then I might. But if it's not absolutely riveting or if it's not so well done that I'm, you know, then it harms my ability to enjoy the media, to focus all my attention. So I'm always doing something else. And, you know, even with podcasts, I'll have a podcast window minimized somewhere and I've got the browser up on the left side, which always has stack overflow or some reference site on it.

. Gene: 2:15:07

No, it's, it's a, it's always a chore to close windows that I've opened during the day. Way too many of them are tabs. I should say tabs

Bemrose: 2:15:16

Oh, don't even ask me about tabs.

Gene: 2:15:18

and it's yeah, , starting to force myself to just close them every night. But when I don't do that, the browser takes 20 gigs.

Bemrose: 2:15:27

My Chrome window that I'm running clean feed on currently has 11 tabs open. And that is a temporary window. you know, cause I'll open it. If I've got a project that I know I'm going to finish in that day, I'll just open a tabs for that project. And then, and then at least it's nice. There's one button I can kill the browser and be like, I'm not looking at these anymore.

Gene: 2:15:49

so

Bemrose: 2:15:49

What do I have?

Gene: 2:15:50

tabs open on this one and I've got

Bemrose: 2:15:54

yeah, my main browser when I pull it up

Gene: 2:15:59

Oh yeah, you barely beat me there. And then I've got seven more in this one. So it's a it's great that they let you do that. But , it does create a bit of a memory hog and a mess.

Bemrose: 2:16:12

Yeah. Well,

Gene: 2:16:13

And occasionally I

Bemrose: 2:16:14

any, any programmer has at least 32 gigabytes of memory

Gene: 2:16:17

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, , that's that's well,

Bemrose: 2:16:20

people are like, well, what do you use all that memory for? Do you edit video? No, I edit code and I always have, what do you use the memory for my browser?

Gene: 2:16:29

I don't know who the hell doesn't max out the memory on their computer in the first place. Cause that to me

Bemrose: 2:16:33

who buy pre-made computers,

Gene: 2:16:35

yeah, but like

Bemrose: 2:16:36

people who buy Apple,

Gene: 2:16:38

no, you absolutely have to max it out because it's not upgradable. So if you don't, if you don't buy an

Bemrose: 2:16:44

mortgages you want to bring out.

Gene: 2:16:45

it fair enough. But if you want to buy an Oh yeah. So one of the guys that I interviewed the other day, a developer out of the UK, we were reminiscing about our Mac pros the garbage cans ones that we bought. He had paid $7,000 for his and I paid $10,000 for mine. And.

Bemrose: 2:17:04

I'm just saying I can, I can buy six amazing fucking computers

Gene: 2:17:09

well, you could now, but that's the point. So Apple, historically what they've done is through their relationship with Intel, they've been the first company to get the batch of the new stuff every time.

Bemrose: 2:17:22

Oh. Oh. Do you get, do you get new tech lust?

Gene: 2:17:25

Well, not as much these days I used to. Absolutely. Yeah. I always had the latest shit, but so , when they announced the Mac

Bemrose: 2:17:33

That, that is a curse. I've never had to

Gene: 2:17:35

Oh, , you're lucky in that game. And so that though I got the the 12 core little garbage can with two video cards maxed out Ram maxed out. I says the everything combined and it was 10,000 bucks. And I pre-ordered it. So I have to then wait for six months before it actually shipped. And it, it was the fastest machine for what I was doing, which was video editing. For a bout Bob was probably the fastest for about 12 months, but I lasted about 18 months before buying a$3,500 PC that ran circles around it. So did not get my money's worth unfortunately, in that machine.

Bemrose: 2:18:16

I mean, there's, there's a school of thought that says, if you buy Apple, you don't get your money's worth,

Gene: 2:18:21

yeah, but

Bemrose: 2:18:22

very subjective.

Gene: 2:18:23

know, it's, I think it's generally true, it's it? And it doesn't have to be a bad product just to not get your money's worth just means it's overly expensive. If, if I phones were 300 bucks, instead of a thousand bucks, it'd be an absolute, no brainer. Everybody should always buy an iPhone. There's just a better product. But at, at a thousand

Bemrose: 2:18:43

I might dispute that, but I agree with your point.

Gene: 2:18:46

You can look at some particular hardware made by, whoever you like that does something that Apple products don't, but the seamless nature, the, just the way that these things are built, if you're not an idiot and you don't drop your phone into the toilet on a regular basis, these things will last a damn long time.

Bemrose: 2:19:06

No, I understand. But there's, there is a flip side to, you know, the, the number one benefit that people will always point out for Apple devices. And in fact, the reason why so many people pay the obviously inflated prices for it is the everything just works argument. And the flip side to that is. Really important to people like me. I am a hacker. I have to tinker. I have to modify, I have to change things. Every time that I launched new software, the very first dialogue I go to is the settings or preferences.

Gene: 2:19:42

Well, it doesn't everybody

Bemrose: 2:19:44

Apple does not do a good job of allowing customization, at least not in that ways that I want to customize things. I like to customize behavior. I actually really prefer open source because half the time, if I can go out and download the source and rebuild it with my modifications, I'll try that. I, you know, I, I, well, I, I don't know how much this is true now that Steve is gone for what, eight years? 10 years.

Gene: 2:20:09

yeah, it's over a decade.

Bemrose: 2:20:11

When, when Steve jobs came out, the first time he was saying, it just works and it's correct out of the box and this stuff is, you know, it, it it's correct for everybody. And what I was hearing was in the 10% of cases where we haven't anticipated your needs, fuck you, you'll never be able to make it work. And that is, that is the main reason, you know, the cost is, is obviously an easy excuse, but that's probably the main reason is, is if, if you go out and build a product like that, then you know, equivalent on the particular where the line is, but I'm going to say 90% of the time or 90% of the users, it just works and just makes everything easy and better. And for the other 10% of the time

Gene: 2:21:04

obviously. You you're just really focusing on the marketing for it. There.

Bemrose: 2:21:08

For, for the other 10% of the time, the lack of configurability is a detriment, because if it doesn't just work, you can't make it work. And I so often find myself in a position where I am trying to use a product in some way that the developer did not imagine or account for. And it therefore things for me seldom work the way I want out of the box. And I will accept that that's probably a criticism of the things that I want, but that's the way it is. And what it means is that configurability is a benefit and Apple classically doesn't have a lot of configurability.

Gene: 2:21:48

I think the Steve jobs really came to understand is that for computers to be seen as Something for everybody. Yeah. That's exactly where I was going. You have to look at a kitchen appliance or a refrigerator and say, how do I make the thing that does the thing it's made for better than anything else and nothing else.

Bemrose: 2:22:12

And for people who want to treat their computer as an appliance, Apple is a fantastic piece of hardware. Now there's also the cost argument, but we put that aside. But you know, if, if the cost was the same, it was roughly equivalent for an equivalent amount of power. Then I, I will say it is a no brainer for most people to choose Apple. Now, the words you used was if you're not an idiot and I, I would challenge you on that because I don't think

Gene: 2:22:42

I think I was referring to iOS. Ben. I think the reason for that for iOS is because I will challenge somebody to show me what an Android device does. Then an iOS device can't do, because just because you're not familiar with software

Bemrose: 2:22:59

Install APKs

Gene: 2:23:00

eight installing AP case is something that you need. Why on the Android, because it's not supported in the Android store.

Bemrose: 2:23:07

well, no, because I might have written my own APK. I might be downloading it from somebody who

Gene: 2:23:11

do that on iOS. You can absolutely write your own software and you don't need to go through Apple to run your own stuff.

Bemrose: 2:23:18

but I don't.

Gene: 2:23:19

You can have up to 10,000 of your friends, run your software without Apple's approval.

Bemrose: 2:23:25

And how's that.

Gene: 2:23:27

How's that? And so that, that is something that's been around.

Bemrose: 2:23:30

I'm not by the way. I'm not looking for it without Apple's approval. I also am looking for, without Apple, even knowing, because I don't want, I don't like gatekeepers

Gene: 2:23:38

Yeah, the 9,000

Bemrose: 2:23:41

Apple being able to prevent it. How about that? If I go right the next parlor app,

Gene: 2:23:46

Yeah, , you can write your next power lap and you can have your closest 9,899 friends using.

Bemrose: 2:23:53

enforce that number?

Gene: 2:23:54

So that number is because to do that. You're using a test flight, which is intended for beta tests. So right now, if you were using iOS pretty much all of the podcasting 2.0 apps, the only way they're available is through test flight. None of them have been approved by Apple. And so there's, there's less than 10,000 out there, I guess. That's the other thing we know about that,

Bemrose: 2:24:20

but I guess I'm, I'm wondering, cause

Gene: 2:24:22

but there, so there's two versions of that there's test flight, which is just totally open to anybody. You pay Apple, you're a hundred bucks a year for your development environment. Oh, well, yes, there you are. And we took money out of the

Bemrose: 2:24:34

install the development environment on this windows eight machine?

Gene: 2:24:37

you can't you can't put money back in after we already took it out. Can you instead put it on that windows machine, if you want to run a VM on your windows machine that has Apple, Oh, that's running out. Sure. And actually, you know what, actually, that's not even true. So there are absolutely multi-platform dev environments for mobile apps that you can write your code and compile it for both systems and then use a test flight in order to be able to distribute it to your friends on the iOS

Bemrose: 2:25:06

So that solves one of the problems. One of my big complaints is the idea that I, I don't,

Gene: 2:25:11

Anything going through test

Bemrose: 2:25:12

that I can't use, I can't use a machine that I want to generate software.

Gene: 2:25:16

Sure. No, they, they, you can do that. It's just the apples. If you want to use Apple's environment, that's only available on the Apple platform, the whatever, something code, whatever they're calling it. But there, there

Bemrose: 2:25:27

You want to know how you want to know how insane I am. I developed Java apps without an ID

Gene: 2:25:34

Well, that's not insane. Why is that insane?

Bemrose: 2:25:36

Because every fucking tutorial and every framework out there all shows you exactly how to do it in eclipse.

Gene: 2:25:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bemrose: 2:25:44

And I'm sorry, I only have 32 gigabytes of Ram on this machine. I'm not installing eclipse.

Gene: 2:25:51

I don't know how much of my stuff you have listened to her or, you know, what bits you've caught about my background at all, but you know, I started off as a developer really I learned to program when I was in like junior high school. And then by the time I was in yeah, by the time.

Bemrose: 2:26:08

wasn't offered it wasn't offered through the school, but I learned on my own.

Gene: 2:26:12

Yeah. So I found I was one of the first people, if not the first person to find a bug in the Mac ROMs. Because I was programming on the Mac at that point. My, summer job after graduating high school was a great computer where I was writing the interface for controlling craze on a Mac which was really interesting. And it also taught me that when you're writing these programs on the Mac, at least this is pre windows days, right? You've got 80% of your code has to do with the UI. And 20% at most is going to be what the program actually does. And that was a huge difference between programming on Unix, which I had learned earlier. And programming on the Mac is on Unix. Your code is mostly, what's doing the work on the Mac. The vast majority of your code is UI

Bemrose: 2:27:08

when I write stuff for myself here, it's almost always command line for that very reason.

Gene: 2:27:11

right? Cause that's quick and easy. And people always find the path of least amount of work for them, for the easiest passable amount of end result.

Bemrose: 2:27:20

Well that, and despite, despite admitting to being on windows, I never used the start menu. My primary, my primary interface for launching programs for doing everything in the system is a command prompt.

Gene: 2:27:32

so let me ask you this. Why? Oh, well, okay. Let me get finish up this story. So did that when I went to

Bemrose: 2:27:39

Well, doing the show, you closed the show and we're still doing

Gene: 2:27:41

I'm still recording it that's right. I closed the show by saying I closed the show. I didn't, you know, so I can, I can have bits that are interesting back in. It's just, again, it's going past two and a half hours, I guess. Actually my history may be more interesting to listeners than to you, but when I was at the university, , I took the first ever C class that the university events auto offered. And when I took that class, I realized how basic everything was. And of course, that class, we had to use the unit systems. And so you had to log in and, compile , your programs on there. And I thought being lazy that, , this is bullshit. So I wrote my own scene interpreter on the Mac, so I could do all my homework without having to do it on the the school computer, because the only thing that mattered was that. Your code was correct. And that your end result file that you, demonstrated that it worked had the right crap in it. So whether it was running on a Unix system or running on my Mac, everything was all a command line anyway. So it didn't really matter. So it was like, this is super simple. The only thing is I,

Bemrose: 2:28:53

as the compilers were were

Gene: 2:28:55

but I wasn't compiling it. I actually wrote a C interpreter in Pascal because Pascal was my main language back then I was doing most of my stuff and I still have a, I don't think it's a better language, but I definitely have a soft spot for

Bemrose: 2:29:08

Y2K must have been great for you.

Gene: 2:29:10

I, I, well, it was, but I had nothing to do with programming. I well, I actually did. I had a bunch of programmers working for me. I had a company doing development back then, but anyway, so I did that and I quickly realized that , what I enjoyed in college were philosophy classes. What I thought was. Annoying was computer science stuff. So I ended up realizing that for better or worse or certainly worse for my parents' standpoint, I was going to be a philosophy major because I really liked that a lot more than trying to get a degree in something that IRA was making money out.

Bemrose: 2:29:47

Who named Ben?

Gene: 2:29:48

So the reason I bring all this stuff up is because what happened to me is I burned out on programming., I could not do it for a job. I could do SIS admin shit, but I couldn't do programming because , I kept all the code in my head. If that makes sense to you. I not that I didn't

Bemrose: 2:30:07

mean, eventually it has to make it into a text file of some

Gene: 2:30:10

Yeah. And that's why I'm, I'm, I'm not trying to be funny about it. It's , I wasn't like memorizing code. It's just that

Bemrose: 2:30:15

Oh, I understand.

Gene: 2:30:16

built the program conceptually in my head and then the writing, the code was just putting that down

Bemrose: 2:30:21

It was a

Gene: 2:30:22

the computer. Yeah, exactly. And.

Bemrose: 2:30:25

creative step in the translation step did not coincide. I understand.

Gene: 2:30:29

Exactly. And then when C plus plus came out and object oriented programming was starting to become like the new thing that was popping up and obviously, , had been created previously, but that was when it was starting to come make a push at the university level. Most companies were still not using object oriented programming when I first installed C plus plus, and I read a few books and I started programming. I made the prediction that never again from now on, will we ever have a case where any single developer knows what the fuck the program is actually doing? Because everybody is relying now on these objects that are going to be distributed by multitude of people written by other people uh, varying degrees of capability. And yet this is going to become the dominant platform. And I think I was fairly right. If not a hundred percent right on that prediction. And I made that prediction, I think in like 90.

Bemrose: 2:31:28

I mean, I, I could quibble with you, but the first place I would quibble is, is as, as we've already decided, we have to with definitions is w w for one thing, what do you consider part of the program? Because the moment that an operating system or a driver became a thing, and you

Gene: 2:31:45

Yeah. It's it's

Bemrose: 2:31:46

writing everything to bare metal or, or the moment that a compiler became a thing, and you weren't writing assembly code, you could say that's when that

Gene: 2:31:53

enough, but I was debugging in assembly. I mean, I was fairly fluent in 68,000 assembling language. I wasn't writing code in it, but I was absolutely looking at Kyla assembly code to debug.

Bemrose: 2:32:03

Mean, I did debugging debugging, audio drivers in x86 assembly. Not entirely fun, but

Gene: 2:32:09

well, by the way, that's where I found the bug in the Mac ROMs. So there was a Mac plus rom had a bug in the IDO driver where it had a buffer overflow and you couldn't fix it because it was in the rums.

Bemrose: 2:32:21

But I would argue that what, what you described that, that no, no single programmer can understand. The whole program is not particularly a function of C plus plus, but rather a function of program complexity.

Gene: 2:32:36

It's object oriented program. It's not,

Bemrose: 2:32:38

what object? Well, Nazi plus object, but, but, but it, it is a feature of program complexity and object oriented programming is I, I just think that you got your causality, the wrong way. Object oriented programming does not cause program complexity program complexity has been monotonically increasing as computing has gone on object oriented programming is, is merely a means of, of managing the complexity.

Gene: 2:33:07

Let me qualify that statement. Absolutely you're correct on what you just said. Object oriented programming was the inevitability as the needs of software grew like it had to happen. What I said is simply the fact that up to that point up to a point where programs, even commercial programs were still written prior to using object oriented programming. Somebody had to learn that code and really understand the logic in how it works. And. That process took quite a bit of time, but it, it forced that programmer to become very intimate with the program and be able to jump around from section to section, knowing where to look and where, where, what type of thing happens with object oriented programming did is abstract that further away by a reliance on objects beyond just simply libraries that you yourself wrote that might contain procedure calls here. You actually had you know, an encouragement to utilize whole objects, whole classes that included both code and data in them, themselves that were sort of a mystery black box. And as long as what it did when you put it in the right data and it spits something out that vaguely resembled what you're looking for, you're good to go. And I get it that saves time and it allows you to create larger, more complex programs.

Bemrose: 2:34:35

I object oriented programming got a really bad rap from a lot of, of old programmers back in the day. And, and I think that you know, what, what you just said is, is one of the reasons why a lot of people were suddenly distrustful. Well, what if

Gene: 2:34:48

I'm bemoaning and it's just, it's like a craftsman who has made knives by hand for 20 years. Now, all of a sudden looking at this mass production factory, cranking them out in 30 seconds. And it's like, yeah, I can't make knives that fast, but I'm pretty good at knowing how to make a good knife.

Bemrose: 2:35:08

I mean, ultimately I lay it at the fact that, that the average program complexity has been a monotonically increasing function ever since the beginning of computing. And at some point the, it, it far, you know, at some point early on it far exceeded the human brain's ability to keep that much complexity in your head at one time. And, you know, you could be a better or worse program, or you could be, have the ability to keep more or less complexity in your head at one point. But at some point, everybody, you know, gets exceeded and I don't see a problem with object oriented as a. A tool with which you can slice your program into manageable chunks of complexity, and then reassemble them at the end using abstraction layers. You know, as with, with all programming, you know, w w

Gene: 2:35:59

kind of created a, sort of a meta programming.

Bemrose: 2:36:02

every problem in programming can be solid solved by adding another layer of abstraction, except for the problem of too many layers of abstraction.

Gene: 2:36:11

Yeah. And that can be solved by memory.

Bemrose: 2:36:15

Just, yeah, no JS just solves that by yo throw another few more gigs of Ram.

Gene: 2:36:20

I am still very much at this point. My, certainly my personality hasn't changed since my my early years whereas ring where I really strive for the elegance of simplicity and code. And , I get a kick out of being able to do something in five lines of code that nobody else is doing in five lines of code. It puts a smile on my own face and , it's something that.

Bemrose: 2:36:47

lines of code are a poor proxy for complexity. If, if those lines, especially in higher level languages, where those lines can have a lot of side effects,

Gene: 2:36:56

well, they might have, so just to, I guess

Bemrose: 2:36:59

it's simple. If you can do it in five lines of 50 lines of assembly, it's it might be elegant if you can do it in five lines of Python, but it might not be simple.

Gene: 2:37:10

That's exactly what I mean. Elegance and simplicity from the standpoint of not having a bunch of crap in there, apart from using as little as possible to make the desired result happen. And no, no, I don't like Java. That's totally true. But most stuff that I've been doing has really been. In languages I've never really had to fuck around with, because most of the code writing I've done for the last 15 years has all been for game engines. It's all been mods for games because, you know, it's , and I've mentioned this, I think in another episode probably the one with Brian. Brushwood that the way that I ended up getting sucked back into programming is because I'm playing a video game and I don't like something in that game. And so then I looked to see what kind of API the game has. And if, if

Bemrose: 2:38:03

can you do me a favor and get the hell out of my head?

Gene: 2:38:07

she has the right API, then I just, I learned whatever the hell I need to. And I,

Bemrose: 2:38:12

games that I will play now are the ones that I can mod for exactly that reason at an in fact, you know, if I'm not coding, then one of the other things that I'll do while I have a podcast on one screen is I might be playing Minecraft, which is a incredibly moddable game. And, and I have a whole folder of Minecraft mods that I've either worked on, or sometimes I'll download somebody else's model change their body.

Gene: 2:38:38

Yeah, exactly. And so I am not meant to Minecraft simply because I like high quality graphics and like a game.

Bemrose: 2:38:45

nearly as important to me.

Gene: 2:38:46

Yeah, well, yeah.

Bemrose: 2:38:49

There are some crazy fucking shader things that people learned how to do in Minecraft.

Gene: 2:38:53

Certainly, I think there's been so much done just because it has been such an expandable platform, but I, like, I get into a game called Ark survival evolved pretty much when it was in pre-release and you know, it's a neat game. It's, it's not, it is a little bit, I guess it is somewhat different than Minecraft, but it's a survival game. And the idea is you're like you wake up on the beach with no clothes on. And you got to try and figure out how to survive, stay alive. And then you you start seeing like some dodos walking around and you built the fire, you do all your standard sort of building game stuff, but there's

Bemrose: 2:39:30

So aside from the graphics and possibly the 3d voxel aspect, you just described Minecraft.

Gene: 2:39:36

know. I know that's but, but it looks nicer. It's, it's like a four for a K version of a nice looking Minecraft, but there's also dinosaurs running around trying to kill you and all kinds of stuff. And you have to keep, you know, gathering materials to build your higher and higher levels of crap, just like Minecraft. But in that game, I just found that there were a number of limitations. So I wrote a mod to create a a stove that I can cook up different things on and create more combinations of. Combining crap, all of that was already in the game. And then I did some other mods in it and, I was just making mods for myself. I didn't really give a shit if anybody used them, but to use it myself, I have to upload it into the server so that it gets added into the game. And when I, or I shouldn't say server uploaded to which I'm called to steam.

Bemrose: 2:40:29

See the w when I make a mod, I only need to upload it to my server because I'm running a server on, on a Debby and box in the basement.

Gene: 2:40:36

I think I could have theoretically done that. The seam route was very simple because as soon as the mod was done and I just create a little icon for it, then I just hit the upload button and I'm done., I don't need to do , . Anything with a server or anything else? I just, it, it was easy. So anyway, by doing that, and then you start realizing how many people are downloading your crap and the way you usually realize that in my case, I don't know what your experience is when I start being treated like tech support, because all of a sudden these people are like, Hey, I was trying to do this other thing. And I don't think your thing works.

Bemrose: 2:41:09

Oh yeah.

Gene: 2:41:10

Ah, God damn it. You're using it wrong. Well, they don't know how to use it. Cause I'm the one who wrote

Bemrose: 2:41:14

tend to run a private surfer,

Gene: 2:41:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bemrose: 2:41:17

The why let's see, I don't have any way of sending you a URL.

Gene: 2:41:21

Well, I mean, you could stick it into a DM on nudge on the social, I guess. You can be on PC.

Bemrose: 2:41:26

social and IRC. Those are the places that I check often. Otherwise it's

Gene: 2:41:29

but you could also email it to me. You have my email.

Bemrose: 2:41:32

Well, I do don't I,

Gene: 2:41:33

Yeah.

Bemrose: 2:41:33

But no, that's from clean feed. I didn't get anything

Gene: 2:41:36

No, but I, I, I sent you an email than they said you it's. Oh, it's just a gene at sir. gene.com.

Bemrose: 2:41:43

Okay. Well that, that's really difficult

Gene: 2:41:44

That's super hard to remember. Yeah. So anyway, anyway, the point is that eventually what ends up happening and it's definitely happened with this arc game is I planted for a couple of years. I maintained the mods through the, every time the game's updated, the unreal engine has to get updated. So you gotta recompile all your mods. And I had a bunch of them by that point, eventually I just kind of stopped playing the game, but I'm still getting these tech support tickets for people that are cause there's like 18,000 downloads of my mind. And I'm not making any money off this. I eventually I did what I now realize everybody else did. I just didn't know it at the time. Eventually I just posted on the mod ah, this is so horrible guys. I lost my hard drive. Didn't have a recent backup. And so unfortunately this is the current final version of the compiled DLLs. I can't, I can't do anything else without having to rewrite it from scratch.

Bemrose: 2:42:45

I like about the free modern community is that it is totally legitimate to just abandon a mod and be like, I'm done with this. Now, if you want to give back to the community, you post your source code. The email I just sent you is you, you were describing you, you mod things for you. And I sent you exactly what I like the primary thing that I bring along, which is a big collection of, I don't like this in Minecraft. And when I create a private server, I want it to change or be different. And so what I just sent you is the link to where I publish this thing and I publish it open source, and I'm like, it's MIT license and it, people will post in the comments all the time. Oh, I wish you didn't do this. And I'm like, if I think it's a righteous feature may be. And if I don't think it is, I'm like, well, here I could, you know, if you'd like to download the source and rebuild it, I can show you which lines to change

Gene: 2:43:38

Yeah. Curse for sure. Yeah. It's you know, what I've done is generally I've just provided code if people wanted, but and I've got to get Cub and stuff, but I just never use it usually. Cause it adds a layer of complexity. I don't really want there's usually enough complexity with.

Bemrose: 2:43:55

for me. It's called offsite backup of my source code.

Gene: 2:43:57

Well, right. But then you lose the excuse of not of not wanting. Well, I guess you could always, I mean, I just I've saw a bunch of people and posting other mods and like suspiciously, too many people were losing hard disks and it didn't occur to me until I use that same excuse myself, that Oh, most of these people are just making excuses. They're tired of working on their mods and they don't want to just outright say, well, fuck you. I'm not going to work on this anymore. And so instead they're

Bemrose: 2:44:24

the fi I,

Gene: 2:44:25

they're saying, Oh, my hard drive

Bemrose: 2:44:26

of that. Fascinating because if I didn't want to work on something, I would say, fuck you, I don't want to work on this. I probably wouldn't say, fuck you, unless somebody pushed, but I'd be like, you know what? I'm I'm done here, but here's the source. Do you do what you will?

Gene: 2:44:40

Yeah, that's probably a better approach, but I just took the same path that I saw a lot of other people did. I just didn't realize that's what it was at the time, which I lied about and just blame it on the hard drive. But now for, I did that for that game right now, the last game that I ever did a mod for was Kerbal which is a space flight game, but really more of a simulator. It's one of those video games that has almost a nearly vertical line for its learning curve. Like, you know, here's what we're going to do. We're going to build rockets from parts. It's really cute. And they got some cartoon character looking critters in there. But we're going to use real physics. And so you ended up with a lot of explosions and a lot of crashes and a lot of things that you probably don't know unless you took aerospace

Bemrose: 2:45:24

a game. It's a simulation.

Gene: 2:45:25

It disguised. It's a SIM disguised as a game that really teaches you

Bemrose: 2:45:31

all the best Sims are.

Gene: 2:45:32

Yeah, like I still think I would be great at being a city planner because I've done that so many times and

Bemrose: 2:45:37

Oh yeah. Yeah. W with the, the highly, highly abstracted and simplified version of the city

Gene: 2:45:45

Yeah.

Bemrose: 2:45:45

where, you know, Oh no, we, we, we're going to go ahead and plan a city, but you're not allowed to make any roads that go at a 45 degree angle with the Cardinal directions.

. Gene: 2:45:55

For those last thing, I, they just put out an update of the game and the, it added some really cool new functionality, but only for the new parts in the game. So most of my mounts, you know, they're not, they don't tend to be like horribly visual and stuff., they're solving a problem. So I think of it more as like an API Montney thing. And although I did have to use a. A blender to create some 3d graphics and whatnot. But so this last month for Kerrville, it basically just changes the parameters of a whole bunch of parts by sorting through them. And I was able to do all of that after I cleaned up my code, I, I was able to do that in six lines of code, which put a big smile on my face. Cause I'm like, fuck. Yeah. Cause I mean, all Coda is, is just , math and, and parameters for memory addresses anyway. So all you gotta do is go to a certain location memory and then make it a mathematical change on that.

Bemrose: 2:46:55

So KSP does not have an API for changing this. You, you like did monkey patching in the memory.

Gene: 2:47:02

Know I'm explaining it as memory patching, the actual code to do that was not tweaking memory. You were, you were making procedure calls, but I'm just saying effectively that's all that code can be reduced to. Not that that's what I was necessarily writing. And I certainly wasn't writing that for for Kerbal, but

Bemrose: 2:47:21

Okay.

Gene: 2:47:21

a sense, that's what it boils down to.

Bemrose: 2:47:23

I've encountered modding frameworks where that is exactly what you have to

Gene: 2:47:27

Yeah. That, that, that might be a wee bit too much work.

Bemrose: 2:47:31

I write, I write mods for, for a game called borderlands and,

Gene: 2:47:36

that.

Bemrose: 2:47:36

Yeah. I, I, I really, as far as first person shooters go, it's one of my favorites because they are extremely self-aware. They don't mind, you know, it's it's, the guns are not all, just Ruskin's have exactly the same bullet physics. Some of them, you know, they'll do crate D they're not afraid to do crazy stuff like a shotgun that fires a pellet that waves back and forth, or, or, you know, every once in a while there'll be a sniper rifle that fire sticks of dynamite. So they do crazy stuff. Which means that the engine supports crazy stuff. And so I love writing. Oh, it's for that. I'm sorry.

Gene: 2:48:09

Which engine they are using?

Bemrose: 2:48:10

Borderlands runs on I want to say it's unreal. so the unreal engine the, the studio has. This, it has a system where you can create behaviors and, and it creates like it's got its own its own system for doing. But the problem is that once the game is released, the data file doesn't have any of the source for the behaviors. All you have is a set of numbers that refer to other numbers, which refer to lists, which refer to other lists of numbers, which have to be bit shifted and twiddled and stuff. So the dev tools involve, you know, the very first thing you have to do with the dev tools is you have to go in and hack the executable to turn on the dev console. And once that happens, you can inject numbers into the data files, but knowing which numbers to inject into the data files and where is complicated and, and, and locating, you know, which number controls the stats on a particular gun or your, your jump height or something like it, isn't

Gene: 2:49:15

if they don't provide you, it's going to be a lot of trial and error.

Bemrose: 2:49:18

but creating new ones, behaviors though is truly crazy. Like I had one where I injected a script that would cause it to skip some dialogue so that, you know, cause the game is very story-driven and there's a number of places where in order for the scene to work, you arrive at a door and then the characters will talk to you and say something. And then you're supposed to look out a window and see an explosion and then it will let you progress. And if you've already played the game a hundred times, then you're like, okay, I just stopped talking. So the explosion can happen. I can get through the stupid door. Well, so you can, it's easy enough to put in stuff that says, okay, you can move even while they're talking and the door opens automatically, but now that sequence breaking on some of this. And so I'm like, okay, well I have to go in and insert a behavior where. It, it not only opens the door early, but it also sets the flag that the explosion tripped off and, and suddenly you're doing full on meta programming in these data files that were never intended to

Gene: 2:50:20

I could see that. I could totally see that. Yeah. Unreal in general. I think. There modding of games that are written and unreal, isn't too bad. If the game company releases the data formats that they're using, because essentially you can use the exact same tools. I don't know we're using the unreal. I can't remember what it's called now. It's like the unreal Def pack or whatever. It's their engine made specifically for doing game development. So you essentially build it on that and then you compile it and then you stick it into your

Bemrose: 2:50:55

had the, the official unreal tools installed for years.

Gene: 2:50:58

Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah. And so then, but the current bullet was written in unity, not unreal. So then I had to learn that. So it was a lot of, a lot of tweaking going on and I don't do any of this shit for work. You know, this is just hobby activities that make

Bemrose: 2:51:12

that is a hobby. The engine that is probably my favorite tomato is Gamebryo slash creation kit

Gene: 2:51:18

No, I have never seen

Bemrose: 2:51:19

for the Bethesda games.

Gene: 2:51:21

Oh, really? Is that the one they use? Interesting.

Bemrose: 2:51:23

Well, the elder scrolls three and four and fallout three and fallout, new Vegas were all. Gamebryo and then they took, they took the Gamebryo engine as it was in fallout, three, forked it and added a ton of new functionality for, for elder scrolls five. And then that's the engine they used for fallout four. So it's not actually Gamebryo in the later ones. It's, it's a custom fork of it. But the thing I loved about Bethesda. Is that they straight up release their engine editing tool. So you don't have to do a lot of code. Now. They've got the scripting language in there and that's of course my favorite part because it is coding, but you can it, it allows you, you know, because you're using their kit, you can grab models and textures from, you know, the standard, what the 3d S or whatever the, and you can bolt bring them into the thing and you can adjust, you can edit objects and insert new things and create new forms and all of it in their engine, which makes it tremendously easy compared to bit twiddling of other

Gene: 2:52:33

the unreal dev kit lets you do all that too. Yeah. Cause it's, it's relatively

Bemrose: 2:52:41

most games built on unreal. They don't want you editing

Gene: 2:52:43

Right, right there. They it's, the tool kit is useless unless, you know, data structures. But if the developer is pro modding and they publish the data structures, then you can build in the Toolcat, knowing what the data structures are, compile it and dump it into the game. And you don't have to do anything outside of the toolkit. And the toolkit is like 30 gigs. I mean, it's fricking huge so I dunno, I find that I kind of went from like playing video games and really enjoying the competitive aspects of it to playing solo video games, to writing mods for video Kansas, like drifting further

Bemrose: 2:53:25

my, my evolution, I was probably in the Xbox three 60 era. I was massively focused on nailing every game and complete. I was a completionist. It was like I had to get every game to a hundred percent, which on that platform meant a hundred percent achievements. And I, you know, focusing on, on my, my gamer score, which

Gene: 2:53:44

X-ers as a group, tend to have OCD

Bemrose: 2:53:48

And then somewhere along the line, I realized this is not necessary for me. And I have evolved. And now I am a casual, I don't, I don't play games for the challenge anymore. I no longer find a good use of my free time to be spent being frustrated. So I don't play games to try to hurt, hurt me anymore. And I don't play multiplayer competitive anymore. I love playing multiplayer cooperative, but I don't know. I've totally turned into a casual.

Gene: 2:54:24

yeah, we're getting older. That makes sense. I found just from a competitive standpoint, I couldn't play the twitchy fast shooting games anymore. I was really good at that in my twenties.

Bemrose: 2:54:35

I used to be good at those,

Gene: 2:54:36

I played competitively and I was at one point I was ranked second in the world on battlefield 42.

Bemrose: 2:54:42

I've heard

Gene: 2:54:42

yeah. And to elaborate on that, I think that lasted about three weeks. It was not a long-term long-term place because it, you know, it's updated constantly based on the results coming in. I never achieved my goal was obviously to get to be the top player in the world and that never happen. But, but but I also did every,

Bemrose: 2:55:00

know. It might be possible now

Gene: 2:55:02

I think there's a pretty hardcore group of people playing that game and I

Bemrose: 2:55:05

or are they still playing it?

Gene: 2:55:07

Oh dude. I I'm shocked. Every time I open up steam and I look at like some old game that I was really into 10, 15, maybe even 20 years ago. And Oh, like, a good example is age of empires. Do you remember that one? Yeah. So Adrian vampires. So circa 1997,

Bemrose: 2:55:25

I always liked it. It's much less popular, but more interesting,

Gene: 2:55:30

the age of mythology.

Bemrose: 2:55:31

age of mythology.

Gene: 2:55:32

But the original, like the major mythology was further down the line after they

Bemrose: 2:55:37

I understand. So was, so is AOA two and three,

Gene: 2:55:40

so yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I, I figured, Oh fuck, I'm going to relive this. I installed it and steam over the, open it up. And there's like 150 people online that I can play with. I'm like, you gotta be shitting me. This game is 25 years old. How can there be this many people that are, they're interested in playing, but it's, I don't think these games ever die, man. I think the size of community shrinks tremendously, but there are

Bemrose: 2:56:09

the games will die. The games will die if they don't have good replay value or, you know, there's, there's tens of thousands of games out there that straight up there, there exists no modern hardware that can play it because it, you know, it's, and, and of course it's all under a copyright for the next. 10 decades.

Gene: 2:56:33

Oh yeah. We can definitely talk about that.

Bemrose: 2:56:35

Let's

Gene: 2:56:36

That's such

Bemrose: 2:56:36

we should probably quit while we're behind. It is now five 30 my time.

Gene: 2:56:41

Yeah, it it's it's an interesting hobby. It, it's a, it's an introverted hobby, which generally in most of my life, I'm pretty extroverted. So that's my, like, my balance is sitting in programming.

Bemrose: 2:56:55

I, I, I've never, I've never given a lot of stock to categories as you may be able to tell, but I definitely behave more classically introverted, which I always took to be. Where do you go when, when you're wiped out and where, what do you do to recharge? And I absolutely want to be alone when I'm tired.

Gene: 2:57:14

Yeah. And that's actually the definition that young used for introvert versus extrovert is where do you recharge

Bemrose: 2:57:22

Now can I be social? Yes. Can I be charismatic if I try? It's a lot of effort. Sometimes.

Gene: 2:57:29

and this is why I'm I say normally in my life I'm an extrovert because I absolutely leave a party or an event with a group of people with a lot more energy than I do showing up to it. Whereas for introverts, like my ex-wife by the time they leave that party with me, they're just so tired of people and just want to. Be somewhere quiet and read for a while or do something like that. And I'm the opposite. I'm just like, you can't shut me up. I just want to keep talking. I'm more excited. I'm like, I may not sleep tonight. This was great. We need sleep.

Bemrose: 2:58:04

I'm introverted. And so is my wife. And the result is that my computer is in one room and her computer is in another room. We both got our man caves, well, hers, whatever she calls it, the bitch cave. And, and we, we, you know, we have a great relationship. We get up, we talk to each other, we'll, you know, have coffee. And then when we're done having coffee, we disappear to dis separate rooms and are both thrilled by it.

Gene: 2:58:32

Yeah. And

Bemrose: 2:58:33

It's nice having a house where we can do that.

Gene: 2:58:35

that's a good, healthy way to do it. I think that's for sure. So it's. For me, the programming is sort of that side of it as I that's, that's how I balance out the the more extroverted type things. COVID was really shitty for me because I typically would be out and about

Bemrose: 2:58:52

COVID was really shitty for a lot of people.

Gene: 2:58:54

Well, it also shitty for me financially, because I didn't make any money last year. And,

Bemrose: 2:58:58

Yeah. That didn't help.

Gene: 2:58:59

no that like going a year without making money sucks, dude. There's no two ways about

Bemrose: 2:59:04

can relate. Yeah, not fun.

Gene: 2:59:05

My, luck had been

Bemrose: 2:59:07

I need it. I needed grumpy old Benz to start a year sooner because we're, we're still on an upward trajectory with the reach and it's, it's finally getting to the point where it's kind of covering itself, like all of the, the new channel strip that you say I don't need. And the new microphone all came out of gob

Gene: 2:59:27

Oh, nice. That's awesome.

Bemrose: 2:59:28

I mean, it is really awesome that we have made enough to be able to cover that, but it's certainly not paying the mortgage yet.

Gene: 2:59:37

no,

Bemrose: 2:59:38

And, and you know what nothing else is either. You talked about burnout earlier. The, the entire reason I left Microsoft in 2014 and it took me actually a couple more years after that to admit this to myself was I was burnt out. Pretty badly. The, the entire corporate scene destroyed me and I didn't want to work on code. I didn't want to work with other people. And I would, I would mess around sometimes with a game or something, but for a period of four or five years, I only worked on things for myself and nothing else. It wasn't until the last couple of years that I finally started getting out and going, you know, I really can write code and now I should probably find a way to get paid for it because I get, you know, but, but it took me a while to recognize that I was burnout and also to realize the terms under which I was willing to do it where I like, I can't, I don't think I can ever be a cog in a corporate wheel any or any more. I don't, I, it really did a lot of damage to me. And I've got a lot of stories about things that happen at Microsoft and it took me. Sometime to realize that I like working with code and I like working with smart people and I hate corporate culture.

Gene: 3:01:01

Yep. No, I, I totally get that. In my case, what the burnout was caused by was just having a lot of well having responsibility to do stuff, but being expected to work on it myself. You know what I mean? And, and for somebody who does have more of an extrovert tendencies, that was pretty difficult because as an extrovert, my more normal interaction would be to , do little pieces. And then interact with somebody and talk about them and look at them and test them and then go back and do another small piece and then do it all over again. And that was not how programming worked back in the early nineties. And, and

Bemrose: 3:01:44

No, it was, it was very much. Programmer goes. Yeah. It's you, you, you take programmer, you pull them down off of the cross. You bury them in a cave. You put push a stone in front and three days later you expect him to with Cody,

Gene: 3:01:57

well, you gotta put some mountain Dew boxes in there as well, but yeah, that's essentially, that was it. And then moving to doing a dude named Ben type activities forced a lot more interaction with end users, which made, which was great for me because now I was doing ticky shit, but I was doing it where I was talking to people all day long. I was the guy that. Was trying to diagnose intermittent problems with the network going down and talking to different departments about it , and, , a lot more like interaction and team related stuff. And that was a lot more fun. And then as I was doing that, I realized,, I know what my bill ball rate is, and I know what my salary is, and I'm pretty sure there's not a whole lot of work to be done by the sales team, but there's an awful lot of money that goes to that team. And so that was how I decided to stop being an employee and start being a business owner is,

Bemrose: 3:03:04

I wish I had the energy for

Gene: 3:03:05

just, just doing the math. Well, I, this was in my twenties when I was single and I just did the math. I'm like this isn't, this is not. A way to do it, what I need, you know, I don't want to be working somewhere for 15 years to get a gold watch or not even the gold, like a fricking gold plated watch from, from the company for 15 years of service. So I, I started a develop a software development company and it was right around the time where websites were kind of coming to a point where every company realized they needed websites. So mid, mid 1990s, mid early or mid to late nineties, I guess is the way to phrase it. And it was a great why two K was there. I had a dozen developers working on, on doing shit. I was a sales guy. I was going around meeting with clients. I was closing 100% of the deals that were coming through. It was incredible time and it was, you know, very good for the ego, very unrealistic for long-term sustainability, where you literally close a hundred percent of your deals. If I met with somebody, we walked out with a contract and, and it, it was great while it lasted. And then we had the, the financial market crash in 2001 really late 2000, I guess. And that kind of just took all those really easy to close things and, and made them disappear. And all of a sudden I was scratching my head going, well, wait a minute. How could I go from having a bunch of business to no business?

Bemrose: 3:04:40

Your, my understanding is you're only a couple of years older than I am,

Gene: 3:04:44

Well, I'm, you know, 109, whatever, however old you are.

Bemrose: 3:04:47

well, okay. The reason I ask is that I ended up getting out of college. I, my timing was the worst possible and you just reminded me of this. I graduated college in December of two

Gene: 3:04:59

Okay.

Bemrose: 3:05:00

with a computer science degree.

Gene: 3:05:02

Yeah. That's a crappy timing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So like, if you would have graduated a year earlier, I would have hired you for a hundred thousand dollars, but then I had to lay all those people off, like a year and a half later.

Bemrose: 3:05:16

But I would have had a hundred thousand

Gene: 3:05:18

But you, but you were probably spent 105 because that's what happens when you get a big salary right off the get go. No, that's totally true. Yeah it was, it was an very interesting and fun time. And I also managed to get married right during that year when just. All shit hit the fan financial markets that was very unpleasant because I had pretty much decided that I was a genius at picking stocks. And so there's no point in paying somebody else to handle my money if I could do it myself better.

Bemrose: 3:05:49

I don't think there were that many people who saw that

Gene: 3:05:52

No, but

Bemrose: 3:05:54

maybe Devorah. Heck

Gene: 3:05:55

Yeah, yeah. Maybe. The company that lost me a minimum$160,000 was three com because I'd worked with three com products and I really liked what they were doing. They were the leader in the lower fields, and I know that they were opening up new markets in Latin America. I felt like three com was going to end up the big winner out of all this stuff. And the younger people I've never heard of three times. They have no idea who that company is. You're old enough, you probably still remember three com

Bemrose: 3:06:25

Oh, I remember

Gene: 3:06:27

and

Bemrose: 3:06:28

didn't have a lot to do with them, but

Gene: 3:06:29

no, but they were sort of the de facto network card that, that corporations use the computers. And they, they have a huge market share and we're growing in other less developed markets. And there was a number of factors that happened that coincided, that made three Comstock literally drop by 60% when something dropped 60%, you tend not to, well, you have two reactions either. You're like, fuck it. I'm going to sell it at a loss. Or you do what I did, which is like, there's no way I'm selling. They're going to recover. It's okay. These idiots that are selling right now are losing money. I'm not going to be an idiot. And so you keep holding that. Stock, because of all the things that you thought they were going to be able to do, as it continues to plummet, and your margins are called and there are four cells and in the end, the company is sold for peanuts because they were very financially stretched and they couldn't weather the storm that was happening. And so effectively, I mean, somebody bought them, but effectively they ended up going out of business. And so I will always remember three for that.

Bemrose: 3:07:48

I don't want to, I don't want to cut you off here and feel free to go ahead and continue telling your story into the recorder, but I actually do need to go.

Gene: 3:07:55

Oh yeah, no problem.

Bemrose: 3:07:56

showed up. My wife just showed up with dinner for mover eats.

Gene: 3:08:01

Okay. So she, she showed up to your man-cave with food is what you're saying.

Bemrose: 3:08:05

Well, she showed up in the kitchen and then poked her head in here and showed me

Gene: 3:08:11

food. What, what did you

Bemrose: 3:08:12

we've been sitting here. We are closing in on the four-hour Mark

Gene: 3:08:15

Yeah, that's

Bemrose: 3:08:16

I've never podcasted that long without taking a leak.

Gene: 3:08:20

So that's, that's a record there.

Bemrose: 3:08:24

Well, it's it's later in the day, one of the, one of the reasons why I have such a reputation of having to Peter and grumpy old Benz is that in order to wake up early and by early, I mean, we record at 9:00 AM, which is crazy

Gene: 3:08:36

crazy early. That's insane. I mean, people aren't up at that hour.

Bemrose: 3:08:39

I have to drink half a pot of coffee just to wake up and then that half upon a coffee needs to go somewhere.

Gene: 3:08:44

Right? Right. Yeah. Have you, have you tried cocaine?

Bemrose: 3:08:49

I not recently, I hear that the good stuff is not your grandpa's cocaine.

Gene: 3:08:55

That's a good answer. No, no, no, it definitely isn't. It's definitely not your grandfather's Coke.

Bemrose: 3:09:02

Okay. I, I, that's a story that I

Gene: 3:09:05

Actually probably gonna order UberEATS soon as I get off of here. Cause now you've got me thinking about

Bemrose: 3:09:09

this was a lot of fun. Thank you for, for the conversation. And and maybe we'll, we'll find it easier to schedule it again later. If, if you ever choose to have me back,

Gene: 3:09:19

Oh yeah, no, I definitely want to have you back, like, you know, next year it'd be perfect. So we can, we can work on getting that happening now, maybe even before that. But yeah, I, I certainly think from listening to grumpy old bands that I find myself agreeing with you. Way more frequently than I should.

Bemrose: 3:09:43

that is a dangerous position to be taking.

Gene: 3:09:46

And at the same time, , I do like,

Bemrose: 3:09:50

random thoughts, random thoughts.

Gene: 3:09:53

the random thoughts I do like that podcast more than grumpy, old Benz. So that's the issue is that like , maybe what it is is with random thoughts. I'm not hearing my thoughts in that conversation, but when I'm listening to you guys, on grumpy, old Benz, you're actually saying the shit I'm thinking and that makes it less interesting.

Bemrose: 3:10:20

Well, I apologize for that and I'll try to be someone else

Gene: 3:10:25

Okay, well, that's fair. I appreciate the effort. I appreciate you willing to make the effort and I will let you get going,

Bemrose: 3:10:33

for one of our experts?

Gene: 3:10:34

I will send you that stuff. I think you will enjoy. It is a bit of a contrarian view, but it's a fun one because If you can get past thinking about Venus as an ocean planet, it makes a hell of a lot more sense.

Bemrose: 3:10:47

It's one thing that, that a lot of people don't really, I mean, don't really understand it. Very few people take the time to do is that if there is a well thought out view that I disagree with, then I want to learn about it because one of two things is going to happen either. I'm going to change my mind or I'm going to have ammunition to throw back at whatever idiot brings the view to me the next time.

Gene: 3:11:11

And that concludes part one of my interview with Sarah Bemrose.