The number you have dialed, 4-3-6-1-3-7-8, has been changed.
The new number is O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O.
Please note, the new number is O-O-O-O-O-O-O.
The new number is O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O.
The new number is O-O-O-O.
The new number is O-O-O-O-O.
The new number is O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Hello.
Out in Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
You do. Good evening.
Well, it is a good evening.
It's a good evening.
You know, we had quite an astounding turnout yesterday around the country for Election
Day.
And I dare say we've steered the bus into a different lane for at least a spell and hopefully
given people some inspiration that, yeah, you can do something.
You can make a difference.
You can change the direction we're heading in.
We'll see where we go.
But I'm hopeful now.
For the first time in a long time, I feel some hope.
It is nice to have election results every once in a while that don't scare the hell out of
me.
Well, I'll take the contrary viewpoint.
I'm not entirely hopeful about the results of the election.
Why is it I always have to have a negative Nelly every time something good happens?
I can be, you know, in a crowd where, you know, we finally like met friendly aliens and
somebody is going to say, you know what?
I saw this in a science fiction film.
It's not even original material.
You know, there's always somebody bringing me that.
You know what?
You're not going to do it, Alex.
You're not going to do it.
I feel good today.
I feel happy.
I feel optimistic.
And if you want to feel miserable and pessimistic, be my guest.
But I'm not happy.
All right.
I will feel that way about New York because I'll always speak my conscience.
All right.
All right.
But you didn't.
You haven't said anything yet.
I have.
I think we had a horrible result in the mayoral race.
I know that's a very unpopular position, especially on this particular station.
I think there were a lot of useful idiots out there that were campaigning for this mayor
who was basically going against many, many people's interests.
And so, yeah, I know it's a very unpopular position to take, but I take it.
And yet somehow it bobs to the top of the show as the dominant position.
Look, useful idiots, you know, I don't know what exactly you mean.
I mean, I can sense what you mean by that.
But the real idiots were the ones running, and that's what people voted against.
I mean, I'm not going to get into an argument about this.
This is, you know, we deserve to feel good about change.
You want the same old thing over and over again?
You want more Chuck Schumer?
You want more Hakeem Jeffries, people who are afraid of their shadows?
And don't want to make any waves whatsoever?
You have to stir things up.
You've got to get people upset who oppose you.
You've got to make sure your presence is known.
And I'm glad to see Democrats for once in their lives doing that.
We'll see if it works.
Maybe it won't work.
But, you know, you've got to try something.
And being cautious has not worked.
Well, that's one way of looking at it.
I think another way of looking at it is that we have abdicated - and I want to take this down to the level of technology here, too, because, you know, we're a technology-focused radio station here.
And, you know, some people get upset when we just talk about politics.
But I think this is an issue of technology here because I think what we have done, and especially if you look at the results of this particular election, is that we have traded charisma for competence here.
I think what we need to have is a real discussion about who is the most competent candidate, who is the most competent administrator to run a particular city.
And I think that we elected somebody who is incredibly young and incompetent, who has never held a position in his life of anything even remotely resembling this type of responsibility.
And yet we've just handed over all of this accountability to this one particular person.
No.
No, not to this one person, to a team of people, to a huge team of enthusiastic young people who are going to make a difference.
And I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
There was one name -
Because what has happened before has not worked.
Look, it didn't work with Adams.
You elect a cop, and, you know, you get what you elect.
And we got exactly what we deserve for doing that.
Now, Cuomo, look, you know, he's been in power.
So you can say Mondale doesn't have the experience, and I counter that by saying Cuomo does have the experience, and it's that experience that people voted against.
All right?
It's what he brings to the table that people didn't want any part of.
So, you know, that's - the people have spoken.
And I've dealt with the people speaking against what I believe in so many times that, you know, I'm going to say, okay, well, you know, it's too bad.
But your side didn't win this time.
I guess so.
But, again, I think we have to go back to baseline levels of competence, and we should be expecting competence, quantifiable merit and achievement from our leaders of this -
And I really, really do believe this, that New York City is the greatest city that human beings have ever created.
And I think that to hand that over to somebody who's 34 years old and never really had an actual job in his entire career is an abdication of our responsibility as an electorate.
That is extremely dangerous.
Yes, Gila.
I actually agree with Alex.
Oh, for God's sake.
And I think that a lot of -
I just wanted to be happy for one night.
I can't ever get -
Yeah, we're not going to let that happen.
The real issue that I have, though, is that that piece of the discussion, which I think is important and should have gotten a little more airtime, got completely covered up by so much of the incredibly hateful rhetoric that got brought up about who people are.
And there are real discussions that needed to be had, but got hidden by Islamophobic rhetoric, which I don't think was germane to the, does this person have the experience and skill to run this city?
We had no good options.
I do have a question, though, which is why are we still having party primaries in a ranked choice system?
I hope you're not asking me.
I don't even vote in that election.
Good question.
Yeah, I mean, that's - it's a good question.
Rob, go ahead.
I like that we didn't elect the sexual harasser.
I think out of all the choices we had, we as a city made one that does not involve putting a known sexual harasser back into that seat of power.
And I think that's what the people were speaking on mostly.
If - yeah, for God's sake, Trump endorsed him.
Elon Musk endorsed him.
You got to listen to what that means.
You know, this is not what New York wants.
It's obviously not what New York wants.
They voted.
They literally voted.
So, you know, you might think the guy has no experience.
Well, he's about to get a whole lot of experience.
About to get a whole lot.
And I think he'll do much better than a bunch of other people who have filled that role, including Giuliani, de Blasio, certainly Adams.
So, you know, the bar is not that high.
But I think he'll do all right, especially with support.
I mean, I want to bring this down, though, back again to the level of like -
I honestly had no idea we were going to have this conversation tonight.
I have so much other material.
But fine, go ahead.
Speak your mind.
It's impossible to ignore it, I guess.
Right.
But I want to bring it back down to this level of algorithmic manipulation and its effect on the polity here.
Because this is what I can't reconcile, Immanuel.
25 years ago, just about 25 years ago, this city was subject to one of the worst terrorist attacks we had ever seen in the history of this planet.
It was a veritable act of war when planes were flown into the World Trade Center.
Why do we always have to bring that up?
Why does that have to do with the present day?
It has a lot to do with the present day because just over two weeks ago, Mamdami publicized his visit with an incredibly offensive and contentious imam, this guy, Siraj Wahaj.
And he publicized this himself with smiling photographs of this guy.
Yeah, okay, fine.
You know what?
This is just like talking to Cuomo.
Look.
No, it's not.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
It's a stupid thing to bring up.
It really is.
First of all, I've heard that the guy was a witness for the government.
All right.
And second of all, it's quite likely when you're shaking hands with thousands of people, you don't know who you're standing next to at that particular moment.
No.
Do you really think somebody running for mayor is going to be out there glorifying 9-11?
That's what he did.
That is exactly what he did.
It was brazen.
Just say that out loud to yourself or just say it in your head to yourself and ask why in God's name would somebody be that stupid?
That's my question.
Because he was so brazen and thought that he had such a glide path to the election, to winning the election, that he did this or he didn't care.
This guy was an unindicted co-conspirator.
You are buying into the most right-wing talking points I think I've ever heard on these airwaves.
These are facts.
You can look them up.
Okay.
Well, they're your own facts.
All right.
They're they're also we all have our own our own truths.
Apparently, this guy, this is a mom who's also known for making really vitriolic statements about gay persons in the LGBTQ community, as well as the subjugation of women.
So my question is, how can this happen?
I can find you people so much worse who hang out with with the other people as well.
And that's not brought up ever.
That's never, ever talked about.
Let me get the question out here, though.
We only have an hour.
Can we please speed this up?
Okay.
My narrative flow keeps being interrupted here.
How can this happen if this is true?
And there's lots of reporting about this particular incident.
If this is true, how could this person be elected if we aren't being manipulated algorithmically in one way or another?
How can somebody meet with an imam who is an unindicted co-conspirator of an attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and then weeks later become elected mayor of that particular city?
Because your facts, your facts don't add up.
That's how.
These are facts.
Yeah.
Oh, then people are really stupid is your point, I guess.
Everybody in New York City has been misled and doesn't see what's right in front of them.
That's your point.
That is my point.
All right.
Well, good luck with that.
Rob?
Can we all agree that we're not going to miss Eric Adams?
Yes.
Yes.
That we can agree on.
Yeah.
That we can agree on.
I also think that you know...
I would have preferred Curtis Sliwa, to be honest, to Cuomo.
You know, I think he is at least honest.
I don't agree with what he says.
I think he's ignorant on a number of things.
But he likes cats, and that makes him a good person.
I can agree with that.
All right.
Let's move on, please.
We can talk about this on Overtime.
And yes, folks, if you want to hear more of this kind of crap, 8 o'clock, Channel 2600 on YouTube.
And I'm happy to defend my position anytime.
Kyle, you have had very little to say.
Well, I would just observe it.
It's going to be very interesting, New York, in the sort of direction for the future.
And what I noticed is there were a lot of characters.
And character was something that I think came up.
When you go through the options, and it looks like the way the mayor-elect presented himself was the kind of character that the city was interested in trying.
So it will make for an interesting couple of years.
It's got people excited.
And no matter what side you're on, you're excited.
And I dare say it's spreading throughout the country.
People are just getting excited.
And, you know, maybe this will inspire people to try something different in their own way, in their own part of the nation.
And a lot of the other options were characters themselves in kind of, I guess, more egotistical ways than the way the mayor-elect was presenting a movement for the populace of the city, which I think just stood out on the ballot.
Well, you know, one thing, and this goes, even if I knew nothing about the various viewpoints or stands on certain issues, just the fact that you've got somebody brand new, as opposed to somebody who we've heard from so many damn times before and so familiar a name.
You know, just that alone, without knowing anything about the platform, it's a bit refreshing.
But then you add the other things in, and, well, it gets even better.
Okay, let's move on.
We had a lot of feedback to last week's show.
Probably nothing compared to the feedback we're going to get to this week's show.
But last week, I was complaining about my Nest thermostat.
Yeah, it's just one hot topic after another on this show.
And that resulted in a bunch of letters.
And also, there have been some developments, which I think are pretty good developments.
Honestly, it is the season that people are looking to these devices.
And it ties in with a lot of consumer issues that we've talked about when you're running software and issues of ownership of various bits of hardware and IoT, so-called Internet of Things.
That is, we're subsumed.
We're steeped in it.
And if we're not careful or without advocating, we can kind of lose ourselves to these terms of service and all that.
So it's, yeah, a complaint, but it's really quite relevant considering how many different devices people interact with and might run into the same issue where, like, something no longer has support.
And what do you do?
How do you work around that with hardware and software?
Yeah.
And the story basically was that Google has withdrawn support for Nest thermostats, I think generations one and two, from at least a decade ago.
And basically leaving people with just regular thermostats that don't do the things that they bought them to do as, you know, scheduling, remote access, that kind of thing.
And the question is, you know, is that a good thing to do, to basically not let something wear out over time, but kill it so that people are forced to buy the same thing again?
Um, I didn't think it was a very good idea and, um, a number of people seem to agree.
Here's, um, here's one letter.
I, uh, love last night's show, especially the parts about keeping older technology running.
I just wanted to let you know, I was listening to the show on a 2008 vintage Logitech, uh, that I, uh, uh, that I bought in, um, uh, 2008 for about $400.
Logitech squeeze box boom.
I don't know what that is.
Uh, it sounds cool.
Uh, Logitech maintained a website, uh, my squeeze box.com where you could configure their squeeze box line of internet radios until March 19th, 2024.
After that date, all the entire line of Logitech squeeze box devices were bricked, but that's not the end of the story.
An open source project, uh, Lirion rose from the ashes.
I am now hosting the Lirion music server, uh, on a Raspberry Pi on my home network.
And since Logitech bricked a whole bunch of excellent audio equipment in March of 2024, I've been able to purchase eight more Logitech radios for pennies on the dollar from eBay.
The Lirion contributors have even started publishing firmware upgrades for the radios.
I've communicated with contributors on the forums who have addressed my minor feature requests in the same day.
I can't tell you how much better my music experience is today.
I'm not just getting by with old equipment.
I have a superior music experience than you can get with smart speakers and smart as in quotes and subscriptions.
My wife loves it because every radio in the house has six preset buttons that play our favorite radio stations when pressed.
No more, hey, Google, and then hearing Bulgarian hardcore metal because it misunderstood your request.
No offense meant toward Bulgarian hardcore metal, if that's your thing.
And it happens to be my thing.
So thank you for saying that.
I wrote this to illustrate what I think is a real and growing market.
I believe that due to Moore's law, computer hardware, laptops, tablets, phones, et cetera, became so powerful about 10 years ago that the products satisfy most people's needs without ever requiring an upgrade.
Imagine that.
Yeah, you don't need an upgrade.
You're happy with what you have.
Worst thing possible for Google and all the others.
We need a better internet radio to the same degree that we need a better paperclip.
Well said.
Corporations won't, and I might have trouble with this word because I don't think I've ever said it before, corporations won't commoditize, commoditize, commoditize.
I can do that.
Corporations won't commoditize these products because they'll lose annuity revenue, but they will shed them when they are no longer worth supporting.
Maybe, just like the right to repair, we need a right to open source.
When thermostats and radios are no longer profitable, corporations aren't forced to keep supporting them and lose money, but they do need to open source their code and hand over control to an open community.
There is too much amazingly powerful technology going into landfills right now.
This might help.
Thanks for the great show.
It was so compelling that I spent 10 minutes writing you an email about it.
Al, thank you.
Thank you for writing that.
Thank you for taking the time.
Thank you for your ideas because they've inspired me, and I'm sure they'll inspire many more people as well.
Yes, we need a bill of rights for the right to open source.
Absolutely.
You know, enough of this bricking of technology.
Maybe what we have is good enough.
Maybe it's what we want.
Maybe we don't want your upgrades and your changes.
How many times has somebody forced an upgrade on you, on your operating system, on your streaming service, whatnot, and it doesn't do what you want it to do?
It doesn't do what it used to do.
You know, you should have a say in this.
You should be able to run what you're comfortable running.
And if a company doesn't want to support that anymore, give it to somebody who does.
Yes, Rob.
Absolutely.
The Squeezebox boom that our writer is talking about is Squeezebox was a line of internet radios.
So basically the form factor of a radio type appliance, but for internet streams rather than over-the-air radio waves.
And the Squeezebox boom was the boombox version of that.
I'm looking at a picture of one.
It actually looks pretty cool.
And it is a boombox with, you know, early 2000s, mid-2000s sort of bit of gadgetry in the middle that you would use to control it.
And the fact that people can still use these, they came out in 2008.
The Squeezebox boom was discontinued in 2012, but our friend here can keep his going thanks to the efforts of the folks maintaining the open source, you know, version of this.
And I think that's really admirable.
And nobody has anything else to say?
Really?
I do.
Go ahead.
Well, I mean, you'll have to cut me off.
I mean, what can I say about it?
It applies to so many different things.
And the support or at least leaving a path for people to support something themselves is, I think, chiefly in the interest of safety, really important.
Because if people are maintaining things and they don't have information about how something is meant to interface or work, they're going to have to - they're going to be trying to figure those ways out on their own with whatever skill level and tools they have.
So, yeah, and taking away the original intent.
If you leave something in a state that it doesn't work as it was originally sold to someone, you're disabling it.
You're disabling something as it was originally presented and then not having any kind of way for people to design support themselves.
You're really kind of essentially breaking or completely destroying something without the user having any kind of agency in that process.
Well, we have another letter here.
This is from Tom.
You may have seen this already.
The latest comments on the bottom of the page might be hopeful this could still work.
This is an allusion to something back in 2014 on hackaday.com.
It's called Rooting the Nest Thermostat.
Actually, you know, a bunch of the comments are quite interesting, but I'm going to read part of this post from June 24th, 2014.
A few months ago, Google bought a $3.2 billion thermostat in the hopes that it would pave the way for smart devices in every home.
The Nest thermostat itself is actually pretty cool.
It's running Linux with a reasonably capable CPU and adds Wi-Fi to the mix for some potentially cool applications.
It can also be rooted in under a minute.
Yes, the CPU inside the Nest has a device firmware update mode that's normally used for testing inside the Nest factory.
This DFU mode can also be used to modify the device without any restrictions at all.
With a simple shell script, somebody can plug the Nest into a laptop's USB port, put the device into DFU mode, and upload a two-stage bootloader to enable a complete control over the Linux-powered thermostat.
As a bonus, the shell script also installs an SSH server and enables a reverse SSH connection to get around most firewalls.
This allows anyone to remotely control the Nest thermostat, a wonderful addition to the Nest that doesn't rely on iPhone apps or cloud service to remotely control your internet-enabled thermostat.
And they go into a whole lot of detail, but I thought, you know, some of the comments here about what was then a fairly new device, they're kind of interesting to read now.
Why would you want your home to be connected to the web?
I like to keep my things simple and NSA-proof.
Yeah, and that generator replied, then you better get off of cable TV.
That cable box has a camera watching you.
I don't know about that.
Does it?
Can you please move the Taco Bell cup you have had sitting on your player for the last week?
We can't see into the kitchen from here.
Yeah, okay.
You know, the conversations usually degrade pretty quickly.
But one thing that somebody basically said or made somewhat of an accusation of was that, you know, Google only did this to mine data, to get data for all these people.
They had no intention of actually running this company or supporting this company.
I'm told that they didn't even issue security updates or any kind of upgrade to make the devices continue to work as best as they could.
And instead, they simply collected all the data, you know, you have your home address, your name, I imagine other contact info.
Then they killed it.
Then they said, you know what, we're not interested anymore, but we'll keep the data.
Thank you very much.
Here's another letter.
Hey, I hope you're well, wanted to bring this to your attention if you're discussing this on your show.
Basically, an organization has placed a bounty on unbricking the old Nest thermostats.
Yeah, bounties.fulu.org.
So, you know, a bunch of people have been doing this.
And then we also heard of something on GitHub.
Looks like someone has already revived the old Nest thermostats.
It still relies on a back end run by someone else.
This is from Aron Jins, who is writing this to us.
I wonder how long that will last.
It would be nice if they open sourced that part of the whole thing.
And then he did a little digging and said, oh, I missed a section at the bottom of the GitHub page.
The firmware images and back end API server code will be open sourced soon, allowing the community to audit, improve, and self-host their own infrastructure.
That is indeed good news.
And we are going to try to have the guy behind this on the show next week.
His name is Cody Kosiemba.
And he is the founder and CEO of HackHouse.
So, yeah, you can check out his GitHub slash, I'll spell it out, C-O-D-Y-K-O-C-I-E-M-B-A slash no longer evil dash thermostat.
All right.
Well, you know, optimism.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to feel happy today.
Alex, whatever you have to say, you're not going to bring me down.
Go ahead.
I will bring up a contrary point here, of course.
But I want to go back to something that you've mentioned in passing with respect to the 2014 article that I think was on Hackaday, which is that the thermostat itself could be rooted in under a minute and runs Linux.
I think that's a very interesting point here because that makes these things really dangerous in a way because having a rooted Linux server essentially just hanging out on your network could be really, really dangerous because it can be used to perform recon as to what else is going on in your network, what other devices you have on your network, perhaps even like your household routines, the other IoT devices that you have that might have sensitive data.
There's all kinds of things that could be done, like an attacker could put in custom firmware or some kind of software that's invisible to you or the device's original manufacturer.
There's all kinds of crazy stuff that you could do with a rooted Linux machine on your network.
I think that's the most interesting aspect of this craziness story to my mind.
Would you be happier if it was a rooted Windows machine?
Possibly, actually.
I think it might be less dangerous, right, than a rooted Linux machine, though, because, you know, Linux machines allow for much more, for more easily performed packet sniffing and things like that.
Our email address is OTH at 2600.com.
Just put attention, Alex, in the subject and it'll get right to him.
Sure.
All right.
So we have a couple more bits of email here.
So you recently were discussing the Nest thermostat, old version, it being shut down.
I stumbled upon the following page, which seems to be a means of updating it, so you can still use it.
It's actually the same page we just discussed about.
But a bunch of people wrote in.
Thank you, Josh, for letting us know about that.
And, boy, we got a lot of mail this week.
Okay.
Here's a couple of reactions to the Nest discussion.
This is from Illuminator.
First, I think the best fix for this problem is to expect interoperability.
If Google decides they don't want to maintain the infrastructure or staff to keep the cloud bits running, you should be able to connect it to Home Assistant or something similar or even another cloud service.
Some devices are already multi-platform, but it's usually a choice between which terrible giant you want to connect to.
That's better than nothing, but it would be better if everything was required to have an open standard to work with any control system.
I also agree that Google stopping the support is a bad way to do business, especially as a giant corporation that probably wouldn't notice the cost of maintaining it.
I would love to see a regulatory solution for that, too, but I'm not holding my breath.
Unfortunately, I think all we can do on this one in the near term is the old vote with your dollar.
The other possible justification for pulling support being that the effort of patching the firmware when vulnerabilities are discovered is too much.
I guess I see more logic there, but I still think we should require interoperability with other control systems.
Okay, it's not safe to put it on the Internet, but what if you don't have to?
And this relates directly to Gila's point.
Just why is there a chatbot in the car?
Why does every device have to be an entire computer?
They give the devices features they don't need, and often that software is running on hardware that it really doesn't need.
Bloated software is harder to maintain.
A device that only does its job doesn't need to be as complicated.
And in my opinion, a better designed device will only do the things you want it to do.
Sorry if I went too long, which you did not.
Thanks for the show and everything you all do, and hoping to be back at Hope next year.
Thank you, Illuminator, for that wonderful letter as well.
And that seems to be the overall philosophy from many of our listeners, that they're doing it wrong to start with.
The software is bloated.
We just need these devices to do what they're supposed to do.
We don't need to be running a social media network on our refrigerators.
I don't know what people are thinking.
Try buying a dumb TV these days.
It's impossible.
Is it what people want?
I'm doubting it is.
There are many people who do want these things, but there are many people also who don't, and they both should be catered to.
This is true.
Gila and I were recently shopping for a new microwave oven.
And, you know, it's exciting.
We went on a site and, you know, looked at the selection they had.
And when we used the filters to get rid of smart ones and ones with apps and ones that wanted to be online and subscribe us to things, it cut the selection like way down.
It really did.
Finding a dumb countertop microwave was significantly more complicated than I thought it would be, honestly.
I like what we wound up with, but we needed very few bells and whistles, and they kept trying to bell and whistle us.
And we don't need a TCP IP stack in the thing.
No, we certainly do not.
And, you know, you think about automobiles, all the crap they give you in cars these days that you really don't want.
But try getting a car without all these things.
You know, like I'm talking about touchscreens.
Touchscreens in a car are dangerous.
I mean, how do they not know that?
You know, you're driving.
The last thing you should be doing is looking at a screen off to your right and making selections, which is the only way you can tune a radio in many of these cars these days.
It's so frustrating.
Kyle, you can attest to every time I rent a car, I'm spending at least 20 minutes complaining, you know, before I even start driving.
Because it's just so crazy what they make you do.
Radios are the simplest thing in the world.
That's why we love being on radio.
You know, the dial to the right, you tune with.
The dial to the left, volume.
You don't need anything else.
You don't need to look at it.
But these days, no, you have to make selections.
You have to pick a band.
You have to hit the right button.
And God forbid you hit the wrong button, you'll be fixing that mistake for another 10 minutes at least.
Yeah, rental cars are a great way to experience this, just trying to do something as simple as tuning a radio.
Because you have to basically train yourself around the entirety of the user interface and that experience, how it was designed.
How you're supposed to gesture or how you're supposed to navigate from one menu or submenu and make selections and then get back to another sort of neutral screen or turning things off that you don't necessarily need.
It's incredibly complex.
And if you switch from car to car to car, they're not uniform in the ways that icons or graphics were pictograms, the kinds of things that a button or a switch would have had.
So it's just added this layer of complexity.
So you have to understand the software that every single different type of manufacturers decided upon before you could really say, like, you master automobile interfaces.
You've touched upon something really important there.
You have to master it.
And that is the requirement for every bit of technology these days.
You have to master your television.
You have to master your refrigerator.
You have to master your car.
And if you can't do that, you're out of touch.
And I think that's what the older generation gets labeled as way too often and many times unfairly because it's not that they're out of touch.
It's that you're going nuts with all the design gizmos and features and things people don't actually want or need when the basics will do just fine.
So it's got nothing to do with being out of touch.
It has to do with wanting something different.
Who had their hand up?
Rob, you did.
Good.
Yeah.
Regarding touchscreens in cars, I think the basic facts behind that are pretty obvious and fascinating because a flat touchscreen with no tactile feedback or anything is going to be more difficult for a driver to navigate.
And if a driver is trying to just reach off to the side and control things, it's always going to be safer to have mechanical buttons and switches, but it's always going to be cheaper for an automaker to just slap a touchscreen in the thing and call it done.
And I think they very much enjoy saving money.
And so they're going to do what they do regardless of the actual safety concerns of what they forced on people.
And I'm really interested to see some studies and some numbers about the safety, the relative safety of smearing your hand around on a touchscreen versus using knobs and switches while you're driving a car.
Yeah, I'm curious how they would even get that data, but it just seems so obvious that that's not safe.
Taking your eyes off the road, it's not safe.
You should not be encouraged.
And just being distracted by all kinds of messages.
You know, I like using Waze.
I really do.
It's a good service.
But I'm not going to get drawn into social interactions with other drivers, which is what it's constantly trying to get you to do.
And, you know, the craziest thing is that the attention signal that somebody you know is nearby or I don't even know what it was trying to get me to acknowledge.
But the signal is a car horn.
I mean, really?
A car horn while you're driving?
That's how you want to get my attention.
It's just stupid.
All right.
Let's go back to some listener mail.
Legal question about AI gun detection in Baltimore.
I'm not sure if that's what we were discussing last week with the Doritos bag.
Was it Baltimore?
Okay.
The police responded due to an AI-generated alert that thought the Doritos bag was a gun.
And forgive me if I'm getting the brand wrong.
I think it's Doritos, but it could be, it could be, it could be laced potato.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
Is it legal for police to take action based on non-human input?
A machine cannot give probable cause.
Only a human can.
I run an AI-based security system.
I have big concerns with this story.
Charles, thank you for that letter.
And very good point.
Alex, do you want to answer that?
Yeah, I can answer that.
And I think our listeners' intuition on this subject is absolutely right.
Probable cause cannot arise from an automated system on its own.
There has to be a so-called human in the loop here.
A human has to be able to validate and verify what the actual alert is.
You can't have some kind of machine that gives some kind, that throws up a message like, hey, there's a gun in a Dorito bag, for instance.
And that alone can give reason to probable cause.
That's absolutely wrong.
It cannot happen like that.
There has to be some kind of human intervention, generally.
Now, every state has different wrinkles.
But for the most part, that's my understanding of the black letter law when it comes to these particular types of automated systems.
Okay, moving on.
Now that Apple has removed IceBlock from their store, I wanted to follow up my email from a couple of months ago, which you read over the air.
Okay, well, you're two for two then.
That email gave several justifications to give in defense of the app.
And now I'd like to point out something else.
For some reason, I believe everyone is assuming that even if they already have the app on their device, they can no longer use it.
Is that really the case?
Is there something about how it receives reports from users or how it then displays that information to everybody that requires Apple's servers as intermediaries for that data?
I searched the web for hours and finally found only one news report that happened to address that question.
And it mentioned it only parenthetically.
It said, yes, the app still works, but I can't be sure they know what they're talking about.
Even Joshua Aaron himself in interviews on cable news failed to talk about whether IceBlock still works.
For those people who already have it on their phones.
The question should have been addressed on Off the Hook as well, but wasn't.
Okay, well, let's address it.
I don't have an iPhone, so I couldn't use the software.
Does anybody here know anything about that?
Gila, go ahead.
It just opened right up on my phone.
I have no reported sightings in the neighborhood right now, but it's still giving me the opportunity to report.
And, yeah, I mean, it's still operating just like it did.
Okay.
And by the way, Hampton Bays, a lot of ICE agents in Hampton Bays out east on Long Island.
That's from another reporting app.
There's a bunch of them.
But, yeah, just getting the word out there.
But if you could keep that running and let us know if any ICE agents make an appearance.
So we'd like to know that.
Alex, you have something to add.
I want to finish the letter, but go ahead first.
Yeah, I was just validating what Gila said.
And perhaps the app will continue to work unless this becomes like a deprecated version of it.
Unless Aaron himself updates it in a way that would cause it to not function anymore, I would assume it should still function.
Because Apple can't wipe this from your device.
They can just stop you from getting updates.
Are you sure they can't wipe it from your device?
I'm pretty sure.
I mean, I think this is how things were operating when there was a TikTok ban in place as well.
So I think it's very likely that they can't.
They might have the functional capability to do so, but I don't think that they would.
But something that is weird and that happened on my phone is that sometimes my phone will like uninstall things to free up memory.
And Ice Block had been sort of uninstalled on my phone.
Like it still existed, but I had to re-download it just now.
How did you re-download it?
Uh-huh.
No, but how could you?
It's not on the store anymore.
I know, but I already downloaded it from the store.
I have it.
I just had to like re...
I will admit I'm not entirely clear how this part of the tech works.
Okay, all right.
But yeah.
But I don't think it re-downloaded because you would have had to have downloaded from somewhere, right?
No, it re-regenerated.
Alex, I bet you know what I'm talking about.
It did re-download it.
Yeah.
Yeah, it did re-download.
I had the same issue because I wasn't continually using the Ice Block app to report, you know, ice agents in my neighborhood or something.
But...
You guys got to keep alert to these things.
You have to know where the ice agents are.
We all do.
Well, if I'd be the first one to say something, you know, I follow the dictates of Homeland Security very closely.
If you see something, say something, right?
So I would have used it.
But I had the same issue and I had the same concern, wondering like, hey, what the hell is going to happen here?
Is Apple now going to prevent me from actually re-downloading this app?
And it didn't.
And that's very likely because the app was probably stored in your own iCloud-based storage account so that your own settings and permissions and data are associated with it and downloaded individually as opposed to from the app store.
So basically, your phone is making a predetermined decision.
You're not using this, so I'm going to, you know, stash it away somewhere until you do need it.
And when you need it, it's going to download it from your own space.
Exactly.
That's my...
I'm operating under that assumption because that's the only one that seems to make sense.
But maybe others on overtime will have more information.
Yeah, go easy on me because I don't have an iPhone.
I have no idea how they work.
You guys probably should know a little more and probably do.
But yeah, okay.
So my thought is, you know, is it not possible to simply have an alternate source where people with iPhones can download the software and put it on their phones?
Do you have to go through iPhone's app store?
I think you do.
Because otherwise it would require some kind of sideloading, which you would need to have your iPhone jailbroken in order to do that.
Well, then maybe that's the solution because you should be able to run whatever you want on your own phone.
You shouldn't have to get Apple's permission just to get a particular program to even run.
Imagine, you know, doing that on your laptop, being told, no, you can't run that program.
It's not allowed.
You know, we shouldn't be accepting that.
Yeah, I mean, that's the walled garden that we've chosen when we own and operate iPhones.
And in some ways there's a lot of security functionality that's attendant to living in that particular walled garden.
It's safer.
Jailbroken phones are, you know, with apps that can be sideloaded, you know, can often have malicious code installed on them.
And so a lot of organizations that have like BYOD types of policies will prevent you from actually jailbreaking your phone if you're going to use it for work purposes through a mobile device management policy.
So there's all kinds of reasons why you shouldn't jailbreak your phone.
But I agree, having the freedom to install the software that you want is a critical issue.
Let me dive back into the letter here.
If the app is indeed still functional for those who downloaded it prior to Apple pulling it, then that just brings up another question.
Is there any suspicion that the next Apple iOS update will contain some kind of kill switch for IceBlock?
Or maybe some OS changes that deliberately leave the app unable to operate for its existing users?
I think that's a very valid concern.
And regarding the abandonment of Nest at the risk of seeming to play devil's advocate, believe me, I'm immune from that.
I suspect Google could defend their action by saying that the Nest unit can still function like any conventional dumb thermostat.
So it's not like your home heating is suddenly out of your control.
Well, let me just address that.
No, it's not.
But I have a dumb thermostat now.
So please refund me the money between what a dumb thermostat cost and what I paid for the high tech one that you guys just bricked.
You know, I think that's fair.
Anyway, perhaps you can even continue programming its operation and timing via the unit itself.
Well, you know, Google says, yes, you can still walk up to your thermostat and select the temperature and have your heat go to that temperature.
Amazing, isn't it?
I have 1930s technology now.
Thank you, Google.
I'm supposed to be happy about that.
Anyway, secondly, while it's true you paid a premium price to have a smart unit that lets you monitor and control it remotely, Google could complain about having to perpetually bear the expense of maintaining servers to handle your online interactions with Nest, as well as the bandwidth required to handle that traffic.
Google, then you're in the wrong business.
If you're going to complain about running servers and keeping Nest going, don't run servers.
Don't buy Nest.
Don't do those things.
Let someone else do it.
But they didn't necessarily say that.
But if they did, that's what I would say in return.
Of course, Google's data centers have become so massive now that dealing with data from a decreasing number of old Nest units, which they had no problem doing decades ago, cannot really be a problem for them whatsoever.
But do you see validity in any of these arguments Google could make?
I see validity in bringing those questions up, but they're very easy to tear down.
So, yeah, you know, I'm glad you raised them, but I don't think those points stand.
I really don't.
I totally agree with you about people who keep saying you should abandon older technology, even if it still works for you.
At best, they are operating with the presumption that newer is better and simply want you to enjoy it like they do.
But they also go on to imply that the progress of humanity is being held back by you as if they themselves cannot use new things if you don't do so as well.
Kevin, thank you for that wonderful letter.
We've got great letters this week.
Yeah, that's that's that that is the mentality that, you know, if you don't conform and do as I do, then you're the problem.
And that that is always an issue.
And it transcends any kind of relationship you have.
People take that on.
They say, you know, I've found the answer.
Why don't you find the answer to you can apply that to Google?
You can apply that to religion.
You can apply that to anything.
You know, brand loyalty.
We need to have diversity.
We need to have people use what they are comfortable using and continue to be supported.
Is that so wrong?
They can't hear you shaking your heads.
I thought the rattle might be audible, but no, that is not so wrong.
All right.
Our friend Joseph Cox over at 404 Media.
Did I get it right?
404 Media.
I had an article a little while back.
ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents are scanning people's faces on the street to verify citizenship.
We don't have a lot of time.
We only have two minutes left.
But yeah, what do you think about that concept that that is what ICE is now doing?
You still think ICE isn't a threat?
You still think that it's only for the for the bad guys that ICE is acting the way they do?
No, they're they're they're doing it to you, too.
You might not feel it.
You might get tackled on the street, but you are having your privacy invaded.
Your face scanned run through a database that you are now in and your citizenship status, because that's the most important thing in the world now, apparently, is being checked.
God knows how many times.
Any any thoughts in the time we have left, Rob?
Yeah, just like the Doritos instead of a gun story.
This is ridiculous just for the fact that the tech doesn't work.
It's, you know, facial recognition tech is still disproportionately poorly performing when used on people of color.
It is not dependable.
And also, I don't trust the people using it because I wouldn't trust your.
If it were dependable, would your would your concern change?
No, it would not.
It's it's just, you know, why are we even thinking about this when the damn thing doesn't work?
But, you know, assuming that it will one day work, it is still terrifying.
See, I would say, you know, they're going to come to you and say, OK, yeah, good point.
We'll make it better.
You know, I wouldn't give them that.
I wouldn't say, yeah, it sucks.
I'm glad it sucks.
But this is this is unacceptable.
You shouldn't be doing this to people on the street or really anywhere.
It's an intrusion and it's a violation.
And I think that's that's the point we have to make and stick to anyone else.
We have one minute.
A lot of valuable time going by.
No, nobody.
OK, we don't care about this, apparently.
Yeah, I mean, I'm in agreement with you guys.
You know, I'm usually the contrarian here, but I think that it's right.
These these technologies are pretty dangerous.
They're untested and untrue.
And I think dangerous because they erode our sense of privacy and what we would reasonably expect to be part of our rights of privacy.
So it's I think it's generally all around that.
All right.
We're going to have to leave it there.
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Have a good night, everyone.
And welcome everybody to YouTube. Sorry for the delay there.
Manuel here. Kyle, is he okay?
Hello.
YouTube land. Rob, Gila, Alex, you all here?
We are here.
Yeah, we're here.
That's awesome. And are we actually on YouTube?
We are actually on YouTube.
Well then, there's nothing left. We've achieved everything we set out to do.
Great. Okay, well, that was fun.
Yeah, I don't know how to top that, to be honest.
I really don't.
Appreciate not knowing what I was walking into just then.
Yeah, okay. So anyone want to add anything more, go for it.
We'll take phone calls in just a little bit.
Fantastic. I do want to say hello to the 20 plus people who are with us right now.
And Emmanuel wanted to share a message with you that just came in
from a user who's known as at yougoony3338.
We're not getting real names anymore.
We're just getting YouTube handles.
Thank you, Emmanuel, for standing up for those who don't have a voice.
You proved that today on air.
You are the type of person that defines New York City's inclusivity and diversity.
Hack the planet.
Oh, shucks.
I just want to mix things up a bit.
You know, I just want to cause a stir.
That's what I'm after.
But thank you.
Thank you for that.
Absolutely.
And, you know, we had gotten during the show,
we had gotten a reply over on Macedon from someone called Drakken,
who was mentioning that Mom Donnie was in the state assembly.
He has experience, I think,
in response to those of us who were talking about his lack of shame.
Yeah.
That's hardly experience.
It's like a part time job.
Come on.
Get a life.
You're joking, right?
No, I'm not joking.
I know assemblymen.
I'm friends with people who worked in New York State assembly.
And it's a hard job.
It's a hard job.
Come on.
Yeah.
Come on.
You know what?
People can mock what you do then.
You know, if you're going to mock their job,
then you're opening yourself up.
There's also a guy, I mean,
he's got a degree in like Africana studies or something from, you know,
an elite college in Maine.
I think he went to Bowdoin, right?
Like no graduate degree, no experience with law.
But yet somehow he's a, he's a lawmaker.
Wait, what is, what is, what is a degree in Africana studies?
Is that a bad thing?
A degree in Africana studies?
That's, you know, we, we had that, that department at Stony Brook too.
It's not, I'm not, I'm not really a fan of it.
I don't think it's like.
No one's expecting you to major in it, but.
How does a degree in Africana studies?
Explain this to me.
How does a degree in Africana studies prepare you to legislate?
How does a degree in English prepare me to publish a hacker magazine?
I don't know.
You find a way.
You're a publisher.
You're a writer.
That's how it prepares you to do it.
Yeah.
But you know, it should be something more pertinent to the, the,
the study.
I mean, if you're going to get all technical about it, like, look, I,
the, the secret, my secret, at least to higher education is to combine
elements.
All right.
So if, if you are somebody in, in, in government who majors in chemistry,
well, then you're the,
you're somebody who can draw those two fields together at some point.
You won't, you won't see it coming.
You won't know when, but you're better for it.
You're better for having that diverse gathering of, of ingredients,
I guess, you know,
just basically not just doing what everyone else does.
Yeah.
I'm sure it'd be fine with you if he just majored in political science,
but he'd be like everybody else.
You know,
if you major in something different,
then you have that different perspective you can bring to the table.
And there's,
there's plenty of opportunity to get the mainstream views and,
and, and all the, um, you don't,
you don't know what he doesn't know.
Right.
I mean, you're making some judgments here.
Yeah.
I'm not, I'm not hearing any problems.
Yeah.
Really not either.
Neither is our YouTube, uh, uh, listener.
Fuck yeah.
Computers is what they're called.
And we can say that because we're on YouTube, um,
who, uh, writes to us, congrats to New York.
I'm not electing a dickhead.
Um, to which I would, uh, add, you know,
we didn't elect the known dickhead.
I think, uh, out of the choices we had there.
Who's the way you got, you gotta be clear.
Who is the dickhead?
I mean,
it could be saying someone else is a dickhead.
We don't know that when you give people nicknames,
you don't know who the nickname belongs to unless it's,
you know, a registered nickname.
I, I've been thinking about it as in terms of characters and someone who's,
uh, who's feigning or, or not feigning, but, um,
sort of, um, promising their own character.
In this case, principally being about the people of New York that is yet to be seen,
but the other candidates that, I mean, the person that won Mondami's, uh,
their own kind of individual case, but then you have the rest of the ticket and it really
was these characters that don't, don't have a lot of integrity or didn't really stand up
and match up to what this, uh, candidate is promising.
So it's, it just seemed like, um, from what the choices were, there's, there's a factor
of, of the politics in there and that people want to believe in something that, that populism
itself does have a, a sort of energy.
You know, it's weird, Alex.
Mondami reminds me of you.
He does.
The way he carries himself, the way, the way he plunges into a crowd of people, the way he,
he, um, embraces disagreement and respects people he disagrees with.
I don't know.
You know, I, I, I think there's some, uh, some common ground here, you know,
there might be, there might be, but give him a call.
Just give him a call.
At least have a conversation with, I'm sure you guys can, can, can come to some understanding.
Well, look, I mean, maybe, maybe he's a nice guy.
He is a nice guy.
I can tell you he's a nice guy.
I don't know.
Maybe he's a lovely guy.
I have no idea, but I still maintain that he's completely unqualified to become mayor of
the city.
And as you indicated before, he'll do a lot of learning, but I don't want my mayor learning
on the job.
Okay.
But hold on a second.
You had Adams.
Was he qualified?
Well, he was also an idiot.
Okay.
But I didn't hear you speaking out like this when he was elected.
Uh, de Blasio was an idiot.
De Blasio.
Yeah.
You know, uh, de Blasio, maybe a step above that, but not much.
I agree with that.
Uh, but yeah.
And, and, uh, you know, Bloomberg, I mean, ew.
No, I think Bloomberg was actually an excellent mayor.
Bloomberg had me arrested.
So fuck Bloomberg.
There you go.
There you go.
And Giuliani before that, uh, I mean, come on, Giuliani.
I didn't agree.
I didn't agree with that.
He was an asshole.
First class asshole.
And then he went on to become a graduate asshole afterwards.
However, I think, I think Giuliani and Bloomberg were actually very good mayors of the city.
I do, I disagree almost entirely with all of Giuliani's policy decisions, especially when it came down to, to arts funding and things like that, like the big to do that he had with the Brooklyn Museum.
But I, um, I have to respect his ability as a good administrator of this, of that office.
Fine.
I praise Giuliani on WBAI after 9-11 because he was made for 9-11.
But after that, and before that, he was a dickhead and somebody that, that made life worse for so many people.
And, um, you know, and you can keep going beyond that.
There have been problems with every single mayor.
I, you know, I just think having somebody fresh in there who has a good team around him.
And, you know, we're, we're, we're basically saying the same things that a lot of people used against Biden, saying that he was incapable of doing the job, uh, when he was perfectly capable of doing the job, just had some trouble expressing himself and obviously was getting older, but he had a good team and he was able to make decisions.
And if you're able to do that, you can do the job.
So let's not just assume that, oh, this guy's too young and inexperienced.
He can't possibly do it.
He might surprise you.
Give him a chance at least.
And Gila, go ahead.
The greater concern that I have is not as much about his ability to do the job or not, because at least what we've seen in the last day is he's surrounding himself with people who do in fact know what they're doing.
People who have done this before and have an understanding of how to, I always say that when you get a new job, you need to learn the what's and then the how's will come to you.
He's surrounding himself with people who know the what's and that's good.
The concern that I have is the fact that so many people have turned this mayoral election into a referendum on so many pieces of identity and security.
I don't give a shit what you think about who's being elected the mayor of New York City if you live in Kansas City or if you live in St. Louis or if you live in Pennsylvania and you don't spend time in New York.
Sorry, Alex, that's not about you.
Or if you live in California, it doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference in your life.
Who's the mayor of New York City?
And the fact that so many people have been fear mongering for the past six months and Andrew Cuomo, who couldn't get past his own ego to understand that nobody wanted him to be the mayor and he needed to go away.
Yeah, that did seem to be what people were saying.
I am.
I am activated and I am frustrated that this issue is splitting so many people in so many of my communities.
And yeah, if you live in Wisconsin, I do not give a flying fuck what you think about who's getting.
Why are you picking on the Midwest?
You're picking on the Midwest.
I'm picking on my own family.
Pick on the South.
I don't know as many people in the South.
I'm picking on my family right now.
So this is a family issue.
OK, I get it.
You know, if you don't live here, like when I was a kid, I knew who the mayor of New York was because like it was Ed Koch and Ed Koch was a media figure.
But ultimately, the mayor of a city doesn't matter if you don't live there.
Very true.
Very true.
There's been all kinds of panic about, well, this will be the face of the Democratic Party and the Republicans are going to have a field day.
I say bring it on.
Enough panicking.
Enough second guessing.
Do something.
And, you know, you have this person that everybody is talking about.
Well, now there's an opportunity to actually do something and make a difference.
And piss Trump off to no end because you know that's happening.
And that's what we need to do.
That's what we've been talking about for months.
So finally, someone's doing it.
Well, we've got somebody now who's going to be a very effective foil for Trump because Trump's going to be able to point to the degradation of New York as a key reason why the radical left, as he'll call it, is completely incompetent and ineffective and can't be trusted.
Alex, facts do not matter to Trump.
You must know this.
Crime has gone down and he's pointed to crime going up.
Well, here's my fear about this, though.
If this if this happens to the city, if it becomes more lawless, if the police are sidelined and become emaciated, which is the word that he intended to to use to describe the police under his rule and eventually rolled it back, as I understand it.
But if if if New York City ends up becoming a really degraded city, Trump does not need a reason.
He only needs an excuse to send in the National Guard.
You see, as he's again, you're buying into these right wing talking points because that's not right.
Yeah, it absolutely is.
He's going to send in the troops and we must live in fear.
We have we have to behave or he's going to do that.
I mean, give me that is a real threat here.
Yeah, it's a real threat.
It's bullshit, though.
It's it's it's it's a threat that should not be tolerated.
And Donnie last night said he's not going to tolerate that.
He said, Trump, turn up the volume.
He addressed him directly.
He wasn't trying to be nice.
He was direct.
That's what we need more of.
Yeah, I don't think that that's what we need more.
Oh, we sure.
How how long do you want to be a victim for?
Come on.
It's not a victim.
It's this is not being a victim.
What's happening to people in the streets, what's happening to all of our federal programs?
The fucking government is shut down for God's sake.
When do we start fighting back?
We finally start with somebody and I'll know that's too much.
No, it's exactly what we need.
No, I'm fine.
I'll have somebody fight back.
But I want somebody that I can trust to fight back.
Somebody that has a record of fighting back.
Somebody that has a record of executive decision making.
Not somebody who, like, worked for a small nonprofit as a foreclosure prevention housing counselor
before he got some, like, sinecure government job as a senator.
Well, if he's that much of a milky toast, I don't know why everybody is so afraid of him.
It's not a matter of being afraid.
Yeah, there's outright panic amongst the right wing.
I'm afraid of his incompetence.
The right wing and the centrist Democrats are in a panic for this guy.
Gila, go ahead.
You were trying to say something.
I was, yeah.
I think another part of this whole issue is I am fascinated by the fact that the Republicans
in New York can't get out of their own way.
And how is it that they have put Pat Paulson up again for another election?
Like, how?
And I think, I don't know.
I'm, I'm, I'm, I am frustrated by how this has gone.
And it was something I was thinking about thinking about the other issues that were on the ballot.
That the idea of moving the mayoral election to presidential election years, if this had been along with all the noise last November,
I would never, I would never, I would never have left my house.
Mm-hmm.
Um, and the, the other thing I hope is that we can get to a certain point and say, it's done now.
It's done now.
We don't need to talk about it again.
And Andrew Cuomo can slink off to whatever sewer he comes from.
Um, and the thing about, the other thing I'm thinking about is when I was a kid, I was 13 and my mom said, oh, did you see Letterman last night?
And I said, no.
And she said, oh, were you watching Leno?
I'm like, mother, it's not just those two things.
There are other things going on and I, I'm interested to see what happens going forward.
I am.
And like, this is where we are.
And Alex question for you very specifically.
Because, uh-huh, I think that people assume that because you are not enthusiastic about Mamdani as a human being,
you are by definition enthusiastic about Andrew Cuomo.
Can you confirm or deny?
Absolutely, I am not.
I think he's a vote for Stasis.
And I think, I think all of the candidates were pretty awful.
The one that I, I frankly, I liked most was, was Curtis Sliwa.
I think he probably would have been the most qualified to be mayor or, or I would have probably trusted him.
And at least his, his, his, his background as being really acting in the best interest of the city and the safety of the population.
But I live in New York.
I pay taxes in New York.
I pay a ton of taxes in New York.
And my children can't even get basic services from the, the, the public school system here.
I mean, it's like unbelievably how badly things are wrong.
We need a good administrator.
I don't give a shit how charismatic somebody is or, or energizing on the basis of, you know, this shows us what progressives can do, et cetera.
I want somebody who can make this goddamn city work and run.
I want, that's what I want.
That's my interest in, as a New Yorker, I want my tax dollars to work for me.
I want them to work for my children.
And I want the education system to be run like a real school district.
That's not too much to ask for.
And that's not something that I got from mom, Donnie.
Well, I would, I would listen to what they're saying, you know, what he's saying, not necessarily what people are saying about him as he is the winner in this.
And also, I think the reason so many people around the country are weighing in is because of, well, just the, the other, the other races and the general, the political headwinds, the sort of direction that this could mean in other places overall.
And I think that's why people are so interested in who won in New York.
Yeah, I mean, look, there's, there's obviously universal interest about this.
You know, I was in Dublin last week and people were talking to me about this in the various pubs and asking me, you know, for whom I intended to vote.
I mean, it is, it's kind of, you know, extraordinary how much attention this particular race has gotten.
And I don't necessarily think that's a good thing because then we lose focus on really what matters to people.
Like the people in Dublin are not going to be affected by this particular outcome, but the people that live in the city of New York are.
And all I'm saying is, you know, I, I, I don't like Cuomo.
I didn't love Sliwa.
I just think that Mamdami was the least qualified of all of those candidates.
I don't think somebody who just turned 34 years old can reasonably be expected with no other managerial or executive experience to run the greatest city on the planet Earth.
Well, have you ever been surprised before?
I have been surprised.
And any time when, you know, I've seen people like the president who have no qualifications yet are elected by a population that seems to be blinded by the facts and are voting against self-interest.
I've always been disappointed.
Well, OK, you brought up Trump.
So, yeah, you know, there's somebody with no experience doing anything on an elected basis.
We can't deny that he has accomplished a great deal.
All of it is bad.
All of it is negative.
Yes.
But he did it because he has support and he had people around him.
Now, I'm I'm putting forth that if you have, say, the light side of the force as opposed to the dark side of the force.
Is that what they call it?
The light side?
Yeah, whatever.
You might have that ability in the other direction as well.
Why?
Why are we so closed off to that?
You know, with with with the right support network and with people behind him.
And you've got to admit this was a landslide.
It wasn't something close.
It was a landslide.
People are excited by this.
People are motivated.
And you have that add that into the mix.
So that's where your real change comes from is is the mood in the street.
So people are into something that's going to energize the entire administration.
And, you know, assuming that anyone is competent, they're going to get things done.
They're going to make changes.
I would say raise your voice, be heard, but don't be dismissive.
Don't assume it's not going to work out.
I know, you know, with Obama, even with de Blasio to a degree, there were so many people who just wanted it to fail.
And, you know, they they spent all their time doing that instead of actually helping and making things better.
I know you had crazy.
Call me crazy.
But I'd rather have a candidate with a record of quantifiable merit and achievement for whom I could vote as opposed to the basis of blind faith, hoping it'll all work out because he's surrounding himself with some other.
But the thing is, when you also have a character that's polluted by corruption, it's going to be hard to get people to work with you.
And Cuomo would have had a big problem doing that.
A lot of people did not want to work with him.
He does not leave a good taste.
You have somebody new now and it's a fresh start.
Fresh starts can be good.
Yeah.
How's that?
I mean, how's that for experience?
Speaking of fresh starts, by the way, did want to just there.
The chat is incredibly active.
I can't read everything, but a lot of people have a lot to say, which is great.
But I just wanted to push one thing through from Slipstream Boy, who says, greetings from Australia.
Have listened to you guys for the past three years after watching Freedom Downtime for the first time.
Love your work.
And you have rekindled the hacker in me and appreciate you.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you very much.
You know, I wanted to share.
This is not New York related, New York City related.
It's actually Long Island related.
I talked about this on the other show last night.
It was a referendum.
And I just would like to read the referendum, the way it was phrased on the ballot and get your guys take on it.
Tell me if you think the way this was was phrased, particularly you, Alex, because, you know, this is something legal.
If this was phrased in a biased way, tell me what what you were inclined to vote for based on this.
The resolution was about extending the elected term for a county legislator from two years to four years.
That was the question that's come up before.
It's been soundly defeated before.
Here's how it was phrased.
A charter law to revise the county's term limit law to close potential loopholes created by the adoption of New York's even year election law.
That's the law that has most elections taking place on even years so that more people show up and avoid the need for taxpayer funded special elections and to amend the term of office for the office of county legislator from two years to four years.
To ensure compliance with New York, New York's election law without the need for three elections in four years be approved.
Now, all right, that's the first part.
Now, it's going to go into a little bit for for yes and for no.
But do you sense a bias in that, Alex?
I sense you might.
Yeah, that's that's almost impossible to parse.
Number one.
Oh, yeah, that's true.
And and and this like this talk about taxpayer funded nonsense, whatever it is, obviously, is making you biased towards one one decision as opposed to another.
Right, because taxpayers will have to fund three elections in four years because what's going to happen is because of the the even year law.
Somebody who's elected yesterday will have to run again next year in the even year and then have the next election in twenty twenty eight.
So and the taxpayers will have to pay for that.
That that's what they're pointing out there.
All right.
So a yes vote.
This is the second part of it.
A yes vote would avoid potentially requiring legislators to resign midterm.
And the need for taxpayer funded special elections.
A yes vote would also amend the term of office of county legislators from two years to four years, thereby ensuring compliance with the New York even election year law without the need for three elections in four years.
Now, to me, that's putting forth all the positive of the yes vote without any of the negative.
Did you hear anything negative about that in that description?
No.
All right.
Let's listen to how they describe the no vote.
A no vote would mean that legislators could be required to resign prior to the end of their term, causing the need for taxpayer funded special elections and would also require that elections for county legislators be held three times in four years in order to comply with New York's even year election law.
I heard only negative in that.
I didn't hear a single bit of positive, you know, results from voting no.
So, yeah, of course, it passed, even though it didn't pass last time they asked to extend county legislators terms from two years to four years.
This was written by Republican county legislators.
How did they get away with that?
How did they get away with writing something so biased, putting it on the ballot and winning?
I mean, it was very persuasive writing.
I mean, these things have to be reviewed before they're put on to the literal language.
But it was reviewed.
It went through the whole process, and that's what we wound up with.
And I feel like, you know, people were manipulated.
Of course, you know, you can't do anything about it after the election.
You have to do something before the election.
But who sees the phrasing before the election?
The people who wrote it, they see it.
Yeah, well, that's right.
But this was Suffolk County legislature?
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, it doesn't surprise me then that, like, you know, a Republican cabal has essentially steamrolled this through.
I mean, Suffolk County is, like, rife with corrupt Republicanism for many, many decades now.
And I think it's just unfortunately par for the course.
Well, I don't want to just settle for that.
I'd be happy if there was some kind of investigation going on somewhere, but nobody seems to have even noticed this.
That's what's frustrating me.
I was just, you know, you would have heard me in the polling place saying, is this for real?
You've got to be kidding me.
You know, a lot of people were saying things like that, I know, but, you know, for different reasons.
You know what could have stopped that, actually, if you think about it?
If you had, on the other side, and the Democrats, if you had people that were in those county legislator seats that were competent, that had the right type of education, that had the right type of background in order to parse this type of language and to stop it from getting onto the referendum ballot, that would be one way of creating a bullwark against this type of corruption.
Well, there were definitely legislators who were against it.
I imagine the Democrats probably were, but they weren't being heard.
Yeah.
No, I'm obviously drawing a parallel to the lack of experience that we have in our mayor-elect.
Oh, I didn't get that.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bringing it all back full circle.
But, you know, we are supposed to have a call-in show, right?
Aren't we supposed to?
Yes, we're setting up the phone right now, so please chatter amongst yourselves for the next couple of minutes while we make sure that the phone is working.
That's it.
And I'm enjoying being beaten up in all the comments here.
I appreciate all of that.
Well, no, you know, all respect to Alex for taking a position.
I know it's not a popular position here.
Yeah, but it is.
It's a very unpopular position, but like I said, although we speak my conscience, and I think, you know, we all love each other here, and the nice thing is that we can agree to disagree and still treat each other like human beings.
I disagree.
How do you disagree with that?
How do you not agree to disagree?
How does that work?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Yeah.
Well, while we're waiting for the phone to get finagled, I will remind folks that the 2600 meetings are happening all over the world this Friday.
Check out 2600.com slash meetings.
There is a lot of chatter in the YouTube chat about the oncoming meeting, and I encourage folks to check it out.
You can find one near you at 2600.com slash meetings.
If you're here in New York, you could check out NYC2600.net, which has the details for our local one here in New York City.
That's correct.
Now we're at the stage where we're going to test the phone line for nasty hums.
Go ahead, Kyle.
There's not even a dial tone.
So, yeah, we've got a ways to go.
Is it there?
Ah, here we go.
Did I hit a button?
It's a hum, but it's not that bad.
So how about this, folks?
Don't complain about the hum.
We won't get angry.
We know there's a hum there.
And unless somebody wants to climb in a telephone pole, apparently there's not much we can do about it.
That's just the way things are.
And this week, if Rebel calls first, I promise I'm not going to bed.
Was Rebel banned or?
No, he wasn't banned.
He wasn't banned.
No, I remember last week when I was in Dublin, I was so tired.
I said, if Rebel calls first, I'm going to bed.
Right, but he didn't call more than once.
I don't think he did.
He didn't call more than once.
We remember.
All right, but we're talking about him now.
So maybe that is, you know, maybe he should be banned for that.
I'm ready to take calls whenever you are.
Okay, the phone number, get ready, is 8, and it's not working until I finish the last digit.
So, yeah, if you think you're a wise guy, you can dial faster than I can talk.
You're just going to wind up in voicemail hell.
8, 0, 2, 3, 2, 1, 4, 2, 2, 5.
And now it has been, oh, my God, that's really fast.
All right, all right, let's take this phone call and see what's out there.
And good evening.
You're on Off the Hook Overtime.
Go ahead.
Hey, Bryce, how are you?
Oh, I'm good.
Okay, this is Howard from Queen, the guy with the dog.
Oh, yes, I'm sure you want to talk to Alex.
I'm going to have to sit back.
Oh, I want to say something.
I will if I want, but I have other things before we get into it.
I want to say that I agree with Alex 100%.
I'm shocked.
Alex is my kindest parent.
Thank you.
I'm shocked.
Thank you, sir.
I'm just, wow.
If I ever got into trouble, I would want Alex to be my lawyer because he sounds like
a practical, common-sense individual.
Yeah, thank you very, very much.
I appreciate that candid sentiment.
I'm an engineer by trade, and you know what?
To run a city or a state, you have to have fundamentals.
You have to understand how, you know, this is a $120 billion organization.
You have to understand fundamentals, the science of financing.
You know, what do your actions do to the bond market?
Yes, what happens in New York City does affect the rest of the country because we're the financial
capital of the world.
Yeah, I agree.
Okay, but actually, one of the things I wanted to talk about today was to say that I agree
with Emmanuel on the things with his, you know, with technology.
You know, you look.
All right, I'll take that.
I'll take it.
You go out and buy a microwave.
You know, what about the old days when you turned a knob and it was mechanical?
Mechanical logic.
Today, it's all computerized.
I bought a stove, and my stove is all, you know, touch screen.
I'm blind.
It's really hard to use.
And guess what?
My oven wants to talk to the internet.
It wants to tell the internet what kind of food I'm putting in it.
How did you let yourself get talked into buying a touch screen oven when you can't see it?
Because there's nothing else really available at this point.
Yeah, you're right.
I bought an oven with a, you know, with a rain.
I bought a full-size range, and I had no choice in the matter.
The only saving grace is that this oven will talk to my iPhone so I have accessibility.
So, you know, if I need to do something or need of something, I use my iPhone to talk to the oven.
Wow, that's quite an image.
I think that's ridiculous.
It is.
It's totally ridiculous.
I think it should be, but as far as getting back to this politics, you know, I come to this show to listen to about electronics, technology, but you guys seem to be pushing so much politics.
You know, I tried, give me credit, I tried to move the conversation away from politics, and I just had one sentence, and I got pulled right back in.
The reason why I'm giving you a hard time manual is because you're so left, and I said, true, I can't know how anybody can vote for this guy.
That's the first thing.
Number two, how can you have things for free?
You've got to have free funds.
Who's going to pay for it?
Show me one place in the world where socialism has worked.
It's not the Cuba it didn't have worked in Russia.
Works in Scandinavia.
Works in Scandinavia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark.
But they don't have the output.
Those are smaller.
Those are smaller.
They're the happiest countries on Earth.
They're the happiest countries.
I don't know.
And the Staten Island ferry is free.
Explain that.
It's free because it's part of the MTA system.
So are the buses.
Because you've got to pay elsewhere.
If you take the ferry, then you get on a bus and trade.
It's all part of it.
You're not going to be able to have free buses.
And guess what?
People are going to start leaving the city.
People who have money who can get out of the city, like I'm thinking of moving, people are going to move.
People want to be safe.
You can't tax productive people to the point where they say it.
Look, I don't know if Alex lives in New York City, pays taxes in New York City, but if he's a lawyer making good money, I can feel for a guy like Alex.
Look how much money you've probably got to pay in city, state, and federal taxes.
Yeah, he's got to move to Florida, I'll bet.
Well, that wouldn't get me out of my federal taxes, sadly, but I do live, I live in the city, I live in Manhattan, I pay an extraordinary amount in taxes.
It's insane.
And as I was indicating, you know, I feel like I don't, I can't even get basic services for my children in the school system.
And the mayor has such an incredible amount of unilateral authority when it comes to the education system in New York City, that it gives me a lot of pause and makes me really wonder here, you know, whether we have the right person in office.
We need somebody who's a good administrator.
Hold on a second.
Alex, you're complaining about something that the previous people did and blaming the future mayor somehow.
No, I'm saying the system is a mess right now, and we don't have the right person in place that I believe can fix it.
Yeah, but all the people before that also weren't the right people by that definition because the system is so bad.
Do you think this guy is going to come into office and say, wow, this system sucks, I'm going to make it worse?
I don't know what the system was before I can speak to it.
Listen, by the way, just so you know, I can hardly hear Alex, that hump.
I didn't want to bring up the hump, but the hump is almost 70% of the audio.
So, I've got to really listen.
Really, I can hear you the best, Emmanuel.
But you know what?
If you're going to have stuff for free, you're going to have to pay for it.
You know, the New York City can't print money, and legally it has to run a balanced budget, okay?
Well, can I just say one thing here?
He doesn't have the authority to just make the buses free.
So, you know, the MTA is run by the state.
I agree.
The MTA is run by the state.
The reason why people voted for Emmanuel, the reason why people voted for this guy, and
I didn't vote for this guy, and I didn't vote for Cuomo, and whatever, but I will say this
much, and I actually can't believe that Alex and I like Curtis.
I don't know, it's hard to believe that me and Alex...
I like Curtis, too.
Curtis is a stand-up guy.
I just don't agree with a lot of what he says, but, you know, as a person, I think he's a
decent person.
I think he's somewhat decent, but I think that he did some stuff until at the end.
He was knocking Cuomo.
Some people think that he was in there to help this guy get in.
I don't know.
That's hard to believe, but he didn't go after the frontrunner.
That I don't understand.
But getting back to this guy, how are you going to be able to, you know, if you, how
will free grocery stores work?
Come on, they can't work.
You know what?
I was in Europe.
I was in Eastern Europe in 93 and 94, right after the fall of, you know, the Soviet Union
in 93 and 94.
And if you went to places like Romania and you looked at some of these stores, it was horrible.
Oh, I did.
I saw it.
I know what you're talking about.
I was in Bulgaria.
I was in Sofia in 1994.
And if you looked at it, it was so depressing.
I might have been there that same year.
But yeah, I know.
I went to East Germany in 1989.
And what you say is absolutely true.
I just don't know if that's the same environment we're dealing with here.
Well, it's going to happen.
Free stuff doesn't work.
Capitalism or competition, where you go to a place, you know, take a thing like Walmart.
You know what?
They give you a pretty good deal.
They try.
You know, they're better than your local supermarket because they buy in volume.
And you know what?
When you have the right to decide, oh, I don't like your service, I go somewhere else.
You know what?
I rather, you know, just for an example, competition.
I rather go to my local bakery or coffee shop than go to a McDonald's.
McDonald's is a big chain.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree with that, too.
I'm not sure how you think this guy wouldn't say the same thing.
No, because he's going to come up with, he's telling you that he's going to have free stores.
And what he's trying to say is this.
We're going to subsidize it.
When you start subsidizing, you take away choice.
And costs go up.
Show me how government can be efficient.
Government cannot.
It's never really efficient.
You take accessorite, for example.
Look how inefficient that is.
Look at the MTA.
The MTA is so efficient.
And, you know, it's burning money like crazy.
Alex, I want to let you talk, but talk louder and talk closer to your microphone.
Yeah, very good.
And I appreciate the sentiment of the caller.
And I know that we often disagree.
So it's nice that we finally find some common ground here.
But I think to take it back to the level of technology, since we are a technology show, I think that this election, and in most elections, since I would say maybe 2013 or thereafter, social media has played far too much of an outsized role, in my opinion, in all of the electoral process.
And I think we need to really sincerely ask ourselves whether we are evaluating the right competencies in these particular candidates.
Do we want to be ruled by showmen, or do we want to be ruled by statesmen?
Do we want the functions of government to be run by administrators, or do we want them run by avatars?
I think that's the situation that we'll find here.
Well, I don't think of it to be run by common sense.
And you know what?
Don't blame media for that or Facebook.
Look, it's blaming the voter who doesn't take the time.
Like a person like me, I'll listen to a show like you.
I'll listen to maybe WNYC.
And I'll listen to a show, to guys on WABC and WOR.
Listen to my local AM broadcast stations.
And then try to figure out where I want to go from there.
And by the way, you know what?
I know a lot of people hate Trump.
Well, when you say Trump has no experience, and I know Emmanuel doesn't like him, but you know what?
Yeah, some of the things he did is not right, but you know what?
Other presidents have done worse than him.
Other presidents have done it.
People call him a Hitler, and I think that's the wrong thing to say.
And as far as the experience is concerned, he had experience in building buildings.
He built a lot of buildings.
He actually knows how to run a job.
He was able to get the ice rink in the city built on time.
He's done a few projects that the actual city went to and said, hey, can you take care of this?
Because the city couldn't get it done.
If only he had stuck to that, though, you know, just building.
He was good at building things.
They don't necessarily go hand in hand.
They're going after the poor guy right now for doing what he's doing in the White House.
I'm in favor of that.
Look, other presidents have made changes to the White House.
If you want to bring dignitaries that you've got to have a function to the White House, you don't want them to have it out in a tent.
And here it is.
He's getting other people to put up money.
Is that a possibility of influence?
Yeah.
But guess what?
It's not paying for it.
It's not about the money.
He knows how to do projects.
And, you know, the White House really does need improvement.
It's not about the money.
It's about the misleading, saying you're not going to touch something, then destroying it before anybody has a chance to even say a word.
It's about the symbolism.
And I think that's, you know, right and left, I think, are upset by that.
And I don't know about people having to huddle in tents or anything.
I've never heard about that before.
But I'm sure in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of places to have the soirees that he wants to have.
Yeah, but that's right.
You have the safety to move the president to another place.
You want to have it at the White House.
When you bring people, you want to have functions such as, you know, bringing world dignitaries.
These are not just bringing.
These are bringing world dignitaries for signings.
And you're having state dinners.
Most countries do have, you know, big ballrooms or mansions.
Yeah, but he does it at his house in Florida.
Look at that.
Or look at it in England.
You have various places.
So I think that, you know what?
Look at what Eisenhower did.
He lived across the street in Blair House for two to three years in the 50s when they were redoing the White House, when they put the bomb shelter in.
And look at Kennedy.
Kennedy put in a bowling alley.
So he put the pool in.
And I think it was Nixon that took out the pool.
So people have made changes over the years.
Yeah, but there wasn't a surprise.
They went through channels.
They went through channels.
Anyway, listen, we have to move on.
But say, finish with Alex.
And then there are other people waiting for him to get in.
Well, I've got to say, Alex, to be a kinder spirit.
Because I believe he needs confidence.
He needs someone who understands what's going to happen if you do this.
You have to be able to have the mathematical, the engineering, the civil engineering, and the understanding of how a corporation runs.
Like the city of New York is, whatever, it's $140 billion.
There's 300,000 people that work under him.
Yes, you do delegate authority.
But you have to be able to do it.
But running the city of New York is basically the second toughest job behind the president of the United States.
Well, I entirely agree with you, caller.
And I appreciate your sentiment.
Thank you very, very much for being called.
Yeah, I was on the show.
I think you're one of the best guests on the show.
Because you usually have a lot of common sense.
All right.
Well, we've got to leave it there.
Thank you for your call.
You're welcome, guys.
Take care.
All right.
Well, you know, Alex, you know, I feel good.
You're going to get a whole lot of new friends.
And, you know, just don't forget us.
We'll still be here, you know, clamoring and struggling and all that.
Yeah, the struggling masses on the free buses.
Yep, I look forward to it.
This whole free bus thing, it's just, it's a desire.
Yes, he's expressing an interest in that.
He can't just snap his fingers and do it, you know.
And I don't really see how it would work to start with.
But I'm interested in listening.
I'm interested in listening to other ideas.
Make a free ride zone.
Yeah, you know, look at how New York has changed so much in the last couple of decades.
You have, you know, mass transit has revolutionized.
I know we don't like to admit these things, but, you know, now with countdown clocks and apps and the Omnicard and just, you know, improvement in technology, it really has become almost European style.
So I'm very proud of that.
Didn't think that was going to happen, but that resulted in changes.
You know, that came from changes, came from a different way of thinking.
The city of Seattle had a free ride zone for a very long time.
I remember that.
Yeah, but it is not the case anymore.
These things can come and go, but, yeah, it's interesting to try a new plan, see if it helps people.
New York did not always have transfers.
You know, you get on a train and then you get on a bus, it's a free transfer.
That didn't used to be the case.
That was somebody saying, let's have this.
And it wasn't the mayor saying it because, you know, the MTA makes these these decisions, these policy changes.
And the MTA, as I said before, is run by the state.
So, you know, he is going to have to work with Hochul.
And, you know, she was smart in in in endorsing him early.
And Schumer could not get himself to do it.
And, you know, to say that Schumer is in touch with the people of New York, that that's I just don't think that's right.
And Hakeem Jeffries was so cautious and worried constantly.
He just exudes weakness, not what the Democrats need.
So, you know, it might be a disaster, as always possible, but it's exciting.
We have a phone call.
Yes.
All right.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook over time.
Go ahead.
Yes, Emmanuel.
First two callers.
And I recognize him so well.
Go ahead.
OK, I'd like to mention nothing about politics or anything, but I'd like to mention things about texting and then like how numbers are being taken.
I know that I talked about this last week, but before I do, I'd like to thank God.
I want this.
Excuse me.
You OK, there.
What?
Are you OK there?
Yes.
All right.
I'd just like to mention something from our sponsor is Windows 11, is Windows 10 ending?
Why don't you switch to Linux?
OK.
Linux is a stable operating.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're familiar with the term shit canned because that's what you're going to find yourself if you continue advertising anything.
Even even on WBAI.
I know it's us.
And we're saying so.
It's our it's our own strong viewpoint not to advertise anything.
You can talk about things.
You can tear things apart.
Yeah.
Windows 11.
OK.
Tell me something good about Windows 11.
He was advocating for Linux, but still, we don't advertise anything.
So, I mean, it's funny.
That's good.
But it's also not what we do here.
So what other comment did you have?
Maybe phrase it differently.
OK.
The people spoke and know how we're delivering because we have lots of votes here.
Speaking of voting and elections.
I thought you weren't going to talk politics.
No, no.
It's not politics.
It's people in the chat.
That's.
All right.
I'm going to say what I want.
I've never heard Rebel Laugh before.
OK.
Next thought.
When you get a text from places like, you know, like doctor's offices.
OK.
They text you with this number like, you know, it's called 607 and a phone number.
When you call the number, it just beeps or it doesn't.
You're not supposed to call the number.
That number is going to send you a code that only you will get.
Don't share that code with anybody.
Repeat the code to them.
And then you can fill out the forms.
But that's why we're running out of phone numbers.
Because we have these phone numbers that are being used to the text.
I'm not sure that's why we're running out of phone numbers.
We're running out of phone numbers for a lot of reasons.
And, yeah, it's it's it's.
But the thing is, people don't use phone numbers that much anymore.
They don't talk on the phone.
They don't call each other.
They they send text, but there's short codes for that.
And I don't know.
It's I think we could reduce the number of digits in a phone, you know, a phone number these days.
Are you taking notes?
No, I'm just telling the chat that I'll be at the 2600 gathering this Friday.
OK, if you're talking to us, don't talk to the chat.
Talk to us.
Then talk to the chat.
Well, I can multitask.
No, you can't because you just proved you can't notice he said gathering.
This is his whole thing about the meetings being gatherings.
I don't want to confuse people that generally know the 2600 meetings as meetings.
But Rebel refuses to call the meetings these days.
He's calling them gatherings.
I think we should start calling them gathering, you know, like meetings like, you know, I remember the first 2600 meeting I came to.
I was like, oh, do I have to be there on time?
Do I have to dress fancy or some do sometimes we do require that?
No, some of them do.
That's that's the thing, Rebel.
Like if you change it to a gathering, then the meetings that have people showing up wearing dress code at a specific time for a meeting, they get thrown off because then somebody comes acting like it's a gather.
Let me try to explain this.
If you are meeting somebody to buy drugs in an alley, right, it's a meeting.
It's not you're not going to say, hey, Fred, can can can can we why do I use his name?
No, you know, can can can can we have a gathering later?
Somebody for a hookup.
No, I'm going to say a hookup.
Hooking up with somebody.
I think this is for drugs.
This is just for drugs.
Look, it's not a gathering.
I don't say, hey, you want to have a gathering later?
No, I say you want to have a meeting later.
They understand what I mean that way.
Want to meet up later.
How do I want to meet up?
I hate that.
That's a company.
That's a company.
You say that you're advertising a company.
No, it isn't.
Not anymore.
Oh, really?
I don't know.
But it's what's wrong with the word meeting.
And then there are people who say meet instead, like it's a track meet.
And you you meet people for the first time.
So it's like a meeting.
Yeah.
So, I mean, there's a lot of meaning in it.
And then you don't want to get confused with.
It makes sense.
Like an event called The Gathering.
Did you meet somebody at the meeting?
You know, that makes sense.
The word.
But you say, did you gather somebody?
I meet up with people that I know there.
Uh-huh.
This is a silly conversation.
Is there anything else that you have to say?
Yeah.
What was the last thing you were going to tell us?
No, about the phone numbers being.
And I don't know.
I think that was it.
All right, then.
That's it.
You heard it from Rebel himself.
That is everything.
Thank you for your call.
Are you going to the meeting on Friday?
I'll be at the 2600 meeting or gathering or whatever you want to call it on Friday.
All right.
So people know.
In New York City, by the way.
That's the one that Rebel will be at.
He won't be at any of the other ones.
He'll be gathering at the meeting.
Yes.
And you can get a listing of all the meetings at 2600.com slash meetings.
Right?
Yeah.
That's where it is.
And I've been calling off the hook.
I mean, I've been listening to Off the Hook and on the radio.
Not on the radio, but on the archives.
And I noticed that, you know, like when you used to have electronic switching with the
click.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, speaking of clicks.
Speaking of clicks.
Let's see.
Foreign exchange.
What about like if you have a phone number?
Like if you're in Queens and you have a foreign exchange line in Manhattan.
Yeah.
Tie lines.
We've talked about this so many times.
Tie lines.
Yes.
You know, you dial something and you get a dial tone in an area.
Not a dial tone, but if somebody calls a Queens number, but they're, let's say a Manhattan
number, but they're calling another borough or like say they're calling Long Island.
Yeah.
Somehow you get, you're talking to the person in a different place.
We've, we've talked about this maybe a dozen times now.
I would, I would refer you to another edition of Overtime where you ask the same question.
All right.
Thanks Rebel.
Good hearing from you and we'll see you at the meeting or maybe we won't.
We'll, we'll see 802-321-4225.
Always nice to hear familiar voices that go on for a long period of time.
He injected a conversation in his exit.
He did.
He did.
He might've even played back some of what he said the first time, Alex.
I think in terms of the meeting names, you know, we should just call it what it is really.
Right.
I mean, let's just, you know, why not just come right out and call it the 2600 conspiracy?
Well, that's, that's what we're accused of all the time.
Yeah.
That's it.
Let's do that.
But then it gets confusing because, you know, that's the co-conspirators you've met with.
You have to add a prefix and, you know, English.
It's just difficult.
All right.
We have another call.
Yeah.
We're still ready for calls.
This next call is ready to go.
And the phone line will be open as soon as this caller hangs up.
People know how telephones work.
Well, I just feel like we've maybe confused people a little bit, but I'm going to let this
caller take it away.
Yeah.
When someone's on the phone, don't call the phone.
Wait for them to get off the phone.
All right.
Good evening.
You're on off the go of time.
Go ahead.
Speak up.
Is that me?
Yes, it is you.
You're on the air right now or on, on the internet.
Okay, yeah.
I just wanted to, I know you were trying to get away from politics a little bit, but
I just wanted to say a couple of things on politics.
Sure, go ahead.
First of all, you were, Alex was talking about, oh, first of all, Gila was wondering, well,
why is everybody so interested in who's going to be the mayor of New York?
I mean, this is the biggest city and, you know, this is the financial center of the country.
So, you know, even people who don't live here, a lot of them are still interested in what's
going on.
I had friends, I used to live in Australia, and I had friends all the way from Australia
calling me, asking me, what's going on in the election, who I'm going to vote for?
I mean, it was just, it was almost like a presidential election.
It was just huge.
You know, it was just, it was just huge everywhere.
And as far as Mamdani goes, to me, Mamdani, to me, is the most unqualified mayor in the
last, probably the last 20 years.
I actually, because you guys were talking about this earlier, and I actually went on the Wikipedia
pages of all these past mayors, from de Blasio to Eric Adams, and there's, Mamdani is literally
the most unqualified mayor.
The only thing to me about Mamdani that I look at as a positive is, he's like an inspiration
to me.
I mean, I look at him in the world, this guy can do it, anybody can do it.
Literally anybody could do this.
You could, because this is, this guy just came from nowhere and was able to do this.
And I didn't vote for Mamdani.
I like Cuomo.
I know none of you guys, none of you there like Cuomo.
I personally like Cuomo.
I voted for Cuomo, and I still think he would have been a better mayor.
I mean, a lot of things, and Democrats to me, they're all on this moral stuff.
Oh, he's a bad person.
He did this.
Who cares about that?
This is why Democrats always lose, because they're on this moral stuff.
I mean, he's there to do a job, and I think he's the most qualified person.
He was a governor, and if Cuomo was mayor, I mean, he's the kind of person, you don't
have to worry about anything.
He's there.
He's a stable hand.
Nothing is going to get crazy.
It's just, things are just going to work the way they're supposed to work.
There's not going to be a bunch of crime.
Nothing is going to change.
He's just a stable hand, reliable person.
You don't know what this guy's going to do.
I mean, this guy's a young guy.
I'm not that much older than Mamdani.
I'm only 40 years old.
I'm not that much older than him.
And this guy's a young guy.
I mean, I just don't, I've never understood the point in making this guy, in voting for
this guy.
There's just no experience.
There's just nothing, free this and free that, free buses, free this, free that.
I mean, this is, none of that stuff, to me, should excite anybody.
And I think, to me, I think he's going to be the worst mayor ever.
I literally think that.
Okay, but you know.
I think he'll be the worst.
You think that, and you're predicting that, but you can't point to anything that proves
that, because he hasn't done anything yet.
Whereas you can look at these other people, you can look at Cuomo, and like him or hate
him, you can point to things that were problems.
You can look at somebody like Chuck Schumer, who keeps getting reelected, and say, wow,
there's a lot of problems with this guy.
But you know what?
We don't know anything else.
We're going to keep reelecting the same tired old people.
Or you can try something new.
And yeah, you're rolling the dice.
And it might pay off, or it might not.
But at some point, you have to do something different.
But some of these older people are just stable.
I mean, you know them.
They've been around for a long time.
You don't have to think about them.
Yeah, I don't think stable is working.
I don't think stable is working for us anymore.
I really don't.
You know?
Alex has something, but you might not be able to hear him.
But go ahead, Alex.
Yeah.
I mean, Kohler, I'm glad that you shared the same viewpoint.
It is me about the qualifications of Mom Downey here.
Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.
I doubt it.
But I agree.
I mean, this guy has not had a job outside of politics.
He's totally ill-prepared to handle emergency situations
or to make pronouncements on citywide policy.
I've seen nothing in his past that gives me confidence
in his ability to do that.
And what Emmanuel is asking us to do
is to take this lack of qualification,
and the fact that he might be somewhat inspirational
and have some kind of blind faith
that hopefully he'll do the right thing.
What I want in my elected officials
is a record that I can point to
of quantifiable merit and achievement
and instances where they have exercised
good and sound policy judgment.
We don't have that with Mom Downey.
It's a total lack of a record there.
It's tabula rasa.
Maybe he'll surprise us.
I really hope, for the sake of my children and the city,
that I am entirely wrong about him.
And I will be the first one to say
I was wrong about him if he acts in a surprising way.
But I'll also be the first one to say,
I goddamn told you so if we're not wrong.
Well, so we'll see.
Hopefully he has surrounded himself
with people who know what they're doing.
You know, hopefully he does that.
You know?
Looks like he is, but we'll see.
All right, thanks for your call.
All right, thank you.
All right.
Oh, the listeners seem to be with you, Alex.
Look at that.
I know.
Look, there's a first for everything.
I know they're not really with you.
People are getting angry.
People are angry on the chat.
But yeah, whatever.
But yeah, there's different opinions out there.
And you got to deal with that.
You got to deal with disagreements.
I agree.
You know, I just think how you deal with that
says something about your character.
And I think he dealt with a lot of attacks
and a lot of disagreement on where he was coming from
much better than the others did.
The others, you know, they responded with hate,
with prejudice, with tired old accusations.
Being the best of a bad lot is still part of a bad lot.
True.
But glad to hear you admit you voted for a bad lot.
All right.
We have another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Go ahead.
Hello.
I'm calling from Allionsman Handset today
as per the last couple weeks.
Wow.
You sound good.
This is the best sounding phone I've encountered so far.
Well, of course, you have to be up on a telephone pole
using it for it to really sound good.
I'm sure that's true.
This one has the modular jack,
so you can just use it like any older phone.
Sounds better than my 2500.
Wow.
Okay.
Well, that's good.
Certainly sounds better than a cell phone.
Just one quick thing about Mom Donnie.
I mean, I think out of all...
I agree.
I think he's the best choice out of all the others.
Time will tell to see, you know, what kind of policy...
You know, what his performance is going to be like.
I think people shouldn't be so quick to judge him.
Agreed.
Yeah.
And the other thing, you know, I think a lot of people forget
is that it's not just him.
It's us as well.
You know, you have to pressure the people that are in power
to do the right thing.
And what I see in New York right now,
a lot of people who are engaged who were not engaged last year.
And that can't be a bad thing.
So if they stay engaged, if they stay inspired,
there'll be all kinds of other people who come up
and take elected office.
And before you know it, the landscape has completely changed.
And Trump can't do anything about it.
Hey, I grew up in the Bronx.
I have a right to opinion on this.
Yeah, Cuomo won in the Bronx, I heard.
Oops.
That surprised me.
Yeah, I'm definitely Staten Island.
Anything else on your mind?
Hello?
Did we lose the test set there?
I heard a oops.
Well, that was because Cuomo won the Bronx.
I thought that's what that was about.
Me too.
Wow.
Is our phone still engaged, Kyle?
Can you tell?
It is.
All right.
No, no, let's give him a chance to come back.
Caller, we can't hear you.
If you can hear us, maybe hit a touchtone or something.
Although, when I tried that with Kyle, that didn't work.
Because sometimes the one-way path just seems to get cut off.
I don't know what causes that.
All right.
How about this?
If you can hear us, just hang up right now.
Okay.
You see, that would have been unmistakable.
I'll give you one more chance.
You can call back.
Was that a click?
No, it was somebody else.
Okay.
So if you can hear this, he did hang up.
I just didn't hear a click.
All right.
Well, let's give him a chance to call back or somebody else a chance to call.
802-321-4225.
Well, yeah, maybe the phone will magically fix itself, just like you're hoping will happen to the city.
Emanuel.
Are you going to be this insufferable for the next four years?
Sounds like it.
Can we let him, like, do something first?
We'll see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, you know, Eric Adams could still run the place into the ground in the next two months.
We don't know.
You know, Rob, you got me tickets once to greet the new mayor on January 1st.
Can you do that again this time?
I wonder if I can.
That was, we went to see de Blasio get inaugurated.
Yeah, it's a picture of me with de Blasio, which is kind of cool.
Yeah, yeah, and me too.
You each have one, yeah.
We had, I had a travel mug that I got at that day for a long time.
I don't have it anymore.
But it was interesting.
And mostly I was there to see Bloomberg leave.
That was the part I was really excited about.
And we got to see that as he kind of was rushed out the side door.
Um, it was, it was a fun experience.
I do recommend if you have the ability to go see the mayor get inaugurated, whether or
not you, you like the mayor that's being inaugurated, check it out.
It's an interesting piece of, uh, of political ceremony.
It absolutely is.
Oh, um, do we have a phone call?
Not yet.
802-321-4225.
Cool.
There was one thing I was going to say to Rebel earlier, but he can't hear anybody on
the phone except you.
So I'm going to say it now.
Um, so one thing I've noticed recently, it's happened a few times is that Rebel says things
about us on the panel and it's just very confidently wrong about them.
So, um, Rebel, I'm going to challenge you to not talk about any of us.
Thank you.
I would take it as a personal favor.
Um, that's all I had to say.
Okay.
Yeah, I saw some erroneous information about me being passed around over there earlier.
This is why I don't look at chats because I get distracted if I do.
Um, but Rebel once announced that we were off the show for a week because we were going
to a wedding or something.
I hope we weren't supposed to go to a wedding because we, I mean, if we miss one, I'd feel
bad.
Um, maybe he knows something we don't.
Is he getting our invitation?
All right.
Uh, good evening.
You're on off the cover time.
Go ahead.
I'm so sorry.
The battery, the lead acid battery in my portable VoIP setup died.
I probably need to implement some sort of level checking.
I think this is only the second time this has happened.
Okay.
Well, at least now we know what the, uh, what the issue was.
You should get a gel.
So, nah, man, that's for my illegal drug smuggling activities.
You know, you can't mix them up.
I got to have proper OPSEC, you know?
Well, we're glad you're on OPSEC here on YouTube.
Well, here I am.
Well, no more politics, I guess.
I must have cursed the handset or something.
Yes.
Uh, okay.
Uh, any, anything else that, uh, you wanted to share?
Televisions.
Televisions.
You can see vision from afar.
You know, I heard a piece on NPR.
It's about, uh, people.
This, uh, select group of people who are video files.
People who are really into, um, televisions and appearance of them and such.
And they say they're not buying new TVs.
They're actually going, uh, and buying old plasma TVs, which are no longer made, uh, made anymore
because they believe the newer TVs, uh, the motion on them with certain motion pictures
just, uh, looks unnatural.
Uh, interpolation on that provided by new TVs.
Yeah, the features that, uh, change some of the attributes of how video is displayed
can be really jarring and distracting.
Um, some of those models, you can turn some, you can turn that off.
In, in other cases, it might be a good turn.
Well, what does it matter?
I don't want a smart TV.
I don't want it to improve my picture.
You know, I just want a TV that just does one thing and one thing good.
It just puts a picture on my screen.
And, you know, every television up to, up from the beginning until just about now did
that.
And only now it's different.
Now buying a TV and setting up this, like setting up a Microsoft Windows computer.
Sound like me.
You're very low.
I can barely hear that laughing.
I'll laugh next.
I'll laugh closer to the mic next time.
Yeah, you'll hear it, uh, very loudly if you, if you wish.
We'll, we'll improve that.
Um, all right.
Well, thanks, thanks for the call.
We're going to try and get one more call in because we're getting kind of tired, actually.
I just had a quick, uh, quick question for Alex.
Is he still here?
He is.
I am.
Yep.
Um, I just had a question relating to collection of domains and drop catching.
Like, specifically, this is a domain in the .cat TLD, um, that I want to acquire, not for
nefarious needs, just for my domain collection.
I see that it's not actively used.
It's just redirection, directing to another page, um, possibly as some sort of, um, what's
the, um, you know, where you buy domains that are similar and then have them redirect.
So it's, it's, it's not being actively used, it's redirecting to another site.
And I was just wondering, like, is it possible to drop catch this?
Like, what are the conditions, you know, can you, is this something you can do on your personal
computer?
What, uh, what programs do you recommend?
Yeah.
I mean, you can use a, a drop catching service to pick up any domain name.
It's, it's not illegal.
Yeah, but why do I want not want, why would I want to pay a service?
Why can't I just do it on my own home computer?
Oh yeah, you could do that.
You absolutely could.
You'd have to very carefully though, watch the states of the domain name life cycle to
make sure that you got it as soon as it was publicly released.
And to increase your chances of getting the domain, you would probably want to try to register
it with a registrar account that the domain is currently associated with at that particular
time.
So for instance, if the domain is registered with GoDaddy, you would probably want to have
a GoDaddy registrar account if you're trying to drop catch it at that particular moment.
Hmm.
You could probably, you know, write some kind of countdown script and then just continually
like look for a state change in the domain and use that as your own sort of drop catch
service or you could pay a commercial service for it.
But yeah, I mean, you can do it.
The thing is, you know, you could be committing trademark infringement perhaps if you're registering
a domain that you knowingly know.
The domain I'm trying to register is only three letters long and not trademarkable.
Okay.
All right.
I think I have perhaps an idea of, you know, what it could relate to at that point.
So in that instance, you absolutely could then because if nobody has the trademark rights
to it, well, there could be, I guess, perhaps maybe common law rights to it that one could
assert, but it seems unlikely that anybody would have standing based on what you're describing
the domain to be to assert any kind of trademark, right?
So you probably wouldn't be subject to something like a UDRP or Uniform Domain Name Resolution
Policy Complaint whereby you're accused of cyber squatting.
So it sounds like you're probably, you know, in the right to acquire it.
So somebody could always try it on and send you a cease and desist letter or claim that
you're committing some kind of infringement.
But if so, if you're using it in a fair way, even then, like for parody or criticism or critique,
that's consistent with the principles of fair use.
And you should be able to use your domain as you see fit in that particular way as an act
of free expression.
But if anybody does try it on with you, just give us a call back and then we'll be in touch
and I'd be happy to talk with you.
Do you know any pre-written programs that can do drop catching or do you have to make
my own?
I don't know if there are any scripts that do drop catching.
I would imagine there probably are.
I would look on GitHub, see if you can find something.
I haven't looked on GitHub either, so I probably need to do that too.
But thank you.
And then another quick question.
The top-level domain .cat requires you, as a rule, because it's for websites in the
Catalan language to publish a Catalan language website under that domain within a preset amount
of time.
What if I don't?
That's what .cat is for?
Boy, that's misleading.
Yeah.
I was actually thinking about it because I remembered an episode where you're talking
about the new .dog and .cat TLD from many, many years ago on Off the Hook.
I was listening to the back shows and it just came to me, you know, what if I register this
domain in the .cat TLD, only three letters.
Hey, that's going to be wonderful.
It's going to look so beautiful.
But there is one other domain in the .cat TLD, Nyan.cat.
You can probably guess what that is.
And that is not following the rules of the .cat TLD.
It has nothing to do with the Catalan language.
Actually, Nyan.cat does have a Catalan language option if you go to the choose your language
thing on the top left.
Rob, you knew that way too quick.
Why?
Because I just happened to bring it up when we were talking about .cat because I remembered
that it exists.
Yeah.
Well, it opened up a lot of doors tonight.
So to answer your question, Kohler, what could happen if you don't have your Catalan version
of your page accessible, presumably is that you'll be found out and you'll be found to be non-compliant,
likely with your registrar-registrant agreement.
And at that point, then the registrar could yank the domain from you, you know, basically
pull it back into circulation.
It would then go back to the registry and the registry would probably cancel the domain
and then it would be re-available for public registration.
At which point you could then utilize your .cat script to catch it again and put up another
site that's not in Catalan if you really wanted to protest that.
Yeah, they're really going to love you.
Yeah.
You have a copper line in the studio, right?
We like to think we do, but we're not sure anymore.
Really?
It's probably pretty easy to comply with that requirement using Google Translate or something,
you know?
Yeah.
Hey, that's fine.
I don't care.
I was just wondering whether...
Okay, yeah, I understand now.
All right.
All right, that's basically it.
I'll save questions for later.
Okay, take care.
All right.
I just wanted to issue a correction.
Mondani did win the Bronx.
Somewhere I heard that Cuomo won the Bronx.
And it's very hard to find online this info, who won the Bronx.
Cuomo won Staten Island.
He won Staten Island.
I knew that.
I thought maybe he just did better in the Bronx or something.
I don't know.
I was watching a lot of TV last night, and it got kind of confusing.
We're going to see if we can get one more phone call in, but that's it.
That's the last phone call.
802-321-4225.
And it can't be anybody who has already called in.
And we prefer it to be somebody who hasn't called in either ever or in a long time.
Let's try that.
And we'll give it a couple of minutes.
While we're waiting, we can talk about Prop 5 in this city, which passed in the election last night.
That's the one where we voted to replace borough-controlled paper maps of the city with a unified digital map.
I saw that on News 1, which, by the way, I'm still able to receive, which is great.
But what is the digital map of New York?
What was that all about?
It's the official map of the city, which has been maintained independently by each borough on paper since time immemorial.
But the vote was to stop doing that and start doing just a unified digital map that the entire city will have all in one place.
Hang on.
Can you explain the paper version?
I mean, where is that?
Can anybody just get it, or do you have to visit it?
What is it?
Yeah, it would be a public record that I think you could probably get wherever, you know, in each borough's...
Each borough hall, probably.
Yeah, each borough hall, and have access to it and whatever.
Who does that?
Who goes to borough hall to look at the map of the borough they're in?
Maybe for things like planning and building and deeds and things like that, just to have an official map to check things against.
I think, partially, this is not least because this is part of the amending the city charter as part of last year's work by the Charter Revision Commission.
And I think it's probably pretty costly at this point to have five different paper maps.
How did this become a ballot issue?
Yeah, it's a big function of government that I guess you have to have official mandate from the population in order to upgrade or change how things are done.
Yeah, I believe you have to...
What's the word I'm looking for?
Put a proposal in an election?
No, to alter the city charter, I think you need to have.
It also expands criteria used to assess maintenance costs for city property.
Wow, that sounds exciting.
I mean, it's...
I mean, it's not exciting.
And I will say, I don't think I knew that...
I don't think I knew this was on the ballot until I walked into the little booth last night.
But I'm very curious who the 26.8% of New Yorkers who are like, we're cool...
And voted against it.
I would actually really like to know.
I'm very curious.
They probably are against digital things.
Well, that's what we were talking about.
I was like, are we just talking about like a bunch of old Luddites?
Well, I don't know.
Maybe, maybe.
Okay, I think we are done for the night.
But, because, yeah, the one call that came in was not from somebody that...
It was from somebody who called before.
So, we're going to give them a chance not to do that.
Otherwise, they'd be banned.
And we don't want to impose that.
So, with the sake of night.
And hail Mondani.
All together now.
Things are going to change, Alex.
Things are going to change.
You'll find out.
You're all going to find out.
Well, look, let's see.
As I said...
Re-education camps.
Re-education begins in January.
Oh, we've got to get this last comment.
Okay, so we just got a comment from Slipstream Boy in the chat, who is, again, our listener
from Australia, who joined us this evening, who said, I saw all of your faces during Hope
Stream and was amazed.
I truly believed Alex was an old man based on how he sounds and speaks.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how wrong I was.
It was great.
That's hilarious.
I will take that as a grand compliment.
Thank you for not mentioning my face.
That's really funny.
All right.
Thank you, Slipstream Boy.
O-T-H at 2600.com, email address, anything you have left to say that you'd like to share
with us, please do so.
We will see you next week.
I think we're going to have the guy on who's doing the Ness thing.
It's quite possible.
And then the week after that, I guess we'll do a call-in on BAI.
So, yeah, we'll be back for overtime next week here as well.
And I want to thank you all and the callers and our friends in the chat for the very robust
discussion tonight.
I think it was a fun debate.
And I like it when we disagree about things.
It makes it lively and interesting.
And I also like how we can disagree and respect each other.
It's funny because you literally didn't say a word about this until tonight.
So, I was completely broadsided.
And that was fun.
I didn't know you didn't bring it up either.
I just said one thing.
I said, wow, it looks like we've changed direction.
It was a happy night last night.
Everybody's dancing in the streets.
And, of course, I bring it up.
And I've got the person who thinks it sucked.
So, yeah, I can't let people, you know, assume that I agree with you when I don't.
So, you know, that's it.
All right.
I think it was a fun discussion tonight.
That's a word.
That's a word.
Okay.
We will see you next week.
Good night.