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We're supposed to be. 
Sorry about that. 
That's okay. 
I'm sure the tri-state area forgives you. 
I was just trying to usher everybody out of here. 
All the phone company announcements, it gets really crowded in here. 
Aren't those phone ladies nice, though, to spend the time to give us our special tailored announcements for this radio show? 
It's Off the Hook. 
We're here again on a Wednesday night, Emanuel over here, Kyle over there. 
And as you've already heard, oh, go ahead, Kyle. 
Say hello. 
Hi, Emanuel. 
Already heard Rob and Gila. 
Good evening. 
Speaking into their live microphones. 
Boy, I can't believe that went out over the air. 
Things they were saying. 
Well, we'll clean it up later. 
An interesting couple of days. 
Interesting week. 
Where do we start? 
I've been having a bit of a war with big technology companies. 
You know, they start it. 
Seriously, they start it. 
Facebook, Google, I don't know what it is. 
I must have annoyed them or something. 
Facebook started the whole thing by basically cutting me off from my instant messages. 
I use Facebook Messenger, but I only use it as a sidebar. 
I don't actually use Facebook, but I'm able to talk to people through Facebook using the Trillian interface to Facebook Messenger. 
Well, one morning, Facebook decided that my Trillian interface was a hacker and said, somebody is trying to get into your account or somebody has succeeded in getting into your account and we blocked them, which just sort of contradicts itself. 
But basically what that meant was the beginning of a three-day battle to get my app to be able to log in like it's been doing for years. 
And I had to change my password no less than three times because every time I answered their automated query saying, was this you? 
And I said, yes, that was me. 
I had to make a new password just to be safe. 
It was the most frustrating thing in the world. 
And then today, today I find out that my communications to you folks who for some reason use Gmail has been going into the trash bin just, you know, directly from me to you. 
Nope, spam. 
All of a sudden, I'm spam. 
And Google has decreed that. 
And, you know, everybody says, well, this is what you have to do. 
Why do I have to do anything? 
It's Google that is the problem here. 
And in fact, you know, I've said this to many, many people, people who use Gmail. 
Go take a trip over to your spam box. 
Okay, just, you know, wander over there and tell me how many pieces of email are in there that you really would like to see. 
Yeah, people say Gmail has great spam filtering. 
They have very overzealous spam filtering. 
When you email your own account from your rescue account and it gets labeled as spam, that's overzealous in my opinion. 
And yet, you know, every time you dare to criticize Gmail or Google, people tell you, oh, you're doing it wrong. 
You have to modify your behavior. 
You have to not use these particular words. 
It's always you that's the problem, not the big tech companies. 
Well, I've just about had it. 
I won't be using email anymore. 
I'll call you all on the phone from now on. 
There's nothing you can do. 
You can't talk to a person. 
The best you can do is tweet, and maybe somebody will get back to you who's a bot. 
Oh, let's see, I left out a company. 
I left out Amazon. 
Yeah, Amazon completely ripped me off this week. 
I was downloading music, and, you know, digitally. 
Yeah, don't they owe you a dollar? 
They owe me 99 cents, because what I did was, I was on a 1972 kick. 
You wouldn't believe how many good songs there are in 1972. 
I decided I wanted them all, so I was literally buying every single song from Amazon, okay, and they basically told me that you can't download this anymore, even though I hadn't downloaded it at all. 
The problem is, I figured this out because they couldn't do it, they're naming the files the same thing. 
So if I download a song from The Temptations, okay, it's named something. 
It's got the date and some other number or name, and then if I download another song from Stevie Wonder, say, it has the exact same file name, and then when I try to download Stevie Wonder's song, it says, no, you already downloaded this, because it's the same file name, and it won't let you, and it keeps your money. 
That's what it did to me, and I complained about this on Twitter, which is what Twitter is good for, by the way, is complaining about things to big corporations, because it gets their attention, and somebody or something responds to you. 
And yeah, so I got the response from something that claimed to want to help me, and this happened about four or five different times, where I was basically lured into some kind of online chat, where I explain the situation to them, and they tell me to do something which is completely useless and doesn't do any good whatsoever, and then I just have to go back to Twitter and complain again, and then the whole process starts over and over. 
In all this time, with all this complaining and talking to various beings on the internet, nobody has been able to get me the song that I paid for or the 99 cents that I paid. 
Nobody can do that at Amazon. 
It's incredible. 
I don't really care about the 99 cents, but it's just the point of the thing. 
So basically, in the end, I went to Ukraine. 
Yeah, there's a great MP3 site in Ukraine. 
It's a tenth the cost. 
I like to think I'm sort of helping out the country in some way, and you're giving a big middle finger to Amazon at the same time. 
And I don't think the artists are getting paid either way, but there's no way to know that. 
So yeah, for some reason, big corporations have been angering me this way. 
I know why they're angering me. 
I don't know why they're acting the way they're acting. 
So how's your week been, guys? 
I bought some music, and it works fine. 
So I'll just throw that in your face there, Emmanuel, and make you completely jealous of me. 
I didn't buy it from Amazon, but I bought it in a way that benefits the artists in the long run. 
So I have that going for me. 
If I could walk up to the artist and buy a CD from them, I would do that for sure. 
But like I said, 1972, many of them aren't around anymore. 
What's the song that you couldn't download? 
I'm curious. 
You know what? 
I know this. 
It's going to come to me. 
Oh, I know what it is. 
If loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right. 
That's the song. 
Excellent. 
1972 was a banner year. 
Anyway, it's my problem. 
I'll deal with it. 
I'll get my revenge. 
I'll get my 99 cents back. 
And I'll figure out how to send mail to people without being labeled as spam. 
Yeah, it's like the virtual equivalent of losing something in a vending machine, you know? 
Yeah, it is. 
I'm rocking that digital vending machine. 
Precariously tilting it back. 
Maybe it'll fall on me. 
Maybe it won't. 
But I'm going to get what I paid for. 
And the email story is saddening because email is kind of one of the last bastions of the old internet where anybody could just contact anyone and you didn't need any special clients. 
You didn't need to be signed up to any particular walled garden. 
You could just, if you had email, you had email and you could send and you could receive. 
And it is simple and it is beautiful. 
And not enough people still think of email as something that's, you know, a basic building block of how to communicate with people online. 
People want to go to direct messaging on a social media site or something else. 
And, you know, I have had good friends tell me that they didn't want to email me something. 
Just let me DM you on such and such a site. 
Okay, but Rob, you know, what I say to these people who want to do that, I'm not on that site. 
I don't have an account there. 
I have an email address. 
Everyone has an email address. 
You know, you can't keep yourself from getting an email address of one sort or another. 
What do they say when you tell them, but I'm not there? 
You know, I'm not on Facebook. 
I'm not on this particular client. 
Here's my email address. 
Can you, and you have an email address too. 
So why the reluctance? 
I don't know. 
I guess it's just not as cool as it used to be. 
Yeah, what I am hearing is that mindset that theirs is the system that is logical and that you have to, everyone else who isn't on their, as you said, walled garden, they have to bend and contort themselves around to fit what your group is deciding on any given day, it even, any hour, what they decide are the new rules for something as universal as email. 
The point of it is to be interoperable and it shouldn't be that you're kind of getting a cohort of email users and then changing the rules just because you have a large user base. 
Yeah, it's kind of like a microcosm of the internet itself where it's breaking up into little walled gardens that you can't climb the wall and get to the other gardens. 
Basically, everyone is in their own little world. 
In fact, you can see this happening with the war in Ukraine where Russia is being pretty much closed off and Russia is closing off the world. 
You know, things like that are happening more and more. 
Or, you know, North Korea certainly has perfected that. 
Or China. 
You're getting to a point where the technology is there. 
It's just not connected anymore to itself. 
And I think that's a very dangerous and negative thing to have. 
The whole point of the internet was to connect us all together so we could communicate. 
And now you have to jump through hoops to figure out how to communicate with people because, you know, they all use different rules rather than the one thing that ties us all together. 
It's like, you know, imagine if, you know, your phone, those of you who remember telephones, actual telephones in houses, you know, that rang that were hooked up to the wall. 
Imagine if somebody couldn't call you because they used a different phone company and there was no way for that phone company to talk to your phone company. 
It kind of defeats the whole purpose of a phone. 
Yeah, and that whole network becomes, kind of collapses, sort of implodes from the hubs and the places where it intersects. 
And it's a real disintegration of something that was otherwise wildly connected and growing. 
See, I understand why countries are doing this, why governments want their people to be segregated from other people in other places. 
I get that. 
What I don't get is why we're doing it to ourselves. 
Why are we cutting ourselves off from other people? 
When it's the easiest thing in the world to shoot an email to somebody, we're making it so difficult that people never get back to you because they're getting back to you in the wrong way. 
It's really sad. 
It really is sad. 
Well, it's this idea of not trusting anyone, the zero trust. 
It's like they have all their users and anybody else is on some spectrum of really sketchy to, okay, maybe we'll let this email come through. 
You trust Facebook more than you trust just email by itself? 
Well, and that's the sort of paradox. 
It's like self-fulfilling in that their own user policy leads to abuse in a lot of ways from their own group and these like fake accounts, that whole herring. 
But there's all this outside communication and stuff that, of course, spear phishing and the proliferation of spam makes even mere pleasantries impossible because of the deluge and because of this filtering. 
So are we getting better or are we getting worse? 
It's hard to even tell. 
It's just a storm of bad info. 
Oh, we're getting worse. 
I know. 
It's pretty easy to tell. 
We're getting worse for sure. 
However, the question is how do we reverse this? 
How do we make it better? 
I know people are concerned with privacy and many, many email clients these days encrypt. 
So that should not be a concern as much. 
And there are always holes no matter how protected you think you are. 
So I think there's kind of an even ground no matter what platform you're using. 
I think the key is to use a platform that as many people as possible access on a regular basis. 
Have you ever tried to talk in like a nightclub or like a really loud venue? 
Like you're next to someone. 
I was trying that last night. 
Yeah. 
You're having a conversation and you kind of can hear them, but there's all this noise around you. 
You spend most of your time smiling and nodding and hoping you're not agreeing to something you don't want to do. 
You feel like you're pretending to communicate, but it's not. 
It's really ceremonial. 
It's not, you're not getting much good information through. 
That's kind of, I feel like the analogy of where we're at. 
It's like we have the capability, but there's so much external noise and, and it's so compromised in these different ways that it's, it's hard to even use. 
It's, it's like, you don't want to hear what the person has to say because they might have your worst fears. 
Yeah. 
Go ahead, Gila. 
Sorry. 
This is all just reminding me of years ago, a place where I used to work. 
I had a colleague who was told, and I don't know if this was true or she was just convinced of this, that there was a setting on her email that was not allowing her to email anyone outside of the organization. 
And she had to get special authorization to email anyone, to email any email address that did not end in our organization's TLD. 
And I don't know if that was actually true, but this person told everyone that, yeah, she couldn't email anybody outside the organization. 
Well, I mean, it's, it's not uncommon to have that level of paranoia in an organization. 
And certainly it's not uncommon to have all of your email perused by your boss or by some administrator within that particular organization. 
And they legally have the right to do that because you're using their, their, their bandwidth, their, their computers. 
And a lot of people I don't think get that. 
But no, this person was told they were not like any email they tried to write would not leave our organization. 
Like they couldn't contact anyone external, which I thought was fascinating and definitely something we discussed a lot. 
But no, it also made me think of when I was young and email was first becoming a thing. 
And could you email people on other services or was it like a long distance call? 
I was convinced it was like a long distance call. 
And if, you know, I was emailing someone on CompuServe from my AOL account, it was going to cost something. 
Well, you know, back in those days, that thing was, that was probably a bit more, more common to think that way. 
I mean, in the days where, you know, you'd UUCP your email, basically, you know, you'd write your email on a bulletin board. 
And then at night it would call another bulletin board and transfer your email one step towards its destination. 
And that's how people communicated. 
So, yeah, you know, I could see people thinking that if you email this particular domain, it might cost you more or there could be a risk involved. 
In this day and age, though, domains don't really mean anything. 
And, you know, distance doesn't mean anything. 
So it's just sad to see people losing a grasp on that because we fought so hard to get to that point where, you know, we weren't separated by distance and by the expense of talking to each other. 
Now we can reach out and talk to people anywhere and not worry about about the expense. 
So we should be embracing that. 
We should be communicating as much as possible, whether it's somebody nearby or somebody on the other side of the planet. 
We, you know, shouldn't stand on ceremony and say only people who use this particular program or corporation or whatnot is worthy of speaking to me. 
It's silly. 
That's it. 
It's that risk and benefit. 
And, you know, you create something that's so secure that not just people are only a certain few are gravitating towards it. 
But imagine it's so secure that only a certain, you know, one or two individuals know how to use it at all. 
Think about how much that narrows your ability to communicate if only one or two other people in the world can use the communications technology that you've deemed so secure that you can use. 
It makes you more elite because only certain people know how to reach you. 
Not anybody can communicate with you. 
It's really - go ahead, Rob. 
You know, there was a story going around this past week about a prison in Michigan that banned books on Swahili and Spanish from the prison library because they didn't want the prisoners to learn an obscure language that the guards didn't know and thus be able to communicate among themselves without observation. 
Spanish? 
Yeah, obscure language Spanish, famously obscure language Spanish. 
Nobody in that prison knew how to speak Spanish. 
Yeah, or they just don't want to hire a Spanish speaker. 
In the United States. 
That's incredible to me. 
Hey, we got some news. 
Yeah, there is other news going on besides our own problems. 
By the way, our email address, which we do read, except sometimes those of us who receive it on Gmail might wind up having to go into our spam folder to find the mail. 
OTH at 2600.com. 
I can promise you 2600.com is not in any way connected to Gmail. 
Now, we run our own server, and we welcome spam. 
We decide when it's spam and when it's not. 
It takes a lot of different coins, too. 
It takes coins? 
Yeah, that's how I keep it working. 
Really? 
That's what I heard. 
Like a parking meter. 
Yeah. 
Okay, Elon Musk. 
Let's just break the mood here by saying Elon Musk. 
Yeah, that silences any room when you do that. 
He is getting what he asked for. 
He's getting exactly what he asked for. 
Twitter's board of directors, after initially resisting his demands for data that backed up its claims about spam and bot accounts, representing less than 5% of daily active users. 
They're going to go ahead and change course, according to the Washington Post, citing an anonymous source familiar with the company's thinking. 
Musk this week threatened to call off his $44 billion offer to acquire Twitter over the issue. 
In a letter to the company, his lawyer said Twitter's refusal to provide data about spam and fake accounts represented a material breach of their agreement. 
Now, in an effort to close the deal, Twitter will offer Musk and his team access to its full firehose of raw data from the social platform, which includes 500 million-plus tweets posted daily as early as this week. 
Can you imagine what he is going to be subjected to in a matter of hours, probably? 
The massive amount of crap that he's going to have to wade through and figure out. 
Okay, does this represent something that's acceptable to me? 
Yeah. 
Back in April, when Elon Musk first proposed the deal to buy Twitter, he waived his right to conduct deep due diligence on the company's operations. 
Why would you do that? 
Why, Elon? 
I mean, $44 billion, you know, it's no chump change there. 
You should be careful. 
He's on the hook to pay a breakup fee. 
How much do you think that breakup fee is? 
Anyone want to guess? 
Unless you know. 
Gila, it looks like you have a guess. 
Go on. 
No, I do not. 
You can say a number. 
I mean, it's not, you know, anything. 
Okay. 
$42 billion. 
A $42 billion fee on a $44 billion deal, and it gets nothing. 
Yes. 
No, that's not right. 
Kyle, did you have a guess? 
$4.2 billion. 
That's a good guess. 
That's a very good guess. 
It's almost like 10%. 
I like that. 
I like that way of thinking. 
Rob, did you have one? 
I'll say maybe $1. 
No. 
Wow. 
How about $8 billion? 
$8 billion. 
That's good. 
You know, 20%, I guess. 
It's a sizable penalty. 
I'm going to guess $1 billion, which is correct, because I'm reading the story, and it's right in front of me. 
$1 billion fee is what he has to pay if he is subjected to the breakup fee for walking away from the deal. 
And, of course, he could also be the target of lawsuits by Twitter shareholders or Twitter itself. 
Why would a Twitter shareholder sue Elon Musk for not buying the company? 
I mean, does it really hurt them that much? 
You're still a shareholder. 
It has, though, because since he's been, like, Twitter stock prices have tanked since he started coming forward with all of this. 
Wouldn't they still have tanked after he bought it, though? 
I mean, how would it improve? 
After he buys it? 
Unclear. 
But it has gone drastically down, I think, in the last couple of weeks since he came forward with all of this. 
So I don't know. 
Well, I don't understand. 
It's going to be interesting. 
And another development, Twitter shareholders will be voting in late July or early August on whether to approve Elon Musk's bid for the company. 
So they get still rejected after all this? 
That's kind of amazing, isn't it? 
Does he get $1 billion for wasting his time if that happens? 
I mean, you know, I'm not usually in the habit of arguing for Elon Musk to get more money, but it just seems like, come on already. 
It's either, you know, I can't say that on the air. 
Either buy the company or get off the can, basically, is where I'm going with that. 
But, you know, given his history for throwing things out there on Twitter that would send one company or another's stock flying off in different directions, Elon Musk knows that he has the ability to just change the face of whatever's going on at a particular company or, you know, with its stock. 
And so, like, if this is all some big pro-wrestling style work, I am fascinated to know how it ends for him. 
But also, the guy, didn't he make some of his money through PayPal so he knows about, like, bullcrap fees being added onto the prices people thought they were paying for things? 
That's the American way. 
That's the secret. 
Those bullcrap fees. 
I think it's put up or shut up, right? 
Yeah, yeah. 
That's another phrase in the Constitution. 
Hey, maybe someone here can explain this to me because, you know, I've been really busy preparation for the Hope Conference and the magazine and trying to do a little gardening and, you know, things like that have taken all of my time. 
I don't know what in God's name the Bored Ape Yacht Club is. 
Can somebody explain what this is? 
Because I keep hearing it in the news and I don't know what they're talking about. 
And apparently none of you do either. 
I feel better, but really, no one knows what the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, that's the clue for you. 
Gila, you're... 
Yeah, they're dumb-looking pictures of monkeys that are NFTs. 
They actually are apes. 
I didn't know that. 
I heard this was... 
No, they're legit. 
They're monkeys. 
And... 
It's like an art project or something? 
Yeah. 
And people are, like, pinning their entire identity on these apes. 
Apparently 10,000 unique Bored Ape NFTs. 
Yeah. 
There you go. 
So... 
And... 
But who are they? 
Is this a particular entity or just a collection? 
Well, I think part of it is generative art. 
Rob, do you know how to describe that, maybe? 
Yeah. 
The thing with these is that these NFTs, they're all based on one drawing of an ape-looking board, like a cartoony ape. 
But algorithmically, they generated 10,000 of these, adding different clothes to the ape or different accessories or giving it little props or things. 
But it's all basically pictures of the same ape. 
And so your NFT, if you bought one of these, is your particular unique ape out of the set. 
And... 
Wait, wait, wait. 
Let's stop you for a second. 
So it's one damn ape. 
It's one ape. 
And somebody is putting different clothes and expressions on this one drawing? 
Who's doing it? 
Not even somebody. 
An algorithm. 
An algorithm is doing this. 
Okay. 
So who owned the first picture? 
Who drew the picture? 
I don't know offhand who drew the picture, but it's owned by the Board API Club collection of images. 
It's a project of a company called Yuga Labs. 
And... 
Okay. 
So basically, they weren't content to just fool people with one NFT to buy a digital image. 
They copied lots and lots of them and got lots and lots of NFTs. 
They must be making money hand over fist. 
Now, there's more. 
Oh, and I know there's more. 
I'm getting to the more. 
Rob. 
I'm trying to figure out the what first. 
Rob. 
You gotta... 
You can't forget to tell them about the ape coin. 
Oh, no. 
Because every... 
Ape coin. 
Is this necessary? 
Do you really have to tell me about this? 
Every buyer of one of these images was able to get a certain amount of a cryptocurrency as well. 
Did the human race hit its head or something? 
I mean, seriously, between not being able to communicate anymore and these NFTs and Bored Apes and everything like that, I don't know what world I'm on. 
Wait. 
It's about to get better or worse. 
Why? 
Why does it have to? 
Because on April 30th, Yuga Labs launched their own Metaverse project. 
As is their right, I'm sure. 
I don't know what that means. 
It's a whole thing. 
And, like, I don't know. 
If I were going to get any cartoon ape, I would want it to be Grape Ape or perhaps Magilla Gorilla. 
And I don't know, man. 
Now, Rob, you draw pictures. 
I do. 
What's to stop us, assuming you permit me, from teaming up, you and me, and we can draw a Bored Pig? 
And then we'll have some kind of algorithm or something go out and make varieties of these Bored Pigs in different clothing and different expressions and all that. 
But why would the Bored Ape? 
I assume the Bored Ape would basically continue to make tons of money and we probably wouldn't make a penny. 
But why? 
What's the reason for that? 
I think the reason for that would be they got in there in this whole scammy scene early. 
And they were just one of the big projects in the beginning of this whole current wave and craze. 
And Kyle, I think you have feelings about this. 
Yeah. 
I think there's a couple different things that have gone on here with this. 
But there is a way to pump up the value of stuff like this. 
So once these art projects were created, they needed a place to be sold, like an auction site. 
Melania Trump knows how to do this, I believe. 
Yeah. 
I think. 
I've got her number somewhere. 
But she does coats, I think. 
I do have her number. 
No, wait. 
Yeah, you're right. 
She did have one NFT, maybe a couple. 
Well, so anyway, there was a place where they were all being bought and sold, right? 
So, okay, here's where you have customers, right? 
Well, some of these, I think, allegedly, were bought by people who had already created them to drive up the price. 
Then you sell it. 
So you pay yourself. 
Yeah, and somehow this isn't illegal. 
I don't understand how this isn't illegal. 
Then you sell it to somebody else for the price you paid plus a price. 
Then you get paid what you paid yourself, and then they paid what you said it was worth plus more. 
If I could basically draw an analogy, if people can recall real world things, like a house, okay, that's something that you would physically, you own the physical house itself. 
Let's say you already own the house, but you put it up for sale. 
But then you bought the house from yourself for an inflated price, and then you have a record of that house somehow being worth more than it really is. 
And then some other poor sucker comes along and says, oh, okay, well, I'm going to pay the same amount, and then you make a profit somehow. 
Yeah, they're like crypto deeds. 
How is this right? 
Well, there's no regulation because these are novel forms of digital value that are being traded. 
And it got even crazier. 
There's other aspects to this, like the prices, things being sold, old orders, like old sales for lower prices. 
Somehow that was exploited on some of the aspects of that stuff. 
The reason I brought up the Bored Ape Yacht Club in the first place is because I keep seeing stories coming in about how somebody keeps hacking them, and they got hacked again. 
It's happened several times now. 
They were hacked on Saturday, and they've lost upwards of 200 Ethereum coins. 
That's about $360,000 worth of NFTs. 
And you know what? 
Is that wrong? 
For what they're doing, that's not wrong. 
Is it wrong for somebody to come in and say, you know what? 
I'm going to pilfer some of your fantasy money here. 
Well, it's real money, but it's based on value for something that isn't real. 
I don't know. 
Reality is really, it's getting trickier to get a handle on it. 
According to data from blockchain security firm PeckShield, one Bored Ape Yacht Club and two Mutant Ape tokens were stolen in the scam. 
I swear, you know, if I was back when we started this show, listening to what I'm saying now, I would be convinced that we all took some kind of collective psychotic drug or something. 
Fortune magazine reported that the hack was the result of a phishing attack that compromised the Discord account of Boris Wagner, the project's community manager. 
After, you know, if you're using email, I don't think it would have happened. 
After obtaining Wagner's login credentials, the attacker posted fake links in the Discord channels of the official Bored Ape Yacht Club and its related metaverse project called Otherside, according to the report. 
Twitter user NFT Herder was first to spot the compromise, tracing the stolen funds to four separate wallets worth an estimated 145 Ethereum. 
That's around $260,000. 
Yuga Labs confirmed the hack on the official Bored Ape Yacht Club Twitter account, reporting that its Discord servers were briefly exploited. 
About 200 Ethereum worth of NFTs appear to have been impacted, according to the tweet. 
Remember when that sentence was silly? 
We are still investigating, but if you were impacted, email us. 
Ah, right. 
They want you to email them if you want to fix this. 
Oh, that came around nicely, didn't it? 
Indeed. 
Okay. 
I already thought deciding a JPEG was worth money was a silly idea. 
Yeah, but none of this is changing my mind, and this whole thing just keeps going and getting weirder. 
There was a story at the end of last month that you saw, Gila. 
Yes. 
Seth Green, the actor Seth Green, whom you may know from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Austin Powers movie. 
Seth Green. 
No, you know Seth Green. 
Chris Griffin. 
Yes. 
Sure. 
Okay, yeah, I know Chris Griffin. 
I know him. 
Okay. 
Sorry, I'm familiar with Seth Green. 
Not animated, Seth Green, but I digress. 
He was planning on creating a cartoon based on the Bored Ape that he owned, and then he got phished, and someone took the NFT, and now he can't make the cartoon he was planning on making. 
And he's trying to sue for it. 
Does he know who to sue? 
I mean, where do you begin? 
No, this is an excellent question. 
So it's, they're, the real world brick and mortar repercussions to these things are becoming more and more, I don't want to say insurmountable, inescapable, but like they're there and people are trying to really have it both ways, because if you want to play in this unregulated ecosystem, and then somebody steals your stuff, so you can't make the cartoon you were going, like I'm just fascinated by the cartoon thing. 
I'll be putting air quotes around most of these words, like stealing and stuff and paintings and whatever else, because it's all digital, it's all copyable, you know, just because you have some kind of certificate saying that you own it, doesn't protect you in any way if somebody is able to hack the system. 
It's, you know, no one can tell me why this is a good idea, other than to make a quick buck and to be in on something before anybody else is. 
Okay, if that's your idea, good, that's fine. 
But I just don't see it being something that people take seriously for very much longer. 
I don't know, as an artist, like I've ranted on this program many a time, I believe, since this whole NFT thing took root. 
But I will say again, that like the strength of a digital file and the strength of creativity expressed in a digital form is you can copy it and you can spread it around and every copy is identical and just as valuable. 
And the fact that there is an entire pyramid scheme-y scene going on around people convincing themselves that of otherwise, it just breaks my head, guys. 
Well, I remember, I remember ranting about this on the show, the worst thing that they could call you in the NFT, Bitcoin universe, but specifically NFT, was they would like say you had the right clicker mentality. 
Wow. 
Yeah, that's a thing. 
That's a thing. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
Now, you want to explain the right click, basically you right click and that allows you to copy. 
You can save the JPEG. 
Or save it. 
And you get it without paying for it. 
And I remember saying specifically that the concept of the right clicker mentality seemed to be so diametrically opposed to the hacker mindset because you can either share information or hoard it. 
And that brings me back to Google because somebody shared with me a Google document and it's a couple of pages long. 
And I like to have things in front of me and walk around. 
So pieces of paper with ink works for me. 
I couldn't print it. 
It was disabled. 
It was disabled in every browser I tried. 
I tried selecting all and that was disabled too. 
Could not select it, could not print it. 
And I've never encountered that before. 
Of course, what I wound up doing was taking a picture of it and printing that. 
But come on, I don't think this is healthy at all to be restricting things in this manner as a means of somehow retaining value or what you think is privacy. 
I think the folly in setting really high prices on things and trying to get maximum amount of money out of a wave of enthusiasm and an idea, just extracting capital from people is very greedy. 
And I think it attracts the kind of community it deserves. 
And ultimately, the idea of putting value in things that are based in sort of a cryptographic transaction scheme and blockchain and so forth doesn't necessarily mean that you are secure by default, you're still having to handle something that you're projecting and inflating in some cases all of this value on. 
And that hash, that token or that cryptographic data needs itself to be handled very, very carefully, much in the same way you would handle highly valuable precious metals or something else. 
It's just it's in data. 
And what we have to remind everyone is that we haven't really sorted those cardinal things, those those basic things, the foundational security of information that wants to be free in my air quotes. 
You can't just assume that that's solved or that because something uses cryptography, your handling of it isn't going to be prone to disaster. 
But Kyle, if you wait for it to be sorted or solved, you're going to miss out on the opportunity to make a ton of money from people who don't know what they're doing. 
And I think that's what's happening right now. 
But on that on that note, all seriousness now, if you want to support WBAI by getting a WBAI NFT for one million dollars of the call letters perfectly framed on a eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper, you will own that NFT for one million dollars. 
No one else can say they own it. 
Sure, people will be able to copy it. 
They'll be able to print it. 
They'll be able to take pictures of it. 
But you will be the person that owns the certificate for that WBAI portrait of the call letters on an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper. 
Yeah. 
And I think, you know, that's that's a good example of what NFTs could be used for. 
And if you have a million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and this makes you happy, this kind of donation, 212-209-2950. 
Give a call to that number right now or go to give to WBAI.org. 
Give the number to WBAI.org. 
And if you don't have that kind of cash on you, then whatever you can spare and maybe something more traditional, like, you know, a shirt or a book or a CD or, you know, those things that us traditionalists value and collect. 
We have plenty of those things to give you as a thank you for your support of this amazing radio station. 
This amazing radio station that allows us to broadcast the kinds of things we talk about week after week. 
And so many other people, so many other subjects and topics, some of which will drive you crazy, some of which will will draw you in. 
All of it will make you think that is the promise. 
And that's what we've been doing since 1960 at 99.5 FM in New York City. 
So, again, 212-209-2950. 
Give to WBAI.org to keep this non-commercial station in the middle of the FM dial in the middle of Manhattan in New York City. 
That's where our transmitter is. 
It's incredible. 
It's fantasy, but it's real. 
This is the real fantasy that actually exists. 
And I'm so honored to be a part of it. 
And I'm honored to be a part of this whole production that we do week after week, but also something that is just, you know, has such tradition to it in the New York radio scene. 
Unlike every other radio station that exists in New York, we have survived the longest. 
We really have. 
We have been doing something in this realm, non-commercial, alternative, thought-provoking radio. 
We've been doing it since the beginning, when the radio station was donated to a very suspicious group of people at the Pacifica Foundation who couldn't believe somebody was donating a full-power FM radio station to them. 
Took several phone calls for them to be believed in the end. 
So, again, please give a call and support WBAI so that we can continue doing what we're doing. 
And some of the things that we're doing, kind of exciting. 
You may know that there's going to be a January 6th commission hearing in prime time tomorrow. 
Yeah, that's never happened before. 
Starting at 8 o'clock, we're going to be broadcasting it live right here on WBAI. 
I think we're the only station, radio station, doing that, if I'm not mistaken. 
And not only that, next week, I believe on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we're going to be broadcasting daytime hearings, I think from 10 to 2. 
And in two weeks, two weeks from tomorrow, there will be another evening session of the January 6th commission. 
Everybody's going to be talking about this, and it's going to be historical and fascinating. 
And it's just one of the many things we do here at WBAI in the course of a broadcast day or a broadcast week. 
It's truly fascinating. 
Again, our email address for people who want to write to us, OTH at 2600.com, OTH at 2600.com. 
We got this listener comment earlier this week. 
I remember you lamenting on your show that it doesn't exist, but it does exist. 
And of course, what this person is referring to is something that I coined a phrase for called bird shazam. 
And you know what shazam is, where you can identify music by holding your phone up, and I want to be able to identify birds with the same thing. 
And this person says it exists. 
Yeah, I got it today on the recommendation of a neighbor. 
It's called picture bird. 
Picture bird. 
Okay, I like my name better because, you know, it's, I don't know where the picture comes from. 
One can identify birds, okay, by photo or song. 
So it's two things they can do there. 
Um, I've, uh, I've tried it a couple of times. 
It seems to work. 
I'm a classical musician and, uh, rather finicky about all sounds, but so far so good. 
I've been a fan for many decades. 
Thanks for all the years of great radio. 
You guys are great. 
Thank you, David. 
David from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. 
That letter made my day, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. 
As if you guys aren't busy enough, you know, doing symphonies and whatnot, you listen to us. 
I'm just amazed by that. 
You never know who's out there. 
You never know who's out there. 
And bird shazam exists somewhat. 
Yeah. 
Picture bird. 
Can insect shazam be far behind? 
Maybe. 
Yeah. 
They make plenty of noise. 
Uh-huh. 
I'd like to have language shazam where basically you hold the phone up and you don't know what language you're either hearing on the radio or that you're overhearing on a subway and it'll tell you, oh, this, this is Midwestern English. 
Oh, because that's an incredibly polite thing to do as you're just walking around the world in public and just walking up to people. 
It doesn't, Kyle, it doesn't matter anymore. 
I think politeness has been left behind three stations ago. 
I don't think we're coming back. 
Okay. 
Okay. 
Fair point. 
Hey, New York passed the first electronics right to repair law. 
After a multi-year battle, New York has become the first state in the country. 
We're doing that a lot lately. 
The first state in the country, you know, levels of gun control and all sorts of other things. 
Okay. 
You know, maybe we're finally getting somewhere. 
New York has become the first state in the country to pass an electronics right to repair law, which is an historic win for consumers and independent repair shops across the United States, not just in New York. 
Um, the move has the potential to size seismically shift the power balance between consumers and electronics manufacturers. 
That's according to this story from vice, uh, the bill overwhelmingly passed the state Senate, uh, on, um, uh, Wednesday. 
I don't know if it's this Wednesday or last Wednesday by a vote of 59 to four. 
Uh, I guess it was last Wednesday because then it passed the assembly Friday afternoon by a vote of 145 to one jerk. 
Got to find out who that was. 
Uh, it'll now go to Governor Caffey Hochul for final passage. 
The bill is the most expansive consumer rights legislation to pass in the United States in recent memory. 
And is the result of countless hours of grassroots campaigning from consumers and consumer rights, uh, consumer rights groups. 
And you know what? 
She signed a bunch of bills, uh, yesterday, I believe. 
So maybe she signed this one. 
Uh, we'll look into that and see if that's, that's true. 
I'm a really, uh, ecstatic, uh, enormous fan of this, this. 
And, uh, just in hearing you say that I was imagining, um, as you said, the rest of the world or the rest of the country as well. 
Well, that's so true because, um, the city and the state of New York itself could, um, uh, lend expertise and lead the way, uh, in supporting people around the country that are trying to fix things that, that might seek out, um, the kinds of repair shops and places that, that, um, uh, emerge around this kind of law and, uh, uh, protections that could, uh, create a thriving, uh, uh, economy in repair and all the equipment and, and, uh, things that support that. 
And, and it just could be very, very good, uh, people, uh, getting things, uh, uh, repaired, keeping things out of the waste systems and New York's, uh, setting the stage for that. 
Yeah. 
And it'll put the pressure on other places. 
This is something we're definitely going to be, um, focusing on at the whole conference in July, uh, and the hacker world in general. 
And it means so much to be able to fix your own stuff, to be able to know how the technology that you've invested in, that you've bought, uh, how it works, how it can be changed, how it can be, uh, uh, better suited for your purposes. 
It's really, really important. 
Save up for that, uh, get that microscope money. 
Saved up. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
Absolutely. 
I, I remember, uh, growing up, my house had some very old appliances, which when you opened up the backs of them came with little schematics inside that showed you how to fix them. 
The TV, the TV had a schematic inside of how it worked. 
And I thought something was lost with that era. 
And it's nice to think that we're getting something like that back. 
Hey, we have to continue this conversation over time. 
Join us on YouTube channel 2600 or follow the link that is, um, on the top of the 2600.com webpage right now at this very moment. 
Um, and, uh, we will, uh, see you again next week on WPAI. 
Remember, OTH at 2600.com. 
Happy Pride.