Your party is not answering. 
Please try your call later. 
We're sorry, but your call will now be disconnected. 
078-P. 
We're sorry. 
The number you have reached, 99.5 WBAI, is now Off the Hook. 
The telephone keeps ringing. 
So I ripped it off the wall. 
I cut myself while shaving. 
Now I can't make a call. 
It couldn't get much worse. 
But if it could, it would. 
Bumbly Bump for the best. 
It's great for worst. 
I hope that's understood. 
Bumbly Bump! 
Bumbly Bump! 
Thank you. 
We have Alex. 
Good evening. 
And over in the other Skype land, we have Gila. 
Good evening. 
And it looks like, yeah, that's Rob T. Firefly over there, isn't it? 
How are you doing? 
It is. 
Good evening. 
A little hazy picture today. 
Great. 
Okay. 
And I think we're coming in a little hot, but I think we're all right now. 
Good? 
Yeah. 
That Skype signal's extra crispy. 
Yeah. 
We got the Skype extra this week. 
Cool. 
Well, you know, if there was a theme to this week, I would say it would be the phrase, and maybe you've never heard this phrase before, but it would be something along the lines of, oh, how the mighty have fallen. 
Has anyone ever heard that before? 
No? 
And I guess maybe I just made it up. 
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. 
Let me explain how this ties into news events of this week. 
We have the whole Twitter, Elon Musk, debacle that's going on. 
We talked about this last week on Overtime. 
We did not talk about it on the air, so I'd like to remedy that this week. 
We also have a failed candidate who has announced his comeback, so to say. 
I don't know if we want to talk about that at all, but it is a little bit funny. 
And then, of course, we have FTX. 
Yeah. 
The FTX cryptocurrency disaster. 
I don't know if there's enough time to talk about this. 
We'll certainly try to get to that. 
But, boy, to see a fortune of tens of billions of dollars just evaporate in a matter of days or maybe even hours, I don't know, it gives you pause. 
And it makes you think maybe, just maybe, cryptocurrency isn't as rock solid as we all thought it was. 
Or ready. 
Or anything. 
To be pouring all your investments into. 
Well, I mean, all these things we believe so strongly. 
And NFTs, and now people are doubting those, you know, faith in, you know, gods and things like that. 
All being questioned. 
Our lives are being turned upside down. 
I don't know if we can handle it. 
But we have this place. 
We have WBAI. 
And before we get started with the discussion, I want to implore people to support WBAI so we can continue to work through these chaotic and sometimes traumatic news events that are going on in the world of technology. 
Without WBAI, you have to rely on the mainstream. 
And that never ends well. 
So please, give a call to 212-209-2950. 
Pledge whatever cryptocurrency you have left. 
Or if you have real money, please, that's a lot better. 
You can also go to give2wbai.org. 
That's give2wbai.org. 
You'll find all kinds of premiums and thank you gifts that we will send you for supporting us. 
But the biggest gift of all is the continued broadcasting at 99.5 FM in the middle of New York City, like we've been doing since 1960, against all odds. 
And the only reason, the only reason this place is still here, as opposed to every other radio station that has come on the air over the years in New York City. 
They've all changed formats. 
They've all been bought and sold. 
We've stuck around because of you, the listener. 
And that is a very, very strong currency, I guess, is a good thing to describe it as. 
As opposed to what we're seeing in the world of cryptocurrency, no, listeners, that's rock solid. 
That's something that, it's not theoretical. 
That's something that's easy to understand. 
It's something that no other radio station relies on as we do. 
Other radio stations, they can go to their sponsors. 
They can go to all kinds of corporate grants and favors and things like that. 
They don't really listen to you. 
You don't really play a part. 
Here at WBAI, it's different. 
Here, you play a part. 
You become part of the WBAI family, whether you like it or not. 
But you can vote. 
You can have a voice. 
And when we're in the studio, of course, you can call in. 
In fact, you can call in after the show when we're on YouTube at 8 o'clock. 
We'd love to hear from you. 
But the important thing is that we continue to keep broadcasting. 
Because every single day, despite what you might hear of radio being dead, yeah, everyone's moved on. 
Nobody's listening to the radio anymore. 
Well, if that's the case, then just give us all the frequencies, okay? 
We'll take them if you're not using them, if you don't think they're valuable. 
But no, they are extremely valuable. 
Radio is very much alive. 
And there are people, entities, corporations, governments, aliens, you name it, that want to take 99.5 FM from us and give it to some other commercial entity. 
Because we don't have enough commercial radio stations. 
We need more. 
We need more commercial radio stations that play the exact same kind of music. 
Because that's what the people that we never listen to, that we never hear from, that we don't take their advice, that's what the people want. 
Yeah. 
So I think it's a little different. 
I think WBAI is very different, in fact. 
We're in the middle of the FM dial, unlike most non-commercial stations. 
We broadcast at full power. 
And we're part of a network. 
And we've had our ups and downs. 
But we're always better off having the resource. 
And that is decided by you, the listener. 
Without that, we're nothing. 
All right. 
212-209-2950. 
Website give to WBAI.org. 
And with that said, let us move into what we're discussing this week. 
Okay. 
So we talked about what's happening with Twitter a little bit last week on Overtime. 
And more has happened since then. 
Gosh, anybody have the latest? 
Because I walked out of our office about 10 minutes ago. 
So, but I see the headlines. 
Elon Musk is putting Twitter at risk of billions in fines, warns company lawyer. 
Company lawyer is warning of that. 
And something that happened a few days ago, where Elon Musk decided to end Twitter's SMS two-factor authentication. 
And what that raised was a very real possibility that if you had two-factor authentication, as I did, because I was basically advised to by Twitter, that means that when you log into your Twitter account, you get a little code on your phone sent to you by SMS. 
Except they turned it off. 
Or Elon Musk decided, hey, for some reason, I don't like this. 
I'm going to turn it off and save something. 
Don't know exactly what he's saving. 
And if you still have that feature, you won't be able to get into your account because you won't ever get the text message that has the code that you need to complete the two-factor authentication. 
It's been disabled. 
So there was a bit of panic over the weekend, people realizing, oh, my God, if I log out, I will never be able to get back in. 
So you have to go into your settings and disable that feature, being very careful not to log out in the process. 
Supposedly, other forms of two-factor authentication still work, but you know what? 
I don't want to take the chance. 
The guy is so moody and temperamental that he could just unplug it and that's it. 
It's fun. 
It's fun watching it all implode. 
It really is. 
But it's also sad because, you know, this is one guy doing this. 
So many people have poured their heart and soul into Twitter, both employees, engineers, programmers, but also people who contribute content every single day and help spread the word about various things. 
Activists and all kinds of creative people out there. 
I'm not talking about influencers. 
No, definitely not talking about influencers. 
I'm talking about everyday average people that probably get about half a dozen likes on something they post, which is pretty awesome. 
Those people are feeling the effects of a cranky billionaire. 
And, yeah, there are alternatives. 
We're moving to alternatives, but they're fragmented like everything else these days where, you know, you can't just give an address and expect somebody to. 
Be able to reach you. 
No, you have to have the agreed upon way of communicating. 
It's not like just picking up the phone. 
It's not sending an email. 
It's no, you got to you got to contact me over here at this particular social media outlet because I'm not going to be reading that particular social media outlet. 
And we're all poorer for that. 
Anyway, back to Elon. 
Does anybody want to focus on something that has happened? 
Early this morning at midnight Pacific time, roughly, an email went out to all Twitter staff saying that if they don't decide to be in, basically, they have until five o'clock tomorrow to decide if they want to stay at Twitter or take three months severance. 
If you stay, it's going to be, quote, extremely hardcore, long hours, only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade. 
If it were me, I would take the severance and go. 
I don't know. 
I kind of want to test that system a little bit. 
Are you familiar with the tactic of work slowdowns? 
It can take very long to do a task. 
You know, I'll work long hours. 
It'll take me, you know, three hours just to boot up my computer. 
I want to do it right. 
I want to do a good job. 
And I feel if everybody at Twitter did something like this, you got to stand up to bullies. 
He's a bully right now. 
He really is. 
I'm not saying he doesn't have good ideas occasionally and might actually be able to do something beneficial. 
But right now at Twitter, he's not doing that. 
And I think employees there really have an opportunity to, you know, tell him something about himself. 
It's also an interesting piece because some of the way that the hiring is being, excuse me, not the hiring, the end of hiring is being handled, for lack of a better term. 
There may be questions about compliance with law in the EU, GDPR stuff. 
Things are becoming, and also, thank you, Rob, because California is an at-will employment state, but that doesn't exist everywhere. 
There are lots of countries where the labor laws are a lot stricter, and this may not fly there. 
So, how this is all going to pan out is, I think, an open question in a lot of ways. 
Yeah, this isn't just the United States. 
I read something recently about Irish employees and how they were all being told that they had to report to work in Dublin, even though most of them were working from all over the country, from their homes usually. 
And what people were saying was that he clearly had no understanding of how the housing market worked over there. 
There was no possible way all these people could even find places to live anywhere near Dublin on such short notice. 
And it's this kind of cluelessness that, you know, it's both amusing but also really sad because people's lives are being very adversely affected. 
I don't think he cares or is even aware of that. 
And it's just, it's staggering to watch. 
Alex, go ahead. 
Yeah, I think there's, you know, a number of issues that have been raised by the last few comments here. 
I want to go back to one of your original statements, though, Emmanuel, which was that all these people that have put so much into Twitter, aside from the developers, aside from the programmers and the owners and the executives, with the people who made the platform what it was by generating content and likes and contributing to the discourse and generating a follow, essentially almost building your brand on Twitter, which was one of the premier platforms on which to do so. 
But I think this goes back to the very type of principle that we have been discussing on this show for many years now, which is to not put all your eggs in one basket, to not be beholden to any individual platform. 
And in just the same way that you won't put all of your music into iTunes and you still want to have a physical or digital copy of your music, just in the same way you don't want to entirely trust Twitter with your social media, whatever it is you do on social media, talk, chat, brand yourself, etc. 
If you put all your eggs into Twitter and you see Twitter imploding on itself, all of those years that went into developing that content are going to go down the tubes. 
And it is by no fault of your own. 
It's entirely the choice of certain executives who are willing to save a buck or willing to charge $8 to any individual who decides to pay for a blue check in the face of losing massive amounts of advertising revenue for that exact decision. 
But I want to go back also to what Gila said, too, which was this issue of employees and the FTC. 
And, you know, Twitter's top lawyer apparently last week sought to reassure a bunch of Twitter employees that they wouldn't have any kind of personal responsibility or liability if the company disregarded an FTC or federal order to protect users' privacy when it's developing and launching new features. 
And I frankly, I don't think that that lawyer should have made such a pronouncement. 
I think it's a lot more complicated. 
I think it's more difficult. 
And I think if you look back at what we saw throughout this year of 2022, we're seeing a lot of not just corporate responsibility, but personal liability and personal responsibility for lax data security and cybersecurity practices. 
I mean, this is something I was actually just talking about maybe two hours ago with some colleagues. 
But you have just this year, think about it, you've got a chilling message that was sent to CISOs, to chief information security officers, when we saw Joe Sullivan, the chief security officer of Uber, sentenced and criminally convicted. 
Well, he hasn't been sentenced yet, but he's been criminally convicted for mishandling a data breach in 2016 and obstructing an FTC investigation. 
And what had happened in that particular case was, as the CISO or the chief security officer, he had, because he was handling a data breach while Uber was already under some kind of FTC order and investigation. 
And he decided that he was going to reshape that data breach and make it look like this was something that related to a bug bounty and not a breach. 
And so in reshaping that, he misled the FTC, DOJ went after him and they got a conviction for obstructing an FTC investigation. 
And then you look at what's happened in a federal court in Texas, I think maybe about six months ago or so, where a civil lawsuit was allowed to proceed against the CISO of SolarWinds for making pronouncements about their cybersecurity practices and the technology that they had at issue. 
And then bring it back right to the FTC, just a couple of weeks ago, you had the CEO of a company called Drizzly. 
I don't know if you guys have ever heard of Drizzly. 
Have you heard of this? 
Drizzly. 
Sounds fun. 
Yeah. 
It sounds like it would be fun, too, because it's an alcohol delivery service. 
I had no idea this existed, to be honest. 
Wow. 
Okay. 
I didn't know you had to have a company to deliver alcohol. 
I thought pretty much anyone could do it. 
I thought it was somewhat regulated who could deliver alcohol, but in any event, it's actually a subsidiary of Uber. 
So Drizzly is owned by Uber, and their CEO, who was already under, I believe, some kind of FTC order as well for lax data security practices, really got the hammer brought down hard on him personally. 
And the FTC, just a couple of weeks ago, essentially stated to him that you now are personally responsible for implementing certain data security practices at Drizzly, and here's where it gets really interesting, and any other company that you may go to after Drizzly. 
So it doesn't even just apply to him in the company that was under FTC order because he screwed up so badly, according to the FTC. 
This order is going to follow him wherever he goes. 
Assuming he's running the company, if he gets hired as a doorman somewhere, he's not going to be responsible for the company that he's letting people into, right? 
Who knows? 
I don't know. 
I guess. 
That would be unfair. 
That would be too much. 
I don't know expansively if the FTC views its authority or something, but fair point, Emmanuel. 
But I think if you look at all of these individual trends towards personal responsibility for lax data security practices, it's difficult for any lawyer to say that you're not going to have personal responsibility for not following clear FTC mandates. 
So that's something for these Twitter employees to think about when they're making their decision about whether or not to stay by tomorrow. 
Hey, Alex, I was kind of thinking about something along similar lines, and I'm wondering if you kind of hear where I'm going. 
But to a degree, I think you're absolutely right. 
But I think lawyers will have a lot of strength as the types, the sophistication level escalates, because I don't think the average company is prepared for certain thresholds and beyond of attacks and breaches and activity. 
There's, of course, a long list of important activities that all kinds of institutions can participate in and test and prepare for the average everyday activity. 
But I don't think it's a binary necessarily in every scenario. 
But going back to this kind of holiday layoff topic, I find it - I know I heard Amazon, they're laying off like 11,000 people. 
Facebook. 
Yeah, I think - how's Netflix doing? 
Has anybody checked on Netflix? 
Like all these big, high-flying companies that have a lot of really talented people facing this kind of stuff, as Alex pointed out, they are obviously going to have to deal with the immediate effects, litigation through severance and stuff and entanglements with their current or now former employer, and then they'll have to survive somehow. 
But I'm really curious where they will take their talents. 
I hope they all take their talents to the same place and form a new company and do a better job, drive these guys out. 
It's something worth playing around with in your imagination, I think, because, as you said, there's a lot of ways things can go. 
As they try to, like, get this adrenaline of, like, accelerating churn and, like, changing around management and everything and, like, try to make it an obedient organization, so to speak, and then more malleable, in a sense, to whatever aims and goals they have going forward, I think it is - it's important to recognize that, you know, if they want a dynamic, chaotic, changed environment, they may soon get that. 
Oh, yeah. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
I want to speak a little bit about - Alex had mentioned, and I think you had mentioned too, Emmanuel, the people who have contributed their material to Twitter over the years to make it what it is, to make it as successful as it is. 
And one thing I'm seeing a lot of is people in the creative spheres, in the writing, artistic, whatever, spheres where they've been building up this body of work on Twitter. 
And Twitter's been around for 16 years now. 
They started in 2006. 
And people have really made it work for them in the creative world. 
People have gotten work off of what they've done. 
I've gotten creative work off of things I've done on Twitter. 
And a lot of people, like, sort of fell away from maintaining their own websites, maintaining their own portfolios because, oh, all my stuff is on Twitter. 
You want to see what I've got? 
It's on Twitter. 
And they've got their audience on Twitter. 
They've got their portfolios on Twitter. 
And people are now being caught at a loss because Twitter being what it is, people are leaving the platform. 
The audience is leaving the platform. 
And people are realizing, wait, where's all my stuff going to go? 
And I think it's really important to reinforce for anybody in any sphere where what you do on social media is part of what pulls in your audience and gets you work. 
You need to have your own site, too. 
You need to have stuff in a place that you control because anything you put on a service that you don't maintain control of, that could go away in a second. 
And I think this is the first time for a lot of people, for maybe a generation of social media users, that they're coming up against this in such a scale. 
Yeah, I mean, not only just have your own website, but maybe just have another place, another outlet because I know not everybody can run their own websites. 
Perhaps there's an opening here for some other type of service where people are helped in that regard, where they maintain control of their website. 
Because, you know, Twitter or any other service could shut down tomorrow and take everything with it. 
And even Jason Scott won't be able to get everything before they disappear. 
So whenever you trust anything to the cloud, that's what happens. 
That's the risk you take. 
And I don't think a lot of people are really aware of that risk. 
You know, you put all your photos on Flickr, great. 
But I hope you have your own copy locally as well in case they disappear. 
Same thing with Facebook and, you know, all your contacts. 
And, you know, that's why I push email so much is because it's not dependent on one particular service. 
Gmail could disappear, but email would still be there. 
You know, it would just go somewhere else, different address. 
You'd have to set that up. 
But people tend to want someone to take care of everything for them. 
And that often doesn't work out. 
Sad to say. 
Anything else from the world of Twitter before we move on to other disasters? 
Go ahead. 
I do have one other thing. 
In the, what is it, a day that the Twitter blue thing existed and you could spend your $8 for a checkmark? 
Yeah, that doesn't still work, right? 
It doesn't. 
And part of the reason why is because a couple of companies were basically impersonated and their stock tanked. 
Who could have seen that coming? 
Right. 
So, like, Eli Lilly stock. 
Oh, boy. 
Dropped, I think, 30% because someone created a Twitter called Eli Lilly Co. 
And bought a blue check for it and announced, hey, everybody, insulin's free. 
And there was a message after that saying, we don't give a damn about these people. 
We apologize to those who have been served a misleading message from a fake Lilly account. 
Uh-huh. 
If anybody knows a diabetic, like, they were honestly not, you were probably not mad to see that at all. 
No, no. 
But, um. 
It's like everybody became the yes-men for a day. 
Yeah. 
And no one thought about that. 
And I think I saw something go by that said there was no, um, mechanism in place to check for the, like, continuing the blue checks. 
Uh-huh. 
So, you could pay $8 once and keep your blue check forever, and there was no, like, there was no way to make it recur. 
I don't remember what it was, but the rollout of verified blue or whatever on earth it was actually called could have been a bigger mess. 
I'm just not entirely sure how. 
There is a way. 
Um, if you want to see, uh, the people that, um, um, that you follow, uh, who paid for a blue check, as opposed to people who have a blue check because they're, they're verified in the past. 
Yeah. 
Um, uh, this is what you type in the, um, in the, in the search string for Twitter. 
And it's, uh, it's a little complex, so, uh, take notes. 
Uh, the word filter, followed immediately by a colon, no space, filter, colon, follows, F-O-L-L-O-W-S, space, dash, filter, colon, verified, space, filter, colon, blue, underscore, verified. 
All those words are spelled the way they sound. 
I'm going to read it one more time. 
And, uh, if I don't say space, that means there's not a space. 
If I do say space, that's where you put the space. 
Okay. 
Filter, colon, follows, space, dash, filter, colon, verified, space, filter, colon, blue, underscore, verified. 
And obviously when I say underscore, I don't mean the word underscore. 
I mean the underscore character. 
That will display tweets from the people that you follow that have a blue check, but paid for it. 
If you want to be able to separate who did that and who didn't. 
Of course, they have to be tweeting for you to see who they are. 
Um, but, uh, it's, you know, we, we saw this coming. 
As soon as they announced this ridiculous scheme, um, where they're not going to be able to differentiate, uh, between. 
I mean, it could have been worse. 
It could be, you know, you can click on that blue check and see if they, if they paid or if they didn't pay, uh, and, and were verified from the start or, you know, in the past. 
If they didn't have that, then it would be complete mayhem. 
So it could be worse, but it's pretty bad right now. 
Yes, Alex, you had something. 
I think, um, it is utter and complete mayhem that this whole idea of charging $8 for a verified account was just short-sighted and somewhat childish. 
And it appears to be par for the course because the whole, the whole system of management since Elon Musk has taken over appears to be childish and short-sighted. 
In the sense of every single idea is put out for the public, it is tested without some kind of Q&A protocol being put into place. 
At the same time, they're cutting staff, cutting salaries, have this ridiculous, uh, stay or, or be severed deadline for tomorrow. 
Now, I thought that it was going to be bad when Elon Musk took over Twitter, but I thought it was going to be bad for the wrong reason. 
I thought it was going to be bad because content moderation was going to go to the dog, so to speak. 
But, you know, this is much, much worse than I think anything that we had expected because just the management from on high and these policy changes without any notice or really without any thinking is much, much worse than I had anticipated. 
Go ahead, Kyle. 
Yeah, I have a theory. 
I think it's mostly, um, to keep it in the news cycle and, um, it is serving as a huge distraction from other really critical stuff. 
Um, and, you know, we're, we're all bearing witness to it. 
Um, the, just with the, the constant change in, in business models, very much like, um, venture capital coming in and, and like, uh, hyping something to, to keep the attention on this. 
We are going to continue to hear crazy stuff that goes on and it will be self-important, but Elon Musk wants us to focus on this as opposed to some other. 
Well, I just think, um, like the last political cycle, you know, the way this platform has been used and exploited is to serve as a constant drama. 
Um, and I think, um, in this case to, uh, to, to keep interest in investment or keep people looking at it, it's going to use its own tumult, its own craziness to, uh, keep people, uh, even there at all. 
Yeah, I don't know if anyone is going to want to invest in this after, uh, I don't understand what, I don't understand what else you'd do. 
Uh-huh. 
Go ahead, Gila. 
There's, thank you, Kyle, because there's one reason you would do it. 
And I've been saying this, I said this on the show a couple of months ago. 
Well, if Elon Musk were a normal guy, had just gone through a breakup, he would go buy himself a Porsche, but it is the, he's finding himself at the intersection of bad breakup, too much time on his hands, and way, way, way too much money. 
He cannot, he's got the, the venture capital and all of the this is and the that's is, and, and he, you know, he can't go dye his hair blue. 
Why didn't he just splash out big? 
Instead of buying a Porsche, why didn't he just buy Porsche? 
You know, that would have saved us all a lot. 
What? 
He's competing with them. 
Is he? 
Oh, that's right. 
He is with his death machines. 
Yeah. 
Yeah. 
But, and now it's so bad, Gila, like he's, he's buying ads on Twitter, like one company supporting other companies, taking out, uh, selling stock to, to put together the investment to buy this. 
Uh, this, uh, sucking vortex that, that he runs now is a mess, but I think also we can't take our eye off the fact that the content moderation stuff is also really, really, really bad. 
Yeah. 
There was like an anti, anti-discrimination or anti, uh, one of the committees just a couple of days ago was disbanded. 
Um, it's not priority. 
It's not priority. 
And I have to say, as the person in this group who identifies as not male, it is not a fun time to be a not male person. 
It is not a fun time to be in any kind of minority on Twitter right now. 
Um, it's really scary and there's no place to go. 
And that is terrifying in and of itself. 
And I wonder if the big noise is about firing people and breaking everything are to keep everybody's eye off that particular ball too. 
Interesting. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
Um, just, uh, going back to the, uh, string of characters you, uh, gave out before to see who you're, who among the people you're following, um, bought their check, check mark rather than earned it under the old system. 
Um, if you want that, uh, string of text, we just, uh, tweeted it on our Twitter account at hacker radio show. 
Okay. 
Awesome. 
Hey, um, we're going to move on. 
Um, we, uh, have some mail from, from listeners. 
We, we get mail all the time. 
We, we love getting mail and you can, um, you can continue that tradition by writing to us. 
OTH at 2600.com. 
OTH at the numbers, two, six, zero, zero dot C O M. 
Um, this is actually a, um, response to an article that came out in the most recent 2600, uh, which just came out about a week or two ago, uh, has to do with, um, with cars that drive themselves. 
And we just talked about, uh, Elon Musk's death machines because they've been in the news too. 
Um, and, uh, here's a quote from the article, uh, entitled, will you let your car drive itself? 
After explaining my previous experiences with the cruise control, my companions agreed to try it and to watch closely. 
Should anything happen after engaging, we drove for 20 or 30 minutes without incident until my car suddenly slammed on its brakes driver behind us, swerved, no obstacles or vehicles ahead of us. 
Apparently this kind of thing happens fairly frequently. 
Now, um, this, uh, this writer says this one resonated with me personally. 
Uh, this feature has saved, uh, has saved me or someone, uh, my life or someone else's life at least once, uh, in my Pacifica, ironically enough, 2020 Pacifica. 
Uh, but I always pose this very question. 
What happens when the software thinks there is danger when there isn't and creates danger? 
I'm following up with the writer and the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to find out if this next part is accurate from the article, um, that their office has received 758 reports of this exact same thing. 
I too have almost experienced this. 
My car thought there was danger and alerted me and started to slam brakes. 
I was driving normally, no cruise control, yet my car almost caused a serious incident because the road curved and there was a breakaway to the left to allow people to turn. 
I still believe in this tech, but, uh, I thought it was important to note. 
And yes, you know, I think that's the theme. 
We believe in the tech, but you have to, um, uh, pay strict attention to the hazards and the flaws and the problems because there's always going to be problems. 
And, uh, if you try to cover them up, they get worse. 
So thanks, uh, thanks for writing and, um, for sharing that with us. 
And we invite anybody else playing with that kind of technology to share their, their thoughts. 
Yeah. 
And I think there's a little bit of variation, um, the types of, uh, uh, imaging and vision that are used as inputs, uh, whatever, whether it's laser or, um, uh, some kind of, uh, radar. 
I don't know, I don't know the technology there's, there's, uh, probably, uh, quite a big market or big range. 
And the standardizing of all of that, I think is important along with safety. 
If it's glare or, uh, heat from some other source, uh, that, that, the, uh, the computer vision, uh, software or the, the stuff running it, uh, interprets as, as some kind of object. 
Um, you know, what, what are the implications and, and where is the discussion? 
What does the, uh, conversation, um, look like? 
Where is it at now? 
We have another letter. 
Um, this one's kind of a nasty letter and Alex, it targets you. 
So, um, I'm, I'm going to, uh, give you some fair warning here and we're all going to, we're all going to stand up for you. 
So don't worry. 
Um, this has to do with, uh, remember, uh, we were talking last week about how your kid was watching YouTube and, uh, saw a YouTube ad, um, warning him that John Fetterman was, too radical for Pennsylvania and he came outside to ask you if in fact, uh, Fetterman was too radical for, uh, that state at that particular point in history. 
Nine years old. 
Yeah. 
Um, a reminder to Alex that YouTube has a very reasonably priced ad free option. 
I haven't seen an ad on YouTube in over five years. 
It's my main source of media consumption. 
Insert sarcastic Emanuel comment here. 
No, no, I'm not going to be sarcastic there. 
I'll be sarcastic somewhere else, but, uh, you know what? 
If you want to, uh, make YouTube your main source of media consumption that I guess I'm getting sarcastic, aren't I? 
Uh, that's your, that's your right. 
I suppose. 
I mean, what can you say? 
It's, it's no worse than mass media. 
You get to choose what it is, but boy, be careful what you choose. 
Uh, not only is ad free, you can listen to videos with the screen off and download videos to your device. 
Uh, kind of like what we do at eight o'clock where we're not even on video in case people think they're going to see us on YouTube at eight o'clock. 
No, you're not going to see us. 
We're going to hear us. 
Yeah, that's how it works. 
We thought about it. 
It's a lot of work. 
It's, we were advised not to, uh, maybe he, uh, he can take, uh, maybe Alex, you can take a more active role in parenting his child. 
Now that's nasty. 
That's just, how dare you? 
That's nasty to say that he doesn't take an active role in parenting his child. 
He's very active in parenting his child. 
You have no idea. 
Um, instead of subjecting him to evil YouTube ads so that he can trot him out as the victim of an agreement he willingly entered into. 
And there was no trotting. 
I don't think he's, his kid's even aware that we talked about him on the radio. 
I think I heard this from 2600. 
If something is free online, then you are the product. 
Um, I, I, you know, that's true in some degree, you know, to some degree. 
Uh, I mean, you're not our product, right? 
We're free, but, uh, I wouldn't call our listeners our products. 
Um, I know Alex knows this, the negative by-product of so much law training, um, is you get really good at arguing points you don't actually believe to try and get your message across. 
And it's really easy to say that about a lawyer, isn't it? 
It's really easy to say, yeah, you're a lawyer, so you don't really believe what you're saying ever. 
You have a choice in the situation, Alex. 
Uh, he chose to sell out his child to save 10 bucks a month. 
Not really YouTube's fault there. 
Oh, my God. 
Really? 
You expect, you expect every parent in the country to pay YouTube 10 bucks not to have their kids exposed to commercials? 
I don't think that's the point. 
I, I, I, I, look, Alex, you're fuming, so go ahead. 
I'm going to let you have the floor here. 
Oh, yeah. 
No, I, I, I would say, you know, I, I welcome criticism like that, especially unbridled and, uh, unrelenting criticism like that. 
So, you know, if anybody wants to write anything negative about me or, uh, or anyone else, you can reach us at OTH. 
Reach at 2600.com and, uh, and, and feel free to foment vitriol at, uh, at will. 
We have enough stuff for a website. 
Now we could put up a whole website of all kinds of the negative. 
Yeah. 
But, uh, but, uh, we'll talk about that later. 
Let's, let's address some of the, I think, valid points. 
And, uh, and I will concede almost every one of the points, um, that the listener addressed is valid. 
And I had thought about this notion of paying for YouTube, uh, because it is an ad free version, but that was only after I realized that my son was being subjected to so many political ads. 
When I engaged in, or rather I had held the erroneous assumption that a platform like YouTube would direct age appropriate ads at viewers. 
Namely, that if you're watching something that relates to childlike video games or cartoons or Spider-Man that you would receive ads that relate to childlike video games, cartoons, etc. 
Not necessarily wholesale political ads attacking John Fetterman as being too radical for Pennsylvania and getting into the minds and brains of a child. 
So to be fair, the, the listener is right that that was an erroneous assumption on my part that these platforms would take the responsible route and direct ads towards age appropriate viewers. 
Uh, I, I think your point, however, Emmanuel is also valid that every parent in this world that has a child should not have to pay YouTube $10. 
To simply not subject him to this type of political misinformation, uh, that's certainly valid as well. 
Uh, but the other thing that I think is not valid that the listener brought up and it was ambiguous because of his use of a pronoun, namely he, was that the listener wrote that this was a, uh, a deal or rather than a bargain that, that he entered into, that he struck. 
Uh, and if he was my nine-year-old child, he is incapable of striking any kind of agreement because he's a minor. 
Uh, he didn't choose this. 
He just wanted to watch some videos. 
Uh, perhaps I should have been a better parent and assume that YouTube would do the wrong thing rather than the right thing. 
But, uh, I'm not going to cave in and buy, uh, a $10 subscription to YouTube. 
I think the better choice is to just turn YouTube off and that's the choice that we have as parents. 
And just to clarify, Alex, you are a great parent. 
So, uh, anyone who just otherwise is, uh, is, is certainly mistaken, but, um, but, um, to, to, to, uh, basically turn it off or to subscribe to the $10, uh, a feature. 
Your, your kid's smart. 
He'll, he'll get around that if he wants to. 
Any kid will. 
It's, you know, you can't just cut off YouTube. 
Uh, I know because governments try this. 
It doesn't work. 
People find ways around it and especially kids. 
Go ahead, Rob. 
But then we have to get into the FTX story. 
We only have a few minutes left. 
Go ahead. 
Absolutely. 
Um, the funny thing is YouTube does present itself as a safe place for children. 
If you're in the children, uh, section of it, basically any, uh, video that's flagged as being for children, the comments are disabled. 
YouTube knows that their comment sections are garbage, so they're not going to subject kids to that. 
Uh, but on that same video, apparently if there are ads, it'll subject you to comments about John Fetterman. 
I'm amused. 
Okay. 
So I'm going to read a headline here. 
It's just kind of sums up how bad things got this week. 
Uh, FTX, you might, you might've seen FTX logos everywhere. 
If you watched the world series, every umpire was wearing FTX. 
I thought it was a broadcast network. 
I thought it was like FXX or something or FX or God knows what, but no FTX. 
Um, basically, um, they, um, um, their, their cryptocurrency exchange, um, this is the headline. 
FTX suffers $400 million hack after declaring bankruptcy. 
Remaining funds moved to cold storage. 
Yeah, it was a bad week, a very bad week. 
First, uh, they had to declare bankruptcy. 
There was a run on all the money that, uh, the people had and they, uh, a lot of people have lost a lot of money. 
Um, and then on top of that, they were hacked and the timing is just as bad as it could possibly be. 
Uh, and, um, basically it seems likely that whoever did this, um, has some kind of insider knowledge because, um, they had access to all kinds of, um, of root, uh, passwords. 
Uh, passwords and, and, uh, and various other things that somebody, uh, who had knowledge, uh, of the company would have. 
Uh, many believe if this is a hack, it had to be an insider job. 
Uh, the hacker had access to the private key root level on the website, publisher key access to the apps. 
Uh, another, a user highlighted that the breach included an Apple publisher key breach. 
This allowed the quote unquote hacker, uh, to sideload malware into the FTX app. 
Many users are reporting that their FTX balance is now showing zero. 
God, so terrible. 
Many in the crypto community point to the fact that FTX has never been hacked since it started its operation. 
Therefore, the idea of the exchange being hacked immediately after filing for bankruptcy is, uh, shady. 
So, uh, yeah, there's that. 
And then, of course, there's the fact that people who used FTX may very well have lost everything because filing for bankruptcy means that they are a dead last in the list of people that get money back from them. 
If they ever pay anything, all kinds of other creditors are ahead of them in line. 
And it's, um, it's basically been very sobering for people in the cryptocurrency world. 
Uh, Bitcoin has tanked there. 
I think they're down to 16 grand now. 
So, um, it's, um, it's the risk I think most of us knew was always there, but maybe we didn't see it coming this dramatically, this disastrously. 
Go ahead, Alex. 
This FTX hack is incredibly interesting and very curiously timed, of course, the same day that the exchange declares bankruptcy over 330 million. 
I think it's around 339 million in digital assets goes missing by way of a quote unquote hack. 
Yeah. 
This is all money that would have been paid to its creditors that would have been paid to its users, to anybody that held money on the platform. 
And somehow it just goes entirely missing. 
And whoever is holding this 339 million is now apparently one of the largest holders of, of ETH. 
So that's the 35th largest holder of Ethereum, 35th in the world. 
It's, it's pretty, it's pretty incredible. 
What about, what about this, Alex? 
Just, uh, uh, human me for a second. 
If, um, if this person is sort of like a Robin hood that came in, grabbed all this money and intends to distribute it to the people who lost money, the actual people who lost money. 
Do you think that's a possibility? 
Yeah, sure. 
They could do that. 
They could, they could establish essentially their own fund, their own kind of interpleader where you show what you had in your account and then they give it back to you instead of to the creditors that had a higher secured interest. 
But, you know, I think that's unlikely. 
I think, I think it's a great idea, but, uh, not necessarily reflective of reality here. 
Unfortunately, this is another rude awakening for a lot of holders of digital assets who might have assumed erroneously, just like I did with regard to the YouTube ads, that the, that there was some kind of protection or some kind of insurance related to what they had on deposit. 
You know, like, like a bank has FDIC types of insurance. 
Well, that doesn't exist because the only reason there's FDIC, uh, uh, coverage or insurance, uh, for your bank account and what you hold in that particular bank account is because banks are highly regulated entities. 
They agree to do certain things. 
They agree to keep certain amounts of capital and reserve to have certain security practices in place that goes against everything that a lot of cryptocurrency exchanges stand for. 
They want to be outside regulation. 
They want to be decentralized and outside of any of the holds of, of national governments. 
And so something akin to FDIC insurance coming from a national government is just not there. 
It's not present. 
But on the other hand, to look at this from this, this tragic situation that affected so many people in a lot of ways, I think there is some optimistic way of looking at this. 
Oh, I want to hear this. 
I want to hear this. 
Go ahead. 
Make it quick. 
We only have two minutes left. 
I know I'll make this in 30 seconds. 
I think that what we're seeing here, the fall of a lot of these exchanges and a lot of these coins and a lot of these places that were essentially paper facades or houses of cards, whatever you want to call them, is necessary for the digital asset ecosystem to begin to evolve. 
There are going to be things that are standing on stronger footing, that have better practices, that take care of their customers, that are going to be propelled forward when all of this nonsense has fallen to the wayside. 
So I think we're going to hopefully see, once all the dust has settled, quite literally, a renaissance when it comes to digital assets and cryptocurrency. 
I think you also made an excellent point regarding regulation. 
This is why regulation, folks. 
This is when people complain about government oversight and you just want to be left alone. 
This is what happens when you are left alone. 
This is the risk that you take every time. 
So ask yourself now, will a little regulation have been such a bad thing? 
You know, obviously, over-regulation is a bad thing, but, you know, you can't just rely on the market to govern itself. 
It doesn't work. 
It doesn't work. 
You have catastrophes like this. 
Yeah. 
I mean, there's so much precedent in history for the many different scenarios where the important oversight, the public interest, it has to be a priority. 
And, yeah, I'm with some of the other optimistic stuff out of this. 
I think I'm with that spirit because it's emerging. 
It's something that, you know, it's bittersweet in that there was a lot of acceptance, a lot of enthusiasm around it. 
And these are part of the fits and spurts, I think, of it. 
These are the growing pains, the growing pains of all growing pains. 
And as Alex said, it will lead to something better in the future. 
It doesn't help people who lost a lot now. 
But, you know, our advice to people investing in cryptocurrency, only invest as much as you can lose, as you can afford to lose. 
And then it won't be so bad. 
It will be bad, but it won't be as bad as it is for some people right now. 
And we'll learn. 
We'll learn from this. 
We're going to continue this conversation on Overtime in a couple of minutes. 
Go to YouTube.com slash Channel 2600 or just click on the link on the 2600.com webpage. 
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