NN - S2 EP04 - We Explore How Always-On Habits Break Us And How Hard Stops Put Us Back Together

Originally released in July 2021

A sharp, satirical open gives way to a grounded talk on work-life balance, fair pay, and digital boundaries. We share practical routines, reflect on loss and purpose, and unpack voice cloning, spyware, and the Audacity privacy scare with a calm, evidence-led lens.

• forced pauses and the cost of always-on habits
• rage quitting, living wages, and retention signals
• family loss, gratitude, and time with intention
• voice cloning ethics, consent, and transparency
• spyware basics, social engineering, and simple defenses
• Audacity privacy update and pragmatic tool choices
• caller tips for hard stops and screen-free dinners
• prioritizing must-haves vs nice-to-haves for balance
• DME Resources scholarship focus and impact goals

Be great. Do great things. Or else. 👽

Chapters

• 0:55 Cold Open And Satire Clip
• 5:59 Host Intro And Scholarship Update
• 6:35 Movie Trailer: St. Vincent
• 8:29 Why Work-Life Balance Still Slips
• 8:34 Rage Quitting And Fair Pay
• 10:22 Travel, Loss, And Labor Shortages
• 11:24 AI Voice Cloning Ethics
• 14:05 Spyware, Social Engineering Basics
• 16:12 Audacity Privacy Panic Explained
• 17:46 Returning To Balance: Caller Insights
• 18:38 Amber Schroeder On Hard Stops
• 21:47 Credits And Support Reminder

Transcript

SPEAKER_08: 0:55

Earlier today in Washington, D.C., another career politician said something really, really stupid. Officials are concerned that ignorance and stupidity has blatantly crossed party lines and unfortunately has made its way to those appointed by elected officials as well. We spoke with a high-profile former politician who recently left office and asked to remain anonymous.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17

I don't know what happened.

SPEAKER_08: 1:39

Do not be alarmed if you recognize these symptoms in your elected or appointed officials. There is hope, according to health experts.

SPEAKER_03: 1:47

Many of these babbling idiots return to normal as soon as their sorry ass is voted or kicked out of office. You don't say.

SPEAKER_08: 1:54

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

SPEAKER_04: 1:57

Larry, I want to work life balance thing. One of the things that I've observed in my career doing this thing for industry is that you have to work life balance for you, you have to make it a lot of people. That's my two cents. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_06: 3:13

I want to close this account.

SPEAKER_02: 3:18

No, you're overdrawn that much.

SPEAKER_06: 3:20

What does that mean?

SPEAKER_02: 3:21

It means you hit zero. Here's zero. You went below zero.

SPEAKER_06: 3:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_05: 3:31

This is my treaty wreck. I'm calling the cops. Is everything okay? I may get some your new neighbor. So well, we're moving in.

SPEAKER_08: 3:42

It's Oliver. You can lead us all in morning prayer.

SPEAKER_07: 3:54

I was wondering if I could use your phone.

SPEAKER_06: 3:57

My house? I can watch the kid after school. I can do$11 an hour. Use a dime. Yeah. Cost more than that.

SPEAKER_07: 4:13

It's a mum.

SPEAKER_06: 4:14

You need to defend yourself when you get more down.

SPEAKER_07: 4:18

Small if you haven't noticed. That's a horrible comparison.

SPEAKER_00: 4:23

So how do you invent to know each other? I'm walking from this mouth control. I'm also danced to the phone.

SPEAKER_06: 4:29

A lady of the night.

SPEAKER_05: 4:35

What kind of a man takes a child to a bar?

SPEAKER_06: 4:41

That's the new cherry host. Is there anything going on that we should be aware of? Well, I don't want to take up all your time. Let me show you one thing. Do it right. Break the guy's nose.

SPEAKER_07: 4:53

Break his nose.

SPEAKER_06: 4:54

Right. You're not gonna get it right.

SPEAKER_00: 5:00

Don't like people. People don't like you. You like it?

SPEAKER_08: 5:14

The state is a human being we celebrate for the sacrifices that they make for their commitment to making the world a better place.

SPEAKER_05: 5:22

Why is he mowing your dirt patch?

SPEAKER_06: 5:24

I'm showing him how the world works. You work, you get paid, you drink.

SPEAKER_05: 5:28

Are you drinking alcohol?

SPEAKER_06: 5:31

I honestly don't remember.

SPEAKER_08: 5:35

Oh man, one of my favorite movies, that is the movie trailer, was the movie trailer for St. Vincent, starring Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy, released in 2014 by Lionsgate Pictures. It is available on YouTube as well as the trailer. I'll have a link in the description for you. How's everybody doing? Larry Compton, your host, hanging out, and you know, a Sunday morning, just kicking it. Figured I'd try and get an episode out for you. Been pretty busy with this work-life balance thing and my new side project where I'm trying to focus my free time, which is uh a new scholarship I started at DMEResources.com. In fact, converting uh the entire professional community over to a social purpose organization and applying for 501c3 status so that uh donators can get uh tax deductions, you know, donations can be tax deductible, that sort of thing. So reading a lot of IRS documents, that sort of thing. It's been a tremendous just a blast. It's been so fun. But it really is near and dear to my heart. And prior to the movie trailer, we heard from one of our callers, Colin, and talk about work-life balance. And that same caller called back. We'll hear from them here a little bit later, as well as I'm also gonna include a call from Amber Schroeder, the CEO of Paraben Corporation. We had Amber's call in, I believe it was season one, episode eight, but we had talked about work-life balance in season one, episode seven, and episode eight a little bit, and Amber called in at my request, and I want to share that again because uh both callers really great insight onto this topic of work-life balance, which I've been spending a lot of time, you know, really trying to improve for myself. And, you know, as of late, within the last few months, I had some forced vacation time health-wise, and that really opens your eyes, right? You know, I thought I was quite, you know, aware to the work-life balance, especially with me focusing on it since I've been out here out west the last uh several years. But man, there's always so much more to learn. And what I've been focusing on here lately is, you know, how much of the problem is myself, is me, and the way I am as a person. I don't turn off. I've whether this may sound unusual to some, but I have been an always-on technology person since the 80s, literally having a cell phone in the 80s, literally having analog and digital pagers in the 80s, all the way through the 90s, all the way till today, folks, you know, and so I've always been on, and that's just how I've operated, and it's a challenge, it's a real challenge. I thought I had things pretty well licked on the work-life balance thing, but there's always room for improvement. So here's a good topic somewhere along those lines from the headlines recently on BusinessInsider.com. Workers are rage quitting their jobs as a tightening labor market forces employers to take note of unfavorable conditions and low pay. So interesting story goes on to say uh Kendra wasn't usually one to get mad, especially not on the job. She joined Dollar General in 2019 as a longtime homemaker, hoping for a change of pace. She loved chatting with the regulars who fled into her small town location, etc. But then came the pandemic, and uh Kendra began to watch the stress start to roll downhill, et cetera, et cetera. She's the federal minimum wage of$7.25 an hour and only working 10 hours a week. It's not gonna work. It goes on from there. So it talks about how workers are rage quitting their jobs and essentially just not being taken care of. I don't know if you're familiar with Dan Price, Dan Price from Gravity Payments, the CEO who years ago uh became famous for slashing his pay in order to provide a living wage for all of his employees. In fact, he has a CEO pay one-to-one ratio of the median of his employees, which is absolutely unheard of. And just incredible. But anyways, I follow him on Twitter, and he has some great things that he points out on there regarding, you know, the billionaires and the differences in taxation and so on and so forth. But yeah, workers' rage quitting their jobs. Not that that's anything like, you know, brand new, right? That's not anything entirely new, but it does seem like, you know, a lot of people are looking for are looking for employees. And I and I I was out to New York over the July 4th weekend. Another reason I hadn't gotten an episode out earlier, I went out to surprise my mom and family for a couple of celebrations of life. A couple of my mom's sisters, my aunts, had passed during the pandemic, and so we had two uh celebration of life ceremonies over the weekend, 4th of July weekend, and I got to go back for that, which I'm just very thankful that we were all able to get together and have that time together to uh to grieve and remember those family members. But when I was back there, you know, it just I I went to I remember one evening I got back to my hotel and I went to I thought, oh, I'm gonna run over. I think it was a red lobster or no, no, it wasn't a red lobster. It was another restaurant right next to the hotel, and they had a sign on the front saying we're closing at nine, we don't have enough employees. You know, I mean, just like a lot of places shutting down early because they simply don't have, you know, the employees in restaurants and bars and things of that nature. It's kind of crazy to me. Speaking of restaurants and bars, another thing that's been in the news was the Anthony Bourdain voice cloning creeping people out. Right on uh AP News, the headline reads, Why the Anthony Bourdain Voice Cloning creeps people out. The story goes on. The revelation that a documentary filmmaker used voice cloning software to make the late chef Anthony Bourdain say words he never spoke has drawn criticism amid ethical concerns about use of the powerful technology. The movie Roadrunner, a film about Anthony Bourdain, appeared in cinemas Friday and mostly features real footage of the beloved celebrity chef and globetrotting television host before he died in 2018. But its director, Morgan Neville, told the New Yorker that a snippet of dialogue was created using artificial intelligence technology. And that's renewed a debate about the future of voice cloning technology, not just in the entertainment world, but in politics, etc., etc., etc. So, you know, the same fears with cloning pictures and their videos, and now we can make you know AI generated deep fakes and so on and so forth. I this doesn't bother me at all as long as it's being ethically used, and I know that's a big gray area, right? Ethically used, but in this particular case, right? I'm not an Anthony Bourdain family member. So who am I to pass judgment? How this director uses and whether I didn't, you know, did you go check with the family? I'm sure he did. You know what I'm saying? People getting upset over the silliest things, in in my particular opinion. I just don't I do understand the ethical concerns. Don't get me wrong. Like I said, I've been doing this stuff for 30 plus years, uh, you know, in in networking and technology and governments and public networks, and I I do understand the ethical concerns. But, you know, those same concerns apply to non-technology things too. You know, things can be done unethically with a hammer, right? You know, and a screwdriver, and so on and so forth. So things can be done unethically. It doesn't mean that we should ban the technology like facial recognition. The technology's not at fault. The federal government has had guidelines in place, folks, for many years that facial recognition is not to be used as a sole source of identification or even probable cause for arrest, period. So any agency that uses it for as probable cause is, you know, on the wrong to get-go. They haven't done their homework, they're not doing, you know, the training, so et cetera. So I don't know. I'm off on another tangent. Let's get to another story I saw recently I wanted to mention, and that was a military-grade spyware reportedly found on the phones of journalists and activists. Phones linked to murdered Saudi journalist Jamil Khashoggi were also attacked in investigation fines. This story was on CNET.com says a military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm was used in attempted in attempted and successful hacks of smartphones belonging to journalists and human rights activists, according to an investigation by the Washington Post and 16 media partners. In all, 37 phones, including those belonging to two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamil Khashoggi, were attacked with spyware licensed by the Israeli firm NSO group to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals, the investigation found. The phones were included on a list of more than 50,000 numbers concentrated in countries known to conduct surveillance on their citizens. Da blah blah blah blah goes on and on and on. Here's the here's the really, really high-tech way this spyware gets on your device. It's it's pretty high tech. They send you a text message with a link, or an email with a link, or an attachment. It's really, really crazily high-tech, right? It's simple, folks. It's really simple. Even stuff coming from people you know. Why'd you send me this? I validate. Like I don't even open attachments from people I know. If I, you know, if I don't think they're sending me an attachment or know that they're sending me an attachment ahead of time. I damn sure don't click on I don't even click on links from my own bank, right? I go to my bank's website and validate that they have, you know, that this is something they sent to me. I don't even click on the links in email. It doesn't make sense to do so. Just a heads. So NSO group, spyware, you know, leverages social engineering essentially, as most of these uh do. You know, it's always the human factor, the weakest link in the chain, right? The last thing I wanted to mention in the news lately, and that was you know all the hullabub about Audacity, the free audio editing tool, which you know I keep in my toolbox. I have professional audio editors, including Audition and uh a few others, but I always fall back on leveraging Audacity simply because I'm just generally doing quick, easy edits. I'm not doing you know advanced analysis, I'm not doing casework anymore. So I did a lot of casework in audition and using some other uh third-party tools as well. But I still leverage Audacity despite the news lately about its privacy policy changing and all of the scare. So you may have read that Audacity was purchased by the Muse group and that uh some podcasters and audiophiles are are basically besides themselves because of all of this, claiming that uh Audacity is now spyware. Those who have used Audacity should also be aware that the Audacity team very quickly responded to the community's concerns regarding uh their new privacy notice, and so I'll have a link to that in my description as well. So you can check out the Audacity team's response to those concerns. I was quite pleased with their response, and it was a very prompt response. I don't always update to the latest versions of Audacity, anyways, particularly I generally am back a couple versions on Audacity, so in any case, I'll have that for you as well. It'll still remain in my toolbox and be leveraged, I'm sure, for years to come. So that's what's in the news. Back to the topic of work-life balance. I think I'm gonna throw a couple calls in for you to check out. I'll get that uh second call from the caller we heard from earlier, as well as that call from Amber Schroeder. Thanks so much for listening to this episode and checking in with us. Be sure to check out our new scholarship at DME Resources that I have been working on. I'm gonna be focusing my time and effort there on that scholarship program for the next two to three years and hopefully get that off the ground. And if not, well, after about three years, we'll say we gave it a good run, right? We tried to put some people into school, we tried to help folks, and that's all we can do is try. So thanks so much for those who've contributed to that scholarship so far, and thanks for everybody for supporting me along the way.

SPEAKER_04: 18:33

Hey, Larry, another thing too I wanted to add is during your work-life balance assessment, what you need to do and what's worked for me is you have to separate things into nice to have and got a halves and things that you give me out of bed in the middle of the night or weekend holiday, whatever after hours.

SPEAKER_01: 20:00

And a lot of times it feels like having another kid that's just a business. And you hope that your business can grow up just like your kid can and be the best it possibly can be and hopefully probably be able to take care of you when you're old age. But when it comes to that balance, it's the hardest part is realizing that it doesn't ever stop. And so you have to tell yourself it's time to make it stop. It's demanding, it's hard. It's all the things that are the same reasons that are demanding and hard of being a mom. So I'm I'm one of those people that stops work at 6 p.m. I have a traditional family dinner with my family where we talk about other things and what's going on with everyone. If no one wants to talk, then I have a box on our table of subjects that we can pull out of so we have something to talk about because there are no screens allowed at my table. I make a hard stop on digital when it comes to that family time. And from that 6 p.m. time until 5 a.m. when I wake up to go back to work, I make sure it is about doing those things with my family and balancing out what I'm doing with my kids. I still discuss my job, tell them what's going on when they ask me, and see how it can apply to them. But at the end of the day, the way to find the best work-life balance is to do a hard pause and say it will always come back. It is not that big of an emergency that it will not be there tomorrow.

SPEAKER_07: 21:24

And you just don't get it, you don't beset again, you learn to accept it, you know.

SPEAKER_06: 21:35

Don't upset it again, you learn, to accept it, you know.com.

SPEAKER_08: 21:58

All right, reserve. Well, except that I don't really mind if you share this, so maybe feel free to do that. You know, share and share alike, that sort of thing. Speaking of copyrights, though, special thanks to Joe Daniels, copyright owner, co-writer, and original drummer from LocalH, for permission to use Bound for the Floor by LocalH as our show's theme song. Support our independent ad-free show by making a small donation to the Paul F. Contin Scholarship for Excellence in Digital Forensics. Simply click the Support the Show link to learn more. Be great and do great things, my friends.