 Cindy in Indie has a question for us while browsing the web, I'm getting so tired of seeing ads and follow us links that can only be targeted targeting me from either conversations I have had, which we all know was happening, or even more bothersome gas from podcasts I listened to well at my desktop Mac. For instance, I have recently been listening to fantasy football podcasts and not talking about football with anyone. And now my Facebook feed is full of every NFL team and players, sports TV channels and all things football. Ideally, I would like to apply a keystroke or to completely turn off and on my internal microphone, either through an app, keyboard maestro, Alfred or whatever geekiness you guys suggest. Okay, I'm going to state, we're going to head down this path in a variety of ways, but I'm going to state up front that I really don't think that your Mac is listening to you. Because if it were, you would see the little microphone in use orange light, I'll call it, that sits in between the control center and the clock in the upper right corner of your Mac. That is that that orange light is on when any microphone attached to your Mac is in use and it is not there or off when it's not. If something's listening to you, so I really don't think it's your Mac for a variety of reasons, which we can get into, but if something's listening to you, it might be another device like if you have an Amazon Echo unit, the A-Lady in your house, a Google device, like those are listening all the time. There are some conjectures out there that they are using that data to do targeting. I'm also not convinced that that's the case because if that actually was happening and it were provable, they would be in so much hot water. It would be terrible for you to notice. Imagine the edge you would start seeing. Yeah, that's number one. That's right. Yeah. I just don't think that that's what's happening, but if it is, you've got those things. We've had this conversation on the show. The prediction algorithms for specifically Facebook, but lots of the, I'll call them retargeting or ad targeting technology has gotten really good and they use a lot of data to point them to know that we would be interested in one topic or another. Football season is gearing up. The preseason just ended this past weekend. I think if I'm correct about that, I think so. I'm also getting tons of football ads on my feed and it makes sense because in previous seasons, so a year ago or eight months ago, whatever it was, I've interacted with these things. I might have even posted things about a certain team or another and so Facebook doesn't forget that stuff just because it wasn't in the last two days. In fact, they have a whole profile. They know all the things I'm into. They probably know more about me accurately than I do about me, and I'm somebody who prioritizes self-awareness, but I think that's probably why you're getting all these football ads is it's the right time of the season and all of the TV streaming companies are trying to win your business by telling you, hey, if you cut the cord, you can still watch sports here, you know, like it makes sense that this is the time to spend tons of money and attention on these things, especially targeting people that they know who in the past have done it. All that said, the question is super interesting to me. You know, how do you ensure the microphone is muted, right? With your camera, you can put a, you know, a slider black tape or whatever you want over it and know that the camera is definitely not going to be viewing you like it can't. You know, we understand the way light works. Okay, but with sound, you know, you might be able to figure out where the mic is on your whichever computer you have and put a, you know, piece of tape over, but that's only going to muffle it. You know, you're not going to stop the microphone from listening. So how do you ensure that your Mac can't hear you? And the answer is there's no direct way, but I have discovered a workaround in the past. And what I've done is I go into, if I want to make sure that it's never even for a second going to accidentally, you know, capture the audio in, you know, a room or something, I will go in and select a non-microphone audio input device. So if you happen to have like, for example, a thunderbolt dock that has a microphone jack on it, you can select that audio input device, but if there's nothing plugged into it, you're not going to get any sound. I mean, you might get some like very, very, you know, low volume hum or something, but even that shouldn't happen if there's nothing plugged into it. So, but it's certainly not going to be picking up audio from the room. If you don't have one of those things, you can install something that will let you create a virtual audio device. Blackhole is a free piece of software that will create either a two channel or a 16 channel virtual device and just don't point anything at it, but select that as your sound input and that's going to be, that's it. You know, it's going to get nothing or loopback is a paid product that does the same thing, let you create actually many, many different virtual devices and you can do the same thing. Just select a loopback session or a loopback device. It's a virtual device that has nothing feeding into it. And then you're good to go. It's not going to, you know, there's no audio to be recorded.