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This week, comedian Rosie Tran tries to convince you to buy a physical privacy notebook, and write your password manager’s master password inside its cover. In our show notes, found over at StupidSexyPrivacy.com, privacy expert, BJ Mendelson, walk through your choices of BitWarden, 1Password, and the offline option KeePassXC for password managers. And if you stick around at the end of this episode, you can hear an excerpt from BJ Mendelson’s first book on privacy, as read by Broadway actor, Roger Wayne.
Creators and Guests
Host
Rosie Tran
Rosie Tran is one of the fastest rising stars in the entertainment business! Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, she moved to Hollywood to pursue her career as a professional entertainer. The stand up comedian, writer, podcast personality, and actress has toured internationally, at comedy clubs, colleges, and overseas for the USO in Europe and the Middle East.
Editor
Andrew
I am the Editor of all things on the Stupid Sexy Privacy Podcast.
What is Stupid Sexy Privacy?
Stupid Sexy Privacy is a miniseries about how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos. Season 1 ran from 2022 to 2023. A revised version of Season 1 began airing in August of 2025. A second season will premier in 2026. Your host is comedian Rosie Tran, and the show is produced by author and information privacy expert B.J. Mendelson. Every episode is sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. Tune in every Thursday night (or Friday morning if you're nasty) at 12 am EST to catch the next episode.
Edited Episode Transcript
Note: Transcripts have been updated where appropriate to reflect our advice in 2025-2026 and may not always match the audio from the 2022-2023 episodes. Parts of the original book, “Privacy: And How We Get It Back” have also been slightly modified, giving you a small preview of the upcoming book, “How To Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos.”
Rosie: Welcome to another edition of Stupid Sexy Privacy.
A podcast miniseries sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo.
I’m your host, Rosie Tran.
You may have seen me on ChimeTV’s A Brand New Yay!
Or on Season 2 of Peacock’s Comedy InvAsian.
Aside from organizing with your friends and neighbors, laughter is one of the best weapons we have to fight fascists and weirdos.
So, if you need a good laugh — check out my episode of Comedy InVasion, which is called Saigon Honey, after you’re done listening to today’s episode.
Clyde, The Duck: *Quack*
Andrew: He doesn’t like self-promotion.
Rosie: I mean, Clyde is a duck. He doesn’t like a lot of things. Hawks … the scent of Lemon Oil … and people who try to give him bread.
Clyde, The Duck: *Quack* *Quack! *Quack!
Rosie: I’m not trying to give you bread!
Clyde, The Duck: *Quack* *Quack!
Rosie: Andrew, can you inform this duck that If I don’t tell our listeners who I am, then I’m just some random person on the Internet.
That means there’s no human connection, and they’re not going to care about what we have to say.
I might as well be AI.
And if that’s the case …
Is he seriously looking at a stop watch right now?
Andrew: Clyde’s gotten super into time management.
Rosie: This is what happens when BJ gets depressed for like, two years, and puts a literal duck in charge of the show.
*Rosie Clears her Throat*
Speaking of BJ …
Over the course of this series, we’re going to offer you short, actionable tips to protect your data, your privacy, and yourself from fascists and weirdos.
These tips were sourced by our fearless leader — he really hates when we call him that — BJ Mendelson.
Episodes 1 through 24 were written a couple of years ago. We’re re-airing them now because most of that advice still holds up.
Everything you hear after episode 24 is going to be brand new.
Including this introduction.
Andrew: And anything we need to update from those original episodes can be found at StupidSexyPrivacy.com.
Rosie: That’s right. So make sure you visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com and subscribe to that newsletter.
Now, for those of you who don’t know … BJ is the author of the book, Privacy: And How We Get It Back.
Alongside Amanda King, who you’ll also hear from in this series, BJ is writing a sequel called “How to Protect Yourself From Fascists and Weirdos.”
So everything we’re going to present comes from two actual humans, who research and study this stuff for a living.
Clyde,: Quack!
Rosie: Ok. Ok. Two actual humans, and one super intelligent duck. Although I don’t know how intelligent that duck really is.
Especially when he keeps forwarding Andrew and I emails with the subject line that says, “1986’s “Howard The Duck” Is Good Actually.”
Clyde, The Duck: Quack! Quack Quack!
Rosie: It’s a bad movie and you know it!
*Chime*
Andrew: Ok. I think that’s enough of that. Remember to visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com, and let’s get to today’s privacy tip …
This Week’s Privacy TIp
Roise: Your first tip is to purchase a notebook, one that we'll refer to as a privacy notebook for the rest of the series. What kind of notebook should you get? Any will do, but we prefer the Leuchtturm 1917l, which we've linked in the show notes below. They're sturdy, have high-quality paper, and they're great to travel with. I also like them because they're more expensive. That might sound counterintuitive, but privacy is something we all need to take seriously.
So I think paying more for the notebook creates a larger commitment in your mind that you're actually going to use the thing and not let it gather dust somewhere.
Once your notebook arrives, there's one more thing that you have to do to complete this week's tip. You're going to go over to 1Password (or BitWarden) and set up an account. We've included a link for you in the show notes as well.
Now here's the important part. After you set up your password manager, write down your master password on the inside cover of your privacy notebook.
Don't keep your master password saved to your desktop as a PDF. You won't believe how often people do that, and it's always a bad idea. Don't make life easier for the fascist and weirdos. Keep your most sensitive data inside of your privacy notebook and not on computers, phones, or in the cloud.
Excerpt from Privacy: And How We Get It Back
Rosie: Are you still listening? We hope so because we have a special surprise. Back in 2017, BJ's first book on privacy came out. It was called Privacy: and How We Get It Back. Broadway actor Roger Wayne did the narration for the audio edition of the book. Our editor, Andrew, was nice enough to go through the audiobook and pull out the sections that are still very much worth sharing with you today.
So if you stick around and listen to this miniseries after every privacy tip, you'll hear another excerpt from BJ's book. Take it away, Roger.
Roger Wayne: This book is meant to inform you about what's being done with your data by billion-dollar tech companies like Facebook, and how those companies and others, like Equifax, are allowed to get away with creeping on you due to a lack of tools and legislation to protect you from them. If you're looking for an ethics debate about privacy, or why it's important to be concerned about all this because that's part of being a good citizen, I'm not your guy. Like most Americans, I don't like the idea that companies are making billions off my personal data.
But I also know there's not much I can do to stop them beyond what's discussed in this book. This is especially true if we want to maintain the convenience and ease of use we enjoy with some of today's most popular apps and services. With the way big data and most algorithms work, many of our favorite platforms and apps would not function well if at all if we dramatically curtail the amount of information they could collect on us.
Amazon, for example,can make great recommendations based on the things you've purchased and searched for. But you first have to actually go ahead and start your search with Amazon and purchase things through them to improve those recommendations. The trouble with Amazon involves what happens to that purchase data after it’s done making those recommendations for you. It’s a lop-sided, anti-consumer arrangement that they control the terms of, not you. Amazon is not obligated to adhere to a fiduciary standard, for example, to make sure it protects your best interests once it’s recommended a new brand of soap for you to try.
Likewise, just imagine how much fun Instagram would be if you didn't have any friends on there. Pretty boring, right? So, there's a transaction that takes place between us and these platforms. But as I will show you, that transaction is comically lopsided. Mostly for no other reason than because we allow it to be, and because we’ve allowed corporate money to corrupt the basic functions of governments around the world. This creates a system where the tech companies are writing our dictating our laws, not the people, leaving us with very little recourse other than to throw our smart phones into the ocean. (Don’t do that. The Oceans are having a hard enough time because of the Climate Emergency. Something the Tech Companies are also making worse thanks to their literally power hungry AI schemes.)
Like “Artificial Intelligence” and “Innovation” — which you can easily replace with the word magic and have it mean mostly the same thing — Big Data, by the way, rarely has a consistent definition that everyone agrees on, so I use data and big data interchangeably throughout this book. All big data was meant to refer to, before it got co-opted by the marketing people, is the sheer amount of data being collected that far exceeds the amount of space available to put it. The most I can do as an author, and honestly all I want to do, is to educate you about what's going on. And if some of this sounds like common sense, that's great.
Give this book to someone who needs to read it then. Before we get into it, I want to make a few points clear that I think will help you understand where I'm coming from …
Commercial Break
BJ Mendelson: Hello everyone, this is BJ Mendelson and I'm one of the producers of Stupid Sexy Privacy. I'm also the guy posting all that content you read at StupidSexyPrivacy.com. Today I just want to take a moment to tell you about a book I co-authored with Amanda King. It's called How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos and the title tells you everything you need to know about what's inside. Thanks to our friends at DuckDuckGo, Amanda and I are releasing this book for free starting in February of 2026. If you want a DRM free PDF copy, you can have one. If you want a DRM free MP3 of the new audio book, you can have that too. All you need to do is visit stupidsexyprivacy.com and subscribe to our newsletter. That website again is stupidsexyprivacy.com and we'll send you both the PDF and the MP3 as soon as they're ready.
Now, I gotta get out of here. Clyde is very bossy. And you know what? He has strong opinions. One of those opinions is that he really likes interleague baseball. Personally, I think interleague baseball is a sin against God, so I don't really have the time to argue with him. I got a book to finish.
Resume Privacy: And How We Get It Back (with 2025 Revisions as needed.)
Roger Wayne: What makes this book compelling and unique among other books on privacy is that it deals exclusively with something that's entirely within our power to fix. That is, dealing with the use and abuse of our data on the part of companies like Amazon, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook (Meta) in order to further their bottom line. If I'm successful, I'll have helped motivate you to contact your state, not federal, representatives to push for legislation and regulations that will hold these companies and others accountable for how they use your data. (Don’t bother with getting anything done at the federal level. Until we have a full scale people powered revolution that overturns the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, restores and then updates the Voting Rights Act, and provide universal mail ballot voting for all federal elections, it’s our position getting anything done on the federal level is a dead end.)
My hope, at least in the 2017 version of this book, is that the threat of regulation will force these companies to be more transparent and form an independent organization that holds them all to a high standard and penalizes those companies that fail to meet it. If not, and this better reflects the world we live in here in 2025, at least there will now be laws on the books in your home state that do exactly that, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act.
I wanted to write a book on privacy that was light on histrionics and morality and heavy on educating you about what's going on. I really enjoy reading books on privacy, but often they run out of things to say after, “We need state and federal regulations.” You should know I also write in an intentionally exaggerated and aggressive way that doesn't come from anger but from a desire to educate and entertain you. So, if you notice me repeating a point or two, swearing or saying something funny or ridiculous, this is intentionally done as a way to get some of the lessons found within this book buried deep inside your skull. So deep that you won't be able to forget them. And you'll place them along with memories of that time you tried to blank. Fill in the blank and email me or text me your joke: StupidSexyPrivacy@Duck.com or text me on Signal at 646-331-8341. All feedback and jokes are appreciated.
Roger Wayne: The why of this book. Your data is worth a fortune. The Databroker industry is valued at nearly $300 billion dollars as of this writing in 2025. To put that in literal terms, at $8 per jar for peanut butter and jelly — you know, because of dumbass tariffs created by people who don’t understand that tariffs are actually a tax you pay for — $300,000,000,000 buys 37,500,000,000 jars of peanut butter and jelly. Split evenly between peanut butter and jelly, that’s 18,750,000,000 jars of peanut butter and 18,750,000,000 jars of jelly With a world population of about eight billion, that’s about 2.34 jars per person total — roughly 1.17 jars of peanut butter and 1.17 jars of jelly each. So, yeah. $300 billion dollars is a lot of money. That’s how much your data is worth, and you, my friends reading this, get absolutely none of that money. Just fun externalities like pollution from data centers, which drives up healthcare costs and the amount of money the government needs to spend on climate emergencies.
Whether you actively use the internet or not, the odds are solid that there's a data file on you out there, and companies and criminals will stop at nothing to get that data for a multitude of reasons we'll discuss. (And yes, we get asked this one a lot: Assume you do not use the Internet. Assume you have never used the Internet. The odds are still really good there’s a profile on you too because of data that was shared by your friends and family. There’s no escape here from this industry.)
So, yes, I'm a big advocate of you getting paid an annual license fee or a small daily payment in exchange for your data by these and other companies. If you're really into cars, you should be able to sell your data to a car company not run by a Nazi, or the local dealership group, in exchange for seeing ads from them when you browse the web. Provided there are guardrails in place that govern when, where, and how your data is used, and how long the company is permitted to retain it after your relationship ends.
We don't need creepy companies collecting and selling our data without our consent and without compensating us anymore. We just need the will to put this system in place. Before anything can be done, Citizens United most be overturned, and restrictions need to be put in place when it comes to advertising generated by corporations. They shouldn’t have the same right to free speech that you and I do. Once we get there, we can do the following: First, we need privacy laws passed in all 50 states here in America that do not have them. Then, we need to ensure that all tech companies and others managing your data agree to adhere to a fiduciary standard when managing your data, putting your interests ahead of their shareholders. Finally, we need to completely ban personalized Internet advertising that utilizes your data to sell you something or nudge you to take a specific action based on that data. (Honestly, I think we should just ban advertising entirely, but I won’t see that happen in my lifetime. It’s only after those things are in place, then we can move to a new system involving the sale of your data. I know. It sounds like a lot, but it’s really not. All this takes is organization, patience, and execution. We can get there. The fascists and weirdos, as well as the companies funding them, want you to think it’s impossible. But it’s not.
Now, in a lot of books, readers don't make it through the first chapter. I hope that won't be the case here. For those of you who want to protect your data as you use internet-enabled devices, the following are my suggestions on what free services and tools you can use. None of these apps, websites, or programs are perfect. You need to understand that just by using the internet, you've already surrendered your privacy in some form to your internet service provider, ISP to the company whose device you're using, and to the company who makes the browser you choose to use. What you can do is minimize the amount of data being collected. And at the time of this writing, the following items are the best we've got at doing this. Also, always remember to update the software you're using, whether it's on your mobile device or on a desktop. And you should put some tape over your computer's camera or any internet-connected camera that you might have. That's the fastest easiest thing you can do to protect your privacy, right now, that doesn't cost you much in terms of money and time. Do that right now.
Back to Rosie
Rosie: There’s no Stupid Sexy Privacy without our friends at DuckDuckGo.
So, if you want to thank them for making this show possible, we hope you’ll check them out.
Because Stupid Sexy Privacy is a people powered project.
With a couple of exceptions — like producing podcast transcripts through Riverside — we don’t use AI.
Everyone who works here is getting compensated for their time, effort, and energy.
The only way that’s possible is to find good partners like DuckDuckGo.
So today, we’re going to highlight DuckDuckGo’s web browser.
A tool millions of people have switched to, in order to safely search and browse the Web.
And the best part is, the DuckDuckGo browser is free, just like all the content we create at Stupid Sexy Privacy.
We make our money from DuckDuckGo.
DuckDuckGo makes its money by selling privacy-respecting search advertising.
These are ads based on what you’ve searched for.
They’re not generated by data gathered without your consent.
And on your phone, the DuckDuckGo App offers a nice additional layer of privacy.
It does this by blocking invasive data harvesting from the other apps on your phone.
For example, when BJ wrote this ad, in the last hour, DuckDuckGo’s App Tracking Protection blocked 218 tracking attempts by Substack and four other Apps on his phone.
And in the last week, DuckDuckGo’s App blocked 9,202 tracking attempts across 11 different apps.
This included 43 tracking attempts from the Starbucks App, despite the fact that BJ hasn’t been to a Starbucks in over a month.
At Stupid Sexy Privacy, we’re never going to recommend you use something that we don’t use ourselves.
So, do you want to take back control of your personal information?
Well, there’s a browser designed for data protection, not data collection, and that’s DuckDuckGo.
Make sure you visit DuckDuckGo.com today.
And check out this episode’s show notes for a link to Download the DuckDuckGo Browser for your laptop and mobile device.
Rosie: Today’s episode of Stupid Sexy Privacy was recorded at the DuckDuckGo podcast studio in Los Angeles, California.
If you enjoy the show, I hope you’ll take a moment to leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening right now.
This won’t take more than three minutes of your time, and leaving us a review will help other people find Stupid Sexy Privacy.
When it comes to protecting ourselves from fascists and weirdos, never forget that we’re stronger together.
So, please take a moment to leave us a review, and I’ll see you right back here next Thursday at midnight.
Right after you watch my episode of Comedy Invasion on Peacock, right?
Clyde: Quack!