100: So Much Universe, and so Little Time

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. It's our 100th episode and we've signed up with Patreon to try and get paid.

Terry the fucking man Pratchett. No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away. Apple has a watch and some other things you may be interested in because that seems stupid. And did we mention it's our 100th episode? Shocker, we have beer and we didn't do a lot of prep.

Phil Collins made honorary Texan for gift to the Alamo. I thought Texans didn't like people with funny accents. Blurred lines. Welcome to episode 100, Brian. Hi, Jason. I don't know how I got saddled with all of the stories that I didn't know anything about in our intro read.

Well, you went in without even saying go. Well, because you were looking at me like you were bored. Oh, well, I have beer. I'm not bored. Okay. Bored, not beer. That's exactly right. So let's talk about Terry Pratchett a bit just to get it out of the way because we're both sad about it. Yes, Terry Pratchett passed away yesterday, lost his battle to Alzheimer's. It's very sad.

Just speaking for me, he is one of the authors that turned me into the grumpy old geek I am today. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, me too. I started my first book that I read of his was the, you know, Neil Gaiman co-authored Good Omens.

One of my favorite books of all time. Mine too. Mine too. And I learned about him from that book. And I'm like, who's this guy that's like getting in on Neil Gaiman's action? And then I found out, oh, it's the other way around. Yeah, I do remember going to the bookstore after I had read Good Omens and I was like, I'm going to look up this, this Terry Pratchett guy and just a mile long of books.

His whole Discworld series. I mean, he was well into it by the time I found out about it and started reading. Yeah, it's, it's, I just have a stack of books in the corner that I haven't gotten a bookcase for yet. And everybody's on my case about getting rid of it and winnowing down as many books as I can.

And I've done a couple of passes. The Discworld books will, will never disappear from my collection. Yeah, absolutely. I gave a lot of mine to my brother, but I think I might have to reclaim them. My first one that I got was Pyramids after reading Good Omens. That was the first one. And I love the concept that was introduced there.

Whose fucking phone is that? That's not me. That's your ding. It's not me. It's definitely not me. Okay, there, let's make sure this is off. It's Friday the 13th, people. Everything is going to go wrong today. But we have beer. Here's the, hang on, before I get back to Pyramids, I was, I was hung up on Topanga Canyon coming over today.

I'm going to, I'm going to, we're going to have a Californians episode here. Guess who was holding me up? Who? The president? Not a Prius. Oh. It was a Ford six-wheeled Super Duty pickup truck. I'm just like, okay, this is going to, this is what the day is going to be.

It's because it's always a Prius. Yeah. But today, no, it was a Ford pickup truck. So the thing in Pyramids that I loved was they introduced the concept of temporal wine. So you get the hangover before you have the wine. Yeah, that was very clever. I couldn't even tell you the first one I read and I couldn't, I was thinking about, you know, what, what's my favorite book.

I don't have one. There's so many. Normally when I'm talking about a series, I can pick out one or two that are just like, oh my God, these are the best things ever. Start with these. I got, I got nothing. I love almost all of them. They're all fantastic. The way it's funny because I was reading Neil Gaiman was a little too choked up to really write anything about it yesterday, but he pointed to an article that he had written a while back about talking about Terry Pratchett and how he, you know, people have this impression of

him being this, this jovial guy that sits around with his beard, looks a bit like Santa Claus and laughs a lot. And he said, no, everything was driven by anger, anger at the world, anger at society. And no wonder I like him so much. All of his books, they're all allegories.

Everything in Discworld is picking on the church, picking on politics, picking on countries, picking on the police state, picking on the internet. It's all allegories and it's wonderfully written and it's hilarious and it makes you laugh and cry at the same time.

It's just genius stuff. And it got better as he got older. I agree. Well, he got angrier, like we all do. Yeah. Some of these books at the end, like Going Postal and when he introduced Moistavon Lipvig, I think it really took a different turn and Veterinari really kind of got into the modern age and they really kind of started to get closer to what we are as like, you know, in our modern times and really kind of the parallels started to come out.

They were genius. I mean, he started, when he started, he was much more focused on the Unseen University and the Wizards, which was the allegory for church and religion. Yeah. Rincewind in the luggage. Love Rincewind, one of my favorite characters. But they did get more pointed and more barbed and more political as he went along.

And yeah, the focus of Discworld shifted from the university and the crazy wizards to Vims and Ventanari and Lipvig. And yeah, just, we get one more apparently. There's one in the can that's going to come out next year. So that will be quite a moment.

Here's the thing that this was what makes me happy. There is one in the can. It's not like Douglas Adams. Yeah. Because when Douglas Adams died, he left that half baked novel done. And I still want to know why the cat was half transparent. And I'll never know. Well, yeah, I don't – I'm happy that it's done and it's a finished piece.

And I'm desperately pleading to the publishing company and the estate, do not let people do what they did with Frank Herbert's Dune series. Let's let this universe exist as it is. I don't want anybody continuing it. No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

And it's like I wasn't a huge fan of the witches books. I mean, they were okay, but it's not really where I was at. I loved the Night Watch. I really kind of got into Vimes and the Night Watch. He was my favorite guy at the end. But like watching his journey, like I think Terry like did a – he really kind of paved the entire story with him to get Vimes, you know, from the street thug to the guy in the castle who was like the duke at the end and, you know, you could just see his entire journey.

Yeah. And I think that really kind of came to a head in the fifth element – or the fifth elephant. Sorry, the fifth elephant. And it was just – that was one of my favorite plot lines. Yeah, it's just all good. And if you're a listener to the show and you have no idea what we're talking about, go get on it. Go start reading his work.

It's fantastic. If you enjoy our sense of humor at all, you will really enjoy his books. And just a quick note, this is – you know, we had Leonard Nimoy pass two weeks ago now and now we have Terry Pratchett going. This hits a lot harder.

I know a lot of people are in love with, you know, Spock and Leonard Nimoy. And for me, this is the writer versus the actor situation. This is the person that came up with the ideas. Spock, Leonard Nimoy played a great character. Terry Pratchett wrote this stuff. Yeah. His ideas, his brain, and it's not going to be replaced.

No, absolutely. Absolutely. Now we're done with our little sappy part. Our eulogy is over. Our eulogy is over. We have done our bit for Terry. He is sorely missed. But guess what's not missed? Bluetooth in iOS 8.2 because it came back on.

It is almost uncanny how it's every other update they release. Resurrected. Bluetooth switched right back on immediately right after I installed 8.2. Thanks, guys. I did the test. It did the same for me. I don't know what the deal is because there's apparently some watch that's coming out that, God forbid, that, you know, people talk about this week on the internet, on podcasts.

Oh, come on, you were watching the speech live. I did not. Here's the thing, man. I've been working all week. I've actually had a job this week. That's why the show notes are so light because I have been wiring studios with, you know, paneling them with foam, recording podcasts with other people.

And I got to tell you, after doing this show, this is our 100th episode and plus also doing the other shows I do, being in a studio with three guys in microphones, listening to them talk and not being able to talk sucks. I'm just like, I would have just stopped after being in a studio with three guys.

Well, having been in that situation many times, it's a lot of farting. Well, I was the one, unfortunately, because I went and got some Chipotle before I got in the studio. Rookie mistake. I told totally rookie mistake. I didn't actually like get down to business, but my stomach was growling so bad. They kept cracking up while we were doing the shows.

But yeah. No, I am so far behind this week. It's a very odd week to have our 100th episode. But I'm out here with you, sitting next to you, not looking at you, which is very strange. It's not as strange as it was when we were looking at each other last time. I know. I don't know how we're going to figure this out.

We're never going to do it in person. Special episodes only. Actually, our big idea was to do it live on location, which I think, you know, if we make it to 200 or if we get any money off our Patreon page, check that out, we will start to do them live. And I think that'd be fun. But even live, if you've seen live events or live radio broadcasts, they sit at a table flat like this and they look out.

They still don't look at each other. No, yeah. Because looking at each other throws you off. I've been to, you know, almost every live Dignation taping when they used to do it back in the day. And it's the same thing. They never look at each other because you can't. You're trying to, you know, do a show.

Sideways glances like we're doing now. But every now and then. Yeah. You just got to keep your mic technique and just kind of swivel and pivot and then give a thumbs up, thumbs down, whatever. All right. But yeah. So did you see the story about the thousands of women are throwing the dance party for the fat dude? I think you kind of ruined the whole point by calling him a fat dude.

But yeah. Well, he was he's a fat dude. He is a fat dude. But sometimes the Internet is a good place. I love this story. Yeah. I mean, call a spade a spade. He's a fat dude. I'm a fat dude. I can call people. Here's the rule. You can call somebody fat if they're fatter than you are. OK. Actually, no.

No, that doesn't really work. That's actually really terrible. I was backwards on that one. Sorry. Anyway, no, he's a big dude. He got he got shamed at a dance thing. And then like all these girls said, hey, we'll throw you a dance party. And Pharrell got on it. But I think he's probably busy getting sued right now.

I was about to say, I don't know if he can still throw money in anymore for the seven $7.5 million going to the Marvin Gaye State. $7.5 million for him is probably like his hat budget for a week. Yeah. I'm pretty sure he's got money to burn. You know, I could talk for an hour on this topic alone.

I'm not going to. I'm just going to say a lot of people ran around saying how this is proof that the music industry is alive and well because this one particular song made so much money that even a portion of the proceeds is $7.5 million that is being transferred over because he may or may not have stolen the song.

But it's not. This is an outlier scenario. This was the biggest hit of an entire year that got synced so many. It made a lot of money. Yes. But the music industry in general? No. No. Nobody's making that kind of money except for Pharrell. Yeah. He's, you know.

And Beyonce. And Jay-Z. And a couple other people. Okay. And, and, and. A couple other people. But it's not, you know. Again, it's much like our own economy. It's the middle class is disappearing and there are the rich and the poor musicians. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

I'll wait for you to have a sip. So now this, this band, the ex-cops who are pissing and moaning about McDonald's asking them to play for free. This, I think, is, is we have gone into this business of just this outrage porn about not getting paid when asked to do something.

I mean, these guys, we've been through this story. Okay. Somebody asked somebody to do something for free, but the person who's asking has a lot of money. Yes. Right. Turn them down. Move on. Say, go fuck yourself. Move on. Now, in the first couple of times, it was, they were big stories.

Now, anytime somebody says, hey, will you do something for free? It just turns into like, like a look at me, me, me news piece. Well, I. And this, and just for some background is McDonald's asked this band to play for free at South by Southwest and they posted an update and said, you know, they said, it's a horrifying and gross reality when one sees the true nature of corporations and their pathetic attempts to achieve relevance with millennials.

Doritos received a lot of flack for their stage a couple of years ago, but I'm going to assume they paid Lady Gaga. I have a different opinion than you. I do think that, unfortunately, ex-cops are using this to try to get a ton of publicity, but who can blame them?

Because I'd never heard of them before. Most people haven't. Um, but I do think that when this happens, it should be called out. And I think we should be shaming these corporations. McDonald's is massive. It's more of a horrifying and gross reality that McDonald's has a stage at South by Southwest.

What the fuck are they doing there? Uh, McRib it up, baby. McRibs. You got the best barbecue in the world and you're passing around McRibs? Jesus. No, you know, it's, it's corporate reality. South by Southwest wants to make money. McDonald's is kicking in a shit ton of money to be at South by Southwest.

Would it kill you to give him the 300 bucks, McDonald's? Well, I mean, honestly, yeah, they should have thrown them a bone on, you know, I don't know if they're the problem. Here's the problem. There are no bones in McDonald's food for them to throw because in the McRib, it's just pressed fake bones.

There's no bones in the chicken, so they can't throw the bones because they got no bones left to throw. You know, I've never actually had a McRib ever. What? Never had one. Oh my God, you're missing out. It is one of the most disgusting guilty pleasures on the planet. Oh, you've had White Castle though, right?

No. Oh, jeez. We got to get you to Chicago stat. I've had pork or what's the belly place in Chicago? Oh, Potbelly. Potbelly. Well, Potbelly is actually good food. That is delicious. Well, I like good food. Anyways, I want the light shined on corporations when this happened.

I'm fine with it. I think that they should have done the one release and statement and left it at that. Unfortunately, they're trying to ride this to more YouTube views or whatever the hell they're hoping for these days. But I support them on this. There's no reason why they shouldn't have gotten paid.

And as part of the statement was made, McDonald's came back with a statement saying that this is the standard practice for these sorts of things. And then South by Southwest had to chime in and say, well, no, it's actually not. Bands get paid. Okay. So, I mean, yeah, like I said, we have a differing opinion on this at this point.

We do. Now, you posted a link to a Slate story. Go figure. Big surprise. About what happens to our brain and body when we look at cell phones when we go to bed. I thought we have covered this to death. Well, I put this in the intro because that is our follow-up segment.

And we have covered it with scientific studies with very long words and big concepts. And this is a simple video, which people seem to like more. Oh, because it has the words toxins in it. Well, that does drive me crazy. Anytime any scientist uses the word toxins, I feel like I'm just being sold snake oil.

How about some real science, not toxins? Toxins are the same crap that people talk, acupuncturists tell you they're pulling out toxins. What a load of shit. The thing is, he's actually quoting a real scientific study that they were trying to figure out that we actually, when we sleep, our brain gets cleaned up.

It gets flooded with toxins. No, it gets flooded with cleaning agents that then flush out the dead cells from the day before. And, you know, there are neurotoxins, but that's different. That is different. But using the general term toxins, even Dr. Drew, you know, I think Dr. Drew is kind of sketchy sometimes.

I was about to say, you know, hold him up as like some bastion of science. I love him as a TV personality. Whoops. Jesus, Crispy. Sorry, I was making my point with my beard. When he comes out and says, I want you to show me a toxin. If you are going to, if you're going to go on TV, be a doctor and talk about toxins, show me the molecular makeup of a toxin.

Yeah, I agree. I'm with Dr. Drew on this one, and he's a real doctor. I just play one on the Internet. But, okay. Anyways, you should watch the video if you haven't gotten the point yet. Put your damn phones down at least an hour before you go to bed. This stuff is messing us up. Yeah. I mean, always stick to that.

Just stick to getting away from your phone before you go to bed. It says the guy who listens to podcasts at like three in the morning. But, you know, we do what we can. Do as we say, not as we do, people. Do as we say, not as we do. And as you know, you like to pick on my Slate articles.

Again, you know, let's celebrate good journalism when we have it. So let's not shit on them too much. Remember a while back when I actually tried an app and I downloaded Yik Yak and gave it a shot. And my review was basically, wow, a lot of kids over at Santa Monica University are horribly racist and definitely horny because all they're trying to do is get laid or make fun of people.

Absolutely. I remember that. Yeah. Well, there's an article on Slate, The Upside of Yik Yak, written by Amanda Hess that makes an argument that there's actually a plus to it and the kids are all using it and maybe we should relax about it a little bit. But I disagree. I still think it's just horrible.

I was going to say, what is the plus? What's her point in this article? Because it was TLDR for me. Because I've used Yik Yak, I've seen the dirty side of it, and I don't see any upside to it. Well, their upside now is that they've used the ability to peek on other locations and they recommend going to feeds for like USC and Tibet where there's somewhat more enlightened conversations taking place.

So hopefully you'll stop being a jackass. Yeah, no, no, that doesn't work. No, there's plenty of other places to have enlightened conversations. This app is dead. I don't understand this article. But I guess it's not dead because college students are all over it. But that is a time to experiment with stupid things.

Yes. Like Ayn Rand. Well, you don't like some Ayn Rand? I love it. I just know it doesn't work in the real world. No, I want people to understand that Ayn Rand is fiction. That's it. It is fiction. Yes. Well, can you please go tell a bunch of people in our government?

They don't seem to fucking know that. No. Fiction. It's good fiction, I think. No, I love her books, but just don't try to make it happen in reality, please. Yeah, like I said, I love Terry Pratchett, but I'm not going to go find some walking luggage to go with me.

It's the way it goes. If I could, that'd be fiction. If I could, I would, but you can't because it doesn't fucking work, people. All right. So I wanted to follow up a little bit on last week's episode because you were making so much fun of me for not listening to our own podcast. I went back and listened, and we had a little bit of a discussion about how you and I will always be able to make money on the internet, and anybody that is worried about not making money, they're an idiot because they can always go and make money on the internet.

And then the only examples that you provided involved New Bali Young Women potentially removing clothing on certain apps. Really? Yeah. Oh, okay. Maybe you should go back and listen to the episode. I was there. I don't have to. Hey, no, wait.

That was my defense last week. See, I edit the episode, so I have to listen to him twice. Well, I started to challenge you and press you a little bit on it, and it came down to, you know, well, if you're a girl, you can take off your top on Snapchat. I'm like, well, as a 41-year-old male, I may have titties, but I ain't going to make any money.

Well, here's the deal. You have to find your niche. There is a market for your man movies somewhere. It may not be where you want to be, but you can do it.

But that is not my point. I think that there is definitely ways for people to still make money on the internet, selling all sorts of things. I see it all the time with people who buy, they go to the 99-cent store, they'll buy a bunch of stock, take it up, ship it up to Amazon, and get a profit on it.

Okay, there are ways to squeak by. Yes, absolutely. I'm just saying, well, I met a girl the other day, and she was not actually showing her boobies online. She was writing e-books and selling them, and she made a half million dollars last year working about four hours a week.

That is impressive. Which, you know, not four hours a week, because that's the Tim Ferriss crap. She was working four hours a day. But still, there are people out there that are finding ways to do it. You just got to look at the system and find the ways around. All right. And speaking of just squeaking by, did we mention we launched a Patreon page?

Yes, we did. So we can try to make some money off the internet? Hey, we have. We are now, this podcast, as of this recording for episode 100, is profitable. Well, it's profitable because I thought this beer wasn't so cheap. I think we blew through that.

Well, we're profitable going forward if we do not buy anything ever again. We can pay for bandwidth, and retroactively, yes, at some point we might get some money back. But, yes, it's awesome. I mean, the fact that we got sign-ups in the first 30 seconds of putting up the page was amazing.

Actually, that was very impressive, and thank you all so much. We'll talk about that more in the comments section. Yeah, we'll talk about that more when we get down there. So last night I had a friend come over, and he was trying to get his Google AdWords certification. I know.

I'm sorry. Go ahead. That's pretty much what I heard. There was something really funny happening in the other room. I don't know. Google AdWords, give me a fucking break. You can't even make a dime off that. Well, let's talk about that. You have a big site with the titties again. No, no, no. I told you, real estate agents that I know make thousands of dollars a month.

You have to advertise. And plumbers. Plumbers is what they always use as their key go-to because every town has plumbers. Every plumber has to advertise. We can talk about economics and all that shit, but here's the point. Having looked at this, I will readily admit that Google seems to go out of their way to make all of their products more complicated than need be, particularly at this level.

Like, the interface for AdWords is a mess. It's impenetrable. And if you look at Google Analytics and their latest update to make it better, oh, my God, you cannot figure out where anything is. No, it makes your head spin. Okay, maybe you do need a certification. Well, here's the thing. It was only 40 questions because he didn't do his homework.

And he's like, hey, man, you know the Internet. You can do this for me, and we'll just knock it out. Two hours later, after he tried to figure out how to set up his own account, which took forever. Thanks again, Google. Yeah. And it's through Google and through the testing service.

It was just a nightmare. So I took the 40-question test. Okay. And I had had a few cocktails. Shocking. Well, it's been a long week, and I had a few cocktails. Did you do this in the hot tub? No, I still haven't gotten in the hot tub. But, yeah, so 40 questions.

Came out with 70% accurate. Okay. 75% was passed. So I missed it by three questions. With no knowledge. I went in cold. I had no idea what we were doing, and I came out of it with 70%. And I stand by this.

The three questions were the ones that I let my friend answer. Okay. I would have passed. I actually believe you. When I saw you put this in the show notes, I was like, if this test only took five minutes, I think we should actually do it on the podcast. Yeah. We would probably both pass. It actually took, like, because they give you 40 minutes or 50 minutes.

It took us, like, 13 or 14 minutes to get through it. I assume they did a better job setting up their testing interface than, say, the DMV. Well, I didn't want to play around with it, but I bet I could have hacked that. It was a third-party testing service. And to get Google AdWords certification, you don't actually get tested by Google.

You get tested by a third party. Right. And what would getting a Google AdWords certification actually do for you? Are there people that think that this is important? Well, in the case of my friend, it lets them keep their job. Oh, then it's important. They're in one of the big box SEO companies.

You can probably figure out who I'm talking to if you know how to use Google. I think I do. Which I apparently only know how to use 70% of the time. We talked about Barack Obama doing the BuzzFeed thing a couple weeks ago, and I kind of turned a corner on it because I felt all bets are off now.

Before, I would have said that's really unpresidential, but to hell with it. He did Jimmy Kimmel Live last night and did the mean tweets section. I saw that this morning. I thought it was extraordinarily lackluster and didn't really kind of do anything for me.

That's the problem with when you bring in somebody like the president of the United States into a segment that is basically extremely mean-spirited to some degree. I'm sure that they had to vet which tweets were going to be read, and there could have been a lot of different ones that would have been a hell of a lot funnier, but they're not going to do that.

So that was kind of walking the line between we could have really done something for humor, but we're still trying to respect the presidency. So we got to find the middle ground here. Well, you have to respect the office. But nobody on Twitter does. I mean, I checked. I looked.

And just within the last, you know, six hours, there are ones that are extremely funny. Well, if he would have read them, it would have been extremely funny, but there's no way in hell he's going to. Oh, yeah. I'm sure there's tons and tons of them. But I just, why did they really screw up?

Wait a minute. Why is that so fucking echoey? Did that just get echoey? No. It sounded just got echoey. Okay. Why did they have to screw up Los Angeles traffic so bad? They shut down, like, Highland Boulevard between the bowl and Hollywood for, like, two hours at Russia, between four and six.

Now, I don't want to get all Californians on you here, but I'm going to tell you right now, that screwed up probably hundreds of thousands of people's lives for the day because he could go and read angry tweets. That is not cool. There is nothing Californians or Los Angeliens dread more than Barack Obama coming into town.

Our traffic here is bad enough on the best days. If it's raining and on a long weekend where most people go home, traffic still sucks here. When the president comes, it's a nightmare, and we all can't stand it. You know, I'm not – I hate to bring up Adam Carolla, but I'm going to anyways because he's, like, best buddies with Jimmy Kimmel.

Even he said on his podcast, what the fuck is up with this? Land. Open up Air Force One. Have everybody come to you. Jimmy, get off your ass. Take your desk down to the fucking LAX. Set up there and do it there. And sit on the runway and do it there. Yes, and that's a better thing to do.

Everybody gets to go see Air Force One. That's cool. No, definitely. That would have been the way to do it because it was – I was supposed to go back over there, and I just couldn't do it. No, I mean, as soon as – you know, we get the traffic reports, we're told, you know, what times people are going to be where, what streets are going to be shut down.

But most of us here just kind of go, all right, president's here. I'm going to work from home. I'm not going to leave the house. I'm going to make sure I have my beer. That's it. Now, one thing that hit me this week was GigaOM shut down. That sucks. It really sucks because I remember when – I remember when OM Malik started the website.

We were friends. He was, like, still working as just kind of a street journalist doing his thing, and then he started his own deal. And I was super proud of him, and I was just – I was really upset to hear that they were shutting down. I mean, he had stepped off for a bit because he had health issues and was just tired.

I can't blame him. You can't run a blog for that long and not get tired. I ran on for eight years, you know, and it just takes it out of you. So I was glad when he stepped down. I thought he was going to retire with his bags of money and Scrooge McDucket for the rest of his life. But apparently not because somebody else wanted his bags of gold.

Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate. The quote in the article that we have in our show notes depresses the hell out of me. In 2008, our company decided that we would not pray at the altar of page views and advertising metrics that do nothing but devalue our readers' time and attention. Unfortunately, that didn't work out so well.

Yeah, yeah. How'd that work out for you, buddy? I'm sorry. Yes. Again, it's the internet, and we all pray at the altar of page views and advertising metrics. I know. It's sad but true. It is another example of a site with good journalism getting the death bell. And they ran some really good conventions and that kind of thing.

And, yeah, I mean, I knew where their office was. I had a meeting there one time when I was pitching my startup. But right down the street was BuzzFeed. So who wins? Nobody wins, unfortunately. No, none of us do. Amazon came out with an article.

Well, Gizmodo came out with an article about Amazon. It's their next plan beyond delivering with drones. It's 3D printing your purchases in the back of its delivery van. What? They've put in a patent for it, an entire delivery system in which there will be a van that drives around that has 3D printers in it.

So as you start to order things that can be done with 3D printing, it will print in the van itself and then deliver it to you. Are you fucking kidding me? Nope. That is pretty kind of cool. It kind of is. I like that. I like this much better than the drone delivery plan. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, this is way better. You know what? If they come to my house with a 3D printed drone, I'm in. I am totally in. It's only a matter of time before there's 3D printers on drones. Oh, wait, then we get into the whole Terminator thing. They're going to start creating themselves. They will. They're going to create themselves and then they're going to figure out how to create, you know.

See, that's the one thing that people don't think about. They're like, okay, well, they're not going to be able to make bombs, right? So if you put a 3D printer on a drone, people are thinking, oh, it's got to be complex. They're going to make bombs. All they need to do is make, like, you know, bowling balls and drop them on our head.

We're pretty soft on top. Yeah. So I don't know. Yeah. Oh, well. What are you going to do? I don't know. Somebody must stop Amazon. Oh, I don't know. Should somebody stop Apple, too? I was blissfully unaware this week out of anything that went on with the keynote.

I think I totally lucked out this week. I think you did, too. This is one of the first times that, well, also, you had your prediction about the stock price, and you were kind of right, but kind of wrong. Well, Christy Turlington totally proved me right. Christy Turlington. I don't know this part. Oh, she lost, when she came out on the, you know, her little run thing, $17 billion worth of Apple valuation disappeared.

Well, it was on the watch. On the announcement of the watch, that's when stock tanked. But for the most part, it's big. Somebody has a graph of her, like, when her video started. It started to drop. You know, she's running with the African kids or whatever. I'm just going this from just reading about it on the Twitters and seeing the graph.

And then until she, like, left the stage, it was just a straight decline. Yeah. And then it came back up. Well, I mean, like I've said, you know, as soon as I got a pager in college, and yes, I am that old, kids. We didn't even have cell phones then. I had a pager. As soon as I had something in my pocket that had the time on it, I stopped wearing watches.

I have no interest in wearing a watch. I have no interest in the Apple watch. I don't want a smart watch. I don't even want a dumb watch. I don't want a watch. So this was nothing for me. You don't want a watch at all? No. No? Okay. No. I personally like watches. I do.

Some people do. And are you going to spend $10,000 on a smart watch that'll be obsolete in two years? But you don't have to spend $10,000 on it. You can spend $350 on it. That gets you the ugly plastic one. So? All right. I tell you what. It's a status symbol, man. I'm kind of into getting the $12 Casio with the calculator like the old days.

I did have one of those in the old days. I'm thinking, let's go retro. No, I'm not interested in the watch. You're kind of interested, but not really. Most people I talk to around my age aren't that interested in it, but the kids are. And I really do think this is one of the first Apple products for which it's not being directed at us, Jason.

We're officially too damn old. I think you're right. I think we are too damn old because I was talking to my friend last night. And she's like, okay, the phones keep getting bigger. That's great. I can see them now because I'm old. And I love it that I have an old person's phone that's like one letter per screen.

And she's like, why would you put something on a watch that I cannot see? You're just making it harder. And she's like more curmudgeonly than we are. And she's like, people call me. I take my phone out of my pocket. Why the fuck do I need a watch?

And that's the whole thing. This has been going around all week. And I don't want to belabor the point. Because all you're doing is getting notified to pull out your phone. For the most part. Yes, there are some little things that will pop up on the phone anyways, or on the watch anyways, that you don't need your phone for.

But 99% of this stuff, it's, oh, okay, I should probably do something about that. And then you pull out your phone. You know when Steve Jobs got on stage and introduced the iPod? People were like, why do I need that? I have my Discman. No, I was totally into the iPod when I was out. Me too. I bought one immediately.

But yeah, this whole week, I mean, I think the best thing that came out of this week is the video of the Apple engineer talks about the new 2015 MacBook, which is, I think this is the new Angry Hitler. Like, they're going to be using this guy. It's like, I don't know where it comes from.

I just, when I first saw this video, you have to go to the show notes and watch it. Although by now, I think everybody's seen it. Because when I saw it, there were 64,000 people that have seen it. And last time I checked, there was almost a million. It was very funny. It's very funny. I was in tears, but just talking about the silliness of how the new MacBook has one port.

And I do think that that is ridiculous. Well, I do too. But it's part of the greater tech culture that we're in right now, which is everybody's moving away from the ability to control your own data. And this is another thing. It's so much easier if you put it in the iCloud.

No, no, no. Why would you need to have connections? Why do you need to put things in and out of your computer? Well, because I fucking want to. Well, that and the fact that we're talking through like, you know, $10,000 of fucking gear here. Yeah. And there's no port for that. Yeah. We're running on Thunderbolt now.

But before, the old thing I had was Firewire. And then three years, Jason, you're going to be on PC. You watch. Oh, Jesus. Fuck. Yeah. You know what? This is the circle of life. I'm going to have a free BSD machine by the time we're done with this. Probably.

Yeah. Sitting there with audio tube interfaces running through. I had no idea. No, I think it is a really weird move for Apple to do that. I don't really get it, but I don't get a lot of things. And I still get the stock. Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to say? One of the other stories I saw, you know, Apple, obviously, with their watches moving heavily into the fitness thing.

This is one of those, you know, Apple giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other. And if I were a developer, certainly with app developers, we've seen the same thing. Or if I was one of these guys who, you know, the Jawbone and all these other fitness wearables that were in the Apple store, they were probably so thrilled when they first got in the Apple store.

We're going to sell tons. But then Apple just takes your idea and goes, OK, thanks, guys. Thank you very much. Get the fuck out. Yeah. How many steps is it from where you're at right now to the door? Because that's where you're going, biatch. Yeah. You know, it's been Apple's racket.

And you guys out there that are trying to develop and piggyback on Apple, you need to be careful because it's a gamble. Are we going to get it bought out by Apple or are they just going to release their own version of our shit and kill us? And anybody who thinks that this is something new, they have been doing this since OS 7.

Yeah. I mean, people would, you know, do shareware widgets and gadgets and make, you know, a decent living on it. And then Apple would just say, oh, that's actually pretty cool. Let's put that in the system and not buy your thing. Yeah. And sometimes every now and again, they will buy somebody's thing and make it good or they will buy somebody's thing and make it terrible, which is the case for iTunes, because iTunes was one of the third party things that they bought and then turned into iTunes.

Well, they took something terrible and made it terrible or a little, a little, a little, a little. But that's the carrot that Apple dangles. I mean, it's the same thing as the lottery. They throw it out just enough that you think you can win because we'll buy, we'll buy a company every couple months just so you keep, all you developers keep doing stuff.

So when you get something that wins, we'll figure out if it's cheaper for us to redo it and drive you out of business. Or every now and then we'll just buy one to keep you all going. To keep you going. Yep. Keep the fucking hamsters in the cage. Yep. Let's go develop apps. Oh, God. Yik-yak. Anyways, in continued Apple news, I found this one to be odd because we've been talking a lot about how to get off the cable and all these apps.

I'm still stuck in apps. All these TV stations and channels and networks are basically unbundling and offering apps that you pay for yourself so you can just get them direct, which will probably end up costing more money than the cable package does at the end of the day because that's how this always works. But HBO now has announced that they are going to be exclusive to Apple TV, which I find weird.

Well, you know, before the YouTube thing, I would have thought it weird. But, you know, Apple has bags of money that are bigger than the planet. So they probably threw a couple of them at HBO and said, here, in lieu of us buying you because we don't want to buy you because then we'd have to run you.

Let us just give you Googles of money to just let us use it for a little bit for, you know, exclusively. And then later on when nobody cares anymore, then you can go to Amazon TV and Prime. I mean, I mean, honestly, the back catalog is already on Prime.

Yeah. This is all for the new stuff. But I'm also assuming that this is just it's an exclusive deal for devices that connect to your TV. I'm assuming that HBO is still going to have their app that you can install on whatever device you want and pay for directly. Or is that gone, too? That's the only thing I didn't look up.

And I think that would be a huge mistake for HBO. But it's also probably a limited exclusivity. This is just for the announcement. They get it for like a fucking year and then it's going to come out. Something like that. Something like that. I'm sure there's, you know, I don't I honestly don't care about the terms of this. As long as I can watch Game of Thrones on somebody else's device that comes to my house that I don't have to pay for, like HBO Go, if it stays up, that's fine.

And go from there. And if I'm on the road and I don't have a friend who has somebody else's HBO Go password. Oh, and by the way, expect them to like not let you use your HBO Go on more than one device. When they launch this as a paid app that's separate, they are going to cut down on that tomorrow.

Done deal. But if I'm on the road and I want to watch something on my iPad, I will pay 15 bucks a month. That's that's it's not that expensive. It's it's easier than going to our friends in Sweden, which is what we always said. It's like, give us an option to pay you and we will pay you.

Yeah. If you make it easy enough, that's that's enough to turn for 99 percent of people. Yeah. No, absolutely. Did we mention that we have a Patreon page? We do have a Patreon page. Make it easy. And it's not in Sweden. No. OK, one last Apple story, and this is only purely because I really want it to happen.

Apple had their shareholders meeting and the shareholders decided to skip any questions about dividends, which also I would really like to have happen because Apple has too damn much money. So they've got to do something with the amount of money they have. So the idea is dividends or everybody in this meeting want them to buy Tesla.

That would be. I want this to happen. A terrible idea. I don't think it's a terrible idea. I don't know. I think Tesla is like on a tear. They're doing great. And I think the home battery thing is going to be a game changer, a serious game changer. Well, I do.

Probably five to ten years off, but a serious game changer nevertheless. But that's why I don't want to get them into the Apple ecosystem. I really want them to stay independent and stay snappy and sharp. If Apple could do what Google did with Nest and buy them and make them independent, I'm down.

Oh, yeah. I'm down with that, too. I think that's the way it should go through. Well, we'll call Tim and make it happen. I'll just dial him up on my watch. My Casio. Yeah. Security?

I would like to posit to you, Brian, a long time ago I said something about what I would do if I was a smart person with skills to become an employee at Apple.

Sadly, we're never going to find that out. Of course not, because I'm a fucking retard and I have no chance of ever getting a job at Apple. What would I do? I would be in there implanting exploits that I could take with me when I left. You did talk about this at great length. And it seems the NSA has some people doing the exact same thing from the inside and outside, and they are trying to take down the Apple-ness of Apple.

This was an article from FirstLook.org called I Spy the CIA Campaign to Steal Apple Secrets, which we knew about because we're smart people, and we knew that they were going to try and crack everything that they possibly could. And it seems that they have been on a tear for it.

Yeah, well, and some of the most insidious aspects of this is that they were hacking into Xcode and the different software packages that developers use, so getting into backdoors into basically almost everything. Like, say, yik-yak. Yo! Yo! Yo! What ever happened with yo?

Oh, I don't know, yo. God, I hope they don't know. I'm going to go have some fro-yo, yo, no. The thing is, with the versions of Xcode that they were exploiting, I think that was to get them on certain people's machines. I don't think they tried to inject that into the main update stream, but they did figure out—this is the insidious hack that I thought—they figured out how to inject software into Apple Update on certain machines, which means that then they own your ass.

Wow, Apple is just not that different from Windows anymore. No, it's not. It's not. I mean, I am glad that that really crappy story about how Apple is the most, you know, insecure system that came out, like, last week got debunked. Yeah. But still, it's—no, the NSA's coming after us.

As they say in the article, spy's gonna spy. Spy's gonna spy. On the plus side of this whole debate is the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, is filing a lawsuit against the NSA and the DOJ, finally challenging the U.S. government's mass surveillance programs.

The nonprofit is being joined in its efforts by up to eight other organizations at the moment and is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. So, who knows? I know. I know, it's not gonna work. It ain't gonna do shit. It's a nice try, though, and it's something that, again, it's something that needs to happen.

This needs to be happening. These lawsuits need to be filed. These companies that have sort of our best interests and hearts need to stand up and say something, and they'll get beat down, and it's not gonna work. But let's shine some light on this. I think we're all agreed at this point that Snowden took the illegal path, but at least what came out of it has been very enlightening and very troublesome.

Now let's see what we can get legally. Yeah, the problem is that they're gonna have to show damages. Yeah. They're gonna have to show the fact that they have been harmed by the NSA's activities, and then they also have to prove that the NSA did the upstream tapping.

And they're the NSA, and it's really hard to figure out what they did because they're really good at it, you know? Man, Jason, you were just sliding closer and closer to my original viewpoint on all this. You can't fucking do shit, so why try? No, no, no. I'm fine with trying.

I mean, hey, man, if they can figure it out, great. If we can get a whistleblower at the, you know, the junction, like the undersea cable junction that will come forward, like the guy at the AT&T Black Room, if we can get one of those guys to come forward, then we got a case. Then we can move on this, and we can get some actual action, but until somebody who spliced the fiber into the black boxes that the NSA, the CIA, all those guys are using to siphon off the internet connections, it's a tough road to hoe.

I agree. Yeah, I don't know how that's gonna work. But I'm applauding the effort, and I will be watching it closely. Oh, no, totally. I expect my reports about the uselessness of it. Speaking of useless, Twitter just banned revenge porn and doxing. Isn't that a bit like the Pirate Bay saying, we don't condone piracy?

It's exactly about that. Okay, just wondering. Yeah, no, this is just PR pissing in the wind. I like how it's filed to trolls and gizmodo. Yeah, exactly. Please, Twitter, that's 90% of your traffic. But also, have you heard of the internet?

You cannot stop revenge porn and doxing, because you are not the internet. I mean, I'm sorry, Reddit is not the internet. The internet is the internet, and you can build a website, put it up on Squarespace, an intuitive fuster-cluck we are, and put up some revenge porn and some dox, and do it on a free account, and be gone before morning.

And nobody will know you were there. There's so many ways around this. I agree. But in much the same case as with the Wikipedia lawsuit, I applaud the effort. And I enjoy the fact that Reddit took a stand about it as well, as they should. Twitter is a bit more ridiculous, because Twitter is Twitter.

But Reddit is the home to the entire next generation of kids like us, Jason, that are growing up on the internet, and let's let them learn a fucking lesson. Like, you should not be doing this. Well, yes, I understand that. Let's give them a little bit of, you know, leeway to hang themselves for the kids.

But still, I mean, you and I know that this is PR. Oh, yeah. There are things that are going to come through the cracks. There's just, there's no way to stop things happening on the internet. There are still no, I mean, I think Instagram probably needs to license their nipple filter, because they have a very good nipple filter.

Yeah, it's called about 10,000 kids in the Philippines getting 10 cents an hour. Well. Let's be honest. Oh, I think we covered that on a previous episode, yeah. Ah, goddammit. Here, I think algorithms will save the world, and it's just labor. It's just, yeah, it's slave fucking labor. That's what it is.

It's fucking reality. And time becomes a loop. Yes, it does. One last bit in security from a friend of the show, even though he doesn't know it, Cory Doctorow. We've talked a bit about how you should never, ever, ever take a USB drive from somebody else that you don't know and put it in your computer.

Yes. Someone's made a laptop-killing, booby-trap USB drive. How does it, what are we talking about here? It's a handmade USB drive that, when inserted into your USB slot, will burn down your laptop. Oh, my god. Is this like thermal? It charges capacitors up to 110 volts and just boom.

Oh, my god. I want one of these. That's amazing. Actually, whoever invented this could, I mean, you know how the spies in the old days had the suicide pill on them? Yeah. The NSA needs this. If they've got a laptop and they're running around and they need to destroy this, like, Asian smart style.

In two seconds. I'm sorry, but no, that won't kill everything. You know what? Nothing ever kills anything. I'm sorry. There's an old episode. I think it was, I can't remember which one it was. It was the old show that was on Revision 3 with the hackers.

And what they did was, we can't do this anymore because we don't have removable CD drives. But they took a removable CD drive and packed it with thermite. Nice. And it had, like, a special key command. So when you hit the key command, the thermite ignited and basically melted the entire laptop.

See, we worry that Apple's been taken over by the CIA and the NSA through their code. I think that there is actually people in the hardware manufacturing part that are getting rid of our ports for us to be able to destroy our computers as we're about to get caught. That's their plan. This is why there's no ports on Apple computers anymore.

Interesting. I'm just saying, no thermite port. That is actually kind of a smart thing you just said. I can't believe, that was, that's actually. Oh, shut the fuck up. No, I'm amazed. If there's no ports, you can't plug anything in. You can't destroy your own computer anymore.

Yeah. Dude, this brain has skills. Oh, mad skills. I need another beer. Get on it. Comment of the week. We are officially running out of beer, so we need to get through the rest of the show because we have a meetup to get to.

We'll see who's there. I'm going to have to meet up with more beer, that's for sure. So this week, Joe Saggio sent us a $25 donation. Thank you very much, Joe. Thank you very much. And Joe, you wrote in on our website as well, but you didn't check the box that says we're allowed to read your thing, so we can't use it.

And we take your privacy seriously. We do. It was very funny, too. Yes, it was a good little note, and thank you. So next time, click the button. Click the button. Or maybe he didn't actually want us to read it, and it was just for us. Maybe. We've had people do that.

It's a very lovely note, so thank you. So we did get a note from Lawrence Lee, one of our favorite folk, lawrenceleeart.com. We'll put a link in there. He's like, I got the email about Patreon while working in the studio this afternoon and decided to sign up. I don't listen to grumpy old geeks while I'm painting for fear that I'll miss something.

Good call, by the way. So when I got home, I fired up episode 99 and was astonished to hear my name and your kind promo on comment of the week. Thank you. And I must say that number 99 was great. I can't wait to go through the show notes and explore further. Thank you again for your hard work.

You enrich my life. Oh, and I'm happy to have been able to save your sorry asses. Thank you, Lawrence. Yes, thank you, Lawrence. Thank you very much for being one of the first people that went in on our Patreon page and is chipping in some money every month for us to keep this going.

Thank you so much for your interest. And, yeah, very much a fan. And interacting with you has been fun, too, because you're a funny-ass guy. Yeah, no doubt. Now, we got a note from Herbert Fillmore. Yes. On a – basically, he put in his entire Audible.com review on a book called Departure by A.G. Riddle.

Now, I've read A.G. Riddle's entire first series and talked about it on the show, which is probably how I'd assume he'd found out about the author. I have not read Departure yet because Departure does seem to be a little bit of a – Departure? Yeah. Stole my joke. Hey, man, we did – we came at the same time.

What did I say? Whoa, way now. We came to Departure at the same time. No, I haven't read Departure yet. I did enjoy the whole Atlantis series, the three-part book series that he wrote first. Oh, that's the guy. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember you talking about that. So that was a really interesting story.

But again, even at the time, I had some issues with his actual writing, but I thought the ideas were strong enough to kind of let it go. I'm not really grabbed by the synopsis of this one. So I just haven't gotten to it yet. I'm sure I'm going to read it because that's what I do. I support authors whom I like.

Yeah, I mean, he says in his TLDR version, if you could sum up Departure in three words, what would they be? Campy, sweet, entangled. Sounds like me at 16. Yeah, I like entangled. I was entangled with myself at 16, but that was about it. You know when you told me to kick you when you started to get a little weird?

No, no, no, no. I told you about something else, but go ahead and let's take us home. We got somewhere to be. Okay, let's get out of here. The one thing that we have to announce that is big news is we have launched our Patreon page. We are a fan-supported show, and we will be begging you guys for money.

And of all the systems out there, you know, you've heard us rail on Kickstarter and many of the others, Indiegogo and whatnot. This one does actually seem to be set up in a way that makes sense for people like us who are doing podcasts. Everybody else seems to be on there. And, you know, we just pushed it live yesterday and tweeted about it and put it up on the book of the face.

And we are already halfway to our first goal. I know. Early adopters got in there really quickly. So a big thank you to Tara, Lawrence, Kenny. Lawrence, we haven't been there twice. All right. No, and Melissa and Jordan Cooper.

Melissa and Jordan Cooper, who have gotten us to $50 per month for us to do this podcast, which is halfway to our first milestone goal, which is $100 per month, at which point we have self-respect. We, well, I don't know. So we're halfway to self-respect, Jason. I don't, well, you might have self-respect.

I don't think there's any amount of money that is going to buy my self-respect. See previous 99 episodes. Yes. But for the most part, we can't thank you enough. And, I mean, I'm just kind of annoyed that we waited so long because we tried the Tugboat thing. We had great results there.

Our friend of the show, Mike Tamal, gave us a bunch of money there. Sean Bonner. We had a bunch of people give us money on Tugboat. We had a bunch of people just sending us money through our PayPal donate link on our site. So there are many, many of you out there that have been supporting us as we go along. We're just trying to consolidate it into one particular site that seems to make the most sense for us now.

Yeah. And it lets us talk to you, like, offline. Like, once you're in the club, we can, like, send you fun stuff and do fun stuff. You know, we've got stuff coming up that we'd love to do. I would love to be able to do, you know, live shows. I want to be able to broadcast this live, have chat rooms like, you know, the other folk do.

But it's, you know, it's a technological hurdle and it takes a lot of, takes a lot of more, a lot more time. Yeah. But, you know, if we can get there, we'd love to do it. Yeah. And the way that Patreon is basically set up, if you haven't looked at it yet, is that we can set goals at certain dollar amounts per month.

And when we hit them, we will start doing special content or recording the show live. Or, you know, if we hit the dream of actually being able to do this almost part time, we'll start to do a daily show. Yeah. I mean, if we can honestly get to, I mean, it's $5,000 a month, which is our daily goal, which, you know, would give us enough runway to actually do, you know, do the research, spend the time.

You know, you know how much time we spend doing the show every week, which is ridiculous, except for this week. Even then we still put the whole thing together. We didn't do a lot of show prep this time because we were both busy with other stuff, but we did behind the scenes stuff. And, you know, Jason's been learning all this gear and calling himself an audio engineer now.

There's a lot of blinking lights in front of us. It's unbelievable. I do not call myself an audio engineer. I'm an enthusiast. I'm very enthusiastic. Yeah. So if you enjoy the show and you listen to it regularly, please do visit our page and give us a monthly donation for us to keep going.

And even a dollar helps. I mean, everything, every little thing helps. And we appreciate it so much because we love doing this show and we would love to keep on keeping on. Yes. And tell a friend, too. Oh, especially. Please tell a friend. At the library.

I'll make the at the library section a little bit quick this week. As I mentioned earlier when we were talking about Discworld and all of that and how I did not want the universe to be kept going after Terry Pratchett's passing. One of the main reasons I don't want this to happen is because of what's happened with Dune.

If you have not read the Dune original series, the six book series by Frank Herbert, you have to get on that because I think that's probably the finest sci-fi universe that's ever been created. Certainly the deepest and most philosophical. And it is absolutely fantastic.

Wait, there were six? Actual Dune. Oh, okay. Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapter House Dune. Did you just read that from memory? I might as well have because I've probably read those six books. By the way, average page length of each book about six to seven hundred.

Ooh. I have probably read that six book series of thousands upon thousands of pages seven times in my life. Wow. And I'm about due to do it again. You're about due to Dune? Due to Dune. I'm about due to Dune again. Yeah. I can't recommend it enough. Now, unfortunately, after Frank Herbert passed, his son, Brian Herbert, kind of took on the legacy.

He was smart enough to pair himself off with established sci-fi authors to start writing expansions to the universe. There's been more than the original six already. Okay. I think they're up to about 12 or 14 or something like that.

Expanded universe books by his son and other authors. They started off kind of okay. I think it was mostly I was just on a high of there being new Dune works and I was thrilled about it. And they are just dragging on. And I tried to read the latest.

I just finished it last night called Mentats of Dune. Well, I basically covered my review at the beginning. Please do not let people continue on these universes. It's just the philosophy isn't there. The big ideas aren't there.

This is just meandering, ploddering bullshit based on what he's already written. See, I felt the same way about Ender's Game. Even though somebody else didn't take it over, the original author took it over, Ender's Game should have been one book. It should have been one and done. I did not care for any of the followers.

I like the first three. I don't like the fact that he's going back to basically do director's cuts and alternate camera angles of what he's already done as seen through the eyes of other kids. That's a fucking mistake. He's Lucas-ing it? Yeah, he's totally doing that. But I disagree with you about Ender's Game.

I think the first three, the trilogy, as a trilogy, I think it stands and it's amazing. And it takes Ender's journey from being Ender to a wizened old man who solves all the universe's problems in a very good way. After that, he should have stopped. Okay. You know what? I'm going to give him a try again.

On your recommendation. Because between Ender's Game and reading the second one in the series, I read the one about the crazy Mormons and the dead kids. And it totally soured me on the author. So that was a really tough book to read.

Sometimes you really just have – I know this is hard, but sometimes you have to separate the artist and the art. I know. And person Scott Card is one of those. I despise him as a human being. Yeah, that's the problem. But he's written some amazing things.

In Empire. I loved Empire. Yeah. We've talked about Empire on the show. I think that was a great book. So I'll give it a shot and I will turn my brain off and forget that I hate everything about him as a human being. Yeah. And the movie sucked. I liked the movie. I thought it was horrible. Well, it was better than I thought it was going to be, which wasn't like I didn't turn it off in 10 minutes.

That's fair enough. And I do want to make a quick mention of somebody that we've never talked about in a book series that we haven't talked about. And Jason, do you happen – I blanked on this and I should have gone through the show notes and done this. The guy that is listening to the podcast with his son that wrote us last week.

Because his son is younger, I think that this series might be of interest. My gateway into getting into Terry Pratchett and kind of the more ironic and punny and hard sci-fi books were a series called Xanth by this guy, Piers Anthony.

And he's still writing them. He started writing them a long time ago. And it's very funny, punny, younger, definitely younger. It's not as smart. It's not as brilliant. But it's good stuff. And the whole Xanth series, I read Ogre Ogre when I was nine years old.

It opened up a completely new world to me. I got the jokes mostly because some of them are written for adults. And it just – it got me going. I don't know if you could go back and read them now as an adult, but can you read them to your kids? Yes, sir. Oh, cool. That's very cool.

It's very good stuff. It's very funny. Yeah, I always wanted to try those. I remember my girlfriend had them, and she turned me on to most of the good sci-fi that I know today. And we had those on the shelf. But I moved over. Instead of reading those, I read Werner Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep.

Which I'm still working through, believe it or not. Oh, my God. That is such a good book. Yeah, but go back and check out Xanth. That's cool, yeah. Those got purged from my book collection a long time ago. But I think I'm going to go back and read the latest one because he's still writing them. And one thing that you do have to respect about it is I don't even know how many he's written.

It's got to be in the 30s and 40s. Wow, that's a lot. He moved the universe along. He hasn't stuck with the same characters. There is a chronology. The characters that he started writing the Xanth universe with now are like the old statesmen. And it does focus on younger characters because it's written for younger people.

But he checks back in with all the characters. They're still in the universe. He has created an entire universe. And you've got to fucking respect that. I totally respect that, especially that you're still talking about it and you like it. Yeah, and I haven't read a Xanth book in probably 20 years. Wow, very cool. So much for a short at the library.

Yeah, it got a little longer.

Media Candy. I still, unfortunately, read less. It's a lot. You kind of have to if you're in my industry. It drives me crazy most of the time. Sometimes he's right. And when he's right, he usually makes it into our show notes.

This one, I don't know if he's right or wrong. This one I just found fascinating. It's all about playlists on Spotify. And how they are starting to get traction and starting to become important and people subscribe to them. And there's this guy called Songkir, without the E in it because he's Web 2.0 apparently, who has this massively popular playlist that he runs on Spotify.

And then Levson got in touch with him and he responded back with his entire process of how he does these playlists and how he manages to get so many subscribers and all the time and effort that he puts into it and the things that he's figured out about gaming Spotify. And then I finished reading all of this and I was like, how the fuck do you make any money running a playlist on Spotify?

I can tell you right now, it's probably affiliate revenue. There's affiliate programs for Spotify? There must be. There absolutely must be. Otherwise, he's getting paid as a Spotify employee. Right. Which is always possible. Anyways, it was pretty fascinating and interesting read if you're into what people are doing in the music space right now.

But again, I still don't I don't see how that's monetized. Let's let's do some research and figure it out because I, you know, I can rock some DJ DJ beats. Yeah. So let's go back to this blurred lines thing. I mean, the only thing that came out of the blurred lines thing for me was the fact that I actually went and finally saw the the adult video, which was very nice.

I must say. I'm just saying. Hey, no, it was a very nice video. I thought it was fun. It's misogynist and fucked up in so many ways. And so two years ago, everybody seemed like they were having a good time. Well, that's what cocaine is for. Hey, you just told me that is not out of the park, because as part of this lawsuit, Thicke has basically admitted that he was out of it the entire time.

This is how he tried to get out of the lawsuit. I was too fucked up on drugs and drink to know what was going on. That is one of his statements. So it's fucking relevant. He was on tons of cocaine. It is on the record. It's on the record. Cocaine is on the record. OK. I don't want to talk too much about it.

There's a good article that kind of reviews the state of where it's at. If you're really interested in this sort of thing, it's a good read. I do – the main thrust of the article is that this squelches creativity. The same sort of thing happened with sampling. I mean, we had the golden age of sampling, which the Beastie Boys profited from immensely.

Immensely. But then that was shut down because you had to basically pay if you're going to use a certain amount of somebody's recorded work. Yeah. And it's just – where does it cross the line? Yeah. Because I was listening to K-Rock on my way over here. And they were talking about how the gays are going to go back and sue Pharrell again for Yusuf Happy.

Yeah. I could see – And they played his vocals over the old track that they're going to sue him for, and it sounded like an amazingly good mashup. It really did. I think it does make a good mashup. But there has to be – this is going to be an interesting discussion that goes along for a long time now because there are only so many notes.

That's exactly what I was going to say. There's only so many notes and only so many arrangements. So when do we get to peak music where there is nothing else and then all you're doing is putting your spin on it? I agree completely, and it's interesting that you used the word arrangement. Because this lawsuit is not about the recorded music, which was sampling in the Beastie Boys.

This lawsuit was about the literal written down music, the arrangement. Yeah. And they're saying that they copy the arrangement. And especially if you're talking within the pop format with only so many notes and only so many – so much time and only so many beats and it's all 4-4.

Yep. There's only so much you can do that is catchy. The rest sounds like Yoko fucking Ono. So we are hitting a point where things are starting to sound very similar, and this is interesting for that reason, and I'm not going to try to solve it. No, no. We have figured out that we cannot solve anything.

All we just do is tell people how they're wrong before that they figure out that they're wrong. Exactly. We're good at that. I agree with that. And continuing on the music theme in terms of good reading, the Vice channel, I guess ID is now owned by Vice, had a really great article that I really enjoyed reading.

If you're as old as I am and you remember the different music subcultures that I was growing up with, the goth, the death rock, all of that sort of stuff, this article is called, Our Music Subculture is Losing Their Definition by Tish Weinstock, and I enjoyed the read. It was a great read, and my only comment was, yes.

Yeah. We defined ourselves by the music we listened to back then. Punk, Scott, Skinheads, Suedeheads, Hip-Hopheads, Rude Boys, Teddy Boys, Mods, Rockers, Ravers, all of that I grew up with, and that was how I defined myself at the time. I don't know how to get kids to find themselves by our...

Pokemon, video games. Snapchat or Yik Yak. Exactly. I mean, that's... There's so many different ways, because we just had no media back then, you know? I mean, it was such a narrow channel, and now it's just like, which noise are you going to be into this week? Yeah. Which shark fin are you into?

I mean, just even reading the article made me so nostalgic for my youth, and that was so much of my definition was the music that I was listening to, which then defined the clothes that I wore and everything, everything about my life. Yeah, the music I listened to defined who was going to beat me up that week.

That was pretty much it. I feel very bad for you right now, Jason. I'll be nicer the rest of the podcast. Well, I mean, you're a punk rocker kid in the Midwest. It's like, okay, is my Misfits shirt going to get me, like, you know, a couple kicks to the back, or is my Dead Kennedys shirt going to get me chased down by the jocks? I'd like to remind you that I was a goth in Southern California.

It got fucking hot. Well, it's your own damn fault. Brian was melty. I was a bit melty. I was running for my life, and Brian was melty. Yeah. Okay, moving on. A quick note about my podcast listening. I was a big fan of Alison Rosen on the Adam Carolla podcast as the news girl, and we had talked about how the fact that she basically got booted from the show, and she still is doing her own podcast, Alison Rosen is Your New Best Friend.

I was listening to it for a while. I finally just gave up on it and deleted it. I'm not digging the new format. I'm not into the people that she's bringing onto the show. I really like the crew that she had that worked for Carolla. They worked really well together. The new crew does not. Also, nepotism, bad.

Her husband is just horrible on the show. Oh, yeah. It's just bad. Like, I would never do a podcast with my wife. No, same here. I wouldn't do a podcast with... I'm glad you're not going to do a podcast with my wife either. That'd be weird. Well, because I've never met her like once, but still. I would like to say, though, that the 99% invisible about the challenge coins this week was really good.

I got to put that in the show notes. It just talks about this whole history of challenge coins, and it made me think that for our Patreon page, we should actually come up with some challenge coins, because they're not that expensive to make, and then you can be a grumpy old geek's, you know, challenge coin owner.

You know what challenge coins are, right? No. You can tell by my blank look at my monitor. Okay, yeah. No, they're military coins. My brother actually designed one for a military unit in Iraq, so I think we'll talk about this on the next episode, since I just completely blindsided Brian with this one.

But it was a great episode, so I want to bring that up next week. Well, not to keep harping on about the Patreon thing, but it is our 100th episode, and we just launched it. But we're open to whatever you guys would be interested in, so let us know if you want. Yeah, yeah, honestly. For us, it's fun, because we pushed back on it for, what, 70 episodes?

Patreon came out when we were at, like, episode 30. Right. So we were just kind of jerking around with it, but now it's kind of fun, and people actually want to hang out with us and do stuff. It's cool. Yeah. All right, I'm going to transition into depressing again. Oh, Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. We've been doing a lot of death on the show, but there was somebody else that passed away relatively recently, and I didn't even know because I – did you ever listen to the show Says You on NPR?

No, never read it. I never read it. I never read it. Audiobook. I'm used to reading by – Wow. Books you will listen to, and then podcasts you want to read. I read by ear. What are you going to do? It wasn't a podcast. It was an NPR show, very much in the vein of – what the hell is that other one?

Sorry, I got to – wait, wait, don't tell me. Wait, wait, garbage truck. Oh, wait, wait, garbage truck. So Says You was basically very similar to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. It was a bunch of learned, older people making funny jokes and puns and basically showing off the fact that they were actually smart in a very funny way, which I love.

It's kind of like us, but with funny and learned. And Tweety Cody. Okay. That sort of thing. The longtime host of the show, Richard Scher, passed away February 9th. I really did love this show. I haven't listened to it regularly.

One of the things that I think that they made a mistake on is they never switched to podcast format like a lot of NPR shows do. Yeah. You can go to their site, and they have some shopping cart that was built in 1992 to purchase episodes. It just became too much of a pain in the ass to go buy it, like if you want to get the whole season of 12 episodes, you have to individually add each one to the cart and then download each one individually.

But it's a very, very good show, and I'm very sad. He, as part of his dying wishes, apparently said, I want the show to continue, so hopefully somebody will take on that mantle. Oh, that's cool. That's cool. And they will keep the show going, and I will listen to it more regularly. And I will tell you right now, if I die, this show dies with me.

I will bury you with your mic. Well, wouldn't you want the same? If I die? Yeah. I don't give a fuck. I'm dead. Yeah, that's actually pretty true. You don't give a fuck in your life. I don't care now. Okay.

Now, this, I don't know if we're being trolled on this one. This comes from comicbook.com. I think we're being trolled. Exclusive, original, unaltered cut of Star Wars trilogy to be released on Blu-ray by Disney. They're saying that they're going back and redoing everything right now to get it ready for a Blu-ray release before the next episode of Star Wars comes out.

There is a, as Judge Judy would say, the hint of truth with this. Actually, I've changed my mind. We're not getting trolled. This is Disney. That's what I'm saying. Disney realizes they are going to make a buttload of money putting this out. Yep. And George Lucas, after he sold it, has lost control.

It was Lucas that never wanted the original ones out. Exactly. I will buy this in two seconds. Except I won't, because who gives a fuck about DVDs anymore? I know. I hope they put it up on Netflix. I mean, and you can get the Renegade editions right now that somebody has already gone back and painstakingly made for these.

But if they did it, it's genius. And actually, it's not genius. It's common fucking sense. And that's why we all hated Lucas for so long, because it's common sense to put this stuff out. Pawn Solo shot first. Exactly. We'll leave it at it.

The web's not dead. Oh, no, it's not. Where's your friend a rock star programmer?

Oh, that's so good. Okay. As you can tell, Brian is very happy right now, because we just opened up Sons Bullshit Sons, which is a font that will actually just change the words that are bullshit in Valley, Techno Valley speak, to just the word bullshit.

I didn't look at the site beforehand, Jason. And as soon as I saw the line, is your friend a rock star programmer? I pretty much lost it. This is awesome. I know. This is a downloadable font that you can get, and it's fun. It's really fun. It doesn't work on your iPhone. The fucking garbage trucks are back.

I told you. Friday. Yeah. That's why we start at nine. We're done before it starts. How many garbage trucks do you have? How many types of garbage can there be? I've seen the bullshit episode where they had the nine versions. It's Santa Monica. First, we have regular garbage.

Then we have recyclable garbage. Then we have Prius bullshit garbage. Then we have dirty hippie garbage. Then there's the chihuahua poop bag garbage. There's the older lady with the dog everywhere poop bag garbage bag. All right. Okay.

So Sons Bullshit Sons is a really fun little font. Just check it out. I mean, we talk about those bullshit generators. This is an anti-bullshit generator. It just calls you on your bullshit. Can you imagine running wired through this? Oh, my. That's it.

No, TechCrunch. You run TechCrunch through this. That'd be good. It would be amazing. It would be black. It would just be black. Yeah. And the best thing I've seen all week. Well, not the best thing I've seen all week on the internet. We'll get to those. But this is very funny. Please go to the link in our show notes because it doesn't work without the visual.

But a bored pilot drew a penis on flight radar with his private plane. I've seen the runtime one, you know, where people run around San Francisco like making penises. But this is a pilot in a plane. This guy took it to the next level. And when I pulled it up, I just bust it up.

It's really good. It's awesome. Yes. It's a very well-endowed little flight path. And unlike last week where I found two videos that kind of tugged at the heartstrings a little bit. By the way, I want to do some follow-up on that because I went back and I watched those. One of them, I was completely nonplussed by.

The one with the skeletons. It was cute. It was good marketing. I knew what they were doing from the get-go. But the one with the little girl and the dad, I cried like a little baby. I was grabbing tissues. I'm just like, as soon as she said, my dad's a liar. And I was just like, oh, God, here it comes.

It was just like, I told you. Floodgates were open. I told you, man. Oh, God, it was so good. You were making fun of me. And I was like, that one made me cry. Well, because, yeah. Well, no, I was making fun. Because the first one I saw was the skeletons. And I'm like, oh, this is just marketing crap. Dude, I saved the best for last. You did. You did. I'm putting the videos in order again this way, this time.

Okay. All right. The first video. Yes, you are. Yes, you totally are. The first video is Tinderella, a modern fairy tale. And it was very goddamn funny. It was so good. Yeah, I watched this last night and I was just, I was, I was cracking up. Yeah, it was spot on and well done, guys.

And the second one, I don't even, I don't want to step on this at all. I'm just going to say. I know. Yeah, it's hard with these. Yeah. This one in particular, because you don't know where it's going until it hits the chorus and then it punches you in the gut and you just start laughing hysterically and you realize how spot on and perfect. This guy, I'm going to buy his comedy album based on this video alone.

You need to go watch this. Trevor Moore, The Ballad of Billy John. If you're a Grumpy Old Geeks fan and you've heard us talk about various things online, this guy nails the state of the internet and our human interactions on it perfectly. I know. When you, you were saying that I didn't need to watch it before we did the show.

And then I'm just like, no, no, no. I need to see things. I need to be informed. And then you started playing it. In about 30 seconds in, I just, I had tears. I was laughing so hard. I had tears because it was so spot on with our, the people we've become on the internet.

Yeah. It is so damn good. If you, if you don't listen to anything we say for this entire episode, besides our Patreon stuff, go check out Trevor Moore. And it is so damn funny. Closing shout outs.

So Jason told me a little bit about challenge coins and I realized, well, we're Grumpy Old Geeks and we're online based. So we're going to do challenge bitcoins. Bitcoin challenge. So they'll just do JPEGs. Yeah. Send them JPEGs with some random numbers. Yeah. So if you hit a certain number on our Patreon page, we'll send you a JPEG of a challenge Bitcoin.

Not really in the spirit of it, but I think it's damn funny. Okay. So as doing the closing shout outs, we, we'd like to, you know, do this and, and this is our Academy moment, a hundred episodes. So I would like to throw out a hearty thank you to our first actual, I think, fan who wrote in and kept, kept with us for quite some time.

Beach mama. Oh yeah. Beach mama. She hasn't been around for a while, but you know. She's always here in spirit. Yes, definitely. And a thank you to all of the people that have given us a bit of their bitcoins or regular coins or any sort of coins over the last two years. We're still broke, but we're more buzzed because of you.

Exactly. Thank you very much. And I want to do a thank you to all the guests that came on, even though we don't really do that that much anymore. Yeah. I want to do a hearty thank you to Rudy Jashan, Joey Rabier, Sean Bonner, Tara Brown, Jay Goldman, our in-house troll, Mike Vinicor, Dr. David Teeter, Jordan Cooper, Shane Nickerson, Jordan Harbinger, Scott Beal, Felicia Michaels, Mike Malinan from the Goo Goo Dolls, and Tim Ferris.

Thank you for all coming on. Thank you very much and for spending your hard-earned hours with us. We gave them beer. No, we didn't. Most of them. None of them. We gave one person beer and it turned out to be one of the worst shows we ever had. We got wasted with Joey.

We got wasted with Joey. Teeter, we had beer. Oh, well. Mike Malinan, we had beer. No, we didn't. Oh, no. He called in. He was in D.C. Felicia, we had beer. I thought she drank water. Well, she had a show later. We had beer. Oh, we had beer. We offered her beer.

But see, there's your fault. It's not our fault if you don't take it. Rudy, we gave some beer to, but the rest of them were all remote. All right. Oh, yeah. Mike Vinicor didn't have beer. I was in his house when we did the show, but I had beer. All right. Yes, there wasn't much beer. Scott, no. Jordan, no. Yeah, there wasn't as much beer as you think.

Okay. We got sober after the Joey show because- Jesus Christ. We still get Google traffic for the keyword, ladyboys. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. You know, that was a crazy show. If I could actually go back and delete the first year's worth of podcasts, I would, but- We're not going to.

See, Brian, this is a journey. People can go back when we're dead and see our journey and then try and not emulate it. We are a mile marker for the things that you should not do. When you die before me, which you will, I will bury you with the first hundred episodes. Thank you.

Okay. Can you do it on one of those exploding USB drives? So when somebody plugs it in, just poof. Yeah. All right. As we've mentioned a few times on this show, we now have a Patreon page. And thank you for the Patreon subscribers that hit us up before we even mention it on a show.

What we'll now call the Fantastic Five. Yes. Because we had four, but then Melissa snuck in this morning. So thank you very much. Kenny, Lee, Tara, Jordan, and Melissa. We appreciate you very much. And going forward, we will not be pimping our Patreon page nearly as much. Maybe.

Maybe. It's like a new toy. We have a new toy. It is. So we're going to go edit this and get to the Finn McCool's meetup, and we will talk to you next week. Talk to you next week. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show. No, really. It is.

Go to our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG and pick your level of awesomeness and we'll love you forever. If you can't spell Patreon, you can try the Harry Potter Patronus, but that won't do much. Go to grumpyoldgeeks.com and follow the links. The level of love is still the same. We really appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews.

Please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars. Better yet, turn a like-minded friend onto the show so you can make fun of us around the water cooler on Mondays. You can also find us at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks or twitter.com slash GOG podcast. Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 100.

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