106: Smack Your Remix Up!

Good afternoon, sir. I'm sorry. I'm going to take that out. Yeah, go ahead. 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.

Who said that event-based TV viewing is dead besides Game of Thrones, Jason? I don't know, Brian. Who? Us, a lot of the time. Apparently, it's not true because I don't know if you noticed, but you might have a different demographic on your Facebook feed than I do, huh? I probably have. We have a lot of people in common, but I think I have a whole separate set of demographics of people that you probably don't have as friends.

But my Facebook blew up last night with people mourning the death of McDreamy. Okay, who the fuck is McDreamy? Grey's Anatomy, dude. There's McSteamy and McDreamy. McSteamy died a few seasons ago. McDreamy just died. Okay, I was going to say, I had a McSteamy this morning at around 8 o'clock, but...

And that's the death of our show. Yes, I do not have a Grey's Anatomy type of following on my Facebook feed, so there was absolutely no mention whatsoever of this. Yes, well, I had a feeling that I might have had a separate demographic as part of my friends, and it most definitely did.

I mean, it was just a big event for women of a certain age. So, it still happens, people. The dream is still out there. Well, not McDreamy. He's dead. But, you know. Keeping the McDreamy alive. Exactly. I wonder if they're going to roll that out at McDonald's.

Anyways. I don't even want to go there. I sit on the couch and read a book when these things happen, or I'm down at the bar having a beverage with some friends. But I was on the couch last night, and I was scrolling through Facebook, and outcries, Jason, outcries of anger. Boo-hoo-hoo.

So, let's move on to something that I'm angry about. Okay. I want to propose a new Grumpy Old Geeks rule. This happened to me just the other day, since we now all know that we officially live in a third-world country, and as far as our power grid goes, there's rolling blackouts, power outages, or the new norm.

I'm calling for a new rule. Any device that has a damn clock in it and plugs into the mains for electricity must now, by law, require to have a tiny five-cent watch battery in it to keep the damn clock going when the power drops for two minutes. No, not going to happen.

I know, but it makes sense, doesn't it? Oh, it absolutely makes sense. This would not be a big deal to implement. This should be a standard, and it would save us all from having to walk around our house changing the clocks every damn time. But then you'd have to take it back to the genius bar every time the battery died, and, you know, what are you going to do then?

And it takes up more space, so then you would be a quarter of a millimeter thicker on your phone, and God knows. Johnny, I won't do that. I'm not talking phones. Phones are fine. They have a battery built in. I'm talking, like, stoves and microwaves. Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about your cell phone.

No, no, no. Why would your cell phone clock go out when battery goes out, or when power goes out, unless, of course, your battery is completely dead, in which case you're screwed anyways, which is my new normal, because my iPhone 5 is dying. But, no, I'm talking your stoves, your microwaves, all your house-based stuff that could just have a little five-cent battery in it to keep the clock going when the power drops, as it always does now, because, again, third world nation.

Because that would require $0.30 of electronics in it, and then that $0.30 would probably jump up the cost of about $20. You know? Come on. You have to think trickle down here. I just have ideas, man, and they're just good. They're just like, just go set your clock again.

Come on. Okay. Moving on. So, Apple Watch Day. Yay. Whoopty freaking do. Hey, you're the one getting one. Well, I don't think so, actually. Oh, really? You changed your mind? I've done some more research, and I really don't need any more notifications.

I've turned off most of the things, and I just keep the phone in my... It actually, this giant honk in 6 Plus, it's a reason for me to not take my phone out of my pocket and turn off notifications that aren't necessary, because it is a pain in the ass to take it in and out, because it's so big. So, I'm like, yeah, I really don't need to know when somebody new follows me on Twitter.

I just don't. I turn that one off. I turn a bunch of them off, and it's nicer. So, if I go and get a watch, then I'm just going to get all of the crap again, and it's like, meh, nah. So, maybe by version 2, when they figure out some... to make it more useful, not so damn big, and maybe cheaper, then I might hop in.

But, so far, the only thing that I'm going to do about the Apple Watch is, I went to TweetBot this morning, and I put in a mute filter for the word watch. That's very smart. I knew it was watch day, because every site that I go to for news and, you know, just kind of my normal morning reading has a big article about how excited they are about their new way to get their headlines on the watch, so announcing their app for the Apple Watches.

It's on every site today, and I could care less. Quickly, on your point that you're not getting one, Jason, if memory serves and patterns hold, we will be talking in three weeks about Jason's new watch that he got. Yeah, this could be true. Although, they screwed up, and they're, you know, releasing this expensive-ass bauble, really way too close to tax day, because, you know, tax man cleaned me out.

I'm glad I was broke. No, it's a smart move, because a lot of people do get money back, and they don't think appropriately about the best way to use it, i.e. saving it. Ah, yeah, so we're investing it. I gotta say, I did put in another mute filter. Whatever this damn MyEidol app is that everybody's using, stop, please.

I have no idea what that is. I haven't seen it. Oh, you'll see it soon enough. I think I, my, the people I follow on Twitter are generally a leading-edge indicator of the annoying shit that everybody else is going to be doing in about two to three weeks. So, you will be seeing these little animated movies of people dancing.

Oh, God. Didn't we have something like that before? Yeah, in the 90s. No, we just had Bits strips a couple years ago. Those were super popular for a while. Yeah, okay. This has all happened before. It will all happen again. If you just got your tax return back, and you want to actually make some money, buy Apple stock, not an Apple watch.

Yes, because it is going to drop like a stone soon. And then it will come back. And then it will come back bigger, better, faster, stronger. I would like to give a hearty welcome to our new listeners who come from The Morning Dump with Jordan Cooper and Transmission with Kyle and Kenny Roderick.

Hello, people. Hello, people. We've been running some ads over there to kind of broaden our base. And I have seen a spike in our numbers, which means we do have some new listeners. So, welcome to the show, and we apologize in advance. Yeah, sorry about that.

Don't go back and listen to the first ones. Oh, God, no, no, no, no. We should actually... No, let's leave them up. No, they're staying. They're staying. They are a cautionary tale for other podcasters. Yes. Do not start podcasting by drinking heavily. Yeah, especially when you don't know how to podcast. We're actually doing. Why not? It was fun.

It was fun, yes. It didn't really get us a lot of listeners. But, hey, it was a good old time. That's right. So, we talked about the Star Wars trailer last week. Yep. And I'm guessing you saw the articles. They were going around everywhere. That trailer added $2 billion to Disney's value that day.

That's what happens when Han Solo shows up. I'm telling you. I should have bought stock earlier. I did not. So, I'm hoping for a dip sometime this summer, but we'll see. Yeah, well, there might be a big dip when the movie comes out and it sucks, but we'll see. It's not going to suck. Speaking of sucking, though, BuzzFeed has gone to an all-time low.

I mean, this is the single worst headline I've ever seen. Ever. Well, it is. Wait, wait. Can we guess your age based on the year you were born? Mm-hmm. Well, that's generally how you figure out how old somebody is.

And it says, your birth year says a lot about you, like how old you are. But in keeping with the maxim of, if the headline is a question, the answer is no. They could not get my birthday from the year I was born. They have a 50-50 chance. They did have a 50-50 chance.

They did not get my birthday correct easily either. And you made a really good point. This is a great way for them to get demographic data. So, it was smart. Yeah, it could be just, you know, somebody being really dumb or them being really clever. Either way, it's just, it was a head-scratcher. It was an utter head-scratcher. And the comments reflected that.

If you want to read some amusing comments, go read the comments on that post. Yeah, it was pretty damn funny. We ran into, or I ran into, a great article that basically is everything that we've been saying about Silicon Valley. It is on Salon, but it is not a, the attribution is actually should be alternate.

But what they do is they make it so damn difficult for you to find the original article, I still couldn't. So, I just linked to the Salon article. Yeah, Salon and, that Salon alternate partnership, you can't find them. You cannot go find those alternate articles. Oh, I know. I even Google searched just for the title and alternate, and I could not find the article.

I spent 10 minutes looking for it because I'm terrified of you yelling at me about attributions. Oh, well, I could have told you. When it comes to, when it comes to the Salon alternate ones, don't bother because I've done that. I've been down that rabbit hole before, too. I thought we covered that, like, on a, like, way back in the 30s. We probably did. Yeah, so, yeah, just skip it.

Don't worry about it. Yes. Anyway, great article. Rise of the techno-libertarians, the five most socially destructive aspects of Silicon Valley. So, let's just run through the numbers really quick. Number one, tech products become the byproducts of money-making scheme rather than an end unto themselves. Now, see, this one I really like because when I started building websites and doing the tech stuff, I did it for the love of it.

Didn't think about it for the money. Now, it's just for the money. It's all about the money now. Yeah, it's all about the Benjamins. That's right. Even inspired leaders internalize a worldview which places profits over humane behavior. Uber. Well, as soon as you start to see piles and piles of money, then who cares about your fellow man?

Fuck him. Exactly. Fuck him. The culture encourages a sloppy... I can't say that this morning. Solipsistic. Yeah, too much coffee. Detachment from reality, even as its brute economic strength colonizes everything it touches. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. The valley gets fixated on lame and sometimes anti-social buzzwords.

Yeah. Bro. Disruption. Bro-grammar. Bro. Yo, bro. Finally, Silicon Valley's culture is hurting our economy. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, see shows one through whatever number this is. Yeah, definitely.

I think we need to stop linking to these because, you know, I think they listen to our show and steal our shtick. So I think we're going to have to stop giving these guys any cred whatsoever. All right. And speaking of not giving people any cred, we're going to do this anyways, even though I said we wouldn't. We'll talk about title really quickly one more time. One last time.

Unless, A, a miracle happens and they turn around some profits or, B, they finally shut down. Or Jay-Z becomes an Uber driver and starts posting pictures on WordPress. Yes. So, yeah, there's a good article about the numbers don't lie.

Jay-Z's title music service is already a spectacular flop. App downloads are pushed way down the charts. It's over. It's done. It's... Yep. Nope. Out of the gate. Done. That was one of the most spectacular shark fins in history.

Yeah. And the absolute worst and most tone-deaf rollout of an app ever, which is saying something from Silicon Valley. You know what? Maybe this was all just, you know, a plan by Spotify because Spotify's numbers went way up. So maybe they paid Jay-Z to get title out there just so they could get more subscribers.

It's definitely a possibility. I wouldn't put it past them. And I actually included an article called Data Kills Title by our friend Bob Lefschitz, who I never link to, but this is actually a pretty good article. This is why I'm still subscribed to his newsletter.

I mean, nine times out of ten, I'm tearing my hair out and I want to scream it down the intertubes at him and tell him what an idiot he is. But this one's spot on. He's right sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah. You know, hey, man. And again, it's, you know, I think he was listening to us because half his points are ones we were making. Yeah.

Even a style clock, you know, right every now and again when you throw it against the wall and bash it to pieces. Very good point. In the news. In great news of the week, Comcast is pulled out of the proposal to buy Time Warner.

I am pretty surprised by this and very happy. Yes. What basically happened here was the FCC says, we're going to have to have hearings, which kills it right there. Out of the gate. They don't want to waste the time and the money on that. Well, the thing is, it's like the longer those proceedings are drawn out, the people who are going to profit from the deal on the merger are probably going to leave the company.

So they're like, oh, we're not going to make the money off of it because we're going to bail out with our golden parachute anyway. So we're not going to stick around for it. And this is how the FCC killed the AT&T T-Mobile deal a few years ago. Same exact processes are like, you know what? We need to talk about this a little bit.

So why don't you guys just chill and we'll get back to you when we say if it's okay or not. And that effectively kills every deal like that. Yeah. Well, I'm super excited about this. This is something I did not want to have happen and I was almost positive would. No, I was after last week when we talked about how regulators were saying, yeah, this isn't the best idea.

I had a feeling that it was going to go that way because they are the two most hated companies in the country right now. Yeah, they really are. Yeah, it's like making a supervillain if you let them merge. Speaking of supervillains, Marissa Meyer in their weekly or quarterly earnings call called laying off 1100 Yahooers a remix.

So now Yahoo's remixing, title streamlined, quote unquote, streamlined 25 people out the door. So what is the next douchebag term they're going to come up with? I'm like, hey, I'm sorry, Brian, but we're vacationing you so you can go spend more time with your depression and bill collectors.

I mean, come on. Yeah. When I saw this and I saw that she called it a remix, I was like, oh, that must be the PR launch team from title moved over to Yahoo. It's, again, incredibly tone deaf to have these companies creating these terminologies and downplaying what they're actually doing and trying to make it sound hip and cool is is painful and revolting and just another sign that I does anybody over at Yahoo know what the hell they're doing?

Oh, God. No, no. OK. I'm surprised she didn't say, sorry, guys, we're going to have to disrupt your paycheck. They might as well have. God damn it. Yeah. See previous article from the intro when we talk about people choosing profits over people. Yeah.

I think of all the articles that we put in the show notes, that one angered me the most. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Now, a little follow up on Mobilegeddon. It is now upon us. It is upon us. Oh, sky is falling. Sky is falling. Shut the fuck up.

Well, it is. It kind of is if you haven't bothered to update your site in 10 years. Yeah. There's a lot of those. Yeah. And a lot of them are people that I work for. And, you know, there's some awesome tools out there that let you quickly and easily see if your site is mobile friendly or not.

And basically, you will lose your rankings in the Google search results if you are not. And there's a lot of tools that will help you discern exactly what the problem is. However, there is no handy tool to convince people that they need to spend money to update their sites. Absolutely. That is the big problem.

I wish that tool existed, yes. Yeah, me too. So, I mean, I literally have had some emails basically saying, we don't have any money to put to this, but do what you can to fix it. Yeah. It's called an entire site overhaul. Yeah. You have not updated your site for 10 years because you have not wanted to pay for it.

So, we have to rebuild the site. Yes. This is a minimum five-figure problem. Yes. So, there you go. Oh. Good times. Good times. Now, we've got a series of articles here that kind of goes into a larger theme.

So, we'll start with the first one. The Why Do It For Me is the next big thing. This is a TechCrunch article. It's mainly talking about enterprise software. Yeah. But this Do It For Me movement is kind of a thing now because we talked about all of the concierge services on a previous episode and how a lot of people are just saying, fuck it, let's pay somebody else to do it.

Yeah. And, you know, when I was growing up, it was the complete opposite. It was the DIY movement. Yeah. You know, if there was a gap in something, we filled it with our own, like, you know, elbow grease and on our own steam. Yeah. And now, it's just this set of articles here.

So, now Amazon wants to deliver packages to the trunk of your car if you're in Germany and have an Audi. But it's a pilot program. But the fact of the matter is, it's like, they'll put it in your damn trunk for you. Yeah. Which is, I don't know who came up with that brilliant concept. That's stupid. Probably somebody from Audi.

One would guess, yes. Because it's a new car that has, you know, like, one-time keys to get into the trunk. Which, yeah, yeah, what could go wrong with that? What could possibly go wrong? So, between that and this other one that I'm still scratching my head about here, it's called We Can't Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership.

Now, this article, I think, is very, very important. Yeah, it's probably the most important article in the show this week. Because what they're claiming is that when you buy something, you don't actually own it completely.

They have all of the rights to the software that is the heart of the thing you just bought. And you cannot tinker with it, you cannot open it up, and you cannot modify it. Yes. And to do that is a breach of copyright. Yes. Not good.

No, not good, but not surprising. And this is something that I've been very concerned about as we start to talk more and more, and we're moving more and more into the internet of things. We are taking the software, the apps, everything that's happened in the digital world.

We've already done this to ourselves in the digital world. We do not own our music anymore. We license it through Spotify, through Tidal, all five of you. We do not own movies anymore. We license them through Netflix and through Hulu. We do not own our software anymore.

If you want the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, you are leasing it. You do not own it. And as we are moving into the internet of things, this idea is obviously being pushed into the real world, into physical items that you will no longer own. This is a no-brainer for these companies.

Why wouldn't they want to do this? They've seen this happen, and all of us roll over and accept it virtually. Why not physically? Yeah. I mean, there are people out there that are trying to get this repealed through the Copyright Office. There's the Unlocking Technology Act, the Your Own Devices Act, and fair repair legislation.

But all of this kind of dovetails back to the DIY part where, if I don't own it, how can I do it myself to fix it? Which means I have to pay you to do it for me. Yeah, and that's why we see things like jailbreaking with iPhones becoming more and more popular with certain segments. And it is one of the only, like, I'm not a huge maker culture guy, but I'm cheering for them right now.

Go makers. I like this whole idea of people that are just saying, to hell with that. I'll build it myself, or I'll pull it apart, and to hell with the warranties, and I want to tinker with things. Yeah, the fact is you can go to jail now if you're caught doing it. And at least, you know, there was a big enough stink and a big enough fight where it's now legal to unlock your phones.

Because a couple years ago, not legal. Yeah, it was completely illegal. Yeah. It's just, there's this whole movement towards, you know, just corporate lockdown that sucks. It needs to get changed. Because, you know, if I have a car, and I'm savvy enough to go into the software and figure out a way to make it more, you know, economically friendly, get a few extra miles per gallon out of it, why can't I go in and do that since I paid for the car?

I own the vehicle. And just because your software comes with the vehicle, you know, they're claiming that a rival car company could go in, reverse engineer the software, and then put it in their car. Yeah. And. But they'll do that anyways, and they'll do it illegally and just not tell anyone.

Yeah, that's the point. That's exactly the point. They're just making it harder for us as people to do things to things that we bought with our own damn money. By the way, Jason, do you know what, who we can actually blame for this being popularized? Would you enlighten me? Listen, Mac fanboy, this all started with Apple and the iPhone and they've locked down infrastructure and we all just went, okay.

Well, I think I'll do a little research on that because I'm fairly certain. Yes, I'm sure it's happened before, but I'm talking mass spread and mass acceptance. It's the iPhone. Well, I mean, Steve Jobs always wanted the toaster. He didn't want anybody to be able to go in and tinker with the stuff.

That's always been, that's never been anything outside of what his mission has been. You know, as soon as he comes in, we get the iMac, the iMac, the untinkerable machine. Yes. And it's, it's a long string to get to the iPhone. And it's a, again, it's always why I was a PC guy.

I wanted to be able to open up my computer. I wanted to be able to swap out parts. I wanted to be able to upgrade my video card. I wanted to be able to do all of that and I couldn't do that with a Mac. So I stuck with PC for years and years and years. And then I finally threw my hands up and said, oh, fuck it. I give up. And then you bought my Mac pro that you could do the same thing on.

You could go in and tinker with it and do all that stuff. It's a question of money. They're moving away from that again. Apple is moving away from that again. They're moving back to, they're not even giving you USB ports half the time now. Well, here's the deal. Go get another Mac pro. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, there's an, another article in here called, uh, automakers to gearhead, stop repairing cars, which is, it goes along the same, same thread.

Yeah. And I recommend checking these articles out for sure. They are, they're well worth the reads. And I think in the coming weeks, I'm going to have a little bit more to say about this stuff because we, we've talked a bit about it in the past. And I just think this, this movement towards paying other people to do things for you, I kind of summed it up in the last episode where we talked about it, where I'm like, you're, you're actually hurting yourself when you do these things, especially, especially the people

in big cities where they're paying people to come into their house, do their laundry, fold their clothes, put things away, go buy their food for them. It is, it reminds me of the book, uh, uh, the Nassim Taleb book, anti-fragile, because you're just making yourself more fragile by not knowing your city well enough, not knowing where to go for, you know, critical goods and services.

You're like, okay, I move here. I just pay somebody to bring me groceries. I get, I get vacationed or my paycheck gets disrupted. And then I have to go out and figure that stuff out for myself. Or what if there's, you know, some kind of disaster. These people are just going to be simpering little idiots when problems arise.

And I think that, you know, I'm looking farther out than just, you know, oh my God, I can't get an Uber. Well, I mean, this is, this has always been a trope of science fiction and, and we're starting to see, you know, us heading down the path, which is always a little bit weird. Science fiction has always been a very good bellwether of, of future dangers.

And there are many, many old sci-fi books. I wish I could name one off the top of my head, but I can't right now where the whole theory was, we all learned how to stop doing things and we stopped understanding how things worked. Some sort of disaster hits. We're screwed.

Yeah. I think, I think something that most people can, can relate to that's not like, you know, old school science fiction is the WALL-E-fication of the world. You know, it's, everybody's turning into WALL-E idiocracy. It's, it's, it's all becoming true slowly, but it's happening to the point where it can start to become a problem.

But it, you know, at this point we're screwing up the economy so bad. I don't know if we're going to be able to, to maintain this negative growth. I don't know. I don't know. And speaking of people doing things for you, Twitter's got a new highlight service that gives you a daily digest of curated tweets because apparently you're too damn lazy to go read the tweets yourself now.

Here's your ads. Yeah. Yes. Here's the ads we would like you to see. Mm-hmm. Thanks, Twitter. Yeah. Same with Facebook. You know, we're just going to show you what we want you to see from now on. Don't think for yourself. Don't, don't feel the need to scrub through everything your friends say.

We're going to make it easy for you. Everything's going to be easy. Everything's going to be easy. Yeah. So in increased Twitter news, and again, you're, you're more of the Twitter guy. I dip my toe in, but you actually engage as a social network on there a lot more often than I do. But even I know that Twitter has a massive problem with online abuse and trolling.

And apparently in an effort to curtail it, they're rolling out a bunch of new things, including the dumbest thing I've ever heard to stop harassment, which is opening up DMs or private messages to anyone, because you used to actually have to follow them or they follow you to be able to send a direct message.

And now anybody can send anything to anyone. Now, see, correct me if I'm wrong here. I mean, I actually, you may not know this, but when they first rolled out DMs, I thought you still could basically DM anybody. And then they rolled in the privacy settings that no, there has to be a mutual follow. Yeah.

I believe when they first rolled it out, they, it was open to everyone. And then they experienced unsurprisingly a massive amount of harassment. Uh, apparently they've forgotten about that. Yeah. Um, this is a, this is an opt in, not an opt out. So you have to opt in to let people direct message you.

At least they did that right. Yeah. One thing, right. So, uh, Oh, Twitter. I honestly, I keep seeing just the failures over there of their leadership. And somebody said it this week on, on Twitter. It's like, you'd think that the people who are running Twitter actually don't use Twitter anymore because that's, that's how mind bogglingly stupid all of their, all of their decisions have been.

But this all started from the shutdown of the API. You know, you can, you can trace back the, the idiocy of Twitter when they shut down the API, restricted it, cut out all the third party developers. And ever since then, it has just been a slow decline into hell. Well, in terms of usability and, and good decisions, certainly, but, uh, what they still have, and I, I stand by this is Twitter has the absolute best PR agency in the entire world because you cannot look at a billboard without a hashtag and you cannot walk into a meeting

being a digital professional, such as you and I, without somebody going, we need a hashtag campaign. Well, that was the dude at the airport. I feel bad for Chris Messina because he came up with a hashtag and, and, you know, got a little bit of juice out of it, but man, if he had a, you know, a gazillionth of a cent for every hashtag that was out there, he would be, you know, he could probably buy a burger right now, but.

He should have been like John Deere and just licensed the hashtags to all of us. Seriously. Um, now it's sticking with social media here for a second. There's an article in the new Republic called how click farms have inflated social media currency. This is not really anything new.

You know, click farms have been around since the nineties when, when online ads started. And, but this is an interesting article because it just kind of goes soup to nuts on the entire industry. It is excruciatingly long. Yes, it is. Uh, I, I ended up having to just scan, like I was gonna say scam the rest, but skim the rest.

Uh, but it's worth reading if you're interested in knowing kind of how click farms work, why they work and how they are kind of screwing everything up. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's all gamed. So yeah, it's completely game because you can, you can still buy followers.

You can still buy likes. And these are the people that do that for you. Yeah. And, and moving on from that, there's another article on tech crunch called how the Facebook bubble is driving online startups into the arms of offline advertising. This is a, this is a combination of corporate stupidity and click farms and the, uh, the inflated sense of worth of a like or a follow that is like bleeding over into Facebook's advertising model.

Of course. And, you know, corporations throwing dumb amounts of money into the system are raising the prices across the board. So everybody that was there at the beginning and actually was making good money off of Facebook, putting money in getting more out because their advertising worked are saying it's unsustainable anymore.

We just can't afford like the cost per acquisitions that, that you're giving us now. So it's, it's, it's interesting. And I, I'm wondering if there's going to be kind of a shift back from Facebook back to AdWords because you haven't really heard AdWords in the news very much, you know?

No, no. Google's been very quiet with that. Yeah. Well, I don't think they've been quiet. I think everybody just, you know, Facebook is the new hotness. So that's all you hear in the news. I know a lot of people that still make a decent living buying AdWords ads and for their small businesses and, you know, making a decent profit on the investment.

Yeah. So I think that we'll see more people moving back to there and, you know, going for different venues of advertising, like say on podcasts. Hopefully. Such as ours. Write us an email. Yeah, no, I agree. Facebook is starting to price themselves out of the market.

I mean, I don't think this is all doom and gloom. I think this is just kind of what happens. Facebook's ad prices are ridiculously high right now and the market will reflect that and probably, yes, the AdWords and people will shift back to other things for a little bit and Facebook will have to lower their prices and then people will come back again.

Facebook's not going away, but it is definitely outpriced right now. There'll be an auto correction at some point. Yeah. And then, you know, it'll just be the same cycle over and over again until we get another Facebook and then it'll happen all there again. All of this has happened before. That's what I keep saying.

And it'll all happen again. AdSense, though, isn't standing still. They've introduced matched content, which is a new way to help your visitors discover content on your sites. It's basically them scraping your site, finding, you know, related content, kind of like what Outbrain does.

Right. But since or a series of WordPress plugins, very nasty series of WordPress plugins. I've never gotten any of those to work without crushing a server. If you have if you have anything over like 50 posts, you're screwed. I used to run run that on a site that had about 1500 articles in it.

Oh, and every time you'd post something, it would take like six minutes for it to just sit there and rebuild the database on this massive quad server or quad processor server, you know, 32 gig of RAM. And it would still just bring it to its knees. My friends at WordPress. Yes.

Good times. So Chrome is getting push notifications. Just what we need. Speaking of all of this has happened before and it'll all happen again. More shit to annoy us. I don't need this. We already get notifications.

Look, I already get Facebook notifications if I leave it open. I don't need anything pushed to me. Well, fortunately, you don't have an Android phone. So half of that's out of the out of the window. Chrome desktop will have notifications that you have to. Opt in for, which is good because I never, ever will.

We support opt in. We support opt in, but we also roll out anything you fucking want to, as long as it's opt in. And I just hate when they keep adding more crap to Chrome. And then, you know, we're going to have the Firefox problem. You start off with something lean and mean and awesome. And then it turns into bloatware.

Then the next guy comes along, which is Chrome. Then this is going to turn into something. So maybe Firefox, by the time Chrome gets too bloaty to use, which is pretty damn close to right now. Firefox will have stripped all the crap out of it and come back. But after their last HTTPS everywhere debacle, I'm not really in a rush to jump back to them.

Yeah. Oh. Now, in San Francisco news. Yes. 415 area code phone numbers are selling for thousands of dollars as supply runs short. That's because all of San Francisco is a complete load of fucking smoke and mirror bullshit.

Who cares what area code you have? I understood this back in the day. When I graduated from college here in LA at USC, we were, you know, 213 was the Hollywood kind of area extension. I was getting, excuse me. Well, that was gross.

I was getting a new phone and I was, you know, tinkering with the idea of getting a 310 number and people gasped. Why would you do that? 213 LA all the way. Do you know anyone's phone number anymore? Or do you just press their little face on your phone? I just press the number.

Nobody cares. Nobody gives a shit. It's funny. I have, I have two 415 numbers, so I'm thinking maybe I'll just, you know, sell them. I'd sell them. Why the hell not? I was, I was getting ready to say my number on the air, but I guess that would be a bad idea because I got a pretty cool 415 number, but I don't think I'm going to do that.

That would be dumb. No, but you know, wait until you've sold it, then put it out on the air. Yeah. Ooh. Amazon Web Services came out and said they are now a $5 billion business. You've always touted how good they are. Except I don't really use them anymore.

I've started to move away from them because they, they did have a lot of problems recently and they got too pricey. Yeah. Well, scalability, right? As they were ramping up, they're going to have some problems and their pricing certainly has gone up, which is pretty surprising.

But they're very popular and people like them. There's a lot of stuff you could do on AWS. I mean, no doubt about it. You could, I mean, hell, half the damn internet is built on them at this point, which I don't like speaking of anti-fragile. Yeah. I mean, look, like there was a lightning strike and Netflix goes down.

Remember that? Yes. When a lightning storm in Virginia hit and we just lost Netflix. Sorry. You're out of luck. Yeah. Yeah. I moved to smaller, like more nimble guys like Linode and Rackspace who isn't actually smaller, but pricing wise, they've become pretty competitive with AWS.

And I think I only have one legacy client that's still on AWS. Yeah. I mean, I think that's great. I, I, you and I both kind of feel the same way in that we don't want everything being funneled to these Titans. We want some small, we want the equivalent of small businesses.

Yeah. Yeah. And the smaller guys, you know, better customer service. You try and get somebody on the phone at AWS. You have to spend like 1200 bucks a month to get premium service. And what they're always going to tell you is, oh, well, that's your software. It's not our problem. Okay. And lots of drive failures recently with them.

I've had old clients come back to me and say, uh, we just lost our drive. Do you have a backup? And I'm like, I deleted your, your account two years ago. I don't keep software from previous clients. Sorry. Yeah. Backup people. Remember your backups. Although backup locally and not to another AWS drive or another partition on the same AWS drive that your main server runs on, which I've seen people do.

Oops. Oopsies. Now Google Fi. Do we give a shit? Do we, do we actually care anything about this? I kind of do. Uh, because do you have an X of six? I do not. Okay. Well then it shouldn't matter to you. No, it doesn't matter to me specifically.

I'm not going to go get Google Fi, but I do like the disruption element that this might bring to the wireless carriers. So I hope it scares them a little bit. And I hope Verizon and AT&T and all the rest will, will have to take a long, hard look at themselves. Yeah.

I mean, it's more competition. We like more competition. Yes. We like competition. Would I ever go on? Would I ever use their service? No, I don't think so. Again, it's, I'm not going to go to another just gigantic company that's trying to take over another aspect. I mean, do I hate Verizon?

Yes. Do I hate all the carriers? Yes. Will I probably hate Google service too? Yes. And Google service is like, you know, it's a pay to play. It's just like, what are the cheapies out there now? You just, you know, you spend 20 bucks, you get some minutes. Yeah. It's nothing, it's nothing groundbreaking.

What they're trying to say is that, okay, if you're in a spot where your cell signal sucks and there's wifi, we'll automatically bounce you to it. Yeah. And I, do I really want all my stuff bouncing through random wifi connections? I mean, granted, I'm, I'm assuming they're all going to be owned by Google, all these wifi spots that, but you know, assume.

And that is the other reason that I think this is interesting. And I do care for it because I think it's going to make Google, if, if this takes off at all for Google, they will make an effort to bring a lot better wifi all over the nation and we need it again, third world nation people.

Well, yeah. And they're still working on it with Google fiber. So once they have fiber in place, then they can, you know, put up wifi hotspots all along the fiber lines. Yes. We'll see. We'll see what they're, what's going to happen with them. I would, I wouldn't leap into it, but you never know. This could be, this could be something. And, uh, you know, the target market that they're going after obviously is, is if your phone is mission critical, you're not going to want this.

But if you're a kid and you can barely afford your cell phone bill, this might be good for you. Yeah. I'm sure there's going to be some kind of interesting innovations that they'll be able to do with that with decoupling from other carriers and not having to have contracts and being able to get cooler, cheaper phones. We'll see. We'll see how it plays out.

It's going to be another two, three years before it gets to somewhere we can even, you know, find. Yes. But now, now for the record, I, there are four Uber articles here. None of which I put in. I know. I know. I know.

Well, these are, these are, these are different, you know, most of your Uber articles were always about how they're just, you know, douchebags and skirting, skirting the law and saying, screw you to regulators and all this stuff. I bring in human interest stories when it comes to Google.

I mean, not Uber, Uber, not Google. Uber. So, you know, I'm a first adopter Uber hater. Everybody else is just getting in on my game now. I know. I know. You still have the t-shirt from when they were cool. I would say, so Uber's facing a lawsuit claiming bias against blind riders. And mainly it's because they've got service dogs.

And a lot of guys who have nice cars don't want the dogs in the car. Yeah. Kind of, kind of understandable at some point, but. Yeah. But again, this, the, the whole, oh, this, this will just get me off on a service dog or service animal tangent, which I will rant for hours about.

But this was the real reason that Uber, you've got to let people that are blind in with, but then it opens it up to, I've got a service car, dog, animal car, blah, blah, blah. Let me take my elephant into your Uber. Or my fucking chihuahua. Whatever. Paris Hilton with her fucking dog and a goddamn purse that started all this shit.

Yeah. Here's the deal. If you're an Uber driver, get a blanket, put it in the back seat, let the dog in and shut up. Yeah. And in strange news, Uber driver with a concealed handgun prevented a mass shooting here in Chicago. Mm-hmm.

This is a cool story. I thought. Yeah. Guy with a CCW permit, had his gun on him, saw some guys start to shoot at people, stopped the car, got out and took him out. Okay. That's pretty much it. I mean, that's the extent of the story. The guy's not going to get charged because it was self-defense and he probably saved some people's lives.

All right. Outlier story. It's a total outlier story. I mean, it could have just been driver. It didn't even have to be an Uber driver because Uber has absolutely no connection to this story. None whatsoever. It's just a dude in a car that had a gun shot somebody else, but it had Uber in it.

So, you know, it made the rounds. Yes, yes. And you and I have very different opinions about handguns and gun control. So we'll move on. Yeah. Now, this isn't even actually an Uber story. It just has it in the title. And it's Heal wants to be the Uber for doctors making house calls. What could possibly go wrong with this?

Yeah. And, um, yeah, if, if, I don't even know where to start with this because. Do they have like Heal premiums so you get a better doctor if you pay more? That's the point. It's like how shitty of a doctor is going to be coming to your house for like, you know, bargain basement prices.

Yeah. Do they, are they not employed as doctors already where they're working 20 hours a day, healing the sick, working in the ERs, doing all this stuff? Like what kind of doctor are you going to get? You are going to get, you know, Joe Schmo doctor. I don't know who, whatever.

I mean, you can, you can, you can imagine for yourself what kind of people are going to be using this unemployed doctors who can't get a job. Yeah. That's. Well, what I particularly like about this is that Heal has raised $3.7 million in seed money so far from the likes of, wait for it, Lionel Richie.

Ooh, I guess they wouldn't let him in on the title round. Title for doctors. That's what this is. Security. Jason.

Brian. I hear Patreus Petraeus. God. Preaching. Yes. David Petraeus is getting no jail time. A hundred thousand dollar fine for leaking nine black binders, not of women, but of state secrets.

See, and you keep going with the binders of women joke, which falls flat every time. I know. I know. I'm the, I tell you what, laugh at it once and I'll never use it again. Okay. I'll take that. I'll, you know what? That's good enough for me. Actually, we're never going to do this story again because it's done. He got off scot-free, done.

Well, a hundred grand and whistleblowers are still, they're decades in jail. The government's still going after them. But the upside of this ruling or deal or whatever the hell you want to call it, nepotism, whatever, blackmail, is that people that are up on charges for whistleblowing can use this as a case to get, uh, more lenient sentences.

Okay. And hopefully that'll be the case. Eh, we'll see. So one good thing kind of sort of came out of this, maybe. Yeah. Hopefully that will be the good thing that came out of it because the rat bastard deserves to, uh, get at least a little more than a wrist slap. Yeah. Or, you know, call him a whistleblower.

But he wasn't whistleblowing. He was using it for his own personal memoirs. He wasn't really blowing any whistles. He was getting his whistleblown, but that's about it. No, he was using it for profit. But he's going to write a book and, you know, there you go. Profit. That's not the magical. Uh, so I want to talk about Fight 215.

Uh-huh. This is a website set up by our good friends, I believe, at the EFF, ACLU. There's a ton of people. But I think the main, uh, main sponsor for this is the EFF. And it is a site to help people, uh, fight, uh, what was it? What, 215? It was, uh, Section 215.

I don't remember what it was, the 215. I knew it was something 215. Um, that is what, it's a part of the Patriot Act that the FBI and the NSA have used to justify their mass surveillance. Yeah. And here's the problem. Uh, I hadn't heard of it until you posted in the show notes.

Here's the other problem. There are more people down at the bottom of the site that are supporting this than have actually supported it, judging from the tweet and Facebook and Google Plus numbers that they are running on the side. Well, that's why you and I are telling people about it right now. Let's get the word out.

Come on. All right. Let's get the word out. Fight 215. Yeah. 215, it violates the privacy of millions of innocent people. It's unconstitutional and illegal. Section 215 of the Patriot Act was reinterpreted in complete secrecy to allow the surveillance of everyone without suspicion.

One federal judge who ruled on the program's legality after it was revealed to the public called it beyond Orwellian and likely unconstitutional, and it doesn't make us any safer. So it does not go check out. This is basically everything we've talked about in security.

This is what they use to do the things that they do. And since the Patriot Act is up for, you know, review and renewal, now's the time to do it. It is a good time. Get on it, people. Look at it. Once you've finished installing 1Password, go to...

In one sentence, you just dismiss the entirety of our 105 previous episodes. I'm not entirely sure why we do this security segment. No one listens. I know, but it's fun. Okay. It's fun. Come on. Remember the story about the FBI when they dressed up as a internet repairman and they cut the cable to a suspect's room and snuck in?

Yeah. Yes. Well, the judge says, you can't do that. That is naughty. Don't do it anymore. And he threw out all the evidence that they actually collected from their illegal sweep of this guy's room. Good. Yeah. I was like, see, good news in security for a change.

Some people are coming around. All right. But bad news. Oh, no. Take me on such a roller coaster, Jason. I know. Well, here, this one, this white hat researcher who actually does research on aviation systems in planes made a very, very stupid tweet while he was on a plane.

He says, I find myself on a 737-800. Let's see. Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM. Shall we start playing with the EICAS messages? Pass oxygen on anyone? So I guess the Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM link caused a bit of a stir and somebody saw that and the FBI was waiting for him when he landed and he was detained for several hours and they took all his stuff.

One could argue he was doing whistleblowing activities. Well, he was, you know, he's speaking at RSA in San Francisco this week on, you know, security and airlines and things like that. But this was just so supremely stupid. Yeah. That was dumb. That I, part of me says, you got what you deserve, you dumbass.

You know? Yeah. And the other half says it might have been a little bit of an overreaction, but, you know, because if he was actually doing anything, what kind of person would say that? But if there's, see, that's, that's the chicken and the egg problem with this. If you're dumb enough to post this, are you dumb enough to do it? Right.

Well, it doesn't matter. The problem is when you post it, there are other people that are dumb enough to do it. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, I, this has brought up the, I mean, I saw this has made it not this particular story, but this has opened up the whole debate again that even made it to, you know, the today show, which is, do we allow wifi on planes now?

You know, first we said we can't have it because it's not safe. And then they said, well, of course it's safe. Now we can have it. And now they're going, well, shit, maybe it's not safe. Well, the thing is those systems are so segregated and they spend so much time and money on like aviation safety. There is no way that they're going to plug the entertainment system into the avionics.

You know, we say things like that, Jason, but what does our history tell us? When it comes to aviation, I'm fairly certain I can state that as a fact. All right. Prove me wrong on that one. And then I'll never fly again. But for now I'm going to say that the, uh, the crappy Linux based aviation entertainment systems that they have that reboot on me all the time.

I can't crash one of those just by pressing enough buttons. Not even any specific buttons you get on Virgin America, you press the buttons a bunch of times and it just reboots and crashes. They have the worst one. It's, it's not good. But then you get the little penguin while you watch it reboot for 15 minutes and then you land.

But the downside is when you break it, you can't order any booze. So if you're going to crash the entertainment system on a Virgin America flight, get your booze first, then crash it. But because of the first one, they used to be able to play Doom on that thing when they first came out.

I don't know if you can anymore, but anyway. Random tangent. You can now download your Google search history. Wee. I like that. We've always complained about not being able to get our information out of, out of people and they're letting you download your entire history, which I don't have turned on.

That's the thing. You have to have had it turned on. And I think seven or eight times on this show, we've talked about going and turning it off. Right along with using one password and then going to the fight for 215 thing. And I do know people that have gone in to Google history and turned it off based on what we said on the show.

Because, because you know why one password cost you 40 or 50 bucks to get the suite going to Google and turning off your history free. It is free and you should do it and you should do it immediately. And we have links to the show notes so you can teach you how. Yes. Very, very simple. There's two links in the show notes.

Just run with it and turn it off. Yes. Because it could be embarrassing. Very. Actually download it first so you can laugh at yourself and then turn it all off. And then encrypt it and put it in one password. And delete it completely. And then go to fight 415.

215. Okay. So in really scary news, PayPal wants to integrate password with human body. Okay. Now, the Hacker News is a website that is not actually the best written that I found.

No. It is terrible. This was barely English. It feels like they got like some Filipino intern who has been to like two English classes to write these things. And it's not very well written. But the information in it is interesting.

But, comma, why killing passwords? This is written as well as I'm sure there will be like the crazy, you know, right-wing Christian fanatics that say that this is Satan coming into our bodies. I know. Article talking about this will be written.

That's how well written it is. I can't even talk about it. This is horrible, Jesus. I know. It is. That's half the reason I put it in here. I'm like, the stuff that PayPal wants to do is utterly ridiculous to begin with. But just the Hacker News is pretty funny.

I mean, seriously, if anybody needs an editor, they need one bad. And a spell check. And here's the thing. Yeah. If they had WordPress running, you know, and installed Jetpack, just the grammar proofreading alone would probably, you know, fix their problem.

Yes. Well, you know, this is the standard article that comes out every now and then, you know, once every five years or so, some tech company will come up with the idea of, hey, we're going to give you a device that you can put in your body to control everything. And everybody kind of goes, no, you're not. No, no, you're not. I remember crime stories here in Chicago where if you were wearing a nice watch at night, they would chop your hand off just to get the watch because it was faster than holding you up.

They would just grab your arm, take a machete, and chop your arm off. Now, if you have, like, the tokens to your bank account stuck in your arm, coming off right away. Right away. So, anyway, yes, it's a silly article, but it's a fun read just for the butchering of the English language.

Yes. Good times. And I figure you might like this one because you like to rant on open source every now and again. Critical vulnerability found in Magento e-commerce platform. Now, this is in the core of Magento, and this was disclosed to them back in January, and I'm still getting emails from them, you know, once a week saying, go upgrade.

Please, please go upgrade because it turns out about 50% of the Magento installs out there right now are vulnerable. Yeah, and they're probably run by companies that decided not to keep anybody on the staff that actually knows how to do this stuff because everything's running great. We're selling things. Yeah, or they're cobwebsites that are on a shared hosting platform, which then, you know, gets compromised.

It's, you know, these cobwebsites out there are never going to get updated or patched, and they're just time bombs, time bombs. But if you run Magento, and why on earth would you? It is so terrible. Let's go get a Shopify account, and you should go probably patch yours if you've got one.

Yes. Go do it now. Save the internet, please. And get one password. And get one password.

I want to give a big shout-out to our new Patreon subscribers, Miranda, Brad Lavis, and Jason Bryant. Thank you so much. We really do appreciate it, and that is our preferred method of supporting the big old show now. So go check us out at patreon.com slash GOG.

I want to make a quick note to folks that paid up on Patreon and wanted the Among Us tracks. Please write us and let us know if we did not get them to you. We kind of dropped the ball a little bit on that one, so let us know. We'll get them out to you, and we will make sure that we keep that up for you new ones that join. Oh, we become what we hate.

Yes. People on crowdfunding who fuck up the rewards. We are now them. We are not giving out rewards. Okay. We got this through the email, I believe. Robbie writes, I love your show, guys. It gets me to and from work most days. My question is, where do you guys host your podcast?

A few weeks ago, you mentioned hosting your own podcasts to monetize it, so I was wondering if you host through the website or an audio service. Also, I noticed a SoundCloud link up in the top, but I only saw two episodes available. Thanks, guys. Short answer is, we host with Libsyn, L-I-B-S-Y-N.com, and if you are going to sign up for hosting there, use the coupon code GOG at checkout to get up to two months free.

Yes. On the SoundCloud side, we did experiment with SoundCloud just to do, like, you know, try and branch out to a bigger audience, and it was a total flop because SoundCloud is just SoundCloud. Yeah, SoundCloud is going away, and we also threw up a couple episodes on YouTube, but we decided not. It was too much effort and time involved to put it up in a bunch of places when it's so easy to get and listen to anyways.

Yes, the ROI was just not there, but thank you, Robbie, for the heads up on the SoundCloud link. It has been removed. Yes, thank you. And, yeah, what's this about, monetizing podcasts again? Yeah, we also got three, count them, one, two, three, new five-star iTunes ratings, the first from AFlag00, awesome.

You guys have a great show, very thorough. I didn't know what I was missing. This is my first iPhone. It's a 5S. I got it in February. I can't believe I've been missing out on podcasts. You both have such pleasant-sounding voices. I'm so glad to be listening to your show. So much good things to hear from gadgets to search engines to everything else.

Thank you so much. And Stumpy Crayfish writes, I love this podcast. This is both funny and informative with the best book recommendations. One of the few podcasts where I actually bother to view the show notes. Thank you, Stumpy Crayfish. Yeah, Jason in particular appreciates that because he bitches about how long they take to put together.

Yes, they are a pain in the ass, but we love them anyway. Yes, and the third one, Rockin' Blogger, one of the best tech-related podcasts, full stop. I've listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of tech podcasts, but Grumpy Old Geeks is the best of the lot. It's meant for a mature audience, fuck yeah, who appreciates the truth about the internet and tech in general.

While I may not agree with 100% of what they say, 99% they are right on the money with their interpretation and breakdown of what's going on in the world of tech. Give it a listen, and I guarantee you'll be hooked. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think we have a new ad copy there. That's great. Yeah, I know. We're not going to pay you for it, but thanks.

Okay, and we got an email from Herb. It says, for obvious reasons, and in parentheses, the incredible, disturbing, without serial murders, Amazon pilot. Okay, I'm a little confused on that one, but he said, I went back and read The Man in the High Castle in audio.

Brilliant, and think about him writing it in 1962. So this actually got me on a kick to go, I'm really thinking, yeah, I do want to read the book now, because the Amazon pilot for The Man in the High Castle was really good, and it's getting made. Go check out a couple episodes ago if you want to hear our talking about that.

So I went on a hunt to find the audiobook of The Man in the High Castle. It turned into quite a bit of a challenge. I'm not going to go through the entire challenge here. If you would like to hear the entire challenge, I made an episode of my Vapid podcast that just covers the entirety of trying to find this audiobook.

There'll be a link in the show notes. It is Vapid 39, called The Pirate in the High Castle, so you can probably figure out where it's going to go from there. Talk later, didn't listen version. Make things easy to find if you don't want people to steal them. Yeah, and sell it in my country. Speaking of The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, I did eventually get a copy of it, and I listened to it through my ear holes.

And it was interesting, because the version that I found was from somebody who digitized the audio cassette version of it. So about every 45 minutes, it said, please flip the tape and start from where you are. Nice. But it was read by George Gwadell, who's one of my favorite people.

And the funny thing at the end is, like, if you would like to hear more of our books on tape, please call us at this number, or you may fax us here for a catalog. I would have faxed. I know. It was pretty cool. So this is a book about—it's like an alternate history book if the Nazis in Japan had won the war.

World War II, that is. Right. I assumed. I figured. But I'd just like to clarify for our younger listeners who have no idea who the Nazis may be. The Spanish Banana War. Yeah. It was good. It wasn't great. Right. I enjoyed it, but it kind of went off on some weird tangents, and I was expecting something different.

And I think probably watching the pilot screwed me up a bit. Right. I got you there. So, yeah. While it was a good book, it didn't kind of go where I thought it was going to go. And they changed a lot in the pilot, like quite—basically, the pilot is inspired by, because there was almost nothing that was recognizable in the pilot that was in this book.

That's pretty usual for Philip Dick adaptations. They rarely stick to his original scripts. I actually, personally—I know this is a heresy, but I think he's a little overrated. I think he's got great ideas, but I don't actually care much for his actual writing. You know what? I think I'm going to have to agree with you on that one.

I'm going to have to agree. It was lackluster, I thought. I mean, I'd give it about a three out of five. All right. And I would tell people to go download the audiobook and listen to it, but you can't. Go listen to Jason's Vapid Podcast. I'll tell you exactly how to do it, and then you can have the moral conundrums that I have to live with.

Yes, and I am continuing my march through the Dune universe, and I just finished reading God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert, which is the monolithic gigantor one with massively gigantic, huge ideas. And it was absolutely fantastic.

One thing I did forget, though, I was a little disappointed with the end, because he pulls a little bit of the—what's your favorite movie, Jason? Where the fifth element is love. Oh, yeah. The Matrix. There's a little—yeah, it seems to, you know— Love conquers all.

Yes, love conquers all, apparently, and it's all about the love. But that was a little sad, so the last ten pages, I was a little bummed out. But there's still two more original Frank Herbert books to go, so I'm continuing my march. Would you hurry up already? On the plus side, I've picked up another book, so I'm going to read that first before I get into the rest, so I will have something interesting to talk about and new next week.

Oh, my goodness. And speaking of that, we had talked a while back about how I'd set up Google Alerts for authors, because it's so hard to find actual information about when things are coming out these days, because everything is so scattered and fragmented, and we don't see half the Facebook ads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Amazon rolled out something similar called Amazon Notifications, obviously, where you can sign up with specific authors, and you will get an email when they have a new release coming out. And I finally got one. I got my very first email. You have subscribed to new release emails from Greg Baer. You won't want to miss this new book.

This is great. It's all well and good. But this book doesn't come out until October. Good God. Never going to remember this. I am not going to hold on to this email until then. So what would actually be useful is if you sent me one day of release. We will see if that happens. Or even like a week before. Or even a week before. But like months, well, obviously, they want you to go and do the pre-order.

Yeah, it's all about pre-order. But I don't do that. No, that's way too far out. That's way too far out. So tighten that up a little bit, Amazon. Yeah, seriously, guys. Get on it.

Media Candy. Brian, did you ever watch tech TV back in the day? Once or twice. It was on a very bizarre channel that I never seemed to find. Okay, so you were not a fan of The Screensavers way back when, like most of us older nerds were.

You missed that one. I missed out on all of that. I think that was the period of time that I was actually spending a lot of time drunken clubs. Ah, yes. I was home alone in the winter and watched it every day, twice a day. Anyway, The Screensavers was just a seminal show on tech TV.

With Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton. Okay. It was the top gear of tech. Right. Absolutely. And what made that show good was the fact that Patrick and Leo had the most perfect rapport. Okay. They offset each other. It's, you know, you had the dopey Leo.

You had the, you know, Patrick has the brain. And the thing about it was it was just a classic. And then it disappeared and came back in a couple other forms. But anyway, it's back. Okay. And it is back with just Leo. Apparently he got the rights to it and it's called The New Screensavers.

Now, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not, this is not allowed to happen. You have strong feelings about this. This is, this is bullshit. This is just like bringing Top Gear back without Jeremy. You can't do it. They're going to. So it's just going to fail just because you have a name in a logo and a theme song does not make the show.

You know, Brian, if you were to die in some random trivia accident one night, I would not try and bring the show back without you because this show is us, you know? Okay. That's the way it should be. So the new screensavers, um, I'm going to go, I'm going to give this one a go flying fuck yourself.

That's what I'm going to say to that one. All right. What is Patrick Norton doing these days? Why didn't I, why did he not come back? He's apparently going to do some guest segments on the show, but if he's not the co-host, then it doesn't matter. He's doing a bunch of other video stuff. Uh, he was working at Rev3 for a long, Revision3, sorry.

I was using the shortcut, uh, Revision3 for quite a long time. That's the last time I saw him. He was on a show, uh, called, uh, Techzilla with Veronica Belmont. And I, I used to, I see them over there while they were doing that. And that's the last time I talked to him. So I'm not sure what he's up to now.

I've kind of fallen, uh, off track with him since I'm not in the same neighborhood and can't go out and hang out with him. Okay. But anyway, uh, Netflix has ordered a second season of Daredevil. So you, you now officially have license to go watch it. All right.

I will go watch it because I'm the one that convinced you to go watch it because somebody of my friends said it was so good. So I will get in. I will get in on this. Yes. And since to, to watch, uh, some of the other stuff I talked about, I got HBO now. I signed up for it. I've been digging into vice.

Oh, it's, it's so well done, but so fucking depressing. So depressing. It's nightmare inducing. I watched like eight episodes before I went to, like, I was just working and I had it on in the background. And like, when I went to bed that night, just nightmares. Again, uh, real chart, real journalism.

Oh, the world is ending. Everybody's trying to kill everybody else. There's like, I look under the couch and there's a slave labor organization going on. It's just like terror everywhere. The sky is falling. I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to go back and watch entourage. Fuck this.

That is the problem. That, that is the real problem I have with vice. Cause I agree with you. It's insanely good. And it's very, very, very depressing. And that is the problem because I usually, my, my DVR records the episodes when they come up and I roll into it coming out of Bill Maher, which is already pretty damn depressing.

I, I, you can't, you can't do those back to back. I know that's the problem. I got to change my viewing habits with that because that has been what I've been doing. And I ended up going like basically, you know, where's my bottle of wine. I want to go to bed and never wake up. Dude. That's like watching Bjork's dancer in the dark alone after your cat died.

You just can't do that. That is just not the way to go. That sounds like such a horrible day. I know. Oh, we will never review that movie on does it have legs. I can guarantee you that single most depressing movie I've ever seen.

It's pretty bad. Oh, but what's not depressing is the prodigy has a new album. The day is my enemy. I like it. You know, again, going back to the same thing with the Amazon alerts for books. I had no idea that this album came out this week.

None. Zero. I have. The only way I found out about it is because my roommate MXV last night, we were, we had the Hawks, Bulls, whatever the hockey team here is in Chicago. We had that on TV, but he was playing records and he pulled out a glow in the dark seven inch of the prodigy's new single Ibiza.

And he starts playing it. And I'm like, I've heard this song before, which it's almost identical to a song on invaders must die. So I'm going to have to do a, you know, a comparison on that because I finally remember the song. But anyway, it was still catchy as hell. And I liked it. So yeah, this morning, that's all I've been listening to. I like it at 11 and I'm digging it.

I listened to the album too this morning, which put me in a weird mood. Uh, my main, again, it's like, I like the prodigy a lot and I like them on Facebook and I was aware that they were in the studio recording, but there is no more real music journalism. There is no more magazines. Uh, you cannot see anything, uh, online about anything because Facebook won't show you posts all the time unless they, the prodigy mans up and pays for it.

I had literally no idea this album came out and this is a band I really love. Um, listening to it this morning, this is a, so far a very good album. I was insanely disappointed by their last two releases. I did not care much for invaders must die. I did not care much for always outnumbered, never outgunned.

Um, I put a link in the show notes to the prodigy, the fat of the land, which if you do not own it as a seminal album, it is one of the best of brand, uh, best of genre. It is a fucking fantastic album, uh, and still is, but this new one is, has gotten my interest. Yeah, I'm digging it.

And I agree. Fat of the land is the, their best work. You cannot beat it. And does have legs. It sounds just as relevant today, which is very rare for electronic acts. No, that's in my monthly rotation. I, I listened to that while I'm working. So I hear that at least once a month.

And honestly, if you've never seen the unedited video of smack my bitch up, you are, you, you're, you're culturally bankrupt. You have to go see that video. Yeah. That, I mean, you know, you know, this is, we're talking to a world that doesn't even have music videos anymore. And if they do, they're, you know, done, done for like five bucks.

But this one was groundbreaking. It, it, it shocked people. It caused people to get very angry and upset and it was insanely well done. Oh, insanely well done. I miss, I miss those days. But the fun thing about Prodigy is they're my age. Yeah. 43. Yes, they are.

Which, you know, Buzzfeed couldn't figure out. So let's talk about Ex Machina or Ex Machina. Uh, yeah, this is something that you'd think we both would have been aware of, but I've only started to hear about it this week and it came out April 10th. So we're two weeks behind on this one.

And I saw the first trailer for it today. You know, it's a movie about catastrophic AI, which you'd think would be, they should have sent us review DVDs. Yeah. Come on, but no, so I'm going to have to, uh, we're going to put a link to the trailer in the show notes. I I'm going to have to get off my ass and go to the theater and see this one.

Yeah, this actually looks really good. The trailer did not offend me. It did not, it didn't seem dumbed down at all. And it's a great concept. So, um, and the site's actually well done too. Yeah. Congratulations to whoever did this. Yeah. Yeah. I bet you didn't get paid for it and you did it for the, uh, you know, the prestige.

I'm sure you got paid next to nothing for it. And rounding out, uh, media news this week, Canadians, I don't know why I stuttered on that. Canadians are leading Game of Thrones pirates and HBO is cracking down.

All right. All right. That's all I got. That's all I got. Yeah. Okay. Well, I've yeah. Go Canada. I guess they're not so nice after all. No, that's, it's, uh, again, I spent a lot of time in Toronto. Um, the thing that we forget about, and it is a bit different from the U S that Canadians pay an awful lot for their media access.

There are no unlimited bandwidth programs. Um, charges are much higher than they are here. So the fact that they've opened up an easy way for people to basically share things and pirate things is not surprising because, uh, all this stuff costs a shit ton there. Well, Rogers is the devil.

Yes, they are. Moron of the week. And, uh, for a returning champ of moron of the week, Gwyneth Paltrow is back. Oh yeah. Now, um, yeah, she tried to live like a poor person on food stamps.

It was like, you know, $29 a week. Yeah. And, uh, failed after a couple of days. Yeah. Miserably failed. Yeah. And, uh, if you're interested in more on this topic, I recommend checking out the internet outrage machine, number 18, the, uh, baby got cat episode where I was a shotgun guest with about five minutes notice.

And we talk about it ad nauseum there. But the, the gist of the story is that, uh, Gwyneth Paltrow is a douchebag. Yeah, I, uh, I agree with that. I mean, I, you know, she's established herself as a brand and a, in a high end lifestyle brand. And when she tries to lower herself down to us, regular people, she just ends up looking like an idiot.

Just stick with the $10,000 dinners and, you know, recipes from your friends who are all, you know, famous chefs. Just don't bother with this stuff anymore. Just stop it. I mean, to be fair, she does donate to the cause. So she is putting her money where her mouth shouldn't be, but, but taking this challenge and not doing it seriously just is, you know, it's an affront to the people who have to live on that much.

And you could say, she's flipping it around saying, I can't do it because it's not enough money. Let's raise more money for it. But I'm pretty sure that wasn't her intent. Yeah. And that's, that's where I have the problem with it. If it was her intent to raise awareness by saying, nobody can do this. This is ridiculous.

Even though millions of people do it every day, you know, there's, anyway, there's no lack of articles bashing on her for this. So yeah, no, she just needs a new PR company. I miss the old days when the incredibly rich and famous people just lived incredibly rich and famous lives and then quietly gave a lot of their money to charity.

Bring back Robin Leach. Sure. Why not, uh, in continued moronity, uh, I've got another one and, and how could, I don't know how we haven't had him in here before. He's got to be a returning one. Kanye. Oh, Kanye. So he has his own paper magazine cover where he wrote a nice article about himself.

Oh, nice. Yes. It's an upbeat personal essay. Uh, just, we have a link in the show notes, not to the article. We have a link to a salon, a breakdown of some of the lamer things. And it just makes me very, very angry. And Kanye is a returning guest because if you remember, he got all upset because of the Photoshop jobs of the paper article with.

Oh, right. Remember the whole family and the baby and all that stuff and, and him kissing himself that, that video too, uh, or that, that Photoshop job. He's been in here a couple of times. Kanye is no stranger to moron of the week. Yes. Just so you know, Kanye, you know, he knows people want to talk about the American dream, but his dream is a world dream.

It's a world in which everyone's main goal would be to help each other. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's, that's the Kanye I know. And finally, I wanted to put Ben Affleck in here because he's had a little dust up. Thanks to actually WikiLeaks. Uh, the WikiLeaks dump of the Sony hack revealed that Ben Affleck had asked PBS's Finding Your Roots to edit out any references to a slave owning ancestor that he had.

Hmm. Oopsies. Yeah, that's not cool. I, I mean, I, I actually wanted to pass on this one because I didn't want to do anything with the WikiLeaks, but, uh, you put it in, so it's, it's news. It's already out there. So it's out there and it's probably the only thing that's really come out of the dump that, uh, they put up the Sony hack that people didn't already know.

And, you know, I just find it amusing that if the show is called Finding Your Roots, you can ask them to take out things that you didn't like about it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I, I, I, to be rich and famous. I know, but the, the funny thing is it's got roots in the title and he's talking about slave ownership.

So you built, make your own joke on that one. I'm not going to. Wise man. At least not until we hit stop. Are you kidding me? Love it. So Brian, you were, you were trying to quit smoking before and you were, you were vaping for a while.

How's that going for you? I've got it in front of me right now. Now, are you a competitive vapor? Uh, no. Because in this article I found from the wall street journal this morning, competitive vaping is now a thing. Okay. I, I, I, I thought it was the onion.

I honestly thought it was the onion. This goes along with the article that we posted a couple of weeks ago. About the truck drivers down South who are anti-environmentalist and just want to spew as much crap into the air as possible. And I thought maybe this was just a followup to that, but they, uh, the, this is on the wall street journal and the article says, and I quote, and this is what drives me crazy about this.

The origins of this sport are somewhat, smoking is a fucking sport. Oh, how far we have fallen as a nation. I mean, whatever, you know, there's competitive beard growing, there's competitive mustaches.

This is probably the same group of people. Why not? And you probably get, you get an award for just showing up and smoking. Yes. Now you see, if it was a competitive smoking thing, I would think it would be French because you know, they would like to hang out in their cafes with their baguettes and look cool while smoking.

So who looks the coolest while smoking? That could be a contest. It's still not a sport, but. See, how much do you get laid with your cigarette? Not much anymore, but back in the fifties, it was a good thing. I tell you what, the best anti-smoking ad that ever came out was the one with, with the limp cigarette.

They're like smoking makes your dick soft. And it was after that, it was just like a rush to the garbage can. Everybody's throwing their cigarettes away. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to, you want to get somebody to stop something, say it just makes your dick not work. And this one, I don't think these guys are getting laid anyway, because it is, you're, you're blowing smoke.

You're literally just blowing smoke. The only thing that really depresses me about this is yes, it does sound like it's from the onion, but it's actually the wall street journal. Yeah. I don't know who's, who should be more embarrassed. The people in the article or the people that wrote the article. I think the wall street journal should wins, wins the embarrassment crown on this one.

Okay. I'd like to give a quick shout out to the internet outrage machine. Number 18, baby got cat, which I mentioned previously a link for that will be in the show notes. You can go, uh, listen to me as, uh, Jordan Cooper says, give, just tell really bad jokes. I do that every week.

I know. It's like, come on. That's what I call my Friday. That's a, that's a shtick, man. Come on. Binders of women. Fuck you. Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to have to work that into every show. Bob's your uncle is out. Binders of women are in. Oh, great.

And, uh, as it's scheduled, I will be on there again this Monday because last week I was filling in for somebody and this week was supposed to be my normal slot. So we'll see how this goes. Now we have a new thing. Yes, we do. It is called grump on grump.

So you and I have talked and it's difficult for us to get a guest on the show with scheduling and equipment now that everything has kind of changed. So it's like, okay, we both know cool people and we both want to interview cool people. But since it's really hard to get all three of us on, we're like, okay, well we can split off and we can do special episodes where I can interview somebody.

I know you can interview somebody, you know, and we'll put them out as bonus episodes. Yes. And we have our first one. Woo hoo. Yes. New York times bestselling author, Tim Ferriss will be joining us for an hour discussion, which will air on Tuesday. We've got a lot of cool stuff in this episode and he's got some big announcements and this was the most expensive podcast I ever recorded.

Oh boy. Yeah. Yeah. He talked me into a bunch of stuff and, uh, but he, his tea recipe that he gives at the beginning, I will say hands down is one of the best things that I've ever done with him. Uh, but there's a lot of stuff that's fairly expensive and, uh, we'll talk more about that on next week's grumpy old geeks after you've had a chance to listen to the episode.

I'm very much looking forward to listening to it. Tim Ferriss, previous guest of the show. And as you well know, I had kind of a love hate relationship with him. So I am looking forward to this and I'm glad you did it, Jason. And I've come trying to line up a couple of people, uh, to do a grump on grump for, uh, myself. Excellent.

Hopefully we'll be doing that shortly. Uh, definitely on my short list is a friend of the show, Carl Wollinger from a world party. So we want to, you know, grump out about some music business stuff. So I'm going to try to get him on in the next couple of weeks. No, that'd be great. You've talked about him so much. I'm sad that I won't get to be in on it, but I can't wait to hear it.

Excellent. All right. So, uh, thanks for listening, everybody. I'm Jason DeFillippo and you can follow me on Twitter at jason.com, all spelled out or at jpd.me. And I'm Brian Schillmester. You can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. We'll talk to you next week. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan supported show.

No, really it is. Check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG and drop a few coins in our cyber tin can and we'll love you forever. If you can't spell Patreon, go to grumpyoldgeeks.com and follow the links. We really appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. 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 coolers on Mondays. You can also find us at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks or twitter.com slash GOG podcast. Music for the show is provided by the band Among Us. You can find them on iTunes and Spotify or maybe even Tidal.

I doubted them. Or you can donate through Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page and get it that way. Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 106. Know this much is true.

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