111: Hyper Caffeinated Disruption Robots

Time you were just like, about this story, and I'm trying to go, I might as well just go to the fucking Apple store. You don't need me for this. I'm out. 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.

Good morning, Brian. How are you? It's, for once, it's not morning. It's 1.15 in the afternoon. I'm doing good. It's actually 3.16 p.m. here in the lovely land of Chicago, and this week's show is not sponsored by Packy Webb Ford of Downers Grove because they are the worst Ford dealership in the world.

If you can, avoid them like the plague. That's super specific. I'm just saying. But okay. Yeah, hey man, anybody who's in Downers Grove listening to this show, just stay clear of them. They screwed me this week, like twice, and they charged me $270 for an 8-cent part.

See episode 110 for more explanation on that one. So I gather you're having some problems getting your car ready to make the drive out here. My car is done. It is pointed in the right direction. I just need a launch window, and I got to put some crap in the back. And by the way, if there are sounds of children playing or lawns being mowed or buses driving by today, that's because I'm recording this in the living room because my studio has been dismantled and packed.

Okay, well, there you go. Yeah, sorry about that, but what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Well, I'm sorry that you had a bad experience. I actually had a very interestingly good experience with some corporate overlords. I'd like to say thank you, Verizon. What? I know.

They did something good for once. What is this? Did they give you a bag of money and said, we're sorry for raping you your entire life? No, no, not that good. But my upgrade date is technically tomorrow, and I am hopping on a plane pretty early in the morning tomorrow. So, and we've all heard the trials and tribulations of my crappy old iPhone 5 and the battery that lasts 25 minutes.

So, I need to get this phone before I go traveling for 12 days. And, well, I logged into Verizon just on the off chance. You never know. And they told me I was due for my upgrade, and I could go do it today. Awesome. I did not believe them, so then I called them, and they did confirm.

So, as soon as we are wrapped up here, I'm hot-footing it down to the Apple Store to get my nice 6. Are you getting the 6, not a 6 plus? I'm not doing the 6 plus. You cannot convince me to do so. I think those things are monstrous. Bad move. Bad move. Whatever. I'll be happy. Yeah, you're going to get a 6 and a watch.

I know it. I know you're going to have that goddamn watch next time I see you. I will never get the watch. I haven't worn a watch since, like, high school. I know. Same here. Well, I have some very nice designer watches that I wear when I go out, but none of them will ever be an Apple Watch. So, and that's the last we'll talk about it.

But you know what I did do? What did you do? I went and saw Mad Max this morning. Oh, I hear nothing but very, very good things about it. I still have a smile on my face from that movie. Excellent. It was so ridiculously awesome. That's all I got to say. I mean, flamethrowing guitars and just, and the funny thing is, when I walked out with my friend Demon, he's just like, they could have gone a little bit more over the top.

And I'm like, what? What the hell are you talking about? No, it was fun all the way from beginning to end. And the interesting thing about it is it's not a Mad Max movie. Mad Max didn't even have to be in this movie. Had nothing to do with him. This is a Charlize Theron movie, and she is amazing.

So, it's a feminist Mad Max movie? It is that. I'm looking forward to it even more now. Oh my God, it is so good. You have to go, and just sit back and go, because the trailers don't do it justice. The trailers make it look like it's going to be a cheese fest, and it's actually not.

Great. So, yeah, that's all I got to say about Mad Max. I got a giant smile on my face. Just thinking about it now, I'm giddy with, you know, apocalyptic. A rage hormone love fest. I don't know. It's awesome. All right. Well, I'm very much looking forward to it.

So, we have a little follow-up. Oh, actually, we have a lot of follow-up now that I'm looking at the notes. So, we talked about Pierre, poor Pierre, last week, and his unfortunate app. I was expecting hate mail from Pierre, which I think you probably were, too. I was expecting you to get some, too.

Yes. He sent one of the greatest follow-up notes I've ever received from an app developer. All right. He said, thanks for the feedback. Everything you said was spot on. I'm like, what? We emailed back and forth a few times, and you were CC'd on him, so you saw the thread. And then I just gave him a full, or free, by the way, rundown of everything that was wrong with his app.

And he was super nice about it. And he's like, thank you very much. Yeah, well. You know what? That bodes well for him going forward, because nobody does that anymore. If you say something bad about somebody, they just get defensive, and they're like, you're an asshole. Right. I'm like, well, yes, I was an asshole, but that doesn't mean I was wrong.

But anyway, yeah, you know, good for him. Yeah. Well, that's great. Yeah. And thanks, Pierre, for putting up with Jason. It's rough sometimes. Trust me, man. Pot kettle black. I'm a peach. So, anyway, a little bit more follow-up. There's an awesome article on Medium called Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck by Scott Santens.

You read this, didn't you? I did read it. Yeah. This is a very disturbing article, because it does kind of lay out what happens when the trucks go away. Yeah. You know, at first, I thought this was going to be, oh, they're going to be super dangerous and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, that's not it. What it's going to do is basically decimate small-town America.

Yeah, that's pretty much the prognosis, because trucking is one of the last vestiges that's holding the middle class together, because you can make a really good living with very little education and just work your ass off and provide for your family. And if that goes away, trouble ensues.

Yes. And apparently, on May 6th of this year, the very first self-driving truck has hit the American road. So, it has begun, people. It has begun. Yes, we covered it on a previous show, and I think that it's going to take another 10 years for these things to be in wide release. Nevada is kind of leading the way, because they just have tons of open roads, and the only viable product they have is Vegas.

So, they want to kind of cement themselves as the autonomous vehicle capital of the world. And they're doing a fairly good job of it. They even have their own license plates. Yeah. Well, look, this is disruption on yet another level.

And yeah, there are an awful lot of people that make livings either directly as a truck driver or, as the article states quite clearly, I mean, all these roadside mom-and-pop restaurants, I mean, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people basically rely on the human element in trucking to survive.

And it's going to go away. And what are these people going to do? And, you know, Uber has trounced themselves as the, or triumphed themselves as like, well, here, you can drive an Uber, and you can make a living. Well, not when they get their own self-driving cars, and you get fired, too. Exactly, because they just gutted the entire Carnegie Mellon robotics unit.

It took everybody, you know? So, Uber is only nice to drivers as long as they need them. They're not there for the long haul. Yes. No pun intended. They are not your friend, and they will get rid of you as soon as possible to make more money. Human, humans are just evil.

We're going to screw each other as far as we can. Oh, we're just, you know, this is, we've been talking about this since episode one. It's a frightening prospect where we're basically, the technology is racing ahead. We're heading towards that Star Trek economy, except for the fact that we are going to basically screw everybody that doesn't have any money.

Well, yeah. You know, because the food's not going to be free and all that stuff. You know, in Star Trek, all that stuff was free. So, you didn't have to work. You do now. Yeah. I mean, this goes back to the, you know, the basic minimum wage for people that just comes out of the tax dollars and everybody, you know, pitches in and then gets something back and everybody has a living wage.

I think we'll talk about that a little bit more in this episode, I believe. But anyway, yeah, this is a, it's a really sobering read. Yeah. And when you think that, you know, oh, this is just, you know, nerds being nerds. No, this is actually a problem. Because if these trucks get rolled out and they will, they absolutely will.

This is coming. Hands down, this is coming. So, people need to start thinking about this shit before it gets here. Well, and it's not, you know, read this article and don't think about trucks. Think about whatever it is that you personally do for a living. Because it's coming for you, too. Oh, shit. There's going to be a podcasting robot? Sure.

Why not? What about law enforcement? Are we going to have robot, robot cops? Like, you know, because apparently in Santa Monica, you've got cops now that are going to be going around policing Airbnbs. Now, I scanned over this article because we've talked about the Airbnb and another on my list of companies I don't particularly care for, along with Uber.

And I was kind of happy that they banned it here because, again, like I say, you've got to play by the rules. You've got to do what everybody else does. I didn't see, they're hiring on re-people. They didn't say anything about taking police and putting them on this. So, they're going to hire basically interns to scan Craigslist and other listings to find people that are trying to get away with this stuff.

So, the three full-time salaries that's coming out of your tax money now to police Airbnbs. Well, you know, I've got to be guessing that these salaries are probably $20,000 a year tops. Now, I agree. You cannot live in Santa Monica for $20,000 a year.

Well, who said they had to be a Santa Monica resident to have this job? Oh, so you're outsourcing it to the, yeah, you're outsourcing to the poorer communities to bring in your cops. What's this you? I'm not the mayor of Santa Monica. Yes, you are. No, I'm just here for the property values, man. You just, you just, you want your cops, but you don't want to pay for them.

I get it. I see how this goes. Look, I think that three is, is overkill. I think this could be done as an internship program with Santa Monica Community College. This could be done with a fucking Pearl script. You don't need anybody to do this full time. Wait, wait, wait, wait, weren't you just railing on the truckers being replaced by technology and now you want a Pearl script instead of giving some poor kid a job here, Jason?

Hey, it's your tax money. It's up to you. I'm sensing hypocrisy between the two people. Oh, this is not hypocrisy. I'm just saying instead of hiring new people for a job that didn't exist last week, that you just do it with, you know, a little technology. This is not, this is not destroying jobs. But look at the plus side here, Jason.

This is the first version 2.0 company, that disruption company that's actually created a job. I'm just saying that for it, here's the deal. Those fines are 500 bucks. All right. For one person that is breaking the law, that's $500. I've done the math, Jason.

Yes, they can't, they cannot, they cannot sustain the salaries for that. So you're going to be paying for it out of your pocket and I'm going to be paying for it with all the crappy parking tickets I get when I come to your place and they give me an $85 parking ticket because my quarter ran out. Are you done with your faux anger?

No. Well, then we might as well just wrap up this show. That's a good point. Look, you know, as well as I do, that this was somebody that a little bit higher up in government who doesn't understand technology, who put together this idea and it's not going to last. They're going to discover that it's going to take one kid about five hours a week to scan listings and done.

Well, I bet they're going to go undercover. They're going to be like, you know, 21 Airbnb street, you know, and go and like try and stay at somebody's place and say, oh, nobody's here. Here's your fine. I guarantee they're going to have to do that. There's no other way to police that. No, I know there really isn't. They're going to have to start applying to them and things like that.

So it was so fun. Go do do it. Now, what would be fun if Airbnb can sue the city of Santa Monica for making fake profiles for people that don't exist to go and try and bust their people? Because that would be a breach of the terms of service. That's a good point. Interesting. Looking for the looking for the holes, looking for the holes.

That's it. I'm disrupting the disruptors. All right. Speaking of disrupting the disruptors, I went into the belly of the beast the other day. I was actually in Uber's offices. Were you there with with criminal intent? I was not there with criminal intent. No firebombs? No, no, no, no.

They were all very lovely people. And it's a nice little office. And they're obviously doing very, very well. It's it's it's everything that you would expect an Uber office to be. You know, the fake grass in the middle of the open sort plan office and young 20 somethings walking around with purpose and iPads.

Now, from where you went into the the building, you know, like you were waiting in the waiting room, did they have an Uber come and take you to the meeting? No, that would have been funny. No, no. OK, why were you? Why the fuck were you at Uber? I'm not at liberty to particularly discuss the specifics on that, other than Uber is playing the same game that that many tech companies are playing.

And we'll be talking about Twitter doing that a little bit. They are basically trying to get good PR by by donating money to worthy causes. And I was there as part of that process. Do they donate any money to you? Because you're a worthy cause. This podcast is a worthy cause. I should get them on that.

So I take it that's a no. That's a no. And speaking of tech people not donating their money to worthy causes, there's a great article in Business Insider about all the wealthy tech execs and billionaires that are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to get their own privacy back by basically buying out all the land around their estates that they're building for themselves so that nobody could ever see what they're up to or bother them ever again.

It's not, it's not called fuck you money for nothing. Yeah, it's called fuck off money. Yeah. I'm going to take, I'm going to destroy your privacy and I'm going away. That's what they do. That's what people do. That's what I'm saying. Everybody is out for themselves. This is the, this is how it works. This is not a surprising article, you know?

Okay. Yes. Zuckerberg bought his own goddamn Island. That's what you do when you're a supervillain because he is a supervillain. Well, I wouldn't go that far. He's, he's not a mediocre villain. He's, you know, he's a supervillain, at least in training. Hoodie guy.

Yeah. That's going to go with. Well, Hey, look at arrow. You know, he's a superhero and he wears a hoodie. And as soon as he puts his hoodie on, he goes, I changed my voice when I put my hoodie on. And Zuckerberg just turns into a bigger nerd when he puts his hoodie on. Maybe it could be poke, man. Oh, yuck. That is an unsavory visual image.

So I had, I had one of the worst migrations of my entire life this week. Actually, several migrations, but I was moving servers. I went from WP engine to a Linode SSD server. Can't you ever just pick one thing to move at a time? You got to move your life. You got to move your servers.

Well, here's the thing. When it comes to moving servers, that's not my decision. That's my boss's decision. That's like, oh, we're done with this. Can you move? Okay. Well, you pay my, you pay for me to move out there. I guess I can move servers. And man, was it a nightmare.

WP engine. If you're ever thinking of using them for WordPress hosting, make sure that you're never going to leave because they make it so impossible for you to leave. So they'll give you a backup of your site with the database. But what they won't do is give you your uploads directory.

Your uploads directory is where all of the images in all of your posts live. And so if you're going to grab something off of that, if you, let's just say you want to FTP it to your server, to your local computer, local computers are case insensitive. Servers are case sensitive.

If from, you know, just some idiot that works for you uploads an image that has the same name, but it's two different images. One's case, you know, uppercase, one's lowercase. And they just happen to collide in a case insensitive environment. You're going to lose one of them. So it is extraordinarily difficult when you're taking, taking a website that has been online from 2007.

Okay. 2007. The download time for this was exorbitant. It basically ruined my Sunday night and my Monday night. Just still trying to get everything off of there and moved. I will say that the caching that WP Engine has is exquisite. They do a very good job of caching with their CDN.

So I had to replicate all of that. I moved to an eight core processor with 16 gig of RAM and it basically went to its knees as soon as I turned it on. Right. Because WordPress is so terrible. But I do want to say Cloudflare. If you are running a WordPress site, use Cloudflare.

It will save your bacon because it does all the caching. It's built in. I'm not getting paid to promote Cloudflare. I actually pay to use Cloudflare. They do have a free tier. We use that on grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 111 for the show notes for this show. But we have a paid version for my day job, which is the art of charm.

And it has worked beautifully. I was at 500% of processor capacity and then I turned on Cloudflare and I went down to eight. Nice. It is ridiculous, but stay away from WP Engine. They're just a bunch of rank amateurs when it comes to giving you back your data. I'm going to get on this Cloudflare thing.

I've got a few WordPress sites that probably use it. It'll take you 10 minutes. Honestly, it takes 10 minutes to set up. And then as soon as you install the plugin, put in your API keys and change your DNS host, it is so nice. It is so absolutely nice. And I'm not one to actually say, let's give somebody else the keys to my kingdom and handle my DNS for me.

But most of the people that have WordPress installs are using some crappy hosting like GoDaddy or, you know, just, you know, shared hosting. And the DNS on those are terrible. The only good DNS from any registrar that I've ever used is Hover. Hover's DNS is really fast and really responsive.

Dotster's DNS is terrible now. GoDaddy's DNS is terrible. But if you use Cloudflare, they take over all the DNS responsibilities and they are so fast. It is ridiculous how fast these guys are. And it's worth paying the 20 bucks a month, even for like the basic package. I mean, that's, it's not much money.

It's 240 bucks a year. And the speed improvements and the headaches that it will take away from you are just legion. Nice. The other thing I had to deal with is image optimization. I found out that kids these days are a little bit... Nobody does it.

They're dependent on the broadband. They think, oh, God, it loaded so fast at home because I've got a 300 megabit connection. They're like, well, it loaded fast for me. I have taken, I shit you not, just the one image on our homepage when I went to go check it was 500k.

Yeah, I see this every day. I see it. Anytime I'm asked to take a look at a site or maybe help out with someone, I'm dealing with that right now. Anytime I use a contractor that's kind of younger, that didn't come up in the old days with us, every time they send me an image, they're gigantic.

I'm like, optimize these things. I don't care that you have bandwidth up to your ass. I mean, this is also going out on mobile. So I'm shooting a 500k graphic that's just being scaled down to your cell phone. That's stupid. That's the thing. People don't realize now that we have gone back to the days of expensive bandwidth because everybody's looking at this shit on their phones.

So, you know, if you're building a website, optimize that shit to within an inch of its life. I literally took off two megabytes, two megabytes from our homepage load yesterday. Yeah. Everything goes faster. Everything's better. It's going to be cheaper in the long run. Uh, gosh, if only we could bring back debabilizer.

Well, you know what there is? I mean, I've been using the Google page load dealio. The cool thing about that is they will give you all of the optimized graphics, CSS, and JavaScript. All you have to do is swap it out. It's like they do all the work for you because they want your page to be as fast as possible.

Now, it sounds like that self-driving trucks thing. Well, the interesting thing is once I put half of their pages and scripts and CSS in, it still came back saying, well, you need to optimize these. I'm like, you gave me the fucking optimized version, you asshole. All of Google's tools are not very good at telling you you're doing a good job.

No matter what you do, they still tell you everything's wrong. I know. It's ridiculous. I, you know, on the score, I went from a 50 to a 75 of with four and a half hours worth of work yesterday just for the mobile version. And the problem is it's like with, you know, doing WordPress and plugins and third-party plugins, you can't fix a lot of it.

So you're still going to get dinged no matter what. But, but even with the stuff that they gave me back saying, this is the most optimized version that you can use. They still said it's not good enough. I'm like, okay. Thanks Google. Yeah. I might as well just get married to you if you're just going to tell me I'm doing everything wrong. In the news.

Because I'm so brain dead and Jason even tried to throw me a bone, I completely forgot that I had a totally related story to the truck thing where everybody gets out of their jobs and we're all screwed. So in the show notes, you'll see a link to an article called Robots Are Coming For Your Job, Amazon, McDonald's, and the Next Wave of Dangerous Capitalist Disruption.

This is actually an excerpt from a book called Rise of the Robots, Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford. And this book just made my to read list. Okay. Yes. It's a hamburger robots. This is a, I was carrying on from the theme of the truckers, you know, fast food is basically any kind of assembly line job within probably the next 10 to 15 years.

We're looking at all those jobs going away and it all just being automated. So good times. Yeah. And, you know, they covered some of this in the Planet Money series on one of the latest episodes where there is a woman who is doing a job. She does get paid for it. And they're like, yes, we can actually automate this job, but the cost of automating it is way too expensive.

So we're just going to hire somebody to do it. And I think going forward, we're going to see a lot of these things where they say when the cost of automation comes down, they'll say, nah, fuck it. We're going to automate you out of your job. Yeah, exactly. I hope your kids like Udemy and Khan Academy because that's all the education you're going to be able to afford.

Pretty much. It's getting scary again out there. I had some hope. We were almost hopeful for a little while on this podcast, but now I'm like, nah. Dude, I've been reading dystopian books all week and I'm just like, yeah, I'm definitely on the down curve of the sine wave when it comes to the outlook for the future right now.

We'll get to that when we get to at the library. But yeah, it's, we're basically just, you know, shooting ourselves in the foot. But on the plus side, the president joined Twitter. Yay. I actually kind of liked his first tweet. That was funny. Hello, Twitter. It's Barack. Really? Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account.

Very clever. Not really. The unfortunate aspect is the fact that it's Twitter and then he immediately got barraged by a bunch of racist pricks. Yeah. Yeah. You posted a link to a salon. I use this term loosely article that was about three sentences and then a bunch of tweets.

But one of them, one of them really stood out to me. And I'm just going to, I'm going to find this here real quick because it is so unbelievably insensitive and this guy, oh, oh, here we go.

Jaden, which is at XJRH underscore says, all of Obama fans are trying to attack me via the internet because I called him a tree swinging nigger. Well, this is my issue with Twitter from day one. No accountability and just a bunch of morons.

And he's got his face kind of pixelated out. Oh, it's a screen grab. It's somebody else posted this as a screen grab. I can't even find this guy now. I'm sure he's probably gone. Yeah. One would assume. Yeah, it's gone. It's it's off. They killed him from Twitter. Good.

Yeah. Well, I'd prefer we kill him from the planet, but we can't do that. There's apparently no no pearl script to do that. But yeah, just just the the the shit that comes out of people's mouths is just so disgusting. It's unbelievable. I mean, granted, we usually look to YouTube for these kind of insensitive comments, but I guess Twitter some days just, you know, can be a proxy for the hideousness of humanity.

Yeah. I mean, I thought it was really an interesting PR move for them or for them to basically go ahead and open up an account for Obama. I would I would I would have waited a couple more months. The funny thing, you know what? He should have really done, though. I mean, his his account is at POTUS, right? Yeah. He should have got at lame duck because he's really moving into lame duck now.

We'll see. I don't know. I think he's still trying to push. Anyways, let's not get political. You and I disagree. Oh, we definitely disagree on many things. We're going to talk about him in a little bit. And he is actually doing some stuff right. Exactly. So and Twitter, speaking of Twitter, has opened a three million dollar tech skills center for the SF poor and homeless.

Isn't the SF poor pretty much almost everyone at this point? Oh, no. Certainly can't afford the rent. Well, all those people are gone. Now it's a bunch of 20 year olds who are gazillionaires. The thing about the thing about this skills center that's obnoxious is the fact that Twitter stayed in San Francisco because they got so many tax breaks.

Yeah. And they basically probably saved 100 million dollars in taxes that would have gone back to the city by giving them three million dollars and some, you know, part time of their employees. This is nothing compared to what the city should have gotten in tax revenue. And what's I mean, what's offensive to me is the name Twitter neighbor nest.

Oh, God, I didn't even see that. That's terrible. Not good at branding, apparently. Oh, man. What is interesting, though, is there is a lot of patents coming out about brain tech. Yeah, up to 1600 last year, all for technology stuff.

Yeah, this is not good. I don't you know, the whole patent system is so screwed up right now. And, you know, when you just deal with software patents and then you go into wetware patents. Yeah, this is this is going to cause a problem down the line. I'm just going to tell you right now it is going to cause a problem.

And but, you know, we are just meat bags and people are trying to patent the meat. Yeah, well, and they're starting to figure out some some decent stuff, which is really starting to get scary. Microsoft in particular has a patent that basically says it claims to be able to discern whether a computer user is amenable to receiving advertisements or not.

Well, then we get into the entire concept of free will. And does it exist? Yes. You know, I mean, this could go down an entire philosophical side road that just makes you question your own existence. It's scary how how malleable and manipulative these people think we are.

And they're they're pretty much spot on for a lot. Yeah, they're not exactly wrong. No, they're not. That's the problem. It's like when you really want to, like, you know, dive under the covers. Do we have free will or are we just programmable bags of meat program bags of meat? Now, speaking of manipulative, AT&T is moving away from two year contracts.

They're moving to AT&T next. Here's the problem with that. I just upgraded to a six plus and I had to move to an AT&T next plan. And all of their fees and add ons have basically made my phone bill more than my car payment was.

Verizon has a similar program called Verizon Edge, which they are trying desperately to push everybody to. And I said, no way, Jose, because that's a load of bullshit. So do you get a free YouTube album? You do not get a free YouTube album. No, but you're basically, you know, they they're paying you.

They're making you pay every single month to basically be able to upgrade instead of waiting the two years. And, you know, it's just so stupid. It's just so blatant. Like, I ran through the math when they were trying to convince me to switch over. And I was like, oh, it takes us a calculator. Yeah. Any any idiot that can fucking multiply will figure out that that phone that normally would cost you, you know, stock is going to cost you three times as much if you go with that plan.

Yeah, it was absolutely insane. I just I said to the lady, I was like, do you see that this will cost me like about two hundred dollars more over the span of a year? She's like, oh, well, yeah. But you get to upgrade your phone whenever you want. Yeah. No, thank you. No, I'm just honestly, I just want to go back to mailing people letters at this point.

I could go buy a new car for what it costs for my phone. That that is how ridiculous it is now. And I don't use my phone that much anymore. Yeah, I do. I know you do. Because you've got to get you've got to find your map to get to Uber. Yes.

Speaking of maps, though, Nokia, Nokia, Nokia's map division is being sold off now. Lots of bidders, including Mr. Ubers. Really? Yeah, everybody. Everybody wants this because they bought Navtech a couple of years ago for like over eight billion dollars.

And the interesting thing is like the bids for Nokia's map division is going around four billion right now. So somebody is going to get a deal. I worked with those guys a little bit when I was on a previous startup for Snaptious and they were like hot and heavy on their map division.

That was their big thing that they were pushing. And it was a really nice map. I got to say that they kicked Apple's ass. This is a really sweet map. And I totally understand why everybody's bidding for it. So we'll see how this is going to roll out and who's going to own it. But Uber, Baidu and just tons of other companies are throwing their hat in.

And even Microsoft is throwing their hat in. Really? That's interesting. Wow. Well, Nokia still has value. Who knew? Real networks is back in the news. Again, I only put this in the news because it was just strange to see them twice in a row. Is this one of those things where your brain gets attuned to it?

So all of a sudden you see it all the time. So then you think it's like some synchronous thing. But really, it's just your brain's attuned to real networks. The Bader-Meinhof effect, I believe. I believe that's what it's called. It's in the show notes for the Tim Ferriss episode. We were talking about it a bit. And I think it's the Bader-Meinhof effect where you once you see something that is, you know, novel, then you see it everywhere.

Like when you buy a new car. So this could be the same thing. Gotcha. Okay. Tangent. So anyway, for some reason, real decided to throw their their considerable, you know, technology horsepower behind saving your photos and making slideshows.

Okay, like we don't have enough of that that nobody uses anyway. That is insane. It is utterly silly. The fact that they're a still in existence and be going into the photo market. And it's like, okay, well, you couldn't crack music or streaming audio or video.

And now you're going to stream photos, whatever. Oh, for $49.99 a year, you can create stories up to three minutes long with no watermark on them. Ooh, fancy. Fancy. What a bunch of idiots. I know. I know. There's another article I threw in called why stealing jokes on social media is a bigger deal than you think.

This is surprisingly from playboy.com. This came across my social media stream. I was not just reading it for the articles, but it's an interesting article talking about how like theft of jokes on Twitter has become, quote unquote, a problem. Well, you know, I mean, that that in itself is a joke, but when somebody steals a joke that has millions of followers and they get retweeted for that, then there can kind of be a problem.

And this comes back into a problem with, you know, curation versus creation that we've we've talked about a little bit before. But I've had my stuff stolen and people have gotten, you know, millions of hits off of photography that I've done. And all I get is a mea culpa and I'm sorry, but they've already got the money from the ads and all of this.

So this is, you know, it's an interesting article, but with I think the wrong kind of bent to it. I mean, they're just they're couching the entire argument in jokes. Yeah, I mean, this is we have this issue with everything. It's we're raising a generation that don't really understand anything about copyright or attribution or anything like that.

And I understand how it's a real issue if like when your bit was stolen and it was on a web page that had advertisements. But I don't understand what what you get out of getting a bunch of likes on your on your from your tweet. Well, if you know, if you're if you're actually tweeting for brands and you have a couple million followers, those a single tweet will get you, you know, tens of thousands of dollars.

OK, so I know that. Oh, well, Chloe Carter, whatever Kardashian, she doesn't tweet for less than twenty five thousand dollars. She's the Ava Herzegova of of Twitter. What a life. Actually, it wasn't Ava Herzegova. It was Linda Evangelista who said, oh, yes, I don't get out of bed for a million dollars.

Yeah, less than a million dollars. And nobody, nobody will know who either of those women are, but that's OK. Look it up. Google it up, kids. Yes, I actually have an Ava Herzegova signed top model magazine upstairs. But Linda Evangelista wouldn't sign it because I didn't have the money.

OK. Now, did you see this article on The Verge about Sony Music's contract with Spotify? I did. What's your take on it? Since I'm a bit more involved in this world than you are. Well, that's why I was actually curious about your take on it, because mine is I don't give a shit because I think I mean, all of these music companies have, you know, vested interest in Spotify doing well, and they're just taking money out of artists' pockets by saying, OK,

Spotify, we want ad spots in lieu of cash. So we're going to run our ads on your network and we're going to make cash off of those ads. And that is money that we can we can actually yeah, we can actually separate that and put that on the side because that's money that we don't actually have to give back to the artists because it isn't a quantifiable sum based on their plays.

You know, that's really what I think the issue is. Yeah. I mean, this article is interesting because we haven't seen any of these contracts, but it's just Sony Music's contract with Spotify. So in terms of of digging down and seeing how much like a Spotify play is actually getting to an artist that we cannot discern from this particular contract because we would have to see what the artist contract is with Sony.

What we do see from this is that there is an awful lot of bumfuckery going on. And all these labels are basically screwing the artist left, right and center by making these insane deals that have nothing to do with actual plays and getting paid in other ways. And you wouldn't even I don't most artists probably never see this if they even did an audit of the label.

So it's insane. That's the thing. It's actually unauditable. Like, you know, the way that they're structuring these content deals saying just give us ads and we'll put something out there, then actually what they can do is put that as a capex against the artist's account saying we just ran a million dollars worth of advertising for you.

So you owe us more money, even though they got the advertising for free. Yes. You know, there's some really, as you said, bumfuckery going on. There you go. So that I mean, it's it's very interesting. And again, I every time that any story like this comes out, I I want to see these stories out there.

I want to see these finances being brought up to the light of day. And I want there to be a discussion about it because this is absolutely ridiculous. Now, on the music scene, I just want to say, state for the record, I bought the new Rasputina album from the artist a month and a half ago.

She still hasn't sent it to me. So there is a there's a problem with, you know, artist run endeavors. And I wrote her and I'm like, hey, where's my album? Did you get my payment? I'm moving soon. I would like it. And she's like, I'm doing this all myself. I'll have it out next week. But in the interim, she has posted the entire album for sale digitally.

And I bought it. I had to buy a physical CD. And then I wrote her and I'm like, hey, can you do me a favor and just give me the digital files? And that way you can keep the cost of the CD and the postage. And it goes into your pocket. And she hasn't written me back yet. And I haven't gotten the files and I haven't gotten the disc.

So you know what? That right there, she apparently doesn't like money because I'm trying to give her more money. So these artists need to really figure this shit out and how to be good at it. How much coffee do you have today? A lot. OK, because anytime I try to start talking, you talk right over me again.

I just had to get that bit out. Sorry. Well, I just I'm wondering if I should just go ahead and relax and take a take a little nap here. Come on, bring it on. No, I mean, artists are artists. They're not meant to be to be the business people. And this is, you know, we can shit on labels all we want and they deserve to be shit on.

But there was a reason that they existed and there is a job that they did and they did it very well. And an artist himself is never going to do it. I mean, I forgot to mention last week I went and saw your buddy Zane Lamprey who did a signing here and he's had the same sort of issues because his organization isn't built to be a distribution center.

That's not what the artists are doing. So this is not surprising. And it's unfortunate because it kind of destroys the relationship between between artists and fan. Like you're probably not as thrilled with her right now as you were before. All I want is the music. But but speaking of how she wouldn't give it to me.

Yeah. All I want is the music and she wouldn't give it to me. Zane was lovely. It was a lovely man. We'll talk about it a little bit in the the shout outs. OK, excellent. And speaking of shout outs, Google is now letting you have a Chrome extension that lets you literally shout to your neighbor's computer and make them open a web page.

This is called Google's tone. That is so stupid. They're like breaking the air gap. And who has their speaker and microphone turned on by default? You have to actually unplug your headphones to send a tone to somebody. And we know that anybody that's in an office is going to be listening to their music on Spotify and not be able to do this.

This is the weirdest extension I've ever seen. Oh, I've got one that's even worse. Yeah, it's called Karma. Oh, Karma. Yes, it's a browser extension that should let the Internet decide if it should trust you or not by pulling up all the sites that you may be logged in with, such as Airbnb, Craigslist, eBay, Etsy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you get a calculated score about your based on your reviews and ratings about whether or not you're trustable. Now, didn't clout do that? Wasn't that like the clout model? I believe so. Yes. But this is another this is the new one that's trying to push their way out there. OK, well, we know how well clout did because nobody cares about clout.

So Karma, nobody cares about Karma. You know what else nobody cares about? What? Automatic. For the people? I didn't like that album much either. Actually, that was a really bad album. That's REM for the kids at home. Look it up. Automatic has bought WooCommerce, which is interesting.

It's an interesting buy. They're trying. I really think that they're trying to make WordPress into the Squarespace now because Squarespace brought out their commerce plugin that's basically built into every Squarespace account. And WooCommerce, out of all of the really crappy shopping plugins out there, WooCommerce is the least crappy, but it's still pretty crappy.

So we'll see how this goes. And the word on the street is they bought them for like over 30 million. Wow. For a WordPress plugin. That's pretty hefty. But they have a lot of customers. Yeah. And it's I mean, from what I've heard, I've never personally used WooCommerce. It's actually pretty good. I actually use it on resistancepro.com.

So if you'd like to buy some wrestling DVDs, go to resistancepro.com. You can use my WooCommerce install to buy some. It's better than most because most of them are just terrible. The interesting thing here is hopefully what they'll do is take all of the paid plugins, buy them all and roll it into one package and then just put it as part of Jetpack.

Right. I mean, that's really what the strategy should be here because you have to like pay if you want to use Stripe or Recurly or other payment processors. PayPal comes for free, but anything else you actually have to pay for. So we'll see how this this kind of shakes out. But, you know, you know, my feeling about WordPress at this point.

So. Yes, we do. So on the Resistance Pro store, do you rely on the wrestlers themselves to send out the merch? No, the owners send it out. OK, see, that's how it should work. Exactly. The hack of the week goes to the St.

Louis Federal Reserve. That's not good. They got busted by a DNS hijack, which is becoming more popular. So instead of going to the website you think you're going to, you're going to something that looks just like it and putting in your credentials. Then they take your credentials, they save them, and then they forward you on to the origin or, you know, the origin address.

Not good. Not good at all. Link in the show notes for this one. But yeah, this is going to become more and more problematic if people don't lock down their DNS. So even if you use a single password for everything, please, for the love of God, use something secure for your DNS registrar.

You know, I was going to suggest that they use one password for the registrar, but that's just never going to happen. Yeah, and use a fake email address or basically what I've said before, get an alias. Use the alias. So when people call and use your real address, they'll be like, no, that's not the address.

And you at least have a buffer. Yes. You know, this all goes back to the honing attack. Never use your real email address for anything. Use an alias. Anyway, because if you can't reset the password for an alias, that's the entire point of using an alias. So there is another flaw out there, which is an interesting one.

This is a it's kind of a Wi-Fi flaw. This this comes from Ars Technica, and I love the title 90s style security flaw puts millions of routers at risk. And this is a basic buffer overflow, like a 64 bit buffer overflow. Oh, OK.

Yeah. If you're trying to basically like mount a USB drive over the network, the net USB architecture says, you know, you have to put a machine name with it. And if the machine name is over 64 bits, then it causes the buffer overflow.

It's kind of silly, but it's it's funny because I just like the name and also millions of routers, you know, Netgear, D-Link, TP-Link. I don't know TP. TP for my bunghole. So, yeah, check that one out. If you have one of those archaic ass old routers, then be safe.

Yep. Or get a new damn router. Yeah. Yeah. I'm loving my Apple routers. I really am. They're good. And also pretty much anyone with an understanding of crypto tells President Obama that backdooring crypto is monumentally stupid.

OK. They tweeted to him. I they they should now now that he's on the Twitter. He had to bar somebody's iPhone to tweet. But because his Blackberry apparently doesn't have the Twitter client. Oopsies. Anyway. Yeah. This is this comes from everywhere. I'm going to put a tech dirt article in the show notes, but there are thousands of these out there now.

Everybody is finally stepping up and signing letters and sending them saying, stop it. Just stop it. Yeah. So what they're what they're going to do, we'll figure that out. One thing I forgot to put in the show notes. I thought I had it in here is basically Obama is rolling back all of the military surplus going to police departments.

Oh, good. That's the one thing that I was I was alluding to before, and I forgot to put a damn link in the show notes. But yeah, he's rolled back all of those those gifting of tanks and, you know, armored carriers and all this crap coming across from from the wars that goes to straight, basically straight to the local police departments that they don't need.

No, no. Local police do not need a tank. No. You know what they need? They need to reconnect with the goddamn community and training. Yes. No, lots of that. We're not going to let's not get political. OK, so Radio Shack is dead, finally.

But and let's see, it's a company called Standard General, which is basically a hedge fund that got their company name in an auction for two point six or twenty six point two million dollars. Now, unfortunately, with that, they also got the entire collection of Radio Shacks, collection of consumer data, names, addresses, email addresses, and they get to do whatever the hell they want with it, because there seems to be no law for that.

Yep. Thankfully, the Federal Trade Commission is not happy about this. So hopefully there will be a law about this sort of stuff happening in the future, because again, Radio Shack was notorious for trying to get your information. And they did have a privacy policy that said we will never sell or rent your personally identifiable information to anyone at any time, which is obviously now not true.

Well, they didn't actually sell the information. They sold the company. So that that's the loophole. Yeah, that is a loophole that needs to be closed. And the FTC seems to be on it. So keep on it. Yes. And there's a new article from Stu Sourman, one of our favorite people from NoB4.com.

They do the basically the fishing training for corporations. I call him a friend of the show, even though we've never met. But there was a Starbucks hack. And it's it's a pretty good article about why you should not use the same password over and over again.

We can we can only say it so many times. But yes, people were basically that use the Starbucks app were hacked. So and if you have the same password, then it just went out to the ether. It's the same problem.

It's the same damn problem. Right. Yeah. You know, why do you need an app for Starbucks? You don't. And here's the deal. You don't even need to go to Starbucks. Not really. It's crap. It's crap. And it's expensive. And just make coffee at home. Two Frappuccinos will buy you a coffee pot for your house.

That's all you need to know. OK, so we've got we talked last week about the guy. I don't think it was last week. It was a couple of weeks ago. The guy who allegedly hacked into the airplane. Yeah, I was kind of hoping we weren't going to talk about this as I'm on one tomorrow. Well, here's the deal.

You know, I originally came out saying that it was impossible because there's segregated systems for somebody to basically plug into the entertainment system and get to the avionics, because I truly believe that they were segregated. And at this point, all evidence and all experts are pointing to the fact that they are.

But the FBI is definitely going up this guy's ass with a with a, you know, a flashlight saying what's up there, because he keeps saying that he did it and that he caused the engines to actually spin up from what he was doing, which, you know, honestly, throw this guy in jail right now, because if he did it great, if he did it great, we now know that it can be done and we can fix it.

And if he did it on a plane that was in flight, he needs to be in jail. And if he didn't do it and he's lying, he still needs to be in jail. So there is no out for this guy. I'm sorry. There is no out for this guy that does not end up with him in jail because he's a dumb shit no matter what.

Right. And I mean, he's been doing, you know, plane security for quite some time and keeps trying to tell everybody that this is possible and nobody listens to him. Well, that could be why he ended up doing it, unfortunately. See, that's the thing. That's that's where you get into it. It's like, OK, I have I have a hack that I can I can take something down.

I tell the people they don't believe me, then you have to demonstrate it. But you know what? A plane in flight. I'm sorry. A plane in flight that you're on. This is this is also the stupid part of the story. He was on the goddamn plane that he did the hack on.

Right. So if he actually did it, how dumb is that? I'm sorry. Let's make the plane go sideways now. I'm on the plane. I don't want it to go sideways. I want it to go merrily forward to my destination. It's nothing about this story.

It ends in good news. I honestly don't think that anything here is going to end in good news. No, but what is good news? Has somebody figured out? I love this one so much. I refuse to open any links that involve Goatzee. They're all they're all pixelated.

They're all pixelated. In Atlanta, somebody figured out how to hack a Yesco digital billboard. And they literally put up Goatzee on the billboard. If you don't know what Goatzee is, count yourself lucky. Do not Google it.

Just stay away from it. But this is it's a very unsavory image. And now the FBI and Homeland Security is involved. And I'm sorry, this is not a Homeland Security issue. And it's not an FBI issue.

No, taking over a billboard is nothing. No, no. This is a local police issue. Well, except for the fact that the police don't know anything about tech. So neither does the FBI or Homeland Security. I'm sorry. No, it's just ridiculous. But they're these, you know, these billboards are asked to the wind.

And the guy, it's the same. It's exactly the same as the airline deal. He tried to tell the company. The company said, we don't care. So he's like, OK, Goatzee, you know. Now, if the plane guy put Goatzee on the side of a plane, maybe we'd get somewhere. But oh, God, our tax dollars at work.

Now, our tax dollars at work on this one is actually pretty funny. How a drug dealer's IP was found out by package tracking. OK. So this guy was buying, he was basically buying Mali from China. You know, there are way easier ways to get this. Coachella? Yeah, pretty much.

I still don't know what Mali is. Everybody keeps talking about it, but I don't even know what it is. That's how old and funny I am. It's what the kids call ecstasy these days. Oh, so it's just ecstasy. OK. OK. So this guy, this guy was buying it from China and they they basically did the package tracking on the USPS website and they said, oh, well, there's his IP.

He just logged in to track the package. OK, well, let's find out where he lives. OK, well, we found out where he lives and we arrested him. It's like, OK, tip for drug dealers. Don't don't track your package through your own Internet account.

Yeah, well, probably not the brightest. Anyways, like I said, there are way easier ways to get this. Yeah, Coachella. Just go to Coachella. You can just buy a year's supply right there. You're good to go. Now, the UK government has done, I think, what the Bush administration did with AT&T and I think Verizon when it comes to breaking the law.

So AT&T had that black room in San Francisco where they were, you know, just capturing everything. And then George Bush kind of retrofitted the laws to make what they did legal after it was illegal. Yeah. Yeah. GCHQ and the UK government basically just did the same thing.

It's like, but if it was illegal then, but it's legal now, doesn't that mean we can still prosecute them because they were doing it while it was illegal? One would think, but apparently they like to grandfather these things in. Yeah. I can't get a goddamn, you know, unlimited data package moved over to my phone, but these guys can apparently spy with impunity.

That's because they have the power. Yeah. You know who doesn't have the power is Ross Albrecht. Yeah. Mr. Silk Road guy. Yeah. So I was listening to a new podcast by Joshua Topolsky called Tomorrow. Terrible name for a podcast because it was really hard to find because there's a lot of them out there named Tomorrow.

Um, but it was a really good episode because he talks to the guy who wrote the Wired articles on the untold story of the Silk Road. The incredibly long might as well have been a book articles. Oh my God. Even, even Spritz couldn't get me through. I just, I was going through and I'm like, Jesus, get to the end.

Skip to the end. Uh, yeah, these are incredibly interesting articles, but they should have been a book. What I really liked about this though was when the trial was going on with the Silk Road, there was this whole thing where it's like, uh, Russ Albrecht was saying that he wasn't the Dread Pirate Roberts.

They were, they were trying like the guy from, uh, was it Mount Dox or whatever? The Bitcoin guy was trying to frame him and do all this stuff. Right. And the author was writing this stuff while it was, you know, while the trial was going on. And he was just like, nah, dude, he did it.

It's him. There's no doubt in anyone's mind anywhere that he is guilty because he wrote about everything. He was a narcissist and he loved to write about it. Right. So he kind of screwed himself. Yeah. I mean, you know, you gotta, you gotta be quiet about this stuff.

If you want to get away with it, you can't just walk around trumpeting how awesome you are doing all these illegal things. Comment of the week. Uber. Thanks to our new Patreon subscriber of the week.

Greg Cohn. Thank you, Greg. You know, earlier when you're all coffeed up, you'd like, wouldn't get pause at all to get me, get me in it all. And now you just drop something in the middle. Awesome. Way to keep me on my toes. I'm doing my best. Coffee's worn off and Greg has stepped up and you were making fun of me when I got Greg to subscribe to Patreon because I was shaming him into subscribing.

You did shame him into it, but I don't mind. We'll take your money anyways. Thanks so much, Greg. I absolutely shamed Greg in. And Greg, being the consummate gentleman, gave us $13.37 per month, which is, you know, leet in hacker speak.

But Greg is, he was actually our first advertiser on Grumpy Old Geeks. That's why he has ponied up. Thank you, Greg, again. Yeah. No, I just want to throw in a quick shout out for Greg's app, which is Burner. You've probably seen it in all the tech news. It's the app that lets you get a fake phone number or a temporary phone number.

I shouldn't say fake, a temporary phone number. The interesting bit about Burner is it was a pivot. They were trying to do corporate communications and they came across this idea and they pivoted. And Greg and I were in the same incubator space at the same time. So I was kind of an advisor at the beginning.

So I'm really happy for his success. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. All that success means give us more money. Give us more money. And yeah, yeah. Check out Burner, especially if you want to get some Molly shipped to your house or get on the Silk Road. And even more massive thanks to Mike Tamal, super friend of the show, who has been basically a donator since, I think, what, episode 30?

Yeah. He gave us the single biggest single donation, the Grumpy Old Geeks ever this week. And we thank you immensely. That will mean many, many beers when Brian and I are hanging out together in Los Angeles. Yes.

Thank you for your repeated donations, Mike. You've pretty much basically covering all of our bandwidth. You're you're awesome. Yes. Yeah. No, super awesome. I cannot thank you enough. And if you would like to, you know, join Mike in the ranks of the super fans, go check us out at Patreon dot com slash GOG or go to Grumpy Old Geeks dot com and click the PayPal button and give us a one time donation.

We appreciate it. We certainly do. And please do go over to iTunes and give us a five star rating like Road Rage Jason did this week. He says best podcast around by far. I am grumpy old and a career geek. These are my people. They are not only entertaining and informative.

They answered a question I had on their latest podcast and gave me incredible and useful information. This podcast was a great find. Well, thank you very much, Road Rage Jason. And yeah, everybody get over there, get on iTunes, give us a rating and send us your questions. We will answer them. At the library.

I am still working through the world beyond your head on becoming an individual in an age of distraction that Jason recommended to me a couple of weeks ago. It is slow going, but it's very, very good. So I plan to finish it up on the plane tomorrow, assuming it doesn't get taken over by that crazy researcher guy. So hopefully I'll be talking about that next week.

And I talked a little bit in the past about how in this age of distraction with Facebook basically deciding what we see and what we don't see about how hard it is to actually find out when books by my favorite authors are coming out. And I talked about how I signed up with a, I said basically either do Google alerts and then Amazon rolled out their service where you can basically subscribe to authors.

Because of that, I found out that there are two books that came out this week by some of my really favorite authors. Apex, which is the Nexus arc book three by Rami's Nam, which we've talked about on previous shows quite a while back, because I think it was probably almost a year ago since I read the second one.

The third book is finally out. Can't wait to read that downloaded. And of course, all time favorite of, I think both of us, Neil Stevenson has a new book out called Seven Eves. And it's basically seven backwards, like it's seven N-E-V-E-S, which is seven Eves.

I'm still trying to figure that part out because I am, I am two thirds of the way through this book. It is one of the best books he's done in a very long time. I was about to ask you, since you have been reading it, is this a return to the snow crash style of writing versus the god awful gigantic series of stuff from the 1800s that he wrote?

I'm sorry, but I really liked that series too. I know you did. I also liked, this is more like Cryptonomicon, I think. Yeah, all right. But it's, it's, it's honestly not, this is, this is a weird one. It's an honest, it's honestly a really weird book because it, it, it, it talks about the end of humanity.

This entire thing, the first two thirds of this book is the end of humanity. I'm not going to say anything about how it happens because it's really clever what he does and the math and the science that he kind of pulls out for this book is fascinating.

It is utterly fascinating. And I just got to the, the third part of the book, which I'm not going to say anything about because that would be a spoiler. If I said anything about what the third part of the book is, uh, that's the problem with this book is I can't talk about it without spoiling anything, but I really, really, really am hooked on this book.

I cannot stop reading it. All right. As soon as I finished the distraction book, I'll roll into 70 so we can actually talk about it. Yeah. Forget apex. Just put that on the back burner. This one. I mean, I really enjoyed read me or ream D I liked that one too. I enjoyed it. I thought it was, I thought it was, you know, it was a departure from his normal stuff.

He has not had a snow crash since snow crash, obviously, but, and, and honestly, I went back and reread snow crash. I didn't really enjoy it as much. I still think diamond age is his best book. Um, but this one is really captivating. I am enjoying all of the characters, everything about this book.

I'm really, really enjoying. Excellent. Can't wait. Yep. No, check it out. Um, fly farther, hack, hack the plane. Yeah, no, I think I'm good. Four hours will be enough.

Media candy. I'm super happy to announce the twin peaks revival is back on. And apparently the David Lynch, uh, basically saying I'm out thing was a ploy to get the money that he wanted to do it correctly. And showtime has given him the monies and they've given him more of the monies because apparently there's going to be more episodes than were originally planned.

I'm very excited about that. I mean, you know, who knows, who knows it's twin peaks. It could be anything. I can't wait. There's a lot of pie to go around. A whole lot of pie. It's a damn fine cup of coffee. No, I'm, I was very excited when I saw this one. You know, I, I really liked twin peaks, but I'm hoping this is going to be like, you know, a really good wrap up.

Yeah. I don't know. Well, nobody knows what they're going to do. And it's David Lynch, which means you can't even begin to guess. So I'm not even going to engage in speculation because he's so goddamn weird, but that's the problem. I'm just excited because it was a brilliant show, a brilliant cast and he's brilliant.

So we'll see what he does with it. It's nice that he's, I like David Lynch best when he's constrained and he is constrained to these characters now as much as David Lynch has ever constrained to anything. So bring on the log lady. Um, I've got some podcasting news and don't snore this time. That's not a sound effect people.

He actually does that live, which is scary. I would choke to death if I did that. Anyway, uh, Amazon's audible hires the NPR VP of programming. Yeah, this is a weird one. I'm not sure why audible is jumping into the podcast arena at this point, but well, why not?

I mean, it kind of makes sense for them that they want to get people hooked on, on their app. So if the, if you can get people getting, uh, in the same way that, you know, for iTunes podcasts are just a giveaway to get you using iTunes and, and get you on the iPhone. So this makes sense. Yeah. And the interesting thing is the, the audible app has actually become usable now.

It was so terrible for so many years and now it's usable. I use it every day and it, if they can bring podcasts into it, it'll be interesting. And, and to be honest, I mean, audible has the infrastructure and the interest in basically being able to pay for play for podcasts as well, which is not an option with iTunes.

So if we could go, you know, if a really popular podcast can go over to audible and say, well, this time it's not free, it's 20 cents an episode or, you know, seven 99 for a subscription. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. You know, that would be fantastic. They, yeah, if they can do that, that would be amazeballs.

I just said amazeballs. What's, what's also interesting is Spotify has also moved into podcasts this week. I knew about this one for months, but I couldn't talk about it cause I was under NDA, but Spotify is now moving into it. About 1% of the audience has it.

If you've got a new update on your iPhone for Spotify and you enable the beta features, you can get a very small subset of like top tier podcasts, including my job. The art of charm podcast is available on Spotify. Uh, but you, um, as it comes forward, we'll be able to actually be on Spotify.

Everybody's jumping into this market. Basically everybody except Google because Google hates podcasts, but, um, honestly they do. They have no interest whatsoever, but all these companies that serve audio are jumping into the podcast arena. I think it's great. I think it's awesome.

So look for us soon on audible and Spotify. Yeah, no, we should be, we should be in Spotify by the end of summer. I've already, I've already talked to, uh, our guys at Libsyn and we'll be there. Awesome. Uh, who I don't want to see on audible or Spotify is the Slack podcast, also known as the Slack variety pack podcast.

This was one of the worst shows I've ever listened to in my life. Okay. Did you listen to it? Nope. Okay. Here's the deal. Look, I read the, I read the description. I don't understand anything. I don't under, okay, let me read this and you tell me, you tell me listeners, if you would press play based on Jason's past recommendations and this description, in the debut episode of the Slack variety pack, we reach for the stars, work out a way of

adapting emoji for audio use and delve inside a computer capable of both changing the world and blowing your mind at the same time. I've no fucking clue what that's about. Neither do they, which is the problem. You know what this is? This is a marketing team that has too much money. They should spend their money buying apps on podcasts like ours instead of going out and making their own podcast.

Because what they did was they hired a third party company to do an NPR style podcast. And they honestly, they did a serious think piece on Mars one, which we talked about probably what a month ago that has been completely debunked.

Mars one was completely debunked as a scam and their show that came out this week has somebody who was signed up for Mars one. And it was like this, you know, heartstrings piece. And it's just like, how stupid the fuck are you people?

Right. Well, somebody at the Slack marketing department said, Hey, we should get on a podcast thing. That'll spread our brand. And they had a piece with Stuart Butterfield out there doing a man in the field thing, which was just like, I mean, God, it was so bad. Everything about this show is so bad. It should not exist.

Please Slack stick to doing the thing that you do, honestly, and buy ads. Get the fuck out of podcasting. You tell them. So one of the things I enjoy about the book of the face is that I found things like the lad Bible, which is a British based company that basically throws out funny content all the time.

You know, it's all hit or miss. This one, I die. I die. It's called lad wears suit onesie to work all week and nobody notices. Now, if you and I were back in an office environment, Jason, I could easily see us wearing this. It is a onesie that looks like a suit.

And from, you know, from the photos, you can't really tell the difference. In fact, I'm going to a wedding. That's part of the reason I'm traveling. And I wish I had one of these now and I would just wear this at the wedding. It's amazing. It's called the suitsie. I know there's a there's a which one do you like better? A or B?

I can't tell the difference. I cannot. I cannot tell the difference. I mean, on on photo A, you can kind of see the end of his tie. And I can't tell if that's real or not. And in photo B, his jacket is tied up. But you know what? I can't tell. I would I want me a suitsie. Yeah, these are absolutely fantastic.

They're three hundred and forty dollars, which is basically not that damn cheap. I mean, most people spend a lot more money. Last time I bought a suit, it cost me twelve hundred bucks. Yeah, there you go. So so you can get it. And the description says you can feel professional while feeling like you're in your pajamas.

I love this. This is this is amazing. I love it. I want it. And and I just took the poll. It said, would you have noticed, Greg, in a suitsie? Yes, it's obviously a onesie is 18 percent. No, it looks normal, which was my vote, which is 47 percent.

And the third answer is don't care. Where do I get one? I should have picked that one, actually. Yeah, no, I mean, 35 percent. As we all know about photography, if you've ever been involved in any of the diet programs or workout programs, a lot can be done with photography to make things look not quite like they are.

So I would like to see one of these in the real world, as it were, in meat space to before I would buy one. But I'm in, man. I'm just watching the video now of him unzipping it and getting out of it. And it's gorgeous. I want one of these damn things. Yeah, I mean, this is like the best thing ever to wear to, like, your family's Christmas.

Have you seen the girls who have, like, the pajama jeans in the wild? Yes, I have seen them. Have you noticed them, though? Uh, not really, because everybody's wearing the crazy, the girls are wearing the crazy skin tight jeans all the time anyways. Exactly. That's what I'm saying.

So I think this is a viable actual alternative to going and buying a suit in Thailand, which is where I would go buy a suit nowadays. Beep. The web's not dead!

Oh, no, it's not dead! On the web's not dead, I found from higherperspectives.com, which is definitely not a site I would normally visit because it does seem to be a little ooky-ooky, but 22 cartoons... What's ooky-ooky? I don't know, like spiritual and blah, blah, blah, and, you know, create your own destiny.

What you're thinking of is woo-woo. Okay. It's 22 cartoons that show how smartphones are killing real conversations, and this is all stuff we've discussed about, and they've collected it, and of course, there's not attribution for anything, which is other things that we discuss, but it's quite a nice collection of 22 pretty funny things that we actually deal with in real life.

Yeah, I'm just scanning through them right now, and they're pretty funny. Yeah, there's a lot of good ones. My favorite one is the guy who's dying on a roof with a selfie with death. Yeah, and if you scan all the way down to the end, it's a bunch of people taking pictures of someone drowning.

Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah, I see that one. Yeah, that's actually a well-done cartoon. I believe you said last week you wanted more death on the internet. I do want more death on the internet. Not that way, though. So, my The Web's Not Dead is a time-lapse mining from internet photos.

Did you get a chance to look at this one? I did. They're very cool. Yeah, this is a joint program between University of Washington and Google and a couple professors, and what they're doing basically is mining the open internet for photos with specific geolocations and specific angles of photography to put together a time-lapse of what happens over time.

Well, that's what a time-lapse is, obviously. It's a time-lapse, yes. To show what happens just by using, you know, open images. It's gorgeous. Yeah. They're very cool. I really, really enjoyed this one.

So, check them out, but specifically check out the video, because it doesn't do it any justice unless you watch the video. And, again, hence the time-lapse aspect. Closing shout-outs! Let's say a fond farewell to David Letterman, who had his last show this week.

I haven't watched any late-night shows in probably, you know, 10 or 15 years, but I think he was our generation's host. Carson, you know, was kind of our parents. And all the kids that are up there doing it these days, you know, that's for the kids.

I love David Letterman. His sense of humor, the quirkiness of the show, the randomness of the show. He was my guy, even though I've basically outgrown late-night shows. And, you know, we all kind of moved on to the daily show, and then we moved on to just watching clips of the good parts. David Letterman, he was the man.

See, I was never into him. I loved him. I never liked his sense of humor, and I just couldn't get into him. And, you know, I really wanted to go, like, watch all these shows this week, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I actually, the only one I watched was the final one the other night, so I stayed up to watch that, and, you know, it was enjoyable, and it reminded me of why I did like him.

If you either got a sense of humor or you didn't, you know, when we were in college, the three guys that I lived with all through college, that was kind of our thing. Every night we would stay up to watch Letterman, so it's good stuff. Yeah, the interesting thing that came out, I think, this week, there's an article with one of the producers of the show that said that they couldn't do really anything edgy or too crazy because people were trying to go to bed, so they really had to wrangle themselves back in.

Well, you know, yeah, I mean, I think the age of the late night talk show is over anyways, so. And I want to give a shout out to Zane Lamprey. I went to his signing down here in Venice last week. He was very nice and very cordial and told some funny stories, and he signed a nice bottle of monkey rum for the grumpy old geeks.

I actually bought both of them. He signed the spice rum, which we will be sharing with our Los Angeles area listeners when we do a meetup here. And also the white toasted coconut, which was delicious, and I almost drank the entire bottle of already. Oopsies. He was super nice. He was very funny.

The news that I have out of that is, unfortunately, there will be no more chugs. National Geographic gave them a shot, was trying to do some food and booze stuff, and apparently National Geographic has decided that didn't work for them, so they're pivoting away from that. So he's not being renewed, and he said there'll be some exciting news coming soon about what he'll be doing next, which I'm sure will involve Kickstarter again.

Yeah, that's too bad. That's too bad. He wrote me back the other day because I gave him a change of address for my drinking jacket, which is now past customs. You probably had to spend an entire day writing all these people for all these different things that you've sent out for changing your address because it's all taken them so damn long to get here.

I know. Yeah, totally. It has. It's ridiculous because everything is, you know, months past due. Well, I think Zane is the only one I've actually gotten physical stuff from in over two years. Crowdfunding, the wave of the future. Yes, crowdfunding is the wave of the future.

But thanks for listening. 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 Schilmuster. You can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. We'll talk to you next week when Jason won't be so caffeinated. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show.

Check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash gog. Drop a few coins in our cyber tin can to help support the show, and we really appreciate it. I mean, really appreciate it. We also appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. Go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars.

But better yet, please, tell a friend. The more the merrier. Music for the show is provided by the band Among Us. You can find them on iTunes, Spotify, and Tidal. Woo-hoo! Or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash gog and get ten exclusive tracks.

You can also find us at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks or twitter.com slash gogpodcast. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 111. I think I had too much coffee. I think I had too much coffee. I think I had too much coffee.

Oh, fuck. I'm tired now.

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