131: The Billion Dollar Show

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks for October 9th, 2015. I am Jason DeFillippo and I am here with my stand-in co-host. Jordan Cooper. How you doing? Good. How's it going, man? Good, good. I've taken my dump for the day earlier this morning, so I'm good to go.

Oh, man. So if you tell me what time it is, can I get a leg up on Poop Bingo for later? Well, I mean, what happens if I already recorded it? Oh. You released it. That's kind of the weird thing of doing a morning show that sometimes I record in the afternoon now. Instead of doing it live, it's just whenever I want. So sometimes I look at the time that I pooped and be like, oh, I'm recording at 4.

Like, I actually haven't pooped for six hours yet. So I guess maybe just like DraftKings, we'll be talking about later, that maybe you'll do some insider trading for Poop Bingo. Exactly. You'll know the information before other people do. I have the upper poop.

Yes, you do. So for people who are wondering why the hell we're talking about poop, Jordan does the fantastic podcast, The Morning Dump, and it is a daily tech show where I usually steal lots of ideas from. So I brought him on this week, or he graciously is helping out this week because Brian is off in Germany.

And what exactly is he doing in Germany? Who knows? I know he's going to watch some soccer and drink some beer. I'm sorry, football. Well, that's the best thing to do in Germany. Yeah, pretty much, I guess. So normally we'd have a bunch of follow-up here, but since Brian's not here and you and I haven't talked about anything since we were at the bar in Louisville,

So I thought it would be a nice thing to start off in the news with a poop story.

And we've always talked about San Francisco and the man poo problems, and now there's this awesome map that shows you, over time, exactly where not to step. And how is the map actually drawn? It's like a little heat map, and it just shows you all of the places where the poop has been spotted over a couple years.

Wait, hold on. So you're telling me that there's so much poop that it actually shows up on a heat map? Yes. Is there like the predator? Is he like hovering in some type of blimp that could see through infrared? Like that's the thing that I wondered. I looked at this map and like, is there a surveyor that's going around and not cleaning up the poop, but just marking it off kind of like a like a sketch artist, like the chalk outline for for crime scenes?

Is that's what is that what he's doing? Well, there's apparently some place where you can report man poo because it's from the SF open data project. And they just took all the spottings of man poo. And I'm just wondering who's like testing it to make sure it's actually man poo.

Well, you got tested by taste, of course. Two great tastes that don't taste great together. Man and poo. But yeah, I thought this was a cool visualization. I've seen something like this before where they use Google Maps, but this seems to be a little bit more comprehensive. And they went with blue instead of brown on this one.

Right. That's a fail. That should have been brown. It should have been brown. And of course, if this was Apple Maps, the poop would be like, who knows, it'll be in the ocean, it'll be everywhere. You would never be able to get to the poop. You'd always take wrong turns. And end up in urine. Oh, man. So have you seen people?

There was the big kerfuffle about the People app that went on last week. Of course, if it is an app. I don't think it's a hoax, by the way. I think it's if you take a look at their site, it is a very horrible attempt at getting VC money.

Because the only I mean, people are talking about this like it actually exists yet when it's all it is is a screenshot and a quote unquote beta. And I put that in very big air quotes. So so it's getting great. I don't want to call it great press because any press is good press.

But I don't actually think that this Apple ever actually come out. Yeah, I'm very skeptical that it will ever see the light of day with all the the hate press that it got. And I mean, they did have a YouTube channel where they talked about how they were, you know, ramping up to it, which I could not even I watch like six seconds of it.

I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm not even going to waste my time. Well, that's the point I was making. It's like most most of the typically you go you go to an app site, even if it's like in stealth mode or whatever, whatever Silicon Valley garbage. They buzzwords they speak that that most of the site is about the app.

You know, typically, you know, you have that bootstrap type of theme with the fake iPhone screen or something that shows the app and then the the Google Play and the App Store buttons. And it shows you the features. It's like their site is more like like their their story and videos about how they're getting funding and nothing really about the app other than we're we're we're promoting positivity like they don't know humanity.

It's like they've never been on the Internet before. If it does come out, I fully expect people to game the system. Obviously, it's just like Yelp. Right. And and, you know, you'll you'll meet someone. You'll you'll pull it up on your phone. Oh, five star person. And next thing you know, you know, you're bleeding out your ass.

Since it is Yelp for people, it will be gamed exactly like like Yelp. You're correct there. But what's the I mean, now it's supposed to be about positivity and love. And it just just makes no sense. Nobody is going to do nobody's going to fund something for positivity.

They're going to fund it for money. You know, like, how am I going to make money off this? What is telling me that my neighbor like I can look at my neighbor on people and find out he's a douchebag? I'm like, oh, well, I already knew that. So now I can rate him as another douchebag. How does how does anybody make money off of that? I guess charging the roommate or the neighbor to get his name off of people.

That's probably the only way you can make money on it. Right. Just like the double dipping with the ad blockers. Yep. You block the ads and then you charge the advertisers to get through the white list and the black list and all that type of stuff. All I know is that there better be categories on people because there's not going to be any good people.

There's going to be douchebags, idiots, assholes. You know, like I want to have to be this is people 2.0 in the app needs to be the ability to take a snapshot of the person driving in front of you. And then it knows who's driving and gives them a one star review.

Like anytime you see some schmuck doing some left turn from the right lane or doesn't go through the light properly. Like I want to have that I want to have that type of rating system because I think that would actually be valuable. And then you put you integrate it into Waze or something or Google buys it, of course, because it's data.

And then you could go out on the road and it could give you accurate even more accurate drive times because it knows how many idiots are out on the road. I think you should get that funded immediately. All I have to do is put up some funding videos about how we're ramping up. We're ramping up.

We're in stealth mode. And I should be able to get 13 million for that, right? Easily. Easily. That might be the best idea for technology I've heard in quite a long time. Right. You combine the things together for the greater good of humanity. And then you could, hey, Google could use the self-driving cars now.

So now the self-driving cars know where the idiots, because typically the problem with the self-driving cars are the other human beings. So since it knows who the idiots are, it'll be able to drive better. That's that's, you know, good use for big data. Call it Waze holes. Yes.

There we go. In other news, Wi-Fi calling is now available on AT&T phones. I guess this is a big deal, but AT&T just never works anyway. So I just Skype everywhere, especially if you're in a place like San Francisco where all the homes are made of Faraday cages and chicken wire.

But I guess this will this will be a new a new happy thing for some people on AT&T. Are you on AT&T or Verizon? No, I'm on AT&T. But since I'm in Louisville, like I'm in the middle where where it's fine here. Like I know when I saw the story and everyone was applauding the Wi-Fi calling, it's like, what do you do?

Do you pay for long distance anymore? Like, what's the point of Wi-Fi calling until obviously you mentioned right now, if you're in San Francisco or New York, where the signal could be shit that going on Wi-Fi may actually be better. But I think in my area around here, I'm like, why would I ever need to use this?

Yeah, for you in most of middle America, I think it's probably fine. But in in different places or in an office building, I've got a new office here and it's built like a bunker. So I come in my office and I stand outside the door. I got five bars. I come inside.

I get zero signal. So this might actually be useful if you have, you know, you live in a bunker or things like that. Google just bought the entire alphabet dot com. Now, why is this news? Why not? Why? It's it's it's like boing boing type of news. It's like this is the equivalent of you banging your head against the keyboard and going to GoDaddy and registering that catwalking across the keyboard.

Who's going to go to that domain? I mean, you better have it bookmarked or a text expander snippet of some type. I think this is just a press play. It's just a cutesy, you know, type of April Fool's joke type of thing. Why not? It's how much is a domain name these days? Now, if they had to buy all of them, like what someone should be doing is is buying the entire alphabet dot XXX and then having, you know, the comprehensive index of porn or something like that.

Did they buy just the dot com or is it like dot org dot? I mean, how about a to z dot gov? That's where the Illuminati is. I didn't I wasn't about to spend the time doing a who is search for all of them. So and here's the thing. They're probably going to have a short code for it.

It will probably be a, you know, was it like they do for internationalization, like I-12N. So it'll just be a 24 Z and that'll be the short code that'll take you to the entire URL for no reason. Right. That that's kind of defeats the purpose of a URL to have a short URL for the URL.

Exactly. I wouldn't put it past them, though. They got they got more money than God. They could buy they could buy. I think they could buy every domain name. Probably I thought that when I first started the article, I thought maybe they were buying a dot com, b dot com, c dot com, you know, going down the list. That would be a story.

But just buying literally the alphabet. It's slow news days, slow news days. Now, you were talking about the Google self-driving cars before, and we've always wondered, like, you know, who's going to pick up the tab when these things start going rampagey and killing people and all that?

Well, if you have a Volvo one, they will, which is an interesting take. They're like, hey, if our self-driving cars, you know, go mad and take over the world and start killing people, well, we'll pick up the tab. It's our fault. Well, that kind of goes along with their whole marketing spiel their past, you know, 20 years.

They're pretty much their entire history that Volvo equals safety. So I think this is just an extension of, you know, whether or not once once you get to court, whether or not they're they're saying the same thing. But they at least want to have the press that, hey, if self-driving cars are going to be around, we're going to have the safest ones, of course, until we find out that they've been faking the safety tests, just like with other companies and their emission tests, then everything goes to shit.

I always wondered on some of these self-driving cars, if they could like, you know, just mechanical turkit, like, oh, it's the computer that's driving the car. And they just put midgets with, you know, a little peephole that are actually driving the cars. Or you do it from you do it through like Wi-Fi. You do it just like on like Fiverr or Elance, whatever you get.

You get people that all they do is they sit at desk and for two cents a click, they have to like click on some type of button that drives your car. That would be good. I could I could see that happening. Why can't they do that? Why can't we have just we have a division, a department of driving so we don't have self-driving cars.

It's just virtual reality driving. And those are the best. We get the NASCAR drivers like that. Their job is to drive for everyone. We'll get them some Oculus Rifts, stick them in a room, and then they can just sit around and drive people to work all day when they're not when they're not there. I mean, it's NASCAR. They're used to being stuck in traffic.

So why not do it for, you know, a little more money? Right. Just like the Black Mirror episode with them on the bikes. And maybe they're maybe actually they're riding the bikes for other people that are out riding bikes automatically. This is like a banner episode so far.

We've got, you know, Waze holes. We've got new ways for people to make money by not actually driving, but driving. We're coming along here. Right. If any VCs are listening, you could always go to go to Patreon. Oh, man.

So you had an episode the other day, what was it called? The Suitcase of Dick Picks? Yeah, Dick Pick Suitcase. Dick Pick Suitcase. Yeah. And I just take umbrance with that because I keep saying they're not called Dick Picks. They're called Dickies. God damn it. If it's a selfie, it's a Dickie. But Dickies are pants. Dickies are their clothing.

I guess you could get sued for trademark infringement on that one. Anyway, so Amazon launches the Snowball, a rugged storage application for importing data to AWS by FedEx. And it's a big like basically a between a suitcase and a briefcase, but it holds 50 terabytes.

That's a lot. That's a lot of Dick Picks. A lot. Definitely a lot of Dick Picks. But I didn't even know that you could fit 50 terabytes in that small of a space anymore. Soon iPhones will be like that. That'll be that's the iPhone Plus Pro Plus 6, 7S or something.

But you'll still have the 16 gigabyte version. Right, right. The operating system still is going to take up 49.8 terabytes for all the 3D touch actions because you need the 3D touch Dick Picks. Oh, man. Now, is this appliance, they're calling it an appliance, like it's a microwave or something.

Is this made for, like, I don't know who this is marketed to. I mean, I guess there are places that contain that much information, but it almost seems like this is a, so obviously it's Amazon. They could, I mean, they come out with, it seems like something every other day because they have more money.

Bezos is coming with all the inventions and stuff that he wants to. And is this for the businesses that, like, they don't believe in the internet? Like, I don't, like, typically you don't, when you get up to 50 terabytes of data, you haven't, you're not transporting that along the ethernet cable, like, all at once.

Like, you may compile all of that over a period of 20 years, you know, with records or, you know, business data or anything. But at what point are you taking all of that and saying, well, we need to just ship this somewhere? Is this just for, like, businesses that just don't believe?

Like, if you tried to pitch them on some type of cloud service, they don't even understand what a cloud is. And they're like, they're the type of businesses that print out emails and then put them in boxes. So is this what this is for, for people that just don't believe in the internet? Well, I think what a lot of what it's going to be is it's like when people are, all these startups who are just collecting tons of, like, log data and just user activities and things like that.

And if they want to ship it up to AWS and then run it against any of the myriad services there that crunch big data, it's going to be cheaper for them to just take that, take that appliance, have somebody at the data center, throw it on there and, you know, FedEx it over to Amazon.

Then it is going to be to pay for the bandwidth to move 50 terabytes of data. And it's going to be faster. So if you're really in a rush to find out what your users have been doing and don't want to sit there and transfer 50 terabytes of data, which would take a while, even on a giant pipe, then it's, you know, it's a good option.

Or if you're just going to take it over and throw it into cold storage and it's another option. There are, I can see some uses for it for startups or, you know, just any kind of internet business that is running anything with big data. And if you need to run it through something like, what is it, Hadoop or those kind of internet applications that kind of look at the data in different matrices, then that would actually be a use case for it.

That's the only thing I can think of. At the end of the day, it's 49.2 terabytes of porn. Yep, that's about it. Okay, so we've talked about drones on the show quite a bit. And finally, the FAA is slapping somebody's dick in the dirt for a biggest, the biggest fine ever, which is $1.9 million for this company.

And here's the thing. It's for flights that they conducted from March 21st, 2012 to December 15th, 2014. And it is now October 9th, 2015. What took them long? So, so damn long. Well, it's the government. They don't know how to do anything quickly.

True that, true that. So what were they flying the drones for? It looks like they were just taking pictures over New York and Chicago. It was 65 flights. And I'm trying to figure out what they. You call them flights if there's no one on it? It's drones. It's like, I don't call, if I got a remote control helicopter, I don't, I don't put flight plans in.

I don't say, hey, you know, how was your flight yesterday? It's like, I'm playing with a toy. But it's still in the air and it's flying. What else are you going to call it? I don't know. Isn't that, isn't the regulation now that you could fly your drone as long as you could see it? Some type of, I mean, that sounds like a, like a regulation made out of an eight-year-old's mind.

But I mean, can they still fly the drones in New York and Chicago as long as, because I'm assuming that these, I mean, they just sent the drones and like they, they could see it on a screen, but it's, you know, miles away from them. Yeah. And they were, you have to be able to see it and it has to be under a certain height limits, four or 500 feet.

And also in different places, you have different, different types of restricted airspace because you have helicopter routes in, in New York and, you know, small plane routes in different, different areas, like closer to like small airfields. Like even if you're at 300 feet and somebody's coming in for a landing, you can still whack them.

But this, these guys just kind of let them go. And I think they just put in automated flight plans, let them roam around and take some pictures and come on back. I think they should appeal this and bring up birds as witnesses because, because my, because, Hey, the birds are in that space.

No one's suing the birds. No one's fine. The pigeons they're getting in the, in the, in the way of airplanes and stuff. And then no one's looking, seeking damages from the birds. And I'd say, Hey, I'm, we want to classify a drone like a bird because then eventually we're going to have robot birds.

And then that gets even then we're going to need some type of amendment at that point. Well, that's what these guys have to do. They just have to disguise all their drones is really fat pigeons. Right. Then nobody will ever know. Have you been to New York? New York has a, you couldn't, you couldn't tell you could, you have a monster pigeon, you know, have some feathers.

It smells like shit, whatever. And just to fly it around, take some pictures. You dress it up as a pigeon, put a little flappy wings on the, on the sides of it. Nobody will ever know. Right. There, there we have another, we have our third startup idea in, in 20 minutes. Was it a drone?

Yeah. Our drone camouflage unit. Right. We're going to have to get our own alphabet for this. We're going to, by the end of the show, we're going to have, you know, we'll have our own full alphabet. Now on the money side, Pandora, you know, we've talked about the future of music. Everybody's talked about the future of music and streaming and all this.

And I guess Pandora doesn't really believe that they can make all their money on streaming music. So they went and bought Ticketfly, one of those online ticket retailers that like to rape you with the, the service charges for $450 million.

So I guess they have enough money from the streaming music to go out and buy something that's going to hopefully make them more money. But I guess the, you know, the future of music that was supposed to be streaming, it's just not all it's cracked up to be. Well, but Pandora has enough to, I mean, they want, they want to diversify.

I mean, that the streaming services are the first, first ones to tell the artists that like, Hey, why don't you like, they're the first ones to say, Hey, you don't make money off the music. You make money off the touring and then they buy the company that sells the tickets for the touring and they go, well, we're going to make money that way also.

I mean, I know, I know Brian's take on everything cause he's in, in the bubble, the musician bubble, whatever. I think, uh, most of the, the, the streaming, the sky is falling stuff is mostly due to, uh, the amount of subscribers that any of these services have is just a small percentage of people that do listen to music.

And that once a billion people are subscribing to a Spotify or an RDO or, or paying for Pandora radio minus the ads or whatever, that there'll be more than enough money for, for every artist who is, is streams enough decent amount of times that, uh, I think we're just in this like 10 year period where like everything got consolidated and now everything's going to open up again.

And, uh, but, uh, but I understand why Pandora is, uh, is buying a, that you diversify your, your income streams. I mean, it's something that Spotify should be doing as well. Speaking of diversification, Facebook might want to look into this one, one of their glitches in their mobile system a long time ago led to some guy getting logged in to some woman's account and he couldn't log out.

She couldn't kick him out. And then fast forward a couple of years later, they get married. This is an interesting kind of how the hell did this happen type of story, but it's kind of cool. Did you check, did you check this one out? Yeah, I checked it out. I originally thought that, uh, the Facebook glitch, like two people got married on Facebook and they didn't know each other.

And then they got married because of that. See, that would be a much better story. Like if you just went around, if you open up your profile and just said, you know, I am now married. Like if me and you just went into our profiles and said that we were married to each other as a joke. And then, then we ended up five years later getting married.

See, that would be, that would be a great story. I see a movie plot there. But this was just, this was just basically, there was a glitch that two people had to communicate to each other on and then they ended up hanging out and getting engaged and married. Yeah, that was pretty much it. I just thought it was kind of a fun story.

I like to put in fun stories every now and again, since Brian's not here. Let's have some, you know, have something uplifting. The opposite of this would be what happens most of, most days, which is why it's not in the headlines. It's Facebook glitch leads to divorce. That's just Facebook leads to divorce.

I think that's out there every day. Right. You get rid of the glitch, you just Facebook leads to just fucking chaos. In a completely different side of things, the EU has ruled the U.S. privacy protections are inadequate and they have gotten rid of our safe harbor data ruling, which means that U.S. companies now have to actually play by the EU's rules on how data is stored for European citizens so the NSA can't get to their data.

This is kind of an interesting story. It's a little convoluted, but basically what the EU has said is, no, no more. We're not going to just keep giving you our shit, period. Who says the EU should rule over everything with this is America, damn it, America, America, what apostrophe that that sound that that's the apostrophe on America, America, damn it.

Yes, I know. I listen to grumpy old geeks all the time. You people are, you know, tinfoil hats to the fucking wall. I'm much more nihilistic, like no matter what anyone does or rulings or laws or anything, everyone got your shit. It's all over. It doesn't matter anymore.

Just give it all up. I'm not one of the types that are like, well, I have nothing to I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to worry about. I'm not one of those types because you never know what could happen. But I just don't think laws and rulings and all this type of stuff are actually going to stop anything.

So I just I always look at the EU as, you know, that they're they're much more paranoid over it. To me, to me, it actually looks like the EU doesn't want the U.S. tech companies to have the data because they want it. Like if if there were some deal to be struck where in the back room somewhere that it's like, OK, OK, what the NSA will will share this data with you, they that they'd get rid of all this.

They wouldn't even talk about it anymore. Well, it's interesting because all these tech companies are scrambling right now and making backroom deals with the EU to keep everything the way it is right now. So it is kind of pointless because they're just saying, OK, we'll just come over here and we'll make a side deal.

So this could just be mostly for show. And the NSA is probably in part of that saying, yeah, here we go. Just just keep it. Who knows if they'll either be in a European Union 10 years from now anyway. I mean, that's that seems like, you know, a group of countries that can never get their shit together.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I think Facebook will outlast the EU. How sad is that? Facebook may become the EU. Could be, but they're moving into Africa first with these new satellites to deliver. Internet access to I'm guessing it's just going to be flip phones because you they're not going to be giving all these people smartphones, but they're going to they've already started the this plan to do satellite Internet.

And I figured, well, don't you have to have a satellite phone to do satellite Internet? But I guess not. They just bought another company and another. Was it? Oh, they're partnering with a toolist stat. And I don't know how this is going to work.

It's the quest for new users. That's what really what they're doing. I mean, Facebook has gotten to the point where where it's like, oh, in order to show Wall Street growth, it has to go. It has to rustle up people. I expect, you know, 50 years from now, you know, they'll be they'll be, you know, trying trying to they'll be making a I just to have Facebook profiles.

I figured they were just going to start baby farms so they could have new, you know, just have a new breed of new users. They're just going to make new users. That's why they want Africa, because there's enough space where they can put their their hidden baby farms. And then, you know, in about, you know, 15 years, we'll have an entirely new breed of Facebook users who are who are just basically made to use Facebook.

Maybe that's maybe currently that's where all the spam bots get made. We don't know those eggs on Twitter. They may actually be eggs in Africa. Now, we were just talking about drones. I should have put this together. California governor vetoes bill regulating hobbyist drone flight.

So Jerry Brown, you know, one of my favorite governors, because they're Dead Kennedy songs written about him. And, you know, you got to love that. He doesn't want new. He doesn't want to create new crimes or penalties. So he's just going to let we'll figure it out later kind of thing.

So he's not going to regulate the hobbyist drone flights, which have been causing havoc with the forest fires out here. And it's kind of interesting that he's just saying, eh, screw it. I don't care right now. How are they causing havoc? Are people flying drones over fires that are interfering with the firefighters?

Yes, they actually have to. Yeah. People are flying drones to get pictures of the forest fires. And then when the, you know, the planes that are coming in to drop the retardant on the on the fire, when they see them, they have to pull out and not fly until they figure out that the drone's gone.

Well, it looks like that that the people flying the drones are the retardants. Yes. You're going to know more about this than I am, because I am not a sports guy. You are. But this FanDuel thing versus the other whoever they are, DraftKings.

How do you not know these companies? They're advertised in Twitter, Facebook, everywhere. You can't go anywhere without seeing an ad from one of these two companies. Well, I run an ad blocker. Even through the ad blocker. Some, I mean, they've native ads. They've, I mean, really, it's to the point of stupidity.

I've seen the DraftKings ads and I've heard them on just about every podcast that I that I go to FanDuel, not so much. But so what's the what's the big scandal that just came out this week with like the back the backroom data that we've kind of talked about in the intro? OK, well, you have to kind of understand daily fantasy sports, which is kind of a new thing.

Fantasy fantasy sports used to be or predominantly is where a group of like 10 or 20 people get together and they draft, you know, people in a in a sport or a league. And then based on the performance, you win money. You put money in a prize pool or something and you win that.

So it's it's more it's more like an NCAA tournament pool, that type of environment. Now, then it went to like national fantasy sports where you get to like you get to select any player you want. People can have the same players. And then based on that performance, you'll be on like a million person leaderboard.

But that would still be for the full season. And then now there's daily fantasy sports where it only counts for the day. So kind of you put you put your dollar in and then if there's 10,000 entries, that's $10,000 and like half the money goes to the person with the most points that day.

And then you get to select a whole new team the next day. OK, so now now that I've explained exactly what this is for the people that are not well versed in sports ball, it's simply it's a skill game. Like the more you make it into daily fantasy sports, as opposed to have that that whole long league structure means that the most important information, like everything, just like with Wall Street, with the stock market, with anything, everything is based around arbitrage of information.

So like if you know a star player is injured before anyone else, you could you could obviously profit off that information by not selecting them or by trading a player or then when these players have price values, you know that that's that guy's not worth that much because he can't play today.

That type of information, everyone kind of knows about, OK, like it gets reported by the team and you really know everyone finds that out kind of at the same time.

In daily fantasy sports, the most important information is how many times a player was selected, because when you have so many entries, like if you have a million entries, the most likely winner is going to be one of the outliers that pick some weird person that gets, you know, five touchdowns and, you know, scores a lot of points.

And since they're not on many rosters, it's more likely that that team's going to win. Now, the only way of finding out that information, it went to the public is when the deadline is set. So like if the deadline for the day is at X PM or whatever time it is, then you could see everyone's rosters.

But obviously, if you put in your roster earlier in the day, like it's selected. But the only people that would know that would be people that are on the inside. So if you work for for DraftKings or FanDuel, you could go in. I mean, obviously, they're programmers, they're people inside that maintain this shit that they could see who's picking who.

So, of course, they can't bet because that's what this is. This is gambling. They instead of betting on their own site, which is going to they're not allowed to do, they go to the competing site. And because there's so many entries, most likely the data that they show on their side is going to be somewhat close to the data on their competitor.

And then they put their entries in there, according to according, obviously, to the company's statements. This actually did not technically happen. But now they're they're kind of they're backpedaling and saying, you know, now we're putting in structures in place and whatever, because for the most part, they don't they really don't want the DOJ getting involved with this.

Because eventually the UIGA, the same regulation that shut down online poker in the United States is going to catch up to this because because this really even though this is a skill game, which same for poker, poker should be legal just like this should be legal.

But if they're going to make online poker illegal like this without regulation, this is going to end up being shut down at some point anyway. So if you do have if you won three hundred and fifty thousand dollars on DraftKings, get to withdraw that fucking money as quickly as possible. Oh, yeah, you never want to leave that stuff in there.

My stepdad lost, I think, twenty five grand when they shut down the the online poker sites. Right. So it was that an adequate explanation for for all your non sports ball people. That was excellent. Now I now I get it. I totally get it because a lot of because a lot of people go like, well, well, so so what? They don't they don't they're not affecting the outcome on the field.

It's like, but no, but the way that game, it's the same way as a as poker where, yeah, OK, the dealers on the up and up. But if you could if you have marked cards and you know what everyone else has, like, it doesn't matter to get the casino is like, well, we we're not doing anything wrong.

But it's like, well, you allowed someone to mark the cards and now they have an advantage just by not knowing by knowing what other people. So you could have a six and a three. It's still a bad hand. But since, you know, what everyone else has, you could play and, you know, you know, when the guy's bluffing, you know, when he has the better hand.

So it's the same type of thing with daily fantasy sports. And now they're banning employees from playing, you know, on the other teams. But are they they can't ban the employees, friends or the friends of a friend so they can still get that information out there and still still make a killing on it.

Right. And that supposedly it should be. It's technically should be encrypted or something locked or whatever. And then, of course, you're going to get probably get hackers. That'll find. I mean, this is big money. This is a billion dollar industry. So when you when you have this much money going around, people are going to try to game it.

And that's why, especially when the likelihood of you winning in daily fantasy sports as a casual is is you might as well play Casper off in chess. Absolutely. That's it. We covered that part last week. There's just no way that you're going to beat these the guys with the inside information or any of the automated systems and algorithms that they're coming out with.

Right. Because that's what that's what's winning. Security. Cisco, who we've always talked about as being one of the biggest problems in security, has now actually come to the table and killed a ransomware ring that was bringing in up between the between the stories.

It doesn't matter who it is. Some people say it's 30 million a year. Some people say it's 60 million a year. It's probably more like 120 million a year. But they found the Angler exploit kit, which is kind of one of those off the shelf, you know, hacked by numbers things. They basically back traced it to the command and control servers and shut them down.

So yay for Cisco on that one. I thought that was pretty cool. It's the first time I've ever seen that word. Can you explain what ransomware is? Oh, you don't know what ransomware is? No, I know malware. I know hardware. I know software. I know menswear. Ransomware?

No, I've never I've never seen that term. OK, here's what ransomware is. When a hacker gets into your computer, what they do is they encrypt the entire drive with their key so you can't get to it, period. And they put up a screen that says we want three hundred dollars in Bitcoin and you have, you know, seven days.

Here's where you send it. Here are the instructions to get it to us. And if you don't get us the money by the time it runs out, it either goes up or they wipe the drive. Well, it's like ransom. They should make a movie with Mel Gibson about it. It's pretty insidious. I want to wait till next month where where this headline is ransomware leads to marriage.

Ransomware leads to flying self-autonomous hidden drones in what in pigeon suits. That could be the marriage proposal. Ransomware. Yeah, I'll give you your I'll give you your your files back if you marry me. Right. So Cisco also in the news has turned on a new kind of security impact rating is what they're calling it on.

Well, we all know Cisco hardware is full of holes and now there's they're trying to be a little bit more transparent about how they let people know that. Oh, you know, all that stuff that you bought from us. Yeah, well, yeah, we know it's broken.

So here, check it out. Update your stuff. From Cisco, it's actually a pretty interesting thing to do because they have one of the worst reputations right now for having just huge amounts of security holes in all of their hardware and their their firmware.

And it's nice to see that they're stepping up to the plate and being transparent. And speaking of bad, crappy routers that somebody has come up with an exploit, this is basically malware flipped on its head. It is a kind of a self-perpetuating worm that goes through and fixes the routers that it infects.

It like comes in. It's like somebody breaking into your house and fixing your leaky faucet. No, someone breaking into your house and fixing your security system. That too. And he ends up getting locked into the house because it's that good. You get in and you're like, hey, I just want to let you know I broke in.

I couldn't get out because I fixed your security system so that once you're in now, you can't get out because I fixed and then then ransomware something. The security segment isn't my forte, as you can tell. And we always talk about the backdooring of encryption from the government who is always trying to say, oh, can we just have the golden key to get in?

And it's a huge fight. It's been going on forever. And now with Apple just locking everything down, it's really kind of come to the forefront. But in a strange turn of events, NSA directors, a couple of past NSA directors are coming out on the side saying, no, do not do that because it is a really bad idea.

So it looks like people are starting to come around to the idea of just, no, just make the encryption strong so everybody has it. And then we're all good. And that way, the ransomware guys can do their thing. We need to have that. You sure that NSA directors didn't just say that they were against back.

They didn't want to be backdoored because that could mean something completely different, completely different. And speaking of drones, now we have phones on drones that can fly up to a skyscraper and hack an office from outside the window with basically a cell phone via their printers.

Because office printers are notorious for being a vector of attack for hackers because they're all network-enabled now. You've got Wi-Fi. You've got Ethernet. So they will go through and try and hack the printer. And then when computers attach to the printer, then they put on their malware or whatever kind of key loggers.

Ransomware. Stuff like that. Exactly. Now you can have ransomware on a drone dressed like a pigeon. Yes, the pigeon. That's what will sell them to the hackers, the Russian hackers. They need pigeon drones. Wireless pigeon drones with phones, Wi-Fi calling, obviously.

And they'll be delivered via driverless car with a little person inside that we control through Mechanical Turk. And we can rate them on people. There we go. It's all coming together. We've come up with the API of all of our startups.

It's convergence, man. It's convergence. And the last story of the week in security is no one's morale is dropping faster than homeland security. All I've got to say is it couldn't happen to a bunch of nicer people. Why is their morale dropping? Because they hate their job.

That's a good reason. Yeah, I mean, if you look at this graph, it's everybody in federal government, their job satisfaction rating is going through the floor. You know, you've got DHS, Treasury, EPA. I don't know what the CICOSA and the FCC.

But everybody's morale is dropping in the past five years. And the one that has dropped the most is the Department of Homeland Security. Well, we're more secure than ever. There hasn't been any terrorist attacks. Shouldn't their morale be, like, through the roof? That's what some people would say. At the library.

Well, I figured that I needed to bring a book of some type for the At the Library segment listening to your show. Even though I don't read. I mean, I read, read, like, as far as tweets and, like, fucking, you know, post listicles and stuff.

Is that really reading? So I wanted to include something that I haven't even read yet. But, I mean, it's kind of like a combination of, like, most of his best blog posts. And that's, marketers are from Mars. Consumers are from New Jersey. And it's Bob Hoffman who writes the blog, The Ad Contrarian, which you should definitely subscribe to via RSS.

DavidContrarian.blogspot.com. And, basically, he just bitches and moans. It's very, he's very similar to Lepsets for music. Like, he basically bitches about the online ad industry. And he's, you know, he's been in advertising for 30 plus, 35 years.

And he basically hates all the social media gurus and programmatic advertising and all that type of bullshit. Talks about ad fraud all the time. And so he comes out with these little e-books, which is kind of a mix between original writing and some of his best blog posts.

And he comes out with daily. And it's, if you're a Prime member, it's actually free. Well, with the Kindle Unlimited type of thing, whatever. But other than that, it's $4.99. Definitely either check out that book or subscribe to his blog.

I will put links to the ad contrarian in the show notes. What is it about old guys named Bob who like to just bitch about their industry? Well, there's a lot of Bobs. There's a lot of Roberts. I eventually, you know, if his name was like, you know, some weird name, we wouldn't be saying that.

It just happens, you know, a lot of people named Bob. A lot of people named Bob like to complain. I'll definitely check that one out. I've never heard of this guy. Cool. And I read, and here's the funny thing. When we were hanging out at the bar, having a beer in Louisville, you're like, oh, I never listened to At the Library.

So I was surprised to see you throw something in here. Well, I'm going to listen to me on At the Library. I see. I read Coined, The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us by Kabir Seagal. I got to interview Kabir yesterday for my day job, and that's how I got the book.

It's an amazing book. It's about the history of money. And I thought, okay, I'll check it out. Like after the first chapter, I was hooked. So if you like money. I like money. And you like history, and you like them together. Two great tastes that taste great together.

Definitely check out this book. It's got a lot of things about the history of money, but it's also got things about like the psychology of money and how our brain works when we're thinking about money, thinking about gift giving and, you know, how to even just phrase things like you're welcome versus no problem or my pleasure to flip the script to make people want to owe you something instead of you owing them.

It's a really fascinating read, so I highly recommend it. And since most of my money is in history, it'll probably be good for me. Software, apps, and gadgets. The fine people at TapBots have finally updated TweetBot.

So now that we have an update on the iPad, TweetBot 4 is out. It is an amazing update and finally adds things that should have been there in the entire history of the software, like an activity tab that tells you when people have friended you or things like or favorited a tweet that you could only get on your lock screen.

And if you missed it, it was gone forever. Now they have a little tab where you can see everything, and it looks better too. And they built that up from the ground up because they don't have access to the activity tab like Twitter shows you. So I'm assuming it goes through their system and then it gets displayed that way, and that's why your activity tab is always going to be linear as opposed to like Twitter who kind of like groups kind of like four people at favorited this tweet and shows you that thing.

So that's the only pretty much difference between the Twitter activity tab and TweetBot. Okay. That makes sense. And I don't know why Twitter is so stingy with the API. I mean, they screwed up so bad when they pulled all the developer access and killed all the third-party apps.

And this is, you know, I think the only one that's really stuck around long enough and still has legs. And the iPad version of it is gorgeous. It's really nice. It was worth the wait almost. But it doesn't have moments. It doesn't have moments. This magic moment.

Have you tried Twitter moments? Oh, yeah. What a waste of time. They'll open up that API. There'll be a moments API. And it'll only be available for a moment because I don't think that feature is going to last. And moving on to text expander five, I've heard about this for so many years on every podcast.

I played with it a couple different times. And now my day job has forced me to really kind of start using it. It's, eh. Do you use text expander? Amazing. Of course I use text expander.

Wow. You get nuts? Okay. I don't see how you don't. I just copy and paste and type shit a lot. I don't know. You could format things. Like, as far as, like, the morning dump, I have a template for, like, every episode. So, like, it's all pre-filled and whatever.

And then I also have shortcuts to, like, I could copy all my browser tabs and then put them in an unordered list with HTML with a shortcut. Like, that's text expander. Like, I could have an entire, like, I type in, you know, TMD pod and it fills out the entire episode.

And all I have to do is, like, put in, like, the episode number and then, like, the top description. And then just put that right into Libsyn and I'm good. And I have a whole bunch that are like that. If I, especially doing web development with, like, HTML coding. So, like, I could cut and paste a URL and then type in a three-thing shortcode and that'll create, you know, all the HTML around it.

That type of thing. So, I mean, to me, that's what text expander is useful for. It's not, I'm going to cut something from here and paste it over there. It's more for the type of things that you do so often. Some people go to the extreme and they're like, you know, they make a text expander snippet, TY, to make it say thank you.

And I'm like, okay, I'm not that much of a douchebag. But it's more for, you know, the workflow things you do on a daily basis for your job or your hobbies that, you know, make things so much easier. Okay, I'm definitely going to have to dig into this more then.

I'm going to have to go watch some of the tutorials because, yeah, I've got a couple of them for show templates. But I didn't know you could do that trick with the browser tabs. That's actually really cool. You could also, you could put the cursor in places. So, for instance, like for, it's similar to Markdown because I don't use Markdown.

But because I use HTML all the time, you know, just like with the, get the link and then put the URL in like ahref URL. But then put the cursor right in the middle so I could type what the anchor text is going to be.

So, you could have the cursor placement also with text expander. Okay, that's cool. I'm definitely going to have to dig into this then because so far I'm underwhelmed. Right, you started with the meh and now you're like, oh, this is the possibility. It's not like the word replacement on your iPhone type of shit where, you know, you put in, you know, TTYL and that kind of says that.

No, this does a lot more on the Mac than just simply make little shortcodes for full sentences or something like that. Okay, cool. So, it's worth the money so far. I mean, even with the little bit that I've been doing with it, it's not cheap. But it's getting the job done because with the show template stuff, I do have a framework built out and a couple different things that I'm doing it with.

And emails is really the main place I'm using it. It is saving some time, but I think I am not unleashing the full power of text expander yet in any way, shape, or form it sounds. I did have another problem with Smile Software products this week.

I had PDF Pen Pro 6, and I used that to sign PDFs and things like that and do, you know, PDF editing. And they had an update screen that was just like, oh, yeah, blah, blah, blah, new version, clicked it, go, oh, it's a paid update. And I'm like, okay, I'm trying to sign my tax forms, and they had to get in, like, right then.

It's like, oh, crap. And I tried to revert, when I reverted back to the old version, there's apparently a bunch of 7 code that gets scattered around. So PDF Pen Pro 6 would completely not work. I sent them a tweet, a very, not very nice tweet. And they wrote back saying, yeah, yeah, we could have probably done a better job pointing out that that is a paid upgrade.

And now when it pops up, it is much better. But PDF Pen Pro 6 just completely doesn't work for me now. So thank you very much for that, Smile. These are the products I don't understand. Like, how many PDF documents are you editing and signing? For editing, I do a lot of brochure stuff.

And we have to update numbers in those all the time. So I do it a couple times a week with different types of PDFs. For signing now, you can just use the Preview app on your Mac. Right. They've got a full signature setup. I've got a signature saved in there.

So I just went back and did that and completely skipped it. So my taxes went in on time thanks to native Apple software. Right. I just look at the PDF applications and go, like, how many times? I'm viewing PDFs, I guess. But I guess maybe I'm just not in the industry that PDF editing is that big of a deal.

I mean, I may need to do it three times a year. Yeah, I do it three times a week. So for me, it works out pretty well. Because we just send out different types of PDFs that different types of companies need for distribution inside of their organizations.

So we have to customize those for them. And then we send them and then they send them around to the people inside, like up to the sea level and stuff like that. And then so it looks all pretty and official. And they like the plain text. Come on, plain text. Can we just all get back to plain text? Hey, man, in a perfect world, I'm down with that.

Definitely down with that. Now, since this is the apps and gadgets section, DJI, the guys who make the, you know, the drones, the cool phantom drones, have made the most expensive selfie stick in the history of the world.

$650 with a fully integrated 4K camera. I know you love the selfie sticks. Are you going to pick one of these up? Uh, no. It has a hand stabilizer? It has, it's, it's, what it is, it's a gimbal on a stick with a camera.

But it doesn't hold your hand in place. It doesn't look like it holds your hand in place. No, but it, it holds the camera. The, the, basically the camera is, is stabilized, but it is a selfie stick or you can, you know, turn it the other way and use it as a, just a handheld camera.

But, you know, for, for headline use, cause it is the verge, they had to put it in as the ultimate selfie stick. You must be really hardcore into selfies. You must be the most vapid person in the history of the world to spend $650 on better stabilized selfies.

I'm sure somebody out there is not me. I don't think I've taken a selfie in like three years, but somebody out there is going to get this for selfies. Guaranteed. Do you remember the Apple hi-fi? No. You never, you never, you never saw the hi-fi? No.

That's before I was an Apple user, I guess. Okay. Yeah. This was an Apple boom box that failed miserably. And I had one, of course, cause back then I was Apple fan boy and bought everything. It was a really good little, you know, boom box system. You could run it on like 200 D batteries or you could plug it in and your iPod plugged into the top.

Simple. I've seen those before. Okay. I mean, there were a lot of third party ones that did that. Yeah. This was the only Apple made one and it tanked miserably, but now Apple's back with a one by beats called the pill plus. And it's about the same price.

I'm just surprised that they're going back to it after the failure of the hi-fi. But that was one of Steve jobs is like biggest, uh, uh, just pain points. He had, I guess there was a big hi-fi banner inside the, uh, campus at Apple. And he's like, get that fucking thing off the wall. Now, will this support airplay?

I think it's a Bluetooth. See that. See, that's the problem. Like with Bluetooth, you have to be only within a certain distance. And like, that's the thing with, uh, with the Chromecast audio that came out or announced whatever last week or two weeks ago that it just makes to me, it makes absolutely no sense that, that Apple is so engrossed with music yet.

They don't make an airplay speaker. Yeah. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It does. This does use the lightning cable. So I don't know if it's actually, yeah. These days, I live my life on airplay. My whole life. I go to meetings on airplay.

I just, again, it's like, do you have an Apple TV over there? Fine. I don't need to drive. You know, like, like I live my life and it just seems stupid. Like you could do airplay to an express or an extreme and plug in, you know, stereo speakers to that and do it that way.

But it just makes, it seems like, especially with their high margin, high price type of items that they wouldn't make a, you know, a Sonos type system or even a cheaper, like $400 wireless speakers that yet they do Bluetooth, but also airplay or with a little hard drive, a little hard drive that has your iTunes music on it.

So it's, it's, it's just, it's on the hard drive there or something. Someone may, come on, we're making startups now. Now we're, now we're consulting with the, what Apple should make as a product. Yep, indeed. And yeah, there's no, there's no real tech specs in, in this TechCrunch article, except that it uses a lightning cable. So it might not even be Bluetooth.

Who knows? What makes it a plus? It's the pill plus. Because the pill is already out there. Oh, so the plus is basically saying, hey, this is better and more expensive. Exactly. It does the same thing. Yep. And, and much like, you know, the Beats headphones probably is terrible.

Media candy. It looks like Top Gear is in production now. Jeremy Clarkson put out a picture of him and their crew doing the great hypercar showdown. And yeah, they've got a small crew there. I think it looks like it looks like about 75 to a hundred people to film this thing.

I guess Amazon money is going to good use. Right. I'm not, I've never watched Top Gear. I'm not a car person. So it doesn't really matter to me. I mean, and also it just seems like Amazon are trying to throw their money at, I think this is their biggest attempt.

It's very, maybe similar to Netflix with House of Cards of putting their money behind a big name to hopefully, you know, snowball this into more series. Cause I mean, but before I transparent got a little bit, but I mean, they've been putting out these original series for a while and there's a lot of them just like Hulu.

Also, if you go on Hulu or Amazon, you'll see these original series. They're like, I never even heard of this before. And they obviously gave it a couple, you know, a couple of hundred thousand dollars to produce. And most of them are shit. Yeah. The only Amazon one I'm looking forward to besides this one is the man in the high castle.

That's coming in a couple, couple of weeks, I think at this point, but they put a lot of money behind that one. Cause they do that, you know, that pilot season now where the users get to pick what shows they're going to make. Right. And also Woody Allen next year. And I can pass on that one. You should actually check out Top Gear though, because it's not about the cars.

I I'm not a car guy either. I couldn't care less. I drive a seven-year-old Ford Focus, you know, but it's, it's actually a really funny show. It's, it's more comedy than it is cars. So it's more like how Kitchen Nightmares is not much about the kitchen. Pretty much. Pretty much. And Fargo is back for season two.

Did you check out Fargo last year? Nope. No, I binge, I binge watch shows. Like basically I need at least three people to tell me you have to go watch this and then I'll watch like the whole four seasons of it. That's typically the way I watch things. Okay.

Well, count me as person number one, then go back and watch Fargo season one. It was amazing. Right. But I'll tell people to watch You're the Worst. I don't know. Have you seen that show on FXX? I have not. Okay. Definitely. Count me as three people. Okay. If you like, if you like, if you're grumpy, you like my type of demeanor.

If you're a nihilist and you're an asshole, you'll love that series because basically it's a, it's a, it's a romantic comedy between two assholes. Between a guy asshole and a girl asshole. And it's pretty offensive. And, uh, it's, it's great.

I mean, it's on FXX. I mean, it's, it's, it's not even good enough to be on the regular FX. Uh, download it. I don't, I don't, wherever you could find it. It's worth the first season was last year. There are five episodes into this season. Uh, but I would consider it to be, uh, comedy wise, uh, one of the best shows, uh, on quote television.

Okay. Well, I checked all the boxes on those. So, uh, nihilistic asshole, whatever. Yeah, I'm in. I'll check it out. And in the last one we got here, Sherlock is coming back with a special and it is a Victorian special. I've always wondered what the hell they're going to do with this one, but the trailer's up.

If you're a Sherlock fan, go check it out. I don't know if it's going to be any good, but they generally seem to be so, um, high hopes, low expectations.

Jordan, are you a back to the future fan? Sure. Why not? Why not? Have you seen these, uh, Pepsi bottles that are coming out? I'm looking at that bright right now. Uh, apparently so, so it's 2015. That's technically where Marty comes into the future, like in the 1985 movie.

So I'm assuming that these are the bottles that these, that were in the movie, the style of the bottle. That's whatever. It's they're, they're, they're basically true. They're, this is an advertising campaign based purely on nostalgia. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm just sick and tired of all these people coming out with, Oh, somebody else did this in back to the future. Let's do something that day. I'm like, if there's no fucking hoverboards, I don't care. It's, it's a Pepsi bottle. There's only 6,500 of them that they're going to release. And it doesn't say, Oh, $20 and 15 cents each.

Isn't that cute for 2015? I don't know if anybody's going to be able to find them, but, uh, yeah, we'll see. I'm just, I'm just over this, this damn back to the future thing. It's like anytime that there's any kind of back to the future reference, the internet gets a hard on and just gets in my Twitter feed.

And so I just had to put this in here, but it looks fancy. Yeah. But on the last, uh, hello internet, if you listen to that podcast, they were debating whether or not to, uh, uh, get it involved in the auction for the, the sports, the Guinness record book, whatever book from, from the movie that you could own the actual book.

And I think it went for like $8,000 or something. Wow. That's actually not bad for a prop. Right. But that's a good prop. Yeah. This is a Pepsi bottle.

Now, if you want to feel good about yourself, you can check out this new digital photo archive from the depression era.

It's, uh, depressing because it's the depression, you know, back when kids there, uh, the big thing that they had to play with was sticks and dirt, not selfie sticks and dirt, not selfie sticks and dirt. No, well, maybe that's the, maybe that's the reason why depression era photos are that bad.

They didn't get, cause no one had, cause in order to be a photographer back then, I mean, you actually have to know your shit now. He's like, you know, everyone could be one. So we don't, we don't get the, there's no, it wasn't, it wasn't that there wasn't any food back then. It's just that no one took food photos. Yeah.

A food photo would probably cost you more than like a week's worth of food. But yeah, there's a site called a photogrammer, which lets you search through a hundred and 70,000 photos from 1935 to 1945. And it was created by the United States farm security administration.

Uh, I didn't know there was a farm security administration. Someone has to protect the farms. I wonder how their, their morale is doing. We're probably, probably much better than a homeland security. I mean, who's breaking into farms? Are you kidding me?

Love it. Jordan, I don't see you as kind of a quantified self kind of guy. Do you have a Fitbit or any of those, you know, clever bands that you get to wear? No, no. I already know my self-quantified. I'm a douchebag. I just have a, just a little monitor that says zero.

I take no exercise. I smoke cigarettes. I drink coffee. I'm probably going to die 15 years earlier than I should. I don't, I don't need a device telling me that. Like, it's not going to change my life. Some people say that they get these little device. Oh, now I work out more. You would have worked out anyway. This is just a way for you to just shove it in my face.

So you can go, look, it showed 12,000 steps. Like, I don't, I don't, what does that matter to me? 3,000 steps for me. Is that going to make me work out more now? That's just going to make me hate myself more. I like to hate yourself more part. I have that fairly often because I do have a Fitbit.

And when I don't hit my steps, I'm like, oh, well, well, that sucked. It doesn't make me feel any better. It actually makes me feel worse. That's a good point. If you go out and say, tomorrow, I'm going to do twice as many steps. Yeah, yeah, I kind of do. I'm that kind of douchebag. I'm on the other side of it.

They're trying to control you. This is mind control. This is brainwashing. Well, here's the other side of it. People are now buying Fitbits for their fat pets. Fat shaming. Fat shaming at its worst. Let your pet be fat.

Don't put an Apple watch on it. And it's not like the pet can fight back with their words saying, what the fuck are you putting on me? And why am I walking today? I just want to sit in front of the TV and eat my my meow mix. So get this damn thing off me. But shouldn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it the owner's fault?

If your pet's fat because it doesn't do as many steps, shouldn't you be taking it out for a walk? Don't blame the pet for it. Good point. Good point. And on the same Fitbit news, CEO James Park explains why your Fitbit won't end up in the junk drawer. Well, most people I know that have Fitbits, they are in the junk drawer.

But a lot of this article talks about how corporations are going to start making you wear them. They say it's voluntary. But we've we've speculated on this like a year and a half ago that as soon as corporations start making you wear these things and check in and, you know, you're shamed, you're step shamed with your other colleagues.

It's it's going to be downhill from there. And then once the insurance companies get in on it and then you have like your, you know, your Lindsay Lohan jail, you know, jail bracelet, but it's a Fit bracelet that you can't take off. Then, you know, oh, you took off your Fitbit. Oh, well, then your your premiums go up.

OK, great. That's what it's going to come to at some point. We're getting closer and closer to idiocracy every single day. Well, my shout outs this week are to Mr. Jordan Cooper for coming on.

Thank you very much for standing in for Mr. Schulmeister, who has buggered off to Germany. I hope I was able to to to reach and and do do well to his incredibly low standards. Indeed. Well, I enjoyed your sports explaining. I think that was the highlight of the show for me.

And I'm not even that much of a sports person anymore. Just that, you know, if if it's if it's a business, I'm a Jewish New Yorker. If it involves fucking money floating around and you have to look at stats and stuff, that's really up my alley. But but I'm glad to be on. And let's see if if I'll get any hate mail.

Typically, Brian does. But maybe maybe I need to come back and and talk about some moron of the week. OK, well, we can I'm sure we can find some morons of the week for you to talk about or you can find them as that's your job. And I'd also like to throw a quick shout out to Gigi Edgley.

She is going to be doing a quick interview after we close right here. So stay tuned for that interview and hear about what's cool coming up in her Kickstarter. I think maybe it's an Indiegogo campaign. She's done Kickstarter stuff, but she was also on Farscape. You might know her as Chiana. And we're going to be talking to her in about two seconds.

But until then, thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFilippo. You can check me out at JPD dot me. And I'm Jordan Cooper. And you could follow me on Twitter at Blender HD or listen to my podcast. The Morning Dump at Dump dot a.m. Until next time. So I'm here with Gigi Edgley, who you may know from many things.

But we met when you were on Farscape 15 at the actually at the first Farscape convention 15 years ago. And I think you've stood me up about 15 years of times, actually, because the amount of times I've tried to invite you to conventions and to meet up and to hang out.

And you always promise me that you will. And then you never invite me to your birthday drinks. And I'm left stranded on the street alone, but with an amazing website. I'm a horrible person. Now, I've been to a couple of conventions that you've invited me to. Come on. It hasn't been all me leaving you by the curbside.

That's all right. I'm used to it. No, I owe you my life. I know I'm an extremely high maintenance actress with websites and you drop everything at every heartbeat. So I really, really appreciate it. You know, I can barely send an email.

So you are my computer. Well, you know, I have to make up for all the times I stood you up. So what are you going to do? Evens itself out. Evens itself out. It does. It does. So I wanted to get you on the show today. At some point, we're going to do a longer interview. But you've got a project going on right now.

And I wanted the fans of the show to be able to join in on this one. So why don't you tell me about what it is? You're amazing. I'm so appreciative that you've taken the time to speak to me about this because it's so very, very close to my heart. I originally came over from Australia to host the Jim Henson's Creature Shop Challenge and it was a fantastic show.

It was 10 creature designers that compete for $50,000 and a year to work full-time at the Jim Henson Creature Shop. And it was so awesome because I just felt really blessed to be part of the world of Henson again. And while I was working on that show, beautiful Brian Henson showed me a script or he showed me an envelope.

And he was like, guess what this is? And I was like, what is it? And he said, it's Farscape the movie. I'm like, are you kidding me? Give it to me. And I tried to tackle him to the ground and he wouldn't give it to me. And so I moved back from Australia to the States permanently. I bought my dog MacGyver, my 18-year-old cat Louie, and then sort of waited around for a while for the Jim Henson Creature Shop Challenge to be picked up and more mentions of the Farscape movie.

And I waited and I waited and eventually got the word that SyFy weren't into picking up the Jim Henson Creature Shop Challenge for the price that – for the budget that, you know, they needed. So I was in a bit of a situation and I met an amazing production company and they approached me and they said, you know, would you be into acting in this short film?

And I was like, yeah, if it's a good script, that's the whole reason why, you know, I'm hunting – now I'm a little older in my career, I'm hunting characters and people that are – and stories that are complex and intriguing and challenging. And, you know, you turn on the television every day and there's so much nonsense that I really, really, really want to stay true to my heart and tell stories that change people's lives and challenge me and excite me.

So this first project was called Hashtag and we actually ended up raising – it was a Kickstarter and we ended up raising – our goal was $40,000 and we got over $44,000. And it is an absolutely beautiful piece. It's in post-production at the moment.

It's all about modern technology and how we are all addicted to, you know, our iPhones and our Twitter and our Facebook and all that good stuff. And because that was so successful and I looked at it and it was so life-changing for me, to join forces with fans and friends and family and it was so refreshing that you could actually stick to the script that you'd originally written.

You didn't have a hundred different producers coming in and overseeing it and changing it and we could really stay very true to our artistic integrity. And I know because I do so many signings that, you know, fans and people that come up to my table are very committed to telling the story that needs to be told rather than the story that's just going to put bums on seats kind of thing.

So, then I was speaking to this beautiful gentleman, Carlos Aldana, and he approached me about this film called Nexus and I was like, you know what, let me have a read of it. And it is beautiful. It's about love. It's about courage. It's about believing in yourself no matter what and no matter what reality you live in because it also explores alternate realities.

So, it's really fascinating. And, yeah, we've actually just started filming it. It's very stunt heavy. It's got the post-apocalyptic worlds and I do a lot of wire work in it. And we actually did some training at the Cirque du Soleil School here in Hollywood.

Oh, very cool. Yeah. It's got a beautiful, beautiful cast attached and fantastic crew. So, this is the Indiegogo that we've got going at the moment. It's called Nexus. You can find it through my website that was designed by yours truly. So, my website, as you know very well, is ggedgly.com and it has a link to the Nexus Indiegogo on that.

And it also has a link to my Twitter and Facebook if you want to keep an eye on my other projects. But I invite you to come on this journey with me because it really is life-changing and it's a very magical, beautiful process to really work with people that have helped me every step of the way.

And now it's like, you know, it's always been big network things and big studios, which I still love and adore. But it's a really exciting journey when you can actually, you know, create something from scratch from a beautiful group of people that all share the same vision. So, yeah, I'm very excited about it.

No, it looks very cool. These monsters are very scary. I know. I've had a few sleepless nights over them. Don't worry. We're going to have everything linked up in the show notes for the show so everybody can find out everything about it there. And any news on that Farscape movie?

Please. You tell me. Usually I find out when I'm doing, you know, signings and stuff and people come up to me and they're like, oh, did you hear? You're going to start shooting. And I'm like, am I? Oh, really? That's honestly how I heard about the, um, how I heard about the Farscape Peacekeeper Wars.

So I'm waiting for, yeah, I'm waiting for one of, one of the fans to come up and let me know my schedule. Yeah. Mine. Yeah. Where's my trailer at? Yeah. Oh, great. So, uh, yeah, we're going to have everything in the show notes. Check it out. And I got to say, I loved the Creature Shop Challenge.

That was so much fun. It was just so beautiful because every single person that I've ever met has been influenced by the Jim Henson Company, whether it be the Dark Crystal or the Storyteller or the Labyrinth or Fraggle Rock or, and I was speaking to some people the other day and I said, like, even if you just take the very, very simple example of Kermit the Frog and he's literally just, you know, a bit of felt with some eyes that don't move.

Sorry, Kermit, but then you, we've all watched him as we've grown up and he's taught us so much and he's inspired us to believe in, you know, our dreams and we've cried with him and we've laughed with him. And so if you think, you know, these very simple forms of storytelling and then you look at the Jim Henson Creature Shop Challenge where we were setting, we were setting the most insane challenges for them.

They had two days to design, fabricate, build the mechanisms, create a story around these creatures, learn how to puppeteer them or teach the puppeteers how to work them and then perform them for us, you know, within a matter of a few days.

And every time I read the script and I was like, there's no way they're going to be able to, they're going to come up with this. It's literally impossible and sure enough, their creations were breathtaking. Oh, they were amazing. Yeah. And very, very interesting.

Like I, I was pulled aside a couple of times because in the elimination nights, I had a really hard time because I looked at these beautiful designers and I feel like I've been on that, you know, you know what it's like. You're a creative soul and a lot of our time is spent looking for the job and trying to make new pieces and staying true to our hearts.

And when we had to eliminate people, I, I had a hard time keeping it together and they produced, pulled me, you know, away from the set and sort of went, um, perhaps if you didn't cry this time. It's tricky because I know that, you know, every, every word that comes out of our mouths, they're hanging on and this is their lives.

You know, it's not like, okay, see you later, have fun at the job, you know, they dropped everything. They hadn't, weren't allowed to tell any of their family members, or I think there was like one or two that they were allowed to inform, but any of their friends, they had to, you know, make up some stories because they didn't want to give away anything about the show.

So they really were, had put their lives on the line for their passion. And I think that's extraordinary. Everybody go help Gigi out and check out Nexus because it looks amazing. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And check out the amazing site that you created, please, gg.com.

And there's links to, what have we got there, Jace? We've got everything. Everything. And we, all we need is some steak knives. And by lunch, you'll have them up there. I know you. Of course. Of course. Okay. Well, I can't wait until we can sit down and actually do our long form interview, but for now.

Oh, you tease, you tease. Oh no. You live on the wrong side of the hill. Oh yeah. It's so far away. Look, I've come all the way from Australia. That was a very long swim through shark infested waters. So the least you could do other than build me a million dollar website is come across the hill.

Okay. I will try and take on Laurel Canyon for you very soon. All right. Beautiful boy. Thank you so much for having me. I really, really appreciate it and I can't wait to join forces with all the beautiful fans and followers and beautiful peeps out there because it really is an amazing and awesome invitation to work together to create magic because this world needs as much magic as it can get.

Couldn't agree more. Thanks for coming on. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show. Check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG. We really appreciate your support. If you don't want to or can't donate but still want to support the show, please go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars or tell a friend about the show.

Intro music for the show is provided by the band Among Us. You can find them on iTunes, Spotify, and Tidal or Apple Music or whatever new service comes out this week. Or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash GOG and get 10 exclusive tracks.

Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stachansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash houseofandy and he's also on SoundCloud at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash Andy. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 131.

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