139: The Bill Murray Disruption Clause

If you're offended by dildos, you should not look at this article. 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.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks for December 11th, 2015. I am Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How are you, Jason? I'm good. Excellent. We have a light breeze and some of that water stuff looks like it's about to fall out of the sky here in California. You know what that means? Yeah, I had to go cover my firewood last night.

Okay, man of the mountain. It got 60 degrees out, man. We had to have a fire. Well, what it actually means is we're probably going to have rolling power outages today and nothing's going to work well because we live in a third world fucking country now. Are you kidding me? That's what happens all the time now in California. A little bit of a breeze, there goes the power.

I haven't heard anything about this. Well, you'll get used to it now that you've moved back here. Maybe your grid's a little bit better out in the hinterlands where you are, but certainly down here, I'm expecting it today. You know, we pour billions upon billions of dollars into non-problems, solutions for non-problems like Airbnb and Uber. What do we put into our crumbling third world infrastructure?

Nothing! Thanks for peaking my levels. No problem. So how about you, Silicon Valley fucks, fix that? Oh, no, they're too busy because I was up in San Jose last weekend, as we talked about on the last show. I had, I'm flying Southwest, right?

Okay. I don't like Southwest generally, and I've started to really kind of get, I started to like them. I've started to fall in love with Southwest. There's a certain egalitarian whatever about it. Bullshit. I had A2. I had a seat A2.

Guess how many people got on the plane in front of me? About a couple hundred. 25. You can pay for it now, right? Minimum of, well, I paid for it. I paid for A2. Right. A woman with her fucking little lap dog gets on the plane because she needed time to board. You know what? She was about 27 and a supermodel.

She did not need her service dog. She also did not need her boyfriend, who was a six-foot-four African-American who looked like basically another supermodel. They got on the plane together because they needed extra time to board. Fuck you. Because they have a dog. Fuck you.

No. I was so pissed off. And even when I got on the plane, the guy in front of me who had A1, when we scanned our little thing, she's like, oh, can you give this to the first flight attendant you see so she can know that general boarding has started? We give it to her, or he gives it to her, and I'm right next to him.

And she's like, what do you mean? This isn't general boarding? What the hell are all these people doing here? Even she was pissed off. She's like, what the hell is this? Yeah. No. It was a joke. It was a total joke. And, yeah, the woman in front of me – not woman. I'd have to say, like, probably teenage girl, you know, with her Louis Vuitton bags getting on early because apparently she needs, like, some oh, my God time to get on early.

No, you fucking entitled fucks. Get off my plane. Well, yeah, that's the world we live in now. Dogs are more important than anything else. I know. When did I turn into you? Shit. Sorry, man. Sorry about that.

Oh, man. You want to talk about things that have changed a lot, too. I was actually just thinking about this the other day. I do believe I ranted about this last year. It's Christmas time, which we now know means it's pink slip time because people now – you know, companies got to get people off their books in time for the new year and the new financial year.

So people get fired around Christmas now. Oh, yeah. Remember the old days, like, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation when the worst thing that happened is Clark Griswold didn't get a big enough bonus check for the pool? Oh, yeah. Now you get fired. Well, I got fired in 1998, and my entire division got fired in 1998.

So I've been on the receiving end of that. You are a special rainbow, Jason. No, because Blockbuster was bought by Viacom, and Viacom decided to liquidate 550 employees just in time for Christmas. Yes. Isn't it lovely? Mm-hmm. Makes you feel all great inside. Mm-hmm.

So who's getting fired this year? Oh, I don't know. A bunch of my friends have been talking about the rounds of layoffs that are still coming. So I'm assuming a couple of my friends will probably get fired, and I've certainly got a few clients that are trying to get me off their books, and I'm trying to explain that they don't get to continue to have a website if they do that.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, that sucks. Yeah, well, what are you going to do? You know, it's time to be happy and jolly and spread the cheer. Yeah, it's just the season for giving. Mm-hmm. Pink slips. Well, I guess pink is kind of like red. You know, red and white. Mix red and white, you get pink. Mm-hmm.

Something like that. So iOS 9.2, you say it did not turn on Bluetooth. It did not turn on Bluetooth. I was very excited about that. I'm going to keep this going, even though nobody else cares. No, nobody cares. My Bluetooth is always on because I have an Apple Watch. Right. Because I'm a douchebag.

And speaking of that, actually, Best Buy is running, at least as far as I know, the very first time ever there's actual discounts on Apple products. Really? Like what? Best Buy is selling iPads and Apple Watches at discounts. Ooh, I might have to go look into that. I'm actually looking into it because I do need an upgrade on my iPads.

They're both pretty old at this point. And if I can get up to $100 off, that's worth it to me. Yeah, I mean, the sad thing about my iPad is I've got that, like, you know, $1,000 iPad with Verizon and all the LTE stuff. And it's an Air, you know, it's an Air 1. It's the first Air. Yeah.

And it doesn't do, like, half the cool stuff anymore. So, like, you know, now that iOS keeps updating, I'm like, oh, that looks cool. Oh, I can't do it. Even though it is quite possibly one of the most amazing pieces of technology I've ever owned in my life, it's now out of date. I'm like, damn it.

Yeah, their cycles are running a little bit too fast for my liking these days. Yeah, because, I mean, the iPad Air 1 is a phenomenal machine. It's phenomenal. It's super light, does everything I need it to do except the multitasking stuff, which the new one does. But you know what?

I guess I don't really need multitasking when I'm playing Candy Crush. No, no, you really don't. And, you know, again, the tablet was never meant – well, they're trying to make them massive workstations now to replace your actual laptops or computers, but that was never the point. No, no, yeah. I do want to try this pencil, though.

I'm going to go to the store this weekend because I have to get new glasses. So there's an Apple store upstairs so I can, you know, while I have to wait for Lenscrafters, I can go try this pencil gizmo because I've heard people, like, trying it and they really like it. Yeah, it looks pretty cool. I can't use it with my iPads at this point, but maybe if I do go to Best Buy and do an upgrade.

Yeah, it could be. Yeah, and I want to see this big one in person to see how redonkulously huge it is. Yeah, I want to do that too, but I just can't bring myself to get near the mall near me because I know how crowded it must be right now. Fortunately, they opened up a mall across from the mall for me, so everybody's going to the new mall and nobody's going to the old mall.

So I can go to the old mall and have, you know, like, free reign of the place. Nice. Mm-hmm. All right. Technology. They disrupted the mall by building a mall. Oh, disruption. Oh, speaking of that, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, she gave birth to identical twins.

When? A couple days ago. Word on the street is she named them Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves. Oh, God. Hey, yo. No. I've been holding on to that one. You should have kept holding on to that one. Oh, come on. It's not bad. Yeah, it is. Okay, it's pretty bad. Hey, you make a tech joke.

Tech is a joke. How's that? That's true. Finally, let's just wrap this up because we're just meandering. I did have – we've talked a lot about working from home because I've been doing it. You did it for a while. You just decided not to do it anymore and you bought yourself a little office to get out.

There's a study, an article on Slate that kind of wraps up the study a little bit and goes over it that talks about how it's not for everyone. No shit. No shit. The studies have basically shown that initially people's productivity go way up, but it's also mostly because they're working longer hours because they're at home and they're not really good at time management.

And eventually they get burned out and get lonely. No shit. So think about – They didn't even have to write an article. They could have just given me a call and like told you exactly what's going to happen there. Yeah. Working from home. When somebody tells me they work from home, my first – the first thing out of my mouth is I'm sorry.

Yeah, you poor man, you. But I'm still doing it. I don't know why, but, you know. Oh, man. So it's so much worth it to just spend the extra money. Don't go to the bar as often. Save those, you know, Starbucks points and spend it on an office because that separation of church and state really makes things better.

Yeah, I think that's really way up there on my list for changes in my life in 2016 is to sort out the no longer working from home option because I'm tired of, you know, 8 o'clock at night getting email, have to go work. And I'm also tired of just sitting at home alone all day. Yeah, no, it sucks.

That's what I did. I have my partner who runs a completely different kind of company just partnered with her and got an office. And, like, she's upstairs. I'm downstairs. Ne'er the twain shall meet except when the printer breaks and they're like, Jason, come fix the printer, you know, which you will have to do no matter what.

That would be the downside, yes. We will always be the tech support for whoever we're in an office with. Exactly. But, you know what, the leaving the house and then saying, oh, no, I can't fix that right now because it's 9 o'clock at night. And my computer is at the office. Yeah. It really, really is nice.

They don't need to know about the five iPads and three laptops you have sitting around the house. Shut the fuck up, man. In the news. Now, Brian, I have never been a fan of the Wu-Tang Clan.

I don't like rap. I don't like hip hop. Right. So when this story came out this week that the pharma's bad boy, Martin Shkreli or whatever the fuck his name is, the asshole that raised the price of the, you know, the drugs that people need to live out of, you know, the ballpark for anybody that could possibly afford them.

Then he went out and bought the single one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for $2 million. I'm like, yeah, I can see that. Yeah. Well, I can see that too. You know, I thought it was a genius move for the Wu-Tang Clan to kind of do that. It's, you know, like fun little performance art, basically.

And then, yeah, this asshat bought it. And then the story got really fun. That's when the fun starts. That's when the fun really started because the internet then immediately exploded because supposedly there was a clause in the contract that allowed either the Wu-Tang Clan or Bill Murray to be able to steal it back from whoever purchased it.

With no legal repercussions. Now, if they got that past this guy, it would have been, you know what? Then they deserve to be able to get it back. But this did not happen. If it had been true, it would have been the greatest news story of all time. But sadly, we got punked.

Yeah, you got punked. Yeah. Not we, you. You and Gizmodo and everybody else. And the entire internet. Well, you know, it's when you want it to be true so badly. I know. Anything that has Bill Murray in a heist sounds really good to me. It really does. So there's another article on Ars Technica about this asshat as he's basically being called by the entire internet.

My biggest challenge is not to lose my temper is, you know, basically what, what's your name, McCaskill from the Senate Committee on Aging. It was like, oh, you, you're a horrible person.

You know, this guy is just not very nice. And we've talked about him before. We know he's not very nice. He's not illegal. Scum. But it's not illegal. It's not illegal to be an asshat in America. And to a certain extent, I, I almost feel like he's just decided I'm going to troll the entire world.

That's it. That's it. He's a pharma. I have enough money. I am going to troll the world. He's a pharma troll. Yep. Pretty much. Just made that one up. Good for him. Speaking of trolls, let's talk about Donald Trump. Well, let's not talk about the thing that everybody is really upset about and rightfully so. And hopefully we'll destroy his campaign.

Let's talk about Donald Trump exists. Well, there's that. In a recent speech, he decided, you know, because we're having so many problems with ISIS and the internet, that he's going to ban it. So he's going to call up his good friend, Bill Gates, and ask him to close it up. Yep. That's what a 69-year-old man would do.

That is your solution. Let's turn it off at the spigot. Bill Gates has the switch, the master switch right next to his bed. And he just hits that and problem solved. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't work. This guy can't really. It's right.

It's got to be done. It, well, it surprises me every day that he's still on the news. I mean, here's the thing. The rest of the world doesn't understand what California went through. When we elected Arnold Schwarzenegger to governor, we thought it was going to be funny.

And it was cool that it's like, oh, we're going to have a celebrity as governor. We went through eight years of just a tanked economy. Yep. Like no infrastructure building. Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the worst politicians in the history of the world, just like Donald Trump.

And they haven't figured that out yet. Yeah. And Schwarzenegger is a gazillion times more politically smart and savvy than Trump is. Oh my God. Yeah. It's like, it's like Einstein versus a rat compared to Donald Trump and Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger was actually, he's a smart guy.

He just is a terrible leader, you know, terrible leader. And Donald Trump is just terrible. Yeah. I just, I don't understand. I, I, anyways, let's move America, America, America, America. Let's talk about other ridiculous things. Did you know that Mercer Meyer severance package is going to reach about $110 million?

Doesn't surprise me one bit. I'm going to make $110 million for doing absolutely nothing with a failing company. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, this whole thing is just, this is. Where can I apply for these sorts of things? It must be on LinkedIn and I'll happily run your company into the ground.

If you give me $110 million, the company was already run into the ground. Even further. I know the fact that it had $110 million to give her is amazing in my book. Yeah. I don't know where they have that money either. Well, Alibaba. Oh, also passing out pink slips to a lot of employees. Oh, Alibaba or Yahoo.

Yahoo. Yes. I thought about trying to go and get a job at Yahoo when this whole stuff was happening because I'm like, oh, maybe they're going to make a pivot and can make a few bucks going to Yahoo. They are pivoting now. They've decided that they're actually going to sell themselves instead of Alibaba.

I know. Is this not the greatest thing ever? They're going to do a reverse, reverse Yahoo spinoff. Yes. I don't know what they're spitting off. They're spitting off Yahoo because of it. Because again, like I said, I don't know what they're spitting off. We talked last week about – What is Yahoo?

Well, yes. We talked last week about the tax issues that these guys are – like everything that they're doing to try and avoid paying taxes. And they're going to sell themselves to avoid paying taxes because they don't want to sell the Alibaba stock because that is a capital gain.

And it's like the GDP of a third world country if they sold that Alibaba stock. That is the only thing that keeps Yahoo alive. So instead of, oh, let's sell the Alibaba stock and pay for Yahoo. Well, fuck it. Let's just sell Yahoo and keep the Alibaba stock in profit.

That's it. I mean that's really what's going to happen. Yeah, it's pretty genius in a certain direction actually. Well, good on them. You've got to pay for that $110 million seventh packet somehow. That's right. You certainly do. So let's do more Silicon Valley bullshit here.

Square, the company that lets you basically – the company that lets food trucks take credit cards. Right. That's really all Square is. Well, or hipster coffee shops in Silver Lake. Yeah, there you go. So they just had a $2.9 billion IPO.

Right. But didn't they do a valuation at $6 billion not too long ago? Something like that. I don't know. There's an article on Recode that kind of gets into how everybody – all the investors are getting freaked out by this because it's signaling the end of like – well, not so much the investors. It's the smaller companies because Silicon Valley is finally having to deal with something that the rest of us have done.

They're squeezing out basically the middle class of these stupid little asshat Web 2.0 companies. They're going away. It's basically you just got the big boys and that's that. It's the search for the unicorn. Kind of like the rest of society and that's what you guys did to it. So screw you. Okay.

I read this. I read this article. Yes. Well, I read three-quarters of the article and I wanted to punch you in the balls by the time I got halfway through it and I just kind of kept going but it's just – because this is written by – I do believe – here's the funny part. It's written by Sue Decker who is the former president of Yahoo.

I know. Isn't that great? I'm – and I'm just thinking, oh, the irony. I'm reading articles about Marissa Meyer who is the head of Yahoo and now I'm reading articles by the person who was the head of Yahoo who now is writing articles. How the mighty of phone order.

You apparently did not get your $110 million payout. Otherwise, you wouldn't be writing articles for Recode. No. That was very funny. Oh, yeah. So let's talk about Airbnb. One of my – it used to be Uber. Do we gotta? Yeah, a little bit. Okay.

In a bid for apparent transparency, Airbnb decided they were going to release some of their data on an AirGap computer that you had to physically go to. And bring your own post-its. And you had to have pen and paper to write down anything that you wanted to because that makes sense.

Right, Airbnb? We're a technology company. That makes sense. Anyways, so they did that because they're idiots. And even with those limitations, journalists have managed to bring out some really interesting details about just how shitty a company Airbnb is.

Yeah. Yeah. So basically, there's a couple links in the show notes. I'm not going to get too into it. But from the limited amount of data that was made available for 30 minutes on an AirGap computer that you could scribble down with a pen and paper, basically the data shows that almost every single New York City hosts are breaking the law, which we already knew because Airbnb really started off, sure, with good intentions, but they are not, not, wink, wink.

Everybody is skirting laws and regulations and city ordinances and tax situations. And that Airbnb has basically been gamed completely, and it's no longer the little guys. It is the larger companies. It's people that have multiple properties that they can then just rent out. Yes, and skirt various laws and taxes.

Mm-hmm. Yay! Uh-huh. Yay! Here's the thing. You can legally rent out a room with Airbnb in New York, but it's when you're not on the premises that it becomes illegal. So these people who own apartment buildings are just making Airbnb apartment, you know, Airbnb hotels.

Yeah. And if they can fill it up, they make a lot more money than if they rented it out to just one person. Oh, hell yeah. They're making a fortune. Yeah. And they should be shut down. Yes, they should. Shouldn't they? I mean, gee, this is- Haven't we been screaming about this since day one? That's what I'm saying.

Do we really got to go over this again? We know that they suck. Well, this is much like us screaming about 1Password. For 100 episodes of talking about it, one person pays attention. We had six. Come on. We're doing better with that. Out of the thousands of thousands and thousands, I felt like Schwarzenegger- I cut Schwarzenegger out a bit there.

I did. The thousands of people that listened to the show, six, have bought 1Password. Thank you, six people. I just- I don't understand how we can sit here and know that people are breaking the law and just go, Eh. Eh. You know why? Because the attorney general is the person who prosecutes them, and he goes, Eh.

It's not our job. We're not lawyers. We're not prosecutors. Yeah. The police are still busy shooting fucking innocent people. They can't be bothered with it. Attorney general, eh, whatever. Okay. Well- So, come on. Let's move on to stuff that doesn't piss me off quite so much.

Good luck with that. Have you heard our show? I know. Well, this still makes me upset. Okay. There's a sea change occurring in that old fogey technology or old fogey industry called hotels that we certainly need to have disrupted because we can't fix infrastructure. So, let's go ahead and do Airbnb and make a bunch of rich assholes even richer, but pretend that it's actually good for all of us.

Oh, I'm sorry. Did I rant again? Bring it back in. Breathe. Brian, breathe. Breathe. Bring it back in. Bring it back in. So, that outdated industry called the hotel industry is trying to appeal to millennials by not putting desks in rooms anymore. That is the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever heard.

Millennials don't use desks. They sit on the couch and put up their Airbnb properties and schedule their Uber driving assignments on their iPads. If anybody's ever used a mouse, you need a desk. You can't put a mouse on the goddamn bed. That's just even somewhere to put all your stuff. I love having a desk in my hotel room.

That's where everything goes as soon as I get in. Yeah. That's where I mix my gin and tonicas. Gin and tonica? Around and smoke my marijuanica. It's that time of the year and I heard the Adam Sandler song earlier. Oh, okay. That was a pretty good song.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is stupid. Leave the desks. We just need, we need a place to put our stuff. Well, luckily they are starting to realize that most people actually do not appreciate this. And some people are going the other way and kind of almost modeling hotel rooms as many offices, which I would like. That's what I would prefer. Yeah.

Because when I'm in the hotel room, if I'm in the hotel room, I'm doing two things. I'm either working or sleeping. Yeah. Because I'm traveling to see the city that I'm in, not sitting in a hotel room. Exactly. And I'm not 20 anymore, so I'm not doing lines off a hooker. So I'm working, you know, that's what happens when you get old.

But that's why you need a desk. Yes. And even if you didn't, you still need a desk for the hooker to lie on. Exactly. Just, I mean, this is just, you know, common sense. It's just math. Yeah. Marriott. Samsung is getting into the self-driving car business now. Obviously, they're going the route that I thought Apple was going to go, and I'm still not convinced that they aren't, although Apple is saying they're doing their own car.

They're just going to be doing the super incredibly advanced technology dashboard that you plug into someone else's car. Well, they're doing components. They are doing components, which makes sense because a lot of what Samsung does is components. And that's what we talked about, how, like, the self-driving car is a hodgepodge of, like, 200 different companies.

Yeah. You know? So, what these car companies have turned into is somebody who basically has a catalog and goes out and says, okay, well, I would like that, you know, turn lane indicator from this company. I would like the proximity sensor from this company. I'd like the LiDAR from this company.

And then you put it all together. You know? I think we might be able to Kickstarter a self-driving car next year. Probably. If we had the catalog, we could probably do it. Yeah. That's probably very true. And that's what Apple's going to do because Apple, you know, they have Samsung make everything for them.

So, maybe that's why Samsung's doing it. Apple's just like, hey, man, we need some of this stuff. Can you guys just get on the bandwagon? Yeah. I agree. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, Google apparently maybe did something. I'm not entirely sure. I have a – well, stay with me here.

Trust me. I'm with you on this one because there's one thing that I want to talk about in this article. There's some key wording in not only this article, which is in our show notes from Engadget, but also three other articles that were written about this very story. Here we go. Google announced a breakthrough in the field of quantum computing on Wednesday.

The company thinks. It's found a quantum algorithm that solves problems 100 million times faster than conventional processes. It's not confirmed. So, then how can you announce a breakthrough if you're not entirely sure that you've done it and you haven't confirmed it yet?

Okay. That's not a breakthrough. That's like me saying, holy shit, I think I have the solution to cancer. I haven't tested it. It's just a thought. It kind of came to me while I was sleeping and I was also naked on a school bus. Okay, Donald Trump. That was the bit of a nightmare.

But I'm going to announce a breakthrough. Okay. Here's the thing. The article that you linked is not the good one. I found one from Ars Technica, which I will also put in the show notes. What they talk about is they have over a thousand cubits. Yes.

Okay. Cubits. Isn't that like, you know, old Sumerian money? I was actually thinking Q-Bert. Well, there's Q-Bert too. If they can get a thousand cubits on the screen at one time all jumping, that would be a new thing. Yeah. No. The science, the math, everything they're talking about here.

It's just like, we made something cool. We don't know what it is. And we're going to baffle you with bullshit. That's what it is. Yeah. So yeah, neither of us could, could deconstruct this at all. No. And I really can't tell if anything is actually there or not, or if it actually, they don't know.

Yeah. There's got to be something if they're coming out saying, oh, we made something cool. You know? Yeah. There's got to be, but we just don't know what it is. And the fun part is they also don't know what it's good for. No, they don't really know what to use it for. Yeah. They're like, okay, this is really good at specific tasks.

We're trying to figure out what those specific tasks are that we can use this computer for. That is honestly what they said. Yeah. Well, maybe they can give it to Uber and Uber can use it to figure out how to do Uber Eats since they're trying to really push that out as a huge new branded food delivery service to try to run all the other Grubhubs and all those fun companies that we railed about a couple episodes ago.

Yeah. And it's funny because Uber just launched a food delivery app and it looks like a seamless killer. And I'd never heard of seamless until you posted this article in our show notes. I'm like, who the hell is seamless? That sounds like a fashion company. Yeah. Yeah. I've never heard of it either actually, but who knows? I mean, they're doing this basically in Toronto as now my question and the real reason I put this story in the show notes, because I wanted to talk to you about this, Jason, I don't understand the splitting off.

I don't understand why every single, all these apps are splitting themselves off. What was wrong with just having it as part of the main Uber app? Brian, Brian. Why do I need a separate app? You know why? Why? They have to pivot. They have to disrupt and pivot. But can't they do that? They have to disrupt and pivot.

You cannot have, you cannot have, your idea cannot be in one app if it's got two ideas. If it's so genius it has to be split out, there's too much genius for one app. Yes. Here's the deal. With Uber, we move your ass from point A to point B. With Uber food, we make your ass bigger at point A.

I don't get it. It's like, okay, there's the layout app for Instagram that lets you, you know, you can pull pictures. No, that is stupid. Why is it a separate app? Why is that not built into Instagram? Makes no sense to me. That one, I understand. It makes no sense. And everybody is doing that now.

Facebook has 17 different apps. All the, just what Facebook does. No, nobody uses those apps. That's the fun part about it. What is wrong with you people? They're stupid. They're kids. They're millennials. They don't have desks. If they had desks, they would have fucking brains.

That must be it. Okay. Let's talk about Kickstarter, another company that we love. I just, hey, I signed up for a Kickstarter this week. Did you really? What? I signed up for that crazy luggage. Oh, did you? I bought it. Yeah. Okay. Let me know in seven months when it shows up.

It shows up. Yeah. The Giro. It shows up in August. Okay. Let me know in December when you get it. Well, next August. Yeah. No. Next December. No, I bought the $275 version. Did not get the quote unquote electronics package on it because you know what?

I can go to Amazon and buy the same battery that they're putting in there for $100 for 1995. So, didn't do that. Just got the basic version of it. So, next August, you know, 2016, 2017. Whenever it shows up, I'll check it out. But it still looks nice.

I went with it. All right, man. Let me know. Again, like I said, when it shows up about a year and a half late, let me know how it works for you. Exactly. There's a whole group of people, quite a lot of them, that are still waiting for their Kickstarter gifts to arrive.

Anybody that signed up and paid for the Xano Nanodrone. It was one of the top 20 most funding Kickstarter campaigns in history. Pulled in over $3.5 million in pledges for more than 12,000 backers. And then they just folded and shipped about 600 of them and then disappeared.

Well, that's what you do. Well, I think here's the only good thing I will ever say about Kickstarter is they may be realizing they have a problem. Okay. A fraud. Maybe they listened to one of our episodes at one point and figured out, huh, hmm, this isn't going so well.

So, they've actually hired an investigative journalist to go find out what the hell happened with these people. Okay. Well, problem number one. Okay. Here's issue number one. You don't hire an investigative journalist. You hire a private investigator. If these people are taking off with millions of dollars, you hire Steve Rombaum.

You do not hire some nerd with a notebook. Okay. You hire somebody that carries a gun and has access to all the databases that can find out where all these people are. You do not hire a journalist. Right. Well, you know, it's Kickstarter.

Don't worry. The report will be about two years late. That's true, too. We'll never hear. We will never hear about this again. Oh, my God. Maybe we can Kickstarter some journalism on this. No, I just don't care about journalism. All right. Walmart. I just decided to hell with you, Apple Pay or Samsung Pay or anybody else.

We're doing Walmart Pay. Okay. Don't care. Yeah, me either. In the least. I don't go to Walmart. I only go to Walmart when I want to feel good about myself. Yep. When I want to feel skinny, I go to Walmart. When I feel like I have, like, my teeth. When I feel like I want to have better teeth, I go to Walmart.

You know? That's the way it works. Well, believe it or not. There's over 22 million customers using Walmart's app every month. So, I guess for them, it made sense to go ahead and control and take over their credit card payments through in-app payments. Well, yeah. 22 million. You look at the percentage points on how much that's going to cost them if they have to go with Apple Pay.

That's a metric shit ton of money. So, I don't blame them at all. No, and they can afford it and they're big enough. It's funny because I've actually had been approached a couple times recently by people who basically want to do their own branded credit card payments. And I'm like, you don't even have $5,000 to build version one of your site.

You think you're going to go negotiate deals with all the credit card companies and build your own payment processor? Oh, my God. Oh, people. And these are people who aren't even smart enough probably to get a Stripe account to take their own credit cards. I basically just said, well, why don't you just go ahead and use Square?

Use Square. Use Stripe. Use Recurly. Go get a Square and then go print out a dollar sticker at Kinko's that has your logo on it. Boom. You got a branded payment. Well, okay. There's two parts that are really funny about that. Neither one of us mentioned PayPal because PayPal is so hated.

Well, and they take such a huge percentage. That's the real issue with them. Well, and also, Kinko's doesn't exist anymore. Kinko's hasn't existed for four years. I did not know that. Kinko's became FedEx Office four years ago. The Kinko's brand is dead. You cannot find a Kinko's anymore. It's FedEx Office.

That is sad. Yeah, it's been four years. I don't leave my house much. I know. You know why? Because you're driving around looking for the blockbuster. That's right. I still have a couple things to return. Well, you can keep them. Okay. Recode.

You're loving the Recode, which is great. I'm a fan. It's not Slate or Salon, so it's better than before. I like Recode. They get some good writers in there, and they have some good stories, and they kind of agree with our worldview a lot. And they can also hire the former chief of Yahoo to write articles for them.

Yes, they can. I expect Marissa Myers to be writing articles soon. Well, guess what, Jason? What, Brian? Are you going to drop a bomb on me here? Oh, yeah, sure. I'm going to drop a bomb that we've been saying every episode.

Economists are kind of looking into the Silicon Valley startups and finding out that they're not really creating very many jobs at all. No shit, Sherlock. Sorry. This is not news. This is.

No, I know it's not news to us, Jason. We have such a disconnect between reality and facts. And how we decide our society is going to keep on going. Anyways. That's how it goes. Yep. Well, thankfully, soon our robot overlords will be here, and they'll just maybe be running all of us.

There's a really great article in The Guardian. I love this. Artificial intelligence, homo sapiens, will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us. Now, see, they missed. Yeah. I love this article, but here's the problem.

They missed the entire side of – there's a couple other sides to this story that they – it's like, okay, oh, if we own the technology, then we own the AI, then we're going to be the gods. No, haven't they read any science fiction book ever? Yeah.

So we're the technicians. I mean, I'm sorry, but somebody has to have – somebody has to have like the Jiffy Lube for your robot. We need Jiffy Lubes for robots. There's a new job. Hackers. Hackers will be able to take over your robots. Maybe.

Well, no, definitely. The internet of robots is a thing, and it's coming. Oh, by the way, I was in a smart home recently. Right. How'd that go? Well, it was very interesting because they're like, we're in another country, and we get a notification that somebody opened our garage door.

I'm like, okay. How'd that go for you? Well, we closed it and called the police. I'm like, okay. So, yeah, okay. Nothing was stolen, but you can now be in another country and get a notification that somebody has hacked your garage door and opened it.

I don't need this. I don't want this. So, we had a very long conversation. So, the next time they go out of the country, they're going to basically unplug the internet and turn off everything smart in their home. Good. Good. Stupid homes. That's the way to go. Yeah, let's go with dumb homes.

We want dumb homes. Let's patent that. Yeah. Now, this robot thing is – it's very cute. You know, it's a lot of hyperbole in here. But my favorite thing was he points out that even while some jobs are replaced, new ones spring up that focus more on services and interaction with and between people.

The fastest-growing occupations in the past five years are all related to services, he tells the observer. The two biggest are Zumba instructor and personal trainer. Well-known to be high-paying jobs that will let you live a life of luxury and take care of your family in the greatest of comfort.

Yeah. No, I know a Zumba instructor. And while she is incredibly beautiful and amazingly hot, that's not her day job. Her day job is, you know, designing shit for the web because she can't make money being a Zumba instructor because it's not exactly what you called skilled labor.

No. Yes. That is the point of this entire article as well that I thought the most interesting, which is there's a silver lining. There will be plenty of new jobs all involving menial tasks. Well, the interesting thing, though, is if Zumba instructor and personal trainer are the biggest, you know, growing occupations, that puts a – that kind of puts a nail in the WALL-E issue where everybody's just fat and sitting on a floating chair because everybody might be skinny and hot in the future.

You know, if the robots can take over and give us time to go get hot, that might be a completely – you know, that's a game changer right there. I think that's disruption. Well, like I said, it's going to be our new overlords, Kanye and Kim Kardashian. Stupid and in shape.

Oh, God. Well, Kanye is in shape. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Anyway. So, Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown inventor of Bitcoin. Bitcoin, the enigma of 2015 and sure to be 2016 as well.

I still don't know if I like this concept or not. Yeah. I'm just staying away from it because it doesn't – in my life, I'm 44 years old. I don't give a shit. Yeah. You know, I don't need another way to pay for anything. Everybody's trying to take my money anyway. I don't need another way for people to take my money. That's it.

I need people to give me money. So, if I can figure out how Bitcoin can give me money, I'm in. But this has been a mystery and an enigma for a long time. So, Wired has a new article and there's like Bitcoin's creators.

Toshi Nakamoto is probably this unknown Australian genius named Craig Stephen Wright. He's not even a Nakamoto. I mean, I really just wish it was Stephen Wright, the comedian. Oh, that would be great. Oh, my God. Talk about the best – you think that Bill Murray story was great?

Stephen Wright, as the inventor of Bitcoin, he'd be like, oh, yeah, well, blockchain. I was about to say. I think there's a case he invented blockchain. Anyway, it's a great article. Nobody knows because, you know, it's – Because nobody knows.

Nobody knows. But they have some pretty good evidence to back it up. But it's still a pretty good read. Didn't they have pretty good evidence the last time around where they were chasing some guy in Pasadena? No, that was some Reddit bullshit. This is Wired. Oh. Yes.

Sorry. The bastion. That's exactly what I was going to say. The bastion of tech news. Well, if Wired says it. Fuck it, Al. Oh, shit. Comment of the week.

Our first comment of the week comes from Grumpy Old Geeks.com from Jeff Bisbee. Hey, Brian. I saw on Google News this morning that iTunes increased the song limit to 100,000 songs. They have heard your plight and got on it. Not quite. Months later.

I tried to paste the headline here but was unable. But I hope you wake up to good news with this information. Have a great day, Jeff. Dr. David Teeter also taunted me by posting this on my timeline because he knows that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because if anybody's listened to the show, they know you have 125,000 songs.

I have over 100,000 songs. So it's still useless for me and I actually canceled it and went back to Spotify. So I'm back to complaining about the problem that as soon as I leave my house, I don't get to actually – Spotify refuses to fucking pick up and stream until I get to my destination, which is only four minutes away.

Okay. So here's one thing. I do actually have something good to say about iTunes Music. Yes. Because I still use iTunes Match because I have 24,999 songs, which I have to very continuously pull out. But now I don't have to so I can put the rest of that Eagles collection back in there and go over my 25,000 limit.

And no, I don't listen to the fucking Eagles. Right. But what I've noticed about the technology behind Apple Music and iTunes Match is that I cannot discern any time lag between when I press play and when that song starts.

I was telling you. That was my first thing that I loved about it. Yeah. It's insane. Because Spotify takes forever and Apple is fast. It's like four seconds. It's like four seconds with Spotify to buffer and play. iTunes Music and Apple, I press it and I swear to God, my finger hasn't even come off the glass and it started to play.

And I tried this. Like, you know, I did some scientific research. I went to like just some really bizarre stuff and just scrolled as fast as I could, got to the bottom of the list, hit play. Just so it's like, okay, well, he's looking at this album, we'll buffer it. No, boom. It just goes.

And so the technology that they're using behind that is amazing. Look, I'm like Mulder. I want to believe. I just want a better UI. I want to use Apple Music, but I can't. And the deal with the 100,000 tracks is they're starting to roll out support, which means you don't know when you're going to get it.

Some people have seen increases. Nobody has seen anything up to 100K yet. And it's Apple, so it's not like I can contact anyone and say, hey, when am I going to get this? Yeah, exactly. So I guess I just have to sign up for $999 again, see if I have it or not, and then cancel if I don't?

What the fuck, Apple? What kind of service is this? Anyways, it's really frustrating. I want to use it. And if I knew I had the 100,000 limit again, I would sign up for one month just to do what I did last time with the 25,000, which is sit and let that thing connect for a while, and then I get a random hodgepodge of 25,000 songs on my phone, and then disconnect and cancel, and those songs are still on my phone, which is nice.

But, you know, again, it's useless for me completely. It still doesn't do my entire library. I have so many weird and random bootlegs and, you know, studio sessions from friends and things like that in my library that I don't even know. It would probably just screw up completely if I put it on.

I don't know. I don't know. It's – I want to be able to use Apple Music, but I can't. Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah. Shit happens. I want my Apple Watch to do a hell of a lot more than it does, too, but, you know, we live with that. Well, someday you'll get that robotic extension that'll shake your hand up and down.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Don't even go there. So, moving on. What do we got here? We got – oh, Pete. Pete Steen. Pete, Pete, Pete. On Facebook. I need to have a word with Pete here for a second.

First, Pete Steen writes to us on Facebook, which we say every week. Do not write to us on Facebook. But to be fair, we say because we'll never, ever find it, and you found it, so fair enough. Just randomly. I mean, I lucked across it. So, he says, just to note, the whiskey you mentioned on the last show is pronounced Lagavulent.

No, it's not. I'm sorry. It's not. It's pronounced Lagavulin. I have been drinking Lagavulin for many years. And we even have a video in the show notes of Brian Cox, the actor from X-Men fame and other stuff, saying Lagavulin.

And it's worth watching because it's his favorite whiskey. And he pronounces it correctly. I pronounced it correctly. And when I pay $99 for a bottle of whiskey, I don't give a fuck what it says on the bottle. I'm going to pronounce it the way I want because I just spent $100 on it. So, there you go.

Lafrog. Oh, oh, oh. We'll get to Lafrog later. Okay. We have an entire section on that. That's actually my favorite. Anyways. You like Lafrog? I do. I do. Oh, God. It's like battery acid. To each their own, Jason.

Yes. Ugh. Anyways, if you'd like to tell us what else we're doing wrong, you can find us on Twitter at GOG Podcast or on Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG. We have a website at grumpy oldgeeks.com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback, or better yet, ask us questions that we can read on the air.

If you haven't given us an iTunes rating or review yet, please do so at grumpy oldgeeks.com slash iTunes. Help us out with a five-star rating and an honest review because they do somewhat seem to matter. More on that in 2016. And if you have friends, please tell them about the show. We could use more listeners. At the library.

As I mentioned last week, I made the wonderful mistake of going back and reading all the original Dune books. They were absolutely fantastic. I'd say mistake because Jason's been getting pissed off at me about the At the Library section for about five months now because that's about how long it took me to read all six of Frank Herbert's originals.

And as I also mentioned, Chapter House Dune, the last one, ends on a terrific cliffhanger. And unfortunately, Frank Herbert passed away and his son found show notes because the Herbert podcast was doing so well.

The pod must flow. The pod must flow. Found notes for an outline for a final book in a lockbox, lockbox, somewhere. And he and, I'm sorry, I can't remember the science fiction writer. Kevin J. Anderson, who has written a lot of other great sci-fi books, got together to basically finish the story.

And they did. They split it into two books, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune. And then they went off to write a gazillion other Dune books, all of which are horrible, but they've made a lot of money doing it. Let me guess what's going to be on At the Library next week. See?

See, people? Yep. Only one more, Jim. Hunters of Dune. There we go. Only one more, I promise. And then over the Christmas break, I will read something that is not Dune. And you will be happy again. Well, as happy as you can be. Don't push it there. Don't promise what we cannot deliver, okay?

Yes, that's okay. So I went and did Hunters of Dune, which is the first one. And, oh, fuck. Good, bad, ugly, not good? Horrible. These are horribly written. They just are. The only reason I'm suffering through this is because, in theory, this is based on Herbert's actual notes.

What I would like Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson to do is post. Post the notes. Frank Herbert's outlines and notes. And I would like to read that because I don't entirely believe it. These other characters are brought in that were never even mentioned by Frank Herbert in any of the Dune universe.

But, conveniently, they ended up becoming the next books that Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson wrote. Again, like I said, I'm just suffering through it for the overall outline because when you go the six books into Dune and you just – you have to know how this is all supposed to end up and who knows.

I'm sorry, but that is actually really funny that it sucks because you were just all hyped up. You're like, they're not that bad. They're not that bad. You're just like, oh, no, no. This is really bad. There was definitely some revisionist history going on in my mind about how not bad these last two ones were. They are as horrible as all the rest of them.

Oh, too bad. So, I'm suffering through – I finished Hunters of Dune two nights ago. I started Sandworm the other night. So, I will get through it for next week and I will tell you in advance it will suck. And that will be the last time I do it. Okay. So, there you go. Jason, I will read something else for the first show of the new year, whatever our schedule is going to be.

I would like to recommend The Laundry Files, which is a series by Charles Strauss, which I've been talking about on the show a lot. Okay. Surprisingly, I don't know how I missed this one. The Reese's Chart is the next version in the – or the next episode in the series and it came out in the middle of summer and I missed it.

See, that's the problem with the internets now. I know. This is like missing, you know, just – oh, God. I mean, all of my favorite authors. I love Charles Strauss. I follow him on Twitter. How did I miss this? I have no idea. So, The Reese's Chart is the next Laundry Files book.

It's awesome. I love it. It's about – and so we just finished a couple books by our – Chris Moore, right? And he does some of the best vampire work out there. His vampire books are great. This book is a completely different take on vampires and it's amazing.

It's so good because it's like, no, when a vampire meets another vampire, they immediately try and kill each other. Because if you do the math on vampirism, if everybody's biting everybody else and turning everybody else into vampires, well, the world would be vampires within a week. Yeah. So, this is just like a completely different take on vampirism.

Well, you know, Anne Rice does – touches on that quite a bit, how they tried to keep cells small and the more powerful ones that would go destroy new ones because if – exactly like you said, it's – first off, we're trying to remain hidden so that there's not some gigantic war against us and all the humans aren't going to try to kill us.

And secondly, we need to keep our numbers down because population control. Oh, you're such a vampire nerd. I love it. I fucking love Anne Rice. I don't. I hate Anne Rice. I'm going to go reread all those just to torture you. Oh, God. Okay. Next show. Anyway, this is really fun because when we talked about Ian Tregellis' books, about how, you know, it's like World War II.

Well, I was about to say this definition – or definition – the short blurb about it on Amazon reminds me of Tregellis. It is very close to what Tregellis does with World War II. Right. It's like MI6 for the underworld. But it's really cool.

You're going to love it. I mean, I'm telling you, if you love Ian Tregellis, which obviously you do because you turned me on to him, I'm going to turn you on to Charles Strauss because what he does with The Laundry Files is exactly the same but funnier, a lot funnier. It's kind of like Chris Moore and Ian Tregellis had a really weird Scottish baby.

Cool. Well, I just clicked on send sample to my iPad right now. So there you go. Awesome. Yeah, start at the beginning. There's like four or five books. They're really fun. It's funny that you mentioned that you didn't realize that the book had come out and you'd missed it. And this has been a constant struggle for me recently.

I think we talked about this a few – Like three or four episodes ago. Yeah, you were missing some of your favorite author's books. Yeah, and the only real good way that I've found so far to kind of keep up with this is when you're – I just surfed around Amazon and I found a bunch of my favorite authors and I just signed up for the notifications.

I would love to know if anybody out there knows of any better service to keep up with authors. Yeah, each publisher has – I mean, I know Goodreads is out there, but it's also scattered, right? It's very scattered. Each publisher has their own mailing list that we can get you on. Yeah, that's useless. That's like signing up for a music label mailing because you like two bands on the label and you're going to get mailings about 70,000 bands you don't care about.

Well, that's not exactly true. We're going to talk off air about this because I think you're going to start getting a whole lot of free books in the mail. Sweet. My day job has taught me a lot about how this back alley of publishing works. And you're going to have a lot of extra recycling.

So get a bigger recycling bin. But we're going to get you more books. And also, I use Audible for most of my books. They let me know instantly when something is on preorder for somebody that I follow. So they're doing really good.

So even if you don't buy on Audible, you might want to sign up and use their recommendation engine. And because I think their recommendation engine, as far as timing goes, is better than Amazon, even though they're owned by Amazon. Although I have to say, I mean, not so much the recommendation engine. But if I do sign up directly for an author on Amazon, they are very quick to send the email saying, hey, book on preorder coming from this guy.

Oh, okay. Perfect. They do that pretty well. Oh, that's good to know. I'll have to do that too. But yeah, we'll talk off air and you might start getting some – I have a pile next to my desk that is four feet tall now. Last time we talked, it was three feet tall.

Now it's four feet tall. I should send you an image that somebody sent me of a Christmas tree basically built out of books. They stacked all their books in the tree shape. You should do that. I can do that. I can actually do that. Software, apps, and gadgets.

Software, apps, and gadgets. It's been a while since we've done a really in-depth one of these. So as a podcaster, there was an old program called Levelator. I remember it well. Yeah, it made my life very easy. Levelator went away and then came Ophonic.

Yes. Ophonic is more of a – it's a higher-end tool that you run your podcast through that gives you radio quality levels. It also has a high-pass filter. It has noise and hum reduction, which if you spend a lot of time in audio programs getting your hum and noise reduction right, and your high-pass filter right, you will notice – Very important.

You will also notice that Ophonic does it better than you could ever do it. Yes. So, yeah, it cost me $100 for that one. Love it. I got the new Levelator. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm just happy that they're back in business because now I can just send people off to them to get that for free because Levelator is free.

So, you audio guys who want to do what we do, go get it. Yep, go get it. If you're doing a podcast, it sounds like crap. That's your step one. Yeah, it's seriously step one. Levelator will save you hours of work, but you know what? That $100 towards Ophonic is going to save you even more.

I highly recommend it. I agree. Now, I haven't done one of these in a long time, and I'm kind of trepidatious about this. Okay. I'm going to do my to-do list app roundup real quick. Okay. We've talked about all of these. Things.

Remember things? Yes. Yeah, I bought things many times, and I hated things because they made me buy things over and over and over again. I remember you complaining about that. Yeah. Over and over and over again.

Guess what I just did? You bought it again. I bought things again. You are such an idiot. No, I'm not, because I want to talk about the next one on the list, which is Todoist. Okay. Todoist lets you have a kind of group to-do list, which means other people can put shit on your to-do list.

That's the last thing in the world I wanted. That is seriously the last thing in the world that I wanted, and that's why I stopped using Todoist. Okay. And the last one is OmniFocus, which everybody's heard about if you've listened to a goddamn Merlin Man podcast.

You love OmniFocus and GTD and all that crap. Yes. Here's the deal. OmniFocus, way too complicated. Todoist, stay out of my inbox. Things, you. It's just you. It's pretty. It works on your iPhone, your iPad, and your Mac.

It's going to cost you a bloody fortune. You can cut off a leg, sell a kidney, go buy it. Just be fine with it. It has put me back on track this week. Okay. So I am, as much as I hate to say it, because I think they're greedy bastards, things is still the best.

Okay. How much does it cost? $50 for the Mac app, and the iPhone and iPad app are probably $20 each, because they don't even have a Plus app. You have to buy them both separately, because they're assholes. I'm just telling you. Okay. And I'm just going to say what I use.

You use a piece of paper and some shit. My physical moleskin. I will put a link in the show notes to it. It costs $16 every year. Yeah. And it gets my shit done. I'm sure it does. That's fine. Do what you got to do. Do what works for you.

Exactly. So I prefer the physical. I do like it. There's something... We've talked about this many times. There's really something about writing something out freehand, which people are starting to lose, that makes things stick in your memory a little bit more. And there's something so fucking satisfying about crossing things off a list.

There is. I mean, I understand that. I really do understand it. But there's also like the point where I just want to just like press the little microphone button and say, okay, go send this email later. Boom. Done. You know. But yeah, it's different use cases. Speaking of weird use cases, I had to do Microsoft Office Online this week.

I'm sorry. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It was one of the single worst experiences of my life. So here's what I got. Taking email from Gmail, moving it into Outlook. So somebody from one computer can see it. This is a very complicated system that had to be done.

I can't go into details about why we were doing this. But taking a Gmail inbox file, getting it to an Outlook.pst file, you would think in this day and age, it would be very, very simple.

Au contraire, Jason. Actually, I think it would be almost impossible because nobody wants to talk to anybody else anymore. Format-wise, no one. 60. 60 hours. It has taken me to move 12 gigabytes of mail. 60 hours.

I'm not surprised at all by that. Remember when there used to be importers and exporters for everything? Oh, the good old days. Yeah. No, I used to write them. That was my job. And these people are just, oh, my God. So I had to download 1.2 gigabytes of Microsoft Office apps just to get Office online, just to find out that Outlook on the Mac will not even export a PST.

So I have to get, I have to get, you know, what's the damn, oh, I have to get parallels. I got to run parallels. I got to run a free version of Office. Then I got to get that. And then I got to re-download the other 100, like 1.2 gigabyte file. Bring it back in.

Oh, my God, dude. Honestly, I'm like, it's text. I know. I could have probably just sent the damn file to someone in India and had it done in 24 hours for 100 bucks. Okay. But the hero of the day is Thunderbird. I tell you, Jason.

You called it. You called it. I love Thunderbird. Yep. Thunderbird was the hero of the day because what you can do is there's an importer, exporter add-on for Thunderbird. Yep. Which you can then take the inbox from Google, put it into Thunderbird, and then take those and move them to the IMAP inbox in Outlook, which then somebody can log into on their fucking

dumbass PC and then pull it down and wait the next 17 hours like I had to do to upload it and then get their PST file. Thunderbird is lovely. Yeah. No, it was great. Completely great. My favorite mail program. Never going to switch away from it.

I don't blame you now. I'm actually, I mean, I use a program called Mailplane for mine because all my email's in Gmail, but I'm seriously thinking of just moving back over to Thunderbird because it really did a really good job. Yep. The only difference is since I use Mailplane, Mailplane is kind of like a Safari browser for multiple instances of Gmail.

Yeah. So you're just looking at the web versions. The downside is it doesn't work offline. So when I'm on a plane and I want to check my mail or like, you know, go through my mail and start to do stuff, can't do it. So Thunderbird, you'd take the hit on the disk space. Yep. But otherwise, it was great.

And it just, it kind of reminded me of the old, you know, Mozilla UI. It actually even got, you can go even further back. It reminds me of Eudora, the first mail program I ever used. I miss Eudora so goddamn much. Me too. That was, oh, the good old days.

I know. So. All right. So, yeah. I previously had mentioned layout. If you're an Instagram person and you've been wondering how people are doing those, you know, multiple photos in one picture post, that's how people do it. So there you go. It's from Instagram themselves. It's called layout.

Go download it. And somebody, for the love of fucking God, explained to me why it's not just built into Instagram. Here's the funny thing. I, I'm opening Instagram right now because I swear that they have, if I click on my, I'm going to open a new photo. Yep. Um, okay.

Mary Poppins chimney sweep. Okay. I go to library. I'm picking Mary Poppins chimney sweep. I hit, okay. On the bottom right, there is a combine your photos. Oh, shit. Ha.

There's a link to get layout. I thought it was built in. Oh, damn. It should be. That should just do it. I don't understand these people. Okay. Okay. That was funny. Oh my God.

I had no idea that was coming. Sorry. That's perfect. So we've talked about the mailbox app that, uh, got bought by our friends at Dropbox who, you know, gotta love Condi Rice. Uh, well, there is a new blog post.

Yes. With my new unfavorite term. Off boarding. Well, Condi Rice, water boarding. You know what they were thinking. Well, there was onboarding mailbox. Now there's off boarding mail. What the fuck is off boarding? There's not even a hyphen.

There should be a hyphen. It tortures your mail to get more answers. Oh my God. Um, so yeah, mailbox is dead. Finally. Um, the sad thing is we're using hack pad, which is, was bought by them, which is probably going to be dead soon too. Yeah. We're going to have to find a new thing for a show notes.

I think here's the really sad, it was good at Google docs, but hack pad is so good at, at collaborative editing that I'm just, I'm terrified when this thing's going to go away because Dropbox can't get their shit together. Hey, Google docs, go buy these people or poach some of their tech people.

Well, if you took this into Google docs as the editor, this would be fantastic. Oh yeah. It would be, it'd be amazing. The hack pad is my favorite tool that we use every week because it works really, really well. And I can see your little face moving around the screen.

I can tell what you're looking at. Look, I'm moving around. I'm actually moving around so you can see it right now. All right. We're acting like it's a drinking show and we're sober. Let's go. I know. Okay. So off boarding mailbox is the, the latest thing that they're shutting it down. Get your stuff out of there. If you haven't already, which is probably why they're off boarding, off boarding, shark finning.

Uh, what other stupid terms have we come up with this year? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe that could be our Christmas special. Okay. Well, Chromecast audio is now these super cheap way to wires, wirelessly fill multiple rooms with music, which is, it seems like a ghetto Sonos. Yeah. Or get Tonos.

We'll call it the get Tonos or the cheap version of Apple. You know, I I've got, I've got Apple TV in one room, which I pipe my music to. I've got, I actually gave you my old Apple express cause I don't need it anymore. Do I give it to you? It's funny. Yeah. I've got it in my drawer. Yeah. You are the third person to try and give me an Apple express.

I took yours first and then two more people like, I've got this Apple express. You want it? I'm like, I have three Apple extremes in my home plus an express. Yeah. So yeah, no, I don't. But these are super cheap. I still recommend the Sonos because the sound quality is amazing.

You heard mine. Yeah. Yeah. And now they have, you know, this is great for dorms. I think if, you know, if you're a college student and cheap and you want to wire up your entire dorm so everybody can listen to the same crap piece of music that you all listen to these days. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to non-ironically listen to Justin Bieber, this is for you.

Media candy. Ricky Gervais is on tap to host the Golden Globes. I love when he hosts award shows because he does the, I don't give a fuck version of hosting and it's genius and it pisses people off and I love it. And it is teed up to be the single best intro ever.

Uh, I hope he does a magical mystery tour of every NBC show that did not get a nomination because NBC is hosting the Golden Globes. Try that one again, brother. Uh, I thought you said you weren't drinking. What the hell? I'm not hosting the Golden Globes and, uh, they got zero.

That's a one less than one, zero nominations. Yeah. I saw that and I was just like, this is for Brian. Yeah. No, no. I love Ricky Gervais on these shows and this is just going to be like, I wonder if it's going to be in his contract that he just can't even mention the fact that they got zero noms.

Yeah. Yeah. There are three letters that don't go together that are not going to be in anything that you say. And that is N, B, and C. Yeah. Yeah. It's good stuff. Um, we haven't, it's almost impossible to have gone this far without mentioning Star Wars because we are coming up on the, uh, basically the explosion of nerddom.

And I'm very excited. Friday or actually Thursday. Are you going Thursday? Uh, no, I'm not going until Saturday. So, oh my God, I'm going to see Star Wars before you. Why is that surprising? That is very surprising because you're the Star Wars nerd. I'm not.

I'm, well, yeah, the last three movies kind of took a little shit storm on my, but I'm very, I understand. Yes. And I think the single best thing that's actually happening right now is Carrie Fisher going around doing her promo for Star Wars. Uh, there's a link in the show notes.

There are some videos. She has, uh, much like Ricky Gervais, no fucks to give about any of this stuff. And she is just having a field day doing these interviews. It is absolutely fantastic. I talking about the bikini, talking about losing weight, talking about being older in Hollywood. She does not give a crap and it's awesome.

Okay. I haven't seen these. I got to check these out for sure. Oh, you got to, man, you've got to watch these interviews. There are no spoilers. She really doesn't talk about Star Wars at all. She just rants and it's great. She's amazing. I love her. I love her. I love her so much. Yeah. No, she's just like you people or whatever. She's, she, you know, um, what was it?

Ab Fab. That's a show that you, you really like, right? I've never seen it, but it just reminds, she reminds me of what I envision that show being. Yeah. I mean, if Carrie, if Carrie Fisher was no longer, you know, in rehab and all that sort of stuff, if she's just started drinking again.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember Carrie Fisher when she was, you know, back in the day. Yeah. Speaking of Ab Fab, they actually just finished shooting the movie. So that should be coming out soon. You should catch up on the show first. It's really, you would love it, Jason. How many seasons are there? Well, it's a British show. So three tops, right?

Yeah. Three tops with four episodes each. Yeah. So we're talking like, you know, 45 minutes of show and we're done. You'll catch up in an afternoon. Go watch it. I highly recommend it. Okay. I have a new podcast that I adore. It's called the Mo Show Podcast. And it's a bunch of voice actors making fun of being voice actors in Hollywood.

Yeah. You sent it to me. I listened to it. It was very funny, but it's super, I get the entourage-y, so inside thing that kind of skews me out a bit. But I did enjoy the first one I listened to. Okay. Yeah. I started at the beginning. I've been listening to it. There's only like 18 of them because they do it in the quote unquote season format.

Yes. And they're like 12 minutes long. But the funny part is like these commercials they do in between. So it's not the story that's the funny part. They do commercials that just mock LA. Right. In between. So if you keep listening to it, trust me, I think you're going to, there were times when I was crying when I'm out like listening to it.

All right. I'll keep it up. It's really good. Now, this is one thing that Fogarty, who does our VO, speaking of voiceover guys, it's called the pronunciation manual. Yes. Which I almost mispronounced, which is very funny, on YouTube. And did you get a chance to look at this?

I did. What do you think? It's hilarious. This is one of the funniest channels I've ever seen because as we talked about before, we were showing the Brian Cox pronunciation of Lagavulin. And in the sidebar, it said, oh, well, check this one out. And it's just hilarious pronunciations of everything.

The Bjork one is also one of my favorites. Oh, Sriracha was great. I like that one a lot. Frappuccino. Frappuccino's awesome. Benedict Cumberbatch. Oh, I didn't see that one yet. I got to find that one. It's good. Okay. Maybe we'll put that at the end of the show. These are just amazing.

Yeah, it's worth a quick view. It's very funny. No, definitely one of my favorite. I signed up for that one. Have you been watching Fargo? You know, I watched on a plane. There was the first four episodes of season one, which I went through at one point and I really enjoyed. And then I probably completely and utterly forgot about it.

See, yeah, that season two was really hard to get into. But once you hit like episode four and five, everything picked up. There's one left. Just finished nine the other night. Oh, my God. It is so good. All right. I should get back on that bandwagon. Dude. Yeah. It really picks up.

Highly recommended. Because I thought it was going to. I mean, it really dragged at the beginning. I mean, I'll be honest with you. I like the first three or four apps. No, wasn't really digging it. Picked up, solid, just as good as the first season. Actually, not going to say it's better than the first season because you had Billy Bob in the first season who was the.

Oh, he's not in the second? The second is a prequel. Oh, I had no idea. Like I said, it fell off the bandwagon. Yeah. So season two is a prequel to the first one. So you see the cop, the female cop from season one. She's the little kid.

So you see the dad story. Ah, okay. So this is all about the dad story. But you've also got Bruce Campbell playing Ronald Reagan, which is pretty funny. It's, it's, it, trust me, go back, finish it, get through it. Next episode comes out on Monday. The final episode comes out on Monday.

I cannot wait. Okay. And Gotham. I love Gotham. Yeah. These guys, I know, but as far as like, you know, stupid superhero TV goes, it's great. I don't, I'm not going to argue with you about that.

I'm just on such superhero overload. They're fucking rebooting them every 10 minutes. Then they let Ben Affleck involved. I'm done. I'm over it. Here's the, here's the fun part about this. There's no superheroes in this really. It's just people. There's nobody, nobody has powers or anything like that yet.

Nothing. It's just a really good story. And the main character is Jim Gordon, the police officer. Right. So that it's his story for the most part. I mean, yes, Bruce Wayne's in it and there's other people that are in it. But for the most part, it's Jim Gordon's story and he's dating the, the companion from Firefly.

That could have been Greek to me. Well, you said, you've seen Firefly. Yeah, but I don't remember it very well. Well, the hottest girl in the entire show. Was that Moon Blood River or whatever her name was? I don't know. I mean, I'm taking your nerd card away.

We all have nerd, our nerdages in different areas. Okay. Moving on. All right. Speaking of that, I mean, the, the only superhero thing that I actually enjoy or is X-Men and X-Men Apocalypse trailer hit this morning and it looks pretty good. Who's directing it? That's Bryan Singer.

I like Bryan Singer. I don't know. Well, what's his name? Who was the guy that ruined the series? He did number three. I don't know. See, not a nerd. Damn. You are so bad at this. I don't know how we've gotten this far.

I'm bad at the superhero bits because I don't give a crap. Anyways, it looks all right. Okay. Another X-Men movie. Something that'll drag me into a theater so I can spend $45 for popcorn. You caught up on Downton Abbey, right? You finally got into it.

No, I'm not done. Brett Ratner is who I was thinking of that ruined X-Men. Ratner ruins everything. Yes, he does. He basically takes a job. He could just open the film canister, take a dump inside, close it, and then just give it to the studio. That's how I look at him. He's like the Marissa Myers of directing. Kind of.

So yes, I'm still, I'm only on episode two of Downton Abbey, so. Well, this is in no way going to be a spoiler for you at all so you can watch this, but it is very funny. I was just making sure that you actually were still enjoying it. I'm enjoying it, and I do know the scene that you're about to talk about. Yeah.

Three of the actors, Michelle Dockery, Hugh Bonneville, and Alan Leach, were on Colbert, and he gave them a scene from one of the episodes and asked them to do it in American accents. It was genius. It is great. The title of the article says, it sounded as bad as you'd expect, but I thought it sounded great.

I thought it was great. I would actually watch it. I know. I was like, I'm in. They should do the whole Downton Abbey Valley style. Valley Girl style would be amazing. Yeah. What's that SNL skit where they, you know, like, in the good. And they talk about traffic. They could do Downton Abbey as that, and it would just be just as good.

Good stuff. Worth a watch. Yes. And Norman Reedus is confirmed that Boondock Saints 3 is going to happen. I'm excited about that. Did you see Boondock Saints 2? No, I missed that one. Good. Keep it that way. Okay. Because if you see Boondock Saints number two, you will not want to see number three.

Oh, okay. It was one of the single worst movies ever made. Okay. Boondock Saints? Great. Great movie. Boondock Saints 2? No. Okay. Mm-mm. Skip it.

The web's not dead. Oh, no, it's not. Speaking of, oh, my God. There's a really fascinating article in The Atlantic where this woman, Julie Beck, basically runs through linguistic tricks of YouTube.

Or there's something called YouTube voice, which is certain phrasings and patterns that everybody is using on YouTube. Because basically, you're just a face in a screen. And how do you keep people involved? And she runs this back and does a really pretty good analysis of it and about how it kind of ties back into the old school carnival barkers and carnies and how they would say things strangely and weird to kind of grab your attention and keep you engaged.

It's a really interesting article. Well, I'm going to have to check that out. Does she talk about the horribleness of uptalk? No. That's because they don't do that a lot on YouTube because that does drive people crazy. That's more just a bunch of girls sitting around together. Oh, good. Thank God. Yeah. And it's more like hitting certain vowels harder and stretching words and things to that sense.

It's really cool. It's kind of an interesting thing. Not being terribly familiar with YouTube stars because I'm an adult, I wasn't really aware of a lot of this. So it was kind of cool to run through it. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. Yes. I'll be trying to do that from now on.

Every time. Everywhere. Yeah. It's an old school radio voice. Yeah. It is. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Okay. So one man is replacing guns with sex toys in photos of GOP politicians. Oh, no. This is Matt Howie. He is the founder that you may know him from, from Metafilter.

He has been, I'm going to stop the voice now because it's probably driving me nuts. So yes, he has been taking pictures of Republicans with guns and replacing them with dildos. These are fantastic. And they're hilarious. I knew he was going to get press from this. I follow him on Twitter.

And when he first started doing this, I'm like, you have gold. You have gold here. And this is comedy gold. It is. They're, they're amazing. You have to go check them out because it's just, yeah, just go do it. Yeah. Good stuff. Are you kidding me?

Love it. Well, in the no shit Sherlock category, apparently there's a school in, uh, in Melbourne, uh, Melbourne, Melbourne, that gets their science from, uh, from Jenny, Jenny McCarthy.

Uh, they were doing kind of this, uh, we're going to be tolerant of people that decide not to vaccinate their children. What can go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Well, a massive chicken pox outbreak. Oops. Well done. That's amazing.

Yes. Again, as we were mentioning earlier in the show, there's this thing's called fucking facts. This is just like, I mean, instant karma. Okay. We're not going to vaccinate our kids. Oh, our kids got the disease we didn't vaccinate against. Oh, we're fucking stupid. We're bad parents. Take our kids away and put us out in the outback to die from the giant spiders and snakes that are going to kill us because that's where you belong.

Or just take them to an outback steakhouse because that's disgusting. Oh God, that shit is nasty. Bloomin' onion. Uh, last week, I think it was last week, uh, emoji was the word of the year and you had a heart attack over it. So I thought. Because it's stupid. Well, I thought you would enjoy this particular article that goes over the history of the emojis in Japan and how Japan, which is the country that invented them, uh, kind of are over them.

And, you know. I really like this article. That will happen here as well. Yeah, I really like this article because we ruined emojis. Yes. The U.S., designers in the U.S. ruined emojis when they started to put in their take on what it should look like, which is the problem.

Yes. So thank you, Japan, for actually telling us that we suck. Yes. So it's a pretty cool article. It's really interesting. I love kind of these compressed time histories when things change so quickly over such a small period of time.

But you can do like a really in-depth analysis of it with all the tech stuff. Oh, it's so good. I love this stuff. No, it's really good. Yeah. I really like this article. So you should definitely go check this out. Yeah. And there's another article that came out sticking with the texting thing that apparently if you use punctuation, that turns your plain message into a passive-aggressive dig.

Here's the funny thing about this one. I completely agree. No, I do too. And what's fascinating is that we are basically coming to realize that texting is an entirely different language. It's a different beast. Completely. It's a completely different beast. And the rules of regular grammar can basically entirely change the meaning in a totally different way.

It's fantastic. I love this stuff. And this entire article is about putting a period at the end of a text. That's all it is. And you know what? It is a passive-aggressive dig if you put a period at the end of a text. We all know it. If I text you Kay right after you've said, we got to wait 15 minutes because my dog has to take a leak, no big deal.

If I text you Kay, period, I'm like, hurry the fuck up. Yeah. You know what the period is? The period is the butthurt of texting. That means that that's what it is. Totally agree. Wow. That's first. Wow.

This whole segment so far, we're agreed. Let's see. Well, let me ruin it, Jason. Oh, yeah. Because this one, I, oh, yeah. Well, I'm still torn on this. I have a feeling this was a definite attempt to have something go viral, but that kind of failed. I feel like this one's trolling. And let's explain what we're talking about because people don't know what the hell we're talking about.

So get ready to argue. This optical test is the new, the dress, but for politics. And some sort of study came out where somebody looked at a kind of a wonkily drawn circle and asked people if they thought it was a circle or not. And apparently, if you thought it was a circle, you're more likely to be liberal, support marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage, and aid for the homeless.

And if you don't see a circle, you're more likely to be conservative in regards to politics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The basic psychology on this based on the fact that if you're a liberal, you're more willing to concede, uh, give on the nature of reality, nature of reality. I'm not, this isn't going to go that far.

You're more willing to, to bend a little bit. And, uh, conservatives are not, they're very strict. Okay. Yes. I did not see a circle. I think it is a wonky piece of crap drawing. I am not, uh, conservative. Um, everything about this entire article did not work as far as, as far as I went with it.

That's it. Yep. Okay. I mean, you, what, how did, how did it come out for you? Oh, nobody was really that interested. I posted it. A couple of people responded. I see a circle. I think it's a circle. Of course it's a circle. It's not a square. No, it's like a dodecahedron, like wonkily drawn.

Yeah. It's like a kid drew a circle or I was drunk and I drew a circle. There's a flat line in it. Flat line. Circle is, circle is points equidistant from the center. That's not a circle. Thank you, Trent, for, for telling us that one. So, uh, Okay.

Now there is a type of mushroom that can. One of us is more conservative than the other people. I think Jason just proved this works. I do own the gun. I do own the gun. I had to prove the point. Um, I have no problem with same sex marriage, legalization of marijuana, or anything else that people want to do.

I say, let your freak flag cry. It said, it said overall, you know, you're, you're painting it into a specific box again, man. Dude. Okay. Look, I'm going to talk about mushrooms right now, dude. Okay. Okay. So there's apparently like a kind of mushroom that when, when chicks smell, they just, they have an orgasm.

I heard about this. It grows only on Hawaiian lava flows. I always knew there was a reason I liked Hawaii. Um, actually this was brought up by Gina Grad. Uh, she talked to the news girl on the Corolla show. I met her. She's great. Well, suppose she mentioned this on the Corolla show a while ago. She's also doing a mark of the morning on traditional radio here in LA.

And she said on the mark of the morning show, they are trying to track down a sample and she was going to sniff it on air. Oh, that'd be great. I don't know if that ever happened. I'm guessing probably not. Cause I'm sure we would have heard about it. Okay. So this article I thought was somebody punking everybody on the planet, right?

Because yes, the fungus, which only appears to grow on Hawaiian lava flows that are between 600 and 1,000 years old can apparently induce spontaneous orgasms in women when they smell it. Now this is published findings in the international journal of medicinal mushrooms.

No, this is where nobody's getting punk. This is real. I went and I found the international journal of medicinal mushrooms and it is a real thing. This exists. So we need to go find this mushroom and we need to turn it into this. If, if anybody from Axe Body Spray is listening to this show right now, this is everything that you've ever wanted your product to do.

You know, if you look at the Axe commercials, this is what they promise. They need to be out there cultivating these mushrooms. It's got to be a head and shoulders or some shampoo. Aren't all the shampoo commercials, women basically bapping orgasms while they shampoo their hair? Well, no, no, no. The Axe is a body spray that gets the women to, to basically break through walls like the Hulk.

You know, so Axe needs to be on this. They have body wash spray. They have shampoo. I've used Axe. It makes you smell like a dog's asshole. It is the most disgusting smell on the planet. So they need to fix that. Anyways, the point being, this is definitely as real.

It's as real as that, what was it? It was like a fruit or something that you ate and it completely changed taste profiles of everything. It made lemon taste like sugar, all that sort of stuff. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was doing the rounds. I never got to try that. I still want to do that.

Oh, we can do that. We can do that with our, we'll take our Patreon money this month and we'll spend it on that. Why don't we do that? We'll do a Grumpy Old Geeks taste test. Closing shout outs. My shout out this week is to Malibu Divers, which is where I'm going tomorrow to find a thousand new ways to die because I'm taking my scuba lessons tomorrow.

Oh, dear. That's pretty cool, man. I have no idea what prompted you to do this, but I'm impressed. I did it because my friend Joey Ito, who runs the MIT Media Lab, always comes to LA and he's like, hey, let's hang out. And I'm like, okay. He's like, but I'm going diving. And he's out on the boat with, you know, people who go to TED and shit like that.

And I'm just like, I can't go with you. And he's like, well, go get certified. So I'm going to his guys at Malibu Divers, who are awesome people and surprisingly live two blocks away from me, which I didn't even know. And yeah, I'm in the pool this weekend. And then I'm going to Catalina the day after Thanksgiving for my open water certification.

Thanksgiving. And Christmas. There you go. I'm still stuck on Thanksgiving. Yeah. So I'm doing that and I'll be a certified diver soon. Again, I'm very impressed. Good on you, Jason. It's extraordinarily expensive. I do not recommend it for anybody.

Yeah, I was about to say that's probably why I'm not going to be trying it anytime soon. It is very, very pricey. And you'll be missing out on my Halloween. Look, we're all over the place. See, you can't even do it. What are you doing to me, man? You're going to be missing out on my holiday party, which is this Sunday. So we'll be sad to not have you there.

But Sean and Tara and some other friends at the show are going to be swinging by. So we're going to have a nice old time. Oh, man, that sucks. Yeah. What time is it again? Two. I'll tell you off the air. Oh, okay. So you don't want people showing up. Nope. Okay. Well, we love you guys for listening, but you're not invited to the party.

Well, you know, I got to do some due diligence first. What was that thing that would let me explore everybody's backgrounds that you stopped using? The internet. Oh, yeah. So submit your emails and names to me to the internets. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And you can check me out at jpd.me.

And I'm Brian Schellmeister. And you can follow me on Twitter at SlenderFungus. Until next time. 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 Apple Music if you can actually make it work. Or you can donate through Grumpy Old Geeks' Patreon page at patreon.com slash gog to 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 139.

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