149: Now, to Be Fair to Uber…

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 February 26th, 2016. This is episode 149. I am Jason DeFilippo.

And I am Brian Schulmeister and I am literally sitting across from you. That's the first time you've ever come to the actual Enigma Lab studio. I love the smell of Woodland Hills in the morning. Ah, yes. It doesn't smell like man poo. No, no, it does not. Okay. So we talked about some stuff before that I want to do some follow-up on.

Okay. Immediately. Yes. Prime. Amazon Prime. Boy, they're getting bad, aren't they? So bad. Yeah. My past three or four orders, way off on delivery estimates. Five days for me. Yeah. I bought a new audio interface for this place and it came five days late.

Let me tell you a little something, Amazon. I did not pay the $100 or close to for my Prime subscription for your audio selections. Yeah. So here is a tip I got from a friend of the show, MXV. Call them and say, where's my stuff?

Right. You'll get probably a month free of Prime for every instance. That is exactly what happened for me. Okay. I have gotten three months of free Prime in the past week and a half. I've just found this to be the general path of almost all of these kind of Web 2.0, Economy 2.0 companies.

They're really, really great at first. And then they just generally start to slack off and suck. Well, I don't think these are Web 2.0 companies. This is Amazon. They were there from the beginning. Yeah. You know what I'm saying. Yeah. This is the general trend of these types of services. I think it's just corporations. Yeah.

Corporations. They'll hook you in with these amazing services that you start to love. And then all of a sudden, they just don't work so well anymore. No, they don't. No. So Prime is crap now. Yeah. Nothing has shown up on time. I'm trying to remember what else I got. I had dog leash and some other goodies and yeah, nothing.

I mean, it's basic stuff. Yeah. I mean, the last few things I've ordered, they've all been late. None of them have showed up on time. And again, I paid a hundred bucks for second day, first day delivery on some items and I'm not getting it. Yep. And so you just got to complain. So everybody out there, bitch and moan.

Bitch and moan. Take a page out of the Grumpy Old Geeks playbook and complain a lot. I wonder if they're just firing all their delivery people and anticipating drones. No, they're hiring everybody. Right. I've talked to three different people who, since Christmas, it was their first day.

Right. And they were on different delivery services that I've never heard of. Have you heard of like one track or something like that? Never heard of it. No. Yeah. These guys show up in these new vans and I'm just like, who are you? And they open the back of the thing and they're like trying to hand me the package. And it's like, they poured the boxes in. It's like, oh, it's terrible.

Well, it's good to know that we all have a future driving each other around and delivering shit to each other. That's pretty much it. That's all we're going to be doing. That's the only jobs available anymore. So good times. Oh man. So we talked about some email tracking issues last week.

And I'd like to think that this is because of our episode of Grumpy Old Geeks that Tiny Letter and MailChimp have both updated their policies. I'd like to think that too, but I somehow doubt it. Oh yes. Maybe people are listening to us over there, but I didn't see anybody else calling them out or complaining about these policies.

I didn't either. And I listened to tons of shows, read tons of articles and nobody else talked about it except us last week. So you know what? We're going to take the credit. We're taking credit. And I'm glad that they did change their policies because isn't that what you're just supposed to do? Yeah. Oh, that's right.

We're in the world now where you do shit first and then apologize for it later. That's right. Sorry. I forgot about that. Yeah. It's like Congress. Hashtag do your job. That's, that's all I got to say about that. Oh, Hey, we're on Instagram. Big news. Oh, this is big news.

Doesn't it make sense for a podcast, which is an audio medium to be on a purely visual social network that doesn't even have outbound links. Yeah. Why didn't they ever do it? It's stupid that they don't have outbound links. I think that they were trying to mitigate spam, you know, I guess it doesn't work though.

No, it doesn't work because what they do is people will create an account and in the profile, the links work. Yes. And then I've seen these one, these one accounts where you go to the grid page and they've posted like 12 images that make up one big image and say, come check out my webcam live, you know, good times.

Anyways, we're at Instagram.com slash grumpy old geeks. Won't you follow us? We posted a picture of Jason's studio this morning. Exciting stuff. A very dark picture. We're going to have to work on that. That was before you opened up your blinds here. I know. I like to work in the dark. I know, you know, you're a goth. I thought you might explode if I opened the blinds.

I'm an ex-goth. Ex-goth. You'll notice I'm quite tan from Hawaii. Okay. That's right. I guess goths don't go to Hawaii, but you'd never think goths go to Disneyland all the time either, but you did that. Well, yeah, we were a strange group. So guess what I did this week? I have no idea.

I SSH'd into one of my servers for the first time in four months. Wow. How did that feel? Gross. Yeah, it's horrible, isn't it? It sounded really gross. I've actually, I did a lot of that this week because I'm starting to scale back. I started removing old sites and I'm just going to basically take my hosting down to next to nothing because shocking, people don't want to pay for hosting.

No, they don't. People don't want to pay for bandwidth. People don't want to pay for fuck all. Yep. That's pretty much how it goes. Actually, yeah, we did have a bit of that discussion with your day job boss on Facebook this week as well. There was some comments about and some discussion of subscription models and that sort of thing.

And it's always the people that don't work in content industries that think everything's just fine. Well, the funny thing is we do work in a content industry, but we work in a content industry where we give it away for free and sell them other stuff. Yeah. But yeah, I thought he was completely wrong by saying, here's the long and short of it.

A friend of mine went to Forbes.com and then made a post saying, oh, Forbes won't let me read this article because I have an ad blocker on. Well, I'm never going to Forbes again. And I'm sure Forbes is just like, oh, whoo-hoo. See ya. We just lost hits that's not going to come to our bottom line.

And I just was like, dude, people got to eat. And I have slowly reversed my position on a lot of ad blockers and I'll turn it off for many sites that I would like to support. I don't click on the ads. Actually, you know what? That's not true. Guess what I bought this week off of an ad that I found on a website that was in the sidebar.

Autoblow 3 came out? No. I bought a belt. I bought a new belt. From an ad? From an ad. Okay. It's this new, I don't know if it's called, quote, belt technology, but. It's the greatest innovation in belts in 25 years. Since I've been losing so much weight, my belts, I'm either like squished like a sack of potatoes or my pants are falling off.

And this belt is like a ratchet technology. Guess what you get to look forward to on Grumpy Old Geeks Instagram soon? Jason's belts? Jason's belts and sacks of potatoes. All right. But no, this thing, and it was, it sold out for a month because it, you know, is a new tech, new technology that everybody's going for, I guess, but I'll get it in April and then I'll tell you about it.

But I did buy something off of an ad that I found on a website. I feel like a Rube, but it looks like a cool belt. Right. Well, to be fair, you could have ordered it on Amazon with your prime membership and promising two day delivery and you still wouldn't get it until April, just like you are now. Yeah. Cause I, I, I, I am positive this belt was kickstarted, so I may never get the belt.

Wow. That's crazy. Uh, but I a hundred percent agree with you about the ad blocker thing. Uh, I've done the same thing. I, I, if it's a site where I really enjoy the content, I allow myself the ads, I'll let them stream because you gotta eat. All we do is complain about like how journalism has died.

So we can't be the hypocrites that refuse to do the ads. I know like we have been for most of our career, but you know what I, yeah. Um, I'm just like, you gotta, you gotta do what you gotta do. The web does not feed itself. We feed it with our personal information, where we're going on vacation, like Hawaii and, uh, where we buy our belts.

Exactly. In the news.

Man, I thought I had a really bad ride with Lyft. This guy. Actually, by all accounts, he probably, uh, there was no complaints about his, uh, his driving. No. Uh, yeah. So the Kalamazoo Uber driver who was killing people in between his fares.

Uh, yeah, that was a thing. Uh, Brian, you're the Uber guy. You're, you're, you're our Uber correspondent. Bring us into this. Yeah. Um, I know we're, we're, we're laughing about it, but it's, it, it is. Well, we were just talking right before we started this segment about whether we were even going to cover this story.

Cause it's a bit old and obviously it's somewhat gruesome. And I was kind of like, how do we not? Yeah. We talk about Uber all the time. Uh, to be fair to Uber, um, he had passed. Wait, wait, wait. Never before have you ever said those words on this show.

To be fair to Uber. We have a show title. Damn it. That sucks. Rewind. Delete that. Continue. Uh, this guy did pass a background check. He was one, he actually did have a background check and he passed it. This is just one of those, he's a crazy motherfucker.

That's, that's really what it comes down to. However, we cannot not say that this guy picked up people in between shooting people. Yep. And that's what you get with Uber. Uh, yeah, I don't know what, I mean, obviously this is going to lead to there being probably class action loss or lawsuits or something against Uber.

Uh, I, yeah, what are you going to do? Yeah. I, I, there's nothing that can stop crazy people from doing what crazy people do. So again, I'd like it to be fair to Uber, our, our show title. Wait a minute. You're actually, I've turned into you and you've turned into me throughout the history of this show.

This is getting scary. Oh, don't worry. I still hate Uber. Okay. I completely despise their, their entire setup and, and what they're trying, their philosophy as a company is, is wrong. And I will get into that now with something that doesn't involve killing. Uh, the city of Calgary in Canada has, uh, basically passed new bylaws for public transportation taxis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, modernizing their system.

They're one of the first cities to kind of do a, a, I love this economy 2.0 type, uh, type legislation for, for public transport. And, uh, Uber has basically found it too onerous to do and, uh, will not be going into Calgary at all because they require these backbreaking things like a $220 annual licensing fee and a $30 Calgary police services, criminal history fee, and an annual inspection fee.

They actually asked for two, then scaled it back to, we'll just look at your car once. All of which I find beyond reasonable, totally acceptable. Yes. A $220 per car for a $50 billion company, far too onerous, far too onerous.

Besides, we all know that even if Uber agreed to it, they'd fucking pass it on to the drivers. They wouldn't shoulder the cost. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the drivers would definitely have to do it. Yes. So, uh, there you go. So I still hate Uber. Okay. And I love Calgary. Good job, guys. I've never been to Calgary. It's actually quite beautiful.

I mean, it's the, it's the Texas of Canada. There's a Texas of Canada. Loyal money, very conservative for Canada, which still makes them fucking liberal compared to all of us, but, uh, uh, great meat. I mean, it's, it's a cow town, so you're going to get some awesome steaks. Uh, great city.

Really cool. I mean, everything in Canada is just better. Okay. Colder, but colder, but better. Okay. Uh, Kenny, our buddy from London. Oh, yes. He, uh, sent us a tweet, said, uh, did this, did this, did this, did this G-O-G podcast? Did this cross your radar yet?

And it was this open letter to my CEO, which by now it has crossed everybody's radar. Uh, yeah. I have some things to say about this. Okay. But I would like your read first. Um, it's, if you, she covers a lot of things in the letter that you and I have talked about.

Uh, this is definitely a reaction to the decline of the middle class, the, uh, shrinking, uh, workforce, the lack of great jobs out there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then I realized how young she is and this is her first real job.

And then I went, you know what? Shut the fuck up and suck it up. I worked, my first job out of college was shit. I got paid $20,000 a year. I worked my ass off to make $20,000 a year. The theory is you eventually rise and get better salaries. Now there's an argument that that isn't happening anymore.

So I totally sympathize with her for that. However, this is your first job. Shut the F up. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's my thought. Here's my thought on it. I don't think this is what it seems. I think she was going to quit because nobody, even if this is your first job out of college, nobody in their right mind would write this and not expect to be fired on the spot.

The millennials come from a way different attitude than you and I do. We would never have posted an open letter. We would have done a very private email to our own friends. Yes. On a, on a BBS with the, with dial up. But here's the thing. She's, she's a writer. She wants to be a writer.

Yes. Which means this, this feels like a prank. It feels like a punk prank that she expected to get fired. She expected this to go viral and using the fact that she got fired could then propel her writing career. Now, that said, I could be wrong because I'm a, I am a conspiracy theorist and I like to look for the hidden, hidden gems of weirdness and everything.

But I mean, it's, it's plausible and it certainly would make sense. And it's obviously garnered her a lot of attention and the writing was fine. I disagreed with her opinions and thought she was a spoiled little brat, but the writing was good. What are your thoughts on Yelp firing her for writing this?

They say they didn't fire her for writing this, which is utter bullshit. Yeah. That's bullshit. It is bullshit. That's like, I am stepping down to go spend more time with my family bullshit. Well, that's, that's why I didn't even, I didn't even bring up that aspect of it that they didn't say it because we all know she fucking got fired.

She got fired. Yeah. So that's ridiculous. But do you think that Yelp is justified slash has the right to fire someone who posts something publicly that is critical of the company? Absolutely. If she's talking about internal processes that she signed paperwork that said she would not talk about.

Yes. One assumes that she did sign a contract. I'm sure she has an employment contract that is very detailed in what she can and can't talk about. And she talks about internal business practices there. Yep. And by doing that, she, they're fully justified in letting her go. Yep. They're also justified in letting her go because this was kind of a cunty letter.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a tough one for me to crap on her too much because they're, like I said, there are so many of the points that, that we make on the show on a regular weekly basis about the actual reality of working in the world right now. Yes. But we also have, and here's the other issue.

We haven't vetted this letter to find out if it's real and everything that she says is true. Everybody takes it at face value that what she says is, is gospel because she, she does write it in a very compelling way, which is why she might be a good writer. Who knows?

Maybe she didn't even work at Yelp. That would have been the funniest part. We can vet the high cost of living in San Francisco. We are, we know this. Glassdoor, which is a company review site lists junior account executive salaries for, for the business and they're very low.

And one would assume she was not even a junior account executive, but she was even below that. Yeah. So we can vet the amount of money that she's approximately making and know that it was not enough, especially not to live in San Francisco. So some of these things we can kind of surmise to be somewhat true.

Okay. And all of that said, I want to say that our response is not nearly even as good as Jordan Cooper's response on the morning dump this week. Did you get to listen to that? Uh, I listened to about five, I had to drive to Woodland Hills this morning, so I got about five minutes into it.

You drove to Woodland Hills. You should have had time to listen to the whole show three times. It was a busy morning podcast and download all the way. Okay. So anyway, here's the deal. Uh, go check out the episode of the morning dump called life isn't fair. Where Jordan pretty much takes her to task by saying nobody told you, you had to live in San Francisco to take a shitty job.

You can live pretty much anywhere in the country, live better than in San Francisco and have a shitty job and still pay your bills and eat and do laundry like everybody else. That's why he moved to Louisville. And it was, it's a, it's very compelling. I thought it's a good argument and it's a fair argument.

If you hate your life so much and you, there are things you can do to change it. Move being the first one. If you live in a place that you can't afford and then move back when you're smart enough and can take the job that you can't afford. Yeah. Move to Tallahassee and be an Uber driver. Or move to Arizona where they're actually putting their, uh, you know, customer service reps out of now.

They're like, Oh, we're moving everybody to Phoenix because it's cheaper for people to live in Phoenix and talk on the phone for Yelp. Oh, well that makes sense. Yeah. Derp. No. So yeah, I agree. Uh, there are tons of things you can do and I would just like to, to let her know cause I'm sure she's going to listen to this show as well. I'm sure she's listening.

Um, we spend an awful lot of time bitching and moaning and complaining and, uh, let me check. Did we ever specify any single client that we've ever worked for? Um, we did in the first episodes that we deleted. And then we deleted it because you don't fucking do that.

Exactly. Yeah. There's this thing called, uh, integrity where you don't really kind of do that. I mean, even if you just don't do it, you don't be specific like that. You can discuss your situation without calling out someone and, and that's the way you should do it. And in the old days, what we would do is you go get a blogger account with a fake name and then you bitch and moan about it and you still don't even say who it is.

Exactly. You still don't say who it is. Yep. So, so there you go. Kids these days. Kids these days. Now I found an article, uh, and this actually came out of that discussion that we were having, um, with, uh, with, uh, about journalism and, and Forbes and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah. Journalists under threat from within. Um, this is on medium. Hey, that's my line. Well, like you said, I'm becoming you. You're becoming me. Um, yeah. And, uh, it, it really kind of gets into the, what we've known has been going on in journalism, uh, for quite some time.

I think it's an interesting read. Uh, it really kind of explains why journalism sucks and it, uh, does call out someone by name. Oh yes. This is a, from frontline freelance. It's called journalists under threat from within. Yeah. And it's a specifically relates to a comment that Stephen Hull, editor in chief of the Huffington post UK.

Oh yeah, made on radio for it in the UK. If I was paying someone to write something because I want it to get advertising, that's not a real authentic way of presenting copy. When somebody writes something for us, we know it's real. We know they want to write it. It's not been forced or paid for. I think that's something to be proud of.

He's proud of basically saying we don't fucking pay our writers. Yep. Well, that's the Huffington post business model. Okay. You know, I look, man, I come from that world. I had a blogging network before Huffington post. And we didn't pay anybody, but we didn't have any money to pay anybody.

We had plans in place to pay people. Yeah. That's kind of the problem is that the real business model became what we all used as the temporary business model because we weren't making any money yet. Yeah. We always intended to pay people for their content. We just kind of fucking crossed that off the list now.

Yeah. That's it. That really is kind of it. Yep. It doesn't matter how much money Huffington post makes. It ain't fucking trickling down. And I'm sure that a frontline freelance here didn't get any money to write this on medium. No, I'm sure he didn't. Well, medium did have, they've, they've been scaling back, but they did have paid sections where they were paying people to write premium content.

I can't say for a fact that this frontline freelance is one of those paid ones, but you know. If anybody out there wrote for medium for one of those and actually got a paycheck, I would love to hear from you. And I would like to know if it was actually for more than the cost of the stamp to send it to you.

Yeah. We would, we would, we would actually like to talk to people like that. So if you, if you know people that are getting paid to write articles for these freemium sites nowadays, put them in touch with us. I think that'd be a fun interview. We'd love to have a discussion with them about it. Absolutely. So, uh, let's, uh, talk a little bit.

Uh, Facebook is expanding and pushing Facebook instant articles more and more and more. That is actually something that I'm working on at the moment. So it is of my, of interest to me. Oh my God. You're actually, you actually have to work on this. I, I'm doing some work. Can you tell me their client? No, no, I can't because I'm a fucking professional.

Um, no, so I am working on this right now. So anything instant article related is of, of relative interest to me. So it gets into, uh, this particular article gets into, uh, how Buzzfeed is basically all in on instant articles, which is not surprising because Buzzfeed basically would not exist if it wasn't for Facebook.

Uh, Facebook was their bread and butter always has been. So they're going all in on it. The New York times, however, is only pushing some things because they are still on a subscription model to make money. So it does not make sense for them to put all of their content into Facebook's hands and display it. Exactly.

Yes. You don't want to take everything behind the paywall and put it in front of the paywall because otherwise there would be no paywall. Exactly. So, and as we know from last week, Cosmo's all in cause fuck it. Why not? Yeah. I'm sure they, they probably will be, but, uh, you know, for them, they're not, they're not trying to make money from subscriptions.

They are just, uh, who the hell knows how they're actually making money these days anymore. Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. But, uh, the thing with Facebook instant articles and, and the way that they are supposedly going to be monetized is of course, Facebook is rolling out their own ad network. So you can split revenue with them and let them put Facebook ads into your instant articles.

Of course you can. This has all happened before. And it will all happen again, except now there's a lot less money involved. Mm-hmm. Um, I was kind of hesitant to speak about the Kesha, Dr. Luke situation. Are you, are you aware of everything that's kind of going on?

I was, I, I, I, I was, I was quite saddened when this came across the, uh, the show notes. I'm like, Oh really? I just, there's a note that needs to be made. Now, obviously no woman should be forced to work in a situation where they even feel threatened, much less if they actually were threatened.

They, we do not know what actually happened. Um, there are, you know, she made an affidavit earlier that said that she was not raped or mistreated by Dr. Luke. He's come out and made his own statements. Um, the problem that I have with it is I think, I think the ruling was fine because the, the judge basically said, you do not have to work with Dr. Luke.

Right. However, you did sign a contract with Sony music. So you are under contract to record for Sony. Yep. She wants out of the contract completely. Now I could be you and put on my conspiracy theory hat. Exactly. So it seems now that she only just kind of totally wants out of her contract, which is bullshit.

You did sign a contract. You can now record, you are free to record with anyone that you want. You do not have to work with the person that you think treated you horribly, but you do have to work for Sony. Yeah. You signed the contract. Yes. So, so that's, I don't want to get into it any more than that.

I just wanted to point out that once again, you, you did sign a contract. Okay. So I, yeah, that's, that's, I, I, I didn't even have to chime in on that one. You actually, you, you, you channeled the inner me. This is terrifying. I'm going to fucking buy a dog and order a fucking, you know, kickstarted belts next.

Oh man. So going back to Facebook here, we've been waiting a long time for this. We've talked about it probably 20 or 30 times on the show about the expanded like button that was finally coming. And now it's here. Except it's not, uh, it's, it's emoticons.

There are, yeah, but the only thing that's been enjoyable about this all week is people putting up their versions of, of buttons that we should have had, like the uninterested Travolta from Palm or for, uh, it's just great. There's been a bunch of animated gifts that people have been posting for different reactions such as the, uh, I block your political post and it's like the monkeys, all that sort of stuff.

That's been hilarious. Um, but beyond that, I mean, okay. The next article that I put in the show notes is Facebook is looking to make virtual reality the future of social media. And it talks about their big plans for everybody wearing these stupid fucking headsets and that's going to be the future of social media.

It took Facebook about eight years just to add a button. That's all I'm saying. Like this, this fast progress that we keep thinking is going to keep happening eight years to add dislike. And then they even fuck that up. Oh, they totally screwed it up. No, these new, these, the new buttons are terrible.

And everybody's been talking about the picture of Zuckerberg walking through the audience with the fat white guys all in their headsets. It looks like 1984 was one of the most pathetic photos I've ever seen. And if this is the future that we are hurtling towards, I want no part of it. Well, you know what? Fortunately, I think somebody is probably going to be making WALL-E faster.

So we can have, we can have WALL-E come save the day and get everybody out of their virtual reality fat beds. Yeah. That photo is absolutely hilarious. And disturbing. Oh man, it's so classic. Yep. I really hope that guy got paid for it, but he probably didn't. I'm sure he didn't. And we'll be right back.

But now a word from our sponsors.

Security? Ha! Apple's been in the news a little tiny bit here and there. Heard something about it. Yeah, they've got a little beef. Yeah. A little bit of a beef. A little problem. Yeah, with the government. We talked about it last week, a little tiny bit. Well, last week they only wanted access to one phone.

Did they ask for access to a couple more? They got a couple more phones lined up after that. A couple more phones. Didn't see that coming. No, not at all. So I'm going to, here's what we're going to do with this one. Because we are not lawyers.

No. We do not play lawyers on the internet. No. We don't know our ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to law. Nope. We're going to put a bunch of links in the show notes and let you read them and make your own decision. Because on this one, even Bill Gates came out against Apple, which I thought was very weird.

He's kind of backtracked a bit on that one. It's not really that much. No, he stands by his original statements. But that FT article really kind of painted him as being like, fuck Apple. Let him open it up. But the funny part is, Microsoft is behind Apple.

Yes. So since Bill Gates is no longer Microsoft, even though he owns a metric hoop ton of it. But he does not speak for his employer anymore. No. Or his company. His ex-company. Ex-company. Or whatever we're going with that. Yeah. And, you know, so we've got a bunch of stuff in here.

They're taking it to Congress. They're like, screw this. We're going to fight and fight and fight. Apple's lawyer states, if we lose it, it will lead to a police state, which plausible. I mean, granted, they're not the biggest cell phone manufacturer in the world, but they're pretty up there, you know.

Android, you just go hack an Android. If Android actually had the same security as Apple did, then, you know, we'd be in the same boat with Google. But they don't. So, yeah. And even the FBI director says, this is the hardest question I've seen in government. Yeah, this is going to be a very big deal.

And it comes down to what kind of world you want to live in. Yep. And there's a New York Times article which is talking about Apple is actually trying to make it harder to hack their phones, which, shouldn't you be doing that every damn day? You'd think. That's all I'm saying.

You would think that that would be one of the primary driving forces behind the development. Exactly. But I guess not. We want these things to be as secure as possible, especially after, what was it, the fappening. You know, I think, honestly, I think this is really, the fappening is what is pushing them because they're like, we cannot have our celebrities' boobs on the internet again.

Well, okay. But the fappening was actually not so much hacking the phone as hacking your cloud data storage that your phone uses. Social networking. They use social networking to get through Apple's customer support to redo it. But yes. Well, we'll see how this is all going to play out.

It's a very interesting story. And I am on Team Apple with this one. Yes. Grumpy old geeks fully support Team Apple for this, 100%. And it's the precedent that is disturbing because, again, like we talk about, there is no such thing as just your phone anymore.

There's your phone and then there's your iCloud and pretty soon it's going to be your internet of things that are connected and you're controlling with your phone. And it's, yeah, it's important. This is really, really extraordinarily important. More important than any of the other shit that we've bitched about many, many times on this show.

This is probably the number one issue of our times right now. The fun part about this is this is what we've been talking about since we started the show. Since we started the security segment three years ago, we have finally gotten to the point where people are actually paying attention to this stuff. Yeah. There's an article in USA Today called, I got hacked midair while writing an Apple-FBI story.

This is one of the worst headlines because it is such a tease that he was hacked because he was writing an Apple-FBI story. No, that just happened to be what he was doing. Yes. And he was using GoGo, you know, the GoGo internet, which is terrible.

Terrible. But he wasn't also using a VPN like we, you know, talk about on the show too. We should check out, if you go to grumpyoldgeeks.com, turn off your ad blocker and in the sidebar, there's a link to private internet access, which is the VPN that we use. Then he just wouldn't have been, you know, available to the hacker that was sitting in the back of the plane that was just scanning the Wi-Fi network.

Yep. But the, you know, this is, this is all deep dive stuff for most normal human beings. They don't think about this stuff. They don't know about this stuff. And the one plus of this Apple story just being everywhere is maybe people will start. Yeah. No, I had a friend the other day. She's just like, she texted me and she's like, hey, I need some spyware for my Mac.

And I'm like, why do you need spyware for your Mac? She's like, to keep the viruses off. And I'm like, that's, that's antivirus. She's like, what's spyware? I'm like, well, it lets people spy on you. Why would you want to put some spyware on your computer? You don't want to add that. No, people just don't quite get it.

But yeah, so this was, the link's in the show notes. But yeah, it was, I think this was a kind of a Beatty headline for sure. Wait, there's Beatty headlines on the internet? Oh yeah. It was USA Today. Tomorrow, the world. Oh man. Oh, so yeah, we've got so much stuff in here about Apple that I, I recommend everybody dig in.

And I haven't even had time to watch Tim Cook's big interview, his half hour interview. He's like, where they said the federal authorities are trampling civil liberties, which, you know, they've been doing that since 9-11. This is not new. No, this is not new. I'm just glad somebody's finally standing up for it, which is, I'm glad it's Apple.

Yeah, me too. It's somebody with enough clout and power and money to fund this battle. And yeah, it's beyond important. So go Apple. Yep. And in, in the civil liberty, civil liberties, that's a civil shepherds, civil shepherds.

Oh man. So moon, what was it? Moonlighting. Moon. Oh crap. I don't remember the name of the show. I thought it was moonlighting. I thought it was moonlighting. Bruce Willis was civil shepherd. Yes. It was a good show. Oh, yes, it was. That shows how old we are. Anyway, predictive policing is in the news and dig has a really good roundup.

I never thought I would say that again. This is like Brian talking about going with Uber. Dig has a really good writeup on all of the predictive policing articles that are out there and why it's dangerous and what you need to know about it. Um, yeah, I mean, uh, big data, I, this relates directly to big data.

That's what the police are going to start to use to do all this sorts of stuff. I don't have a problem. It's going to happen, uh, with almost every industry and everything. Until we get to the precogs. Yes. Until we get to the precogs. I mean, this stuff is going to happen. I don't really have a problem with it. What I have a problem with is the blind belief that this is going to solve everything and it's always right.

Yeah. And, and the problem with these tools is that people then get lazy and just a hundred percent go, this is the way it's going to be. And it needs to be one of the tools in your tool belt, not the only one. Yep. And the problem is that the police and everybody end up using this as their only tool.

Yeah. Because as we know, the police aren't really, uh, they're not really into serving and protecting anymore. No, we know that just from the big data or the small data. Yeah. The, the San Francisco weekly blurb that a dig pulled is, is one that I'm just a hundred percent on board.

It's, um, you know, the belief that there's a killer app for everything, including crime fighting. There's not again, one tool in your tool belt. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, even Batman had multiple tools on his tool belt. Yes. So if you're going to fight crime, have many tools. Uh, we, let's talk about some light bulbs.

Yeah. Uh, friend of the show, Kenny from Twitter sent us a, this link. I bought some awful light bulbs so you don't have to, um, unsurprisingly, the internet of things not ready for prime time. Go figure. No, these are hackable. They're just, look, this username and passwords are hard coded into the app.

Yes. You do not do that. No, you don't do that. Unless you were 13 years old in building an app in 1992, you know, it's no, nowadays we have these things called hashes. Even us old people, we hash things. Yes. No, this is, this is ridiculous.

Yes. It's, this is what's going to happen when you buy cheap knockoffs. And even when you buy the good stuff, they don't care about security. That's why, you know, the government is trying to lean in at least with automakers at this point. They're saying, you know, we talked about this a couple of shows ago where they're trying to get the automakers to talk to the security experts and the hackers.

Yeah. So you don't make a mistake like hard coding SSIDs as well as everything else. Yes. And this is down to just a light bulb. You know, any, anytime you put something on your network, that is a way to get into your entire system.

So every single component needs to be looked at with scrutiny. It's, it's ridiculous. It is. It is. I mean, I want to almost start to see like labeling on these products that tell you, like there's needs to be an independent commission that reviews everything for security purposes.

Grumpy old geeks are available for such work. Yes, we are. It's the grumpy old geeks consultancy. Yes. Google is launching Project Shield to protect news sites from DDoS attacks. Yeah. Not porn sites. Nope. Just news sites. Just news sites. I think porn sites are more important, but because nobody pays for the news anymore.

So the news is, you know. Nobody really pays for porn either, Jason. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Oh, man. We're just going down the crapper. What do people pay for? And you can't get paid to show your boobs anymore. You know, the world's gone down. I know. We're going to have belt porn soon.

That'll be the thing. Look at my new belt. I paid for this belt. So this was something I found on Boing Boing. And what they're doing is kind of taking over like a site like Cloudflare that we use that handles your DNS in case of a DDoS attack and mitigate the attack and route around it.

Google's doing that with their massive infrastructure. And you can sign up for it and it's, you know, for news sites instead of your homebrew WordPress install that you have just kind of sitting on your Hostgator account somewhere, you know. Yeah. That the client doesn't pay for any security on it.

Exactly. Which is my situation all the time. I'm like, we really need to do some stuff here, guys. Why? We're not going to spend money we don't need to spend. Look, you've called me in for the same thing on some of your bigger clients, which I will not mention because I, too, am a professional.

The best quote of the article is, this is an example of what Bruce Schneier calls feudal computing, where individuals and groups swear allegiance to a large and powerful, quote unquote, lord who protects them from bandits and opposing lords. Yeah. So we're in the Middle Ages in a virtual computing land.

Exactly. All of this has happened before. Oh, where's my internet sword?

Comment of the week. We've got some contest entries for our pick a new tagline for the grumpy old geeks. First one comes from great friend of the show, Lawrence Lee. He says, fuck them all and let God sort it out. Okay.

Yes. Very aggressive. Yes. Jeff Donaldson sent donors choose because we give a fuck, really? So I talked to Jeff about this. I'm like, no, no, no. It wasn't for donors choose. It was for us. And why would they put the word fuck in there? And he's like, ah, it works for both of you. Okay. Heather Hollins writes in, clear out the ear.

And hear complaints from curmudgeons with computers. I like that one. Shell, shell, shell, shell Matt. Shell Matt. Well, there's a couple of extra L's in there. Oh, shell hello. Yeah. Shell hello Matt. Grumpy old geeks. We're not your grandpa's friends. All right. And kindergarten rock says gorgeous glib geeks.

Obviously you have not seen us. Oh, I, well, I beg to differ. But I am flattered. So I think we have a winner. We have a winner. Kindergarten rocks is the winner of the donors choose giveaway. We will be sending you some, uh, info with, uh, how to redeem your $50, uh, coupon for donors choose.

Thanks, uh, everybody for playing along. Thank you very much. It was fun. Yes. Uh, we got some more feedback as well, uh, on Twitter, um, Moss 6502, who's written us more than a few times. Uh, thanks for posting the new Lush video. Man, remembering when I was a big fan was a big punch right in my middle age balls.

Yeah, because it was a long time ago. It was a long time ago. Uh, thanks so much. Glad you enjoyed it. I thought the song was fantastic and I'm very much looking forward to seeing them next month. All right. Blonde Sazzle writes us on Twitter. It says, first houses were hacked. Now cars. Well, we know about the cars.

Yeah. Nissan Leaf electric cars hack vulnerability. Disclose. And we have a link in the show notes to the BBC talking about how the, uh, the Nissan Leafs were, have been hacked. Yes. And we don't really care because we're never going to buy a Nissan Leaf because they're kind of ugly.

They are a bit ugly. Uh, JS Lester wrote us on Twitter saying, Hey, I'm Boston Yankee on iTunes. Glad you liked my five-star review. Beers on me if you guys ever head out east. Thank you so much. You, you were not the person I thought you were, but, uh, if I ever end up out in, uh, Boston, I suppose, I will find you and we will have beer.

Yes. And if you come to LA, beers on us. Yes. All right. And we have a new iTunes review from two quip informative and well-rounded tech chatter. I would recommend it to any geek intellect that enjoys some twisted grumpy IO. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Um, so you can find us on Twitter at GOG podcast or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG. We're now on Instagram at instagram.com slash grumpy old geeks. Hey, any, any opportunity for somebody to find us and talk to us. We're happy about, uh, we have a website. The grumpy old geeks.com where you can listen to shows, leave feedback or better yet, ask us questions that we can read on the air.

If you have any friends, please tell them about the show and please, please, please let me get what I want this time. Sorry. I'm thinking about this. Uh, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review. They really do help us out and only take a minute or two. Just go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes and we'll take you right there. This week I read deep work rules for focus success in a distracted world by Cal Newport.

We talked about this book a while ago when we were talking about, uh, his other books that I had read, which was so good. They can't ignore you was the one that I'd read and I'd interviewed him on a show, but I finally got around to reading his new book. And oh my God, everybody that listens to this show should read this book.

Stop tweeting and read the book. Yes. Absolutely. Isn't that basically what the book says? Yeah. That's kind of it. Um, but it's very nuanced in, in how he works and it, cause I mean, he's amazingly hard to get ahold of. It took us almost a year to get him to do the interview because he's so hard to get ahold of you.

There's no email address on his website. He doesn't tweet. He doesn't go on Facebook. You know what he does? He writes good books and he works and then he's done. But how does he build his brand? He does not. Well, actually he does by writing good stuff and then other people promote it for him, but he doesn't work past 530 because you know what he does?

He has a life with his wife and his kids and he wants to go home and relax and enjoy himself. So all in all, it's, uh, I like this guy. Dude, Cal, Cal was so cool on the show that we did. I'll, I should link that in the show notes too, but he's, he's a smart dude. And he's younger than us.

And he figured this out way early that this is what you really need to do. I'm going to read it. I mean, I think, you know, we've, we've talked a lot on the show about, you know, trying to scale back and how we're really just kind of chasing our own tails with social media. And it's, it can be depressing and it certainly breaks up your workflow and your day and, and takes you away from, you know, the real hashtag goals that you should have because you're just posting about hashtag goals.

Um, it's, it's, it's, yeah, I'm going to definitely give this a read and I really wish that I, my job, my job didn't involve being on social media as much as it is. Cause I would love to be off of it. Oh yeah. I would love to, I would love to get rid of it too. But then how would the peoples know about our Instagrams?

So yeah, unfortunately it's a, it's part of my work life, but I'm going to read this for tips about how to separate and scale back a bit because I need to do it. I think you'll get in, especially you will get inspired by this. And I think anybody like us who has been like in the business for a long time and we're always distracted, we'll get some tips out of it.

I've, I've made some changes. I can't make all the changes that I would like to. Uh, but for the most part, I've, I've done some things that have calmed me down a lot this for the past like week since I read this. So definitely check it out. If you are bouncing around and doing too much stuff, that's me going to have to give it a read.

Uh, speaking of that, uh, I ended up reading the book that, uh, that I read this week because I was bouncing around and doing too much stuff. And at one point I was like, uh, I was trying to work and, uh, Star Trek two Rathacon came on TV. So I'm watching Star Trek two and working and tweeting about it.

Uh, but, uh, I also, uh, uh, Shatner's doing the rounds of promotion right now. I think he stopped by a Corolla's podcast and I listened to some of that. So I thought you stopped listening to Corolla's podcast. Well, I saw William Shatner was on. Oh, okay. I love the chat. Okay. Well, it's not to love about him.

Anyways, he was on and he's promoting a book that he wrote about, uh, Leonard Nimoy and his, uh, long relationship with him, the ups and downs that they had. So I basically bought it immediately and read it and, you know, it's Shatner. So it's not like the world's best class of writing or anything, but, uh, I was going to say, as you're reading it, do you read it in Shatner's?

Of course you do. Okay. I was like, Leonard Nimoy was my friend for 50 years. You know, you have to put it in the Shatner pause. I can't believe you could get through this book in a week with all the Shatner pauses. That's why I didn't read anything else. Ah, good point. Uh, but it was actually really good.

I mean, if you're a Star Trek fan, uh, at all, you're going to love this, uh, really goes in depth into Leonard Nimoy's history, things I didn't know about. Also Shatner's history. I also didn't realize how close they actually were for, for periods of time. I thought that everybody was kind of always off screw Shatner, screw that guy, but, uh, they actually were quite close and it's, uh, there's some really touching moments in the book.

And it was, especially when you've just watched Wrath of Khan. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually want to bring something up because I always thought that they were at odds with each other, but remember this was like in, in, in the nineties, uh, they put out a documentary where they had a conversation called mind meld.

He discusses it in the book and I didn't really remember it. So I want to go back and actually watch that. Yeah. I actually own that on DVD in, in the vault at my dad's house somewhere, but I bought it when it came out and I can't remember who farted. It was one of them. Did he talk about that in the book?

No, he didn't mention the farting. I think it might've been Nimoy who farted because he's like, did you just fart? And they left it in the whole thing. It's like, Oh man, how we do our podcast. Exactly. Um, so, uh, the Sanderson's book last week, uh, Brandon Sanderson.

Yes. Uh, we've, we've talked about his series for a while. We've also talked about Peter Klein series, the ex heroes. And I just found out there's a new one. Number five in the series called exile. Yes. You texted me that yesterday and I bought it immediately. And then you asked me if I finished reading it. Well, I texted me yesterday.

I, I know. Well, Hey man, I have not read it all yet. I am very excited though. I do have it and I've started it, but, uh, I've, I love the series. So yeah, great to see a new one. I think you should read it in the voice of Shatner. You want me to take two weeks? Would you like to talk about this book next week?

Because I can do that and it will take some time. Perhaps we shall do our whole podcast this way next week. Spock. We'll be right back. Enjoy a word from our sponsors. I don't, I don't know how I saw this.

This is again, maybe I'm, I'm sure it came up as like a Facebook ad or something. Too much social media, too much distraction, but I'm glad I did see it because this is everything wrong in the world. Uh, talk space is a new app. It's online counseling and therapy. So you can get the app and you can chat with, it's like having a therapist in your pocket.

They say, um, get guidance and advice from licensed therapists. So, uh, yeah, what could possibly go wrong? Um, and this is version 4.6. So I don't think this is new, dude. No, no. But it's the first I've heard of it. Uh, I do enjoy the one-star reviews that say things like do not use, I would give this app zero stars if possible.

Uh, there's quite a lot of negative reviews in here. And look, if you really need therapy, I'm thinking pay for it. Pay for, well, they do take money through the app. Okay. So you can pay for it, but, uh, there's something to be said for in-person. Go to a place where they have an office and you can look at the wall and see their certificates of, you know, proficiency and things like that.

It's very important if you're a therapist, uh, or in need of therapy to have that real connection, that physical, I'm looking at you. I can see the tension. I can see what's happening. Yes. Go in person. As we were saying earlier, there is not an app for everything.

And there is not, uh, there's not a perfect solution and it's generally not an app. Yeah, no, it's not an app. And if, I mean, if you're in crisis, you can call a crisis hotline, but then immediately go see a human being in person because that's the most important part. I've been to therapy and you cannot get it in an app.

You cannot. Uh, but what you also cannot get in an app is a magical eco-friendly hub at home. Yeah. It can be buried in your backyard. These are cool as shit. They really are. I don't know what else to say about it.

These are pretty awesome. Uh, we got the link in the show notes. Look at it. If I had a big yard, I would spend a ton of extra cash from driving. My Uber, um, I would totally get one of these. They are kind of cool. I got to give them that. Yep. Oh man. It's, and you can get different fronts on them.

You just got to check these out. Yep. Seriously. No, it's, it's really cool. I mean, you know, obviously you'd have to be in the Lord of the Rings. Otherwise this will have zero appeal to you, but. Well, no, if you just want kind of a cool underground bunker-ish type home. Look, I would say instead of buying one of those metal sheds that you always see the commercials for on late at night, uh, get one of these.

Yeah. Instead of a good tiny home, get a crappy piece of land that's cheap and then spend all your money putting this in. Get a round door. Do they, they, they don't, they should sell round doors. They really should. But they have swimming pools. You can get, you can get one of these. You can get a hobbit home with a swimming pool and a hot tub.

I was not aware that hobbits swam. Oh man. So I don't have a standing desk anymore, mainly because I can't afford a big enough one, but I might be able to now, uh, this company autonomous has really nice looking standing desks that are mechanical that you can raise and lower so you can sit in the evening and stand in the morning or vice versa, depending on your, your tastes for 300 bucks.

Yeah. I mean, these look great. It's a good, good price point for it. Um, I would totally get one except I'm still in my weird transitioning period and I don't really know what the hell I'm doing. I could be working for someone in the near future. I could be having my own office in the near future or I could just stay continuing working at home.

So until I actually sort that out, there's no point in me investing in something like this. But if you are looking for a standing desk, this is a great price. And I would be remiss if we didn't point out the, the second photo. I knew you were going to do it. The second photo is a, one of these desks in an Uber office.

Here's the funny bit about it. It's outside of an Uber office. So they may have just taken it to Uber. They may have Ubered the desk to the Uber office. And just put it there for the photo op. Took a photo and took it home. It'd be funny if they lifted it home. But yeah, no, check them out.

They're, they're, they're cheap and they're, they're decent.

Media candy. I desperately want to discuss the X-Files right now, but I can't because Jason is behind. What? You texted me about it yesterday and I just didn't have time to watch them all. This is one of those few things.

It's old school. It's, it's, it's in our wheelhouse. It's something we talked about four months before it actually showed up. You think you would have watched it in at least semi real time, but you are two episodes behind and I was looking forward to this discussion all day. I'm sorry.

If I'd have known because what I've been doing is finishing up Downton Abbey. Maybe we should do a spoiler cast on Downton Abbey. It turns out that one of the things that keeps my dog calm in the morning is sitting on the bed and watching Downton Abbey with me.

She likes the music and the vibe. And Dowager would calm down anyone. She just, she sits there and she loves it. So I can check my email without having to worry about what the fucking dog is eating, like my furniture, my carpet or anything else. And she just sits there and watches Downton Abbey and chews on her bone.

So. Yep. Well, uh, and result, we can't talk about X-Files yet. Hopefully next week, but those of you out there, you know, you know what I'm thinking. Okay. I'll be, I'll, I am looking forward to it. Um, I did start to watch a vinyl, the new HBO series. Have you?

I've heard it's horrible. So I have not watched it yet. 12 minutes is as far as I lasted. It was that bad. It's a shame because the look, the feel, the concept, all of it is right up my wheelhouse. And all I've heard from people is it's horrible and it's only going to get worse because this is the only one that like all the major principles that are really, really good are involved in.

So. So the funny thing about it is it's like, it's kind of like playing a game of telephone. Like somebody, some kid wrote this after listening to what it's like to do cocaine and go to a concert and see like a crazy club. It's like within the first 12 minutes, you see a guy scoring Coke and doing Coke.

And you'd think it is the most amazing thing in the world. He's like orgasmic. And then this rabble of people come running over his, like jumping on his car, going to a concert where there was no one in the street before. Right. And then they get to the concert and it's already full, but then there are people outside, but people are getting blown in the, in the hallways and stuff like that.

And it's just like, it is so poorly written and directed. All right. It's, it's a mess. It is a total mess. I would not waste even the 12 minutes that I spent. Let me be a cautionary tale on vinyl. If anybody out there has seen it and thought it was good, let me know because I have yet to hear anybody tell me it was good.

So interesting thing. Somebody that my roommate works with who is 21 years old, watched it and loved it. Thought it was amazing. Thought it was the best thing you ever saw. Maybe it's from having just the complete disconnect. I mean, I'm not even old enough to really, I wasn't running around in the seventies doing any of this stuff, but I'm old enough to have a touchstone to that period.

Maybe if you're just completely disconnected from the seventies and punk rock, this could be fascinating. Maybe that's the deal. I don't know. It was just, it was terrible. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, that's not good. Something that I'm hoping will be good. I've talked about ABFAB, the show itself, and the fact that the movie is coming.

The first official trailer is now out and we do have release dates. July 22nd, sweetie, honey, I'm going to be in a theater. All right. July 1st, if you're in the UK and you're lucky enough for that. Oh, so July 2nd, I can just watch it at home. Oh yeah. It comes out in Sweden, July 2nd.

That's, that's the way we phrase these things on this show. Indeed. And speaking of Sweden, there may be less of a need for it because the great unbundling continues. I found some more news about that. The FCC has put through a proposal that will basically, as I was stating, open up cable systems to anything.

So in theory, you'll be able to get your cable through your Apple TV, your, your Google bots, uh, your Amazon box, maybe even your Android. So that's, that would be a bit of a game changer. So we'll see what happens. That's funny. I actually bought a TV this week.

So, um, I might actually get me one of those Amazon fire sticks. Really? I might try it. You're going to give it a shot. I've got the Chromecast. Um, obviously that doesn't, there's nothing built onto it. You can just toss things from your computer to the TV, which is nice. And obviously, uh, you know, we both have the Apple TV, which I pretty much love.

Although I do have to say, I don't know if I mentioned this before that remote is so annoying. Isn't it terrible? The remote for the Apple TV too has a touchscreen bit on it that if you reach to grab the remote, you will touch and it will screw up whatever you were doing.

It will either scrub it. It will knock it forward 30. It'll knock it back. In my case, because it's connected to my smart TV, if I'm watching regular cable and I just move the Apple remote and touch it, it will switch to Apple TV. Oh, that's terrible. Anytime I touch the remote, which that is the worst design in the world.

It is. You know, it's funny, uh, in my room where I got my new TV, I, and my dumb TV, there is no internet connection on the TV. It is a dumb, cheap ass TV. I grabbed my old Apple TV, um, that doesn't do like any of that stuff.

The old interface, everything. Right. Love it. Love it. Hate the interface, but I love it. I don't have to get, download an app to watch Netflix. It's just there. It doesn't, I, in the middle of the night when I'm trying to fall asleep, I just grab it and I pause and it turns off.

Yeah. I can't change the volume, but boo hoo. Um, no, the, the, the new Apple TV, what's it? Apple TV four. Oh, is it four? It's four. Um, is the inner, the user interface on that with the remote is so ungodly terrible.

Yeah. I, I'm almost considering just like wrapping tape or bubble wrap or something when I'm just having it sit around so I can grab the remote without screwing up anything else that's going on. You know what, you know what would be good for that Apple TV remote? A tinfoil hat. Oh yes. Put a tinfoil hat on it. Okay.

I'll give that a go. Uh, in music news, I, I discussed the massive attack released phantom app a couple of weeks ago where you got to do all kinds of stupid stuff to remix songs and whatever. Good promo made people aware of massive attack, but a horrible listening experience.

If you actually want to listen to it, thankfully they actually just released the first single from the upcoming album. It's called voodoo in my blood. We have a link in the show notes. It's a great weird ass track. I love it. Cool. It's not even close to being a single. It's not, it's just weird and awesome.

Awesome. I'll check it out. And, uh, postpunk.com actually posted, uh, some, uh, live video from live video, some video of the cure playing live in New York city from back in 1980. This was 17 seconds era, their second album. This is before Simon Gallup is even in the band.

It's awesome footage. It's really, really cool. Yeah. Uh, 17 seconds, one of my absolute favorite albums of theirs as well. So it was great to see this footage, uh, link in the show notes, check it out. If you're a cure fan. All right. I'm definitely going to check that out. Ooh, fancy, fancy.

Ooh, fancy. LAist has an interesting link. Um, audio tapes from NASA from the moon mission in 1969 have been released and you hear strange musical sounds heard by the Apollo 10 astronauts while they were, uh, while they were hanging out at the far side of the moon. It's pretty groovy.

It's groovy. Yeah. Okay. Uh, I, I was just looking at it and it looks like, uh, very much, uh, one of those, uh, what was the one that Leonard Nimoy did back in the day? The hit in search of, in search of, it looks very in search of. It does. Uh, but it's, I mean, this is something I don't think any was ever released or talked about or discussed.

I mean, who knew there was still new information about the moon landing must be because they reshot it because it never really happened. You know, because, because George Lucas is, is, he can't do star Wars anymore. So now he's, he's doing the extended versions of the moon landing. Yeah. Anyways, it's, it's worth a listen.

It's pretty cool. Okay. I found, uh, an article about, uh, NASA thinks there's a way to get to Mars in three days, which is, we can barely get to Australia in three days. They're talking about using the same technology that, uh, currently in use in particle accelerators, but on a big scale, uh, it's called deep in or wow, here we get any more porny.

Here's, here's what I'm thinking. It's called directed propulsion for interstellar exploration. Now it sounds like more red tube than red planet, but you know, I don't know. Yep. Oh, thank God they didn't call it balls deep. That's all I'm saying. Uh, speaking of Australia, cause I just mentioned it, uh, the Mercer 2016 quality of life, uh, report has come out, which is the, this year it's the, uh, 23 cities with the best quality of life in the world.

If you want to be warm, you're moving to Australia. The only, the only really warm cities in there are Australian Perth and Sydney, both get a mention, uh, shout out to Canada, which has four cities on the list and Germany, five cities on the list. And, uh, we're number one.

We're number one. USA has zero. Yep. There is no city in the United States of America that even gets close to ranking with the top 23 with the best quality of life in the world. Shocking. Yeah. It's interesting that Vienna got number one.

Vienna is number one. It's a beautiful city. Uh, what I've in the stomach on my 21st birthday by a cop there. So I don't think so. Okay. Well, Jason disagrees with the number one rating. I found it interesting that Munich is number four because it's such a small city. I mean, I guess it's beautiful. The food is unbelievable.

I was just there a little bit ago. I know. You know what? Beer. Yeah. Beer. It's number four because of beer. Yeah. So, and I was very pleased to see that, uh, my second home where, where my wife is from and all that Toronto is in the list. So, and I agree with that. It's a great city.

Yep. Except it's cold. It's cold. Yeah. Like I said, you are off to Australia if you want to stay warm and be in one of the top 23 ranked cities. Okay. Uh, also found a, another link on business insider, uh, that I just thought would be of interest. So I threw it in the show notes, 101 things you thought were true, but have actually been debunked by science.

Sure. It's a listicle, but it's a listicle because it has science. Solistical. God. Yeah. I'm not going to point out any. It's just, uh, if you're bored and you're not paying attention to that whole stay off social media thing and actually focus hashtag goals on your life, go read this. Okay. Myth there's beaver butt secretions in your vanilla ice cream.

I'm glad that's been debunked. Thank you. Business insider. That was a big deal as well. God. Yep. Um, now I've, I got this one from Tim Ferriss's Twitter account. Uh, it's Brian Johnson with a Y. Okay. Uh, it's a video called explorations and it's just interesting because he talks about what's coming up in technology and what, what scientists and kids are thinking about how we can do things going forward.

And it's just one of those things cause it's, it kind of, it makes me happy cause there are still optimistic people out there that think they can change the world in good ways, not because they basically, they didn't interview anybody in Silicon Valley. Otherwise it would just have been about some new like haircut app. No, these are scientists who were talking about interesting things and it's not the, it's not the Uber for trees.

Okay. It's good to know that I'll have to take a look at that. It's a five minute video. It's really worth the watch cause it will kind of give you a little bit of a little kick of optimism that, uh, in this world of grumpiness and pessimism, we kind of lose sometimes. Yeah, I could use that.

The web's not dead. Oh no, it's not. I made me some money this week. How? I went to claim dog.com. I took a look at it.

I punched my name in and I, I really like, I thought there were like four Schulmeisters in all of the United States to begin with. And I know most of them cause they're distant family. There's a Brian Schulmeister in Northern California who is apparently owed some money. So if you're listening to this show, man, uh, I punched in my name and ain't me.

You've, you've got about 120 bucks waiting for you. Nice. Nice. I got 55 bucks back from unpaid Google ads from way back in like the early two thousands. And, uh, there's a couple other ones I can do, uh, for like some insurance stuff, but then you got to go through the rigmarole of a little bit more verification.

But this one, I just put in my name and some pertinence. Yep. Um, I paid them. It was, it was a $60 or $61 old ad check, but I had to pay 599 for claim dog to, to process it. And then, so I made 55 bucks by just checking out money that I had, you know, sitting with the state.

Yep. Who knew? Yeah. I've heard of it. You used to have to go on infomercials late at night and buy a book and then write into all the different agencies. You would have to send in like multiple letters and then maybe you would get a check back or something. Now it's all automated, but they take a piece. Yeah. Well, it's five, it's a flat fee of 599.

Yep. There you go. So you can, you can do it or not, but you can check to see if you're owed any money. Or if nothing else, you can find out everybody else that has the exact same name as you. Yeah, that's true. That's what I got out of it. I found nobody that had my name. Uh, and I found this one, uh, Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag passed this one along.

Oh, excellent. Um, and I found something that, uh, in the who knew category, if you live here in California, there is a preponderance of shopping carts that just kind of end up wheeled around and stolen and used by homeless people and whatnot. I don't think that's not, I don't think that's a California specific issue, but no, probably not, but it's definitely a huge one here in Los Angeles, um, and San Francisco.

And, uh, at some point you will eventually end up with one basically on your lawn that you don't want to touch. Uh, that just happened to me. Uh, and there, I, I was Googling around to see like, who the hell do I call to pick these things up? Who are you going to call? There's a, there's a company. Who knew?

Is there an app for that? They don't have an app. The, and the website is very 1990s, but the very 1990s, the California shopping cart retrieval corporation, uh, has deals with multiple companies. Um, and as long as, as long as the shopping cart is from the company that they service, they will come pick it up in theory.

I've signed up. They haven't shown up yet. I would like to point out that on the homepage, there is a link for the app store app. So there is a cart app. It's like, would you like to report a lost cart? And, uh, click the big red button. This, this site is so 1997.

It's not even funny. Well, I feel stupid for using their website when I could have spent even more time downloading an app that I would never use again. Yep. You could have got the app. Yeah. Are you kidding me? Love it.

Now I'm 44. How old are you, Brian? 42. Okay. Now I found a list of words that are turning 40 years old this year. Oh boy. This is kind of scary. Did you know that Bollywood is only 40 years old? Um, no, but it sounds plausible.

Startup is 40 years old. That's when they actually meant something. That's when startup was actually just the beginning process of a company, not the final state. Yes. Hacker is 40 years old. That's well. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Black helicopter surprises me. Black helicopter. Yes. Yeah. There's some conspiracy theories there. Um, tricky. Look, everything is like relating to everything else. This, this show. It's kind of weird. It is, uh, except jazzercise. Oh man. Download.

Europop. Ebola. Let's, you know. Exit poll and Super Tuesday. Mm-hmm. That's an interesting list. Uh, micromanage. And going forward. Okay. And, but, but the best one, Richard Dawkins, uh, coined this one. Meme. Meme.

Yeah. Meme is 40 years old. How edgy. I'm sure he had no idea. It was only going to be about cats in the future. Closing shout outs. Uh, give a shout out to the, uh, friend of the show, Brian, who spells his name properly like I do with an I, like a real human being.

Uh, he's a, uh, listener of the show, old friend of mine who I haven't seen in years. And I caught up with him for drinks last night and it reminded me how weird it is what we do, Jason. And when you meet up with someone who knows everything about you, because he listens to you talk about your life every week and, uh, you know, jack shit about them.

So you have to catch up with them and they just kind of laugh at you. That's why everybody should have a podcast. Oh yeah. Everybody does. Don't they? Not yet. Oh man. So I would like to throw a shout out to my cohost, Brian Schulmeister for coming out to the studio today. I should get a shout out for fucking driving to Woodland Hills.

Shut up. I drove to Santa Monica for 40 times before you drove out here once for a show. You know what is at the end of that drive? The beach. No, it's not. What's at the end of this drive? Well, you do have an In-N-Out that I can see from the window. Yes, I have an In-N-Out and I went to your apartment. Okay. So we had Finn McCool's at your place.

But anyway, thanks for coming out today and doing this show and bringing me some new gear for the studio. No problem, man. We got to lug that thing out now. Yeah. Yeah. We better get to it and then probably head over to In-N-Out and then. Animal style. Double, double. Thanks for listening. I am Jason DeFillippo and you can check me out at jpd.me.

And I'm Brian Showmaster and you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. Grumpy Old Geeks is a partially 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 better yet, 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. Or you can donate through the Grumpy Old Geeks Patreon page at patreon.com slash gog to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Stochansky. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy.

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