177: Benedict Pleepleusbatch

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.

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by FreshBooks. I've been using FreshBooks for years and love, love, love how easy it is to get all my monies. Go to FreshBooks.com slash Grumpy. Enter Grumpy Old Geeks in the How Did You Hear About Us section to get your first month of unrestricted use absolutely free with no credit card required.

And now, the following content contains graphic, explicit, and vulgar language. And with that out of the way, welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks episode 177 for September 16th, 2016. I'm Jason DeFilippo and I'm here with my co-host, Brian Schulmeister. How about a little follow-up?

iOS 10 is here. It turned on Bluetooth. Now, I've forgotten. Is it the odds or the evens that turn it on? Because we didn't really follow on major updates. Yeah, I've got to go back through the show notes, which will never happen. But it did turn on Bluetooth. I actually like the iOS 10 update. We normally don't talk Apple much and we're not going to, but it's faster on my phone and I like all the messaging things that they've got.

I mean, some of them are kitschy and stupid, but overall, I'm digging it. Okay, good. I've had it for a while. I don't use any of the messaging stuff. But it is what it is. The final release has fixed a lot of the battery issues that I had. So I'm happy about that because it was almost it was ridiculous. It would go from 100% to like 20% in about three hours.

Yeah, that's useless. Yeah, very, very useless. In other follow-up news, I started listening to Frank and Heidi and whoever the new guy is that is not new that came back on your recommendation. This show is now called Frosty, Heidi and Frank. Frosty, Heidi and Frank. Okay.

Yes. FHF, the triplets. Yes. And the many other names they're known as. Here's the deal. Yes. They don't come on until 7.30 my time, right? Right. Because I'm here in the lovely Chicagoland area. Yes. So I turn them on a little bit early. I threw my Echo. Yes.

I'm like, Alexa, play me some KLOS. And she does. Right. Unfortunately, since I do get in early, I have to listen to the actual musical programming of that station. And there's fucking Journey, man. I've heard Journey like three mornings in a row.

And there is no reason that anybody should hear Journey before. No, there's no reason that anybody should ever have to hear Journey. It's KLOS. It's the rock of Southern California, Jason. This is the crap they've always played. And I don't listen to it live. I get the podcast, which has all the music and traffic cut out.

See, I love hearing the traffic. The traffic is, to me, is the best part of the show. You know why? Because I don't have to sit in it. Right. Yeah. So I just listen to the post podcast, which has all that nastiness cut out. And I just enjoy the good bits.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's morning zoo. That's, I haven't found anything that really has made me go, oh, I got to listen to this. It's just nice to have, you know, some noise in the background. But that's the thing. It's, that's how it started for me too. It was noise in the background while I was working from home.

And eventually you end up getting sucked in. You know, you start to give a shit about these people because they talk about their own lives and they're relatively funny. And, you know, it is what it is. It's, it's great. It's why people listen to us in theory. Yeah. In theory. And it's funny. I found myself going down that rabbit hole with Howard Stern because I have Siri in the, or Sirius in the car.

And unfortunately I've actually started to like listening to Howard Stern, which is very odd. Because when I first started listening, I'm like, this is shit. Why do people like this guy? And now I'm just like, oh, what's up with Robin today? You know? Yeah, I think that's a big change that happened with, with the Stern show.

Cause when I got Sirius XM and I was in the car, I was occasionally listening and I was like, Hey, he's a really good interviewer. I like it when he and Robin are bantering back and forth. I could care a little bit less about the revolving cast and extended family that, or they're always talking about, but, and then they would play the older shows and I was like, who the hell ever listened to this old stuff?

It's horrible. Yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty terrible. Yeah. But anyways, it passes the drive. And you know, I think my actually really close to my subscription running out. So I don't think I'll have it for that much longer and I will not be re-upping with Sirius. That's for sure.

My, uh, my subscription on my older car has just run out, but I conveniently just got a new car and I've got another year. Okay. So I've got a year on that car. Well, that's what happens. I guess when you get a BMW, they give you a year with a BMW. When you get a lowly Ford, they only give you six months. Yeah.

We get a year. Sorry. Privileged bastard. That's right. So I, I noticed something that this week that has just driven me nuts. I'm going everywhere, looking at articles on the web was, which is what I do for this, you know, this show. Everywhere I go, there's these fucking cookie notifications.

This site uses cookies. Press okay. If you understand that, I'm like cookies are a, a cornerstone of what a browser does, right? It's been there since 1995, I think is when cookies came out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You might as well just have a pop up and said, this site uses HTML and images and maybe occasionally a center tag.

Don't, don't give them any ideas, Jason. Oh God. Well, as much as we've talked about how the UK and Europe in general tends to be leading the vanguard and are way ahead of the times in terms of things like privacy and a lot of internet regulations, you can thank the UK for the cookie notification that started about two or three years ago.

I was working with Coldplay and all of a sudden it was, Oh, by the way, guys, we have to do this now. And now it's spread obviously because websites are international. So if we want to comply with the, with the, the EU and UK law, we have to have a cookie notification. Yeah. You will not see that on the grumpy old geeks website because we don't give a fuck about you as it were.

Let's not broadcast that fact. Okay, so we're going to jump to the news real quick because we've got a guest coming up shortly, which will be a very fun. It's a secret guest. You're going to have to keep listening because we're not going to tell you who it is. Drink. Quick, Brian, drink.

In the news.

Last week, we talked a bit about how ubiquitous Uber and Lyft and ride sharing stories were in the media or certainly in the tech media. Good article in Recode this week about how most tech is made by tech companies for tech people, which I think you and I 100% agree with.

Dude, you got to scratch your own itch. That's the whole point, man. If you're not solving your own problems, then you're not an app developer and you're not going to get VC funding and you're not going to cash out and you're not going to be a unicorn. Exactly. Everything that Jason just said. So this is a great article that is basically just reminding us of the fact that this entire world that we exist in when we do this podcast and all of Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach now exist in is basically a tiny portion of the actual real world.

80% of the adult working population in the U.S. doesn't even use a computer on a regular basis, if at all. A lot of people don't have email addresses still. And the only screen they ever look at is their mobile phone. But thank God that's why everybody just makes shitty apps that none of them will ever use because they don't care.

So I'm going to interject something here because your butt boy, Ray Kurzweil, was on an episode of StarTalk the other day and he's like 65. He's my butt boy? He's your butt boy. You like him. Yes. I like many people. Does that mean I'm butt boy-rific?

Yes, you are. You're butter-rific. All right. He busted out a fact, which I call complete and utter bullshit on. Okay. He said 65% of the workforce is now knowledge workers. Nah, that's a load of crap. Yeah, I'm sorry, but no.

I'm sorry. It's less every day. That's what we're discovering. That's what we talk about constantly on this show. The fact that people that, you know, people that would have once been a knowledge worker are now driving an Uber. Yeah. And also the world needs ditch diggers and mall cops and, you know, retail assistants.

You don't need a computer if you're selling mascara. That's kind of how it works. Which makes the question as to why, when you are selling mascara now, you have a computer instead of an old-fashioned till and everything takes five times as long. Oh, well, you have to have your CRM and you have to have your POS, you know, and then, yeah.

POS, which is a piece of shit. Yes. You have to have your acronyms that are easily hackable by the Romanian hackers. Yes. And, uh, totally. So it's a good article. It's just nice to be reminded of all that. And, uh... Actually, it's really shitty to be reminded of all that. I like the fact that, uh, there's a whole world out there that doesn't give a crap about anything we talk about.

Of course, this would be a more popular podcast. I was going to say, maybe we should have ditch diggers monthly. They're shooting us in our own foot, apparently. And speaking of shooting yourself in your own foot, all you Uber drivers that ran to that and figured out this is a great way to supplement your income slash make it your full income.

Well, those days are over. No, they're not. Even Kalanick says, it's like, everybody calm down. We're 20 years away, you know? But we know it's not 20 years. It's 10. It's not 20 years because they're rolling in the streets of Pittsburgh right now. Yeah. And actually, there are highly paid engineers in those cars in Pittsburgh.

So it's good work for somebody if you can get it. That's true. That is very true. So speaking of Kalanick, I just want... People may not be aware of what an Uber douche this guy is. Yes, he is an Uber douche. So let me just read this little quote that he came up with. I think this was maybe two years ago, something like that.

It was 2014, yes. Okay, perfect. I nailed it. Okay, when those bad boys are made, look, the way to think about it, the magic of self-driving vehicles is that the reason Uber is expensive is because you're not just paying for the car, you're paying for the other dude in the car, said Kalanick in a moment of bare knuckles candor.

Bare knuckles. And so when there's no other dude in the car, dude, where's my car? The cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. And of course, that means safer rides. That means more environmentally friendly. That means a lot of things. Look, this is the way the world is going, he said.

Answering how he might explain it to Uber drivers who he's about to fire, the world isn't always great. Honestly, there's really nothing that is. He's not wrong. He's not wrong. You know, he's not wrong. Dude. It's not. It's coming, dude. Yeah. So there's a video in this article and I have a few notes here on this video.

So they just bought a hundred Volvos and that's what they're, they're fitting these self-driving cars out to be, which is great because Volvos, as we know, are the safest cars on the road. That's why lesbians love. Well, I know a lot of normal people. Well, I guess lesbians are normal, but I'm saying straight people, the family.

I was about to say, Jason. You know what I mean. Damn it. Breaking news. Jason says lesbians aren't normal. Well, I've dated a few who turned out to be lesbians. True, you have. Yes. You know, you know who I'm talking about. And they were definitely not normal.

All right. Yes. Moving on here. So in the video that they play, it's a Ford, not a Volvo. And Pittsburgh has never, ever looked that nice. I'm sorry. I live there. Pittsburgh is a shithole. Well, maybe, maybe all the self-driving Ubers when they're not ferrying people become Roombas for cities.

They're street cleaners. And speaking of Roombas, who's going to clean out the puke in the backseat when there's nobody there to figure out if the drunk that they just took home ralphed on the carpet. You're going to have some, you know, internal automation, you know, the internal Roombas, or are they going to make it like those self-cleaning toilets in San Francisco and Paris that when the doors close, they just hose the whole thing down, you know, and who's going to refill your water?

I'm sorry. Is there going to be a robot that's going to refill your water? I don't think they've thought of any of these things when they are moving into the self-driving car market. That's why Uber has slowly phased out the free waters, Jason. Uh, well, it depends on the, depends on the driver. It depends on if you're going Uber X or Uber black. Right.

So I've never been in an Uber black that has not given me water and breath mints, sometimes gum. And I don't chew gum because I have terrible teeth. But anyway, uh, I did find an article, let's speak in the self-driving cars where this company is using, uh, using grand theft auto as a way to train their cars, which is genius.

Can't be good. No, well, it's great because that way they don't have to get out on the road to get actual, you know, realistic data of what roads look like. Grand theft auto is a very realistic. I don't know what city you're living in or what part of the city you're living in.

I'm not talking about, I'm not talking about shank and whores. I'm talking about just the roads and the cars on the roads. Okay. It's, it's how to identify objects on the road. Right. I think it's, I think it's a pretty genius idea. Okay. So there, so there, all right.

So we don't talk about Apple much, but I think we kind of have to talk about it. You already did. Kind of have to talk about the wireless headphones. Do we not? This is their big thing. They are pushing us away. The one thing that we, everybody thought was going to happen has actually happened. There is no longer an old school standard wireless, uh, headphone port.

And they want us all to go wireless and wear these dangly eighties earrings things. Ear snot. Yeah. Ear snot. That's what they should call it. Ear snot. There is an argument being made that this is actually a very cool thing. Uh, and Apple is actually leading us into wearable computers.

Okay. So. Yeah. Do tell. Well, they're not only just Bluetooth. It's a, it's an augmented sort of Bluetooth, which is smart and it can tell where you're wearing them, what device they're near. It'll switch automatically. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's great because Bluetooth is fucking terrible.

Also their big argument there. Their Apple is actually making a move to basically replace slash improve Bluetooth. So, because it sucks by itself. And they're basically just saying that this is a computer in its own right that is in your ear, uh, that is leading towards the future of say, having Siri right there, et cetera, taking care of a whole bunch of stuff.

It is not just a speaker and a microphone is a whole bunch of sensors. It's a whole bunch of blah, blah, blah, blah. Saying Apple is really cool to do with this. You know, blah, blah, blah. I want, I want Johnny on the next, we put in a bunch of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So they might as well. But anyways, that's the argument behind these things. I just think the design is crap. The design is crap. Uh, absolutely. Like I said, ear snot. I'm, I'm probably going to pick up a pair just to try them because we have to, and I need, I need tax write-offs because God, it's good.

Yeah. We got to, we got to spend a little money here to save a little money. Oh, by the way, speaking of that, I didn't, I did forget to put this in the show notes, but a company, I can't remember which one has already marketed and is selling the adapter that basically puts a string on your two wireless headphones. So they, yeah, so of course, yeah, no, I mean, I look, I've got a, I've got a, a wrapper for my, uh, uh, my Apple pencil, Apple pencil.

I said Apple, Apple pencil, um, which keeps the cap on because they also did a really shit job with design on the Apple pencil with the little cap on the end. So protect the tip. Yes, it does. It costs me $3. So hopefully the, uh, the $150, $59, uh, AirPods will, uh, will stay in.

But the reason I'm going to try them out is because I actually do wear my Apple earbuds all the time because they finally got a design that works with my ear. Um, it probably works with it from, you know, my scientific studies of friends who, who have Apple ear pods, the normal, normal ones, um, about 20% can wear them.

The rest, they fall out, you know, that's the problem with, that's the problem with them is that their size is, you know, not really that. That's why when you get like our Sennheisers that we love, which you won't be able to use anymore without a fucking adapter come with five or six different cup sizes, you know?

Yeah. My, my ears are like, your ears are like boobs. That's it. Mine are snug in the right ear, fall out of the left ear. Yeah. So every single time. So, and that's, yeah, like I said, your ears are like boobs. You have to have multiple sizes because it's not, not a fit for everyone. Okay. Moving on.

Moving on. Conan O'Brien took the own Apple, uh, Apple's own classic iPod commercial, reshot it and had the earphones flying out of their ears every time they danced. It was pretty funny. It is pretty funny. I, I like the, I'm not gonna, not gonna ruin it, but the, uh, the payoff at the end is, I thought, I thought well worth it.

I thought so as well. So it's worth watching people. Um, and speaking of the knowledge workers that went to Uber and have now been fired, uh, if JK Scheinberg, who used to work over at Apple, it happens to be one of them. And after getting fired at Uber, he didn't actually work for Uber people. I'm doing a story here. Uh, he decided he'd go work at the genius bar because that's better than greeting people at Walmart.

Well, unfortunately that's not going to happen. So he is an Apple engineer who got Mac OS running on Intel processors in the first place. Uh, he retired in 2008 and at 54, he figured he'd be a great fit for a position at an Apple genius bar. Uh, unfortunately they wouldn't hire him cause he was too old. Well, you see, this is the misleading part of the article.

The, uh, the original article, um, it said that they didn't call him back, but there was an update on September 11th. They did write him back and say what they would like a second interview. So the story is ongoing. So he didn't not get the job.

Right. Now, did they write him back and say they'd like a second interview because he had taken to online areas and posted stuff. And then they found that out and went, Hmm, maybe we should write this guy back. Well, here's the thing. Let's look at the original date. It's very easy to find. Well, I'm lazy.

I know you are. That's why I went to the original article. Um, they probably wrote him back because of the article, because, uh, that was on September 4th and he got a call back on September 11th. There you go. So the lesson of this is take to medium and bitch about everything that happens to you and maybe somebody will do something about it.

Well, he didn't go to medium. He went to the New York times. So that's even better. Yes. You could do that. If you're an esteemed engineer from Apple, you can, you can, because you know, you have to get behind the paywall as it is. Uh, there's another article on the same topic in Bloomberg about, uh, being, uh, over 40 in Silicon Valley is pretty tough.

It sucks. It's a pain in the ass, which is why I'm not there anymore. And why I do this silly thing that we do for a living. So we're doing this for a living. Well, I am. You're not, you got a baby. That's right. Um, definitely check out the article if you want, uh, some more interesting news on it, because a lot of people are banding together and, uh, filing a class action lawsuits against these companies for their, uh, discrimination.

Yeah. And you know, when you, when you really think about it, it, it is obviously age discrimination. When you look at one of the HP employees who had the highest rank that you can get for employee satisfaction, which only two, 250 people out of their 10,000 plus employees has have ever forgotten and he was laid off.

Right. Uh, yeah, that's how it goes. So, okay. Good times. So you mentioned my butt boy earlier. Yeah. It was a, it was a huge fan of the idea of the singularity. Uh, he coined the term. Yes. The singularity you New Zealand summit took place in November.

Uh, we've talked a bit about the shark fin curve before, which is what happens with apps or at least used to when people would actually download them. Now nobody bothers anymore. And now it's the, now it's the pokey fin. Yes. The pika fin. Pika fin. And, uh, now we have an elephant chart. Okay.

Describe and explain. This chart basically shows, it's quite a long article and worth reading if you want to be terrified. Uh, this is a chart that is showing basic income and growth incidents, whatever that may be, uh, and global income distribution and basically how the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting squeezed, and we're all effed.

Okay. Yeah. Good times. So the global 1% are going to continue to do really, really well. Uh, they're showing how technologies will like your, uh, you know, automatic Ubers and all that sort of stuff are going to knock out people, uh, in the middle of the curve, even lower and basically the, the lowest of the lower and a hundred percent screwed moving forward.

So good times. Well, here's the deal. Everybody just moves into a torch and pitchfork makers. So when we storm the castle, we'll, we'll be able to think there will be an uptick in that. Yes. There you go. Now, uh, in stupid technology news, Instagram is now letting, isn't that the basic, basic premise of our show?

Pretty much. Yeah. Uh, Instagram is now letting you filter words from comments. Okay. This is an interesting approach. Uh, I think you got to do something now because trolling is well, the internet, uh, and it's kind of taken over, but you can now put in filters on your Instagrams.

Um, this was a rave. This was available for celebrities for quite some time. Like Chrissy Teigen has had it for a while where she excuse, uh, the language here, people, but we're just making the point. Uh, she put in and blocked the words Trump, cleanse, slut, colon, whore, and cunt.

All of which are, I call synonyms. They are synonyms. Yes. Well done. Well done there. Um, so, so this is Instagram's first take at, at basically trying to make people play nice on the internet. Um, YouTube, nothing still.

So of course not. Cause they, YouTube is Google. Google lives by the algorithm. They don't want to get people control. Yes. Good times. How it works. Uh, Facebook is having issues with their news. Oh no, no, really? I actually miss the old human manipulated headlines at this point because I, right now they've switched to basically like two words that don't tell you anything about the story, just the subject matter, which is horrible.

That's very boring. Uh, unfortunately they're also, there's just a lot of bad things going on in a single day, uh, Facebook managed to piss off Norwegians. Uh, they censored a famous work of photojournalism from a new Norwegian news organization. So they got yelled at for that.

Uh, they deleted a Facebook post by the prime minister of Norway in which she reposted the photo and criticized Facebook for its censorship. It then publicly defended its decision to censor the photo. And then it changed its mind after everybody said what the hell's going on and then re-estated every single post. Uh, they also managed to post in its trending news section on Friday, a story claiming that the September 11th attacks were an inside job.

And then they just removed the entire trending topic related to nine 11, even though it was nine 11 way to go Facebook. What I love here though, is, uh, that the fact that they can restore deleted posts means that anything you ever put there is never deleted, which we've known we've, we've, we've chatted about that a bit, but yeah, someone pointed out the fact that yes, everything, no matter if you deleted or not is still there somewhere.

Mm hmm. Times. Yeah. Facebook, like really crappy flypaper. You just can't, can't get rid of it. Yeah. And, uh, the wall street journal is reporting on the music industry's latest kerfuffle. Uh, this is the latest privacy threat, which is stream ripping.

So now this is not notes and Jason have of course had to leap in and go, we've been doing this forever. Yes, we have. Everybody has. No, not stream ripping is, this is not new. This is just their latest excuse saying about why they're not making any money.

It's exceedingly easier now. There are a slew of apps that have just come out that millennials who don't know nothing about audio engineering or routing of signals or anything like that, including the audio hijack link that you put in the show notes. Audio hijack has been around for a decade. Yes. And also takes some knowledge to use.

Nope. It is. Sorry. It doesn't. Oh yeah. You didn't have to learn how to use it, Jason. I'm sorry. There's a, there's a one click. You have had no learning curve on doing all this audio engineering stuff. None. Zero. Zilch. You just sat down and started producing. Have you ever used audio hijack motherfucker?

Yes, I have. Yeah. There's a one click save, save from the browser. You know, Jason, these are apps that people are just using on their phone to capture streams. Read the goddamn article. Thank you. I did. And it's bullshit. It's, this is just them whining about why they can't make any money. Jason's so damn smart.

Everybody knows everything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there you go. I guess we're done with news. No, no, we're not done because title, you're, you're, you're, since you're going in the music round, title lost $28 million last year. And, uh, actually surprised it's that low. I am too.

And the interesting thing in this article is like, can they bounce back from a $28 million loss? I think that's Kanye's, I think that's Kanye's McDonald's budget. So probably, you know, title is not going anywhere anytime soon. They're pushing it. There's too many people invested in it that have the money to back it up.

Uh, they think they'll just stick around and eventually win, which they may, but I doubt it. Um, who cares? Title sucks. Yeah. I mean, and that's pretty much what the, the, the point of that article is. It's, uh, they don't really give anything besides, uh, you know, they give you exclusive access to tracks and they say that there'll be exclusive forever.

And then they change their mind once the window closes. Like, like Kanye, who just said, Oh, whatever happened to that guy that was going to sue that sued him over it. I'd love to see what happened with that. I haven't heard of that. Maybe they, maybe they, you know, I think it was just a bullshit headline to never actually happened.

I, you know, I don't understand how any of the streaming services are going to make money because right now the big pushes people are starting to push down the, the, the, uh, the cost of five bucks a month instead of 10, which means even less revenue. Yeah. It's like pay for your music people. I mean, it's less than our, our budgets when we were kids, I mean like buying CDs, albums, all that stuff, we would spend 50, 75 bucks a month, you know, to buy a couple albums.

Yep. I was taking a walk with the wife yesterday and I said, do you want to get a coffee? And she just scoffed and said, people are more willing to spend four bucks on coffee a day than they are to spend five bucks a month on music. Yep. No, cause everybody, we, we push the free economy too much, way too much. And now it's, it's in the psyche that, oh, if I have to pay for, pay for something that comes through my computer, it must be, you know, they're raping me.

Oh God, it's terrible. Yeah. Ah, anyway, let's move on to some Tesla news. All right. Tesla fixed a deadly flaw in its autopilot. Uh, they basically are doing, uh, take out the Harry Potter DVD player. Yeah. So how about we do that?

Um, that would probably work, but no, this is even more than that. Uh, it's basically a new version. Uh, instead of just using radar, they are also using signal processing and video and a crowdsourcing system called fleet learning, uh, to basically try to avoid the kind of problems that they've had in the past.

Um, and it can also includes a new mechanism that prevents drivers from repeatedly ignoring warnings to keep their hands on the wheel. So basically your car will scold you like as if you were a five-year-old child that kept asking, are we there yet? And we'll pull over and stop driving. If you keep ignoring it. Awesome.

I like that. I actually kind of like it too. I think that's pretty okay. Yeah. I'm down with it. It's like, listen, bitch, put your hands on the wheel. 10 and two, 10 and two. 10 and two. That's right. So it's kind of a funny little thing that they're doing and I'm down with it.

Um, now let's switch over to batteries that blow up because Tesla is also, well, at least Musk is heavily involved in making batteries. Hopefully his are better than this. As we know, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has had some issues. Oh, just a few. Just a few. Yeah. To the point where basically it is a mandatory recall now and you cannot turn them on or even charge them on a plane.

Yeah. We've got to get these fucking Galaxy Note 7s off of this motherfucking plane. All I've got to say. Uh, this, uh, nice little article in Slate about basically lithium ion batteries have never been spectacularly safe. It is a very strange dance between, as per usual, cost of manufacture and safety.

Yeah. No, anytime I get anything with a ion battery in it, it comes with a big sticker from Amazon that says, do not, or it's a ground ship only. Do not put in our motherfucking plane. You know, uh, unless, you know, that, that new Amazon plane, maybe it's like shielded for, uh, lion explosions, but, uh, no, there was a, I read several stories this week shield planes from explosions.

Maybe we should do that to all of them. I'm just saying. Uh, yeah, but your Amazon packages are, are, you know, more, more precious than your, your kids and your family who are traveling apparently. Awesome. Yeah. No, I read a couple articles about, and it's a video and pictures of some of the explosions that happened.

Like one six year old kid got his hands burned and this other guy got his leg just destroyed. It's nasty stuff, man. Those things, those things aren't safe. No, this is some nasty, nasty stuff. The other thing, I mean, if you get really deep into this article, it's, it's not just the manufacturing, uh, you know, basically steps that people are taking to save costs that make it, uh, dangerous.

Even a perfectly manufactured battery requires user steps to keep it safe. And obviously none of us are ever going to do that. So yeah, of course not. So we're basically all just going to blow up and die anyways. All right. End of show. Here comes the apocalypse.

Or at least the eagles. Uh, the eagles are back. Yes. The Dutch police are, you know, we, you love this story the first time around. I, well, no, I hated the fact that they were using eagles to go up against these whirling blades of death in the air.

I thought it was, I thought it was completely irresponsible and everybody got behind me, but apparently that didn't matter because they said the eagles have never been hurt. I'm like, okay, well, until an eagle is hurt, um, you're going to keep doing it. And then once that one eagle is hurt, then how many others are going to happen is just, you know, it's law of big numbers.

You have to get, get a bunch of eagles taking down drones, but it's what we do. Nobody's hurt yet. We keep doing it. Yep. The eagle hasn't, the eagle's battery hasn't exploded yet. Uh, but in happier news, uh, CERN has released 300 terabytes of data from the large Hadron Collider.

This is pretty cool stuff. Yeah. And they give you the, well, they give you the data and the tools for analyzing it, but, uh, you probably want to know a little bit about particle physics first, but it's pretty cool that they're given, given away some data. I'm surprised they aren't just doing like the outsourcing, uh, thing that like SETI did where, you know, throw this on your computer.

We'll manage the, uh, searching through it, but, uh, you know, let's, we'll just use your processing power. I think, uh, I think, uh, I think what it comes down to is the brains on this one. You have to know what you're looking at, you know? Well, thank God we're sending it out to amateurs. That's the way it, yeah. Uber, Uber for, uh, what would it be?

Uh, yes, the, uh, crowdfunding our science. Oh God. That's what we need. Uber for dark matter. And we'll be right back. But now a word from our sponsors. This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is sponsored by FreshBooks.

As you know, Brian and I both run small businesses. Invoicing and collecting payments has always been one of the most painful things we have to deal with. FreshBooks has created an extremely intuitive tool that makes creating and sending invoices very simple and only takes about 30 seconds from start to end.

You get to build them for that 30 seconds. And FreshBooks customizes all of our invoices with our own logo and color schemes, which is awesome because it makes us look slightly professional. When I log in, I can see just at a glance how much I'm owed for all my hard work, which they haven't paid me for yet.

Also, your clients can pay you online, which can seriously improve how quickly you get paid. I cannot stress this enough. Uh, I prefer the PayPal business payments option, which unlike regular, PayPal, it only costs 50 cents. That's 50 cents people to get paid.

FreshBooks can even show you whether or not a client has even bothered to look at the invoice you've sent, making that I never got the email call a little less stressful because you can point it out. And if you can't get them on the phone, FreshBooks can send late payment reminders to your clients automagically, which is great because I have to do that every month.

It means you're not chasing down clients for late payments. Let FreshBooks do that for you. And one of my favorite features is the automatic invoicing. If you're on retainer, which, you know, a lot of us are, uh, you don't have to send that client an email every month. FreshBooks will do that for you without you even lifting a finger.

The most important thing for everyone listening and Hey, that's you getting started on FreshBooks is super simple. Even if you're not a numbers person, actually, especially if you're not a numbers person, FreshBooks is offering a month of unrestricted use to all of our listeners, totally free right now. And you don't even need a credit card for the trial to claim your free month.

Go to freshbooks.com slash grumpy. And this is really important. Enter grumpy old geeks in the, how did you hear about a section? Do it now. Thanks to FreshBooks for sponsoring this episode of grumpy old geeks. And don't forget freshbooks.com slash grumpy. Enter grumpy old geeks in the, how did you hear about a section to get your first month of unrestricted use absolutely free, no credit card required.

And Hey, you're helping out the show. As promised, we have a special guest, uh, joining us is, uh, Zane Lamprey himself. We've talked about him a ton on the show. So, uh, here he is. When you say special, let's talk, like, what do you mean by that?

Like, what does that mean? The short Skype. We've been huge fans. We've been talking about you for quite some time, even going back to a three sheets, which I still watch those episodes, um, uh, drank a lot of your monkey rum. Uh, Jason has joined you on some of your Zane crawls and, uh, we, uh, both supported Chug and watched all of that.

Uh, by the way, what the hell was up with that Chug t-shirt? I do have to rib you a little bit on that because that was a thinner than toilet paper and the cheap. Oh, you know what? You know, it's funny. So you get the gray one. I got the black one. Black. Yes. So yeah, we got like whatever the first one was like guild.

And then the gray one was like the American apparel track, uh, 50, 20, 25, like, like the expensive version, but you're right. It is, I guess, I guess it is funny, but that would be an American apparel. That's like me, like going the extra mile and looking like I went a half mile and by the way, in a track T.

So to try to bring the analogy together, it's funny when you, when you guys lift, list the things that you guys have been involved with, with me in the past. And when it's funny, it's just like, not until you just said that, did I, do I realize like what a, like a, what a weird journey it's been, you know what I mean?

And like to start from three sheets and then have that go away, have it come back like twice, three times on various networks. I mean, it started on Mojo HD that went to fine living network, then went to travel channel. Then went to spike. I mean like there's nothing's ever done.

That's like, that's a first and then to go and then call up Mark Cuban, the billionaire and, and have him back the show for three years. And then after that, go and kickstart it, which has never had, had never been done before to crowdfund a TV show and has not been done since to like actually crowdfund a TV show that actually ends up on TV and then do the drinking jacket.

Now the adventure hoodie, which by the way, we just found out, I guess we kind of suspected, but it was the fastest funded apparel, like fashion project ever on Kickstarter. Um, I mean like $125,000 in the first 24 hours and, and the record of the highest fashion project on Kickstarter is 1.1 million and in a week, we're at about half a million.

So, uh, with almost, almost a month to go. So it's, I don't know, it's, it's kind of a, it's an interesting thing, but they all, if you, if you're with me from the beginning, like you guys are with three sheets and everything that I'm doing is, is sort of like, it makes sense. You know, you can connect the dots, but when you go from three sheets to adventure hoodie, like directly or something, then it, then the whole thing seems weird.

It is because I, I mean, I do remember when you were doing hoodies for three sheets, I, I got one of the original Pleplius hoodies and that was one of the best made pieces of clothing I've ever had. It lasts. You see, it, it probably, you shot yourself in the foot with that.

Cause that thing lasted forever. And now that's the one that says Pleplius with the, with the big chunky letters, right? It's the black one with the patch on it. Yeah. From way, yeah. Way back when. Yeah. And I think that thing, honestly, it just, it would not die.

I think it probably got stolen at some point at a bar, which would be ironic, but no, no, it would be fitting. So, and then you moved into the drinking jacket after that, which was, I, for me, it seemed like a, a normal progression because it was like, I'll tell you what the, the real progression like was.

So it went from that hoodie that you said, like, so I was on three sheets and when I was doing three sheets, I was making about 2,500 bucks an episode. When you shoot at eight episodes a year, that's not even enough for rent at the time. You know, you're in podcast territory there for 2,500.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. Um, and trust me, I had a podcast for two years. Like I get, I understand the reference, uh, shave club. Um, Oh yeah. Oh, Oh, I got a check for 17 cents. I love it. Let's keep doing this. Um, so, so then, you know, I was like, wait, I mean, I have this exposure.

I'm not getting paid. Let me clear with the network to like, start wearing t-shirts. I started wearing t-shirts. I started selling t-shirts, started selling a lot of t-shirts. So then that, that transitioned into the, um, uh, the hoodie. And then when I made that custom hoodie, I was like, you know what?

I like it, but I want, I want it to be more custom. Like what can I do? Bottle opener, zipper. So then I came out with the drink master, which was like bottle opener, zipper, zipper, koozie pocket. Right. Um, and then I was like, how can I just, you know, just go out of the box with this thing.

And by the way, I was just going to put them in my store cause I have an online store. And so, and so I was going to put them in the store, but I wanted to order a bunch, you know, and it's like, you know, if you're paying like whatever, 40 bucks a pop at the time or whatever it is per hoodie when, with all these sort of innovations on them or 35, whatever it is, and you want 2000 of them, then you're like, Oh, you got to come up with 70 grand out of pocket.

And again, back then not happening. So, so then I was like, all right, I guess I'm going to kickstart it. Well, this is after I kickstarted Chug. So now this is sort of the progression of the hoodie. Then, then we'd came out with the, with the, the drinking jacket, which did great. The fourth largest fashion project on Kickstarter ever.

And then, and now we said, look, it's not, you know, to call it the drinking jacket was sort of tongue in cheek. Like it's a hoodie that you can wear every day. I think people sort of thought it was a little bit more of a gimmick, you know, and so it's something or something you needed to wear while you were drinking.

And we're like, no, that's not the case. So then we said, took everyone's input, rebuilt the thing from the ground up, you know, like literally construction wise sizing, you know, everything just to make, you know, improvements and stuff and, and now we have the adventure hoodie with like nine pockets and all kinds of stuff.

But like, it's supposed to look like a normal hoodie and feel like a normal hoodie, but do things that other hoodies can't do. So I got, I was, uh, you know, one of the original backers for the drinking jacket and it, it does work as a normal hoodie. I wear it all the time.

It also indestructible. That's the great thing about it. Good. I'm glad, I'm glad that you said that. I'm glad you're like, no, the first one was great. The drinking jacket, like, you know, it's like, it's a tank top now because it kept all the arms fell off, but no, like, I mean, look, you should probably build in some obsolescence here.

Yeah. Make more sales. If I, if I knew what obsolescence mean, I gotta go look it up. Hold on a second. Hold on. Jeez. This happens all the time. Um, but it's, it's like if, um, you know, unlike other campaigns, which might be like for the such and such, well, I mean, everyone, not a lot of people know about the travel jacket that would kind of turned into an issue because at the end of the day, and this isn't me talking cause I haven't seen one, but there was a lot of talk about the quality just not being

what it was led to be. And so, you know, you don't know those. I mean, they have a company name, but you don't know who those people are. If you backed it and it wasn't good, you could probably research and find out who these people are with me. I put my name out there. And as a, as someone who's, you know, I won't use the C word like, you know, celebrity, but like, but like I am in the public eye.

And if I were to do something like that, like build something that was less than I promised, then, then I would have to deal with that. And that would hurt my image. And that's just not who I am as a person. So like with Chug, you know, if you remember when I did the project, I promise people, if you back it, I will give you six half hour episodes.

And then when I actually made it, I said, you know what, I like to give, I like to under promise and over deliver. And so I ended up delivering six one hour episodes, which is, which took considerably longer and, and more money. And, and I actually ended up losing money with that.

But at the end of the day, I felt good about the product that I delivered, which is kind of, that's just, you know, I guess that's me as a person, basically. But, and it's not the Kickstarter way. I have to say, you've got a really good track record with Kickstarter. We've, we've had a segment on our podcast for a long time called Kickstarter in the balls, which is all about Kickstarter fails, which is 99% of them.

So you've actually done very, very well with it and probably entirely because of that reason you, you are promising and over delivering, which no one does on Kickstarter. And it's like, yeah, it's like, it's like, I have other things that I do. Like a lot of people on Kickstarter are, you know, they might be a name, you know, like the coolest cooler guy or whatever.

And, and, and that's like, he, he put his name behind it. But at the end of the day, it's not like it, if he did bad or whatever, it would hurt him in another industry. You know what I mean? Like if I were to do the bad hoodie, it wouldn't just hurt me in the hoodie industry.

It would hurt me in all of my industries because it's like, Hey, this guy, you know, charges us 80 bucks for a hoodie. And it came to me and it's like, crap, it's made of cardboard or whatever. It's like, no, I want you to get it and actually go, wow, this is even cooler and better than I thought it was going to be.

And I'm, I like to think that that's what people are going to get. So one of the things I want to ask you about is when the drinking jacket came out, uh, you know, uh, it was late, you know, as every Kickstarter chug was late, the drinking jacket was late.

They're all late. Every Kickstarter fucking campaign is late. Well, there's a number by the way. So it's 97% is that number. No, no. And I think that, I think that that, so 3% around time. So, um, and there, and there's another number and I'm not sure what it is of Kickstarter projects that are funded that actually don't ever get fulfilled.

That would be the Belize number where everybody takes the money and moves to Belize. Yeah, exactly. Belize is rocking with people with great crowdfunding. Um, but the, um, um, yeah, the issue there is really, I think people don't understand what they're getting into when they do a Kickstarter.

Like they don't really understand everything that's involved. And when I did chug, which for people who don't know, it was a, an international drinking show, like three sheets, like the other shows that I'd done, um, the networks weren't biting. So I said, Hey, let's the fan and the fans were asking for it.

So I was, I said, okay, great. Let's make it. And, and let's just do it ourselves. And, and the issue I made there, I think the biggest issue I made there was, well, two, one is I expected when I sent the surveys out to people like, Hey, give me your size for your t-shirt. Give me this, this, and this, that I would like get those, you know, in 24 hours, everyone would just like, you know, return those.

And it was like, you know, I'm not kidding. That was in 2013 and I got a survey filled out yesterday. Now it's because I'm now back doing something and I'm back like whatever. But like, I also got one last month before the adventure hoodie launched.

Like someone's like, Hey, Oh, here's my t-shirt size. I'm like, I don't even have that screen anymore. Like I couldn't make you that t-shirt. I did send the guy a DVD, signed it, you know, but said, you know, I don't have the T's, but like, um, I think the first thing, first thing is the surveys. The second thing is I was like, I knew it was about the upsells.

So it's like, Hey, there's t-shirt one. Then there's the American apparel t-shirt, which is paper thin. And then there's the, but super soft and expensive. And then there's like, you know, the, the sweatshirt and then there's the poster and then there's the medallion. And then there's like the hat.

And then there, you know, like there's all these different levels. I don't know if I did a hat, but like all these different levels of things and each thing like, Oh, now I got to go out and buy poster tubes. Oh wow. Now I have to go and buy like this and like the shipping of that and the fulfillment of that, like my, I raised $591,000 on that to make a TV show, my shipping costs, just, just shipping, not like, you know, my, the people to do it.

My shipping costs were $65,000. That's that, that's a mistake. I underestimated that stuff. So here I am going to make a show and, and I'm, I'm like stopped down for like three months while I fulfill the t-shirts and all that kind of stuff.

So for anyone who's going to do that kind of project, I encourage people to not, not do like, if you're making a TV show, make a TV show. You want to make a t-shirt fine. Like leave it at that. You want to make whatever. Yeah. So I was curious about that. Do you think that people should just stop doing these bonuses with their project and just stick to the damn project?

You should, if, if one is an intangible and one is tangible, right? Like if you have a hard good, if you have a digital good and then you have a hard good that, you know, that's going to, that's going to really complicate it because for digital, if you're going to make the show and send it, boom, press a button, you know, you can maybe, you know, work in your, your cost to like two bucks for like the person who needs

to send that email and their time, like you have to work in all those sorts of costs at the end of the day. Like you can't go, Oh, 10 bucks. And then we put 10 bucks in our pocket. No, you're going to put eight bucks in your pocket or eight bucks to make the project or whatever it is. Like you're going to, you know, if you're, if you make a hundred thousand bucks and you think you have a hundred thousand dollars to make your project, you're going to be wrong.

You've got to just back all those costs and you're going to lose money. But like, yeah, and if you're going to do something digital, like, like that, and then you're going to do a t-shirt. Well, it's great if you're digital and you're like a filmmaker or TV or whatever, and you are in that line of work and you understand that. But if you're not in the T, in the t-shirt business, there's a lot that has to do with it.

It's like, it's ordering the t-shirt, getting it made, making sure it looks good and it fits good and everything you like about it. Then there's like the shipping and shipping costs, the packaging, who's going to do that packaging if you end up with a lot of them. And so that, those are just, those are the things that I learned in this process, which I then took to the drinking jacket.

And you actually came into this process with, with quite a lot of knowledge. Anyways, you had already done production on shows. You know what was involved with that. You had already done, you know, merchandise. You know what was involved in that. That's what we've always laughed about these Kickstarters with is people come into it with just an idea.

They have no idea what distribution channels are like or what even running a company is like. So there's so much more involved with it that, yeah, I think people just don't understand that. It, there is an E, there is very low barrier to entry with doing a Kickstarter. Like, like literally my mom could sit down today and for her knitting, right?

Like she, she knits things. Um, and she could do a Kickstarter for like scarves and she could do it today. She really could. The drinking scarf starting today. It's the drinking scarf. It actually holds a drink on each side of the scarf. But if you only have one drink, that's, that thing's going to slide off you.

Now that's a problem. Um, but like, but like, but she could do that. And so people do do that. There's, there's people, there's couples, there's individuals, there's friends, whatever. And they like had this idea and they go and they launch it for me, you know, for the adventure hoodie, I've literally been developing this hoodie.

Um, aside from, you know, the drinking jacket being the, the pre, you know, the, the predecessor to it, I've been working on this, this Kickstarter campaign since February. And then I actually planned to launch in May, had everything all set and then decided May is not the best time to launch a hoodie.

I was going to launch it in May so that people could get it by September, but, but, but people have spring fever and they're just not looking to buy that kind of thing then. So then I reshot my video, I, I, I actually made a lot of improvements to the, like I did so many things that like, and that's why I'm confident that it's doing so well.

It's like, you know, the video, the, everything in there, if you see, like it's really no stone unturned and there's no lesson that, that learned that I haven't, you know, uh, made use of in, in this, this campaign.

Um, and so it just, yeah, it's a completely, even though it's like the drinking jacket, if you even look at the graphics and the message and, and the sizing chart and all that kind of stuff, it's just all, it's just a different, different beast. And that's, if you can do a Kickstarter, that's what you need to do. Like, and I've backed, I've done those forward, backwards shipping charges.

I've sat down with my account to have them find holes in, in, in my, you know, my plan. I mean, like we know what we're going to do, what we're doing with this campaign. We know how, you know, how to do it. And it's, but, but again, I've done two before and I made a lot of mistakes. Yep. And you learn from them, which is fantastic.

And that's when actually Kickstarter, I think can get useful because it's hard to, like you said earlier, it's hard to get that capital to go and launch something yourself anymore, especially, uh, much like the music industry, which is kind of what I came from. Uh, you found in your industry, the same thing that, that people just aren't funding you upfront anymore.

You have to go and get it yourself. Yeah. And, and not only that you, you need, you can't really rely on the Kickstarter community. Um, if, unless your idea is great. Now, obviously everyone thinks her idea is great. So you just kind of have to throw that one out.

You know what I mean? Like you, you need a, uh, a core to start with to, for people that are going to shout, it's like friends and family. That just doesn't work on Kickstarter. You need like, like for me, I have like 171,000 Facebook followers and like 126,000 on Twitter or whatever it is that, that gives me such an amazing advantage over other people because I have people that will listen to my message right off the bat.

You know, like there, there's this, this bag company that is everyday bag. They just broke a record for like the biggest bag campaign, which is, which just finished running. And they, this is like their fifth Kickstarter. And every time they've done it, they've done an amazing job and they've built this fan base for making these great bags and camera bags and stuff.

So now when they launched this one, they had a huge like newsletter. They could go out to like a hundred thousand people or 50,000 people, whatever it is to say, Hey, we're back with this great thing. And then those people forwarded to their friends. They, they put it on Facebook and, and then, you know, and there's a big, for me right now, there's a big, um, Facebook, uh, ad budget too.

Like that's, you know, I don't think that it's just me posting something once a day on my Facebook and then just, you know, going to the bar. It's too bad. It isn't that way, right? Yeah. Well, it is, you know, some days I'm not gonna lie to you. So what else are you up to now besides being a fashion mogul?

Are you going to jump back into podcasting or are you just, uh, it's, it was a thought, it's a thought. Um, I mean, I, the, the issue with there's a, there's, there's two issues. I'll be completely upfront. I mean, the, the two issues were podcasting, especially back when I was doing it like four years ago.

Um, there, there were some guys that were crushing it, you know, Corolla, Rogan, you know, those kinds of nerdists, whatever, those kinds of things. And then everybody else was just like literally fighting over a bunch of crumbs. And we, we were like at about 50,000 downloads, like, which, you know, for us at that time, I was like, that was great.

But, you know, it was, it was, it was drinking based and, and, and, and the issue with that and that's, that been my, my brand is that, um, is that I'm drinking and I'm having fun and I'm having fun with the drinking.

And, and, and it seems like if people put those together, like an ad agency or a brand, they might go, Hmm, this, this has the opportunity for something backfiring. So let's just maybe put our, our, our money elsewhere. So we didn't just because we had, you know, we were drinking made easy.

That was the brand. I mean, like, um, you know, and, and, and then the, then the show is Zane Lamprey, but we still had a lot of drinking guests and we would often sit and have a beer and stuff like that. And, you know, or two, like that's, that's really the extent of where it went, but, um, or of course monkey rum, but like it was, it was, it was an uphill battle with, with sponsors.

And I was like, you know, I, my time is just more valuable than what I could get out of the podcast. And then I started to do some like, um, YouTube drinking things like, Oh, drink committee's did like show you how to make these certain cocktails.

And I was just like, at the end of the day, that's good. And that is my brand. And like, I, I certainly enjoy having drinks with, with friends and, and, and, and talking about drinks, but like at the end of the day, my passions are sort of elsewhere, you know, like, like I, I really do like, I love monkey rum and that's a different thing because that's something that I've created, but I don't, I don't ever need to get another tour of a brewery and I don't get never, I don't ever need to get another tour of a distillery.

And you know, it's, it's, it's just like stainless steel tanks and, and, and amazing chemistry happening inside. It's like, they all look the same and they all smell fantastic, but Hey, bring me to the tasting room. Let's sit down and have a beer and let's talk. We don't even need to talk about the beer. Let's just talk about you and you know, where you can, you know, that kind of thing.

So, um, right now we have Zane's world, which is, which is me and my wife, um, traveling around. Sometimes we're in Europe. Sometimes we're in our kitchen, you know, like we just saved three kittens from the shelter and, and the last video was about that. The one that goes up today, um, is about my dog, which is an Irish wolfhound.

He's, he's about six foot four when he's on his hind legs. He's like one of the biggest dogs in the world. That's a big dog. And I got a Rottweiler. That's a big dog. Yeah. Well, your dog, your dog could take my dog. Let's just put it that way. This would be like me getting into a fight with like Manute bowl, which is one last for him. I just run around and take him out by his legs.

But like, but, but on today's episode, we go and have a play date with a mini horse and by the way, and a, and a camel and a zebra. So it's just like, you know, and then, and then there's another one where I go to the mall of America. There's another one where I go to line in Google, which is a great brewery in the Midwest.

So it's just like, I, I think, I mean, I'm very much like you guys, um, you know, you call yourself, you know, geeks or nerds or whatever. Like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm that like, I like information, but I like to keep it fresh and I wouldn't mind doing something different every day.

And that's kind of where the, the, the direction of the brand is, is going. And that's why the adventure, you know, making the departure from the drinking jacket, similar pro, you know, project, similar, uh, um, product. Um, but, but a more vast and broad, you know, thing like I, when we went, we went to shoot some stuff with the, with the hoodie, more of an excuse to go to the, uh, the Rockies national park.

And we actually, in Colorado, this guy who's a fan reached out and said, Hey, I know you're here. I run a weed dispensary and, um, farm, I guess you'd call it like a greenhouse, whatever a grow house. If you want to come as we made an episode out of that, like I'd never seen that before.

It was pretty, that's pretty amazing. So yeah, that's, that's kind of the direction. It's a little disparate, but, but it's, but it's more, I think, I think at the end of the day, it's more like the most interesting stuff. That's what I'm going to bring you mini horse and a big dog. And a camel and a zebra.

That's awesome. Uh, it's been a lot of fun following you and I think it's great that you're actually just kind of running with it and, and just doing the things that interest you. It's fantastic. So congratulations on that. Um, and the hoodie is fantastic. Jason brought it up to me last week. I've been looking at it. I'm definitely going to get one. And anybody out there that wants to get one, go to zainlampree.com.

Take you right there. Yeah. Or just, or just go to Kickstarter and just type in like, you know, a hoodie. It'll, it'll come up and then check out some of the other, other cool product products, you know, projects on, on Kickstarter. There's always really fun stuff and it's, it's a rabbit hole. You know, you start messing around, looking at things and you just can't help, but, but click on things.

And with the, you know, with the adventure hoodie, it's like, um, it's doing well. You know, we won't, you know, I don't have to hide that. It's doing extremely well. And it's kind of fun to just sit there and watch that number. Yeah. Probably more fun than me from, for me than other people, but it's still fun to watch.

It's definitely probably more fun than you, uh, for you, but yeah, you guys are, you're kicking it out of the park with this one. It's doing fantastic. So everybody go check it out. It was fantastic talking to you, man. Thanks guys. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good day. Security.

We are back again with our good friend from the cyber wire, Dave Bittner. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. Let's get into scaring the crap out of our listeners. It's what we do best. It is what we do best. And here's a good one. This one, this is a hat tip to a listener and friend of the show, Andy.

Um, basically this is a link to Bruce Schneier's blog. We love Bruce Schneier and it's about how someone is learning how to take down the internet with, uh, they're, they're probing all of the weak points of critical infrastructure for the internet. And, um, it's kind of scary.

Uh, it is. I mean, you know, I, it's, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's surprising. Oh, it's not surprising. Yeah, no, um, scary. But I think the, the, the degree to which they're doing it, I mean, look, you know, the internet, as we all know, the internet was designed to be difficult to take down.

Um, so there's that. Um, but, uh, yeah, basically they're, they're, uh, they're using DDoS attacks, distributed denial of service attacks. Um, the, the, um, the frequency and sophistication and length of these attacks is increasing.

Um, and it seems like they're, whoever this is, this group, uh, is targeting some of those critical juncture points of the internet itself. Yeah, it'll, this is, uh, this is definitely a good read if you, uh, are into this kind of thing. And, uh, I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet.

You know, that this is the first time we're hearing about it. I mean, it may have happened in the past, but the fact that, uh, they're, they're systematically testing these systems is what, what, what kind of is one of those things that will keep me up at night. Yeah. You know, I, I, I think another thing this reminds me of is that something we've been hearing about more and more lately is, uh, groups like this and other groups using DDoS as misdirection.

So they will DDoS you. And while you're busy looking over there and trying to mitigate this DDoS that's happening to you, you know, they're sneaking data out the back door. Okay. So that's become, that's becoming more and more popular, you know, distract you with the DDoS.

And so while you're busy, you know, with, with a line of, uh, you know, buckets full of water putting out that fire, um, they're busy doing something else over here that, uh, they hope you don't notice. Somebody has seen diehard three. Let's put a bomb in the school. So all the cops have to go away and then we'll rob the bank.

Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is, this, this, uh, the Schneier report is people seem to think that it's China. Um, you know, China and Russia are the two usual suspects when it comes to these sorts of things. Um, but you know, I honestly, I would say, I wouldn't surprise me if we were doing the same thing around the world, testing the, the, the battle readiness and hardness of various, you

know, important points on the internet because, um, size, the, this notion of cyber war is something that I think is real and is growing larger in people's minds. So I would say all of the nation states are kind of doing their due diligence and trying to figure out where the weaknesses are for themselves and, um, for the, both their friends, uh, and their enemies.

Indeed. Indeed. Now this next one comes, uh, from California, which is always fun. You know, these are the, the first state in the union to put in the, uh, uh, was it the revenge porn laws? Right. Uh, and also no plastic bags at your grocery store, which I still think is a joke.

Uh, but. Well, I remember when we were kids, you know, like you would watch the prices, right. And they would, and then they would always say the car comes with California emissions. And I never really understood what that meant, but what it meant was that, you know, things are different in California. Uh, yes, yes. Which is why I now live in Illinois.

There you go. There you go. Uh, so this is, yeah, I did just in the nick of time. Uh, this is a new bill by Senator Robert Hertzberg that will, uh, treat ransomware as extortion. Now, this will be interesting if, uh, governor Jerry Brown from dead Kennedy's fame, uh, signs us into law.

You can get up to two to four years in jail for putting ransomware on somebody's computer. Now, I don't know what the actual statistics are on people that get a caught putting ransomware on computers, but also the origin of ransomware generally isn't California from what I'm led to believe.

Well, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I, I think this is, um, you know, I think this may be more political than practical, uh, a chance for some people to say, Hey, look what we're doing to protect you. But, uh, in terms of it actually making a dent on ransomware, I think you nailed it.

I don't think a whole lot of ransomware is coming from, you know, the kid down the street from you. It's coming from Romania. Yeah. It's coming from the kid on the other side of the planet from you. So the notion that, uh, you know, California law enforcement people are going to go to the ends of the earth, literally to grab these people, I think is, uh, not realistic.

Well, because Californians do think that they are the center of the universe. So I think that's why these things tend to happen. Justifiably so, I think. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. Oh man. And, uh, in interesting news, uh, judge David Allen Ezra of San Antonio has actually said that, uh, the FBI's use of malware is an actual search of someone's computer and needs to have the legal backing thereof.

Right. And so this goes back to the, um, the, where we refer to as the playpen, uh, case. This is, uh, the, um, that was a, I don't know, a den of child pornography, a child pornography site that was called playpen. And the FBI, uh, installed malware on some people's machines to try to, you know, figure out who they were because the people who were frequenting this site were doing what they could to try to hide themselves, understandably so, um, cause of the bad things they were up to.

But, um, what this comes down to is that, uh, a warrant had been, uh, served or granted to, to put this malware on a bunch of, uh, different machines. And, but it was sort of a general warrant that said, go, okay, go put this on a bunch of machines.

But it didn't really say what machines, where they were, you know, how many, um, so it was very loosey goosey when it came to that sort of thing. Lacked specificity. Yeah, exactly. And so what they said was, no, you can't do that.

You need to, if you're going to search someone's computer, you need to come and get a warrant to search that computer. You know, you can't, it basically, you can't say, judge, I need a warrant to search whatever homes in this neighborhood I may think are worth searching. The judge is going to say, no, you can't do that.

You need to tell me what home you're going to search and why you want to search that particular home. Um, and this has to do with what's called, uh, criminal rule 41, which, uh, has to do, kind of rolls off the tip of your tongue, but, um, it has to do with the reach of, of jurisdictions.

Um, they're actually trying to change rule 41 so that, um, basically it would enable the FBI to search, uh, outside of the jurisdiction of the judge who granted the search warrant. Right now, the way rule 41 works is the judge grants you a search warrant.

Really that search has to take place within the jurisdiction of that judge. Uh, as you can imagine how that can make, uh, searching things like computers more difficult because you may not know, uh, who the person is logging onto the server, uh, that is in your district, you know, when you, when you begin your investigation.

So it's an interesting case. I mean, I, I, civil libertarians are, um, are really happy about this. Um, interesting too, that even though they, they, they were found in violation of rule 41, this jurisdictional thing, um, the judge did not toss the evidence because the way rule 41 works, uh, there really has to be intent, you know, blatant intent to break rule 41.

And the judge said, no, that was not, that was not what happened here. So even though technically you broke rule 41, we're still going to allow the evidence to go forward in the case. So kind of a, I don't know for the, for the defendants, uh, it may be sort of a win the battle, lost the war kind of thing, but for civil libertarians, they're certainly happy with this, uh, this judge's decision.

Yeah. Good. That's a good precedent. I think so. I think so. And, uh, also remember kids rule 42, always bring a towel. Yes. Oh, Jason wins the internet. Well, I'm useless for the rest of the segment now that I've got the giggles.

Oh, okay. Well, giggle us into, giggle us into some stingray news. Oh, all right. So I believe we've talked about stingrays before. These are the cell, cell tower simulators that police like to use. Um, it's kind of a man in the middle quite a bit.

Yeah. Well, they do. And the, the, what they really like to do is use them secretly, uh, and reveal as little information as possible about them. Um, so there was a development, uh, this past week. Um, one of the, basically the operator manuals for one of these stingray devices became available online.

Uh, so we know a lot more about these devices than we used to. And, um. Yeah. And this is the unredacted operator manual because there was, there was an operator manual that came out before from a FOIA request, but it was basically redacted to the point of uselessness. Yeah. It was just a bunch of big blotches of black, you know, but, uh, no, this is the whole thing, the real deal.

And so what we've learned is that, um, these devices are indeed quite powerful, but also they're very easy to use. So it's not like, uh, there's a lot of sophisticated training that a law enforcement officer would have to go through to use one of these. They're pretty much plug and play, um, and you can go out and just start vacuuming up information, um, from people who are, who are, uh, just using their cell phones.

Great. That's what we want. Yeah. You know, I mean, one of the things I learned, I, we actually talked to, um, Ben Yellen is a, is a law analyst, uh, from the university of Maryland center for health and homeland security. He talked to me about this earlier in the week on our show. And I asked him, I said, you know, Ben, the thing I don't get about this is, you know, if a, uh, a cell phone provider needs to have a license to operate a cell phone tower, right?

The FCC has to grant them a license to run that tower. And, uh, so why is it that law enforcement can basically set up a transmitter receiver, uh, without a license? Why do they not need to do that? And his response was that there are cases like this where, uh, law enforcement is not required to have, they're, they're not under the same requirements that you or me or an organization would have, um, with, when it comes to these kinds of restrictions.

So, you know, this is one, this is, I think this is a to be continued. This one's going to still wind its way through. And I think, uh, the release of this information will give some ammunition to the people who are saying that, uh, that these devices are, uh, you know, a violation of our privacy.

So we'll see. Yeah. Stay tuned. Yeah. This is going to be a long drawn out battle, but, uh, yeah, it's point and click surveillance is basically what it boils down to. The fact that these things can simulate four cell towers at the same time is nuts. It is.

Crazy. It is. Yeah. And you need at least, don't you need at least three to do triangulation? So this can actually, you know, pretty much pinpoint any, any cell phone within the range of the Stingray. Right. That's, that's crazy.

That's crazy talk. They're, they're really powerful. So, you know, I think it's sort of a, it's sort of a chilling revelation of just how powerful these things are. And it's, and it points to why I think, in my opinion, I think it points to why law enforcement and the manufacturers of these were, were being so cagey about them and didn't want people to know what they were really capable of.

Yeah, definitely. Well, speaking of things that mess with cell phones, this one is just from the funny files. The police in Evanston, Illinois, were having an issue because people were going into this certain block in Evanston and their key fobs wouldn't work and their cell phones wouldn't work.

And they'd have to tow the cars to, to get back into them. And they discovered about a block away, their cars would start working again and their phones would start working again. And these amateur radio sleuths basically figured out that it was a power supply on a neon light that was causing this RF interference.

Now, I want to know what, A, what power supply this is. They list the address in the, the article that we have in the show notes. So I'm thinking next time I'm in Evanston, I'm going to swing by there and try and get a peek at this, this neon light. I wonder if it's on, on Google street view.

I don't think you can, you're going to be able to zoom into the label to find out, uh, Oh, well, sure, sure. But I, yeah, that's yeah. Right. Yeah. I can probably find out the address and call the guy. I could, I could, you know, I could Mr. Robot the shit out of that. Um, cause they don't mention the actual device in the article, but, uh, and, and, you know, what, what, what it ended up being is the, the cops were just like, Hey, uh, just turn it off.

And so the guy's neon light is off now. And, uh, unless they get more complaints, they didn't confiscate it. You know, the FCC kind of dropped the ball on this because this was really their purview and they're like, eh, that that's the strange part of the story is that, you know, basically this, this power supply in effect is an unlicensed transmitter.

The unlicensed cell phone jammer, which is a felony. Right. It's, it's, uh, it's, you know, it's not far from basically like a spark jet spark gap generator of just, you know, spewing out noise on, on frequencies that are, uh, licensed.

So you, you're not allowed to do that, but the FCC just kind of said, no, no, let's, we're not really interested in tracking that down. So that puzzles me. Yeah. There's like a key fob problems. I call the car company and it's like, Oh no, but these are their cell phones and everything else that's in the radius of this, you know, incredibly powerful transmitter.

What I do like is that it was the amateur radio, uh, gang who tracked this down. Um, you know, and, uh, I, I think, uh, amateur radio is certainly not a growing hobby, but, uh, you know, the, the public service that they do, uh, is, is good.

Uh, you know, if things went bad, the amateur radio folks would be there to, uh, to help provide communications. When I was in college, my roommate was a president of the amateur radio club and we had a situation where a local, uh, airport, you know, just a little airport for Cessnas that had an unmanned tower, unmanned, um, landing lights.

You know, you would, you would ping a certain frequency and that would cause the landing lights to come on. Well, some joker was messing with people. He was, you know, near the runway and when someone would come in for coming in for their final approach, this joker would turn off the landing lights.

That's not a joker. That's an asshole. Well, yes, yeah, yes. Yeah. So, uh, but so what they did was the local, you know, group of, uh, you know, college age amateur radio guys, they got together and through the process of triangulation, they basically camped out, you know, three of them, different locations, just monitoring.

They knew what frequency this guy was going to light up on through the process of triangulation. They nailed his butt to the wall. See, you know, that's a good plot line for a, for a screenplay. Somebody should get on this stuff. Yeah. You know, I love.

Yay to the amateur radio gang. They're, they're, they go, uh, they're kind of under the radar most of the time, but, uh, you know, there, there are times when they really are doing good for everybody. Yeah. It's like the bloodhound gang. Remember that show? Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. It is like the bloodhound gang. That's a great, yeah. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep. When there's trouble, they're there on the double. Okay. You went old TV today. There's probably five people in our audience who now can't get that song out of their mind. I know. So you're welcome.

Oh, I'm going to have to YouTube the hell out of that today. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever there's trouble, we're the bloodhound gang. All right. Moving on. Moving on. So this is an interesting story. Someone has come up with a USB killer device.

I want this so bad right now. Remember, Jason, use your powers for good, not evil. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, no. I think taking out some TVs at the sports bar that have USB, I think, you know, I could use a TV, be gone, and be, you know, nice about it.

But this seems like a better solution. I was going to say a gooder solution. This seems like a better solution. A more gooder solution. Absolutely. So what this little USB device does is you plug it in, and it just bides its time, slowly building up charge by drawing, you know, the five volts from the USB power line.

And I'm guessing, you know, there's a capacitor in there that's just charging up. Yeah. It's got to be just a capacitor and a microcontroller. Yeah, exactly. But then when it gets enough juice, it just starts pounding the port with 240 volts. Booyah.

It just, you know, it just fries the port and whatever else it can get to that's in line with the port. The report said that basically, I think the only thing that they didn't kill was a MacBook Pro that had, it optically isolates the data lines on the USB ports.

So I guess that's, you know, another reason to go back. It costs a little more. Well, yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thing that, you know, I guess part of the extra expense is that Apple sweats that kind of a detail. But anyway, fun, fun little gadget. Fool your friends, right?

Try their USB ports. I'm thinking now, so you take one of these and you couple it with like a Pony Express, plug it into the back of your target PC. You exfil all the data and then you turn on this device. So then it kills the computer and then it turns on itself and then fries the device.

So, it's like a suicide hacker device that'll basically exfil all the data and then kill itself on its way out the door. It really does seem like a device from a movie. Yeah, it does. I mean, it's just one of those unlikely devices from a movie that actually causes smoke to come out of something.

And you know how I love my movie analogies, so. Yes. Well, finally, this week, interesting story. General Motors had to recall, oh, just a couple of million cars after they found a critical bug in some software. Oh, before we get into the bug.

Yeah. Cars come with USB ports now. I'm not going to try this on my car, but if someone out there has a car that they're, you know, going to donate to charity, maybe try this on it and report back to us to see if it works.

Well, but the real thing to do would be to drive that car to Evanston, Illinois, right? Try it out there and then you really make, you know, see just the worst case scenario. Yeah. So, so General Motors had to recall about four million cars because they found a bug and there actually has been a, at least one death that's been linked to this.

So it's serious business. Basically what happens is there's a, there's a set of circumstances where the car goes into some of the safety devices on the car, the, for the front airbags and the seatbelt pretensioners, uh, go into a diagnostic, diagnostic mode and, uh, which means that they won't go off if the vehicle gets in a crash.

Kind of defeating the point of having safety devices. Right. So obviously that's bad. Um, so this is a software bug and General Motors is recalling the vehicles. What I find interesting about this story is that there's a little bit of debate over, there are people who were saying, you know, shame on GM for not enabling these vehicles to be updated over the air.

But there on the other side, people are saying, thank God GM doesn't allow these cars to be updated over the air. Right. And there's two sides to that story. I mean, on the one hand, making sure that your software updates are being done, you know, at a GM dealer or a, or a certified dealer or something like that.

You know, someone who knows what they're doing is probably a good thing. But the flip side is how convenient would it be for both GM and for the users to be able to say, Hey, you know, next time you get in the car, something comes up on your, on your little GPS screen that says, Hey, we're pushing a software update to you. Yep.

Of course there are security issues with that. Look, I get in my Ford, like, you know, in about two or three times a month, I'm driving in my radio cuts out and it says Sirius is doing an update. So if they can update the radio station, they should be able to update the, you know, the firmware without a major problem.

Well, this is, this is how Tesla does it, isn't it? I believe Tesla pushes updates over the air, you know, pretty routinely. So, um, and we all know Tesla's never crashed into anybody. Well, you know, to their, to their, uh, credit, Harry Potter was to blame for the one fatality.

No, I give, I give Tesla a hard time only because, uh, I would love to have one and, uh, and I, and cannot, it's not, not, uh, not possible, uh, yet. So there's that. So this reminded me, since I'm a fight club aficionado, there was the formula in fight club, you know, a times B times C equals X.

And if X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. And the interesting thing is like in the old days, um, we didn't have social media. So I think that the, I think that there's a new, uh, variable in that equation, which is how many times has this been tweeted, you know, because there was one death and they're recalling 4 million cars.

That is massive. So unless the, unless the probability of a failure is that high, um, which it must be because the, you know, the probability of failure has to be, it's one of the variables in the equation, it must be extremely high for them to do a recall on 4 million vehicles after only one person died.

Well, I wonder too, how much has changed in terms of the regulatory environment, but also just with the 24 hour news cycle, that something like this can be, uh, you know, reported the, the news organizations can, can, you know, on a slow news day can latch onto it.

And, and suddenly everybody knows about it where, you know, some in the old days, if someone was reported a single death on the evening news was, you know, you just sort of move on. Yeah. That's an interesting point. Also remember, um, we're, we're in the middle of the debacle with Jeep and their recall because of their, their problems with their gear shifter, they killed Chekhov, you know?

So I think they might be trying to get ahead of the bad press and just putting this out there right away saying, Hey, even though the Jeep had a recall too, but he didn't get the email about, or the, the physical mail about his recall until after he was dead. So I think GM might be, you know, I think it's a bad time for car companies to have, you know, security or just features that can kill somebody in, you know, I generally, the executives are longing for the good old days when you can kill hundreds of people and nobody, nobody heard

about it. That's what hush money was for. Damn it. Right. You just come out with a new color next year and everybody was happy. The new, the Pinto, it comes in purple this year. And you beat me to the Pinto, you bastard. You knew we were going to go.

Somebody had to go there. You had to go there. Oh man. All right, Jason. Okay. I'm going to go polish my gremlin out in the garage. So, uh, yes, very good. My Dodge Colt Vista needs to be refilled. So, uh, all right, guys, everybody go check out the cyber wire at the cyber wire.com.

Dave and his crew do this every day. God bless them because I don't want to do it. Thanks, Jason. I'll talk to you next week. I'll talk to you next week, man.

Comment of the week. Comment of the week. We've got some donations via PayPal this week. Uh, the first from Eagle Ronningstad from the Norway. No, more Norwegians. Yeah. Thank you for the support. Postporn support. Stop using the Facebook.

I'm going more German. I'm going more German. You are. Yes. Sorry. I have one European accent, apparently. Yes. And, uh, please don't use Facebook. You know, because they don't like Norwegians. Yeah. Okay. This one, next one comes from Bernard Morrell. I'm a 70 year old grump.

Love the show. Your tech tricks and tips have been very useful. I'd give a five star rating, but I can't get iTunes to work. You ain't the only one, buddy. Might have something to do with the aforementioned 70 years. Nope. Not at all. It sucks. Stay grumpy, Bernard. Yep. You're probably doing just fine.

iTunes sucks for everyone, no matter what their age. Thank you so much. Um, I'm glad you're listening. Uh, our next comment is from our, is this still from PayPal too? I believe so. Oh, we did not put in notes in here. I think this might be from grumpyoldgeeks.com. No, Jack Angle comes from PayPal. All right.

Well, thank you, Jack. Uh, I believe Facebook and Google are evil. Social media has caused more problems than I think it solves, but in practice, it does have some redeeming qualities. My mother passed away this weekend quietly and with me holding her actually on Saturday, I was listening to GOG and other podcasts when I got the call to be with her.

P.S. I don't blame you guys. Uh, that's kind of funny. I appreciate that. Yes. I have to say the name. That's, that's what we do. Uh, the redeeming part of Facebook was that I was able to communicate with many of her friends and family throughout during and post final movements, sharing information so that I didn't receive texts and calls that made me repeat the same thing, though there were special people that I did call.

It was amazing that people who got notified that I didn't even know who were watching. She didn't want services or a fuss, but I at least got to share her passing. So thank you, Facebook, for this. I just hope that I don't start getting, start getting ads for items on this subject. Yeah. Jack's discount coffins. Oh, too soon.

Too soon. Uh, no, I agree with you. Well, first off, uh, condolences, Jack, of course, many condolences. Yes. Yeah. And I agree with you. Uh, you know, social media, if you're stuck in it and doing it on day to day basis is horrible. What it is good for and what I've always said is keeping in touch with people that you don't live in the same area with, um, uh, anything like that.

And, and yes, mass distribution of information when you're busy, such as like when I had my son, I posted a photo and I didn't have to deal with 10,000 texts every five minutes. So again, condolences. Uh, thanks for writing and I agree with you. All right. This next one comes from paradox 49.

Hey guys, just wanted to drop you a line and say thanks for the shows. Still really enjoying it. Brian, congratulations on your son. Have fun. Don't worry. You'll start getting some sleep around the second birthday. I don't always agree with you guys. Get in line. Uh, when it comes to politics, however, even though I identify more towards the Republican side, I agree with you more times than not.

Just wondering, have you guys looked at Gary Johnson and Bill Weld? They're running under the Libertarian party and now will appear on all 50 states and the District of Columbia's, District of Columbia's ballots even, uh, for the presidential run. I'm not saying I'm going to vote for them as I'm just looking into their stance now, but at this point I feel they are no worse than the other two options we have.

I would actually like to hear what you two think of these two potential candidates in the upcoming elections. Um, I'm, I've been a registered Libertarian. Uh, in the past, uh, I kind of gave up on that. I, I no longer am into pissing into the wind for ideological stances.

Um, they have no chance of winning zero. So vote for somebody who has a chance. I know that sucks. I know you're supposed to vote your conscience, but there's also cold, hard reality. Well, voting Libertarian, if you vote Libertarian though, then you can get, they can get matching government funds next year if they hit the threshold. Yeah.

But I consider this election slightly too important. Okay. Well, I, I'm, yeah, I'm looking at voting at the end of the day. See, see where the numbers are. And then, you know, yeah, I'm in California. It doesn't fucking matter. My vote doesn't really matter. So maybe he will get my vote this time around.

So we'll see. Um, I'm not particularly fond of his specific, uh, stances in terms of, uh, he is libertarian, but I'm not crazy about him. I put a link in the show notes. You'll find it there if you want to take a look at it, Paul. Uh, but under Johnson, according to this, uh, particular journalist, rich people will get richer, poor people will get poorer and sick people will be sicker.

He doesn't provide much in terms of the things that I consider to be important and, and changing them. So, uh, you know, there you go. So I've got a link in the show notes that kind of where I'm getting my thoughts and facts from. So you can take a look at that if you'd like. Okay. I'll be at politics. Yeah. I'll put my, uh, my, my link in the show notes as well.

There's a Freakonomics episode where they, uh, they talked to Gary Johnson about his positions and, uh, what it means to be a libertarian. And it's an interesting, interesting listen. I'm only halfway through it. So I don't agree or disagree yet on anything cause I'm not finished.

Um, I haven't really looked into Gary Johnson that much. Um, or Jill was Jill Stein from the green party. Yeah. But having said all that, I want them both. I would love to have all four, uh, of these people in the debates. Not just to be. Yeah. Yeah. They need to be.

I think we need there. The two party system is killing us. I just don't see a way to get away from it. So let's get these people in the debates. Let's get them money. Let's get them funds. Let's get it all going. Yeah. And, uh, you know, Brian won't vote for anybody until they've at least got a second season. So that's right. That's my rule.

I'm sorry. You're running for president for the first time. I can't vote for you. Yeah, I know that doesn't work that way. You might get canceled. Yeah. All right. This last one comes from Facebook from my, uh, good friend, Mike Burns. Um, this week's grumpy old geeks turned out to be an expensive episode for me.

Thanks for the endorsement slash tip on the adventure jacket. I got the, I got in on the early bird pricing. All righty. Um, good, good one for Zane there. Also been needing a new work solution for my heavy as hell 17 inch laptop. Uh, so my 11 inch Chromebook is getting delivered tomorrow.

Let me know if you can solve any other issues for me. Thanks. Well, um, I can solve many other issues, but since you didn't use my Amazon links to buy your damn Chromebook, you can kiss my ass, Mike. Yeah. You can solve some of our issues. Our issues.

If you're buying the stuff that we are talking about on the show, please click through our links in our show notes because we get, you know, a little kickback there. Just, I mean, it's not even, it is literally a little kickback. It is little. It is dipping a, dipping a toe in the well here, people. So if you like the stuff we're talking about, please go to grumpy old geeks.com.

Go through the show notes or go to grumpy old geeks.com slash store. We're trying to keep up with that and putting things in directly there. Please, please. It does help. Thank you. It really, really, really helps. Yeah. You can find us on Twitter at GOG podcast on Instagram at grumpy old geeks or at Patreon at patreon.com slash GOG.

We have a website at 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 friends, please tell them about the show. And please, if you like the show, drop us an iTunes review. They really do help us out. It'll only take a minute or two and use our damn affiliate links.

Just go to grumpy old geeks.com slash iTunes. It'll take you right there or go to grumpy old geeks.com slash store and click and use our Amazon links. So I've got a couple of books this week.

Two of them from Penn Jillette, who I actually got to talk to on Monday for 90 minutes, which was pretty amazing. First book, Presto, how I made over 100 pounds disappear and other magical tales. Fantastic book. I thought it was going to be a book about veganism, and it turns out it's not.

I thought all his books were about atheism. This is athe-gan-ism. I don't know how to make that a word. No, it's really good. All the stories from the magic side of things and the diet stuff is fairly interesting, too.

And he did it and ate 100 pounds in 90 days. They're pretty close to it. It's very impressive. Before I did the interview, I went on the potato reset for a while and still am on it, actually. It's difficult.

But potatoes taste amazing for me now. It's crazy. I love potatoes. Eat only potatoes for 12 days. Give it a shot. No, thank you. Then tell me what you think of potatoes. Turns out potatoes are made from a lot of fiber. I'm just going to say Soylent ain't got nothing on potatoes.

The other book is Every Day is an Atheist Holiday and More Magical Tales. Also a great one. There are... I see a trend in his book titles. There's Magical Tales. Magical Tales. Yes. Very good book. Very, very good book. I laughed literally out loud many, many times when I was out walking the dog listening to this.

I, like, guffawed. You know? Like, stopped and hit my knees. Like somebody on Hee Haw. It was rather embarrassing. I did look around after to make sure nobody was watching. And they weren't. That's good. Dark Tower 2. Great. Great. Finished it.

The Drawing of the Three. Fantastic. Once you get past that first book, it's all fun from there. So here's what I'm doing. I am not going on to book three for at least two weeks or three weeks. Yeah, take a break. Because what we learned from you doing the Charlie Strauss diet is that you should probably take a break and have something else to eat in between.

Yeah, you can't just have 12 days of potatoes. Exactly. No, take a break. But I'm glad that you liked it. I tell everyone you've just got to get through the first book. It is so good after that. Yeah, it really is. And they should just do an abridged version of the first book that has like the 12 minutes of actually interesting bits that you need to know going into the second book.

Yes. But, and you know what? After reading the first book, I can kind of see McConaughey as the man in black. Yeah, whatever. I'm just saying, man. I can see that. I can see that smug. All right, all right, all right. I followed him through the desert.

Exactly. I can see that smug douche baggery oozing from the man in black that McConaughey has in spades. All right, fine. I did take a break from Strauss. I still have not finished the book because I was got a shout out to my friend Megan from KCRW who got me an advanced copy of Cured the Tale of Two Imaginary Boys by Lowell Tollhurst, which I read instead this week instead of finishing Strauss.

Lowell Tollhurst is one of the founding members of The Cure who went by the wayside the way many, many, many musicians do. Too many drugs, too many alcohol, too many alcohol. Too many alcohols. Too many drugs, too many alcohols, too little abilities to play one's instrument anymore and too little interest in actually doing the job that made you rich and famous that paid for all the drugs and alcohol to begin with.

So therefore kicked out a band, then making poor decision to sue said band and losing and then feeling like an asshole for a long time, then going and doing your Alcoholics Anonymous stuff and eventually coming back and being thrown a bone and allowed to play a couple shows with them and then going off and doing your own thing again, which is basically writing a book and trying to cash in on it.

Okay, sounds. No, it was interesting enough. The thing about The Cure is The Cure is one of those bands that has maintained mystery. Robert Smith is never going to write a book about his days and The Cure and how it all came about. So if you want to know anything about the backstory and the origins of The Cure in the early days, this is a good read for that.

Otherwise, it's mostly him whining. Okay, yep. I'll be a pass on that because I like The Cure as they are. I can stand the mystery. Yeah, it's fine. It's a pre-order, so if you are interested in reading it, you can use our Amazon link and pre-order it. So it was fine.

Damning with faint praise. I'd rather just listen to a Cure album. Software, apps, and gadgets. Now, we've been talking about the VR craze that all the kids are into, and I was doing some research, and because everybody's saying that everybody that I know who has had experience

with the Oculus in the Vive or Vive, which we have still yet to figure out, I'm going with Vive, say the Vive is better. I'm going with Vive. Vive la visceral relation. Yeah, my friend sucks.

So I was checking into it, and there's a backpack for the Vive that looks cool as hell. It's the MSI VR backpack. I think it looks cool. If I was 17, I would wear this thing. This looks cyberpunk.

I think it looks like he's playing laser tag. It does. That's why it looks cool. Okay. I like it. Look, man, I'm an old-school cyberpunk. I like to see the shit that we always read in the books come to fruition. All right. I think it looks kind of silly. It's five pounds, which is not insignificant.

Five pounds? What kind of pussy are you, man? Come on. Oh, there we go again. You ride a bike that weighs more than five pounds, and you have to carry it across the sand so you can get your smoothies and stuff like that. So I'm sure you would survive with a five-pound backpack. It's like you have a drone following me throughout my day, Jason.

Well, that's what you need. You need a drone with the computer on it with a tether to your head. And then I'll have a laser gun to shoot it out of the sky. No, and then when it runs out of battery, it just goes straight up and hangs you, and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. The last drone you'll ever buy.

So we talked about cord cutting last week, and I forget what I was listening to. I think I was listening to Back to Work, Merlin Mann's show, and they were talking about the leaf antenna for digital reception for your HDTV. Right. Well, I don't always go in for brand names, so I went to Amazon, and I found a cheaper one, a 50-mile range HDTV antenna that I can just slap in my window and hook up to my TV.

It was like $30. Right. Now I get broadcast TV to my HDTV because I wanted to watch the news, which you can't do on streaming unless you pay for another service. This is $30, one and done. And now, if the internet goes out, I can still watch TV, which I thought was a pretty good deal.

Let's get to your old school standard networks, your NBC, CBS, all that sort of stuff. Fox, CW. Really? Yeah, I watched an episode of Penn & Teller's Foolist the other night, the new one, as it came out, which I wouldn't get on Hulu for another day or so. I just happened to turn it on when I had the channel scan done, and I'm flipping through.

I'm like, what do I got? There is a lot of Spanish channels that are old movies that have been dubbed, which is fairly fun, and Bam Bam likes those a lot. She'll sit on the couch and watch John Wayne speak Spanish till the cows come home, which is great for babysitting.

I'm actually going to have to order one of these. It's great. I've got a TV in the bedroom, and I'm not going to pay Time Warner Cable the insane price to just have a second box in here. I don't even think I need the 50-mile one, the 25-mile ought to do, and that's only 15 bucks. Well, here's the deal. Go to the other link in the show notes, which is the DTV reception map from the FCC.

You put in your zip code. You can actually put in your address, and it will scan the reception for your area and tell you how many channels you'll get based on your location, which is what I did before I ordered the antenna, and that's why I went with a 50-mile range, because I'm pretty far outside the city.

Right. So I went with a 50-mile one, and, you know, like 30 bucks, but now, like, in the event of an emergency, and the internet's down, but my power's still up, I can watch TV and find out what's going on. I'm a little surprised at all the channels I can get. That's fantastic. Who knew? It's pretty cool, isn't it?

Screw you, Hulu. Who knew? Yeah. Yeah. I talked a little last week about a couple things that I've got with the baby world, the Owlet being one of them, OwletCare.com. It's a great concept. The thing, it just didn't work out for me.

My kid likes to kick off the little monitoring sock. It's a wearable for your kid. Told you, man, last week. Duct tape. Duct tape. I'm not going to duct tape something to my kid if it's making him cry, Jason. Why not? He's not going to remember. He's young enough. He's not going to remember. Sometimes it's good that you may not be reproducing.

Trust me. Trust me. It's always good that I'm not reproducing. There is no ambiguity in that statement, my friend. Okay, fair enough. Just a quick follow-up on it. It didn't work out for me. I returned it. I've got to give them a kudos for the good customer service, except for the fact that they do force you to call a phone number and talk to somebody to get the return authorization.

I get why. This is basically post-Kickstarting. They're finding out what the problems are by talking to customers so they can fix things for future editions. But they were fantastic about the return. No big deal. Taken care of. So, good on you for that. And then I found a new site slash app called 23snaps.com.

Ooh, snaps. Yeah, exactly. I can do jazz hands. It's an app slash website that basically, for lack of a better term, apes Facebook, but in a private situation. So, rather than putting photos of my child on social media and bothering everybody, I can just do it through 23snaps.

Invite my family, who are the ones that are screaming for me to put up more photos all the time. And they can like and comment. And it's a very Facebook-esque layout. And it's fantastic. It's private. So, you just invite people either through email addresses or Facebook accounts. They can sign in.

The whole thing is just set up. They can get notifications. If I upload new photos, they can leave comments, blah, blah, blah. It's actually really good. I've been enjoying it. I've got my family is using it. The in-laws are in there now. The in-laws... My sister-in-law has kids. She's probably going to add her own kids to it.

So, we have this whole secondary social network that is just family-related where we're looking at pictures of our freaking kids all day long. So, it's been great. Two questions. Yeah. What's the monetization strategy? Do you pay for this?

No. It is completely free. The monetization strategy is genius. It is the grandparents. They will put together and send physical albums and printouts of all the photos. Okay. Okay. And how is this different from Path? Because Path did the exact same thing.

It's probably not then. I've never used Path. I ran across this first. Okay. And Path ran out of money. And they did this basically by the book. 23 snaps is Path 2.0. Or 3.0 because Path did pivot. I think it's a very niche-marketed Path.

Okay. Because this is done and directed purely at new parents and sharing photos of babies around. Speaking of that, the object lesson in naming your product, 23 snaps, is based on the 23 chromosomes and snaps in photos.

So, they thought this was clever, obviously. But when you actually go out into the world and you have to plainly state in your fact that this does not mean you are only limited to 23 photos, you should reconsider naming your product. Shitty branding. Exactly. Funny thing is, I had a domain that I bought a long time ago that I was going to build this exact same thing for.

And my domain was called dafamily.com. Dafamily? Dafamily. I think you're even more niche marketing there. I was from Chicago and we had da bears. So, I'm like, hey, I'll make a website for da family. All right. I think I paid for that fucking domain for 10 years before I let it go.

Well, if the 23 snaps people are listening, that's slightly better. Not much, but slightly. Hey, it's da family. Anyway, so I got a course on Udemy this week. Okay. Learn ethical hacking from scratch. Okay.

So, we always talk on security about, you know, all the tips and tricks. And, you know, I know a lot of this stuff. I know what Metasploit is. I know what Kali is and all that stuff. But I thought, you know what? I found it on sale. Here's the deal. It cost me 20 bucks. Yeah, it's 89% off right now.

See, here's the thing about Udemy. I went there today. It was $180. Right. Keep reloading that page until you can get it for 20 bucks. That's the amazing thing about this. They are A-B testing their pricing out the wazoo.

Yeah. And I don't want anybody to pay $180 for this course. I've only, like, looked at the intro yet because it's been a crazy week. But looking at the synopsis and all the stuff that they teach you, it looked awesome. It looked like it's going to be a ton of fun.

So, I signed up for it. 20 bucks. Hey, man, I'll try anything for 20 bucks. And I will, you know, you learn how to set up your test environments, your hacking machines, your lab setup and all that stuff so you can have machines that you can hack that you won't go to jail for.

Excuse me. And I had a Kali in my throat. And it looks really cool. And it's taught by a guy that is obviously non-American, which means he probably knows a hell of a lot more than we do. Not being racist here.

I just know all my hacker friends are from Romania, Lithuania that I don't think exists anymore, Serbia, and the former Soviet Union. So, that said, I also had to get parallels for desktop. Right. I had it. I had version 10, right, which is old.

They're on 12 now. I upgraded to 12. There's a great side effect of 12. They give you this parallels toolbox that gives you almost the exact same functionality as screen flow for the Mac. You can record your screen, take screenshots, convert it to your video to phone, all this crazy stuff that just comes built into parallels now.

It's nuts. And it was just a side effect. I'm like, I didn't know I was buying it. And it showed up. And I'm like, oh, well, now I don't have to pay for that screen flow update that they keep bugging me about, you know, because I do screencasts all the time. Right. And which, by the way, if you have customers and you need to explain something to them, do a screencast.

It will save you a lot of time. But anyway, yeah, go check out Learn Ethical Hacking, which I think if you're listening to the show, you're probably interested in that stuff. And that'll teach you kind of the basics of what these hackers are doing and all the tools that they're using, because Kali Linux, which they use on Mr. Robot, is surprisingly and incredibly robust and filled with every tool you need to basically take over the world.

Excellent. I want to throw out a new podcast that I'm a... Well, it's not new. It's obviously not new. They're on, like, episode 135.

But Brian Brushwood, one of my favorite guys, has a podcast with this guy, Justin Long. Young. Young. Justin Long is the guy that does movies with Drew Barrymore. That's who that is. I knew that. There was something in my head that that was... Who's that guy? Anyway, it's at NightAttack.tv.

Really fun. Really, really fun. They did an episode with Adam Curry this week, which I loved. But... The MTV guy? Yeah. Oh, no. Also known as The Podfather, because he did the first podcast. Yes. So he's still got a show out there with John C. Dvorak.

And, you know, John C. Dvorak is tertiary an inspiration for this show. But, no, NightAttack, fantastic show. Definitely check it out. If you like us, you'll probably like them more. But that doesn't mean you should stop listening to us, because we're smarter.

Yeah, we'd rather you didn't do that. All right. So I've got two bits of British news. Oh. Ew. First off, the Grand Tour. Finally announced release date. November 18th is when we will start to get it. Yes! I am very excited. Particularly as, apparently, BBC.

The Top Gear is just tanking over at the BBC. Chris Evans is out. Apparently, it's just now The Friends guy that's going to be hosting it next season. Who cares? I watched one episode. Yeah. Matt LeBlanc. They have the worst of The Friends now running Top Gear in England. That makes no sense.

Yeah. But, so, all good. Can't wait. November 18th, I will be watching that. So I already have Prime membership. If you do not have Prime membership yet, you might want to consider it, because this should be a good show. Do we know if they're releasing them all in one go? Or is it going to be bingeable? Or is it going to be one at a time?

I think they're going to do it one at a time, but we don't actually know. I can't see them doing the binging. I just can't. I think it'll be, and I don't want them to. I want to wait for it. Speaking of waiting for it, I finally made it all the way through Sherlock, all three seasons.

What a fantastic show. And I'm patiently waiting for series four to start. Have you, did you even watch the final Christmas special where they go back in time? I did. I have not yet. Was it any good? I'm very enjoyable. Okay. I heard not so great things about it.

I've got it on my machine ready to play, but I'll have to check it out then. If you give it a thumbs up, I'll check it out. I mean, I prefer the regular show, but it was cute and clever and well done. So worth watching. And besides, I was, you know, I basically been Sherlock all three seasons. So there's no way I wasn't going to watch something.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And tell me, was it was Sherlock's speech at Watson's wedding? Not one of the greatest monologues ever. It was so good. The show is so good. I was never a big fan of Bumber Black, but I'm getting into him now. Yes, yes. Cumber Batch and his Cumber Bitches.

Engelbert Humber Black. Closing shout outs. Huge thanks to Zane Lamprey for coming on and entertaining us today. So everybody go check out the Adventure Jacket. All of his links will be in the show notes at propieldgeeks.com slash 177.

And a shout out to a friend of the show, Karen, for setting that up with us. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. Also, I want to give a shout out to my mother-in-law because we're about halfway through her three week stay here and I've been able to get out of the house every now and then. I even get to go get a haircut tonight. Exciting.

Yeah, yeah. Milk that for all it's worth. I am. I am. I will be stopping at Finn's on the way to get my haircut. Of course. And on the way back because, you know, those itchies aren't going to. Oh, God. Yeah, moving on. Thanks to Dave Bittner again, as usual, for coming on.

We're going to be doing security a little differently next week. But yeah, we are. We appreciate Dave coming on the show. And as always, thanks for listening. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And you can check me out at jpd.me where you can find links to all my social media and contact info and bam bam, of course, if you and if you want to hire me for your podcast editing and producing needs and bam bam.

And I'm Brian Shawmeister. And you can follow me on Twitter at Slender Fungus. And I'm really quick at diapers these days. 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 Patreon to get 10 exclusive tracks. Outro music for the show is provided by Andy Swichanski. You can follow Andy at twitter.com slash house of Andy. 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 177. I'm Zane Lamperey and I'm drunk. On life and beer.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.

This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action.

The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com.