193: Injecting Digital Magic

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, the tech show for discerning adults. I'm Jason DeFillippo and I'm here with... I'm Brian Schulmeister. How are you, Jason? It's been a crazy week, crazy week. Dog tried to kill me, been on the couch all week. I'm an old man. Sitting down with Advil and heating pads all week.

Well, it is Grumpy Old Geeks. You're just fulfilling your title. Yes, my back-breaking title. Yes, I did see your posts about your dog almost killing you and I do believe this would have been the second major issue with a broken leg since the show has started.

Last time it involved multiple cross-country journeys on train. Well, that was because I slipped on the ice and broke my leg and tore my ankle and had to have surgery. This one was just freezing rain all night. Went outside. I have three giant cement steps and she took off to go take a leak.

It took me with her. I went horizontal and landed on my back on the stairs and almost broke my arm. But, you know, a leg I can lose and still do my job. Broken arm would be a pain in the butt trying to mouse with that. Right. Well, and the last one did involve having to actually do an intervention on the show itself to get you to actually do something about your leg.

This time around, I think we're safe. We don't have to call in Dr. David Teeter and I can't remember who the other guest was. I think MXV and Jordan were both on the show that time. Jordan from the other charm. So, yes, sometimes we have to do interventions with Jason on the show. Well, you know, I thought those multiple packets of chicken fried rice from Trader Joe's, if I kept refreezing it, would heal the wound.

But, yes, after a couple of days and I was going to get on a plane, I'm like, oh, you know what? People die from this. And that's what would have happened. I would have been dead. So that's why I had to take the train. Turns out health care is useful, people. Health care is useful. Just keep that in mind with your voting. Anyway, they laid a dollar short on that one.

Shall we jump into the news? Sure. Why not? It's the day before Black Friday. This might be the last show. Always look on the bright side. In the news. So a little follow up here.

Tesla is proven not to blame after the fatal car crash from the Harry Potter incident in Florida. Yeah. Well, I mean, they're not really. No, they're not. The guy should have had his hands on the wheel, not watching Harry Potter. Yes.

Just because you have a car that has an autopilot mode does not mean that you should just piss off and sit in the backseat watching Harry Potter. Yeah. Now, here's the interesting part about it, because it's, you know, they did a pretty in-depth dive into what was going on with the Teslas.

And they said, after analyzing mileage and airbag deployment data for Model S and Model X cars equipped with autopilot, the NHTSA has concluded that the Tesla vehicle's crash rate dropped by almost 40% after auto steer installation. So there's proof positive right there that it actually works.

I guarantee you, if we had this on every Prius in my neighborhood, I'd feel a lot safer. So, no, Brian, but you said you have to go all in. We can't do it unless we go all in. How many times have you said that? I do think that there's going to be a lot more issues if we don't go all in.

But at this point, I'm so tired of almost dying every single time I go to the post office. I don't care anymore. Well, you should get stamps.com. Oh, wait. We're not getting sponsored by them. Yes. We will not mention them until they pay us the cash moolah. Yeah. As soon as we get that ad deal, give us that insertion order and we're going to save Brian's life.

So somebody at stamps.com that's listening to this show, do your duty and save a life. Well, speaking of stamps.com, they could take an alternative approach to us. They could just have us read it for the exposure that it would give us. Oh, exposure. Oh, yes. We love doing things for exposure.

Now, I know. Unless we're exposing ourselves. Well, some of us enjoy that as well. But, you know, what we do in our off time, Jason. Yes. Anyways, I'm going to bring up this story and I know we've already gotten some crap about it. And I will state for the record that we have been against this and railed against this possibility and this practice since day one of the show.

And it does not matter which side of the political spectrum happened to be taking part of it. I would have been just as pissed if Bernie Sanders would have. Well, who are we kidding? Bernie Sanders doesn't get his hair done. If Bernie Sanders would have done this, freelance stylist Trisha Kelly said she was contacted by a long-term client with ties to the Trumps about a job doing Marla Maples and the younger Trump, Tiffany Trump, hair, makeup, all that sort of thing for the inauguration.

She expressed her interest and explained her rate, a $150 fee for travel to the place to do it and, of course, the cost of the services. Now, unfortunately, they were not up for that and basically said that she should do it for free in exchange for, air quotes, exposure.

Yeah. How many times? I mean, generally, it's around designers and web developers, but, you know. Yeah. This is the freelance industry that gets, you know, taken advantage of the most on this one. The freelance industry, anything within the entertainment industry, I can't tell you the amount of times that I was told that if I did this website for this up-and-coming band, it would be fantastic.

It would be fantastic exposure for me. I would love to hear how they figured there would be any exposure here. It's not like they were going to drop a card in the middle of the CNN broadcast of the inauguration saying, and their hair was done by. Well, you know what? You know what might be the interesting thing? Maybe they did pay her, and this is her exposure.

They just paid her on the back end and said, this is it. It's like, oh, you know what? You can go bitch about it and then get some press about it, and then we're all good. That's your exposure. She has gotten press, and if she were in my area, I would have her cut my hair because I can't stand people to do this crap, especially insanely rich people.

Yeah, that's how it goes. It's usually the more money they have, the more they want to keep. Exactly. So, you know, to pay people their fees, don't ask for things for free. Yeah. Yeah. No, that was endemic in the movie industry near the end after all of the big shops like ours shut down.

Yeah. Everybody was just, it was all up and comers, and they were doing it. They were doing it for free. Yeah. Well, I mean, that really did destroy the web industry as far as I'm concerned. I mean, outside of the fact that we've all just switched to these stupid, you know, scroller templates with whatever. But before, it was the same in the music industry.

It was, I couldn't get a job because people were willing to do it for free. Yeah, that's how it goes. Well, you know what's not going for free? Going to the moon. So, Moon Express is the first private company to receive permission to travel to the moon. I don't know who they're asking permission from.

It's the moon. It's everybody. Just go. Go to the moon. Well, we landed there. We planted our, to quote Eddie Izzard, we planted our flag. We planted our seed on the moon, yes. So, they've got $45 million in private investment and venture funds, and they're going.

They're going to go. Well, good. I mean, I was actually thinking this the entire time all this crap about Mars came up and the Mars shot and all that. I'm like, we got something a little closer, guys. Why don't we start there? Why don't we put a private citizen there? Well, because, well, Elon Musk wants to go to the moon.

He's like, eh, we've been, I mean, he wants to go to Mars because we've been to the moon. Well, and everybody saw the Martian. It just looked cooler. It did look cooler. And, you know, Matt Yavin's there, so everybody can go. Although, I guess, spoiler alert, he got off. Oh, he got home.

I don't know what he did for those five days. He may have gotten off, too. It was very boring. Passed the time on Mars, yeah. And I refuse to believe that it was only, like, 1940s and 50s music on that little USB card that they had up there. Well, this is part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

So, they'll make $30 million if they win, but, you know, they're going to spend a lot more. And if you go read How to Build a Spaceship, you will see that there are a lot of these companies that are going after the XPRIZE. It's spending a lot more than the prize money, and it's not about the prize money. It's about being the ones to do it.

It's about the exposure, Jason. Yes, it's about the exposure. Somebody got a lot of exposure, too, and that was Lily the Drone Company. We talked about them when they were first out and doing their crowdfunding. Well, turns out that they didn't ship a damn thing, and the San Francisco District Attorney is suing them for false advertising and unfair business practices.

What? Oh, I know. Surprise, surprise, surprise. I'm so shocked by this, I fell over. I would know. Here's why I was surprised, and the only reason that this is in here. Somebody doing a Kickstarter or a GoFundMe or an indie whatchamadigger not shipping, that's not news anymore.

We know that. That's why we killed the entire segment. The fact that the San Francisco District Attorney is going after them, that makes it newsworthy and more fun. More fun for us. I agree. This makes me very happy. I don't think that these people should get off scot-free just for doing it. I mean, you are false advertising, and it is unfair business practices, and you should get your ass sued by everybody.

I want class action lawsuits against every single one of these damn things. Lawsuits for everybody, says Brian. Well, that's right. They, like, right around the same time that the lawsuit hit, they put out a thing saying, well, we're not going to make it. You can have your money back. And they said, oh, this is just a coincidence that it comes out about the same time as we're getting sued.

I'm sure that they were about to hit publish right before that subpoena showed up. Of course. Anyway, moving on to some more fun news. We don't have any Uber this week, but we did talk about Uber Air a while back where Uber was trying to convince us that in a couple of years that they were going to have vertical takeoff and landing vehicles going from building to building to building.

They're just popping along, taking you where you needed to go. Well, they might have been a little ahead of the game and knew something we didn't because Airbus is actually testing one of them this year. We can't even get autonomous Ubers okayed for testing, but we're going to go ahead and start people flying around with the Amazon drones in the air.

This is going to become a mess. Well, the Airbus comes from the EU, so the EU, you know, they do things differently over there. Like, you know, that's why Amazon is testing their drones in Jolly Old and not over here or in Canada as well. So, yeah, apparently they're they're they're fans of the Queen.

So they just go where the Queen goes. But it'll be interesting. They want to have these things by 2021. I yeah, we'll see about this. I would love to see the financials on this. I can't imagine this being viable. Well, the interesting thing is it's a single person vehicle. Exactly.

And what's the cost on upkeep and development of this vehicle? I'm not you know, people are complaining about surge pricing on Uber. They're not going to be dropping 25 grand to get it. Well, maybe some people might. Some people might. Yes. There will be 12 of them in the world and they're all in San Francisco in New York. Pretty much.

Yeah, that's exactly how I see this going. Anyways, the FAA just issued the largest fine ever against a company for flying drones illegally. More news that makes me happy and makes me clap. OK, so the FAA announced today that it will find Skypan International of Chicago.

Have you seen these, Jason? I have a drone company. It's only two hundred thousand dollars. So that bums me out a little bit for conducting 65 illegal drone flights in congested airspace over Chicago and New York City. So you're getting off pretty easy for almost killing a bunch of people in planes. Well, yeah, that's the way it goes.

Yeah. OK. Yeah. So there you go. Anyways, I'm happy that they're getting a they got sued and they're they're getting. Well, they didn't get sued. They didn't get sued. They're just getting fine. They're getting a slap on the wrist. Yeah, pretty much. There's a lot of slaps on the wrist in the show today, by the way. Quite a few. Just sticking with the theme.

The army is bringing autonomous hover bikes to the battlefield. These these are kind of cool, though. I like these. But this is straight. This is straight off the moon of Endor, man. It's straight off the moon of Endor and right out of the pages of down. Or was it Demon and Freedom TM from Daniel Suarez?

Yeah. They really need a marketing team on this. So it's called the J-Tarv. Yeah, that's not a great name. Also, I'm not sure if they watch the movie, but apparently you just string some vines up and you're dead. Yeah. Well, that's why it's going to be mostly probably autonomous.

You can sit on it and ride it like a bike, but in checking this thing out, well, this thing can carry up to they want to get it up to 300 pounds to fly 60 miles for resupply of soldiers. And, you know, if it's disposable, even, you know, which, you know, your tax dollars at work.

But if the soldiers need some bullets, but, you know, we know that there aren't going to be soldiers very soon because it's all going to be robots. And that'll be that. But if the robots need to top off of petrol, then they can bring up to, you know, a couple gallons.

I don't see the utility of this other than it being manned. For the unmanned version, why not just use a standard drone to deliver your bullets and whatnot? So I don't get it. Because I don't know if there are any that are big enough, really, that they've got right now that are. Plus, you can't make a video where the guy is basically wearing a stormtrooper outfit while he's riding it.

Well, hang on, hang on, hang on. That's a different one. So in researching this, I found the first Russian hover bike. Right. And this thing looks like a death trap because the J-Tarv has at least, like, cowlings over the prop.

So it's, you know, a little harder to get killed. This thing just looks like a Cuisinart, like four Cuisinarts strapped to a hobby horse and a guy dressed, and a guy doing cosplay as a stormtrooper. It's pretty cool. I like it. It does look like a death shot, though.

It's awesome. I know. He's just got these two little tiny metal panels to protect his legs. But these things, they will take your leg off and your head off if you happen to fall over. But no, you have to watch the video, everybody. It is. It's insane. It's pretty awesome. It is. It is definitely Russian.

Yeah. They even made it kind of painted it to look as if it were like a duck. See, that's I was kind of going for the hobby horse. Actually, if you look at it, it looks like he's riding a toy raptor from Jurassic Park. Yeah. I mean, the yellow beak, the green eye area, you know, maybe it's just because I just had Peking duck recently.

It's on my mind. OK, moving on. Yeah. Let's talk about Hoggis. Hoggis. Yes. Well, this is actually probably my favorite story of the week. You can't beat this. A Scottish newspaper, you know, they still list TV coverage in newspapers, believe it or not, in some places in the world.

I fondly remember going through TV Guide at my grandma's house every weekend when I was a young'un. And, you know, if you look through the listings, they pay somebody to actually write up little stories about the show and tell you what's going to be on. I don't think anybody reads them. That's why somebody could have this much fun with it.

Well, people found this one. That's for sure. It's gone incredibly viral. So President Trump, the inauguration at 4 p.m. on BBC One. After a long absence, the Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories.

Among the most common is the what if the Nazis had won the Second World War setting. But this huge interactive virtual reality project, which was one-fold on TV, in the press and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present. It goes on and on. It's quite funny. Thank God. I thought you were going to read the whole thing.

No, I stopped. But I mean, this is hilarious. It's pretty good. It's pretty damn good. Even if you don't agree with the politics, you got it. This is the best writing that there's probably ever been for a TV show in 20 years. And I do miss TV Guide.

We used to put our initials by the shows in the grid. So, like, you know, that's how you called your show. Like, I would I would go in and I would get the Dukes of Hazzard and the A-Team and my grandfather would get the Love Boat. So I love Love Boat. Well, no, he just I think he was going out because my grandmother liked to watch Hee Haw.

And so he would rather watch the Love Boat than Hee Haw. I'm a picking and I'm a grinning. I've seen hundreds of episodes of each. Well, Facebook has been grappling with the fake news stories and what we're going to do about all of that.

They've unveiled a small test last month here in the United States that makes it easy for users to flag suspected articles, which are then sent to Corrective, a German nonprofit investigative journalism organization, which will confirm. And they're doing it in time and rolling it out in Germany for their elections.

So lucky Germany. Ausgesagnet. Exactly. Netflix is in the news because they are apparently doing very well. They have they beat their their growth targets by 36 percent and they have made a lot more money than they thought they were going to make, which is, you know, it's surprising considering that there's not a damn thing to watch on Netflix right now.

It's all about their original programming. They really did a good job of reinventing themselves that way. You know, this used to be a company that basically just mailed you DVDs. Yeah, no, they only mailed you. See, you know, they were like the Elon Musk, you know, they knew that they they were waiting for the Internet to evolve.

So they just got in on the ground floor, mailing DVDs, waiting for you to get a fast enough Internet connection where they could just stream it to you. And now they can. So now you can still get DVDs, but I don't know if I'd go down that route. But the other interesting thing is with their original content, they have just gone whole hog on comedy.

You cannot go a week without it. Like at least one or two new comedy specials. Some of them, I'd say maybe 60 percent of them are just terrible. They, you know, man. Yeah. But they they just hit the whales. They totally landed the whales.

I got Jerry Seinfeld. He's bringing his comedians in cars, getting coffee show and two exclusive stand up specials. Chris Rock is back. Dave Chappelle is back. And Chris and Rock are going to get 20 million a pop for their specials, which is nuts. And Amy Schumer is doing one, which I really couldn't care less about.

Her last one was so bad. Yeah, I didn't like her last one either. And I like I like her. I think, you know, on occasion she's funny. But man, that stand up special is just a dog. Yeah. Well, I mean, Netflix is nailing it with a comedy. That's for sure. I mean, I think some of their original programming is great. We'll talk about that a bit in media candy when we get there.

And they're they're nailing on documentaries as well, particularly the food related stuff. They've got some great food documentaries on there. So it's you know, they're doing well. Good on them. I'm glad I bought some stock last year. Oh, God, you got stuck in everything. The one the one documentary that they did release that I have to say is terrible.

Anthony Bourdain's first show from 2002 is on there. It just came out. I watched like 10 minutes of it last night. It is so bad. Yeah, he had not found his voice yet. He's 12 years old at it. It's crazy. But anyway, the real story about Netflix.

And this is a story from Tech Dirt that I just love the title. Netflix may not be worried about the looming death of net neutrality, but startups should be goddamn terrified. Damn right. They can't pay for it. It's pay to play. I mean, this is like your poison or you're some unknown hairband on the Sunset Strip in the 80s.

You're screwed. No, we've I mean, I we've talked about net neutrality ad nauseum on the show, and I still recommend everybody go find the Ask a Ninja episode about net neutrality because it stands to this day to be the single best description of what net neutrality is. But yeah, Netflix has been quoted weakening of U.S. net neutrality laws.

Should that occur is unlikely to material affect our domestic margins or service quality because we are now popular enough with consumers to keep our relationships with ISP stable. The big problem is, yeah, you're big enough. Everybody else isn't. Exactly. Yeah.

So, I mean, we do. This is coming. This is why net neutrality is super important. Unfortunately, we know it's dead as a doornail. It's it's on its way out the door, unfortunately. Yep. That that dream of the Internet being the being the great leveler. You hear that? Yeah. You hear that stamps dot com.

You need to you need to start getting getting on board with this show so we can pay to actually get it out to the peoples. Exactly. So we talk about streaming music a lot. Well, you do. I really generally don't care. But this this crossed my my desk and I thought it was pretty interesting because in Germany, streaming was a quarter of the 2016 music market, which it seems pretty low because Germany apparently liked to buy.

This is I think maybe this is where friend of the show MXV should move to buy all his vinyl because it seems like they have a thriving market over there. There's a lot of markets around the world where it's still just, you know, it's a little bit behind the problem. They'll get there. They have much stronger legislation, especially particularly for payments of artists rights, which is why Spotify has not been so quick to go in and sign up all the Rammstein's of the world over there.

The same holds true for Australia. It's still very much, you know, I think it's even more than or I'm sorry, less than a quarter in Australia. Still, people are still buying physical product in a lot of other places in the world. But, you know, it's only a matter of time. That's what we see.

You know, Britain was also behind the U.S. in terms of streaming. Now it's almost all streaming. It'll it'll get there. It's it's a progressive system. But, you know, they've just there's still a honeymoon phase going on over there. You still get some some actual physical product, which is nice. Good for them. Well, I see I see a market opportunity here.

If Australia is really big on physical media, I say we just go clean out every secondhand music store, put it on a barge, float it down there. Me and you will just sit on the top. You can bring the kid and the wife, throw them in the back and hopefully the kid doesn't get seasick.

And then just move to Australia and just open a open a UCD store down there. That sounds like a perfect plan. Let's talk about that later. OK, Mars Rover. We just talked about the moon, but the Mars Rover Curiosity is still up there doing things, which is pretty damn cool.

In recent weeks, it's been examining slabs of rock crosshatched with shallow ridges that likely originated as cracks in drying mud. So this is basically proving that there was water on Mars. Oh, there we go. So very, very cool. I love the fact that this thing is still up there and kicking around.

And my other favorite aspect of this story is that they called the younger mudstone that they think that they found Old Soaker. Old Soaker. Yeah, could use some PR people over there, I'm thinking. Well, I mean, come on. We've got, you know, we've got our silly names in our national park.

So that is true. Fine with that. Yes. Google is starting to buy up chunks of Twitter. Are these actually coming under Google or under Alphabet? Oh, I'm sure it will be Alphabet. But I keep forgetting.

I think everybody forgets. It's like, you know, when you go from 2016 to 2017, you still can't figure out how to write a check. It is kind of funny how all the press basically just did that. Like for two weeks, it was Alphabet, Alphabet, Alphabet. And everybody's like, ah, fuck it. It's Google. It's Google. Yeah. But remember, Google still is part of Alphabet.

So it is the G in the Alphabet. Yes. So Google might be well, actually, they got offers from Google. So it's not just that Alphabet is the parent company. So Google still is its own thing. So, yes, even though we make fun of it, it's still pretty funny. It should be Alphabet's Google, not just.

Yes. They bought Fabric and Crashlytics, which are some nerdy things because, and that's for the developers. They're taking the 60 employees from Twitter and offering them jobs. And the interesting thing about this for me was that Twitter's development side and their dev tools and everything.

I'm like, I was amazed they still had dev tools because every developer on the planet has run to the hills because they were so terrible with how they handled their API. Yeah, I'm surprised, really surprised by this. Look, everything on the back end of Twitter that I've discovered or tried to use ever has sucked horrendously.

Yeah. So, all right. Well, hey, good on them. They lived the Web 2.0 dream. They built something that sucked and sold it for a lot of money. Well, they sold it. No, they bought something that sucked or maybe they bought something that was great, tried to work with it, fix it, and then sold it probably for less money than they paid for it.

That's the real Web 2.0 dream right there. Yes, clever financing seems to be the way to go. Well, one thing good is coming from Google at this point. Android Police, which is apparently not Karma Police, but some sort of site that reports on Android.

They're reporting a new feature that has been started to roll out for some users in Google Maps 944 Beta that shows parking information near your destination when you set off driving, which I think is kind of cool, except if you're in L.A. because the parking information... The entire thing would be red.

Well, yes. First off, there will be no parking anywhere. And secondly, by the time that you get to your destination two hours later, whatever parking that you set off in is now gone. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it is location dependent, that's for sure. Santa Monica should just be black. You can't park in Santa Monica, so.

Pretty much, yeah. So they're going to roll out with three levels of parking availability, easy, medium, or limited for areas where parking is typically hard to come by. I like this. This is a cool little thing. In addition to, you know, the traffic maps, I love the idea of like, oh boy, I better park like five blocks away.

I'm never going to get there, so. Yeah. They just need that tip, that one last level, which is FU for Los Angeles. Don't bother. Yeah. Stay home, take the train, Uber, get an Uber Air. It'll get you there faster. Yeah, that's true.

And Apple and Amazon have ended a decade-long audiobook exclusivity deal, which made me go, blah, audiobooks are over 10 years old. But apparently they are. Yeah, no, I've been a member for, on Audible since 2002. Yeah, it's just, you know, we're old.

It just makes me feel weird. So anyways, the point being, apparently. Well, and also, audiobooks have been around since the CD days. Don't you remember driving? And tapes, tapes. We had audiobooks on tape. Book on tape. You know I mean the digital version. Okay. Okay. Anyways, so apparently there was an exclusivity agreement that Audible basically made with Apple.

It's smart on Audible's part. So they were the only seller of audiobooks inside of iTunes for the longest time. Those pesky Germans, they screwed it up for everybody. So complaints from German publishers and investigations by the EU antitrust regulators have brought this down. And just like your story earlier, well, they've decided to just get rid of that agreement while this investigation was ongoing.

So they would have been sued about it. But instead, they just kind of went, you know what, guys? We were going to get rid of that anyways. We don't know what agreement you're talking about. It's amazing how that happens, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Ah, timing. So the theory behind this, and I love this.

Let me just read the statement from the German antitrust agency. With the deletion of the exclusivity agreement, Apple will now have the opportunity to purchase digital audiobooks from other suppliers. This will enable a wide range of offerings and lower prices for consumers. I would like to see any lower pricing ever.

Because we all know there's collusion on pricing on these things. So give me a fucking break. Yeah, that was the other antitrust lawsuit that was filed against them in New York for publishers. Yes, there will be no lower prices for consumers that come from this. No, no. You know, that digital book that they paid off with the first 2,000 downloads that now is just a cash cow for them, that is never going to get lower.

Nope. Well, that's the way of the world. Now, do we know if this is just in Germany or if this is worldwide or I'll be able to buy audiobooks on iTunes from other providers here in the States? I am assuming this will be worldwide because they wouldn't be reporting on it here otherwise.

Yeah, you never know. Although you never know. All right. It does not state specifically in the story, unfortunately. So we'll have to look into it. But I believe it'd be worldwide. Okay. We will have to do some investigative journalism or investigative clicking. Oh, come on. If Brian happens, if somebody throws a link at him and it hits him over the head, we will have a resolution on this next week.

That's assuming I actually check Twitter. That's true. Yeah. All right. The United States Postal Service. They are now in the hunt for the dark web. The criminals. Really? Because they can't find half the things I mail. That's true. If they'd spend more time getting my box here, I would be okay with it.

But apparently if you buy drugs, that's one way to have it show up. Buy some meth on the dark web and it will show up along with the feds. Hey, USPS. Why don't we start with my dark postcards? Yeah. Why don't we find those? Oh, man. So they've got a list to get a list to getting a link for an investigative internet analyst to start as soon as possible.

I'm going to go apply. The investigator will use data from a number of sources, including open research and classified sources, too. Ooh, spooky. The cybercrime program reviews network data, collects forensic images, researches tools and technologies, administers hardware and software.

That's the one that got me. I'm just like, you don't want that job. No, no, no, no, no. You do not want the hardware and software administrative job. That's IT. And they also conduct online investigations into black market dark web activities affecting the USPS, its customers and employees.

Another similar job listing for an intelligence gathering specialist is also there. So you want to go work for the government? Hey, Chelsea Manning just got pardoned. She needs a job. There you go. Perfect. Security.

The Cyber Wire is back. I got to figure out a new funny voice every week because you guys made fun of me last week. Oh, God. We're back with Dave Bittner and all the good stuff. Hello, gentlemen. How are you?

You know, it's a special day for us, a special week. We're celebrating our one year anniversary of the Cyber Wire. Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations. And here's hoping everybody makes it to two. We'll see how the year goes.

Exactly. Yeah. We've done about almost 300 podcasts in the past year. So that's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah. Somebody should give you a raise. I know, right? Yeah. To your words, to my boss's ears. But now I tallied it up.

I've done over 500 interviews in the past year. So you'd think by now I'd be better at it than I am. But what are you going to do, right? What are you going to do? 500 times the charm. Yeah, exactly. 501. Today's the day. Today's the day. Oh, man.

So let's kick it off. What you got for us? Well, I think the big story today, a fascinating write-up by Brian Krebs over on Krebs on Security, really digging into the Mirai botnet. And, of course, Brian Krebs was one of the primary targets of the Mirai botnet.

So I guess for him, it's personal. This is like revenge porn for him. He's a little invested. He is, absolutely. And I don't know if you guys have had the time to read through this. Have you seen it? By his own admission, it is by far the longest thing he's ever written on his site.

And, again, it's personal. But, boy, is it fascinating. The long and short of it is that the conclusions he's come to is that the Mirai botnet, which, to remind everyone, is the huge botnet attacks that happened last fall.

You know, took down Dine, took down security. Everything. Yeah. And, you know, this was a big DDoS thing with the cameras and, you know, all the Internet of Things devices. The conclusions that Krebs has come to is that basically it was a handful of teenagers, undergrads mostly, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and at least one in the UAE.

And they kind of saw themselves as DDoS protection entrepreneurs. And they got their start taking down Minecraft servers. And I did not know this. My kids play Minecraft. I don't know if either of you guys have spent much time in Minecraft.

I'm not five, no, and I don't have a kid. Bam Bam has not figured out how to play Minecraft yet. All right. Not yet. It's still a few years in my future, but I'm very familiar with it. I've worked with a couple of people that do some nonprofit stuff based on Minecraft and teaching programming to kids.

Yeah. No, it is. I mean, it's sort of a – I look at it as kind of an online Lego kind of thing, you know, where it really lets kids be really creative and, you know, sort of have this open-ended world and explore things. So, you know, when it comes to these kinds of things, I look at it as being sort of a positive thing.

I know, you know, my kids enjoy it and they've learned a lot by playing it. But anyway, apparently the Minecraft DDoS protection business is highly competitive because if a server goes down – Minecraft uses these game servers. And if a game server goes down, the Minecraft servers will switch to a different server.

So if you're someone running a server – and by the way, one of the things that we learned is that you can make about $50,000 a month hosting a popular Minecraft server. So just to tip out there, maybe we're all in the wrong business. No doubt. Wow, Jason.

We're going back to running servers. Oh, man. Damn. Exactly. So it's in – these Minecraft servers, they have to stay up and running. So they hire companies to provide DDoS protection. And one of the big companies was a company called ProxyPipe.

And they were one of the companies that found themselves being hit by these DDoS attacks. And again, Krebs is speculating that this group of folks who are running the Mirai botnet, they started out by basically trying to take down ProxyPipe.

It's a protection racket. The whole thing is a protection racket. Well, while offering their own set of Minecraft DDoS protection services. So, you know, take down ProxyPipe so that people will switch to their service. Wait, you said these guys are from Pennsylvania, New Jersey?

It's a bunch of Italian kids. That's all it is. Right, right. So, yeah, so let's throw in some ethnic accusations, Jason, while we're at it. I'm Italian. I'm from Pittsburgh. I can do that. So it's okay. All right. Well, I stand corrected. Yeah.

I had family in the lifestyle. This is why I can smell this. We can smell our own. I see. All right. Well, all right. Very good. I'll take your word for it. So, you know, it's interesting. Krebs seems to think that the Professor Moriarty behind this whole thing is a Rutgers undergrad who refers to himself as a passionate entrepreneur, which is an interesting way of putting it.

Krebs reports that he's communicated with this guy. And, of course, this guy says he didn't do anything. And he said, in order to do something like this, you'd have to be a sociopath. And trust me, I'm not a sociopath. Oh, it says every sociopath ever.

Right. So, again, you know, Krebs, a lot of it is speculative. And, you know, we're sort of reporting on Krebs' conclusions. It is a fascinating, long read. And basically, interesting that, well, a couple particularly interesting things to me.

One is that the person that Krebs is claiming did this has a buddy, a college buddy, who basically outs him, you know, just quoted conversations about how, you know, you know, I asked the guy, did he do this? And he said, yep, I did it. So you have those, you know, there's your problem.

You know, they always say the biggest problem with security is people. And there you go. So that knocking noise he might hear on his front door is probably the FBI. So we'll see, you know, it's a developing story. But the other part of this that I find fascinating, you know, someone in one of the comments on Krebs' website said, so basically, this is a kid.

Imagine what a determined state actor can do. And then made the point that Bruce Schneier, who, of course, another, you know, well-respected security blogger and professional, you know, wrote about this being a sophisticated practice around for taking down the entire Internet.

You know, Schneier wrote that, you know, these were sophisticated, you know, nation state actors and that sort of thing. And if it turns out that this is just a bunch of kids, you know, what an interesting outcome. It reminded me, this is sort of a roundabout reminder, but it reminded me, you know, way back in 2002, locally here in the D.C. area, we had a sniper.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And, you know, it was actually, if you were living around here, it was, you know, that was my wife's parents lived in that neck of the woods where, you know, people were going to pump gas and being shot and killed. And, you know, 10 people died and three people were injured.

It was, you know, tragic. And they got the guys. One of them was executed and the other one is, you know, serving out the rest of his time in prison. But what this reminds me of is during that whole sniper incident, there were all these profiles that were released, you know, and it was, you know, we definitely believe that this is probably a middle-aged white man, a lone wolf.

And all the reports indicate that we're looking for a white van. All the reports were completely and 100% wrong. Like, it couldn't have been more opposite. It was two guys, you know, two black guys and they were in, you know, they'd like hollowed out the back of like a 72 Buick or something.

Yeah, it was like a big Lincoln or something. Yeah, it was completely the opposite of what everyone had thought. And, you know, that's what this reminded me of was that, you know, it was easy. The, I think the scale of this attack, the scale of the Mirai button, it made everyone think, well, who could possibly do this but a nation state.

So it's a good reminder that while certainly nation states can do this kind of thing, you know, we're in this era where the scale of these attacks could come from anybody. All it takes is a laptop and a giant set of balls. Because honestly, I mean, you have to have a giant set of balls not to think you're going to get caught.

And, and, and you know what? If they're kids, they're undergrads, they're dumb enough to be smart enough to do it, but think that they're never going to get caught. That's, it's the folly of youth. It is. It is the folly and the arrogance of youth. So we'll see how it plays out.

Obviously the person that Krebs named has denied doing it. It's a, you know, read, read the whole thing. It is a long read, but it's a fascinating read. If you're interested in this sort of thing, hats off to Brian Krebs, who, you know, really did the, the deep digging on this. I just hope he's right.

That's all I'm just saying. I hope he's right. You know, some of the stuff is circumstantial, but boy, a lot of the dots do connect. So check it out. I just got to say, you know, for the millennials out there, you should be proud. Everybody says that you don't do anything. Look at him. Look at this.

Right. Go big or go home. Right. Exactly. You want to change the world. There you go. Yeah. Here's a baby monitor for you. Do what you got to do. Yeah. So, I mean, looking at other things we've got this week, we've got this story about Google.

Yeah. Taking their self-driving cars offline. Because there are, there are bad people out there. There are teenagers who want to infiltrate your, your internet of things. And I think a car is definitely a big internet of thing thing. Now, now, how does this work precisely? Which part?

The taking offline? Yes. Do, do you as the owner of the car have a button that one has to press to bring back online? I think what they're doing is keep, they're taking away a persistent internet connection and only pinging home when they need more data, like for map data or traffic data.

And God knows that can't be hacked. Well, but they're, they're trying to, they're trying to reduce their attack surface. Okay. Well, I mean, I wouldn't want a persistent connection anyways. That's pretty messed up. Well, if you're streaming your Spotify, you definitely would. Well, I mean, I mean, think about, think about how many cars have persistent connections now.

You know, that's a, that's a big feature in the showroom these days is, you know, just making your car a hotspot. But I think you can, you can remove that from the, the command and control system versus the, the wifi hotspot in the car. You know, you don't, you don't put your little 3G hotspot in direct connection with the car.

You have a different subsystem that works with the car. You can do that. Sure you do, Jason. Sure you do. No, I'm telling, I'm telling you what to do. I'm not telling you what they did. That's the, that's the difference. I'm telling you how to fix it. Not how it is. All I know is I got a call while we started the podcast from my car, my, my car dealer, because my car had informed them that I was due for service next month.

Nice. Yes. Not kidding. I've got to switch that off pretty soon. Didn't you just buy that thing? That you're going out to the driveway to have a stern conversation with your car. I'm going to have to go, no internet after 10 PM.

Exactly. Right. You could have put the, uh, the, the dealer on the do not call list. And you have, and your car is German. So don't you have to speak to it in German? Yeah. It is German. So, yeah. Oh, well. Anyways, I had to switch that off. Good luck.

Yeah. I know. See if you can find that button. Yeah. Right. Right. Exactly. Uh, next, uh, next, next one I got is this, uh, crazy hack for iPhones running iOS 10 that you can basically crash the messaging app by sending a message. Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. You'd think that if there's one thing that your messaging app shouldn't do. It's a crash when you send a message. Like there should be. Yeah. I mean, you know, I, yeah, uh, that would be the, you know, above all else, your messaging app should be immune to any kind of message being sent.

But, uh, yeah, it's an interesting bug. Yeah. And it comes down to the, it's come to, comes down to what they call the variation selector, which is, uh, when, you know, Apple decided to be more inclusive and make us all the colors of the rainbow emojis, they added the variation selector.

So you can say, okay, I want this emoji, but I want it in this, this color. Right. And that's really where the bug comes into it. Ah, interesting. So it sends a malformed variation selector, which then, you know, basically makes it shit the bed. So don't try this at home.

And I know I'm going to get four emails this week of somebody that listens to this show saying my messages won't work. I've already texted this to you five times. Yeah. I see. That's why I don't, I don't answer your texts. Well, you'll either.

Yeah. You'll get that. And you'll probably also get just as many people saying, well, this is why I use Android. Yeah. This is how to, this is how to break your thumb tendon. This is why I use Android. Is we basically purposefully ignore all the different Android things that we could be putting in this segment.

It's interesting that it actually takes down the phone. It doesn't just, doesn't just crash the, uh, the messaging. You can read, you can reboot the phone. It comes back and then messages app just won't work. So it's, you know, it'll, it'll restart the system, come back. Uh, and the link that we have has ways to basically do it and undo it, but don't do it.

Don't do it. Don't be a dick. It's kind of a jerk move. Yeah. And last, last week I got, I got, uh, four, four messages from people who actually went and looked up what the singer of dead or alive looked like when they died. Oh yeah. Uh, and I said, don't do it.

I said, don't do it. But, uh, nope, nope. They got mad at me because they did what I said, don't do. And so of course this time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, everybody that's listening that comes from that, that particular, uh, mindset, don't, don't give us money on Patreon.

Right. Right. Whatever you do, do not sign up for Patreon. Whatever you do, do not go to patreon.com slash GOG podcast. Do not. Yes. Yes. Do not send me a new MacBook Pro. I do not. Oh, actually don't send me a new MacBook Pro. Those things are crap. I'll take an old one, but yeah.

So, uh, let's get back to the show here. Uh, Julian Assange. Well, speaking of reverse psychology. Yes. So, uh, yes, as we, we mentioned a little bit earlier, Chelsea Manning is, uh, getting a, his sentence or her, her sentence commuted. And Assange, the whole big story now has been, uh, is he going to actually turn himself in?

Well, that's what he said he would do. If he, if he said, if Chelsea Manning got his sentence, her sentence commuted, that he would come to the U S. Yep. Right. Well, uh, so he's saying, I stand by everything I said, including the offer to go to the United States. If Chelsea Manning sentence was commuted, it's going to be commuted or sorry, it's not going to be commuted until May.

We can have many discussions to that point. So he's saying, I got till May to figure out how to get out of this. Well, well, and he keeps doing his Q and A's on Periscope. Nobody's going to hear about it. That's true. Hey, at least he's not doing them on Vine. Yeah. He, and he did originally try to weasel out of it, you know, saying that, well, since he was in prison for seven years, then, you know, it was, I think the quote was, it was well short of what he sought.

So, um, but, uh, you know, bowing to pressure, I suppose this is sort of a put up or shut up moment for him. So really is, um, you know, yeah. Be careful about your bluster cause it may come back to haunt you. So, um, called your bluff there, buddy.

So find somebody, so find somebody else to dress your kitty for you. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how much, if, if, if at all, this was a mic drop moment for Obama as he signed it and went, okay, Julian, I think he, I don't think he dropped the mic. I think he pretty much flipped the bird. Yeah.

Now we'll, we'll see. Like you said, he's got plenty of time to, to, uh, to come up with a strategy to get out of this or just, you know, not do it. So yeah, it's not like he's not going to do it. It's not like he can be a bigger douche at this point. So nope. The man has many marks against him.

That's for sure. Yes. Yes. That's true. Uh, speaking of people that have many marks against them, the CIA, uh, they've just put 12 million declassified pages on the web for everyone to go check out and, uh, play with. Have you guys looked at it yet?

Oh, I have not. Yeah. I haven't either. I'm just hoping that we can finally get to the bottom of this Bigfoot thing. There's a squatch out there. No, they, yeah. It's got all the, the UFO stuff in there and all the, the crackpot, uh, you know, reports.

From, from what I've seen from the tinfoil hat type folk that, uh, dived in and decided to read all 12 million in one night when I can't even finish a book in a week. Um, there's much to do about nothing. Oh, even the, even the conspiracy people are saying that there's nothing in there.

Yeah. Well, well, they just assume that, you know, it's in the other 12 million documents. They didn't. Oh, it's in the other 12 million. It's the other 12 million. That's really got the juicy stuff. But, uh, this 12 million, ah, it's all just, uh, it's all bullshit. These are the decoy 12 million.

Yeah. Yes. These are, these are not the 12 million you're looking for. No. Although I, I like, I was not aware of how the CIA had originally handled this, how, uh, they had, in order to read the files, you had to go to the national archives in college park, Maryland, which is, you know, a stone's throw from here.

I actually have a friend who works there. You can get a chalupa and head on over for lunch and, and read your heart's content. I know. Uh, but you had to go there in person between the hours of 9 AM and 4 30 PM. And they had the grand total of four computers, uh, there, you know, for people who, so people could access the archives.

And they were all running windows XP. Right. Right. Right. Uh, no, I'm pretty sure they were running windows, Bob, just to, just to make it that much harder, Bob, bring me, bring me my documents. Right.

And, uh, what's his, what was the little paper clips name? Clippy comes up and says, I see you're trying to look at the state secrets. Okay. How can I help you? Would you like, right? Would you like, exactly right? Okay. No, I, I actually enjoyed checking these out.

Um, and when I was laid up this week with the back problem, I had my iPad and I was going through the old, uh, presidential security briefings that they were giving, giving them in the mornings. Cause you can get, I mean, a ton of them, but you can read what JFK was getting in the morning, which is really fascinating.

So I thought it was Marilyn Monroe. No, I'm sure she was fascinating too. Um, but, uh, give us a, give us a taste of, you know, what kinds of things, you know, a JFK would get, uh, you know, what, what was the flavor of those sorts of things? Uh, the, uh, was it the mutual defense act between the Soviets, North Korea and China was one of them, like the morning that they said that they signed it, which was kind of

cool talking about different areas of, uh, Vietnam and North Korea and like in South Korea and what was all going on in that region. Uh, lots of Russian stuff. It was, it was very interesting in talking about the different capabilities of some of the, uh, the space programs that the Russians were working on and like, you know, the long haul rockets and stuff.

It was, it was a pretty, I mean, all this stuff is in the news now, but like, if you go back and read it, like just seeing that, cause it's all just scanned pages from what Kennedy would get. So it's kind of cool and kind of takes you back to that, that era. And it's just like, this is, this is really neat. I highly recommend just checking them out one day, just, you know, for shits and giggles.

It's fun. Yeah. A little time machine to see this, even though I imagine the style of communication was, you know, indicative of that time. Actually, no, it was, it was very terse and very well-written and just very straightforward. Really? Yeah. The language, I mean, I didn't see any difference from the language today to back then, which maybe the conspiracy guys will just say that's because it was written yesterday, you fool.

Right, right, right. Uh, yes, conspiracy theorists, start your engines. Yeah. All right, gentlemen. Well, that's, that's what I've got this week. Uh, so, uh, take care. Be safe. That's a wrap. Stay safe. I'll check in with you. Check in with you next week.

Assuming there's an internet. Right. Ups and doodads. I finally got one of those things that I've always wanted for my office this week. Brian, I got one of those swivelly arm monitor mount dealios.

Oh, fancy. I've always thought that they were just like super expensive and I've got, you know, two 27 inch monitors here and I'm like, Oh, maybe I can get one of those things. Cause they were on like, you know, old boxes to try and raise them up and all this stuff. And I found one for like 75 bucks on Amazon with that has dual arms.

It looks like a Hydra. So, but what's great is it had the rotating thing. So now I've got a regular monitor and a vertical monitor. I've never had that. My God, the vertical monitor is the greatest invention ever. It's pretty cool, isn't it? I like, I've got, uh, I don't have two monitors on my setup right now.

I have a laptop that sits on one, one kind of arm of it. And then my large monitor on the other, but every now and then I, I, I flip it around. It's pretty cool. This is, this is definitely one of the best purchases I've made. I mean, granted, you know, the Herman Miller mirror too, which I don't have anymore, sadly was the best office purchase I had for a long time, but I can't afford another one.

But this little $75 gadget really has changed, changed the game for me because I can, you know, it's, everything is in perfect alignment now and there aren't 10 boxes on my desk trying to get everything to the right level. And whenever, you know, I'd knock the desk, everything moves and I got to redo it.

This is beautiful. I love it. Right. I'm awesome. I'm in the, I'm in the ninth or the finally got to the 20th century. We will add a link to this, to our little, uh, grumpy old geeks.com slash store area. So people can take a look and order it if they want to and help us out a bit.

Most def. So there's this ball that's been going viral that's showing up in Facebook ads and things like that for me. It's called play impossible reinventing the ball because you know, I have a whole commentary about how no wonder there's no imagination anymore.

And this is, uh, this is definitely it. The toy used to just be the fucking ball, but, uh, apparently now this is, you know, for kids. Yeah. This is an internet of things ball that, uh, you know, with your phone teaches you to play different games and stupid shit like that. Uh, try to look into it a little bit, go to their own website, play impossible.com.

Uh, if you'd like to, you know, sign up now, you could watch a sneak peek video. You can't really, there's, there's, there's not any information on their site itself. Uh, actually it's even broken English. Sign up for a pre-sales discount offer and to watch sneak peek video. It must be made in Russia.

It's sneak peek P E A K. Yes, that's, yes. I, I didn't even catch that one. It's, it's spelled incorrectly. Uh, so I Googled a little bit more to try to find out anything about this ball so we could actually, you know, I could put it in the show notes. So I found, uh, the design company that is doing all the promo and, and materials for, for, uh, play impossible new deal design.

Uh, there's much more information about this ball on their site than there is on the marketing materials that they are being paid to create for the people. Uh, play impossible game ball is a multi-sport smart ball that injects digital magic into physical play to keep kids challenged, entertained, and moving play impossible.

Look to us to bring their new fun performance brand to life. And we delivered a brand strategy, digital slash physical design experience strategy and engineering framework to launch play impossible into market success. No, you fucking didn't. Okay. I don't even want to open it because we live in the world of autoplay now.

So yes, it will go autoplay crazy on you. So you guys are doing a horrible job anyways, moving on. Um, I talked in the past about 23 snaps and how it's a great little thing. If you've got a, a newborn in and you want to share snaps with your family members and things like that all digitally and online, I still use it regularly.

It's great. It's completely free. The way that they try to make money, of course, is through printouts of stuff, which my parents like, um, you know, they want, my mom asked me if I would come, you know, show her how to do the printouts so they could have something physical from all the photos and things that were uploading to them.

So I looked into it a little bit and here is where I have the problem with 23 snaps. I understand that I can, I can see, I can tell you right now from your notes, I know exactly what you're going to say. They are outrageously priced. That's pretty pricey. It's insanely expensive for actual physical prints from them.

Um, 20, almost 30 bucks for a hardcover photo book of 24 photos, 24 photos. Yeah. Uh, 10, uh, if you want just individual prints, you have to do a minimum order of 10 of them and it starts at about nine bucks. So a buck a print that's, that's you're outpricing yourselves there guys.

You're that's just getting greedy. I, I get, you know, your service is fantastic and I'm using it for free and I should throw you a few bucks, but I'm not gonna. Here's the thing, they're outsourcing that. So you've got two steps of middlemen on here, you know, cause I'm sure they didn't go by the digital printers and they're not doing it themselves.

They've got a third party that they're outsourcing too. So they're a middleman. Yeah. So nowadays you can just go straight to the, straight to the source and get it for much less than that. Yes. And kind of exactly what I'm going to suggest next. I don't know if you've heard of groove books. I saw them on shark tank. Yeah, they were, I was very interested in them when they were on shark tank.

They are absolutely fantastic. Now it is a subscription service. I do not like subscription services, but I, with a newborn, you're going to be printing a book a month for your parents. It's not that big of a deal. It's $3. It's $3 for a monthly photo book, which is up to a hundred photos.

Have you ordered, have you ordered and got one yet? Yes. How are they? Done. They're fantastic. Okay. Cause I saw this in the notes today and I went and made my first hundred page photo book. Now you're not getting a hardcover photo book. It's not, you know, something that's going to, you're not going to put it on your coffee table.

It's just a flip book full of photos that you pick. If the app is super easy to use, you can actually split it. Like if you're signed in on say, you know, my wife takes phones with her or takes photos with her phone. I take photos with mine. We're both signed into the same account. We have the app on both of our phones.

She can upload 20 photos from her phone. Then I can sign in, upload another 70 from my phone and we print a book. Yeah. That's great. It's super easy to use. Super cheap. This is perfect. I do think it's funny though, because they're part of their marketing says, um, they call it your physically printed photos are now, or it's the app that helps you free your photos and put them in a monthly photo book for years.

We, we marketed digital as that's freeing your, your content, but now they're saying that physically printing photos are the freed ones now. So anyways, yeah, no, I thought it was pretty funny. And the quality is good. The quality is good. It's, it's as good as if you just emailed them to CVS and they printed them out.

It's certainly a hell of a lot easier than printing them out and cheaper than printing them out on your own printer using photo paper and ink. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. A hundred photos for two 99 a month. Um, and the one thing that got me on this was that they're like the, aren't the pages perforated so you can just tear them out and give them to someone.

Yep. You can just tear it right out. So that's what I loved. Yeah. Yeah. We had a few photos that, you know, we threw in, we, we basically made two copies of a single book, one for us and then one for my parents. Okay. That was my next. Yeah. That was my next question. Cause I couldn't find a way to make two books of the same one. Cause I wanted to make two, but it just kind of went off and did it.

Yeah, you can do it. Okay. I'll RTFM, but the downside is it's going to take two weeks to get my first book. It takes a little while to get there, but again, it's so damn cheap. No, this is a, this is a no brainer. I mean, this is honestly a no brainer.

Two 99 for something physical from with your photos. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's almost throwaway. Like, you know, you can just look through it once and toss it if you don't care and just get another one. But I do believe that I saw on their site that they have little binders that you can buy to keep your little books in.

I'd imagine they probably do. I haven't gotten that far into it so far. We've just ordered a couple, you know, we're on our second month right now of printing out photos. So, okay, well, they're not paying us. So let's move on. Exactly. Oh, I found a new bike gadget for you. And I don't know if you're going to like this one.

It's called the B line. It's a bike compass that lets you choose your path. Oh, because there's so many different ways I could go without dying in Prius traffic. So what this does is you're, you get on your bike, you clip this thing onto the, you know, the stand where the handlebars, the handlebar mount and you with your smartphone, because God forbid you do anything without a fucking smartphone, you tell it where you're going.

And then what it does is it pulls up an arrow and it just points at it. No matter which way you turn, the arrow just points it where you're going. That's it. I love that the promotional video actually shows them on a road where he's following the road signs or the road lines anyways. Yeah. This is the dumbest thing ever.

This would only be useful if you're like the Stranger Things kids and you're lost in the middle of the woods and you're trying to find something. Or find your way back to camp. You know, if you, if you can, if you can set a waypoint where your camp is. Yeah. But you know, if you can do that, then you've got a smartphone with you and then you got not access anyway.

The whole thing is just kind of silly. It basically sets a, sets a direction on a compass and that's it. And then it drops that on your bike after you've installed it onto your handlebars, which is dumb. So this is stupid. I mean, we talked about something else that kind of did the same thing, except it did like 7,000.

It did a hell of a lot more and you actually were interested in getting that one. So I thought. I was. And the pricing on that finally came out and I think it was about 99 bucks or something. This, which only does this one thing, is $121. Yeah, it's 99 pounds, but it has free international shipping.

Yeah, whatever. This is. But it's a Kickstarter success story, which tells you everything you need to know about Kickstarter. Okay, my next one is called the Icarus. This is a, it's a German thing. It's a German exercise device where you put on the VR goggles, you lay down and you'll shake your booty and fly through the rings.

That's pretty much what it is. It's, uh, it's this thing that you lay on and you use your body weight to move it around. Yep. And, uh, now they figured out, oh, well you can throw some VR goggles on and then fly through some rings. Um, and if I were incredibly rich, I would have one of these.

I think it's cool as hell. If I was rich, I'd have one. But by the tagline that got me is once you have it, you'll never want to walk again. And which is too bad because it costs $10,000 after shipping. Shipping is $1,200 alone because it's that heavy.

Uh, you, you're not gonna be able to afford gas. So, you know, I would like to be able to walk again after that. That would be nice. Now this would be one of those rich, rich person things that they get and they use three times and then basically you just end up using it as like a laundry. You, you, you, you dry your clothes on top of it.

Yeah. And it sits in the other room for $10,000. Also, I was going to say, you're going to see this in the background of a bunch of movies to show rich privilege. Oh yeah, totally. This is going to be like an ex- Well, yeah, or Tony Stark's office, you know? Yeah. And I think it's funny because you complain about, uh, audio play video on sites.

This entire site is not a video. It's, it's the worst. This is trying to bring it up during this podcast and you basically dropped out and I couldn't hear you for 30 seconds. I was wondering what that was. Yes. No. Like Brian's quiet. Hmm. You must, he must be checking out the Icarus. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's interesting.

It's just way overpriced. And, uh, it looks like, like the people that in the earlier segment, the people with those, uh, those bikes going through the woods, the, the hover bikes, they should use this design company. Yeah, no, definitely. Um, yeah, they get this thing down to a thousand bucks.

They'll sell a gazillion of them, but it, it 10,000 was shipping. No way. No way. Um, and my last one for the week is a logic pro X has a big update, which I'm very happy about. They fixed a bunch of stuff and the design is actually much better.

Uh, just slight tweaks. It's a little lighter now, easier on the eyes, but the interesting thing is this comes hand in hand with the iOS version of garage band, which is a pretty massive update too. So now you can take your logic files and share them in iCloud, which to me sounds horrible because every single logic project I have is about three gigabytes.

Um, but then you can, on your iPad, you can edit them, which also sounds terrible to me. Uh, I've used garage band before on, on an iOS device and it's almost unusable, but, um, especially editing a multi-track, you try it, you try and edit a six track logic file on a touch pad.

I, I can just see right now how terrible that's going to be. It's not fun. No, but thank you for updating, uh, logic and it, oh, it has touch bar support. Something I will never use. Yes.

Media candy. Let's talk about two shows that have hobbits as co-stars, Brian. Okay. Uh, I want to talk about Dirk Gently, which has Elijah Woods, who's the OG Frodo Baggins. And then we can also talk about a little Sherlock who, uh, has Martin Freeman, who was Bobo Baggins.

Yep. Uh, I finally sat down and watched Dirk Gently, the new one. Okay. Uh-huh. I'm in. Liked it a lot. And this comes. You posted about it a lot. Well, I'm a super fan of Dirk Gently, so I was very, uh, worried about it and it came, I didn't, and by a lot, I posted three fucking posts, so shut up.

Okay. I mean, that's not a lot compared to dog posts. Yeah. It wasn't as bad as, you know, my Bam Bam post, so that's fine. Um, so I, I, I highly recommend it. I think you should definitely check it out. Okay. I'll consider it. No, you won't. You'll never watch it. No, probably not.

I, I never liked Dirk Gently that much. I was definitely a hitchhiker's guide. I thought Dirk Gently was okay. Ugh, see, you're wrong, but that's okay. Everybody's got their opinions, but did you like Good Omens? I loved Good Omens. You know that. We've often talked about this. I think this is a, you know, this is one of my top five books of all time.

Same here. I'm a bit worried. I am just as worried. See, this is why, this is why this dovetails together, because I had the same fear that you had thinking about the new Good Omens series that BBC is going to put out next year about Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency of 2016. I fortunately had, I went through the pain of watching, watching it and, and it, it, it delivered.

So, I'm happy about that. Well, Amazon Prime will be delivering a six-part miniseries of, based on, based on, of Good Omens in 2018, adapted for television by Terry's co-author, Neil Gaiman, which is good. It's, BBC Studios is producing it, which is good.

The problem is, Amazon has yet to produce a single goddamn show I've thought was acceptable. You didn't like Goliath? Nope. Oh, well, sorry. Go, go, go have Netflix come in with a bag of money and, and swoop it out from under them. Yeah, I'm, I'm not expecting much.

I have a feeling I'm going to be, I'm going to probably feel about it the same way I felt about the Ender's Game movie. It was acceptable, but not anywhere near the spirit or of the book. So, okay. And I, you know, I'm probably one of the only people on the planet that liked the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.

So, I think I might be okay with it. And Neil is the showrunner, so that'll be interesting. And since he's a co-author, he has much more insight into the property. Like, you know, the guy that wrote Dirt Gently was a super fan like I am. So, he, you know, listening to his podcast on The Nerdist really kind of got me into watching it.

I was going to boycott it, but then I watched it. But I'm glad I watched it. You know, same with Constantine. I was going to boycott that. Then I watched it. It turned out to be a great movie. So, you know, sometimes, sometimes you get a winner. I will, I will give this a go when it comes. I'm a bit worried. It's just one of those books I love so much. And I've, I've had, you know, this has been out for years.

I have mental images of what everything looks like and what the people look like and what they sound like. And it's not going to be any of that. So, it's going to be crap. Yeah. We'll see. That's the problem I had with the audio versions of it, too. Same thing. I couldn't, I could not listen to it. I, I, I, it was just not, not what I had in my head.

So, yeah. And I want to 20 years of reading that book. It was just like, yeah, no. Yeah. We both, we both kind of dump links in the show notes about this because I think we both saw it pretty much immediately as soon as the news was announced. But I do want to give a tip of the hat to Slate for my favorite headline about it.

Amazon is giving us Good Omens miniseries in 2018. If the world hasn't ended by then. Well, you know, it's, the nice thing about that is it is a call back to the show, the book itself. So. Exactly. Exactly. So they're, they're actually making a smart headline, just not snark, snark for snark's sake.

Yes. Uh, uh, uh, the snarks, they're back at a game of Thrones this, this year, aren't they? Oh wait, that's a starks. My bad. Anyway, Sherlock. Yes. Have you finished? Humor is coming. Uh, I did. Yeah. Let me know when it gets there. Uh, yeah, I finished it.

I thought it was acceptable. I, there was a lot of, a lot of people in my social network were very pissed off and did not care for the wrap up. And it was very much a wrap up. They could do another episode that could do another season. Chances are they won't. This is a, this was a, this had a pretty little bow.

Yeah. Yeah, it did. It did. I just, I, I liked episode one. I liked episode two. You had, you know, the two different, the two guys doing their own. You had Gaddis and Moffat doing each, doing their own episode when they got together for the third one, it, it had the same problem that seasons one and two did.

They both had a dog and, uh, the dog in season two was the hound of the Baskervilles, but, uh, this one, the dog was the end, the last episode. I did not, I did not care for the wrap up and it wasn't because it was a wrap up. It was just because it was, the pacing was off. The editing, the editing was really terrible in it.

It was, it was a bit of a ridiculous conceit and story anyways. It was fine. I enjoyed the, everything else. I didn't care much for the final, but I didn't think it was a travesty. I didn't, this was nowhere near a Battlestar Galactica. I'm throwing a bottle of whiskey at the TV moment. No, no, no.

It was still nice to see, nice to see him, you know, back. So I'm, I'm fine with that, but, uh, it just wasn't, it, you know, it, I still think one of the pinnacles is the John Watson wedding speech episode, you know, where Sherlock gets up and gives his speech. And I thought that was just fantastic. And I was hoping for something like that.

It's funny because the, the, I read a couple articles where people discuss their opinions about it and people who felt kind of the same way about this last episode that you did singled out that episode is the other absolute worst one they've ever done. Cause all he did was go to a wedding and spend the entire time in his mind castle.

I see. I liked that one. I enjoyed that one. I thought it was fun. I thought it was sweet. Yeah. There you go. I'm going to jump on the Brian bandwagon here and bash on the grand tour. Yep. Oh man, it's going downhill. It's fucking horrible. It's just, this last one was so bad.

It's bad. It's, it's not even funny. And that's the problem that that's the, you, you, you, you hit the nail on the head there. It's not funny. And the fact that in this last episode in Nashville, they had to put up on the screen, get back to it. This is a car show. And they were talking about music. It's just like, uh, yeah, see.

And they did the, for the, not once, but twice they did the, the extended fake fight scene as part, you know, that's the second time they did the same shit, stupid joke in one season. So that's why I'm hoping the season is over soon.

I think it goes to 12 and this was 10, 10 or nine or 10, but, uh, they need to finish the season, regroup and fix everything. The only thing that I've really enjoyed this entire season was the extended travel episode in wherever the hell it was. Again, I can't remember. I thought there were, I thought there were a bunch of segments that were, were solid this season, but yeah, them just trying to be funny in the, in the tent is just not working.

And the drone thing at the beginning is stupid, you know, and the stupid, like why bother with the celebrity thing anymore? I'm done with that. It's not, it wasn't funny the first time. It's not funny. Eight episodes on. No, it's not. It's horrible. Just get rid of it. If, if the show doesn't get better that I'm done, this will be the only thing.

Only season I watch. Oh, I'm sure I'll keep trying because hope springs eternal, but yeah, they, they really need to, they, they, they need to put it in the garage, put it up on the, put it up on the rack and fix the hell out of it. Yeah. Uh, let's see. John Oliver's coming back. I don't know if you saw the season four promo, but it's hilarious.

It was great. I loved it. It was a good job of promoting everything else that HBO has got coming up. Yeah, that was it. It was a promo for everything else with, with a, with a side nod to John Oliver. Yeah, it was very funny. So we have the, uh, link to the video on the show notes. You should definitely check that out. Um, I have watched a Netflix show that I'm thoroughly enjoying.

Jason, it's called the crown. Really? Yes. I heard it was the poor man's Downton Abbey. I missed Downton Abbey. Okay. So you're just, you're trying to recreate the, the, the, the Abbey again. Okay. Uh, no, I mean, this is, it's more political than Downton Abbey.

It's about the queen and the queen took over. John Lithgow plays, uh, Winston Churchill and does, if it wasn't for John Lithgow doing Winston Churchill, I would not be watching this show. The rest of it is really good, but that is the hook that got me in and he is fucking fantastic. Okay. I didn't know he was in it.

I'm in, I'll check it out. Dude, it's really good. There's 10 episodes of the first season. I have burned through eight of them and I'm still really enjoying it. And I want to party with Prince Margaret. I need a time machine to go back. I want to hang with that chick cause she's bad-ass. Okay, cool.

It's, it's, it's really well done. They've definitely spent the money, the acting, of course, you know, it's, it's a bunch of English actors doing English history. It's impeccably well done. And, and Lithgow's knocking it out of the park. Well, since I can't find anything else to watch on Netflix right now, I guess that's the only thing left. Yep.

Check it out, man. It's really, really good. And if you were Downton Abbey hit fan, you're going to like this. So, uh, there's the top 10 teen albums meme that's been going around on Facebook. I, I loved it. See, of course you did. To me, this is what social media is for the Arab spring maintaining open communications under authoritarian governments.

Fuck that. It's for sharing these kinds of lists. Okay. Did you do one? Hell no. Yeah. Well, I'm going to give mine anyways, because you know, why not? So this, the whole point of this and almost everybody has done it because it's fun and enjoyable. And Jason's just a naysayer that likes to poop on everybody's parade.

No, no, no. You are. This is why I'm so surprised that you actually fell for a meme. It's the top 10 albums that, that you were into in your high school years. How am I not going to list that out? I had to think about it. Not only did I think about it, I went back and listened to all of them and all of them, I would argue, hold up with the possible exception of the Sisters of Mercy, Floodland and Love and Rockets, Earth, Sun, Moon.

And the only reason that they don't hold up so well is they've got what we called in the recording arts program that in college, the, the cocaine sheen. Okay. Well, you had to be, you had to be on Coke to like them. Meaning all the artists and the engineers at the time of recording were so fucking gacked out of their mind.

It's all high end. Okay. So anyways, my 10 list is the Cure's Disintegration as Immortalized in South Park is the best album ever. I agree. Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses, Love and Rockets, Earth, Sun, Moon, Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine, Echo and the Buddy Men's Songs to Learn and Sing, The Police Synchronicity, Suzy and the Banshees Peep Show, Jesus and Mary Chain, Darkland, Sisters of Mercy, Floodland and The Smith's Louder Than Bombs.

That's my top 10 and I'm sticking to it. Okay. Well, you know what? Next week I'll, I'll give you mine if anybody cares. Nah, too late, man. You poo-pooed it too much. Okay. Cause mine's, mine's basically a bunch of dead Gennadies and shit like that. Pretty much. Yep. And as we went to record the Gorillaz, you remember Gorillaz.

I, they've done a number of great songs. This is a, what's his face from Blur's 500th side project, Damon Albern. The only thing I know about this is I heard them making fun of it on K-Rock this morning and it was hilarious. They dropped a single called Hallelujah Money featuring Benjamin Clementine, who I don't know who that is.

I'm assuming he's from, they always have guest vocalists come in and sing tracks. It's a not even slightly thinly veiled swipe at Trump. The only problem I have with it is the song is fucking boring. It's terrible. It's a terrible song. This is a terrible, terrible, terrible song.

Don't bother listening to it. I love Gorillaz. I love a lot of their stuff. This is horrible. Okay. Moving on. How much money has Rick Astley made from Rick rolling? This is an article on mentalfloss.com and I'm pissed off about this article. It states, well, as of 2010, he has received the princely sum of $12.

This has become Astley didn't write the song, so he only receives a performer's share of the sound recording copyright. To which I reply, dear idiots who write these articles, how much money has the YouTube clip made in total? This is kind of what you're selling us, not just Rick Astley's sum. Why not update this? You wrote this in 2015.

It is now 2017. That's, well, even if you just wrote it in 2015, that's a whole five years because you give the 2010 sum. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Okay. So you're just mad because they have bad math. I have bad math, bad journalism, bad everything.

I would, I'm really curious now. I want to know how many across the many YouTube clips that have been used for Rick rolling. How much money have they made? I want to know this. Somebody get on that. Okay. Somebody get on that. And, and, well, then how much has he made in performance fees? Because he's done it a lot and it's kind of kicked his, kicked his career.

Now, I would like to just point out that you just pissed all over mental floss, but your next article comes from mental floss. Well, you know, you win some, you lose some. I like this one. What is a TPS report? If you've got to be a fan of office space, everybody, Jason and I both love this movie.

It's one of the best movies ever made. And it's certainly one of the reasons that I quit working for a company because I found the very, the experience to be insanely true. According to Rolling Stone, judge Dave gave an interview at the 10th anniversary screening of office space. He replied, when I was an engineer, it stood for test program set.

Isn't that exciting? A test program set is a document describing the step-by-step process in which an engineer tests and retests software or an electronic system. So that is what the infamous TPS report is. Okay. Well, interestingly enough, if you go to, uh, what is it? Uh, H and R block for your taxes, they actually have TPS reports there too.

It doesn't stand for the same thing. I think it's a tax preparation statement or something, but, uh, they do when the first time I went in there and had my taxes done, they had TPS reports and I just lost my shit. That's great. I would have stole a whole stack of them. Well, I paid for them because that was what they gave me.

Yeah, that's true. Uh, so we talked about, we, we talked about, we talked about Star Trek discovery before and it's, it's never coming. It's just, it's never coming. I don't think it is either. Again, there's supposedly all production is supposed to be in Toronto. Uh, I've been to Toronto three times since they've announced this.

I have friends that I speak to all the time that live in Toronto that are sci-fi geeks. Nobody has heard a peep. I have friends that are not only are the sci-fi geeks, they're in the fucking production industry in Toronto. Nobody they know is working on this project. I don't think they've started shooting or anything.

They're in pre-production and they just, uh, cast Spock's dad. So we've got that show. We're never, we're never getting this show. It's going to be, it's 2018 at this point, especially when you factor in effects. There's no way. This is the vaporware of TV. This is never going to come.

They must have kickstarted this thing. One would, yeah, we can sue. We can sue. Uh, I would like to sue Patrick Stewart because he's going to play the animated poop emoji in the emoji movie. Why would you sue him? Time's got to be tough for, for old Patrick.

Time's got to be tough. Look, if anybody's going to play poop, I'm glad it's him. You cannot. I loved his show, even though it got canceled. What the hell was it called? Oh God, that was so good. I, yeah. Yeah. Damn it. I can't remember what it was called. That's why, that's why it got canceled. Cause we can't remember. I know.

I know. I mean, his role, his, his recurring role on, uh, uh, American dad was hilarious. He does his thing on extras extras was great. Yeah, he is. I mean, there's something about being a captain. William Shatner and Patrick Stewart can just do no wrong and just do ridiculous role after ridiculous role.

Uh, yes. But before he's poop, he's going to play professor X one more time in Logan and the second trailer just dropped and I loved it. I can't wait for this movie. It's, it's like the X-Men movie I was waiting for. So it's rated R and it's got lots of death and blood and gore and stuff like that.

As long as Brat Ratner is not in it, I'm, I'm fine. But these movies have just been getting progressively worse and worse. So maybe they'll fix something. Well, it's rated R. So at least we, you know, might, might be something in there. Who knows? At least they'll, you know, drop an F bomb or something. To boldly poo where no man has pooed before.

Hunting unicorns, hunting unicorns. And just a quick update on our hunting unicorn segment where we pick 10 tech stocks each and we have our buddy. Well, actually we pick five. Way to go. Sorry. Five, five. Bad 10 grand. My bad. So right now, as of, as of going to record today, I am up 2.22%.

You are up 2.12%. And our control doing the durables and non-tech is down 3.42%. So we're doing all right. We win. This is definitely not retirement, uh, money as I've really only made $222, um, but, uh, you know, it's better than nothing.

And we did get a comment through our website. I actually have made more than $222. That would be $272 because yes, we did indeed charge ourselves, uh, trading fees in our stock market game as nope at nope.com wanted to point out to us, uh, you can't buy, you can't buy and sell stocks for free.

That $13 gain you made was probably at least a $1 loss. No, that would have been a $63 gain because we charged $10 per trade. Well, actually for me, it would have been a $50 because Jason screwed up and that did I paid twice as much for my trades. So technically Jason is actually winning.

Yes. Winning. Because he spent a hundred dollars. Yes. And I'm, uh, I'm actually winning at Twitter too, because Twitter is still up and, uh, you have a loss of, uh, 3.19% on your, on our, on our real world Twitter stock. Uh, yes, I bought Twitter at a higher price than, uh, what you paid for it when you got it.

So, but still, I wouldn't exactly say you're winning with your Twitter stock. It's not doing great. As long as I'm ahead of you, I'm winning. I don't believe that was the terms of the bet. The deal was if I made money on Twitter by the end of the year, you buy me a six pack. So there we go. All right.

All right. I guess, well, we got to live in a lot. The year's just begun, Jason. We've only just begun. And you know, Twitter might be responsible for a few world wars. We'll see. Corona of the week. Uh, Madonna posted a photo of pubes shaved into a Nike swoosh and grossed out the internet.

Yeah, that was kind of a, but we don't know whose pubes they are, do we? How's that been determined? Uh, because this is the world that we now live in. People have spent time looking into this and, uh, did they check the CIA documents? Well, they pointed out the skin tone could not possibly be from a 58 year old woman.

It must be a much younger woman. Uh, my, why, why, why, why would you shave pubes into a Nike ad and post that? What? I, uh, because just do it, man. Just do it, bro. I guess so. Anyways, there you go. That, that happened.

Um, neo-Nazi broadcaster, Mike Enoch quits after doxers reveal his wife is Jewish. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm just happy about this because then we've got less podcasting, you know, competition. Yay. Well, unfortunately, as we went to press, he's vowed he's back. Oh, man.

So, yeah, you can look into this if you're really into it, uh, or interested in the story. I don't want to give him die. I don't want to get too into it. I'm not even going to, I'm not even going to link to him. So, yeah, there you go. So you're up next. Okay. This one, I just love this one because I love bringing in dogs on this one.

The cautionary tale of No More Woof, a crowdfunded gadget to read your dog's thoughts. Now, yes, they did not deliver. And there is, there is no, there is definitely no more woof in, in this one. Um, yep. They skedaddled with the money because apparently brain science with dogs is hard, but what's even harder apparently is putting something on a dog's head and making it stay.

That was their biggest problem, but also brain science. So they thought, oh, we can just put a EEG on a dog's head and then we'll just get big data and do machine learning. And then we'll know when your dog's hungry or happy. And well, I don't need something on my dog's head to tell me when it's hungry or happy.

It tells me it barks at me or, you know, wags its tail. There you go. I could have saved myself $69 on Kickstarter. So when, so the morons of the week are the people that actually paid $69 to think they could get a device to stick on their dog's head because they couldn't be decent enough parents.

Yes, this is a very good point. And, uh, my final moron of the week, this one's a personal one. Uh, we brought him up on the show before when the news actually hit, uh, Jonathan Schwartz, who is, uh, the ex manager of notable celebrities, including Alanis Morissette and a few other people. Although Alanis got hit the biggest, uh, he, uh, embezzled almost $4.8 million just from her.

Um, and, uh, he was, uh, basically he was charged when I first brought this guy up. Um, I wanted to bring him up because I spent six months trying to get $4,000 that was owned to be out of them. Little did I know he was busy embezzling 4.8 million. Uh, I think, I think you get the better end of the stick.

If you've got to get, get a crappy end of it, this guy was, you know, basically big stick in me, not wanting to pay things and telling me I'd never work in this town again. And he'd blackball me and shit like that. Guess who's not working in this town again, asshole. No doubt about that.

So yeah, he is set to appear on court February 1st to enter a guilty plea under the plea deal. He will face four to six years in federal prison. Unfortunately, instead of the minimum maximum 23, he's going to get off a little bit easy. He also owes over a million dollars in, uh, taxes and other things like that.

So hopefully he also owes $4 million back to Alanis. One would hope that she also gets her money back. So, uh, you know, I'm not saying that I have a good or bad feeling about people and I'm usually right, but fuck you and easily my favorite video ever in the entire universe.

Uh, if you check out our show notes, you can actually watch the quick Brown Fox actually jump over the lazy dog. No, yeah, this has been making the rounds. And the first time I saw it, I'm like, man, it really happens. It's money. It's money. And you know, the guy that took that video didn't get a dime for it.

Not a dime. It is genius. I love it. It's fantastic. So yeah, go watch it. Yeah. Yep. I found another article on mental floss. That seems to be popping up a lot in my feed recently, but, uh, this one is right up our alley, Jason. Okay. Bring it on. According to the 19 or 19, geez, according to the 1834, back when we did our first podcast book, uh, the anatomy of drunkenness, there are seven types of drunkards.

All righty. Would you like to, uh, tell us, uh, some of the highlights of the seven types of drunkards? I'm a fan of the melancholy drunkard. These are people who get weepy when they drink. Um, they're, you know, not people who get weepy when they drink. I'm sorry. They're melancholy people by nature who drink to pep up.

I call this me. Okay. So you're a melancholy drunk. Yes, I believe so. Uh, I also like the surly drunkard. This is a, the person who becomes a worse version of themselves after a few drinks or what I just call basically most people. Okay. I think I'm a, a choleric drunkard, a class of people grouped together because they didn't fit, fit in anywhere else.

They seem to possess few of the qualities of the other races and are chiefly distinguished by an uncommon testiness of disposition. They are quick, irritable and impatient, but with all good heart and with, and when in humor, very pleasant and generous. Huh?

I think that's us. I think we have a show title. I think we should rename the show. Welcome to choleric drunkard. There we go. Perfect. Like Grumpy Out Geeks wasn't hard enough to sell. I know. At least we could find the domains for this one. That's true.

That shouldn't be a problem. And speaking of that, uh, drunk people, beer yoga is finally happening. Uh, this is, uh, you know, last week I talked about goat yoga. Um, I'm in on beer yoga. Unfortunately, it's all bullshit. It started as a joke. Uh, hot chick did yoga posts is holding glasses of beer, but now it's become a thing where a brewery is starting to offer yoga at their brewery and blah, blah, blah.

It's not as fun as it sounds. Sadly, you can't, I dare you to do beer yoga in reality. Good luck with that. Well, when it comes to drunk yoga, I would like to throw out a shout out to fan of the show, Kitty Crystal, who has a drunken yoga show on funny or die, which is actually pretty funny. Her, her website needs some work.

So Kitty, you might want to work on that, but, uh, man, uh, yeah, I've watched every episode of that show. So I think maybe, uh, she needs some royalties from this. Get on that. Good luck. Good luck. Anyway, when you're done with your drunken or beer yoga, head over to Taco Bell because now they have the naked chicken chalupa launches on January 26th.

The shell is chicken. That's it. That is disgusting. It looks repugnant. It looks absolutely repugnant. Didn't KFC already do the beer is the chicken thing. They did. The bun is the chicken or the beer, the beer, the beer, my mind might be on.

Let's wrap up this show, Jason, because obviously my mind is on something else. I was going to say, maybe somebody needs some beer or maybe somebody's had some beer and we need to, you know, all right, moving along. I haven't, I haven't had the beer yet. It's waiting. Brian pleads the fifth.

Uh, so I got one farewell to queen of the skies. United is going to stop flying seven 47s at the end of the year. I am, I am, I am, you know, I'm of two minds of this. I love being on a seven 47, but I also love being on a much more modern airplane because seven 47s are dated, but damn, if they'd still don't look cool.

So I'm going to miss them beyond belief because it just, they were there, you know, it's air force one is still a seven 47, but for now, now not going to get too into that one. No, we're going to skip that one. Uh, Florida is going to have its first new private passenger rail system in over a hundred years.

This is, this is crazy. It's a 70 mile, uh, route from downtown Miami to West Palm beach. Okay. Um, it's actually, you know, they're going to have stations in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm beach, and eventually they're going to go up to Orlando, but, uh, they're having some trouble getting up to Orlando with, uh, politicians go figure politicians want to shit on everything, but yeah, this is, this is cool.

I'm glad that, you know, private industry is bringing back the rails because I love, I love me some trains. I'm waiting for my bullet train to Vegas. Ain't ever going to happen. No, sadly it's not. Uh, well, you know what you can do? You can, you can sign up for Cadillac book.

Okay. It's only $1,500 a month, but you can drive any Cadillac you like up to 18 different models for a year and they have concierge service. They will bring the car to your house, no mileage limits or anything, but it's, yeah, your, um, your car payment would be $1,800 a month, but you get to drive a Cadillac, but you're not a rapper.

So I don't see you in a Cadillac. I would, if they gave me $1,800 a month, I don't think I'd want to drive a Cadillac. Well, if they gave you $1,800 a month, that would be fine because the service costs $1,500. So you'd get 300 bucks a month. So they would be paying you 300 and a car. So I, you know, in this economy, you might want to consider that.

Okay. I'm on, I'm on board. Oh, wait, they're not going to do that though. Feedback loop. We have a new pledge from Patreon subscriber JC. Thank you very much, sir. Or ma'am. Or ma'am, as the case may be.

Uh, we also got a comment over at Patreon from Eric who said, excellent cover art. Pity about the 1996 GOG 256B GIF artwork. Smiley face. Okay. Two points here. It's not a GIF. It would be a GIF, but it's also a JPEG.

So, uh, your point is moot, my friend. It is a JPEG and yeah, we have to do 1400 by 1400 size for various things. And I don't bother. Minimum. Minimum. And I don't bother shrinking it down for different formats because, you know, we're lazy. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Brian is lazy. Uh, so, so more people pledge to Patreon and give Brian enough money where he's not lazy anymore.

Never happened. Uh, next one comes from Twitter from at swell. Good guys and excellent podcast for non pole techies. What's a non pole techie. I'm assuming that involves politics, not strippers. Oh, oh, so we're good when we don't talk about politics.

Yeah. I'm getting that. I'm getting that vibe. Yeah. That's tough shit. Uh, we also got, uh, two tweets from Barrett Reese who gave us two air quotes, AI stories. Uh, the first being AI can predict when patients will die from heart failure with 80% accuracy. And the second people don't realize how deep AI already is in so many things.

Salesforce CEO Benioff says. Okay. How deep is it? How, how low do you go? How low do you go? Yep. Thanks for those. Uh, yeah. As, as we mentioned, it's just a AI is just such a buzzword that people just throw it in everything now with no real concept of what it means.

So good times. Yeah. But we're the ones that ended up having to look it up to make sure that we were on the right page. So maybe they do know what it is and we don't. So I'm going to get the benefit of the doubt. I still stand by, by definition of it. It's sci-fi. I, I, I, I, I, I, I replace it with my own.

And I do really substitute it with my own, but, uh, that's just the, the dick in me putting that up. I don't, I don't have the shirt on me and it's, you know, been a year and a half since I've watched Mythbusters cause it's off the air and the white rabbit project sucks. Well, we can agree on something. So this next one comes up.

Uh, this is a two star review from iTunes from what's the weather like spelled very creatively. I used to be a geo. What? You got very well done. I like the spelling. Okay. I was going to say it took to good to see if you were on board with that, but yes, it is. What's the weather like you thought it was some German shit, but nope.

I used to be a GOG fan last year. I reviewed this podcast and gave it five stars and I really did enjoy listening to this podcast over the past year and intensifyingly recently, both of the hosts just cannot stop injecting their personal political view constantly into the show. I don't really care what their political point of view is either way.

I have very unique views and I'm very wary of the new POTUS. It's one thing to have a political point of view. It's another to be so smug and unable to control yourself that you're ruining your show. Yes. I'm sorry. Have you listened to our opinions about anything? Yes, I think you should be allowed to have your opinions.

And yes, I listened to your show to hear your opinions. Well, there you go. I don't need to hear a political show instead of a technology one. I'm sure you will smugly rationalize yourselves into believing that you are doing the right thing. Sorry, but I'm done listening to this show. I know that it will only get worse.

You were fun to listen to, but it's too much, even for a non-Trump supporter. Brian, go first. Sayonara. Okay. Moving on. Look, last episode, we may have gotten a little over the top, but how can you not when there's pee-pee gate?

Come on. That was the golden shower episode. We even actually defended him with the BuzzFeed thing and we called that non-journalism. So, piss off. Okay. See what I did there? Look, we have opinions. We're smug about everything. I would argue that we are way shittier to Kickstarter than we are to Trump.

That's true. And Uber. And Airbnb. Yeah, it's what we do. Anyways, it's all over now anyways. It's all blah, blah, blah, done. We call it a raison d'etre, being smugly to fuck. But here's the upside. Most of the time, we're right. Can't argue with that one.

And my point being, and here we come. Okay, so I'm going to read the second review that we got. Then I'll make my point about this. This is a five-star rating from ddan4th12. Love the tech side of it. The political views that both of them have are awful, but I can still enjoy the rest.

Hopefully, as time goes on, they will get over Trump being elected in the same way you birthers did with Obama. Well, here's the deal. I don't care. He likes the show. We're going to keep on doing the show. And we have stated that when Trump leaks into the show, it's because it is relevant to the technology or the zeitgeist.

That's it. Speaks into the show. I'm not going to talk about his agricultural secretary policies. I don't give a shit. But when there's net neutrality on the line or he pees on somebody, it's fair game.

And I'm down with ddan4th12 because he gave us the five stars, even though he doesn't have the same view of us. That's supposedly the point of America. And if I would have finished my damn book in time, I would have been able to say I gave Orson Scott Card a great review for his latest book, even though I find his personal political views odious.

You can separate. Yeah. So, yeah. He's a horrible person, but I still, you know, I still like Empire. I still like Ender's Game. But, you know, I'm still one of the best books ever written. I care about the rest. I just don't believe in magic underwear. But there you go. And our third, I got my turn, my turn.

This one comes from Audio Modder. This is another five star. The worst podcast I've ever listened to. This podcast is the worst. Disgraceful. It's the worst kind of fake news. It's like Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood. Well, thank you, Audio Modder. We appreciate it. We do appreciate that.

And I'm glad that you enjoyed the humor. Yes. Ish. I would like to give a special shout out to everybody over on Instagram. I haven't really brought in any of the comments there. We've been getting tons of likes and tons of people finding it and starting to follow our account. Most of the comments, like most of Instagram, seem to be bullshit people trying to get you to click links and things like that.

So I'll try to do a better job of going in and seeing if there are real comments in there. So we'll bring that over as well. And to all the people that are fans of the show that have then found my personal Instagram and requested me as a friend, I would like to thank you for that request. And I appreciate it.

But my Instagram, I've kept personal just for friends. It's when you have a kid thing. It's kind of what you do. You don't want to see a bunch of pictures of my kid anyways. But if you go to Instagram.com slash JPD, I will take all comers because bam, bam. Yes. And Jason's a whore. So yes, I am.

All right. If you want your questions or comments right on the show, head over to GOG.com. God, I still can't get used to this new URL. This is why we need to become the choleric drunkards or whatever the hell the name was going to be. GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

Closing shout outs. Brian, while we were talking about our barred CD scheme, it dawned on me that we can't do it because I can't take Bam Bam. Because look at what happened to Johnny Depp when he brought his dog to Australia. I can't do that. So. But I want.

You're on your own. I want you to make a teary apology video. Well, I can do that anyway. I cry on demand. I call that Friday night. Yeah. Give me some fireball and fireball and a bucket of shame and I'm in. Oh, boy. All right. We had some breaking news while we were recording.

2017 has begun. The deaths. Here they come. Miguel Ferrer. Ferrer. Do you know how you pronounce it? Ferrer. Ferrer. That's what I thought. Has passed away. He was recently star of NCIS Los Angeles and Crossing Jordan. He was 61. This is more for, you know, for a sci-fi people, Robocop, Star Trek 3.

And he was set to reprise his role as FBI agent Albert Rosenfeld on Twin Peaks when that hits showtime later this year. I'm unfortunately probably going to be written out of that, I'd imagine. So unless they finish. I thought they finished filming. So he might be back. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. But that's sad to hear.

He's a cool guy. Yes. And we lost astronaut Gene Cernan. This week, sadly enough. But on happier news, happy birthday to Betty White, who turned 95 this week. You keep going, Betty. Older than sliced bread. Older than sliced bread. That is damn true.

Look it up. And I want to give a shout out to the LGBTQ protesters that threw a huge big gay dance party in front of Mike Pence's house on Wednesday night. There is video. There are photos. Hey, man. It's funny. It's awesome.

You know, they were having a grand. Full time. See, I don't agree with that. Do it in front of the office. Stay out of his. Stay out of his house. That's in his house. They were in front of his house. That's that's that's that's what we call a dick move.

I'm sure it's funny as hell, but I've died. There are too many jokes I could make right now. All right. I'm going to have to move on. Another shout out to the Women's March on Washington and the sister marches that are absolutely that are happening absolutely everywhere. I think six hundred and sixty two different cities at last time I checked you go girls particular shout out to my friend Sasha and Karen who are actually going to the one in Washington.

I have friends marching everywhere, though. Portland, Los Angeles, New York, London, Calgary, Toronto. Yeah. Yeah. Go go. Let your freak flag fly. Let your personal politics be known and get out there and make a difference. I think the only sad part about this women's women's march is that they're not doing it on Sunday.

So guys everywhere could get their wings and their football on, you know, with knowing that everything was OK. But well, if you knew much about football, you'd know that there's a big football game on Saturday along with the March. So you can still do that. OK. OK.

See, that's what I know about football. Awesome. All right. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like.

If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air. To learn more about all of the people who make this show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about. And show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 193.

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