200: Let Them Eat Pop Tarts

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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. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Welcome to episode 200, Brian. Woo! I can't believe we've been doing this this long. We are two-thirds of Sparta. Okay. Oh, yeah. Another hundred to go, and then we'll have abs and, you know, get to die in the fire.

Yeah. Really? That's it. When you hit episode 300 on a podcast, you automatically get abs. Nobody tells you that. It's in the fine print. I mean, this is definitely a calorie burner. I'll say that. Well, the thing is, we spent so much money on it, we can't afford food. So that's why you have abs. That's true. I'm kind of just gnawing on an old piece of jerky, I found.

Well, we're doing this one again late on a Saturday because of things that needed to get done. And so it's cocktail time. What are you having, Brian? I am having another little sniffer of whiskey. I'm having a little something. I upgraded this time. Okay, good, because last time it was just depressing what you were drinking.

Dude, you didn't have to drink it. Good point. Yes, no, Lagunitas Little Something was on sale, and I like me some Little Something. It's got some kick to it, too. So it's a good beer. They served that down at Library Alehouse here in Santa Monica, where I've had many. Yeah, this is the light one. This is only 7.5%.

Ah, okay. Not the seasonal 13% that is just like drinking whiskey, yeah. Yeah, I like that one. Me too, but ooh, a six-pack of that, you're done for. Yes, that's true. Turns out, you know, we were talking last week, a friend Michael Burns sent us a good Uber picture from Jumbo's Clown Room.

Yes. We were shooting shit on Facebook, and it turns out he's kind of a big deal. Okay. That John Scalzi book, You Like Red Shirts, it was dedicated to him. Oh, it was? Yeah, they've been friends for like 10 years, and who'd have thunk it? Who'd have thunk it? Well, that's very cool.

Go ahead and tell Scalzi about the podcast here, man. Get him listening. It's been done. Okay. Well, at least it's been sent to the intermediary, if he'll ever listen. Who the hell knows? Well, in that case, if I don't like the second book, An Old Man's War, I won't review it.

Yeah, but if John wants to, you know, donate to our Patreon account, he can have the best reviews in history. That's true. We'll happily pimp your stuff, which we're already doing for free anyways. That's true. Because we like your books. Yeah, so apparently they met in the early 80s at a public library, learning basic on a trash 80.

That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. That is a very similar pass for all of us then. Yes, Michael is a grumpy old geek. And he does have the most adorable three-legged pit bull named Bonnie, who is just gorgeous. I suppose I have to drink whiskey now because dogs are mentioned.

That's right. No skin off my back. I was going to say, that should be a plus right now. The Sunday morning whiskey rants probably weren't so tasty. But now... Yeah, I didn't like the 7 a.m. Bam Bam mentions those sucked, but I'm okay with it right now. Yes, well, Bam Bam and I spent the day in the vet hospital, so have another drink.

That's all we're going to mention on that subject. And now that you've had two shwigs, let's move on to some news. Actually, this is all follow-up. Because the first bit of follow-up is we were... Well, actually, you were caught by the fake news bug. Oh, so was everyone.

So don't make it sound like it's just me. Yeah, but you put the story in the show notes. Because it's a good story, and it was basically used to make fun of you. How could I resist that? Well, yeah, do your research next time. So the Japanese man who was killed under the 17,000 tons of porn magazines actually just had a heart attack.

Well, maybe it was a heart attack caused by a giant pile of porn falling on him. Or maybe he was just... We do not know the causality here. Yeah, we do. So it was already reported by Nikan Spa, and the Daily Mail took it, ran with it, and made it into what it wasn't. But he could have died from over spankage, because that was a lot of porn.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, when you get to that point, I don't think that you're actually even properly using it. That's true. I'm just saying. Yeah, if you need that much, you might not be using it properly. You're more of a collector than a connoisseur. That is true. So I found an article called The Rise of the Useless Class by Yuval Harari, the guy who wrote Sapiens, which I covered on the show before.

I thought it was an interesting book, a little bit dry. You know, it talked about evolution and biology and history and all this good stuff and what it means to be human. And generally nowadays, what it means to be human is dying under a pile of porn, sad and alone. But what did you think of this article?

I see you put some notes in here. I enjoyed it. It kicked off what became a very depressing week for me of reading. In fact, at one point, I had about six tabs open in my browser with articles that were so horribly depressing, I could not finish reading them to put in the show notes. But this is the one that started it.

It's a good study. I particularly like the section where he talks about how the whole concept of the article is basically that we are not creating as many jobs as we are losing through automation and various other practices.

And he talks briefly about how there are likely to be some new new professions that will appear by, say, 2033, like virtual world designers. I'd argue that we already have those jobs and a lot of those are already kind of going out of the way, too. Yeah, because nobody's diving into the virtual world.

Yeah, exactly. And it says, you know, the theory being that we'll retrain people to work in new jobs. You know, that's the Uber thought. Anyways, it's unclear whether 40-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual world designers because, you know, they'd have to learn programming and a whole bunch of other skills that are not easy to pick up when you get older and older.

And I would argue that those jobs probably won't be very well paid. So anyways, so the article goes on to talk about how the pace of progress is such that within another decade, probably the virtual world design jobs are going to go away.

And then they'll have to reinvent themselves yet again to do something else. And the argument being that algorithms will probably outperform humans in doing just about everything. So the crucial problem isn't creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans can perform better than algorithms and good luck finding those.

Yeah, yeah. He points out kind of a kind of a bleak future and he's a historian. So he's got some chops. You know, it's not like he's coming at this from just Joe Vox writer. Yeah, I agree. And the thing for me is this doesn't necessarily need to be a bleak future because we can approach this from the perspective of the Star Trek universe where basically everybody you didn't have to work.

You know, there was the UBI or there just wasn't even any money at all. But that would require, you know, rethinking a lot of things about how the world works right now. And the people that have all the monies don't want to do that. And and replicators. We also need replicators. Yeah, we do need replicators as well.

Otherwise, we will always need farmers. Yes. Well, they're they're coming out with robots for that, too. They're on the way. Next, speaking of Joe Vox writer, Uber and Airbnb are not the future of capitalism. Somebody tell them that, please. Yeah. Well, this is more about, you know, the sharing economy and the ownership of stuff.

My friend Mickey Crimmel had a startup that was like one of the it was kind of like, you know, the Airbnb for the shit in your garage and failed miserably. Because it turns out, you know, the the effort that you have to go through to, like, find somebody with the drill that does what you need it to do versus just going down to Home Depot and picking one up.

Yeah. That barrier to entry just really isn't there. So her startup went under a couple of years ago. And I think it's called HomeGoods. No, no, no. That's a different that's a totally different thing. I can't remember what it was called. It's gone. Who cares? But exactly. Even just going through.

I remember going through and trying to catalog stuff in my garage that I would let people loan was just a chore. It's like, oh, why am I doing this? I don't really like my neighbors that much anyway. They're kind of dicks. But the interesting thing about it is, you know, it's just like this whole idea that we're going to own less, like ownership is dead.

We're going to we're going to have everything on demand. We're going to lease everything. It's going to be, you know, there's an app for it. That's kind of what they're what they're saying in this article is like it was way overblown when it came out. And one of the interesting things was they talk about the micro loan industry.

Yeah. And how that was going to, you know, usher in this new model of peer to peer loaning. Like I can loan somebody in Botswana 50 bucks and then they'll go save the village and all that stuff. Well, turns out. Never really happens. Turns out banks and hedge funds have kind of stepped in and just said, hey, it's easier for us to do this stuff.

So they took over that business. Yeah. Yeah. Shocking. Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, again, it's I agree with this 100 percent, but tell all the 20 somethings running around in Venice and Santa Monica flush with their new Snapchat money that right now, because, you know, everything is is all, you know, it's all Web 2.0 all the time.

You know, they're almost every other car is an Uber and they're either driving people or bringing them their food because that's how it works now. I know. But I mean, and to be honest, I mean, you see everything in this microcosm of Santa Monica and L.A. And it's just the world is the country is much bigger. And it's, you know, there's a lot of stuff that we always talk about on the show that has no bearing on a lot of people.

No, I understand. Yeah. Yeah. But it's more fun to talk about it like, well, Santa Monica is the central pit of the world. No, I hate it. We wouldn't have much of a show if we talked about the other people. That's true. That's true. Yeah. So Bob left this letter.

He comes up every now and then on this show because he's theoretically writes about the music industry, which he doesn't write about much anymore. He writes more about tech and the new economy. And he has a new article called The New Economy. And I know, you know, we we have had our disagreements with him in the past.

But did you read this one? I did because you and I always have our like we disagree with him. Then you and I disagree about disagreeing with him or agreeing with him. So I always like to check on what Lefschitz is going to say before you dive into it. So I had a read. I enjoyed this one. It was a good one. Surprisingly. I agree with it 100 percent.

This is basically old man complaining about the new economy and all these apps and Web 2.0 and what the hell is going on with regulation and how, you know, the big businesses are basically always screwing us over, which is, you know, pretty much our show again. Well, that it's, you know, it's very timely right now because all the regulations and everything are getting destroyed hand over fist.

There will be no regulations soon. You know, I think I've heard something about that. Something about people being put in charge of cabinets that want to destroy the cabinets and get rid of them. Yeah, something like that. But we're not we're not a political show. We can't talk about. Yeah, we're not we're not supposed to talk about politics. No. Yeah, it was it was a good article.

I liked it. So it'll be in the show notes. GOG dot show slash 200, you know, because that's where we're at right now. We're two thirds of the way to abs. Yep. And yeah, so I really enjoyed that. You know, it's just right spot on with the other articles that you were posting in there. So something in the zeitgeist right now.

Yeah. Something that's also in the zeitgeist is this goddamn Fiverr ad that's been making the rounds. Have you seen this ad? You could. You just had me at goddamn Fiverr. I already immediately know anytime I hear anybody that's hired somebody from Fiverr or is even thinking about hiring somebody from Fiverr.

I basically just say, yeah, you know, you're not going to be hiring me. So let's just stop talking right now. Well, you know what? Fiverr is a gateway site because what they're going to do is they're going to spend a couple hundred dollars on Fiverr, get zero results, eventually try and come around to you. But they've spent so much on Fiverr that they don't have enough for a budget to hire you.

So they come almost back to you. Then they still go back and get somebody shittier. Yeah. That's the problem with Fiverr. That's that sounds like the last three years of my career. Yeah. So this this new ad, which I think they probably paid for on Fiverr, is a disheveled looking woman with the tagline, you eat a coffee for lunch.

You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer. Fiverr endures we trust. Yeah, that's horrible. But it does. My argument for this would be it perfectly illustrates what exactly your life will be like if you use and want to be on Fiverr because you are getting paid absolutely nothing for hours upon hours of work.

And if you want to be able to afford your rent or food, yeah, you're going to be working 24 seven. Yeah. This is just called the nickel and dime economy now. And it's misery are us. Yeah. But yeah, it's been making the rounds is the most depressing ad on the Internet right now. So we just had to put it in there.

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. So so I have more things that depressed me this week. Hopefully we're this is all of the depression shit's going to be in follow up and then we're going to get to the fun stuff after this. We're almost done. We had Zane Lamprey on our show. We've enjoyed many things of Zane's in the past.

And, you know, and I should have known better because he did do a Kickstarter. This is his like third Kickstarter. Yeah. This is the adventure kickstarted hoodie, which looked really nice. And, you know, we had him on the show and he talked about it. And I went and paid for one because when he got in early enough, it seems pretty cheap and it looks like a pretty nice jacket.

Looked like it would have been great for winter. Winter's over. I have not gotten my jacket yet. It is 85 degrees outside right now. So thanks a lot. Well, I haven't sent it to me if it ever gets here, but because it is officially was at 19 degrees here. So I'll take it. Oh, except I don't need it because I actually backed out of the Kickstarter project because I knew it was going to be late.

Yeah, it's I already had the drinking jacket, which, by the way, I wear every day here now. It's a great jacket and it still works. So I'm not going to buy another jacket. He did such a good job on the first one that did show up six months late, by the way. But I still get to use it. Yeah, it's just one of those weird Kickstarter things.

I mean, I'm sure the jacket will be fantastic when I get it, and I'm sure that I will enjoy wearing it in another nine months. Maybe it will actually be there in nine months. I don't know. Theoretically, it's shipping now, but except not the one that I ordered, because who knows why that style isn't shipping yet.

Because you ordered it. That's why. I think so. Yeah. It's just one of those things where this is why I don't like Kickstarter. This is why I don't like the world we're living in right now. I paid in full for this jacket like six months ago now. Yeah. So what I think that I think the real model here is that and this was the fastest funding garment Kickstarter that they've ever had.

And he's got millions, like over almost two million dollars from it, something like that. So I think here here's the business model with Zane right now. So he got a couple, you know, almost a couple million dollars for it. Bank the money, live off the interest for as long as you can possibly do it before the lawsuits start coming in, then ship.

Yeah. That seems to be that seems to be the yeah, that's just Kickstarter in general. That's that's what's happening. I can just see I want a video of Zane sitting on a beach earning 20 percent. Yeah. Anyway, moving on. A friend of mine, Eddie Codell, who we've actually posted some of his drone videos on the show before, because he's a he's a, you know, a very good drone cinematographer.

And it's funny. He posted a picture of a self-driving Uber in San Francisco. And the tagline is, I guess Uber decided to get permits for their self-driving cars after all seen yesterday in SF. And there's a space age looking Uber with the crazy stuff on the top. Well, next day on TechCrunch, Uber gets its self-driving vehicle test permit in California.

Well, look at Uber actually following the law and being, you know, legal like the rest of us for once, for once, for once, once I've died. Say they're turning over a new leaf, but we have articles further in the story that tells us that they aren't. Of course not. Yeah.

And then finally, the last bit of follow up and a tip of the hat to Ivor Davies, who brought this to our attention. Jason, I don't know if you signed up for the New Zealand tech interview thing where you got the free trip to New Zealand to just do a couple of interviews with some tech companies and basically not take the job and come back home and get a free vacation out of it.

I didn't. But I think they need me more than they know. I should have signed up because I could have fixed this. Yes. Apparently there is a privacy breach which forced them to shut down their website. Anybody who has applied for the free trips has now had all their data stolen. Showing that they definitely need some IT people down there.

In looking at it and looking at what the actual problem was and what happened, I think that it looks like they had conflicts in session IDs. So if you were posting the form and it posted in and then your session ID got jumbled up with somebody else's, so you got to see somebody else's information on the next page.

Right. Whoopsies. Yeah. Yeah. Come on, guys. Well, Jason, this is why they're flying people for free that know what they're doing down there. Very good point. Or they could have just gone to Fiber. In the news. Oh, Snapstock.

Did you end up buying any? No. So many people asked me if I was going to buy any and I have been pretty staunch on, no, I'm not going to buy Snapstock. I'm just not. I do not have any faith in this company. So a lot of other people didn't seem to either.

It took a beating on Monday and fell more than 12%. Tuesday, it fell another 10%. Now it's had a bit of a recovery since then, but still. Not very much. Not very much. It's double digit declines two days in a row. It's come back a little bit.

It sucks a lot for, you know, like I said, there's a bunch of Santa Monica people running around that are millionaires on paper. They cannot sell their stock for at least, I believe, a 150 day lockup period for all employees. So everybody is kind of hoping, and there's a lot of people walking around with fingers crossed around here.

They're still going to be rich. So I'm not going to, no tears for Snap by employees. Oh yeah. Snap's not going out of business anytime soon. Yeah. My Snap glasses are not going to short circuit from all the tears that I'm shedding for these guys. But I still don't think it's a good buy, and a lot of other people don't. The concern around Snap seems to be tied to its potential user growth.

So I wonder if that's been mentioned on this show before. Yes. And we've even had graphs for showing that there was no user growth. Yes. And one of the reasons that Snap is going to be in continued trouble is now Messenger has added Stories to their app as well.

So basically, the one thing that Snapchat had, Stories, is now in Instagram. It's now in Messenger. Twitter has fucked up in an attempt to try to do it as well. So Snap is not going to be taking over anything, because the one feature that everybody goes there to use has been co-opted by everybody else, and there are more eyeballs already at these other places.

Yeah. Feature, not a product. Yep. Exactly. Sorry. Sorry. Now, you and I both can't stand auto-start videos, autoplay. No, no, I can't. It sucks up the bandwidth. I mean, at least nowadays, most of them auto-start, but don't actually play audio.

Thank God. But they still are sucking up bandwidth to preload and start playing. Well, that's okay. We have our hashtag, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, unlimited plans from all our cell phone providers now. Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Anyways, even more annoying, perhaps, than that, is a new feature that Facebook is rolling out.

What are they doing today, Brian? Well, if you manage to start watching a video or potentially not start watching a video because it auto-played on you because you didn't turn that off in the settings, which they buried under 17 different steps in order to be able to turn off auto-play videos, it will now remind you later if you'd like to finish watching the video that you never wanted to watch in the first place.

Now, I was looking through this article and it seemed like this was for the TV app. So when you got home and for some ungodly reason felt like instead of relaxing, having a cocktail, maybe hanging out with your sweetie or your puppy or whatnot, you wanted to turn on your TV and open the Facebook app and then get barraged by things that you didn't want to see in the first place.

Now, that seems a little odd to me. It does seem a little odd to me, but I do believe this is obviously just a first test is going to be on the TV app, but why wouldn't they roll this out to just annoy us everywhere? Because they are all about the videos. All about the videos.

Yay. So also a while. Before we even move on from that, have you noticed how terrible Facebook video loads compared to like YouTube? Everything about Facebook loads horribly out external links. Why is there like a 20 fucking second delay on every external link?

I can't stand it. Yeah. Well, you know what? Stop using it. Ain't going to happen. I know. I miss my friends. Everybody's there. It's not my fault. If they only all go to Snap. Hello. Save us.

Anyways, a while back, you got me hooked on Slack. You got me started using Slack because we set that up for to talk to each other for grumpy old geek stuff. We never use it. And then we stopped using it completely, but I use it for some of the other consulting things that I'm doing. So I enjoy that a lot, but it looks like they're probably not going to be around for too much longer.

No, they're going to be around here forever. All right. Google and, you know, trying to make their Hangouts like Slack is just desperation because nobody really uses Hangouts. Google has rolled out a new version of Hangouts that looks basically like Slack.

So, yeah. And they're splitting Hangouts into video and then the threaded conversation version. And, you know, Slack is just Slack does one thing and it does Slack. Google is just so much. So all over the place now. I know. I don't get what Google's trying to do. And actually, I just saw right before we started to record that the Loon project has now lost the head.

So we all know what that means when the head of any Google project leaves. They're going to Uber. And it's a dead project. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know what the hell is going on at Google, but hey, they've got the monies and they're spending it. Yes, they are. And the one thing I like about Slack is, you know, the team there, we know who they are.

Ex Flickr guys, you know, great, great tech. The integrations are great. I just integrated Todoist with my Slack team. So now I can make my to-dos when I don't want to write them down on paper. It's just got nice integrations. Like the GitHub integration was great when I was actually pushing code.

So everybody could see the check-in. So they would leave me alone. Like, what are you doing over there in Chicago playing by yourself? I'm like, well, here, here's some GitHub stuff to make you think that I'm doing work. Enjoy. It's, you know, I like the integrations there. And I don't think Google will ever get the hang of that.

But before we move on, I would like to point out that Recode, I like Recode. I make fun of you for it because I can. Yeah. Have you noticed that their designers are such geniuses that they made every hyperlink look basically like your spell check has the word spelled wrong?

Yeah, I don't understand why they did that. I was looking at it. I'm like, why would they have that word spelled wrong? I'm like, oh, it's a link. That is so dumb. Yes. A red underline. How fun. Yeah. Way to go, guys. Just makes me instinctively want to right click on it. Mm-hmm. It does.

I'm like, yeah. Like, find substitute. Oh, no. Okay. I have to download link as. Thanks, guys. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I might want to change that. So we've talked about Twitter as a, you know, a feature, not a product many times. Mm-hmm. Twitch has taken that and running with it.

And they are making it a feature of Twitch. Basically, they're taking Twitter, like, you know, functionality and putting it on the homepage for, like, the logged in users. I went to the main Twitch site and I couldn't find it and dawned on me, ah, it's for people who actually use the service and pay.

Yeah. Which is not me. The great thing about this Verge article is a tweet at the top from Jessica Livingston from back in September. It's an overheard. It says, Twitter is a friendster whose Facebook has not yet appeared. I just love that. I love that, too. It is very, very funny.

You know, Twitter's never going to go away either, but everybody knows my feelings on Twitter. I don't get it. And I'm shocked that they're still around. And they have the best PR in the world because everybody's still on news and other media will talk about what the Twitter links and the Twitter handles. And even though nobody gives a shit, that's because it's like the only thing that like MSM can wrap their head around.

It's 140 characters and Donald Trump likes to do it. It's like, you know, it's news for morons. It's great. So, of course, mainstream media is locked onto it. And I still use it every day. I know. I get most of my news from it because a lot of people that I still like post great links.

Excellent. Yeah, but I won't be using the Twitch version, although when I was on the Twitch homepage, I stayed there for about 10 minutes because I was watching these kids in the middle of a battle. This is kind of fun. I really was kind of digging it. I don't understand. I don't. Well, I mean, when I used to play Quake, I used to watch videos of players all the time to learn new techniques and stuff.

But, you know, now I don't play video games. So it's I can understand it, but I can't see myself ever doing it. You know what I mean? Gotcha. Yeah, I gotcha. All right. So back over at Recode, Walt Mossberg, who I generally like as a tech columnist, has written a very long article saying that we've got some problems in the tech field because there's basically five big companies that control everything and that anybody that comes along with something new is basically just going to get bought out or integrated or flat

out, you know, they're just going to steal the technology or the concept from these people and build it themselves and basically take them out of business at some point. The gang of five, as it were. Oligopoly. Yes. The great Oligopoly. And he's not wrong. He's not wrong.

And a lot of these people, though, they buy them, suck up the talent, then delete the service. How many times can we have we seen that happen over and over and over again? Yeah. And it even brings the point, you know, because a lot of people would just kind of come out and say, well, look at Snap. Well, Snap basically relies entirely on its operation for Google.

So and the mobile app platforms of Apple and Google. Yeah. So they've built their entire business on the top of these bigger businesses. So good luck with that. We know how that works. Yeah. When you when you build your house in somebody's backyard, don't be surprised when they burn it down. That's what I always like to say.

Yep. But yeah, I just I like saying the word oligopoly. It's fun. I know. I had a feeling I actually like almost was going to make myself a bet that you were going to pull that line out. So I've done what this would not be the first time that I've done that. No, no. You like to find your your big three penny words.

Well, I like to say luge a lot, too. But it doesn't come up a lot in the tech podcast. I know there's no I luge app out this week. Oh, we go. We need to we need to disrupt luging. Yeah, but what I was going to say is like, you know, all these big companies, the gang of five are looking for smaller companies to spend millions of dollars on to buy up their technology, throw away the technology and hire the guys.

We're going to save you a step. The grumpy old geeks are available to be hired right now for five million dollars. And we don't even have any tech that you would have to delete. It's a it's a win win. We're on the market. Just come come on by five million each. I already know.

Yeah. And I already know how to pronounce oligopoly. So, yeah. And luge. And luge. OK, moving on. We talked last week about them storing data on DNA. And yes, this week, IBM has figured out how to store data on a single atom. I know.

That's pretty amazing. Holomium atoms. Very. They can be very chilly, though. Negative 450 degrees, which kind of puts. I don't think you're going to get a water cooled PC that's going to get you down to that. But no, no, no. Winter is coming. You've got one of these drives, except your jacket isn't.

So you're going to freeze to death. I don't think his jacket's going to help much with this drive. That's that's pretty damn cold. So it is pretty cold, but it's pretty cool. You know, they'll figure out how to make it make it warmer. But it's still pretty neat that they can they can do that down to the level of a single atom now.

I think I remember the same saying something along the lines of they could put the entire iTunes downloadable catalog onto something the size of a USB drive. Oh, wow. Amazing. With this technology, which is pretty insane. Yeah.

OK, well, yeah, we don't have it yet. So moving on. And if I was in Norway, I wouldn't have been able to make that comment about that article because I didn't entirely read the whole thing. Oh, OK. So I love this idea. And I think this needs to be adopted everywhere. This is one of those change the world ideas.

That's so simple. We could get rid of so much trolling. YouTube would basically just go out of business because nobody could go in the comments and troll. What is the great idea? The Norwegian news site is now asking its readers to take a short reading comprehension quiz before allowing them to post comments below articles.

So you have to actually have read the story before you can discuss it. See, that's nice. I hopefully I didn't actually check out how the the tech works on it, because if it's just a quiz at the bottom. You also don't read Norwegian. Oh, I don't read Norwegian, but I could figure out if the questions are at the bottom and the plain text of the article is at the top.

I could just do some quick command F's and find some some common keywords and probably get close to figuring it out. Don't give don't give away my secret for doing the online DMV tests. OK, sorry.

That saved me so much time over the years. Actually, just the one time I got to do the DMV thing. But yeah, that was exactly what I did. I would just open up all the windows. The quiz was right there and just search plain text. Yeah, it was fantastic. New Zealand, you need to hire us.

That's it. Just just send a plane now. Yeah, we're fine. You pick us up and we'll take the five million dollars to that from the other thing. Yes. Give us free vacation and money, people. We're not asking for much over at Slate. The other site that you always laugh at me for finding articles from because I actually like them.

There is an article called move fast and break trust. Now, this goes along with absolutely everything else we're talking about, which is all these technologies are starting to fail us. And it's going quickly to a dystopian world. I scanned this in about like half a second. And all I saw was Uber, Uber, Uber, Uber, Uber, Uber, Uber, Uber, which I was expecting from the title of the article.

Yes. Uber's dishonesty aside, the issue is not simply corporate malfeasance by bad actors. Rather, it's a function of the incentives involved in developing new consumer technologies that are powered by artificial intelligence. Yeah. And so Google also has some issues, which is, again, a good point is made that all of these companies to enhance their artificial intelligence need people to actually be using the technologies because it's it's continued repetitions that increase the the the the how well the technology works.

Right. So the problem is, when you first release them, they're pretty stupid and that's what you have to do. And they're asking Google Home a bunch of questions. And it's not getting it's sending back alternative facts instead of real facts because it's all it's doing is doing a Google query.

For example, somebody asked there's is Obama planning a coup and it will inform you that he's in bed with communist China and may in fact be planning a communist coup because that is all over all right news sites. Yeah. The the people who did the tech on the Google Home really didn't do much much testing on that or thought thinking that, OK, the you know, the truthiness of a Google result isn't always going to be the greatest.

It's about the Google sauce and inbound links and SEO and things like that. If if everything that Google said was true, we wouldn't have the same problems we're having right now, would we not not being political, just state in fact. So there we go. These people need to really kind of test this shit before it hits the real world.

Unfortunately, Jason, facts are apparently political now in these days. So and also they're on. But all these people are on such disparate teams in totally different companies. Almost the Google Home guys, they're probably like over by the Nest team where, you know, so they're at N in the alphabet.

And G Google is over at G, you know, that's they got to they got to get a couple of those different little self-driving cars to drive them around the campus or use some of those colored bikes to even go over and ask a question at the G building from the N building. So it's no wonder they don't talk to each other. Yeah. And then this article goes on to talk about the Uber issues with their self-driving cars and the AI there.

Like in December, one of these self-driving taxis ran a red light in San Francisco, rolling straight through a pedestrian crosswalk in front of the Museum of Modern Art. Now, Uber, of course, being Uber, said that, oh, no, there was actually a guy in there that was driving. It wasn't the AI. Oh, lie. So complete a lie.

Yes. New York Times got them on that one. Yeah. So this article is a pretty in-depth review of how AI and how it's being rolled out is and being done by kind of deceptive companies is not very good for all of us. Nah, it's not.

But it's welcome to the new normal. And by the way, that one that one Uber that got caught running the red light, they were apparently like 19 of them that are on record while in self-driving mode for running red lights. They only have pictures and video of the one, though. Yeah. Only one got caught.

Now, speaking of Uber, Uber's had a rough couple of weeks. As we've documented it intensely. And Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has decided that he had a big staff meeting this week and he said to his entire staff, you know, we're going to hire a COO to help me.

Because I keep fucking things up. He should hire Mary Poppins. He needs to hire Mary Poppins. I can't think of anything else that's going to save him right now. Anyways, we do have an exclusive. I wanted to break it here. We do know who the new Uber COO is going to be. It's Hal 9000.

All right. That's my joke. I guess I was a little drunk when I made that one. Okay. But you even made a graphic. I know. I did. Didn't I? Yeah. Yeah. That'll be in the show notes. All right. Speaking of the Google and sorry, Uber's AI, Gary Marcus.

They're not all home runs, man. I know. Trust me. Uber's head of AI labs. Gary Marcus is leaving after just four months. Yeah. No, he's done. He's going to, you know, remain as kind of like a just a special advisor, but he's not going to be on the team anymore.

We don't know. Maybe he grabbed him by the circuit board and got kicked out with all the other Uber people that are leaving after just a few months and quietly with no explanation as to what's going on. It was that 19th red light running that broke his back.

Yeah, seriously. And we talked about Grayball last week and now they're saying, okay, we're sorry. We're not going to use it anymore. We're still going to use it for some things, but we're just not going to use it for the things that you guys got mad at us about. What a bunch of assholes. And I'm sorry, it's not going to be immediate because the way our systems are configured, it's going to take some time to ensure this actually is fully enforced and coming from the chief security officer.

And he's like, yeah, we can't really do it yet. We'll get to it. We promise. We don't lie. A bunch of lying sacks of shit. I really hate this company. Screw all you people that are still using them. Jesus Christ. What's it going to take? Well, their biggest competitor in China has opened an office in Silicon Valley.

Oh, good. Yeah. Didi is, they've launched an AI or a self-driving lab, not so much an AI lab, but a self-driving lab. The upside of this one is Charlie Miller, the guy who used to hack the Jeeps that we had some video on. I did not know this, but for the last year and a half, he's been working at Uber on their self-driving cars.

And he's like, screw it. I'm going to Didi. Nice. This whole move, I think, is on their part just so they can poach talent easier. So they don't have to have a, you know, it's like, hey, we want you to come work with Didi, you want to move to Shenzhen or Beijing? No. Not really. No. I like In-N-Out Burger.

I'm not going there. So this will just make it easier for them to get talent in the US. Yep. I agree. On the self-driving shtick here, there's a bus coming to Northern California pretty soon in San Ramon. The Bishop Ranch office park complex is going to get two 12-passenger shuttle buses coming from French private company Easy Mile.

And this is basically a test that they're going to be running for a short time before they put them out on the streets of San Francisco. Well, I'm glad that a French company got the job there. That makes sense. OK, well, speaking of French companies, Airbus has revealed their prototype for their flying car drone called a pop-up.

We are never getting flying cars. This is such a load of crap. This has been promised to me since I was like two, you know, jetpacks and flying cars. This one looks cool, though. This is never, ever, ever. Yes, it looks cool. It looks like it belongs right in a video game, which is the only place this thing will ever fucking exist. So you've got these little pods and then for part of your trip, you're on wheels.

So you're in a pod on a roller skate and then you get to wherever you need to get picked up by the the AI controlled, basically flying Cuisinart that comes and lands on top of you, picks you up and takes you wherever you need to go. Could it have a less inspiring, inspiring of safety name than pop-up?

Well, it's called pop-up. This is like it's a fucking toaster strudel then because I've been so embedded in the web thing. I'm like a pop-up ad. So, OK, I can I can see pop-up blockers. But I think, yeah, you're thinking of pop tarts. Yep. Oh, I love blueberry pop tarts.

Those are some of the best things ever. Dude, the s'mores. Unbelievable. Oh, those are good, too, especially about three in the morning after some substances. Cannot go wrong with that. And on the final depressing news, the British government is future proofing its budget by hiking taxes on the self-employed, also also known as the you can run, but you can't hide law when we want our literally our pound of pound of flesh.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And, you know, it'll happen here, too, at some point. So we're all you can't get a full time job. You have to become a contractor. And now we're going to charge you up the ass for it. Yeah, I can't get a full time job because they'll take all the money. already that I already owe them.

So I have to be a contractor where I have to pay even more money that I would have paid them if I had a job. It's just the math just doesn't work. I, I, I, yeah. Vive la revolucion. Security? Ha!

Brothers and sisters, we're here today with flock member Dave Bittner to talk about the evils in the world. There are nefarious heathens who are taking your data and pictures of your God-given naughty bits and selling them on the internet. These people need to be brought to a higher justice. And that's why Dave Bittner is here with us today.

Hello, Dave. Can I get a hallelujah? Hallelujah! Wow, I did not expect that, Jason. That's very nice. So, uh, as a privacy advocate and somebody that would like to believe his government and trust in them and think they're telling the truth.

Anything happen this week that might, I don't know, make me want to get off the grid and go buy a yurt? Uh, no, no. Actually, no. It's a whole week, uh, no. Nothing really. In fact, why don't we just, uh, what's, what's after security, huh? Uh, at the library. Any, read any good books lately? Uh, just as a dystopian futurism, but yeah.

Uh, I, I learned how to cook my own food from twigs. Yeah. All right. Well, perhaps, just perhaps what you're really, uh, referring to, Brian, is the big vault seven, uh, data dump from WikiLeaks this week, which has been all over the news.

We've certainly been covering it on CyberWire. I haven't heard of it. No, no. No, no. It's, it's all the rage. It's what all the kids are talking about these days. Yeah. So, uh, WikiLeaks did, uh, one of their, um, patented, uh, big data dumps. This one is called Vault Seven. What happened to one through six?

Come on, man. Don't start with the sequel. This isn't like Star Wars. Oh, maybe it is. We've been describing this, uh, this data dump as there's a lot less to it than meets the eye. I was actually going to ask. So did you guys like when this broke and after you had like, you know, an hour or two to kind of review what, what's been coming out, did you guys just go off bucket, pack up your laptops and go get beer?

No, I just said Tempest in a teapot. I didn't think this was, this was all that bad. Well, you know, but I mean, it's interesting to, to just look and see how, sort of how these sort of things play out, you know, how they spin out. And so, you know, the, the data dump happens.

And the first thing that happens is the sky is falling. The sky is falling. Right. Everybody panic. Um, and you see the sort of the, the breathless headlines, like, you know, uh, you know, this is the worst data dump since Snowden. And, you know, how are our civil liberties being, you know, violated, you know, and that sort of thing.

Um, before anyone has really had an opportunity to read through all of the, uh, stuff in the data dump. So, I mean, our take on it is, um, the CIA does espionage. They're good at it. Yep. And we're surprised how. Yeah.

We're like, um, this is what they're supposed to be doing. The only stupid part is that this got leaked. Well, I, it's, it's, it's confirmation for what we all knew, which is they can get into our iPhones. They can get into our Androids and, you know, smash your Samsung TV now. But you can only smash your Samsung, Samsung TV if they let one in your house, cause you can't do it over the net.

You got to have your USB stick, you know? Correct. Yeah. Correct. So if, if there's a, a CIA bag man already in your house, you know, installing bugs, um, you, you have more important things to worry about and, and probably you're already aware that you need to be, uh, careful about these sorts of things.

So kind of running along with the whole, you know, Trump says that he's been wiretapped and if that's actually true, he's probably got something to be worried about. Yeah. And the CIA's mission is not domestic surveillance, you know? So, you know, they're not really interested in, in you and me and our neighbors and so forth.

Now, you know, it's a little bit of a look behind the scenes at, uh, you know, how the sausage is made, if you will, you know, what their capabilities are, but there's really nothing that interesting or surprising. Um, you know, um, you know, the CIA uses a lot of open source stuff that's, you know, interesting, good, nothing, nothing wrong or really surprising about that.

You know, there was a lot of early reporting that, um, all of these supposedly secure apps on your phones were, were, were, have been hacked. Well, it turns out that's not really true. You know, they, they have the capability to basically own the device.

And if they own the device, it doesn't matter what you're doing on it. Um, you know, if they can capture, do they can do screen captures or, you know, the things that happen outside of the encryption, you know, at some point the encrypted data has to be turned into text that your eyeballs can read.

Yeah. Seriously. You can't read the matrix. Yeah. And so that's the point. If they can, if they can intercept the device at that point, then, you know, no matter how much encryption you have from point A to point B, uh, you know, it doesn't matter. So, so that's the kinds of things that we're talking about here.

But, um, I think Jason nailed it. It is sort of a tempest in a teapot, not a whole lot to see here. One of the other interesting little tidbits was that leading up to this, uh, reveal vault seven was supposed to be a bunch of Clinton stuff. That was the, the rumor. And, um, there's really nothing in there about that. Uh, other interesting thing is that it's, it's heavily redacted, you know, lots of names. And, um, you know, we talked to one researcher this week,

he said, uh, he said, you know, pretty much all of the really sexy stuff that you'd expect is redacted. So, which is interesting, you know, was it, some of it they're saying was redacted by WikiLeaks to not reveal names? Um, you know, was the document obtained at a point in its life when portions of it had already been redacted? Um, you know, that's unclear, but the bottom line is, uh, the most interesting part of this is the fact that it was leaked. Yeah. You know, the folks we've

talked to have said that, uh, they're pretty confident that the CIA will likely get to the bottom of how it was leaked. Um, evidently that's one of their core competencies. So when something goes wrong, we find out how, right, right. So, you know, you, you, you, you want that. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So the CIA is doing their job and now we know, you know, some of the ways that they do that job. Could that make their job a little harder if the bad guys

know some of the techniques? Yes. Well, isn't that, uh, that's a function of their WikiLeaks is also releasing the software to technology companies to go ahead and plug things and figure out how to stop them, which will then therefore make their job harder. One would assume if that's been proven yet, that's still up in the air if that's actually going to happen. But I think the one thing for me that got me was that just how pedestrian of hackers, the CIA is. I was expecting some like NSA level stuff. So now that the CIA stuff is out there, they're going to have to go

to big brother and borrow a wares disc to keep doing their job for a while because the NSA is way better. It's all just misdirection and fake leaks, Jason. They're keeping the good stuff. The good stuff is in leak seven or eight or nine or whatever the hell we're at. But it's kind of like, um, I mean, yes, but it's kind of like saying that, um, you know, the, these electricians over here are much better at, uh, wiring a light bulb than these plumbers are, you know, the CIA's mission is not,

is not so the CIA does cyber, but they're not the cyber people. The NSA are the cyber people. So, uh, everything here is pretty much as it should be. Um, I wouldn't, one, one other note before we move on, we noticed this week that a lot of the people, the organizations who were called out by name in this report as being particularly hard to crack have been just riding that wave, uh, you know, the security companies, the, the virus, uh, protection companies who were called out in the report are like, yep,

that's us. We are hard to, you know, we're, we've got the good stuff. And, um, so it's a little funny to see people, um, crowing and profiteering off of a report like this. Somebody's got to make some money. Yeah. Why not? Why not? So where are we at with this? We've had so many articles about this.

It seems like we pretty much kind of blew through it here. I think we covered up most of it. I just like the fact that it's, uh, the year zero series, which of course is the Trent Reznor dystopian world that he created as a promo for the album of the same name a few years ago. Uh, it's just so much stuff that, you know, I just geeked out on about this stuff and I was talking to a friend of mine and, and he was, he was mentioning how, remember all those early hacker movies that we had in the

early nineties when we were first getting into this stuff? Turns out it's all true. Uh, which, which ones are you referring to? Because I just still go with hackers. That's my, my go. Well, I mean, hackers is your, is your base level touch point, isn't it? War games is fantastic. So, uh, I don't know guys, check it out. It doesn't have legs.

I showed my kids war games, uh, recently and, uh, they both really loved it. So, you know, I was surprised cause there aren't many of those old movies that, uh, that, you know, that hold up. Usually it's an issue with like pacing, you know, movies have gotten a lot faster, um, than, than they used to be. How deeply did you have to break down the entire, okay, this is a phone and then we put it in this cradle. Well, hold back. Let's go back. This is,

this is a phone that has a cord that goes to the wall. Yeah. Well, you know what? Uh, it's funny, Brian, just last night I was talking with my 10 year old and, uh, and I asked him to, if he knew why, when we end a phone call, we say we hang up. No, yeah, that's a good point. I'm pushing the button now. Yeah. And, uh, and he said, yes, I know what I said. He said, he said, the reason I know

why we hang up is that I, I watched an old episode of the Brady bunch where the Brady's got a pay phone and, uh, and the father kept telling them to hang up the phone. So that's why I know what hang up means. So there you go. Excellent. Ah, the Brady bunch. So I, I mean, I've got one story. We did kind of blow through all of these things really quick. So, but it just as a, this is a link because obviously it involves the ass hat Assange, uh, whatever the hell his name is. Uh, so apparently

it's breaking today that Nigel Farage, who is, is kind of the head of the charge that led to Brexit over in the UK has, uh, it was, it's been leaked to business insider, a whole ton of emails that he's got longstanding links, uh, to Julian Assange. And, uh, he had visited the Ecuadorian embassy on Thursday, declined to say why he was there, but obviously he was meeting with Assange and, uh, UKIP, which is his platform over there has been, uh, it's been campaigning in the European parliament

on behalf of him for quite some time. So some nefarious linkages are starting to come together over there. So it doesn't look like, uh, they're quite, uh, free from some espionage and political charges and weirdness is occurring over in the UK as well as it is here now. So. Yeah, no. And, and I mean, it's, it's a, it's a big concern. Obviously the, all of the, um, uh, the tomfoolery that went on with our own election this year, uh, everyone is expecting more of the same in Europe. You know,

France has an election. Um, you know, there's, there are plenty of elections over in Europe coming up. And so everyone, there, there's an expectation that this, because it worked so well, uh, with our, I mean, it really did, you know, as, as an information operations campaign, it worked really well. And so there's every expectation that this is the new normal.

And, um, so they're sort of bracing themselves for it over there. And, and this, you know, there's no denying the, the connection between Farage and our, and our own administration right now. So it does, you know, we moved ourselves, we took off the tinfoil hat over this latest, uh, massive dump from the CIA, but I'm firmly putting it back on now with this because it's hard, it's hard not to see some sort of overarching conspiracy for lack of a better word when, when you see this sort of stuff. So we'll see. Well, Sean Spicer did show up to his press briefing

today with his flag upside down. I saw that new world order, new world order. That is a longstanding, uh, symbol supposedly that shows that, uh, you're supposed to, you, you are in need of help. It's, you're supposed to do that with the, with the flag. You're supposed to put it upside down to it, to subtly tell people that you need help. So I'm thinking Spicer is throwing out the, throw me a lifeline, get me the hell out of here.

Cause you know, if you, if you're a swinger, you put the pineapple upside down in your shopping cart. That, that means you're a GTF. So maybe I thought Spicer maybe thought his pin was a pineapple and he was just trying to get some action. I didn't know that. No wonder all those ladies were following me around Whole Foods yesterday. See, you got it. You got to watch out for that, man.

Watch out. Hell, I'm now I'm doing it on purpose. Oh, down the wrong rabbit hole again. All right. Let's, let's move on to, uh, this, uh, this white house, uh, app, this encrypted app that some white house people that sort of encrypted, sort of not.

Yeah. Uh, what Jason, what were you going to tell us about this one? Well, yeah, it was called confide and it's, uh, dubbed the Snapchat for business. And is it just probably about as secure as Snapchat, um, which means utterly it wasn't. And all the white house staffers were using it. And, uh, we have no idea how much of their stuff could have been compromised from this. I don't know a whole lot about the actual app itself. I've never used it or even heard of it until I saw this article on the intercept because I've been a

signal guy. So, well, yeah. And so I wanted to, I wanted to get to that because, um, you know, I think one of the interesting things about an app like signal from our point of view, that makes it more interesting is that it's open source. Yep. So that means that, you know, people can go in and actually look at the code and, and evaluate it and make sure that, uh, that it's actually does what it says it's going to do. Uh, how many times have we seen over and over again

that apps like this, this, this confide app, you know, they say, like it says in the article, they boasted military grade end to end encryption and turns out not, not so much, but you know, if you like, you go on the signal, um, website, uh, where they, they, uh, you know, promote the app, um, you have really well-known researchers, uh, you know, Matthew, Matthew Green from, um, Johns Hopkins university. We've had him on our show. He really respected a cryptographer

and they're saying, I've looked through the code and you know, this checks out. There is still one glaring, uh, hole in this hole. Yes. It's open source, right? There's got a, there is a point where someone takes that code, compiles it and sends it to Apple. Yeah, that's true. That's, that is the point where you can inject in whatever you want because you know, you can't, you're not sharing your binaries back out. And even if you were, you'd have to know what you're looking for. So it is still plausible to put in a backdoor

into signal. If you were so inclined and did have that, that level of access that you were the one that was compiling and shipping to Apple, unless it was like a multi-party system who are overseeing that process. But with the size of signal, which is a very small company, I don't know if they even are. No. And we've certainly seen that kind of, you know, code, um, injection with, uh, you know, pirated software on, you know, places like the pirate, there was the pirate bay or, um,

you know, some of the non, the non-authorized Google play store kind of places, you know, where you can download software. So they'll have, you know, what they say is the, uh, official version of let's, let's say Photoshop and, uh, you download it and it runs fine and it acts just to all the world. It looks like Photoshop. And so you're patting yourself on the back that you, um, you know, got yourself a free copy of Photoshop. But in the meantime,

you're broken. It's streaming onto your hard drive. Right. Exactly. It's doing whatever it wants to do to your system. And, um, and you know, you don't even know it. So those things do happen. Right. Yes, they do. So that was just my one take on the, the, the only hole that I saw in the signal process was that there is that one point of failure, but. And I, I've got a question

stemming from this because I did a deep Google dive, meaning I spent almost 30 minutes, uh, searching and I'm pretty good at the Google and the cyber, uh, to find up a follow-up about this at all. Do we know what phone Trump is still using? Because last we talked, he was using a very unsecure Android that was causing a lot of issues for a lot of people. And I have heard nothing about him switching that out yet. No, the latest that I've heard, cause I did a little, uh, digging myself

cause parts of it, what, what happened was I was hearing conflicting things. Like I, I had talked to someone who, uh, you know, was close to that world, you know, with the white house and so forth. And he'd said, no, no, the, the president has been issued his secure phone, you know, um, and that's what he's using. But then, you know, concurrent to that, I heard, no, he's, he's still tweeting with his old galaxy three or whatever it is. Um, and, uh, what I concluded was he, he uses

both. Oh, so we're not, he has a, yeah, he has a secure phone that he uses for his official white house business. The same type of thing that was, uh, you know, issued to president Obama. He uses it to keep the door to the bathroom open while he's inside tweeting with his other phone. Right. But what I, what I imagine is either in his top desk drawer or, you know, maybe in his shirt pocket or his suit coat pocket is where he keeps the galaxy phone. I believe it's actually a cellophane

taped to the back of his tie. That's right. That's right. And so, uh, you know, that is what he uses for his tweeting and his other things. And, uh, okay. Latest I've heard is he's got both. I'm just surprised that the, you know, the, the cyber security community has not, there just hasn't been more followup on this, but I guess you can't, if they're not going to let you know.

Well, and you recall, I mean, we talked to several episodes ago about how basically how the head of the white house cyber, uh, security group, uh, resigned slash was asked to leave. And we joked about how you, can you imagine being that person in that situation where you, you can't get the boss to do the most fundamental things to not just protect himself, but, Oh, I don't know, protect our

nation. It's a, it's an irrational situation. So yeah, but that, that's my understanding of it. All right. Well, you, you are the expert. So, and because you're the expert, I'm actually, I want to throw out a challenge to you for next week. Uh, we have not done this before, but I've as part of, while I was doing the deep dive, kind of figuring out what the hell was going on with the phone. I was reading all sorts of troubling things about, uh, citizens and non-citizens

alike carrying their electronics, uh, their phones, their laptops, their iPads over international borders. Yes. I am going to be traveling internationally in two weeks. I would love to get a, a, here's five ways to not be stupid and, and to somewhat protect yourself while crossing a border from you next week.

Leave your shit at home. Besides leaving your shit at home, the, the more plausible, I, the, I don't really have anything to worry about, but I also don't want my shit copied by the government plan. Okay, cool. I I'm happy to do that. I, we've actually covered this on the cyber wire a couple of times with one of our, uh, one of our, uh, policy experts. So I am pretty much up on this, but I'll be glad to provide some links and give you a little rundown of what you can and cannot expect in terms of,

um, sacrificing your rights as an American citizen, uh, at the border. Fantastic. You're not going to, uh, I'll just give you a little preview. You're not going to like it. Awesome. On that note, we'll talk to you next week. All right. Good talk to you guys. Bye-bye.

At the library. I didn't get a chance to finish a book this week, but I found some news that fits the section rather nicely. Um, Amazon has now confirmed its 10th physical bookstore location. Where's it at? This is way more than an experiment. This one is in Bellevue, Washington, but, uh, they're already committed to also open up new locations in Chicago. I'm going New York city and the suburb of New Jersey later this year. Uh, there, you know,

people are complaining about the store saying they're not really about books. They're about pushing Amazon stuff like the Amazon Kindle, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, the, the echo as well that they're selling that. And it's also an indirect showcase for Amazon prime membership group because you pay less if you're a prime member at the physical stores than just like you would online. Uh, which is great. And, uh, the line that particularly made me laugh as industry insiders speculate that Amazon could also eventually expand. It's just walk out technology from its

new Amazon go convenience store to Amazon book locations as well. That took a fucking industry insider to make that speculation. Of course they would. That's just, yeah. Okay. Welcome to the no shit files. Yes. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I'm telling you, man, it's, it's, it's tough out there for a industry insider. I know it's hard to, hard to make ends meet these days. Yeah. God

predicting the fucking obvious is, uh, apparently a full-time job. Industry insiders speculate that water might be wet. Okay. We talked about, uh, Andrew bunny Wong on the show before for his awesome series on wired UK about Shenzhen. And, uh, I got to hang out with him in Singapore for a while.

Great guy. Super smart. Works with the guys at safe cast sometimes. Anyway, he's got a new book, the hardware hacker adventures in making and breaking hardware. It's a big, I got my copy today. I got a hardcover copy because it's a hardware hacking book. I'm sure it's going to have tons of illustrations and stuff and photos. And of course it does. Yeah. Computers don't display things like illustrations and photos. Yeah. But I liked, I don't know for this. It just seemed like it was, it, it just seemed right

to have the physical copy. I can't wait to hang out with you and like, come over to your place and like, we can play on your computer. We can play all those text games with your green, green screen ASCII monitor. That's right, man. Zill, the adventure of Zill, the first PC game I ever got and it was green and I loved it, but no, I just, I felt like having this one in paperback. So I got it in paperback and if somebody breaks in, I will kill them with it. I'll let you know how it goes. You

know, I'll keep it. I think I'm done with my latest Kindle book, which was my latest bathroom book. So I can, I can put this in the crapper and enjoy at, at my leisure. My next one though, I don't know if I'm going to have a regular book for a while, although I may have to take a break from this one.

I got the entirety of Sherlock Holmes read by Stephen Fry from audible 62 hours and 48 minutes. That's a, that's yeah, that's a long bathroom break. Well, I don't have to listen to audio books in the bathroom. So it's, uh, it's good though. That's the thing about it. I listened to the first story and it's cool because Stephen Fry does, uh, an intro to each one and talks about, you know, his love of

Sherlock Holmes and some of the history behind the story that you're about to hear. And you know, uh, study in Scarlet was the first story, which was the same as the BBC series. And it was fun to go back and listen to the original story and then see the similarities about what they did with the new version versus what the old version was. It's very neat. And his reading is in insanely incredible. I mean, yeah, but he does American guys from like, he does Cowboys really well and Mormons and all sorts of different people. I,

it is hands down one of the best read audio books I've ever heard better than lamb almost, but almost almost. Well, I I'm just looking at the page right now and the disparity in pricing is unbelievable. It's 55 95 unless you're an audible member, in which case it's 14 95. Uh, and if you're an audible a premium member, it's 13 bucks. I paid 13 bucks for it. Nice. Yeah, that sounds really cool. I mean, I, I won't ever listen to it. No, of course you won't, but I'm just, I don't do

audio books and I already have read all the Sherlock Holmes stuff, but if I did, this would be the one I would get. I read them all when I was like between the age of 13 and 16 and I haven't read them since. So it's nice to go back and kind of just, I just think it'll be a good, I love long reads like this, so it'll be a fun one. Cool.

Caps and doodads. And speaking of listening to audio books, I'm listening to audio books now on my shiny new AirPods from Apple as I like to call them ear boogers. Yeah. They, they finally came and they, they surprisingly are very snug. I tried to do a head shake test to see if they would fly out. They didn't, um, charge super fast, work really well. And amazingly sound really,

really, really good. Sound way better than the, the wired headphones. Well, they better. They're also like five times as expensive. Uh, yeah, a little more than that. Cause I can get a pair of wired lightning headphones for what? 17 bucks. And these were 149 plus shipping and tax, which turned out to be about 180 bucks. So I can buy like nine pair of the other ones for these, but I like them. I like them a lot. They're not as good

as the Sennheisers, obviously, which by the way, I'm going to have a link in the show notes. If you go to Amazon right now, the Sennheiser CX 5.00 eyes that we always talk about that Brian you found first and, um, loved and pimped, um, used to be about a hundred bucks. They're under 50 bucks right now.

That is fantastic. I actually could use another pair. Yeah. I wish, I wish I, I gave these away as gifts to like 10 people. I'm like, damn it. I want to refund. I'm actually going to order a, I'm going to reorder myself. These, uh, these Sennheisers cause these are, I, we're not kidding around. These are the best headphones we've ever had. Absolutely. This is the price right now, $48 and 20 cents. I mean, these are $500. You w you, you wouldn't tell the difference between these and a $500 pair of headphones.

No, without a doubt. They are, they're just unbelievably good. The only problem I have with them is I can't wear them in public because you can't hear anything else. There's no background noise. These are for hanging around the house, listening to music, or if your significant other is nagging on at you, stick them in and you're at peace. Now back to the AirPods. Is this one size fits all? Yeah, that's just one thing. It's a little, it looks like a little case of dental floss

that, uh, you plug into your lightning connect or your USB, you know, your standard phone charger, uh, charges up, charges it up the case in about, uh, I don't know. I can't remember. It was like 80% charged when I got it. So it only took like 20 minutes to charge the case, the entire, the earbuds, when you plug them into charge, 15 minutes of charge, we'll get you three hours of life on them. Right. Um, and I've haven't used them for more than three hours. I'm sure I will with Sherlock Holmes, but I just plug them in the case for 15 minutes and they're zapped back up.

They charge amazingly fast, very comfortable. Um, I wish I could turn off the double tap for Siri. It's annoying. Yeah. The one thing that they do really well though too, is when you take them out of your ear, they just pause and you stick it back in your ear and they start playing again, which is great when I'm out walking and somebody starts talking to me, I just pull it out of my ear and it pauses instead of having to find the button and then take them out of your ear.

I just find it hard to believe that these are going to fit everybody's ears. I'm sure they won't. Absolutely not. You know, I'm, I, I'm not going to ever order them because I'm looking to figure that in the next six months, I will find probably 10 to 15 pairs of these on the Santa Monica bike path. Yeah. Yeah. Keep an eye out for them for sure. Yeah.

Uh, and hopefully they're all, you know, like not all lefties. It's like, you like those game pieces you get from, uh, McDonald's for monopoly. You've got like 800 of one piece and then you're trying to find one of one other one. It's like, I need a right, I need a right so I can eBay these. Uh, anyway, I, the sound quality is, like I said, is great, but the nice thing about it is when I'm outside, they are balanced. So I can still hear stuff around me, but I mean, it's like a good balance between background noise and

what I'm listening to. I, so far I'm, I'm hooked on them. I love them. They are way overpriced, but for, you know, first gen and I keep breaking all of my wired ones because my, uh, six S plus is so big when I have them in my pocket with the headphone jack on them and I sit down, it basically breaks it off. So for me, I'm, I'm just hedging my bets and saying, I'm hopefully not

going to lose one of these before, you know, I make up the difference in lost revenue on the other headphones. Right. Okay. A little followup on, uh, we had flight tracker on before and it, you know, it went tits up. Yep. There's another one I found called flight aware. It does just about exactly what it does. Interface is not very pretty. If you go to flightaware.com, it's a great site for tracking flights, but you cannot find a link to the iOS or Android app there, but you have to go to the

actual, uh, app store and you'll find it and you can get it from there. So I got that for my, uh, my trips in the coming months. I also found an interesting article from something I'm going to talk about in a second, um, called find the real reason for delays with the, with airline cargo sites. What this is, is it's a older article from 2007. So it's a 10 year old article, but I think the premise probably remains the same. Yeah. If your flight is delayed and they're giving you some

kind of BS excuse, go check the, the cargo version of the website that, uh, the airline you're on and you can see the flights if they have cargo on it and they will list the actual cause of delay, not just weather quote unquote weather. And then you can print out the screen and take it back and say you're full of shit. I want a refund or I want an upgrade or just give me a free cocktail. I don't care, you know, but it helps you negotiate getting better stuff. Nice. So give that a shot. I will.

And, uh, remember jelly, uh, the app that you and I both made fun of continuously. Well, you made fun of it first. And then six months later, I'd forgotten about you making fun of it and I tried it. And then I made fun of it. It's like Google for really stupid people. Yes. That's pretty much the, that should actually be there. They should make shirts. Yeah, they should. Well, they don't have to anymore. They don't have to anymore. It's the question and answer app that was built by Twitter founder, co-founder biz stone. It was dumb as hell, but, uh, Pinterest bought them up. So

just proving that you can, uh, when lightning struck once it will continue to strike no matter what fucking piece of crap you come up with. Yeah, no doubt. So, uh, I believe you discussed the spark mail app a while back. Yes, I did. So you look at me for remembering that you brought it up, uh, instead of just charging forward and saying, I found this great new app. Okay, go ahead. Tell me all about spark spark is the, uh, the beautiful and intelligent email app is what they say. It was

best of 2016 by Apple, which, you know, probably means that the next version of Apple mail will look exactly like it. Uh, I actually really enjoy it. It's a good mail manager. I never thought I'd, uh, switch away from, uh, the, the, the built in, but I have, uh, I'm using this on, on both, uh, my desktop and on my phone right now. And I've even put it on my iPad, even though I never check email on my iPad anymore. And this is a fantastic, uh, great little email program with a lot of cool

nifty little features, like just, you know, basically adding, you know, likes and thanks and smiles and quick, quick, quick, simple, uh, responses, uh, to, to different emails and things like that. The, so far the way that it's kind of like, uh, the smart inbox that just does filtering automatically seems to be pretty spot on. I like it a lot. It looks nice too. I wouldn't mind if they gave you the ability to do skins, but yeah, then that it's pretty great. Yeah. I've got a few issues

with it after I've used it for this amount of time. Now I wish it had boomerang support for the boomerang app, but you have to use the Gmail client to do that, which sucks. Um, they have snoozing, but it's not the same thing. The snoozing I use pretty much constantly works great. Search kind of blows. Uh, I've had a lot of issues with search, but for the most part, yeah, it gets a job done.

I'm stuck in it. I use it on, on all my devices as well. So all in all, it's, it's done better than every other one I've tested, which has been every other one, you know? Yeah. And when I was, uh, threw this in there and the show notes to talk about it, I Googled Eudora cause I used to love Eudora. Do you know Eudora is still around and it's now open source, uh, done by the, uh, Mozilla guys. Yep. Sure did. Actually crazy. Actually talked about that on the show one time

too, but that's okay. Yeah, whatever. Uh, so when I found the, um, the flight tracking app and the cargo deal, the cargo sites, I found it from recommendo. Oh boy. It's a weekly newsletter. It gives you six brief personal recommendations of cool stuff by Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder and Claudia Dawson. How are they personalized? It's personal, their personal recommendations.

Oh, personal on their side, not personalized to you. Yeah. They each, they each give two things that they like now, Kevin's and Mark's love. Uh, I have not found anything that Claudia and I have in common yet. So, uh, take that with a grain of salt, but the stuff, a lot of the stuff that they talk about in this newsletter I've known about for years, but every now and again, every now and again, there's a little gem like the, uh, the airline app that I just needed, uh, at that same time when they, the email came to me. So it worked out for me.

Give it a shot. I mean, it's free once a week. So sometimes they have good stuff and they have the same sensibilities as us. So the fact that a lot of these newsletters, like a lot of their newsletters have the same stuff that I already know about. That's a good sign. It's not a shitty newsletter. Right. Yeah. Okay. I'll check that out. Might as well. That way, you know, it won't be just you putting stuff that you found on there into our show notes. We can both do it. Yes. Yes. And you can, uh, you can swipe away and spark if I've already beat you to it.

Yep. So, uh, speaking of swiping, Jason, you're still a single man. Yes, I am. Yep. So there's a secret celebrity only version of Tinder that I think you should lobby to get into. Except I'm not a celebrity. Well, we have a podcast. Like I said, I'm not a celebrity. Yeah. So this, uh, this leaked, uh, the other week much to Tinder's dismay because they were definitely trying to keep it hush hush. Uh, they set up a special members only version of the app called Tinder select, which will keep elite bloodlines in the elite.

They should have called it the real party because you always want to try and find out where the real party is. Yes, exactly. This is the real party. So yeah, it's Tinder select. This idea has been around for a super long time, which I always found insanely condescending. Uh, when I was working in worlds where there were rich and famous people, they would bemoan the fact that they couldn't, uh, they wouldn't date the normals. So they, they needed some sort of way to only meet other rich and famous people.

Yeah. They need to find people as damaged as they are. Pretty much. Yeah. I don't know why you'd want that actually you celebrities because you're all fame whores and why would you be with another fame whore? You should be with somebody that just wants to pay attention to you and only you. Yeah. Come on. Opposites attract for a reason. Well, they don't want to do that.

Okay. I found a cool new site called privacy. It's at privacy.com, which means they got some money because that's a good domain to get. It's it. Remember the app burner that I talked about before, who was a sponsor for one of our very early shows. I do. Where you could go get just a throwaway phone number. Well, this is a credit cards to burn. So you sign up, you sign up, you tie a bank account to it or a debit card, or I tied in my simple.com bank account, which is

where I just, it's kind of my, uh, my secret. I throw a few bucks in there. If I need to play around with something and test out things like privacy. Well, it's really cool. It's got a little, uh, widget for Chrome. So if you go to a site, you basically set up your burner card, put however much money you want into it. And then when you go to the site, it'll fill out all the credit card details from your burner or your privacy card. And that way, if anybody ever gets the card, it doesn't matter because it's, you know, it's segmented from the rest of your bank account.

It's great. And it's pretty cool. Currently it's free. So hopefully they'll figure out, hopefully they'll figure out a way to make money off of it and stay in business. All right. Unless their business model is everybody goes and signs up, puts a bunch of their money into privacy.com into their burner cards, and then they just walk away, which could be a good business model. That is a very good business model. Actually. Yes, it is. Uh, and, uh, moving on to

one of the, the greatest ones, the burger flipping robot is it could spell the end of teen employment. This is, uh, the flippy robot from Miso robotics. Yeah. And it's AI driven, AI driven. Of course it is. Yeah. The teenagers use a lot of intelligence flipping over those burgers too. So obviously you need an intelligent robot. Yes. Teenagers intelligence is definitely artificial. So we're, we're all good

there. Uh, the thing about it is it's in business. I think they put it into, into business on Pasadena or somewhere out that way already. It wasn't in the article that I have in the notes, but it came out like a day after that this thing is in the wild. Oh, that's amazing. If it's close by, I want to go see it. Yeah. Uh, we'll, we'll dig a, dig it up and see if I can find out where it's at. But yeah, I think it's over in Pasadena. I want to go, I want to get a robot burger. I want an in and out burger.

Screw the robots. Oh damn. Now I know it's for dinner. Oh man. And finally, uh, there's an article on tech crunch this week, uh, called how hackers turned a Cape Cod fishing guide site into a host for e-commerce fraud. All this, all this article is, is a tale of woe by some people who didn't keep their WordPress site updated. And it is, this happens thousands of times a day. There's nothing special about this website or the story that they're talking about. The only thing special

about it is that it is a picture perfect description of what happens when you don't keep your shitty ass WordPress site updated. Happened to you. Happened to me. Happened to almost everybody that's ever run a WordPress site. Yep. I, I reading through the story, I was like, yep, this is what happens.

Media candy. The Americans is back. It's the best show that nobody is watching probably because it's all actually happening in real life right now. Bet they didn't see that coming. You keep saying that nobody's watching it. Everybody I know won't shut up about this fucking show. So there are, there are other people out there that are watching it.

It is fantastic. Uh, the season premiere for season five just aired. It was highly enjoyable. Uh, they have already decided and called it there. There are only two seasons left this one and then one more after that. So it won't drag on and on and on, which is always good to hear because you know, yeah, it shows get old and it's gets harder and harder to keep a stringing along the storyline as we've seen on many shows that we enjoy. So, okay. Well, I see, I've been waiting on my, I've been using the Brian Schulmeister, uh, methodology on this

show cause I figured it was going to get canceled at some point, but now I know that it's going to get canceled. Now I can start watching it. Uh, yeah, I always said I needs to make at least two seasons. So you could have started watching when season three hit. Yeah, but enough people weren't telling me off, telling me about it. So, well now they are. So I'm happy about that. Okay. Uh, a show that you told me about, uh, and I've heard also from other people as being fantastic. I finally sat down and watched the first two episodes of the expanse and what's

your thought? I really enjoyed it. It felt like this is sci-fi has not had a, had a decent show since Battlestar Galactica. I think they finally got one. Now the one thing that did bother me is unfortunately when I went to the website to put the link in the show notes, I scrolled over and looked at the cast and, uh, to my surprise, some of the people that I thought were major characters from the first two episodes aren't even in the cast list. So I guess that there's

some shake, there's some shakeups that are coming. Yeah. Things are variable. Uh, uh, when, yeah, when you get to season two, things are definitely variable, but, um, that's, it's kind of shitty that they did that, but yeah, it was a bit of a bummer, but I mean, you know, my fault for looking, right? Yeah. But the thing about it is I don't believe it. So I'm not going to do any spoilers about it, but I'm pretty sure that that cast list will fill back out again at some point. Um, that's the thing about it. It's like, you know, when some characters

disappeared from the walking dead and we're back in later on, but I am, I'm just finished catching up with the latest episode and this show gets better and better every single episode. And I didn't really get into it until like maybe episode five of the first season. I liked it, but I didn't really get into it. And by the time they got to the season finale of season one, I was like, yeah, where's the next one now. And fortunately there, I think they're on episode seven

or eight of season two. So they, they only go to 10. So by the time you get caught up, you should be able to just get your way through to the end of season two. Excellent. Well, I'm looking forward to it so far. I've, I've really enjoyed it. So, so, and I do want to say that Shora Agdeshlu, uh, the Iranian actress, uh, is un-fucking-believable. She's the strongest female character on TV right now. Hands down. Seems to be going that way. Although again, only two episodes in.

Yeah. Yeah. No, dude, she, she, oh Jesus Christ. She's good. Wait till you get there. All right. Okay. I will. Um, awesome. So the aforementioned shows that just go on and on and on when they should have been given a decent burial years and seasons before, uh, Big Bang Theory would be one of those. Oh yeah. That show is just fucking awful now, but I get, I will give you one way to

enjoy it briefly. One last time. There is a link in our show notes. What happens when the Big Bang Theory meets Ricky Gervais? So they have, uh, stripped the show of its laugh track and instead put in Ricky Gervais unhinged laugh from his podcast back in the day in its place. And it is comedy gold.

It's pretty damn good. I didn't think I was going to like it, but when I started doing it, I was just, I was cracking up. Yeah, it's hilarious. I mean, you can't not laugh when you hear that Ricky Gervais laugh. So, and the best part I think is of this article is there are links to the actual show without the laugh track and you can hear how terrible the show actually is. And some of it is just like mean spirited nastiness. And I don't think that they picked this clip purposefully. I

think this is just random, but it is so horribly unfunny. Not a single one of those jokes landed. No, it's, I mean, it's, it's bad. So yeah, it's just a bad show now. It's, it's, I've actually officially just completely removed it from my DVR recordings. So yeah, I stopped watching it like, I think I got through five seasons when I had food poisoning and I, I binge watched all five and two weeks and I haven't watched, I caught like a quarter of an episode here or there at my dad's

house. And I was just like, it's the same show and it's worse. So yeah, well in happier news, Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera classics are getting their own streaming service. Something else you need to pay more money for every, every week. Yeah, that's great. Let's see. This is not good news.

Just go with one of the other ones, please sign in. Don't create a whole new one. Jesus. No, man, that's, that's the way it goes now. They're just trying to, trying to run, bilk it out, you know, uh, four 99 a month or 40 bucks a year, initially available on iOS, Android and the web and time Warner plans to expand to major streaming platforms, including Apple TV, Roku, Amazon fire devices, and other shit that you got to plug into your TV. And in addition to, you know, basically

trolling for dollars by creating their own new subscription service, they are also going to get into the original content game where they're going to make new shows based out of the properties that they own, which will invariably suck ass. Yeah. Take a lesson from the Muppets. People didn't work. Nope. For the first time, more people subscribe to Netflix than have a DVR. That's in interesting.

That's not, uh, that is interesting. Actually, hold on. Cause I read this. My brain just went then, uh, Oh wait, nevermind. No, it's not. Okay. I DVR. I was thinking, uh, fuck cable box. What's the thing that you have? Cable box. You're thinking about just a regular cable box. Only 50 or 53% of the U S have a DVR, a digital video recorder, but 54% of adults now have Netflix. All right. I mean,

that's pretty crazy. It's crazy that 54% have Netflix, honestly, because, you know, there's nothing to watch in Howard and that I still think that they're losing money, but I think, I think half of these people, uh, joined Netflix when they mailed out DVDs and just have never realized that they have a returning charge on their credit card. Could be. Yeah. They could only get DVDs. They never actually upgraded to the streaming portion. They still get DVDs every month. And

there's a small portion out there somewhere in the, in the far backwoods that are still getting their VHS tapes every week by pony express. That's amazing. And because I did need something very fun to watch, I'm not a huge fan of James Corden's late show, but, um, they did the, they do these things where they like recap somebody's career in 12 minutes and it's kind of, kind of funny.

They did Sam Jackson's this week and I, I chuckled quite a bit. So I enjoyed that as just kind of a nice respite from the other shit that was going on. I put another link in the show notes that I thought would cheer you up quite a bit as well, Jason. Oh, it cheered me up immensely more than the video of Sam Jackson and James Corden. So I thought it might Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the Cornetto brothers from their Cornetto trilogy are back together again. They are writing a new

project. No word yet as to what it's going to be, but, uh, they're currently working on something brand new and I, for one, cannot wait. I just wish that they would get Edgar Wright in on it, but you know, he's a busy guy, I guess. Yep. But yeah, come on guys. I mean, everything that they've done, I've loved. There's just, there's no downside to those guys getting together. Yep. Shaun of the dead. It's just gotta be one of the best movies ever made.

Even my wife thought it was hilarious. It is how hard that is. No, I don't, but I take your word. I take your word for it, but yes, you cannot, out of the three, Shaun of the dead wins, hands down. Speaking of artificial intelligence and the fact that you probably don't have any intelligence, if you're still buying Soylent, uh, Soylent has now put out their new AI assistant.

Okay. I was thinking that they were probably going to like pair this with where to find the nearest bathroom, but apparently this is just like nutritional facts and things like that. So how boring. Yeah. Well, even the, even the, the title of the article is like, just like all the cool kids, Soylent now has its own pointless AI assistant. Pointless being the key word.

I'm going to go ask it if it's people too. Yes, please do. Okay. Uh, Snapchat again, once again, now just as a quick reminder, uh, how the company's tributes often come off as clueless. Uh, last 420, the app added a Bob Marley filter, which obviously is somewhat racially insensitive given the way that it actually changed people's faces. Uh, a few months later, it rolled out an anime inspired filter that looked a lot like yellow face. Awesome. Yeah. Black face, yellow face. And now what kind of face we got?

We got pink face. This week we had national women's day. So they decided that, uh, let's put some filters on there for three historic women. Frida Kahlo, uh, civil rights activist, Rosa Parks and scientist Marie Curie. Curie filter, uh, actually has beakers that roll out in a ribbon identifying who she is. Uh, but they did add digital eyeshadow and smoothed out the skin. So she looked pretty.

Okay. So look very pretty while you are a scientist. Uh, then they did the, the, I love this article. And then the gadget, cause it says the parks filter didn't reach full Marley blackface levels of embarrassment instead of using your signature hat, hair and glasses, but still turning a person of colors like this into a costume. Similarly, the Frida Kahlo filter adds her historically accurate hairstyle and thick eyebrows, but reduce, reducing her to a few facial characteristics comes off as pretty clueless and insensitive. So good job there.

Once again, Snapchat, you know what you need to do. You need to start taking pictures of yourself using these, these filters, make t-shirts out of them and wear them around Santa Monica and say, thanks snap. Oh, that's actually quite a good idea. I, the locals here in Santa Monica and Venice are actually, there's a bit of an uprising against Snapchat here. People are getting pissed. I could make a buck or two selling these shirts to them. I'm telling you, I'm here to, I'm here to tell you how to make money on the internet. It's my job. Episode one. And, uh, just a quick, uh,

how to for you guys over at Snapchat. Uh, if you want to know how you should have done something for national women's day, uh, NASA has highlighted women in STEM with a virtual field trip through a partnership with Google and it is quite good. So well done there, NASA and Google. Well, yeah, fortunately they, you know, they have a hiring requirements at NASA and Google. So you're required to have a brain. Yep.

Now I knew Chris Hardwick was loaded, right? Cause he sold Nerdist and he's, you know, been on TV forever. Uh, you know, he got rich and famous after the, uh, the, the alcoholic induced MTV youth of his with the, uh, the anti-vaxxer broad, but what you're going to do? So his house now is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. And they actually did a video on Zillow with it. And did

you get a chance to look at this video? Zillow's doing viral content now? Who knew? Uh, yeah, I watched it really quickly and it's just, you know, yeah, he's got a cool house and he's also married to a hearse. So I guess maybe that also probably helps with being able to say, I don't think that, you know, being on TV is not quite the money boom that it once was. So I'm not entirely sure he's all that loaded except he's on TV 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah, that's true. He's never

not on. And I'm sure he's still got a, I mean, he got a good payout from Nerdist and probably still has part of that. So yeah. Right. Anyway. Um, so that's fun. That's definitely a fun thing to go see. Cause that's a cool ass house. I want a house like that. I mean, it's got a secret room.

Well, we just got to sell this podcast, Jason a hundred more episodes, abs, abs and Chris Hardwick's house. That's what they promised me when I started this thing and jetpacks flying cars. And now it is apparently official astronauts can grow potatoes in Martian soil, according to the international potato center. No, right. Who knew there was one? Yes. Apparently down in Lima, Peru, they've been working on trying to figure out how to grow potatoes in the same conditions

as Martian soil. And apparently they've gotten it to work. How the hell is the international potato center in Lima, Peru and not in Ireland? I don't know. Well, the project is in Lima, Peru. The actual center might be in Ireland, but it better be St. Patrick's day is coming up and this would be highly disappointing. Otherwise now, Brian, that seems racially insensitive. And now you might be getting that

job at snap doing the potato, Mr. Potato Head snap filter for St. Patrick's day. I can't wait to see what filters they roll out for St. Patrick's day. I have a feeling we'll be talking about it here. Oh man, you got to get one of those just in time printers to like go out, you know, go out in the morning on St. Patrick's day to your local haunt, take pictures of your friends and then run home, print up, you know, potato head pictures of them and bring them back. So everybody can wear them that night at the pub. Nice. Anyway, a friend of the

friend of the show, Calby, sent me a link about a house that was printed in 24 hours from a massive industrial 3D printer. And this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Yeah, this is badass. It's very, very cool. I watched the video. It's fantastic. I mean, you know, yeah, maybe we don't need to make any money. We can just have a $10,000 house.

Here's the problem. The land. Companies in Russia. Apiscor is a Russian company. So how is this a problem? Obviously, it's going to be coming here very soon. Good point. Yes. You know, I'm not even going to go there. Never mind.

In Russia, house print you. Yeah, seriously. And it's a concrete house. It looks pretty cool. And it's designed well. Yep. I dig it. I dig it. So definitely check out the video. It is a very fun video. And back from the No Shit Sherlock Files, the World Economic Forum has an article called The Effect of Unemployment on Your Personality. Here are a few choice points. Unemployment can change your personality. Over time, you may become less friendly, less hardworking, and less

open to new experiences. Hang on a second. Hold on. Unemployment causes you to work less hard? Well, yeah, because I'm not fucking working. Because I'm not getting paid for it. I'm less friendly because I can't afford to go out and hang out with my friends. I'm less open to new experiences for the same damn reason.

Results showed that agreeableness, which is similar to friendliness, decreased among both men and women during long-term unemployment, one to four years. Well, Jesus, fuck, get a job, people. Why would they need to point out that agreeableness is similar to friendliness? Why not just use friendliness? Because apparently those are different checkboxes on the test page that they're taking. Oh, OK. But during the first two years of unemployment, men experienced increases in agreeableness because they apparently don't have to go to work and they can sit around and

scratch their balls. But after two years, then they decrease in agreeableness. That explains the turn this podcast made. Ah, the bright spot amid these relatively dismal findings is that once you're reemployed, personality seems to rebound. Ah, caveat. Researchers still need more data to verify whether that's true, but it's what the current data implies.

I don't know. Have you seen my clients? No, I haven't. They're not. They're not fun. OK. And honestly, even if your personality has rebounded, this is pretty much baseline from when you were employed. So I've known you for 20 years. This is pretty much your default personality.

Yeah, this is this is all this is all I got, people. See, I think you break that. I think you break the data points because unemployed Brian and employed Brian are completely, utterly miserable and grumpy, but just on two different sides of the spectrum. This is true. This is very true. There's a shit. I got to work today. And then there's a shit. I don't have a job. But this is where the agreeableness comes in. Because the shit, I don't have a job. Brian is like, I guess I better go to Finn's. That's true.

And the shit, I got to work. Brian is like, oh, I'm pissed off because I can't go to Finn's. I guess I got to go to Finn's later. Yeah, it just it just rejiggers your schedule. So this was the just one of the silliest things. And to see this come from the World Economic Forum was just kind of a head scratcher. Yeah, it's a little low. I'm a little disappointed by them. They're usually much better at these sorts of things. I'm assuming you've seen this video. I have yet which video. Which video are you talking about? This is the South Korea expert interrupted by

children on BBC World News. Yes, I have seen that video, Brian. I think everybody has. This has been the most viral thing that I've ever seen. And I can explain exactly why. Well, actually, I could use Slate's headline to explain exactly why it's quite so popular. Thank you, BBC dad and his pesky kids for providing a respite from this miserable world. Yeah, well, there you go. That's that's basically it.

The video is fantastic. I absolutely love it. If you've been living on Mars growing potatoes and haven't seen it yet, go see it. It's hilarious. And in particular, there is a link in our show notes to somebody who has way too much time on his hands. His name is Ben Thompson, who broke it down step by step on medium. And the breakdown is as funny as the video. Okay, I'm gonna have to read that then because I was like, do I really need to waste my time on that? But if you're saying it's funny. Oh, yes,

you do. Okay, because you know, I think it's funny that, you know, the South Koreans, even though this guy's a South Korean expert, you know, you have Gangnam Style coming from South Korea. So these people like live and die by viral videos. So I guess this guy really and truly is an expert on South Korea.

It appears to be. And this this breakdown is worth it, not just for the guys writing in and of itself, but for the choice bits from Twitter that he's included. It is. It's funny. It's worth it on it. We have a new Patreon subscriber, a liver, liver, liver. How much of beer have you had? I've had two

and a half and my liver is gone. Oliver Banta. Shout out to my liver. Oliver Banta is now our Patreon subscriber of the week. And if you hear noise in the background, that's because I'm dealing with a rowdy dog. Thanks so much, Kidney. Thanks so much, Kidney. Thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Our first comment over at our website, jrg.show is from Spencer for hire. Hey, guys, love the podcast. Was wondering if you could incorporate timing of the segments into the description. I like to jump around and it would make it much easier to navigate the podcast. Keep up the great work. Jump around, jump around, jump up, jump up and get down. I've actually been thinking about that because it's not too much of an effort to do it, but I just haven't had the time. So maybe in the next couple of weeks, I'll start integrating those into the show notes.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. And then we have a comment from anonymous. I thought you would like to know you're not the only podcast struggling with Trump. I am also an amateur astronomer and listen to an English podcast called the awesome astronomy podcast. Listen to the beginning of episode 57. I did listen to the beginning of episode 57 and I spent about five minutes laughing on the floor. OK, since you just said epithethobe 57, you cannot laugh at my my Oliver. Oh, yes,

I can. I listened to this, too, and I was in tears. These guys have it nailed. Yes, that's very, very good. Very, very funny. Thank you so much. That was that was a good laugh. And swell on Twitter writes JPDAF GOG podcast. Sounds like it might be worth another few bucks. And that was a link to our Patreon link. So, well, thank you for promoting for us. We appreciate it. Yes. And then we also have to another tweet from Boove Garage hidden backdoor discovered in Chinese IOT devices. A slash dot

story. Ring a bell. GOG podcast. Ha ha ha. I did reply to Overguard. And fortunately, this is not my brand. Well, lucky you. Yes. Schroeder apps rights. GG podcast finally took your advice and signed up with by VPN service, which is private Internet access, which we pimp all the time. So far, I'm a very happy customer. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. We have a link in the show notes or just go to grumpy old

geeks dot com. It'll be on your right hand side. We both use them both and love them. So and that would be GOG dot show now that we've updated to our short URL. Yes, I'm sorry. That's right. And I got a tweet from Lactac asking if we had heard about tripod and then the link to an NPR story. Top podcast hosts asked their listeners to try a pod. I wrote back and said, well, we pimp the podcast. We pimp different

podcasts all the time on our podcast because we talk about the things that that we enjoy and tell other people to listen to it. And he responded, no, this is more about a social media thing. Now I'm going to go on a brief aside that tells you why nobody likes to work with me. Oh, I'm all ears. Imagine we're in a conference room and Steve, the media manager, came up with this whole idea of like doing a hashtag campaign

to try a pod. And I sit there and I raise my hand and go, excuse me, we have a lot more people actually listening to our podcast that follow us on social media. So we'd actually get more people to hear what we're talking about on our podcast than we do by posting it on social media because anybody that's on our social media is definitely listening to the podcast. And like I said, we have way more people listening to the podcast and are

actually on our social media. Then Steve gets really, really mad at me because I shot down his clever idea, which wasn't that clever. And then he eventually kind of pushes me out of the conference room and out of the job. That's my career in a nutshell. Oh, it sounds about right. Yeah. Yeah. Common sense. Welcome. Welcome to common sense old geeks. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, regardless, we're going to do it anyways.

So I've already done one. Jason's going to give me a couple and we'll mention a few podcasts on our social media and use their stupid hashtag. But, you know, listen to the show. We talk about the stuff we like. I'm going to groan here for a second because I hate the fucking word pod. It's a podcast. I don't call a blog a blah. It's a podcast. It's not a pod. It's not a pod person from invasion of the body snatchers. It's a fucking podcast. So there's my problem with it. Fuck

you, Steven. Get out of the conference room. This is why we never get anything done. Right. Okay. And finally, Barrett Reese. Actually, not finally. We've got a lot of tweets this week sent over a link. The 94 year old lithium ion battery inventor unveils a new ultra efficient glass battery. Mr. Glass. Now you can break your screen and your battery at the same time.

Oh, nice. Samsung has already bought the technology. Yeah. Okay. Next up, Barrett writes, don't be pushed around by people who whine about your political views like Jason's tattoo. Free the press. My tattoo is actually free the media, but I enjoy the sentiment and will do.

Yeah. We're not going to stop. We still talk about stuff. We just, you know, we put a thin veneer of snark and hatred over it. We try to pretend that we're not vaguely suicidal about the state of the world. Well, and I would like to end up with a special thank you to Gabriel Pagan, not Pagan, as has been mentioned previously on the show for the DVD of Megaforce. Thank you so much. I saw on his Instagram feed that he had two copies of Megaforce or somewhere on Twitter. I can't

remember, but he sent me one and now I have a copy of Megaforce on DVD, which I will be watching very shortly. It might even end up as a doesn't have legs episode of Mike Vinicor will ever get out of the sick bed he's been in for two weeks. So I think you got to get Pagan on the blower and do it with him too. Oh, there we go. He is a fan and quotes it quotes the movie regularly. I can't remember half the quotes, but I remember the movie itself. And I loved that as a kid. I loved that movie.

That's a, that's actually, that's fantastic that, that, that he did that for you. So I just want to throw this out there since Jason got something. Jason basically said, you know, this guy has two of him. He sent me one. If anyone out there has $2 million, send me one. And if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you want to support the show, go to the appropriately named

GOG.show slash support. And if you've got that one, $2 million and want to send me the one just sent, you know, find me on Twitter. Closing shout outs. Big shout out to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of the best TV shows ever made celebrating their 20th anniversary of the first episode. Loves me some Buffy. Never watched it. Of course you didn't. You should. It's right up. It's, it's all teenaged

angst and gothy and in Vampirey. You'd love it. I know I should probably get around to it. Seriously. It is one of the best TV shows ever made. It was, it was a genre breaker as the kids say. Ah, well I take your 20 years old and I one up you 30 years ago today. You two released the Joshua tree, which made me realize it's been 30 years since I've liked anything that they've put out. And it's about 34 for me since war came out in 1983. And that's the last one I liked.

Cool. Until next time I am Brian Schellmeister. 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 or the pod as Jason likes to call it, 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 the people who made this show possible, head over to GOG.show

slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 200. It's called a fucking podcast. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day.

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