224: Grump on Grump with Sean Bonner

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. Brian isn't here this week, so we're playing an interview I did two days before Christmas in 2015 with Sean Bonner. The day after the show was recorded, I got my little furry bundle of slobber Bam Bam, and as a result, this show ended up on the shelf.

I was originally recording it because Brian was on vacation in Canada and we needed a show that week. Well, Brian's in Canada on vacation again. Something about his daughter's one-year birthday or some crap like that. So it's appropriate that we run a show that was originally recorded because he was on vacation.

So if you're new to the show, this isn't going to be the best place to start. I recommend grabbing last week's show as well to get a taste of our regular fare. But I also recommend this show because it was recorded in a much simpler time. We'll be back next week with our regular show, so make sure you tune in and thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with us.

And if you could care less about people talking about LA traffic, feel free to skip in about three minutes when we start talking the nerdy stuff. Thanks for listening. And now, the unaired Grump on Grump with Sean Bonner. Enjoy. Welcome to a special Grumpy Old Geeks for Christmas 2015.

I'm here with Sean Bonner. Hi. Brian was busy today, so we decided to do a little Grump on Grump action. And since it is raining in Los Angeles and I had to drive all the way out here, I am in the mood to be extraordinarily grumpy. It's pretty much the worst thing that can happen in Los Angeles.

Water falls from the sky. The whole place falls apart. The infrastructure deteriorates to nothing. Nothing. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Freeways are a disaster. Yes. Sidewalks crumble. Everything floods. Soccer moms just cannot figure out how to make their minivan go in one direction.

Yeah. They just have to swerve everywhere because, you know, there might be a puddle in the way. Yeah, they're panicking. People are driving trying to avoid raindrops. Yeah. It's a mess. And also, like, you know, the actual science piece is that because it never rains, all the oil that drips out of cars, you know, just like builds up on the sidewalk and are on the roads and stuff.

And then when it does rain, all the water just beads up. And so it becomes slick as crap. Yep. Yeah. So, yeah, you put stupidity, just the fact that everybody is out for themselves and doesn't care about anybody else. I figured that went without saying. Yeah, well, that just comes with Los Angeles.

And, yeah, the fact that nobody can stop. Yeah. And it just makes for a great day. Yeah, I tried to run out this morning, and I had, like, an hour to run some errands, and I literally got about six blocks. I got down one street, and the parking lot that I was trying to get to was too full and overloaded, and there was, like, nine people waiting for it.

So I was like, whatever, I'll just go to run this other errand. And I went four blocks down the other direction, did the exact same shit, waited 20 minutes in that line, gave up on trying to get into that parking lot, thought I could go back to the other one. That was still there and said, great, I just came home. And so it took me an hour, and I didn't even cross a major street.

See, and it's not like you can walk because, you know. Yeah, it was raining. Yeah. Because, God forbid, you get a little moist. I don't have shoes for that kind of weather. Who purchases things like that? Requires a raincoat, umbrella. I know. But you used to live in Chicago. You should at least have, you know, some.

I moved out of Chicago in 2001. Well, I mean, you like vintage. I'm talking 15 years. There's got to be a pair of vintage something around that will get you through. I'm not big on vintage umbrellas. Let's just say that. Now that it's on my way here, there were at least six people who decided to completely run into each other and make everybody's lives miserable.

And I've always said that if you cause an accident in Los Angeles, you should have your license taken away for 10 years just because of the pain and suffering that everybody else has to deal with just because you bumped somebody else. Yeah. Every accident that I've ever gotten in Los Angeles was caused by someone else who fled the scene.

Wow. Yeah. I've never had a hit and run. I've had a. Well, they weren't hitting. I mean, I guess at the end of the day, it is hit and run. But it was sort of like, you know, someone slams on their brake on the freeway and somebody else hits them and somebody else hits them. And like the first three cars involved in that all like take off. And the four other cars that, you know, ended up in it are left to like hold everything.

Okay. Yeah. Well, let's move on from the traffic in Los Angeles because I know it's riveting. Yeah. For all your listeners, they can't wait to hear more about traffic. No. So we're here to talk about what happened in 2015 because it's the end of the year. Yeah.

Why the hell not? Everybody else is doing it. Why shouldn't we? Year end wrap up. I know. I know. And this year really kind of was not a good year for just about anything. Yeah. Well, so I saw some and I don't have the link in front of me, but I saw I saw something this afternoon that was basically like, actually, according to all the data, 2015 was the best year on record for pretty much everybody.

But because the news and the media and the way like all the stories that captured all the headlines, it seems like it was the worst year ever. Okay. Which, you know, I can I'll buy that. We're coming up to an election year. So that's exactly what they want to do. Yeah. And this was, you know, something that flew past on Twitter, you know, maybe an hour and a half ago.

So I could please I could just be reading into that entirely. Okay. That seemed what the headline implied. And I think that actually is what it's been. You know, you know, it's less violent. It's less crime. Right. People have more money, but you just follow the news and everybody.

It's like, you know, raining cats and dogs. Well, it's all the phrasing. Right. I mean, I'm sure that you saw the headline just just the past few days where guns kill as many people as cars now. You know, like this is the big giant milestone because like that's been the big sort of like pro gun argument that like, oh, cars kill more people.

You know, it's like, well, now finally guns kill as many people as cars. But it's actually that cars don't kill as many people as they used to. Like, it's not that more it's not that there's more gun deaths. It's that there's fewer car deaths. Cars have gotten safer. Guns have stayed the same. Yeah, exactly. Guns are just as deadly as they were before.

Cars are safer. Why aren't we making safer guns? No, but but it's but it's interesting. You know, it's right. Like all of the headlines that were written about it were like guns now kill as many people as cars. But it's like actually guns kill the same amount of people that they killed before. It's just cars don't kill as many people as they did two years ago. Yeah. Technology.

Yeah. So and that's going to change. And as soon as we get our self-driving cars. Right. That number is going to be even even more. Then the only people who get killed are the people who insist on driving their own cars. Yes. Oh, I mean, I'm still looking forward to it. The more the more I think about it and the more I have to drive in Los Angeles, the more I want as many self-driving cars on the road.

People are always the weak link in everything. They're always they're always the ones. You can have the whole system running smooth. You throw one person in there. They're going to fuck the whole thing up. Yes, because as we've as you know, I mean, we've been doing the show for this is going to be a episode 141. And I think what we've really determined is that people are just stupid.

Yeah. You know, there's really no getting around it. Yeah. The software works. The system works. The algorithms work. You add a person into the mix and it all falls to hell. Yeah. That's you know, we're made of meat. We don't do that. Well, and yeah, I mean, I haven't talked to anybody that's actually got one of these new Teslas that have tried them out yet, but from Joey's got one, I haven't talked to him.

All he got me to do is to go try scuba diving and almost killed me. So I think I'm fairly certain that he's just trying to get me out of the picture. Yeah. Cause the scuba diving thing just didn't really work out so well yet. I'll be going back. Maybe once my wrist heals, I can do it.

You can do it. Yeah. As soon as I got a place to train, but my wrist has to heal. So I can't do anything until. Yeah. I mean, I think if you spend, you know, just like a couple hours in the pool ahead of time, you know, for maybe like a week or something. Oh, you mean, you mean showing up at the pool and having the guys say, jump in and go swim eight laps without warming up or stretching.

Right. You mean like, you know, that wasn't a good idea or not, not swimming in X number of years previous. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably just filled up the bathtub and paddle around a little bit. Get a little. I'm in Southern California now. I have a hot tub. I can't really do laps in the hot tub.

It's one of those things. You just have to get creative. Yeah. So yeah, I'll just point all the jets in one direction and I'll like rope myself to the side and then just keep swimming against. I'll have an impromptu infinity pool. Yeah. Somebody came up with that idea somehow.

I'm sure that it was a guy with a hot tub and some duct tape wrench. Hot tub and duct tape. Yep. I can, I can 18 the shit out of that, that hot tub. Exactly. We'll be doing all kinds of, of infinity laps. Yep. So what, what are your like big tech things that you thought happened this year that were like either neat or stupid or man, I don't know.

Um, this year I spent more time than I possibly want to imagine fighting with iTunes and Apple music and everything and recovering lost songs. And this is, this is my solution to, to all of iTunes. Oh, what's that?

This is just a, uh, this is an audio podcast. So this is just a, uh, that's an Anstel and Kern, uh, AK junior. It's just a, like a, it's a high res black player. It plays any number of different audio formats. It has a little SD card.

It's not a phone. It doesn't have an internet connection. It just plays music. Basically what you have here is a swanky iPod. Yeah. It's an iPod that plays, that plays, you know, high res files or whatever, but it doesn't interface with iTunes in any way. So iTunes can't fuck it up.

That's a good thing because yeah, I have everybody, everybody I know has had problems with, you know, iTunes, Apple music, the whole nine yards. I didn't even, I didn't even like set up the Apple music thing because I had, I'm still, I'm still recovering from the disaster of trying to use the Apple match or whatever.

iTunes match. iTunes match. Like a few years ago, I'm still finding songs that, you know, they're my songs. I had them and now it says I can't find the file and the files are all gone because, you know, they decided to store everything in, you know, the cloud that I don't have access to and it's gone and I can't get them anywhere anymore.

You know, yeah, I, a long time ago, I think maybe it was 1999. I had ripped all of my CDs and then had a hard drive failure and that taught me like just never, ever, ever have less than two backups of all your music because back then it was put the CD in, wait 20 minutes for it to rip.

And I had like seven or 800 CDs that I had done it all for. Right. I remember at one point you put everything up on like Amazon, right? Like I had every, yeah, everything on S3 for a little while. And then I did the math on the storage on that. And I'm like, oh, I could buy a new hard drive a month for what it's costing me to keep it on S3.

Yeah. That's why iTunes match was great when that came out. And, you know, just trying to use that was fine for a while, except I, I have 24,999 songs in my library. Yeah. I don't even know constantly, absolutely ridiculous amount of, of songs in my library all over the place.

And, and, you know, the thing, the promise with match was that, you know, they were like the lowest we have is 256 K. So if anything that you have is lower than that, the old, old things you ripped or whatever, like we're going to give you better versions of them. And it's like, oh, that's fantastic. I'm going to get a better version of the song I have, except now I don't have any version of the song.

So yeah, when, once I got, the first time I did it, this is, I think a lot of, a lot of people like, like us did this. I put up all my crappy old rips that I did in win amp in the, in the nineties that were like, you know, just not, we're terrible. Yeah. Got everything up there. Yep. Got everything up there and immediately deleted everything and re-downloaded it from, from iTunes match.

And then saved that. Right. Because the, and you know, if you're listening on like earbuds, like Apple earbuds, at least that you can't really tell the difference. Now, if you have those swanky Sennheiser earbuds, then you can really tell the difference. Yeah. Well, and that's the thing with the, with this, like the flack files on that I have on here, I've been, I've been ripping stuff and finding stuff.

And there's some things that are like, like 3000 K or whatever. So they're just like listening to that. Like I have songs on there that I can listen to with headphones that I've heard a thousand times and I'm hearing stuff I've never heard in those songs before. It's absolutely wild.

That's crazy. Yeah. I, um, I, you know, even off the vinyl, you know, like through, through old, old system over there or whatever, it's not, it's not like listening to that. So, yeah, no, I, my problem is I have crappy hearing, so it's like, I think I get so good.

Exactly. Yeah. Too many, too many front row shows, you know, punk rock shows have really, and you know, 44 now. So you lose those high ends. Right. As you get older. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it just happens. You can't do anything about that. Right. So when I wasn't fighting with iTunes and losing all of my songs, I was fighting with, uh, Apple's contacts, which was multiplying all of my contacts.

Oh yeah. So I wasn't losing anything instead of, I would have 7,000 contacts and then I would look and there would be 14,000 contacts and then there would be 28,000 contacts. You're a popular guy. It was, yeah, it was, it was, and then, you know, my, I would look at my activity monitor and like the contact sync would be spinning out of control 98% of CPU or something.

And it's just like, what the fuck is going on? Yeah. I had, I, I didn't have that. Well, I had that problem once. And then I said, I'm never using Apple contacts again. And I just use Gmail contacts. And the other problem I had was if you try and use, um, key chain over iCloud, the security demon inside of, you know, just the, the Mac security demon will try and sync it pretty much all the time.

Yeah. And it will, uh, just spike your CPU randomly for days on end. So then you have to turn off, you know, key chain match to keep it on your Mac or your phone. And if you do that one or too many times, it, it, you're supposed to, it'll send you a notice notification from your Mac to your phone to authorize, you know, either one you've seen that.

There is a way that you can screw it up so unbelievably well, like I have where nothing will off anymore. You can't turn it off. That's fantastic. You cannot turn it off period. So all my devices once a day will say, Hey, uh, we've sent a notification to another device.

Would you, you know, off, off on that device, except all three of my devices have been sent to each other one and nothing will off anymore. So, you know, key chain support for iCloud is completely. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I have to re off all of my devices almost weekly at this point, just for no reason, just out of the blue, you know, like I wake up in the morning and nothing will, nothing will work.

And I have demanding re-log into everything and total piece of shit. What happened? I mean, it used to work. Everything used to work. That was the whole thing. It used to just work, but that was their thing, right? That was the Apple thing. You should just work. I still have my, my first iPhone. Yeah.

The one that you bought me. Yeah. It dropped off my office. I still have my, I still have my first iPod. I wish I still had mine. Does it, does your still work anymore? Did the battery explode yet? No, no. It's, it's, I mean, it still works. Okay. If I, if I charge it up, I need firewire to charge it up, but. Oh yeah.

I have some firewire cables if you need some extra. If I plug it in, it fires up. It's got the big spin wheel and everything. It's cool. Found it the other day when I was cleaning up some stuff and ran some juice into it. I was like, wow, this thing still kicks. It was a, is it a five gig version? Yeah. That was like the deck of cards size one.

Yeah. The first, yeah. The first one. You can. Big silver back. Yeah. And since you're using flack now, you can't put any songs on it. Nothing at all. Even if you, what was a thousand songs in your pocket basically was the, was the tagline. It was a beautiful promise. Yeah. Changed the world. It did. It did.

And now it's just, I have an iPod nano, like one of the little tiny ones that's like an eight gigger. And I use that when I go out because yeah, I just can't use it anymore. Yeah. I completely gave up on putting any music on my phone at all. I have podcasts on my phone and that's it. And like, and that's not even with the Apple podcast thing.

I'm using that, that pocket casting that you told me about. Pocket cast. I actually, I don't think I told you about pocket cast cause I've never used pocket cast. I think you mentioned it and you said, let me know how it goes because you weren't using it or whatever. But it's like, it's like a browser sync, like, you know, they have like a multi, multi-platform or whatever.

And yeah. Yeah. I use overcast. You got to pay a couple of bucks for it or something. Yeah. Overcast and downcast are pretty much my go-tos. Yeah. Downcast lets you import files. So when we're testing, it's nice, but overcast has that crazy speed sync. So if there's gaps in like people stop talking.

Right. It compresses the sound. Yeah. Like that's kind of nice. I like that. How much time does that shave off on average? Well, let's take a peek here because I have overcast right in front of me and they keep stats on that kind of thing. So since I've started using it and, and this is, I'm going to tell you, this is exactly why smart speed has saved you an extra 91 hours beyond speed adjustments alone.

Wow. Telling you. That's significant. And I listened to everything at 1.5 already. Yeah. So 91 hours is not insubstantial. No. That is a couple work weeks. Yeah. I mean, you listen to probably more podcasts than most people though. Not, not so much anymore.

If there was a while, I was listening to over a hundred because, you know. That's crazy. Over a hundred. Yeah. That's like four. Well, you know, this is my job. I really wanted to get good at it. I was slow. I was slow on the boat getting on the podcast, the podcast thing.

No. So, I mean, you and I have worked together. We, what year did we start working together? Uh, I think we launched blogging.la in 2003. 2003. Yeah. So. Okay. Cause I remember when there was a point when we were going to start doing a podcast with Metro blogging, which was our, our second iteration of blogging LA.

Yeah. And because our friend Kevin Marks had just like, he was the one who started writing those crazy Python scripts to move stuff from RSS into an iPod. Right. Because there was no, no reasonable way to do it at that point. There was nothing. I mean, that was what? 2005, probably.

2005, I think. Yeah. Maybe. Probably five-ish. Cause yeah, I was, I was at Technorati when he started doing that. Right. And that was like, really, that's when Dave Weiner and Adam Curry were like, you know. There was like Gilmore gang and like four other people doing it, right? That's about it. Yeah. And I'm just thinking, man, if we'd have started back then, you know, profit.

That's how it works. Right. Just do the same thing the longest. No. And we, we had a bunch of gear and we were, you know, gonna, gonna try and do it. But, uh, and it was at one point where I'm just like, oh, well, nobody wants to do it with me. And then I just gave, um, somebody we knew back in the day, uh, Miss Violet Blue.

She got all of our gear at some point. Yeah. Never saw that again. That's how it goes. It is. Yeah. Oh, stories from the old days. But now they're saying, you know, podcasting is the new blogging. So yeah. Anybody, anybody can have a podcast. Unfortunately, that is true.

That is true. And like, I have one, so, you know, how's that? But like most podcasts, I mean, most blogs, podcasts, you know, generally, if, unless you practice and try and make it something. Well, we're also, I mean, unless, are you actually trying to do something or are you just like your, is what you're trying to do, have a file that you've successfully recorded at the end of it, right?

Yeah. No, the, uh, the, the problem right now is all the marketers have jumped on the podcasting bandwagon. Yeah. That's really where troubles, troubles are brewing. Once you have, you know, SEO for podcasting, it's like, oh dear. Right.

It all falls apart. It is falling apart. As soon as, as soon as all the, uh, industry guys show up. The nice thing about podcasting is it's a lot harder than blogging. So, well, it has a little, there's a little bit of a, a learning curve, right? A little bit of a, of a step up.

Yeah. And you know, you need these shiny, fancy mics, like we're talking into right now and blogging, you just need a keyboard and you know, a crappy opinion about something and you're off to the races. Blogger ruined it for everybody. It was super easy. Well, I mean, you could always go back to, you know, geo cities and yeah, if you want to keep going back to that live journal.

Yeah. Oh, live journal. There's still people, there's still people that use live journal nonstop. I know what's wrong with them. I don't know. It's got, it's got some, some hook that, you know, people that just won't, won't give up on. It's like goths who just never grew up. Yeah. That's all I've ever seen on there.

Yeah. Well, they are, they do. I mean, I think that at this point you can only have a black background with purple text. Okay. On live journal. Yeah. Some, uh, animated gifs of bats and stuff like that. Yeah. Happy blood in the corners. I still have some of those laying around, you know, just in case.

Yeah. It was good. So set the creepy tone right away. Oh man. So, okay. Podcasting is the big thing now, obviously because cereal is around. Right. Although didn't, I mean, so let's talk about this episode, season two, right? Mm-hmm.

What's the point in listening to it at all now, since like the army, the army announced what's happening. Like they, like they totally just spoiled their whole episode, their whole season, right? I, I haven't, I've, I've listened to like half of episode two, so I'm not up to speed. What happened? I don't know what, what, what cereal is talking about, but like the day after they launched this season, the army announced they're pressing charges against the guy and like, they, they like dumped all their documents and everything.

So like all the news had like, oh, okay, here's actually what happened. And here's all the charges that are like, so all the, all this, all the onion that cereal was planning to unravel over, you know, the following weeks, the army just announced. Well, that might be a problem. I'm guessing.

Yeah. Maybe that's why they did that, that quote unquote stealth launch because they're like, just like, we got to get this on. We got to get it out. Right. They knew what was coming. Cause I listened to the first episode and I was like, oh, okay, this, this could get interesting. What's this all about? And then like the next day I was like, oh, here's the whole story from the CNN.

Cause the army's pressing charges against the guy and they're going to court-martial him and like whatever else. So it's like, oh, okay, well I don't need to listen to cereal. I can just watch CNN now, which why would anybody ever want to do that? But, um, yeah, they were, they were talking about some of that stuff in episode two, but that's, you know, that is a risk I guess that they take when they do that kind of thing.

Right. I mean, why don't they just do the Netflix thing and dump the whole, the whole season? Cause they're not done with it. They're making it as they go. That's, you know, that's why everybody was like, what's going to happen in, in season one. Right. They're like, we don't know. We're trying to figure it out. Right. And I get that. But like this one, I mean, this story is sort of already happened.

So I don't know. Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, well. I, I'm not a, I mean, I, the first season was interesting because it was something new, you know, but now I'm just like. Well, it's also, I mean, I think the first season had enough weirdness that you could sort of change your opinion after every episode, you know, you could sort of be like, oh, wow.

Okay. Now I think it's that, right. Like it was like, you know, spy movie, right? Like you're like, oh, it's like, whodunit kind of thing. Right. Yeah. So like it had that hook. This one, this is a guy who just kind of left his job. Right. And it's trying to justify it. So like, okay, you did or you didn't, you know, and maybe, maybe that was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.

But at the end of the day, you still left your job and you're still going to get arrested for it. Yeah. It's really, it's kind of indefensible. Yeah. So I don't, I don't like what, what's, what's the big thing that we need to uncover with this? Like, I don't, I was waiting for them to tell us not, it's not a whodunit. No, we know whodunit.

He done it. He done it. He done it. It's not a whodunit. And now he's facing a court martial. Yeah. So like, are they going to try to figure out what, what his, you know, what, what his penalty is going to be before? I don't know. It's just, it feels, it feels like that, that was a wrong, I think this was a wrong bet.

This is the podcasting equivalent of stepping on your dick. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Because I know they had to have a hard time really trying to find another story. Yeah. Because they get so much hype. They get so much press. And, you know, in the first episode or the first season was such a letdown at the end.

Yeah. The only people that made out this whole thing is the people who came up with follow on podcasts who were still following the story of the guy. Yeah. Those are the only people that really made out well. Well, and now I'm all in, and isn't like the, the people from like zero dark 30 and stuff like helping her and them with this thing with, yeah, with this season.

Right. And, and they're pretty much just like CIA shills. Right. So like, they're just like whatever propaganda piece that's going to come out of it. So I don't know. I don't know. I'm skipping that one. Have you been listening to lore? Lore is amazing. Didn't that guy do a great job? Lore is my favorite thing to listen to right now.

I know. It's so good. I started listening at the beginning of October. Will was talking about it a lot. Will Wheaton. And, and so I went and checked it out and it's just, everyone's fantastic. I know. I just want to punch this guy in the dick though. I mean, because he's a, he's got like 10 episodes out now.

Yeah. He's pulling in a couple grand on Patreon and it takes him like an hour and a half to make an episode. He doesn't even try very hard. It's like, oh man. But all he's got to do is, you know, find a sort of creepy story. Talk about it a little bit. Yeah.

Put some, put some sound behind it. Put some, you know, yeah. Get some music. Throw it down. It's good. I like it. It's a winning combination. It is a winning combination. Yeah. I wish I was him. I really do. Yeah. So I'm digging, I'm digging lore. And I like some of the other Radiotopia stuff.

Like the, I've been digging Strangers. You haven't listened to that one? Strangers is pretty good. 99% Invisible. Yeah. I mean, 99% Invisible, of course. That's always good. But I, and this is, this is one of my favorites, obviously, because it's funny, but The Dollop is, I still think, the best show on the air right now.

And that's one of those shows that shows you that you can have crappy microphones, absolutely no production value whatsoever. And if your content is solid, you're going to, you're going to be a star. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. So they're professional standup comedians already.

So that part saves them. Yeah. The, the, like in the first couple episodes, I, I had to fast forward a bunch cause they were just like knocking the microphone around and talking out the window. Like, Hey, what's going on over there? Okay. Okay. Well, there's the microphone. I forgot where it was. Yeah, sure. But as far as quality content goes, I, half of those episodes, I'm in tears laughing so damn hard.

Well, and you know, also I, it feels like as soon as somebody comes out with something fantastic, then there's like 75 people that all try to do the same thing all crappily. Oh yeah. You know, like welcome to Night Vale. Amazing. Every other, like we have fake news of this like fake place once and there's tons of them now and they're all bad.

Yeah. They're all bad. Well, yeah. I mean, cause if you look at a lot of these people, they are professional entertainers before they even get onto these shows. And then it's just other people who are not really professionals who think that they can do the same thing just because you have a voice and you can put one word in front of another doesn't mean that those words always go together and work.

It's true. It's the same thing with anything, but yeah. Oh man. I'm, I'm looking forward to next year in podcasting because I think a lot of these, you know, you can, you can just tell most shows hit 13 episodes and die.

So we've going to have, we're gonna have a lot of these guys that die, but Google's coming into podcasting now, which is really going to open up the market for a lot of people. It'll be finding the stuff much, much, much easier. I mean, you're still trying to find anything on like iTunes or whatever is a disaster and any other, any other app, you pretty much either their recommendations or you already know exactly the one you're looking for.

And everything's pulling from the same set of iTunes feeds, right? You know, every, every podcast app pulls iTunes. That's it. So their best of is all the same, all the same, all the same. Overcast is a really cool thing where it, if you hook in your Twitter account, if other people post about a show that week, it'll show you what your other friends are actually listening to, which is kind of nice, except for the most part, it's all the same damn shows, you know?

Hey, everybody's listening to cereal. Yeah. Or back to work with, well, that was one of the big things when, uh, you know, I don't know if it was, I can, maybe it was last FM, but it was like, as soon as, as soon as any of those companies started telling you like what your friends are listening to and like, you know, giving you recommendations based on, based on what your friends are doing, you're like, oh, wow, my friends have terrible taste.

That's what you learned from that. Yeah, no, it's, I don't know. It's a, it's a crowded market, but not really. That's the fun part. Yeah. It's like, you know, you just have to wheedle your way in. That's where lore really kind of came in just from the side. It's like, right. This is just something new.

Yeah. And finding that kind of thing. Yeah. And it's like, I don't even know, I don't know how much of what he's talking about is legit. And I kind of don't care, you know, because it's like, it's entertaining enough, you know, because he's like telling it as if he's just like reading it out of a book or something. And maybe he is.

I think he does actual research on this stuff, but he also writes, you know, horror novels. Right. Exactly. And so that's the thing is he could sort of just find this thread of a story and then he embellishes it. I don't know, but like, it's fantastic. Right. Like, it's great. Yeah. Yeah. Who cares if he makes it up?

It's still fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. It's still fun. So what were some of the big like memes this year that I, I, I unfortunately missed so many of them and you are Mr. Meme. Yeah. But I know like, you know, like what's happening this week, what's happening this year is a whole, a whole other tricky story.

I don't know. That's the problem, I guess. It's like, you know, you, they're here for a week and then you just completely forget about them and you never think of them again. Right. Until, you know, next year when someone casually mentions it and you're all like, ah, nostalgia. Oh yeah. Oh, your face. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that one.

Yeah. I mean, cat, cats are always in. Oh yes. Can't go wrong with the cats. I, I thought, I thought I heard, uh, that they were on the decline now. I don't know. Selfies, uh, pictures of food and cat pictures are on the decline. Well, I, you know, some of that's good.

You don't need more pictures of cheese sandwiches. What about, what about, what about not selfies? The, uh, all the, all the reporters and things referring to just pictures of people as selfies. It's like, no, those are called portraits. Yeah. That person didn't take the picture themselves. I know.

Just because, yeah. Yeah. It's called a photograph. It really is just called a photograph. There's like 20 people lined up against the wall, all smiling and somebody else taking the picture. That's not a selfie. No, it's not. Yeah. It's pretty much called a, called a portrait. Yeah. So all the not selfies were pretty good.

That was, that was, that was amusing for a while. Uh, see, this is why we suck at these, these wrap ups and why we generally don't do them. Cause it's like, I have a list ahead of time. Nah. Why would we do that? That just kind of takes the fun out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Any good new technology you picked up this year?

No, I haven't really. I mean, I've been, I've been afraid of everything this year, so I didn't get any, you know, like all my, all my Apple problems have made me super gun shy about stuff. You know, like, it's just like, I don't want to get some new thing. That's going to like, I have something that sort of works and I'm afraid that if I get something new, it's going to break what I have.

Yeah. Like, I mean, like, I, I, I noticed in that, you know, it's like something new comes out and my first reaction is like, what is this going to ruin? Yeah. And I used to be like, you know, first in line, like all that, you know, like we were always like, Oh, who got this first, you know, like everything. And, and now it's just like, I'm scared.

I'm scared that it's going to like mess shit up. Since I moved into this whole audio thing, I haven't upgraded to El Capitan because I know half of the stuff that I, I rely on to like, you know, make, make money to eat food. Right. You know, if it can, if it can break my ability to make money and eat food, it's no longer a fun hobby where you want to go stand in line to pick it up.

It's terrifying that something that, you know, that's out of your control can just break your entire workflow. Yeah. But I mean, and it's not just like in, in like hardware or, you know, like that kind of stuff. Like even, you know, like I'm, I run WordPress on, on half a dozen sites.

Right. I'm so sorry. I know, but I mean, that's, it works. Right. And people know how to use it and you've got a bunch of people and, and that's, that's what you do. And so, you know, it's like, okay, well, I'm going to buy this theme, you know, so it looks nice. And then base some stuff off it, but the theme isn't just a theme. The theme comes with its own like visual editor now, which replaces the WordPress.

And then it like, it wipes all this stuff and it's like now, and then WordPress updates something. And then that breaks. And it's like, I used to be able to just log into my website and make a post and I can't do that anymore. Nope. You can't. Like, how is this better? How's that an improvement on anything? It's not an improvement.

It's absolutely not an improvement. I've been thinking about going back to just hand coding my, my blog. Yeah. So back to movable type. Oh God. No, I refuse to run Pearl because I was using fire up a gray matter instance. Oh man.

I wonder if he can even find that source code anymore. That guy would like went off the rails. Yeah. He took off. Mm-hmm. He married his, his boyfriend and became a photographer and he was the, he was kind of the first, you know, casualty of the blogging, blogging world.

It worked. I would, I would have been using this theme called Divi for a while. And I don't know if you've seen this one, but it turns it into a full drag and drop. It kind of, there's like three or four of those things because like the new, the new theme that I just set up for all the safe cast sites comes with, I'm forgetting exactly what it's called, but it's, you know, they have like their whole own suite of plugins that don't work outside of their own theme and all of this stuff.

And one of them is this big visual editor that you either turn on or off for every individual page or post. But once you turn it on, you can't not do it. So you can't turn on their visual editor for any of the content on the page and then switch to a different theme. Your content doesn't exist anymore. No, it doesn't.

Yeah. Yeah. I bet you're using the same one that I'm using. Yeah. Like, what do you mean my about page is gone? And here's the crazy part. These theme developers who are making all this crazy stuff, they don't even think about the fact that, oh, okay. So, you know, an author is going to come into this thing and try and write a post with all this crazy stuff going on and they leave these giant buttons that say, use default editor, which basically once you click it, everything that you could have spent two hours building

this gorgeous page and somebody can just come in and click it without any, any knowledge whatsoever. And then it's gone. Yeah. People just don't think, you know, the, the, the crapitude of software this year, I think it's been. Yeah. What happened to rollback, man? I don't know, man. This, the software has gotten too complex and everything does break so easily.

And it's all, it was always like our big dream was like, oh, WordPress can update itself, you know? Right. And now that it's here, it's a nightmare. Yeah. It is a complete nightmare. You can lose like 12 sites in one overnight update. If you have an incompatible plugin that you use everywhere, you know, I bitched about it for months now and I had to go just turn it off on everything.

Cause it does break. And it's like, I don't get paid to do that stuff anymore. Yeah. So yeah, yeah, absolutely. Stay away from it. I, there's gotta be a competitor coming out soon for WordPress that somebody has to get off their ass and make it because I mean, Squarespace, an intuitive fuster cluck that's useless.

Right. And then you got WordPress, you know, that's it. Yeah. Drupal. There's always Drupal. Yeah. Joomla. Joomla. No, I was, I was actually talking this week to a major, uh, major television sports, like, you know, branch.

And they're like, we're, we're taking everything out and we're moving it to WordPress. And I'm like, you're idiots. You're absolutely stupid to do that. What was, what was the last stat? Like how much of the web is running on WordPress now? All of it. 85%. It's just all of it. Yeah. Matt's just sitting in a corner laughing somewhere. I know he's sitting on an Island somewhere laughing with just living in piles of money and trombones and any, any jazz artifacts that he hasn't bought yet that he's trying to find out how to buy.

Everybody's got automated attacks now. Yep. I got hit by an automated attack two weeks ago, took down a bunch of my stuff and I found one plugin that's even better come straight from the WordPress, you know, plugin repository pre-hacked. Absolutely pre-hacked for you.

I'm like, uh, you guys realize this is already hacked. Just skip that step, that whole step. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have to leave it back door. Why wait around? Yeah. I'm just going to download the pre-hacked plugin and we'll go from there. It's pretty stressful worrying if you're going to get hacked. This just takes that, that whole like concern out. It takes a lot of stuff. Yeah. You know, for sure. A hundred percent.

Yep. And we talked about it on the show last week where Andy Bio got owned. Oh, I heard about it, but I haven't, I haven't read his, his writeup or whatever. His writeup's worth reading. Yeah. It's definitely worth reading. You'll get a little bit of shell shock because you've been through everything that he went through. Right. Probably several times.

Yes. Yeah. Trigger warning was a new thing this year that I'd never heard of. Right. Yeah. That kind of came up all over the place and, and I think it's going away. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think, I think, I think, I think as quickly as it was adopted everywhere, there was a lot of people, um, in, well, so there was a lot of negative backlash on it.

Right. There was like students filing claims against teachers for like talking about things in class, you know, um, without trigger warnings and saying that they were, you know, blah, blah, blah. But then I think that there was a, a, a number of, of researchers who came out with, with data pretty quickly that said, basically this like stifles, like stifles mental development in any way, you know, like you need to be, you need to be able to have a conversation that isn't like a hundred percent positive, you know, like you need to understand how to do that in, in the real world.

Like, like a human being in an adult and not be modern. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so like creating a system where like, you're never confronted with anything that might be troublesome for you. Like that, that's not actually good for you, like emotionally or mentally or anything. I didn't need a fucking scientist to tell me that.

You know, honestly. Turns out a lot of people did. And I did like that Neil Gaiman just came out and titled his book trigger warning. He's like, this is all stupid. I'm just going to name my whole book after it. So. I mean, I still see it around a little bit, but I think, I think by and large, the, uh, the science is there to say that it's not, it's not a good idea.

SpaceX. SpaceX. How about that? I watched that this, I only saw it this morning, but I watched the whole video all around. Yeah. And Jeff Bezos just being a troll. I know nonstop. Like that's his entire Twitter feed. Now I was talking shit on SpaceX. I know. It's like, dude, go do your own thing.

Like, why you got to worry about it? Get back to making the drone so I can get my delivery faster. So speaking of the drones. Yeah. Speaking of the drone registry. Yeah. Did you see this? It's searchable. Yes, I did. Yes.

How about that? Name, address, email, everything of everybody. It's all public. I know. Yeah. So that sort of destroyed that whole thing immediately. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Why would anybody, why would anybody register a drone at this point? Nobody should. Absolutely should.

That's like the stupidest thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, okay, well, if I'm not in the registry and I'm flying my drone, you can't find me. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. No, that's just mind boggling. Yeah. What's the best way that we can get everybody to opt into this? We'll make all of their public information, all of their data public.

Yeah. So I can just find out who in my neighborhood has a drone. Yeah. And then just. Or, but anybody. You can just put in somebody's name and find their home address. That too. Yeah. Like you could just start running down celebrities because some of them probably have drones. Yeah. Yeah. Especially because you're talking about something that, you know, could be, you know, a couple hundred bucks, a couple thousand bucks, you know, like you can probably just like pick random people out of the newspaper, you know, and find their home addresses with that.

Yes. That too. Ridiculous. Now. And the other crazy thing, it's like, okay, you have to put your drone in, but I can also go to the hobby store and get a remote controlled helicopter that does just about exactly the same thing. Yep. Don't have to register that. Yep. Don't have to register my, you know, giant 747 replica plane.

I know your fixed wing, right? Yeah. Yeah. That I could probably put a hell of a lot more, you know, bad stuff on than I could on a little tiny drone. Well, it's the same thing with all those, all those walkie talkies and stuff that you can buy on, on Amazon and every place else, right? There's the ones that have the sort of one mile range or whatever.

And then there's the ones that have the 10 mile range that you're supposed to get this like operator's license before you ever turn on, you know? When it comes with the form inside, you have to fill this out and mail in five bucks to get your license. 99% of people who buy those things put that thing right in the trash. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like why? I mean, why, why bother?

If it's a voluntary thing and you're, where are the walkie talkie police? Are they going around really like trying to deal with that? And drones are just, you know, people just have this paranoia. Yeah. And especially if you're going to, if you're planning to do something nefarious, step one is not give them your name and address.

People don't seem to think about that part. Like if I am going to do something bad with this, I'm not going to tell you. Well, you know, because, you know, because they're going to go, they have all the best intentions when they buy the drone and then they get radicalized. That's right. They go, they go mad with power.

Post drone purchase. Yes. Gets to their head. I can hover now. Yeah. I am mad with power. It's like anybody that's going to do anything really bad is just going to build their own. Yep. It's not like you can't go to the hobby store and put all the prices together. Yeah. It's dead simple.

Mm-hmm. Dead simple. So we kind of started this rambling conversation about what's going on. All over the place. Without really kind of, I mean, you've been on the show before, but we, you know, we've got a lot of new people listening. So why don't you just kind of tell us what you do? Oh, that's a nice setup.

Exactly. Because nobody knows what the hell you do. I know. Nobody knows what I do. It's actually, well, it's not necessarily any easier than it's ever been to describe. I spend the vast majority of my time right now running a nonprofit called SafeCast that me and Joey, who we mentioned, and our friend Peter started just after the Fukushima earthquake back in, I guess, 2011.

It's been that long since Fukushima? Yep. Well, so this in March, March coming up in a few months is our fifth year anniversary. Oh, okay. Time flies when you're trying to figure out if the world's melting. Right. Yeah. So what we, basically the short version of that is that right after the earthquake, when news started coming out that, you know, there was a nuclear reactor melting down, we tried to find information about what was happening for, you know, friends and family and anybody

that couldn't find any information and found out that there was just nothing in place. There was no, nobody had any idea what was going on. And it wasn't that that information was hard to find. It was that it just didn't exist anywhere. Mm-hmm. And so over, you know, we started immediately and over the course of, of the following months, built a hardware and software platform for people to go collect radiation data and publish it to the web.

Mm-hmm. Um, and into this big open, open repository of data. So five years later, um, we're just about to break 40 million data points. Um, and that's all, we publish everything into the public domain. That's the largest collection of, of radiation data that's ever existed anywhere on the planet combined.

So if you took all the other radiation data sets and jammed them together, ours is still bigger. Um, everything else is copyrighted and locked down for the most part. And so this is public. And so the result of that is that everybody uses our data. So, um, from UN and like atomic industry and governments and everybody, everybody sources safe cast data now, um, for whatever they're doing.

So that's, that's cool and useful and started a lot of interesting conversations along those lines. Governments are coming to us and find out how, how, uh, they can fix whatever they're doing since nobody pays attention to them anymore. Okay. How do you guys monetize it?

How do you have a staff and pay for the hardware and all this stuff? Well, so it's a nonprofit, um, and the vast majority of people are volunteer. So we have an incredibly supportive and huge volunteer network all around the world. That's working on this all the time. Um, we sell, well, we don't sell them.

We designed kits that are the hardware. Um, and then other distributors make the kits and sell them. And so people buy the hardware themselves to be a part of it or whatever. So we're, we're not actually involved in that piece of it as safe cast.

We just, we designed the devices, but we're not, we're not hardware salespeople. Um, so there's distributors that, that put the kits together and then sell the kits. Um, we do workshops and things like that. We have some foundations, uh, that have thrown in some cash to help us do it.

So, um, primarily right now, um, Shuttleworth foundation, um, I'm a fellow with the Shuttleworth foundation and they provide just an insane amount of, of support, um, you know, from financial and advice and, you know, just like resources and everything to help make things happen.

And so there's a handful of people that are sort of very specifically task based to have to finish something by this week or whatever that get paid. Um, but, but everybody else is really just sort of jumping into like help get this thing done. Okay. Um, and so we have, um, data from everywhere around the world for radiation and now, uh, we're building out air quality sensors.

So that's what we're working on for, for 2006. Well, we've been working on it for the past two years, but it turned out to be a bigger problem than we thought. So, but that's the big focus of a, that we're working on for this year is to build, build air quality sensors. So we can, we can generate some of the same kind of data that we have for radiation right now, because, you know, if you want to know what the air is you're breathing outside, there's really not any reasonable way for you to do that.

I heard GE was starting to build those into their smart, uh, smart lights. Yeah. There's a lot of people doing lots of different stuff with air, but it's all kind of opaque. Um, and it's all sort of like their own algorithms on it, you know? And so you're, you're not, you're not getting a specific breakdown of actually what chemicals are, you know, like what the gases are that are out there.

You're getting like their air quality index or something, you know? So people will say like, Oh, okay. You know, the air quality day is like 35, you know? It's like, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, we have our, we have our thing, you know, and we, you know, we consider safe, you know, in this rain, you know? Yeah. So there's lots of people who, who published that sort of like, you're in the green today, you know?

It's like, okay, well, what does that actually mean? Yeah. It's like the old terrorism index. Yeah, exactly. So there's that. And then, and then there's also, you know, the fact that, that there's like wind and stuff, right? So, so things change a lot. And, uh, and so the stuff that we're working on, we'll, we'll tell people sort of like, you know, up to a second, you know, like what's happening like outside, outside their house or, or anything.

And so you'll be able to sort of look at trends over time and see like, oh, looking at the data over the last month, I can see like this time of the day, every day, it's good, bad. There's must be something that's, that's causing that. Oh, it's rush hour, you know, like whatever it is. Right. So you'll be able to like pinpoint exactly what that is and see like what, what's in the air at any specific point.

Okay. That's cool. So that's kind of what we're working on. Um, and, uh, so yeah, our main office is in Tokyo and, um, that's pretty much it. I mean, you have a hell of a commute. It's not a bad commute. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you know, being here in LA, so it's nine hours there, 11 hours back, do it, uh, five or six times a year, depending.

Um, and, uh, but yeah, we have, we have a bunch of people in Tokyo, we have a bunch of people in Fukushima and then we have a whole bunch of people just all around the world. So we, we bring, we bring a bunch of the volunteers together at different points and we have, uh, you know, events like here and there or whatever. So a lot of the people who are helping out with the project are sort of working on it, you know, sort of because they're interested in it, but then, you know, they also get flown around the world for, you know, a week at some point.

So there's like a bit of, there is a perk. Yeah. So, so, you know, there, there's almost nobody who's full time on it. Um, I'm full time on it. There's a couple other people, but for the most part, it's people who have real jobs and then they spend evenings and weekends and stuff on it. Um, and a bunch of those people, it overlaps, right?

Like it overlaps with their real job in one way or another, you know, so it benefits or whatever. So it's like their 10% project. Yeah. Something like that. So, and then, you know, with Joey being at the media lab, we, we have, um, you know, a bunch of connections with the students and researchers there. So we're bouncing there and having cheap labor students working.

Yeah. We're like, here's this problem that you need to fix for us. Yeah. Um, so, so that's kind of good. That's cool. Yeah. So that's been, that's been, that's been the bulk of, of my last five years. And, you know, it's sort of when we got into it, we're like, oh, it's this small problem. And then we got into it and we're like, oh, it's a little bigger than we thought.

Like, oh, it turns out it's a little bigger five years later. Holy shit. It really is big. Wow. It turns out the world is a giant place. It's not we. I'll tell you that. Try taking a train across the U S even that little bit. It's not we.

Yeah. So, uh, yeah. So we have, we have about a thousand of these devices out in the world that people are carrying around with them all the time, collecting this data and publishing them back to us and, you know, apps and everything all over the place. But, um, you can look at maps and stuff at safecast.org. Cool. Yep. The link will be in the show notes.

Yeah. Good times. So you've also kind of, uh, got your, uh, toes dipped in the music world. I didn't, I never even knew you knew how to do any of that. Like, well, I don't know that I know how to do any of it now. Um, yeah, I mean, we started, uh, a few years ago with this, this project with, um, my friend Andrew from strife, uh, got in touch and, and was sort of like, Hey, I have this thing or like thinking about this stuff.

And, and he was working on a project with mugs, uh, from Cypress Hill and stuff. And so, you know, we just kind of went to the studio and started talking about ideas and try to figure out a weird ways to like throw technology into it and throw art into it. And, uh, and that's called cross my heart, hope to die.

And we, um, sounds like an old multimedia CD-ROM from the nineties. I mean, it kind of ended up being right when we did a gallery show, right? Like we did a gallery show at shepherd's gallery, um, that was full of, of sculptural and photographic work. Um, those, those are actually, those are, those, those two that are hanging on the wall behind me are actually cross my heart pieces.

We will, uh, I will take a photo of it and put it in the show notes because this is into a JPEG. Okay. Cause this is an audio podcast. Yeah. So there, those are sort of data bent photos. And so the, what we were doing with those is taking, taking photographs and then dumping them as raw data into audacity and then tweaking them as if audacity thought they were songs and then re-exporting them back into a photo editor.

And those are all the glitches that are coming out of the, so you see the glitch photos. That's basically a computer thought that was a song. Well, the funny part is if you want glitchy audacity is your program. Yeah. Yeah. So who knew that it was an image editor as well? Yeah. Um, so yeah, so that's what we, we were just sort of messing with, um, you know, the, the space between music and art and like what, what makes something music or makes it art.

And, you know, like if people are sort of building something creative and they're spending X amount of time in it, you know, if the end result, you can hold it in your hand, then people consider it art. But if you, you know, whatever, so we're just playing with, with that middle area and seeing, and seeing what could happen between it.

Um, and so, you know, in the, in the mix of all that stuff, I started finding like weird, weird Japanese synthesizers that glitched out other sounds and stuff and started playing with those into the, and, and so I should add that that's the art piece of it, but there's actually a music component too. Like we put out, you know, an album and two EPs and stuff.

And, um, you know, there's, uh, the new, there's a new show on we TV called South of hell that used one of our songs as the title song. So it's like, it's actual like real, like, you know, radio play music. Yeah. And it's got some guys in the garage. Right.

Exactly. Doing misfits covers. And yeah. So, uh, so, so, you know, that, that all happened. Um, but yeah, in the midst of it, I kind of got, got interested in, in these like weird synthesizers and weird sort of soundscape kind of noise things. And so I've been, uh, doing that independently on the side and just throwing stuff up on SoundCloud and bouncing around with people and see, got a couple, a couple of weird projects in the mix on that.

We'll see, we'll see if anything ever develops, but it's, it's been fun. Dude, it's LA. Everybody's got to have a project. Yeah, exactly. You got five free minutes in the day. You got to jam something else in there, you know? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Well, thanks for taking the time to sit down with me today. Thanks for coming out. It was fun.

Yeah. Now I have to go back into the rain of Los Angeles. Looks like it dried up for the moment. I don't see, I don't see anything pouring through the windows. I'm hoping. I'm hoping. You might have a spare, spare window. So I'm 17 miles away, which I could probably walk faster than, than driving here.

So I should, I should definitely get going because Christmas is in two days. So I need to make it home for Christmas. Yeah, people are out like rushing around for their last minute, their last minute purchases. And you're gonna have to fight off some, some sale hunters. I gotta, I gotta fight off the soccer moms at the Target parking lot. That's about my, about the best I can do today.

Yeah. Cool, man. Well, thanks again for taking the time. Yeah. And, uh, everybody listening, uh, we will talk to you soon. Brian and I will be back next week, uh, after he has done traveling to the land of Canada and getting his poutine. I'm also going to Canada. Everybody's going to Canada. Yeah. It's funny.

Everybody I know this week is in Bangkok and next week, everybody's going to Canada. They're going, going to Canada. Yep. Canada. They have ketchup fries. They do. They're not ketchup fries, ketchup chips. I know. I mean, I see, I knew what you were talking about. We have ketchup fries here. I think everywhere has ketchup fries.

Yes. The ketchup chips were good. Ketchup chips and maple cookies. You know, I've given up on Brian bringing me back maple cookies because every time he does, he puts them, he eats them before he can bring them over. Yeah. I think he's just a bastard. That's why. He might be.

It's possible. I've met him once or twice. Yes. Yes. All right, man. Happy holidays. You too. Bye. Closing shout outs. Big shout out this week to Sean Bonner for coming on the show. We're actually letting me go to his house and, uh, also a special thanks to his wife, Tara, for letting me turn her living room into a recording studio for an afternoon.

Oh, so long ago. And thank you to Brian Schulmeister for taking a week off, even though for some reason I still get to do all the work this week. Go figure. Safe travels and hope your son's birthday is going a-okay. Until next time, I'm not Brian Schulmeister, but I am Jason DeFillippo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors, and stuff we like. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to gog.show slash support, where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air.

To learn more about all of the people who make this show possible, head on over to gog.show slash about. Show notes for all the links discussed in this episode can be found at gog.show slash 224. I'm doing a special Christmas theme today. Yeah. Go.

Okay. Good day. I'm Bob McKen... Welcome to Great White North. I'm Bob McKenzie. This is my brother, Doug. How's it going? Okay. This is our Christmas show, eh? Yeah. So, like, that's our topic. There's our Christmas tree. One of our topics is, like, beer knob, okay? Because we hate eggnog. And, like, at our family parties, everybody drinks eggnog at Christmas, right?

So, what you do is you go to Max 7-Eleven, you get eggnog, and you empty it out, like, right in the tree, eh? And then you pour beer in here. That'll help it grow. Okay, you got beer right in there, and then you get, like, a happy cup. You can't see through. Pour it in that. Walk around the party. You don't have to drink eggnog. Drink beer knob instead, okay? At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love. From beauty and fashion, to home, culinary, and outdoor living.

Shop now at QVC.com.