225: A Beacon of Light and Hope

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 Canadian Brian Schulmeister. I'm very relaxed. I will mention that briefly, that unplugging has been absolutely glorious. I've avoided news altogether. The Cheeto-in-Chief I've avoided. I've been happier than I've been in months. I've followed absolutely nothing. It's been great.

Yeah, good dying of fire. Yeah, I know. I've heard it's been quite wonderful down there recently. I'll be back on Tuesday to help. Oh, thanks. Just what we need. Another has-been programmer to come save the day. That's right. Now, Brian, before we talked about some 23andMe action and I said that I signed up for it, I got my results.

Yes? So, yeah, they make no sense whatsoever. That seems to be the consensus. This is a bad thing to happen in the world of social media these days because everybody's been posting their crap and going, what the hell? So, my dad comes back at 44% Italian, right?

Uh-huh. I come back at 6.8% Italian. Right. And we're pretty sure that he's the daddy. So, how the hell do you get- How? How does that happen? Yeah, well, because it's a load of crap. I think that's just about it. Yeah, the science on this is not quite there.

You know, the categories are hilarious. I mean, I think both the French and the Germans would take umbrage with being lumped in together as French and German. Broadly, Northwestern European. What the hell does that even mean? Yeah, it means I'm 33.7% British and Irish, lumped together. I am 13.5% French and German, lumped together.

And then, broadly, Northwestern European, I'm 22.9%. Then, we get down to Southern European, where I'm 6.8% Italian, 0.5% Iberian. Yes. And then, the rest is, like, almost 20% broadly Southern European. It's like, uh, you're from over there.

That's about as close as they get. Basically, yes. Yes. They pretty much should have just circled Europe on a map. Mm-hmm. Here's a globe. This is where you're from. And, uh, looking at some of the other markers in there, it's just, I don't know, man.

I think I may have wasted a bunch of money. I was about to say, do you feel like you've got your money's worth? Because, uh. Hell no! Yeah, that basically tells you nothing. Oh, hell no! You know, I hear that they're trying to push into genetic markers for depression, which, last I heard, the study of psychology hasn't even figured out entirely yet.

But, apparently, 23andMe is going to tell you. Um, the only good news that I think comes out of 23andMe is all the white supremacists who've been taking the tests and, uh, getting pissed off at their results, finding out they're not purebreds. Ha ha! Well, here's the deal. They may be, but you're never going to know because 23andMe doesn't fucking know either.

This is true. Yeah. Well, I, hey, I called it, right? I told you it was going to be a load of crap. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, it's sad. It saddens me that this was so damn expensive and just a steaming pile of shit. Yeah. This should probably rename it to 23andMe and everybody else, all from Europe.

Yeah, seriously, because it also says that, uh, I am definitely genetically predisposed to late onset Alzheimer's disease, which I think is probably most people, uh, but Alzheimer's does run in my family. So that was close. Uh, it got a couple things right.

Asparagus pee, which it told me a bunch of shit that I already know. That's the funny part. Right. I have no back hair. I don't have a unibrow and I can smell asparagus in my pee. Things I already knew. Thanks. What I wanted to know was where the fuck I was from and it didn't even come close on that because I know the lineage of my family and I am more than 6.8% Italian.

What the hell? Yeah. So, uh, you know, shockingly not, not, not quite there yet. Not ready for prime time. No. In the news. So this is actually kind of, I suppose, a bit of follow-up to our show two weeks ago, um, where as what I predicted, we'd get a one-star rating and we did, but we'll talk about that one later.

Uh, so the whole white supremacist thing, the Nazis, which we based our episode on and tried to stay as strictly teched as possible. So we'll continue on with that. Um, after Charlottesville, Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right have become a lot less welcome on the web. As we've discussed, they are getting shut down left, right, and center.

So they're making their own internet. Okay. I guess, because, you know, it would be very ironic if they went on the dark web. It would. Well, they can't go on the dark web. They have to go on the white web. They have to go on the white web, even though from their 23andMe test, they're discovering that they kind of belong on the dark web.

Whoopsies. Uh, yes. So they are making their, basically, their own shut down things that are kind of hidden from view. And they're finding, you know, uh, sympathetic hosts that will keep care of their stuff and stay out of the limelight. And they're branding themselves with the face of Pepe, the frog that has become the meme of the alt-right.

Uh, there is a social network called Gab, basically, which is a social network for Nazis and white supremacists and people that hate everything. Um, you know, and, uh, the notification sound is the croak of a frog. It's, uh, so they're clever, aren't they? Oh, yeah. So clever.

So clever, like every fucking 15 year old that ever got a computer for Christmas. Yes. Well, so basically they, they have decided, you know, if we're not welcome amongst the internet in general, we will create our own. I suppose that's fine. I guess it's unfortunate. This is, they're not creating an internet of their own though.

They're just sitting on the same internet as everybody else. They're just not telling everybody where they're at. Yes. Well, I mean, it's in the same way that the people call the, uh, say the dark web is some sort of different internet. It's not, it's just not Googled. It's a different protocol. I mean, you have to have special software to get on the dark web.

It's not the same as the general, it's not, it's HTTP over a subset of protocols that hide you from other things, at least for the onion. It's not a different internet. It's not a different internet. Everybody's on the same goddamn internet. Yes. Anyways, my favorite quote from this entire article is it's a safe space for the kinds of people the rest of us want to feel safe from.

Oh, good. Let them go play in their own corner. Fuck them. That's right. Yeah. Let them have their own poopy sandbox. Yeah. Ribbit. Uh, hashtag. The hashtag is 10 years old. Believe it or not. Hashtag blessed. Oh God. You know, I, good for Chris.

Chris Messina invented the hashtag out of necessity and almost nobody knows who the hell he is. I mean, he got some press for the 10 year anniversary and he made no money on it. So he's an honorary grumpy old geek for making something fantastic and he'll never get paid for.

That is pretty much how you become a grumpy old geek, except he got some pretty good jobs. He's a smart cat. So, you know, he was smart enough to get a job at Google, then leave a job at Google, then get a job at Uber and really quickly leave the job at Uber because he's a smart one.

Uh, I'm not sure what he's up to nowadays, but, uh, good for him. Happy, happy 10th anniversary for the hashtag. Yes. Hey, hashtag. Uh, I ran across an article a couple of weeks ago while we were off and it was good enough that I thought to keep in here because we spent a lot of time talking about the big companies, um, the apples, the alphabets, the Facebooks, the Microsofts that, uh, you know, the, basically, you know, the big, the big five, the, the, the whole point of your life in tech these days is not to create a product that lasts.

It's to create a product to sell to the big five. Uh, but this article talks about a way to basically thrive and, and not sell to them and, and go on and do your own thing. And it, it, uh, this, the article discusses three companies in particular anchor, which I had not heard of before, uh, Roku and Airbnb and one of my favorites anchor actually is one of my favorites.

I've got anchor shit all over my house. They're awesome. Well, there you go. So the way that, uh, that they have said that these three companies have managed to survive, uh, and be a small company, small company, small company, small company, anchor is not a small company.

Roku is not a small company. That is definitely the big problem I have with the headline. And I blame the, uh, the editors over at slate or I recode on this one because these are not small companies. No, these are massive corporations. I know. So anyways, they say small companies that thrive surrounded by tech giants.

Yeah. I suppose the five are bigger than these people, but they are not small companies by any means. Uh, but it goes on to talk about the three in particular and three ways that you could survive and anchor, it says, compete where others don't want to. So you're getting into a market where most people are saying we don't have a shot.

So why not? Um, Roku be Switzerland in a world at war. So basically play nice with everybody while everybody else is battling out over formats and things like that. And for Airbnb create brand new markets in the digital layer, which is such a bullshit fucking sentence. It makes me want to puke, but basically saying, you know, take tech into non-tech.

I have avenues and, you know, disrupt basically, disrupt and pivot and disrupt and then make a logo that looks like a butthole. Uh, that's how Airbnb rolls. Now I see when I saw this, uh, the title for this article, I thought maybe we're talking about lifestyle businesses, you know, the ones that they always make fun of on Shark Tank where you can, you know, have a little business that, you know, pays the bills, employs a few people, kind of like you had for about 15 years, you know?

Oh, you know that, that middle class thing that's completely disappearing? That's right. That's gone now. Ah, yeah. Okay. So, so either you're on the side of the quote unquote small companies like Airbnb with thousands of employees or you just don't exist.

The fact that this is what they call a small company now is silly. The days of, the days of basically having a mom and pop shop in the tech industry are long gone. So yeah, the small companies like Airbnb is where it's at. Well, I don't think they're long gone. They're just never going to get any press. I know a lot of people that are running their own, you know, service shops and making a decent living out of it, have a nice home, do okay.

It's not like it used to be, you know, because the square spaces of the world have pushed a lot of people out of business, but still, they're out there. They're just never going to get any press because this is the barrier to entry for quote unquote small. Yeah. Well, I've got another small company that's getting into the automation home market.

Okay. Ikea, that tiny company Ikea is actually getting way into it now. Now, based on the rules, as previously stated in the recode article, Roku's be Switzerland in a world at war. Ikea's smart home is basically doing that and it's starting to make a bit of sense.

They are, they are basically platform agnostic. They are making their smart home stuff. So it works with everybody else's. It is 100% compatible with every other major player out there, which is smart as hell. And they're cheap, they're easy, they don't mess around, you cannot cycle colors.

It is a light, it is normal light-colored light. It is not a blue-green, purple-green, orange-green, boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop. It is just a fucking light, and it works with everything else, so good for them.

If you bring this to the mainstream, it's going to be these guys. So it's compatible with HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant, everybody else. It's relatively cheap. It seems to be super easy to set up. Good on them. Okay. No word about security. I was going to say, the fact that they open it up to so many, it works with everybody, including little Pepe the Hacker down the street, because it's just an open architecture.

Come on in. Turn on my lights. Light my fire, baby. There's a reason I put that in the news section and not security. Yeah. There's no news there. Oh. Yeah. That's a... I don't know, man. I can't do it. I just cannot do it.

I cannot buy one of these things. But I told... I mean, I did, and I used it some total of three times because I thought it was cute, and then I realized that it's just so much easier to hit a switch to turn on a light than to talk to something to turn on a light, and I don't care. Yeah, definitely. The one thing I will...

I'm thinking about buying this thing called a shift pod. Okay. It's one of the only businesses that have come out of Burning Man that is actually kind of cool. It's a tent company. Or, as you know, I forgot to mention this when I did my review of the last Cory Doctorow book.

This guy cannot write a fucking book without a yurt in it. Everything has to have a yurt. Him and Bruce Sterling, it's like, if there's no yurt, it's not a novel. I don't know why they are stuck on yurts. Well, this is kind of an insta-yurt. It's called the shift pod, and it's a pop-up shelter that you can carry with you.

And they're turning these things into... They're selling them for disaster relief and things like that. They need to have a floating version, obviously, that we've just figured out this week. But I definitely recommend checking out the website, because these things are pretty cool. They're not cheap, but they are very cool.

It's called a hexayurt. Hexayurt. That was it, yeah. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. But it's kind of cool. Yeah. And it is kind of cool, and conveniently looks to be made of tinfoil. Yeah, I think they're a little bit stronger than that. Those are the ones for Burning Man that keep the sun out.

But they tested these things with a helicopter to try and blow them over, and they didn't go anywhere. So they're not good. Yeah, now they need a... Basically, what they need is a hexaporta potty, because there's really no place else to... You've got to kind of go outside and still take a leak, but...

You need a hexasquirt next to your hexayurt. That's it. Hexasquirt. Oh, God. Uber has a new CEO. Oh, yeah. Speaking of squirts. Yeah. They went to Expedia and got their new CEO. Did a little Expedia search and said, hey, can you fly over here and run our company?

Yep. Well, couldn't get a woman. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. So... Yeah, I can't even pronounce this guy's name, so I'm not even going to... Cora... What is it? Cora Swarovski. How are you? Yep. Yep. Not even going to try. It's too goddamn early, and my coffee hasn't kicked in. Kostrasawi.

That's what I'm going with. Okay. That's probably not even right. I don't care. Yeah, I don't care either. What's the over-under he lasts less than a year? I think he's going to do pretty good. Okay. The thing about it is, you know, at Expedia, he did a pretty good job of actually... Dot com.

...diversifying his workforce. So, it's got a pretty good track record of coming in on the side of good and right, so we'll see how it goes. Uber's workforce is already diversified. It's not the workforce that's the problem. Well, we'll see how it goes. I'm keeping an open mind.

Actually, here's the thing. I don't give a shit. I really couldn't care less if Uber lives or dies. I would actually prefer them to die. But, you know, at least now, the CEO search is over, and we can stop talking about them for at least 20 minutes. And we'll see how it goes.

We'll see how that 20 minute goes, because I have three Uber stories to follow up. God damn it. Yeah, it's not going to work. So, all right. So, basically, we had the benchmarks lawsuit against Kalanick. The judge has granted Kalanick, unfortunately, a win on Wednesday, and the lawsuit will now have to go to arbitration rather than play out in the courtroom.

So, that will lower our Uber news in coming episodes, because we won't get any juicy gossip. On the plus side, Uber's market share has finally reportedly taken a big hit since the beginning of 2014. Uber has gone from owning 91% of the U.S. ride-sharing market down to 74% as of this month.

According to data from Second Measure, a research firm that tracks billions of dollars in anonymized credit card purchases. Now, this is game slightly upwards, because Uber cheats by using Uber Eats and billing that as a regular Uber, so you cannot separate Uber Eats purchases from Uber rides.

So, their market share seems to be artificially inflated a tad because of that. Lyft has been the main benefactor. So, the month that they had the biggest loss was back, I believe, in January, when the Delete Uber campaign was in full swing. So, apparently, that actually did have some sort of an effect, which is good.

That's surprising, yeah. I thought the... And finally... That came down to that was actually, like, everybody deleted it, and then next week they went back and said, yeah, I kind of need my Uber back. Apparently not. I mean, a lot of people did actually switch over to Lyft. So, it's not like they gave up on ridesharing. It's just they tried Lyft for a while and never went back to Uber.

So, we'll see what happens. And finally, we always think about Uber and Lyft and things like that taking over taxis. But the other thing that's happening, especially in city centers, is people are starting to use these ridesharing services rather than public transport, which is not exactly the best thing in the world because the whole points...

The plus sides of public transport is, A, obviously, it helps the poor. And if ridership is down, then cities don't put money into it, don't keep it clean, don't keep them going, consider getting rid of them. So, that is not good for the poor. The other thing is, of course, the environment. It is much better for 200 people to be on a train than 200 people to be spread out over 2,500 different cars.

So, not so good, unfortunately. So, we're seeing people, according to this report, even in New York City, which has one of the best public transport situations in the country, people are taking Uber and Lyft if they can instead, and ridership is down.

Which means that funding will go down, and that's not what we want. No, we do not want a downward spiral of public transportation riders. Definitely not. I love public transportation. I'm a huge fan. Me too. Ironically, I live in the city in the world that has none, but whenever I am in cities that have good public transport, I take it.

It is amazing. See, now, just to be clear, you live on the side of town that doesn't have it. The other side of town has a ton of public transportation. I used to take the bus to the train to the valley to go from, yeah, the valley to Hollywood every day. And I did it a lot, and it was great.

So, your side of town just sucks. But I guess you're getting a train soon, aren't you? I heard that the... Yeah, it's all coming in. It's starting to happen, so it's good. Okay, well, public transportation isn't the only thing that's going to be taking a hit from technology soon, because Domino's and Ford are teaming up for self-driving pizza delivery cars.

Now, we always worry about taxi drivers and things like that, but turns out that little stoner down the street just might be out of a job soon. Man, if you think about this, Snow Crash would never get written. I know. Dude, trust me. I totally thought about that. I'm like, okay, Neil Stevenson looked at the future, but he looked at the wrong future.

See, I'm confused about what's happening here. I just start to think, which direction are they going? I thought we were, first off, we were getting little rolling pizza robots that were coming down the street, and pizza drones, and now it's pizza cars. It used to be porn that drove things, now it's pepperoni.

Oh, man. Well, there's a sausage in both of them, so there you go. The interesting thing, and why I hate this headline, is because the headline is bullshit. They are not testing self-driving pizza delivery cars. There's actually going to be a safety engineer in the car with other researchers as well.

They're focusing on the last 50 feet of the customer experience, meaning how does the customer come up and interact with the car to get their pizza? Which is, you know, that is definitely the last mile problem, or the last pepperoni problem, if you want to go with that, is how do they approach the car, take out one pizza that is their pizza, close it up, and so it can go on its merry way.

You know, where's the technology for that? Not take all the pizzas. Exactly. So you have to have, you know, some kind of pizza delivery system in the car that only lets you get your pie. And, you know, also, no tip.

You don't have to tip, so that's kind of cool. But, yeah, this is the future that we're building for ourselves. Everything starts with no tip, and then Uber adds a tipping thing to their app, and then you're supposed to tip again, so it's all a load of crap. It all comes back to just the tip, baby. It really does.

Just the sausage. So, Trump's tech policies. There are four things that are top of mind right now for Silicon Valley CEOs, and there are some big things that are supposedly going to be happening by Monday when this podcast hits, so we'll see where we're at. Yeah, we'll see what happens. So the four top concerns, according to Recode of tech CEOs, is expanding access for talented programmers to come to the U.S.

This would be top of the list and the one that is least likely to happen, hence Toronto being a big place right now. Number two, intellectual property protection. I think this one is a pretty safe bet under a Trump administration, if we can actually pass anything. Number three, AI and automation.

Nobody's paying attention to this, so the idea that this is top of mind is unbelievable to me, and I call bullshit, because absolutely nobody is looking into this at the moment, at least in terms of legislation. And number four, net neutrality, also known as the one least likely to ever happen, because we all know we're going to get screwed on that.

But the reason I really put this article in is the quote that I'm now about to read, which lets you know how MAGA we are right now. According to the World Bank, the U.S. now ranks 46th on the ease of starting a new business right after Afghanistan.

Oh, man. See, that's why we're at war with Afghanistan. Because, yeah, we need to take over Afghanistan for that. Yeah. It's easier to start a fucking business in Afghanistan than it is in the U.S. now. How awesome is that? Yeah. Have you tried to get a business bank account recently?

It is hard. Yes, it's hard. It's ridiculous. Oh, man. And here's the deal. If you want to go to Russia, you can go and you can jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon, because apparently Burger King has launched WhopperCoin in Russia.

Let me tell you, I definitely want to invest and feel confident of any currency that is based on a fast food giveaway. In Russia. In Russia. Oh, yeah. I got nothing on that one, man.

Yep. Yeah. WhopperCoin. WhopperCoin. All right. So, I mean, the jokes is right themselves. I'm sorry. Well, it's funny because I get bashed a lot.

Like, I get a lot of messages and a lot of tweets because of my kind of stance on the cryptocurrency right now, which is I'm not getting involved. But then we get a story like this, and I just, like, want to write back. I want to tweet this back to all of you and go, really? Really? You want me to take cryptocurrency seriously when there's a Whopper fucking coin?

Well, I mean, it's a little apples and oranges or, you know, Whoppers and Big Macs, but, yeah, a little different. But still, anybody can make. See, that's the thing. It's open source. You could make BrianCoin if you wanted to. I could. I think we need to make GrumpCoin.

No. You, like, when I said you can do it, see, then you said we can do it. There's no we here, my friend. If you want to start something, all for it. But, yeah, there is no we when it comes to the GrumpCoin. That's for damn sure. You can have all the profits from that one.

Okay, thanks. And finally, over at TechnologyReview.com, there's a great essay by David Byrne. I don't know if you read this or not, Jason. I have not. Okay, well, definitely go give it a read. It is kind of right in line with what we've been talking about. In case you weren't aware, David Byrne is, of course, the ex-lead singer of Talking Heads.

He has since gone on to do all kinds of crazy art stuff. He's a fairly brilliant and super crazy dude. I saved his domain once. I got David Byrne Radio, I believe it was. He lost it. And Shennie from Boing Boing, like, was, she texted me or something because this was before Twitter existed.

And in the end of the day, he sent me an autographed copy of one of his books with a little dedication in it. And I looked it up online. This is, like, some super rare book that's worth, like, almost 200 bucks if he wouldn't have scribbled in it. So, I like David Byrne. Well, it's him scribbling in it. But it says my name.

David Byrne's great. Yep. Okay. Yeah. Well, that ruins everything. He wrote a really great little article called Eliminating the Human that talks about how, you know, all current technology is eliminating the need for human contact and how that is very, very bad. So, something that we've discussed quite a bit on the show.

It's a fun little read. I highly recommend it. It's quick, but it's well thought out. And it's right on topic. So, does it explain why the millennials aren't screwing? No, he doesn't really get into the millennial sex habits, but he does get into how casual interactions and the lack of them can create tribal bubbles.

Brian, it's finally happened. The one thing that we've talked about since the Echo came on the market, you can now use multiple Echo devices like a Sonos and play music in all of the rooms that you have Echoes.

Sort of. Not sort of. It works. It works. Not if you have Spotify. Not if you have Amazon Music. And not if you have SiriusXM. If you have Amazon Music, it works great. The things that I use it for works perfectly.

I use it for listening to WGN and KROQ in the mornings. Works perfectly. And it does work with Amazon Music. I think you meant Apple Music that it doesn't work for. But for those things, it actually works. Okay. Well, not for most of what I use it for.

Yeah, fuck you. But I'm looking forward to it. You don't need to forget. I am looking forward to it. So, that's good. It's smart that they had it. And first, when you said the one thing that we've been waiting for, I was like, oh, it can control my TV? No, no, no, no. No. And I tested it because the one thing that I was really, I was sensitive.

I'm like, okay, is this thing going to, you know, be in sync? Which I'm sure the reason that it hasn't happened yet is because, you know, they didn't have the technology or the patent licensing because, you know, that is a patented deal to make them all in sync.

And I went around and it works perfectly. I've got three echoes in my house. And basically, I walked around the whole house. I was playing the radio so I could definitely hear when things were out of sync. And it was perfectly in sync all through the house. Great. That's fantastic.

I can't wait to get home and try it. Yeah, the one thing I have found, though, is that the, because you have to create these zones and they're only, they give you names that you can use. No. They're all predefined names. So I just have one that's called Everywhere. Right. And it seems that sometimes it decides to just remove one of your echoes from the list.

I don't know if it's because it power cycled or something. Yeah. Yeah. See? She's awake. Bitch. Maybe it drops it if it senses it's going out of sync. Because I would probably rather something drop out than go out of sync when playing music.

Well, here's what I've noticed. If I say, play this everywhere, it will play. I can say it in my echo upstairs, and it'll start playing on the other two, but it won't play on the one that I actually told it to play on.

It's very strange. But when it all works, it works great. But when it doesn't work, it's a little head scratching. Right. But the one, I could say, you know, to the one upstairs, hey, you know, play the radio downstairs. So when I come down, it's already playing.

Like when I roll out of bed. Right. Or like set a timer downstairs, I actually haven't tried the timers. That might, that'll be interesting. Well, we'll see how this whole thing works out. But I got it to work right out of the gate first time. And I was, I was stunned. I could not believe it.

A free upgrade that actually did what it was supposed to do. That's very exciting. I mean, it definitely, you know, I'm, I'm happy to hear that. I can stay in my Amazon infrastructure for audio and not have to do a Sonos to do full, full house streaming. That'll be good. Yeah. Cause I've got, yeah, these echoes are cheap and I've got them run through like, you know, really nice speaker systems now.

So I would much rather do that than pay the money for like another play one system on Sonos. They do sound, Sonos does sound amazing. You gotta, you gotta admit that. But if you have, if you have the infrastructure already, then it makes no sense to go out and buy something new.

Comscore's mobile apps report is out for 2017 and it pretty much says everything that we've been saying. Nobody is downloading new apps. The app economy is dead, dead, dead. You know, it'll change those stats, Jason. What will Brian when Trent finally does our new damn app?

It's never going to happen. We're never getting another grumpy old geeks app. No, it's over. Forget about it. Yeah. I mean, I don't know anybody that downloads a new app. I've talked to people. I always ask people, especially like when they whip out their phones, because God forbid we have lunch without everybody having their phones out.

I always ask people, what's the last app you've downloaded? And they're always like, I don't know. That's a very odd question to ask your friends at lunch. We do run a technology podcast, Jason. Yeah. But when I'm at lunch, the last thing I want to do is think about this damn thing.

No, it shows. Oh yeah. Yeah. Go look at the notes this week, motherfucker. I told you I've been relaxing in Canada. Yeah, I know. Anyway, that's the state of the apps. And it's funny. I have a friend who's actually building a new meditation app.

Like we didn't have enough of those already because there's only 50 on the market. Yeah. All of which are free. No, they're not free. Headspace is headspace costs money. Most of them cost money. This is going to cost money, too. So good luck with that.

Exactly. Fortunately, he's a multimillionaire and he doesn't really need to make any money off of it. So which is which is a very good thing, because I have a very good feeling that he will not make any money off of this. Some people that got my money this week were Little Snitch because they came out with Little Snitch 4.

Yes. Which is the the Mac app for your desktop Macintosh that monitors network traffic and tells you when things are going off the rails and being nefarious. And this new version 4 is so damn cool. Have you installed it yet? I have not. I have it.

I'm going to do that as soon as I get back home. Yeah. OK, so the network monitor now has a map and it will show you physically where when it can figure out where the IPs are, what it's connecting to and where it's just shows you exactly where your Chinese cameras are. Exactly.

Yes. Well, it kind of just goes over there. But most of the stuff in the US gets pulled out. Most of the stuff in Europe. I haven't spent too much time looking at it, but as soon as I installed it, I put it up for like five minutes and watch it. It was pretty cool. So and you can like there's all sorts of tracing stuff that they have in there now.

So I can't wait to play with it some more, but it's you know, it's worth the upgrade. I just love giving these guys money for their upgrades because this is a product that honestly, I think everybody should have and I can't believe Apple hasn't stolen it yet, but it's great. I don't think Apple necessarily wants you to know how often they connect back to Apple.

You would be amazed at how often they connect back to Apple. It's a little shocking when you watch that on Little Snitch. Oh my God. Yeah. It's constantly talking to Apple, but that's why, you know, that's why they made all those new data centers because they got to call somewhere.

Got to call somewhere. Carbon Copy Cloner 5 is out. Carbon Copy Cloner is one of my favorites for doing backups to like standalone hard drives. I use it pretty much all the time for all my machines just have like bootable, recoverable backups and it does a lot of other stuff.

Version 5 is out. I haven't been able to get it yet because they got so overwhelmed when they made the announcement that the servers went down and they couldn't verify your old serial numbers. So I haven't had any time to go back, but I'm looking forward to that one. It looks like they did a pretty decent redesign on it.

So I like pretty software. Very cool. I picked up some hardware, sort of. I picked up a small desktop mic stand for my trip here to Canada because last time around I had some flimsy crappy thing that came with one of the mics that we used for free that really didn't do the job. So I went on Amazon and I found the Amun MS-12 mini foldable desktop tabletop tripod microphone mic stand holder.

The name is longer and larger than the actual product itself if you were to print it out. But it's only eight bucks and 50 cents. It's prime. It is a sturdy piece of equipment. Jason, I know you were asking me about it before I even got here to try it out. I'm actually using it now. I highly recommend this.

I think for the price and for it is just it's sturdy. It's nice. It kicks ass. I like this thing. How tall is it? Right now it's sitting at about I'd say about a foot tall. Oh, that's good. That's a good height. Which is probably about as tall as it's going to get.

So you might still want a book or two depending on the seating arrangement. But right now it's working out great for me with no books needed on it. The adjustable height is pretty nice. So you can get in and around. It's going to adjust all over the place. But it is surprisingly sturdy.

I mean, for eight bucks, I thought this thing would be a piece of junk that I'd use once and then have to find something else. Nope. This is going to be in the travel bag from now on. And I take it it's nice and light. Yes. To nice and totally light. So it's fantastic. I highly recommend it for a nice, cheap and easy desktop stand.

I will go purchase one today and give it a shot because I'm always looking for those kind of things because the mic stands that I have are heavy like the. Yeah, this is super light. Yeah. I need something that's definitely light so I can send to some some clients of mine who like to handhold their microphones to get them close to their mouth, which makes me want to stab them all in the face.

Exactly why I ordered this right before the trip, because otherwise the other one was so useless, I would have been handholding it. And we all know how that. Yeah. Yeah. It would have been a very short show with the new Star Wars coming soon. I keep forgetting we get new Star Wars soon. Yes, we do.

And unfortunately, this is what I hate about the world. Now, the toys have rolled out and it's spoilers galore. I have not clicked on this link. I do not want to look at this. I'm going to I'm pulling out my headphones while you talk about this. I don't want any spoilers. OK, well, there are no spoilers from me. I'm just saying that there's a new toy out, which is the dark side of BB-8.

I didn't want to know that. Well, it says it right in the goddamn title of the thing. I know. I was angry when I looked at the show notes. Oh, poor baby. It's going to be in the commercial next week, I'm sure. But the upside is the same company that makes the little BB-8 toy. They made an R2-D2 one, too.

So I did see that as cute. The R2-D2 one I would get. I don't care about BB-8 or the new dark, dark BB, but I wouldn't mind a little remote controlled R2-D2. I'm sure Bam Bam will eat it in like one bite, but it'll still be fun to chase around for a little bit. Probably.

Yeah, it'd be the fastest hundred dollars I'd probably ever go through. Like, wee, wee, wee, wee, wee, wee, wee, wee, wee, chomp, done. Okay, next. And finally, KFC has made a VR training module for their employees, and as the title of the article says, it's terrifying.

It really is. This is the strangest thing I've ever seen. This is one of those where you have to come to the show notes, gog.show slash 225, go to the link and watch the video. It is bizarre. I mean, this is like out of the 90s bizarre.

It's, I don't understand. It's confusing. Somebody got paid to make it, so good on that. I know, that's the only thing. It's like, yeah, somebody got some special sauce on that, buddy. Oh, so strange. So strange.

Media candy. I want to give a shout out and congrats to a friend of the show, John Resnick, lead singer of the Goo Goo Dolls. He has a new show on Sirius XM, a volume channel. It is called, what the hell is it called, Chorus and Verse, and he sits down with peers and heroes to dig deep into the songwriting process.

It's going to be a once a month show, so find it, listen to it, should be interesting. I love talking to John about songwriting and his thoughts on songwriting because he's got many. He's been doing it for 30 plus years now, and so he's going to talk to other songwriters about it, and it should be really interesting.

Looking forward to the show. Congrats, John. Do you have Sirius XM? I do. I still have it. It is still free with the car. I think I've got it for another four months or something like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because we talked about that. Mine expired after I got the car after six months, and they wanted like a hundred bucks a year, and I'm like, are you kidding me?

Yeah, it's a little overpriced for one. It's so playlisted. Anyways, go get it and listen to John's show. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Sure. Hey, John, can I borrow a hundred bucks? So next up, a lot of stuff on Netflix this week.

We both have some stuff here. I watched Banking on Bitcoin, which is a really good primer about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and its history, if you want to get caught up really quick on what it is. It was a pretty good movie. Highly recommended. They talk about Whopper coin? Nope. That's the thing.

These coins come out pretty quick, but banking on Bitcoin, too. You know what? The next one will be lunching on Bitcoin, so then we can get the Whopper coin in. I watched all of the Defenders. Thoughts? I thoroughly enjoyed it. I like Luke Cage when he's with other people.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. I don't like his solo show, because he was great when he popped up on Jessica Jones, and he was great in this, but his own show was kind of a drag. This was my first exposure to Iron Fist. I'm sorry. Do not care for Iron Fist. Yeah. I don't care.

God, he's like the millennial superhero. All he does is whine and bitch and talk about how great he is. I've got money! Hey, I'm the Iron Fist! Yeah. Yeah, he's like, I am the Defender of this, and I've got a lot of money, dude! Yeah, so then he complains and bitches about shit for a while.

It's like, shut up. Yeah. Man, what a whiny ass. Seriously. Yeah, so did not care for Iron Fist, was a little bummed that it was so, um, the entire Defenders thing was kind of Iron Fist-centric, or at least the main plot points were tied mostly to his character than anybody else's. Yeah. Um, but seeing Jessica Jones and, uh, um, Daredevil back in action, and all the, uh, subsidiary characters are all absolutely fantastic.

Thoroughly enjoyable. Uh, loved it. Um, really interested to see. Can't wait for Jessica Jones and Daredevil to come back. So, yeah, after I watched this, I went back and started to watch Jessica Jones again. It is so much better than I even remembered. Uh, oh man, it is so good.

So good. Definitely my favorite. So. Yeah, and I mean, it's like almost a tie between her and Daredevil. I love both of those shows, but I just want more Jessica Jones. We've had enough Daredevil. Give us some more Jessica. Uh, what I don't want any more of is Death Note. Death Note.

Uh, they just had the new movie came out. Oh my God. What a steaming, steaming pile of death poo. Ugh. Okay. I mean, if you want to go and watch the original comic, or the anime, it's on Netflix. Watch that instead.

It's like 30 some episodes. Uh, they're short. They're only 22 minutes. Amazing. Amazing. This new one, completely whitewashed, changed all of the characters, and, you know, basically tried to put, you know, a lot of books into a very short time span.

And it makes no sense. It is, it's just incomprehensible crap. So, skip it, skip it, skip it. Will do. And, uh, in a little more Netflix news, they're, they've developed their own strains of marijuana.

Because, you know, because that's apparently what you do nowadays. I think this is very funny and somewhat genius marketing. Uh, I'm a little surprised because you generally don't see major corporations do this sort of thing at the, you know, because you're going to offend somebody or other. Uh, but very clever.

Very, very funny. Yeah. I mean, hey, it's legal now. Why not? You know? Not everywhere. Yeah. But the places that you can buy it, it's going to be legal. Yes. And yeah, it, and you could get it in West Hollywood. It actually was from August 25th to the 27th.

So, it's done now, but I'm sure it'll probably stick around. I love that, uh, one of them's called Poussey Riot, which is pretty awesome from, you know, Orange is the New Black. But it, it's funny. I, I, I, big pat on the, pat on the back to whoever came up with that.

No, it is, it's clever. Banana Stand Kush for Arrested Development. Very funny. I, it's all very clever. So, um, guess what we're getting a new version of? What is finally being rebooted? Oh, what now? Sadly, it's Heathers. Fuck me gently with the Jameson.

No. No. I don't think that that, uh, I don't think that that, uh, line's going to make it to the show since it is going to be a TV series. It was in the trailer, though. Oh, was it? Well, good for them. It is in the trailer, yes.

And the trailer is terrible. Oh, it's, I'm not impressed. I will give it that. It seems like their heart is in the right place. Uh, let's see. Grace Victoria Cox, who is in, from Under the Dome and Twin Peaks, The Return, will be playing Winona Ryder's character.

Uh, they have re-updated the Queen Bee Heathers, including a, a gay guy and a black person, uh, instead of just the all-white, uh, all-straight lineup that we had before. Shannon Doherty is signed on to play an unnamed adult character in this series, um, and, uh, I don't, we'll see.

I don't know. I know this is just such a perfect piece of pop culture as is. I, I, I just can't imagine this being good. But who knows? The trailer is not good. The trailer is terrible. And the, the thing that they didn't do, which, what they should have done, is make it their own. There's too many callbacks to the original.

Literally. She says, fuck me gently with a chainsaw. It's a remake. It's not a reboot. Which is annoying. It's like, if you're going to reboot it, make it your own. You know? Do, pull a BS to you. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree. Just, just, yeah, completely disconnect from it, because you're not really, the Venn diagrams of people that are going to watch this do not overlap.

Yeah. Yeah. Just, just make it your own. Or write a new fucking story, you lazy pricks. Nobody writes new stories anymore. Come on. I just, I love Heather Stone. Now, here's something that I, I do too. And one of my other favorite movies of all time, which is not getting a reboot, at least not yet.

And please, if anybody is working on this, stop it. Do not do it. A Fish Called Wanda. Mentalfloss.com often does these great little bits where they do, they delve into cult classic movies and like, give you fun, interesting facts about it. So I've got a link in the show notes.

11 fun facts about A Fish Called Wanda. A Fish Called Wanda is probably one of the funniest movies ever made. This was an enjoyable, fun little read. Yeah. That's the thing about A Fish Called Wanda is you cannot remake it. There's no way on earth to remake it. The characters were so perfect.

Harvey, men, friends, and, you know, I saw this movie in the theater. Don't call me stupid. I saw this movie in the theater with my dad opening weekend. And we both literally, this is not, this is not figuratively, this is literally fell out of our seats on the floor laughing at multiple points in that movie.

And especially Harvey, men, friends, and one of my favorite movies. Yeah. This is a car. Oh, I can quote this movie backwards and forwards. I know it chapter and verse and I love it. So I can't wait to go check out these fun facts.

Yeah. Good stuff. KMFDM has a new album out called Hell Yeah. And yes, I saw that you were posting about this and listening to it. And I figured I will wait and see what Jason thinks. Here's the thing. It's like. That's never a good start. It's like KMFDM got old.

It's slower. It doesn't have as much punch. There are definitely some songs in here where I was actually like tapping my toe and shaking my butt. So there are some good, you know, upbeat, dancey songs. They have one song called Fake News, which is pretty funny. Okay. All in all, it's a decent album.

I give it a B plus. Yeah, that's not bad. That's better than I thought. I listened to it like four or five times. It's not a bad movie. I saved it in my Spotify list. So, you know, it got the, you know, the vaunted save. So it's in my library. So, yeah, B plus, I think I liked it.

All right. I'll give it a listen. Why not? I'll transition by saying that for a long time, or the rumor was always that KMFDM stood for kill motherfucking Depeche Mode. As far as we know, that's not actually true. Depeche Mode's 101, which was the film by D.A.

Penny Baker, which followed a group of fans around America before their 101st show at Pasadena's Rose Bowl back in 1980. Also, the second show I ever went to in my entire life. That movie is actually fantastic.

If you've never seen it, we have a link in the show notes. You should check it out. It's a lot of fun. But to celebrate the 30 year anniversary of that show, they basically, they showed the movie in the Rose Bowl, which is kind of cool. Nice. I thought that was pretty awesome. So I would have happily gone to that had I known about it, but I found out about it a little bit later on.

So it's a very cool little event that they did where they screened the movie in the Rose Bowl. A couple thousand people went. Generally, they say in the article, it looks like a lot of people that actually went to the original show 30 years ago, which would make sense, because why else would you go to this? So pretty cool.

A lot of fun. So yeah, Depeche Mode 101, if you've never seen it, is a fascinating, pretty interesting documentary that has very little to do with the actual band itself. But a lot of great footage from that show. And what a hell of a show that was. Oh, very cool. I'm actually going to see Depeche Mode in a couple of days here in Toronto.

Yeah. You know what sucks is they played here two days ago and I didn't know about it until the day after, because I totally would have gone to that show. That's one band I've never seen and wasn't really into when they were big. But now that I'm older and, you know, wiser and going back and listening to the bands that all my friends liked, I figured there's a reason they liked them.

So I should maybe go back and listen to them. And then I also heard Dave Gahan on the Nerdist podcast. Very cool, smart guy. So I was really impressed with him. Their live show is absolutely phenomenal. I figured it was going to be on the level with The Cure because they've been going for so long and in the same vein.

It's probably going to be a fantastic stage show. Yeah, absolutely stunning. So I'm really looking forward to it on Sunday. And now I'm twice as bummed I missed them. Thanks. No problem. I also got to watch The Tick, the new series that's out on Amazon Prime. I fucking loved it.

I thought it was amazing. The only problem with it is it's too short. There's only six episodes and they go really fast. And it took me forever to figure out who was playing The Tick. And a friend of the show, Bob Fogarty, told me, if you're a Shaun of the Dead fan, the guy who plays Pete is The Tick.

And I had no idea. But man, is it funny. I highly recommend it. If you want something that's just stupid, silly that you can laugh at and forget about every crappy thing that's going on in the world, go watch The Tick. And you'll laugh. You'll love it. Seriously.

I will check it out. I've been meaning to. And one thing that is not going to make you laugh, Black Mirror is coming back and they have a short video out with the titles for the new season. And it's interesting. I got to go back and figure out which one it is. But Penn Jillette basically wrote one of the stories for this upcoming season, which seems a little weird.

But it does. Yeah, it's very odd. So I'd like to say I'm looking forward to another season of Black Mirror, but I'm kind of not. Last season was really hard to get through. Well, yeah, but good. I mean, they're just depressing.

I find them to be like, you know, John Oliver right now or Bill Maher or anything that's mirroring the real world a little too closely right now. The real world is crap. So this stuff is really hard to sit through. Yeah. So go watch The Tick instead.

And I do want to do a quick shout to Hello Internet. It's a podcast with CGP Gray and Brady Heron. We've talked about it on the show before. And the reason I found this show originally was I had created a podcast that we were going to do and it was called Hello Internet.

It eventually turned into Up to Speed. Yes. Because the name Hello Internet was taken by these guys. Yeah. Bastards. I know. I know. And I was listening to the show today and it just dawned on me that these guys have more fans than God.

It's insane. And they have their own flag, which is really cool. I would like a Grumpy Old Geeks flag at some point, but I'm really crappy at flag design. I do think we need to make Grumpy Old Geeks challenge coins because those would be cool. But anyway, these guys have fans and took their flag into space.

That's cool. Nice. You know, I mean, we're going to talk about how cool our fans are shortly. But hey, if you're a fan of the show and can do some space stuff, we've got some stickers for you that you can send up. We can auction those off at some point. But yeah, check out Hello Internet.

It's a really fun show. And CGP Gray is very smart. So is Brady. I really just... This is one of those podcasts that I'm really happy when it shows up because it's always just a really lighthearted, fun romp through the internet. Yay. At the library.

I've got some stuff that I read this week, but we're going to wait to cover it until next week because you are almost halfway through the book that we're going to talk about, which is our final invention. Yeah, I didn't quite get it done. Yeah, yeah. It's our final invention by James Barrett about AI and how it's going to kill us all.

Yep. So we'll have that barn burner next week. But I checked out The Butterfly Effect with John Ronson on Audible. Okay. This is one of their new in-house productions. It's like three and a half hours long. And it's the story behind what free porn on the internet did to the porn industry.

Okay. And I'm going to tell you the TLDR here. Okay. Fucking Canadians broke fucking for money in front of a fucking camera. That's the TLDR of it. It's an amazing story. And John Ronson, he did The Men Who Stare at Ghosts. Garrett Goetz and a couple other pretty cool books. Very cool guy.

And he narrates it and does all the interviews. It's a well-produced show. I recommend checking it out. If you're on Audible, it's free for the next couple months. It's like it's podcast format. It's three and a half hours. Quick, quick listen. But definitely check it out. Right. Okay.

We'll do. And we have strung out the Bobiverse book three over, I think, three different episodes now. Can we put a bow on Bob? But we're going to put a bow on Bob right now because I finally finished it on my flight out here. I hadn't quite gotten there yet.

You had mentioned that if you get through it, you would discover that this is a good stopping point. He can continue on to write Bobiverse books all he wants. Or we could just have a bow on Bob, as it were. And I agree with you 100%. That was a fine wrap up to the series.

If he writes more, that's great. And if people seem to like them, maybe I'll read them. But I don't feel the need to read anymore. I am very satisfied with my Bobiverse. Yep. Yeah. I was really happy with the ending on that, too. So definitely worth going Bob one through three, for sure. Yep.

And Terry Pratchett made the news this week as well. The great fantasy author that we all love so very much. Who passed away in 2015. He was very... We had talked about this. We had discussed what may or may not happen with his universe after he had passed. We had hoped that nobody would continue writing any Discworld novels that that would be at.

He was also concerned about this. He was more concerned about what would happen to his unfinished writings. He did not want a Salmon and the Book of Doubt or whatever the hell that book was called. Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams, yes. Yes. He did not want to have that situation happen to him where somebody got a hold of his writings and kind of put them out.

So he told his longtime assistant, Rob Willikens, that he wanted a device connected to his heartbeat so when his heart stopped, it would wipe his hard drive, which is very fancy. But they said, nope, can't have that. But what we will do is we'll take your hard drive out and we'll put it in the middle of the road and we will crush it with a steamroller, which is exactly what happened this last Wednesday, I believe, at the Great Dorset Steam Fair.

A steamroller smushed his hard drive and the destroyed hard drive will be on display at the Salisbury Museum starting in September as part of an exhibition dedicated to Pratchett. So any lingering writings that he had, now officially gone, except, of course, we know that they aren't because the NSA can totally reconstruct that.

Yeah. It didn't look very smushed in the picture. It did not, actually. It kind of looked like somebody lightly tread across it. It's lightly trodden, but I'm glad that at least there's no plans to put it out, because the Salmon of Doubt still haunts me to this day. It just, it actually kind of ruined the Hitchhiker's Guide.

Like, if you have been through the Hitchhiker's Guide series and are still looking at the Salmon of Doubt and thinking of reading it, don't! No, no. And especially if you're a Dirk Gently fan as well, because the half-done Dirk Gently novel is what keeps me up at night. I want to know where the other half of the cat is.

I'm sorry, it still bugs me. Yes. Because the thing about Dirk Gently novels is you have to wait till the very end till it's all wrapped up, and now I just, I will never know. It's, uh, damn Salmons. Security?

Ha! We are back again with Security Ha with the East Coast crew this time, Brian Canadian Schulmeister and Dave D.C. Bittner. You're in Baltimore, though, so I couldn't find any. Baltimore Bittner, there you go.

Dave Baltimore Bittner. Yeah, there you go. Yes, lovely, lovely alliteration. Yes. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Good to be back. Yes. Hello, hello. Good to have you back. So, yes, we just had some technical difficulties, so I'm a little verklempt. If you want to imagine Jason running around his studio, yanking cables and plugging them back in and working himself up into quite a lather, that's pretty much what just happened, right?

Yeah, it's one of those things where all the knobs and all the lights are going and everything says it's proper and where it should be, and then it's not. And it's enough to drive you in bug nutty. I'd just like to point out, Jason, that I was eating maple cookies while you were doing that. Yeah, go fuck yourself.

When in Canada. Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah, choke on them. Choke on them. Now, now. Okay, let's talk about some security stuff. What do we got this week? Well, let's start with something that Verizon's got to choke on. Okay.

Because Verizon bought out what was left of Yahoo, and a U.S. judge has said that Yahoo data breach victims have the right to sue, which means that Verizon will have to deal with that lawsuit. So, yeah, any of the victims of the massive data breaches that were suffered by Yahoo between 2013 and 2016 has basically been opened up to, one would assume, a very large class action lawsuit that will be coming soon, as well as individual lawsuits.

So, we should see what happens with that. I look forward to my 36 cents in revenue from this one. Yeah. You know, I was looking through this, and it got me wondering, have we reached the point where anyone has established what is the value in a lawsuit of a lost identity or a breached identity?

I didn't find anything, but it led me down the rabbit hole of, because there are things, for example, insurance companies have established what is the value of a life. And, you know, you can go look that up on Wikipedia. It's about 50 grand a year, or depending on which agency you ask, it's around $9 million is the value.

Can I get it all in one lump sum and then just hang myself next week? Well, can I borrow against it, is really what I'd like to know. But I don't think so far we've established that in this realm of what is the value when you're suing someone, or a large number of people are suing someone?

What's the value of a stolen identity? And I wonder if we're going to get to that. So somebody certainly can do that math. And I wonder, too, how this is going to affect companies like Verizon and Yahoo going out to buy the insurance that they buy against these sorts of things when it is established by a district judge that you can be sued for this.

That kind of raises the stakes a little bit. And I can imagine that insurance policies might be going up a little bit after something like this. Yeah. Yeah, I would assume so as well. But I just thought it was interesting because this is the first time that a judge has basically came out and said that you do have some, us individuals have some sort of right about our identity being stolen and our data being with these companies.

So I'm sure quite a lot of other large companies that are dealing with big data right now are starting to get their lawyers involved in overdrive to see if there's ways to protect against this. Why don't they get their cybersecurity guys in drive so it doesn't happen again? Oh, because much like the healthcare system, we don't do preventative.

That's true. Oh, Jason, you're so adorable. They'll just put this in the EULA. Yes, they'll just put it in the EULA. That's all. It'll just be in the EULA. Well, I'm surprised they're allowed to sue because in the EULA, it usually states that everything must go to arbitration, not to the court.

So this is interesting. Well, that's why I like this case. That's why I like this story. And that's why it's in our little notes here. Our little tiny notes, yes. What's also in our little tiny notes here is Trump's cybersecurity advisors resigned, citing his insufficient attention to threats.

And you could have just dropped to threats. But a quarter of the members of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council has walked off the job. And, you know, this is one of those cart before the horse type of things.

It's like, OK, well, how can you handle the cybersecurity threats if you actually just walk away and quit? Because there's nobody at home to fix the cybersecurity. Nobody's nobody's at home at the cyber. So, you know, it's one of those things where, like, do I respect you for leaving your post over moral objections?

Or would I respect you more if you stayed and got the damn job done in spite of insufficient attention from Orange 45? Yeah, this seems to be coming at—it's a variety of factors that made these people leave their post, not the least of which was just moral feelings about the way Trump has been handling many different things that are not all within the cyber realm.

His reactions to the Charlottesville attacks and so forth, you know, withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. Basically, I think they think that they have a president who's uninterested in these things. But also, you know, I think a lot of people thought when Trump was elected that, hey, this could possibly be OK as long as he puts good people in the important positions.

You know, the business of the government will roll on and everything will be fine. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. We're all fine here. How are you? And what we've seen, of course, is that so many posts have gone unfilled. I mean, just look at the State Department. The State Department has been hollowed out.

And are we at the point where nobody wants to work, wants to come work for this administration? Everybody took their toys and went home. Well, all we have to do is point out the fact that there are basically war-like threats being made on Twitter, as well as other places with North Korea.

And yet we do not, as of right now, still have a South Korean ambassador because we are not appointing people to anything. Yeah. Now, people can point to the fact that, you know, one of Trump's early executive orders was a cybersecurity executive order.

And it was it was a good one. You know, people generally said, you know, this is a good thing. This is a good way of handling. And so also pointing to the fact that perhaps this was a priority for the president. So for those for these folks to leave in the way they did, I guess, indicates that that it wasn't enough.

And they're not satisfied with how things are going there. If an order is signed in the White House and no one is there to implement it, does the order actually make a noise? Yeah. Again, back to the State Department, you know, I I've spoken to friends who who have family members there and they say many people they're just sort of there are people in the State Department who are sitting at their computers.

Not doing anything or sitting in the cafeteria, just, you know, frittering away their days because they have no bosses. They have no. Well, tell them to have no tell them all to, you know, download the latest grumpy old geeks and at least one hour of their day or two hours of their day every week will be will be filled with a beacon of light and hope.

I'll get right on that because there's nothing. Yeah, that'll improve their spirits for sure. Listening to to grumpiness. That's good. That's good. We'll go with that. I do like the fact that I think we just have a title, Jason, a beacon of light and hope. Yes, that's what we are. You know, because you think.

Think about as bad as things are in the State Department, we can always find something that's worse to make them feel better. Although this week they are the thing that's worse to make everybody feel better. So just tell them to start next episode. And all these career folks who, you know, we're losing the institutional knowledge.

It's it really is is bad across so many different agencies. You hear this story over and over again. And there's just no momentum for filling any of these empty positions. People don't want to step up and do it. Not under this administration. And and the the administration just doesn't seem to be it's not the thing that they're focusing their attention on.

So I boy, it's tough. No, I get it. All these places being hollowed out. And when we had Dr. David Teeter on the show a long time ago, we were talking about how, you know, this is it's slightly different. But the end result is the same. When the war on terror kicked in, they basically gutted the Russian department.

They used to have 10,000 analysts on staff. And when he went to D.C. to go talk to somebody, there was like one guy left that was on Russia. And now now we know why. But it's like when these guys leave to go do something else, that knowledge is lost. There's no they're not handing down, you know, the decades of, like you said, institutional wisdom that keeps this country going and keeps us safe.

So it's it's kind of scary. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, moving on. We we have a story here from the Daily Beast about how perhaps people in the dark web got unmasked. Of course, recently Alpha Bay went down and not long after that, the European authority said that they had also infiltrated Hansa, which is another online market.

And so people were wondering, how did they get the information on the people who were using these markets? Well, turns out that at some point in the time when the authorities were suspected of having control of these markets without anyone knowing that they had control of the markets, they had switched a fairly innocuous file where people would keep track of the various trades they were doing.

They'd switched it from being a plain old text file to being an Excel file. Gentlemen, what can you do with an Excel file? Damn near everything. Just about anything. Yeah. So this Excel file that became popular on these sites was phoning home.

It was it was phoning home outside of Tor. So it was exposing the user's actual IP address. And of course, with the with a real IP address, the cops can go track you down and have a much better chance of finding out who you are.

Derp. So, yeah. That's why they should always use private Internet access. Go to Grumpy Old Geeks dot com slash VPN. This is this is this is this is this is this is the self-promotional episode of security. Hey, man, baby's got to eat. Baby's got to eat.

So I put in our show notes. We will take affiliate fees from criminals. We're totally fine with that. Exactly. We're like we're like Switzerland. Just give us your money. Just give us the money. Yeah. But I was wondering if something like little snitch would protect you from something like this.

Yeah. This this particular case, they were targeting Windows machines because that's what you do. But seems to be like if you were running something like a little snitch that would have tagged this. Yeah. If you unless you set it to allow all traffic from an application, which is a dumb idea, unless it's a web browser, then you kind of got to or you can be clicking the allow button a lot.

But, yeah, for, you know, apps like Excel or any other app that should not be phoning home very often, it will tell you it's like, hey, Excel is trying to connect to this. Would you like to allow it or deny it? And then you go, wait, what's that? And then you go, oh, right. And then and as we talked about earlier in the in the show, little snitch for has the ability to look at where the where the network traffic is going to connect to on a map.

And if it says Langley, deny, deny, deny. Yeah, or it says Russia, deny, deny, deny, just about anywhere else. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know what the Windows equivalent of little snitches. Obviously, there must be one out there.

Do either of you guys know what's what's on that side of the world? Oh, God, it's been so long. I mean, there there were numerous programs back in the day. There's tons of them. I just it's been three years now since I've used a PC, so I couldn't tell you something offhand. But there's plenty. So I actually just bought a new PC that comes next week.

So I'll be doing some research on that for sure when it gets here. Thank you. Thank you, Woot, by the way. I got a two hundred and fifteen dollar laptop on Woot that used to retail for two grand. I'll take it. Wow. Wow. All right. I hope I certainly the probably the only downside is it probably comes preloaded with all sorts of malware.

Yeah. Well, that's that's the way it goes. It's HP. Of course, it does. The last the last HP laptop I got when I booted, it booted straight into a blue screen of death until I could uninstall. Was it Norton antivirus? I had to uninstall Norton.

And once I installed Norton, it would boot just fine. So you got to give a little to get a little. Yeah, that's right. It's like there's all those WordPress plugins that come pre hacked nowadays. It's like it save you the trouble. We had another interesting story from the hacker news dot com.

This is an interesting Facebook Messenger scam and it's cross platform. It's Windows, Mac OS and Linux and a little bit of social engineering here. The situation is you will get a message via Facebook Messenger and it will have the name of the person that is sending it to you.

So, for example, Jason, if I were sending you if if you got this message from me, it would look like it was coming from me and it would say Dave video and would have a link. And it would also have a little emoji of a surprised face and it would have a link. And when you but it could also have some of my photos along with it, it would take you to a link that had would look like a video player.

And in that video player would be a couple of photos, maybe one or more photos from my social media stuff. So it would look like there was a video populated with stuff from me. And of course, your curiosity is is peak now. Yes. But when you go to play the video, it says, oh, sorry, I can't play the video.

You need to update. Wait for it. Your copy of Flash Player. Oh, yes. There you go. And so then they gotcha. So loads up adware, it seems, with which they will inject your system with with adware.

So just one to keep an eye out for. If you get a request to look at video from your friends, it may not be your friends. Do not click through and certainly never, ever, ever install something that says that it's Flash Player unless you know 100 percent that you were on the Adobe site.

And even then. Even then, don't do it. And even then. Yeah. Don't do it. Just don't do it. Yeah. Just. Yeah. It's been end of life. So, you know, my philosophy is if you need if you're requiring me to to have Flash to view this content, I really don't need to see that content.

And you need to get with the real world, get with the modern world. Yeah. Because Flash has been end of life and it is just a dumpster fire of security. So I got a little follow up on my camera situation since my Chinese, my Chinese cameras have also been end of life. Um, I've got the Synology and I've been trying to find something that will work with the security center in my Synology because I'm tired of paying X amount of dollars per year per camera.

Right. So, Dave, a couple of shows ago, you talked to me about the Logi Circle or is it Logi or Logi? Uh, I would say Logi because it's Logitech, but. Okay. Whatever. Uh, so I got the Logi Circle 1, uh, tried it out. Fantastic little camera.

Uh, it's the image quality blows the doors off the nest and it's wireless and, um, it's basically got a battery in it so you can move it around. So what I did when I first got it was, uh, I had it set up in a cool spot in my kitchen so I could see, like, the garage door and the side door.

But I was doing laundry. So I just picked it up and took it downstairs and put it on top of the washing machine so I could tell when the washing machine was done. There's your smart home right there, bitches. Woo-hoo! Um, and then when it was done, I went and got my, got my laundry. It was great.

Next thing you need to know, you need a robot vacuum cleaner that can then carry the camera around to pre-programmed places in the house so that you don't have to go through the burden of having to carry the camera to the laundry room. Unfortunately, there are stairs involved, so there are no robot vacuum cleaners that can go up and down the stairs.

So. Okay. Uh, so, but the problem with the, the Logi is you still have to get a subscription. The nice thing about it, though, unlike the Nest, when you get a Nest cam, it's either live video only and you, you can log into your app and look at your camera, but there's no recording unless you pay for it.

50 bucks or like, yeah, like 50 bucks per camera per year. Actually, I think it's $100 for the first camera and then 50 bucks for each additional camera. It's something ridiculous. But the, uh, the Logi Circle gives you at least 24 hours of recording time on their cloud for free per camera.

You don't have to, so you can at least get 24 hours if something happens and you're not home and not watching it live. You can at least go grab that video off of the Logitech site, which is, which is awesome. That's great that they do that. But if you want anything more than that, you got to cough up the money. So.

Yeah. I went and searched all, because you can, there's thousands of cameras that work with the Synology. Almost all of them are industrial grade and cost like a thousand bucks each. I did find, there's one that, that I have used, uh, to keep an eye basically on my garbage cans. Uh, we had a raccoon problem.

Um, that is, uh, one on Amazon that gave you seven days of free sort of rolling, uh, cloud storage of the video. Um, now the thing about any of the cloud storage ones is I am totally fine with a camera that is pointing outside of my house onto my back deck where I keep my trash cans.

That's cool for cloud storage. I am not going to have a camera that's pointing inside my house at what my family's up to, comings and goings and things like that, that has free cloud storage. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Definitely. So that's why I'm, I've been trying to figure out what the best solution is.

And I found one camera that is, it's from Amcrest. It's an IP, uh, video camera. It's actually, uh, motorized. So it's got pan and tilt. It's not small. It's a pretty decent sized camera under a hundred bucks though. HD with a mic and a, uh, a speaker.

So I can actually talk to the room and I can move it and it's, it's under a hundred bucks. And the video quality again, blows the doors off the nest, especially the, um, the, you know, night vision. Cause it's got a really nice array of, uh, what is the, the LEDs or whatever the, the nighttime ones, uh, looks fantastic at night.

And you can move it around. You can set it with, uh, different modes like century mode where it will just sit there and pan back and forth continuously. Right. Um, because the downside is it's not very wide angle compared, especially compared to the circle. The circle is super wide angle.

Uh, this is not as wide angle, but for a hundred or 90 bucks, um, it's much cheaper and it's a one-time fee. But here's the caveat with the Synology. If anybody has one of these or is thinking of getting one, when you buy a Synology system, the security center only gives you two camera licenses.

So you can have as many cameras as you want on your Synology, but they will fist you for another 60 bucks per camera. It's a lifetime, it's a lifetime fee and you can transfer it from Synology to Synology. So if you get a new one or you sell your Synology, you can transfer those licenses for the camera.

So that's a good thing, I guess, but it still seems kind of bullshit to me that they're, they're charging you this fee when it costs them nothing. You've already paid for the Synology. The software works, obviously. This is just like one of those add-ons that is just greedy in my book, but it's still cheaper than, you know, paying year after year for another system.

And so I've got three cameras now that are the Amcrest. As it goes, I'll buy more because, you know, it's a lot of money to put out for your security cameras. And unless somebody wants to buy a Logi Circle or a Nest Cam, I've got two. Sell those right away. But I highly recommend this Amcrest camera.

Like I said, it's not small, but I've got three of them. One looking out the front door, one looking out the side, and one in the garage. And it's, they're really nice. And they come with all the mounting hardware, so you can hang them upside down or put them wherever they need to be. I'm loving these things, especially for the price.

And they're connecting via Wi-Fi to the base? Yeah, Wi-Fi, it's Wi-Fi, it's basically they're broadcasting IP, their IP cam. So you can, you can log into a web browser if you have the IP address. I can't do it from the outside because they're, you know, the way my system's set up.

You cannot get to the IP address from the outside world, but I can get to my Synology from the outside world. Oh, the other thing that sold me on the Amcrest was as soon as I got them set up, the first thing they make you do is change the admin password. You cannot have the stock password that it comes with. They force you to change the password.

That was my next question. Yeah, as soon as they did that, I was just like, I'm in love. Thank you. You had me at admin. Yeah, it seems like a solid choice all around. I'll have to check that out. I'm definitely happy with them. The link will be in the show notes to check them out.

And they're, they're 1080p. So really high res. I rolled mine back because I don't need 1080p for what I'm doing for them. But it's, you can totally change the resolution and they come with all sorts of monitoring stuff, but it's got a nice app.

So you can add all of the cameras to one app. So when you log into it, if you, if you aren't like, you know, behind 17 different routers like I am, and they're just onto your home cable system, you can log in from the outside, get to them, and add as many as you want in the app. And the app is good.

Highly recommended. I am impressed. All right. Good to know. It's good follow up. Oh, thank you very much, sir. Thank you. I will check it out. All right. Enough about security cameras. So I think that's it for this week, guys. Until next time. Stay safe out there.

Now, rather randomly, and this might relate to something we just talked about in security, we had mentioned the Wool Omnibus series by Hugh Howey a couple times recently, just because, I don't know, it just seems to come up and then all of a sudden we just have these connections and everything starts to connect and then you start to see it everywhere.

Really weird. Don't know how that happens. But, the 1% plans to ride out the end of the world in style in the real world, basically mimicking the Wool Omnibus series. There is a company, a development company, that is offering $3 million condos in Kansas built inside a decommissioned missile silo.

Exactly like they discussed in the book. The thing about this is this is not a new project. This project's been around for quite some time. This is one of those... Yes, I know, but we're now discussing it on the show. Because you always made fun of me when I would bring it up before. I wonder, well, I'm still making fun of it.

I'm not saying it's a good thing now. Oh, yeah. It is a little crazy. But yes, if you've read Wool, you can now live in one of these things if the world comes to an end. Or if the government just tells you it's coming to an end. Or, well, it depends on what you think about the books, and I don't want to spoil it.

Yeah, yeah. Just be prepared that there is no TP in the post-apocalyptic Wooliverse. Yes. Yes, that does become problematic. And we've been talking recently about things like the red stapler and other good knickknacks to have on a desk because one of our listeners asked about that a while ago.

Boy, have I found something interesting for you. It is a cube made from every collectible element on Earth. There are 118 elements known to science, and 62 of them, meaning the non-radioactive ones that won't kill you sitting on your desk, so that's a plus, have been compressed into a stylish paperweight that you can put on your desk.

It's called the Element Cube. It's a record-breaking alloy made from what the UK designer Cillian McMinn claims is every collectible element on Earth. How cool is that? It's very cool. It looks like a little aluminum cube, though. So why not just get an aluminum cube? It looks like you're gleaming the cube, but this one has all the elements that won't kill you in them.

Or it could just be an aluminum cube and they're lying. It could be. I think somebody would be able to test that, but who knows. Hunting unicorns! Hunting unicorns! We are catching up on our first show of the month, as we do on our Hunting Unicorns segment.

This is a segment where Jason and I and a friend of the show, Mike, have all picked 10 stocks. No, 5 stocks. It was 5 stocks up to $10,000 spread evenly across the spread. There you go. And we wanted to see how we would do.

So Jason and I picked solely tech stocks, and Mike, as a control pick, non-tech stocks. I am kicking ass and taking names. I am at almost 40% here. My stocks are doing great. I've made over $4,000 already. That's pretty impressive. I am at 31%, and I've made over $3,000 so far.

And poor Mike is, you know, he's keeping pace, but a little bit far behind. He's at 14%, so he's made about $1,400. Mike's doing pretty well. I mean, he's on pace with the market, which is pretty impressive. You know, I think all of us would be very happy if we would have made these bets in real life.

Yeah, no doubt. No doubt at all. This seems to be a statistical anomaly. I would like to try this again next year and see if we get anywhere near these numbers. Yeah, so what stocks do you have again? Because I want to bring people up to speed on this. Because I've got Tesla, Nvidia, Netflix, Intel, and Cisco.

I have Apple, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, PayPal, and Sony. And Apple is doing very well for me. But my real crazy performer is Electronic Arts, doing very, very well. Really? What's the percentage on that one? That one's up over 50% right now.

Wow. Yeah. I'm up 27% on Tesla. Nvidia's up 25%, which is good because when we started playing this, I actually went out and bought some Nvidia stock. So only a whopping three shares. But yeah, Netflix is up almost 19%.

Intel is 15%. And Cisco's dragging ass at 13%. But still, those are some good numbers. Yeah, doing pretty well. So we also had a side bet because I like to crap on Twitter all the time. And Jason bought some Twitter. And we had the bet that if he even made so much as a penny by the end of one year period, I would buy him a six-pack of beer.

Now, much to Jason's dismay, I also then went and bought some Twitter stock as well. So basically backing myself up. If I lose, I'll have made enough money to pay for the beer for Jason. Yeah, cheater. But it's looking like I'm still going to get that beer because I'm still up there.

It's $16.76 as of this recording. I just checked it, which sucks they were up at $16.90 something this morning. But I'll take $16.76 because I bought, I believe, at $16.23. So I'm still up about $0.50 a share. Well, Twitter's still got three more months to screw the pooch.

And I give them a lot of credit for their ability to do that. So we'll see. Yeah, four months actually. But we'll get there. We'll get there. I'm hopeful. Sort of. Not really. I expect them to implode any day now. It's a low bar. It's a real low bar I gave them.

I mean, come on. You basically just have to make a penny. Twitter just has to make you a penny. Feedback loop. Well, it's been two weeks since we've been live, and you guys have been mighty generous. Really do appreciate this. This is just our Patreon list of new Patreon supporters.

Sebastian, David, Mark, Kyle, Donovan, Marios, and Jordan, which I believe is your boss. Jordan is my boss. Yes, he actually likes this. And he's been a guest on the show. So I appreciate every single one of you. I love you all. I love you long time.

Yes, that's a nice little list. And we got a question from Jared Rice over there. First, he said, so I've been listening to old episodes the past time at work, and I've been listening to number 190. I saw Google self-driving car. I'll sift through my GoPro footage, but pretty sure I got it on video as well as going through a red light.

Don't think we ever got that. No, no, he said he was still looking for it. So we'll follow up on that with him. So I have two tech questions and two normal questions for y'all. I don't know if y'all have or did ride a motorcycle at some point, but I'm looking for a good headset to attach to my helmet, my half helmet, and was wondering if y'all had recommendations.

I used to have a motorcycle. I never had any headsets or any of that kind of gizmo geary stuff. So I don't know. I'll ask around to some of my motorcycle buddies who know, though. And my other tech question was, what waterproof phone case would you recommend?

I know LifeProof is always a go-to. Just curious if y'all had any other suggestions. No. The LifeProof one I had for a while, it sucked. Actually, it's funny. Chris Messina, who we talked about earlier on the show, had a LifeProof one, and there were some very funny pictures of him taking it snorkeling for the first time, and within three minutes, the case flooded and ruined his phone.

So LifeProof, maybe not so much. Yeah, I don't really have any. If anybody's listening that has a good waterproof phone case, hit us up. Let us know. And my regular question is, if I was to do my own podcast, what should I talk about?

And where could I possibly go to learn how to do podcasting? You're welcome, Jason. Thanks, as always, for the grumpiness and the good laughs with each episode. Well, since Jared is so nice to throw out a tip to the Pro Podcasting School, it is launching.

This comes out on Monday. It will be launching on Friday. So if you hear this and you want to get notified and some discount coupons, go to propodcasting.school and sign up for the newsletter. And as soon as it comes out, I'll send you an email with some discount coupons and launch day goodness.

But Friday is the day. It is finally here. Believe it or not. We also got two donations directly from PayPal. So thank you very much. Keith Mason and Sahi Zilberman. I think I got that right. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Yeah. And we have two five star ratings over at Facebook.

Keith Mason, same from PayPal, gave us a five star rating. And we got a five star rating and comment on Facebook from Cody. As a young 24 year old guy, well on the path to becoming an old geek, in my opinion, from the tiny east coast of Canada. Well, hey, I'm on the east coast of Canada as well right now.

I hope your internet is better than mine. I have to say you're fantastic to listen to. My only complaint is I'm sad there's not more to hear from you. Keep up the great work. Laughing and learning from you is one of the best parts of the week for me. Cheers, fellas. Thank you, Cody. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And the fact that you can't actually get our show in Canada is turning out to be a pretty surprising miracle because Brian and I can't keep a Skype conversation going for more than three minutes without getting dropped.

So, OK, we got some stuff from the website, from GOG.show, from Andy. I know you guys hated on Jay-Z and Tidal before, during and after launch. How do you feel about Jay-Z and Tidal now? Is it still a joke? Love the show, by the way. Would you care to take this one, Brian?

I go to Tidal for all my music listening needs. Says no one ever. Yeah, says no one ever. The only thing that you ever even hear about Tidal in the news anymore is they announce some sort of exclusive that's exclusive for about two days and then it's on every other service. Or announcing who's leaving the service that week.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm surprised they're still funded. But, you know, they've got Jay-Z money to burn, right? Yeah. Next up is from Mark. Hey guys, Mark in the UK here. I recently found the podcast and I'm loving it. It's full of really useful info, plus your various comments and takedowns make me chuckle.

I look forward to Monday mornings for the next show. In between new shows, I'll be catching up on your previous content. Keep up the good work. P.S. I've signed up to Patreon to support the show. Thank you very much. Woohoo! P.P.S. Brian, is it ironic that I needed to prove that I wasn't a robot via CAPTCHA to sign into my Patreon account? Are they using AI for that or just machine learning?

Ha ha. Yeah, I think it's just machine learning at Patreon. They're not advanced enough for AI. All right. Next one comes from Jared Rice. I think y'all may have covered this in a previous episode. Anyway, I thought you might like to rag on this next, since these two wonderful companies are joining together to try and compete with Amazon.

Not only will you possibly get the wrong items from Walmart, it'll also be delivered in a dirty car by someone who doesn't know how to navigate traffic, so it'll probably get there in who knows how many hours. And this is referring to the joining of Walmart and Lyft to bring you.

Right. These are like, you know, I think about the Walmart and Lyft coupling, and it's like the two people who couldn't get a date for prom just saying, ah, screw it, I guess I'll go with you. Yeah, pretty much. Well, I mean, I appreciate them using Lyft rather than asking their employees to drop things off on the way home.

Yeah, that's even better. That's true. At least somebody's getting paid for it this time. Exactly. Next up from Nick Rollins. Love the show. Usually listen on the web page player at work at 1.5 speeds. So you're one of those Jason people. Episode 223 does not like the faster player speeds.

Maybe a glitch on this last show. Always keep the shiny side up. We both tested that. Seemed to work for us. So maybe a reload there. He wrote back and said that it did work for him. It just took a little while. So I don't know if it was just some kind of CDN issue. Yeah. But yeah, worked fine for us. Next comes from Brian Seward.

Hey, guys, I thought you may be interested in this. Damn cheaper than the helicopters that patrol the beaches here. Wonder if they got started on Shark Tank. But this is a link to these new drones that are shark drones. And they're using AI to find the sharks in the water, which is pretty cool.

And still loving the show. Nothing around compares. That's right, baby. Nothing compares. Wish I could get more people to listen and have friends and coworkers to discuss it with. Yeah, us too. Trust us. Especially since you're down. We wish you could get more people. Yeah. Please.

Go out there. Do our work for us. I have a question for you. How many people do you know that listen to podcasts aside from content creators? I mean, regular people. I don't know a single other person that listens to podcasts. And I'm usually looked at strangely when I say I heard this or that on a podcast.

I just can't get people to even take the first step. He talks about some more stuff. But yeah, here's the deal. I know a ton of people that listen to podcasts that aren't podcast creators, mainly because I've taught them how to listen to a podcast. So, you know, want to teach a man to pod?

Then that's how you kind of got to do it. But once I got people hooked, they're hooked and they dive into it. But yeah, a lot of people, it's the barrier to entry that we've been struggling with over and over and over again. Wait, so you're saying that NPR campaign hashtag tripod didn't work? I wish it did.

It would save me some work, man. But yeah, basically not. I sent a message on Patreon for the stickers. Just checking if I'm in the queue. They're on their way. They went out for you last week to the land down under. All right. And next up is from Keith Mason.

Hello, gentlemen. I will fanboy long enough to tell you that you guys are great and I love the show. I was listening to some older episodes, number 196 specifically, when Bittner mentioned that he was in a Roy Rogers commercial in the 70s. No one could find the video at the time. And while it doesn't really matter one way or another, I'm curious to know if anybody ever found it.

Thanks for your time. And know that you make an informative, humorous, and overall quality product. Cheers. Well, thanks, Keith. He sent me a Facebook messenger thing to a video that I thought was going to be his Roy Rogers commercial. But instead, I just got malware. Yeah, no, and he wrote me back.

He does not have it. He couldn't find it. But he did send me a very humorous picture. And I think it's him with like either Joe Namath or one of those old football players. But it's very funny. And it will definitely be in the show notes. So go check out Bittner as a young child star. It's pretty, it's pretty humorous.

I gotta say. So let's move on over to iTunes here. And let's start with the good ones. Jimmy Pants 2045 gave us a one star on iTunes. We get it. You don't like Trump. Ever since Trump was elected, this has turned into a political show with a tech twist.

I called that. I knew we'd get a one star. So I went and I always like to go see when we get a one star, what their rating history is. Because if somebody has rated a show, you can see what else they've rated. Well, Jimmy Pants only has one other rating. Right. And that's for This Week in Tech.

Twit. With basically the same thing. So way too political. Ever since Trump was elected, this has turned into a political show with a tech twist. Sick of it. He actually added sick of it to the Twit review, but he left that off ours.

Okay. So. They must be much worse than us. Ah, yeah. Actually, no. I listen to Twit every week. Yeah, I know. And I'm not even close. All right. Well, who's the snowflake now, bitch? Bitch. All right. So we got a five star rating from Pocono Charlie.

I love that name. I thought I was a GOG. I thought I was a grumpy old geek. Then I heard this podcast. I am grumpy, old, over 50, and a geek. But these guys are the masters. Wow to the masters. Yeah. This next one comes from Kerry Osmo. Fills a gap. Being a grumpier, older, geekish ex-tech and admin, this is one podcast that allows me to smile at times.

Careful to listen to it in private, as smiling would ruin my image. From Oz. So yes, Kerry Osmo is coming to us from Australia. Woohoo. Thank you very much. And we have another five star from the United Kingdom, from CIHB. Most Excellent Podcasts, recently found this podcast, and I'm really enjoying Jason and Brian's approach.

The news and reviews are useful, and their comments make me chuckle. Timely piece on security cams, as I'm in the market for one. Thanks, guys. Well, I hope you just listened to that previous segment, because Jason nailed one for you. All right, next one comes from TFADuke. Crazy! You guys are crazy, and I love listening to you.

Keep up the great work. I have learned a lot. Thanks, Thomas. Well, thank you, Thomas. Much appreciated. And finally, one last five star, another one from the United Kingdom, from STR at T1C. Stratik. Stratik. Just started listening. Really great show that is not censored on opinions, which is refreshing to hear.

Thanks, guys. Keep up the show. Enjoying it a lot. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. And if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star in a snarky review.

Closing shout outs! Just big shout out to everybody in Canada. Been a fun trip. Not really looking forward to going back home, except for the nice internet connection. This is kind of ridiculous. Yeah, my shout out goes to NotCanadianInternet. Thanks for screwing up our morning, you Canadian bastards, maple-sucking sons of whores.

Yeah. It's you. And we lost the connection again. Oh, I was just waiting for you. Until next week, from an ongoing connection, I'm Brian Schroeder. Showmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

GOG.show is our home base where you can listen to old shows, leave feedback, ask us questions, get links to our awesome sponsors and stuff we like. If you'd like to become an official friend of the podcast, go to GOG.show slash support where you'll find all the ways you can support the show and keep us on the air. To learn more about all of the people who make this show possible, head over to GOG.show slash about where you can find our Twitter links and Instagrammees and all that other good stuff.

Show notes for all the links discussed on this episode can be found at GOG.show slash 225. Thank fucking Jesus. Whose car is it? Mine. It's beauty, isn't it? Why don't I leave my drink, Archie? Ah. Who is this?

Don't you know? How do you do, Mrs. Leach? I'm Harvey Manfred Jensen. I'm, uh, with the CIA. CIA? That's correct, ma'am. Look, you obviously don't know anything about intelligence work, lady. It's an XK Red 27 technique.

My father was in the Secret Service, Mr. Manfred Jensen, and I know perfectly well that you don't keep the general public informed when you are debriefing KGB defectors in a safe house. Oh, you don't, huh? Not unless you're congenitally insane or irretrievably stupid, no.

Don't call me stupid. Well, I'll not. 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.

you