256: You Can Call Me AI

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Mack Weldon, a premium men's essentials brand that believes in smart design and premium fabrics. For 20% off your first order, visit MackWeldon.com and enter promo code GOG at checkout. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Hello, Jason. You're here now. I am. I am in Los Angeles. And I swear to God, the amount of Priuses on the road has tripled since I left. And now throw a bunch of birds into the mix. Good times. So this is why I always used to stay at home when I lived in LA. And now I'll probably be doing the same again. All right. Well, you were busy driving across country and I was busy dealing with the healthcare industry. Listen up, Silicon Valley. You want to disrupt something.

You want to be useful. You want to stop with these stupid scooters and actually do something that matters. Disrupt the damn healthcare industry. Having fun with that? No. No, not at all. You know, I mean, I'm very happy and I'm grateful. My father is fine. He is not under any threat of death or anything. He's there. He's 100% there mentally, but he is in need of physical therapy and he's not mobile. And according to the healthcare industry, he is not doing well enough to stay in a facility and he's not doing poorly enough to stay in

a facility. Nice. And let me tell you, it is impossible to get any answers out of anyone in terms of what's covered, what isn't covered, what can happen next. This is all such a scam. Like health insurance is one thing when you're young and reasonably healthy and you're going to the doctor because, you know, you've got some sort of herpes or whatever, and you just go and they give you a salve and you leave and that's that. And, but when you get older, man, this is, you need healthcare

and stuff gets serious. And I'm only halfway kidding, but I would, I honestly, if you're a reasonably healthy person under 50, you are better off taking the premiums that you're paying every month and buying Amazon or Apple stock and say to hell with it with insurance and just save that money and build up that stock. Because what I've learned in the last two months is healthcare providers will do nothing for you later in life and you're going to end up paying for it all out of pocket anyways. So make the money and stop paying them. Well, I don't know about that. I mean,

half the reason I'm back here in LA is so I can afford to pay for health insurance again because the assholes who fired me took away my healthcare. So I, that was the thing. It's like I did the math on them. Like I can't afford to live where I was living and get healthcare at the same time. So surprise, surprise. But when I, when I broke my leg a couple of years ago and I broke it in the wrong state, my healthcare was in California and I broke it in Illinois and they would not pay for physical therapy in Illinois. So for the rest of my life, I'm going to walk funny because they screwed

me on that and I couldn't afford to do it myself. Thanks. Health insurance companies. Yep. So this is the, that's the world I've been living in for the past, uh, well, basically almost two months, but definitely the last week it's been crazy. And, and my wife, bless her Canadian heart, dropped this line on me yesterday because we continue to go back and forth about moving to Toronto, staying here, how long, whatever. And she basically just said, would you rather be warm and dead in Los Angeles or be alive and cold in Toronto? Yeah. Because you know, Canadians actually have

healthcare that takes care of their people. Yeah. It's a choice to make. Yeah, it is. Anyways, they don't have birds in Toronto. So not yet. So if they do, they will be regulated because Canadians are big on that. Uh, I was going to do some more ranting here, but I'm not going to, because this isn't a show about healthcare. Damn it. So, uh, but big thank you to everyone who sent us stories this week because, uh, Jason and I were both otherwise occupied, um,

and didn't have the time to put into our normal, uh, story gathering and reading process. So we will muddle through a show as best we could. And we really appreciate the help this week. Yeah. We'll be back in, back in the saddle next week for sure. Once I get settled in here and Brian's not dealing with as much healthcare stuff, but yeah, I, I've seen like zero. I didn't even read the news for the past week since we recorded this. I haven't opened any news period. So it's been kind of tough to get back in the saddle here. So yes, definitely. Thank you everyone who sent us

in some stories. How about a little follow-up? Well, uh, one of the main topics of stories that people were sending us was the, uh, great scooter debacle that's currently taking place up in San Francisco. And I got to say, once again, once again, the grumpy old geeks were way ahead of the mainstream media on this. You've been listening to be crap on these people and scream and yell at them for months now. So we knew Facebook wasn't listening to your goddamn phone microphone, and we knew bird was going to be a goddamn problem. And now there's three of them. Yes, there's three different companies because God knows, you know, we have to do that instead of,

you know, fixing something that's actually broken. Um, as scared as this first story is here from wired as shared scooters invade cities, must decide whose vehicles belong where. So yes, because you know, you can't just dump a bunch of, uh, vehicles into a city and just kind of rely on people to do the right thing because that doesn't happen. So they are getting parked everywhere and left everywhere. How are these things just not getting stolen or destroyed? Well, some of them are getting

some broken birds recently, uh, stolen. Well, they've got the GPS and a screwdriver can take care of that. That's true. Uh, but then why would you steal it? What are you going to do with it? Repaint it and ride it around? I guess so. Uh, JL on Patreon sent us a, an article over a tech crunch, electric scooter permits will be required in San Francisco. So San Francisco took quick action, having seen what happened here in Santa Monica. So it took a little longer here in Santa Monica, but they're basically, you know, as soon as they showed up, Hey, guess what? We're going to have to

require permits. There's going to have to be some legislation here. There's going to have to be some regulations here. So they're, they're on it. Um, I particularly liked the Ars Technica article title, uh, which basically rehashes the same thing. San Francisco to scooter startups. Your customers are terrible. That was a good article too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's the, it is the big problem. The big problem is these companies are kind of just, uh, putting the onus of responsibility on their users and the people that use their product. And as we know, people are horrible.

Brian, it's just a platform. It's just a platform. It is literally a platform with two wheels on it. That is true. So that's what they think they're getting away with. Now over on slate, they had an article, uh, also discussing this and it says we cannot overstate the hazards of scooters. Now I have a massive problem with this article because they do what I think is a false equivalency here. So this person gets into it, lays out all the same problems that everybody else is talking about and how San

Francisco is starting to handle it. But then they say, however, as many San Franciscans have pointed out, the presence of scooters is in many ways less of a nuisance and objectively less of a danger than the city's private automobiles. And basically one person tweeted out a bunch of pictures of a car parked horribly because one person in a car was an asshole does not make this equivalent. You have to get a license to drive. Cars are regulated. Police patrol and ticket for infractions. How the fuck does doing

whatever you want on a scooter versus someone breaking the law and getting a ticket in a car make the concept that scooters shouldn't be regulated? Okay. That is not the way this works. I have to agree with you. Yeah. And you know, you pay, you pay taxes on your car as well. Yes, you do. You pay a tax for on the gas, which goes to the city in the state. You pay licensing fees.

All of that stuff goes, there's a kickback in there to, you know, pay for the streets that you drive on and things like that. And then none of that is coming out of the, the bird money. No, it is not. Yeah. So it's total. That's total hack writing. That's just a joke. It's not the same thing. Oh, Brian gets to crap on slate for once. I know. It felt good. Good to hear. Now I found something over at Quartz and it talks about where all these scooters are coming from. These are

apparently Chinese scooters that you can buy for a couple hundred bucks in China, but they, they overprice them here in the States. Now, the interesting thing about these is the weight limits on them. Right. I don't know if they actually say that in the bird terms of service when you go try and rent one, but they're saying that the maximum weight on these things should be about 200 pounds and some of them, it goes up to 220. So I am not going to be getting on a bird anytime soon because I would

probably break it. And the point that they make is the riders must not exceed a maximum weight of 200 pounds. And the average weight of a U.S. man is about 196 pounds. Outside of the fact that I often see two people on one bird all the time. That too. Yep. So. Oh man. But you know, we're just a platform.

And if you don't follow our terms of service, it's not on us, is it? No, it's not. And it's, the interesting thing is the company that makes these, uh, is also a part of the same company that owns Segway, which is very interesting. It's a big scooter. We're dealing with big scooter here. Big scooter. Yeah. Nice. But I'm guessing, you know, they can't make these things work in China.

So they're just shipping them all over here and these guys are getting them in bulk at a discount and they're probably used to. I'd imagine so. Yeah. Yep. Um, and Austin is, is coming and cracking down on these guys too. Uh, Jeff Donaldson, friend of the show sent me this one after two dockless scooter companies launch in Austin city speeds up rule process and there are actually impounding them so far, so far they've impounded 55 scooters. So keep it going. Nice. Keep it going.

Right. Well, as you mentioned, there are a couple of different companies now, uh, bird was obviously at least the first I was aware of and the first that rolled out here in Santa Monica. Um, so they've done something quite clever. This is via J on from crooked, crooked Facebook, as I'm just going to start to refer to it all the time as, uh, it's a smart publicity move on bird's part. Put yourself out there as the company that cares and throw the other companies under the bus. Uh, the CEO of bird has released a save our sidewalks pledge that the company realizes that they're causing a problem

and they've set up three points of to be followed by. And cleverly enough, he says, I've signed it. How about you other scooter companies? So a little good PR for himself there. Yeah. So LimeBike, Ofo, Mobike, and Jump are the other ones that he's calling out. And so far, nobody has signed.

No, nobody has signed. Just Travis. So thanks, Travis. That's a, does absolutely nothing except gets your own brand out there and makes you look good. Yeah. We'll see if anybody else gives a shit. Probably not. Uh, we talked about Tim Cook and, uh, you know, how we, I was worried personally, whereas they were talking about, um, making their own chips for all of their machines. Apple is making all of their chips for all their own machines going forward.

And we talked about, you know, the inevitable merge of iOS and macOS. Now we don't want that. And Tim Cook has at least come out and said, yeah, yeah, we're probably not going to do that because that's not what the people want. I'm like, thank you. Thank you for at least coming out and saying that. So everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. MacOS will stick around.

You have a case study to look at. Windows 8. That's all you need to know. In the news. We've talked a bit about UBI before and, uh, Finland was running an experiment, which they have now decided to end, unfortunately. Uh, but as many have pointed out, it was never a true universal basic income experiment. We need to have one of those badly. We need to see how this is going to work because,

uh, yeah, basically contrary to universal basic income, which advocates say should apply to all citizens, regardless of background. Finland's trial is targeting people in long-term unemployment. So it was basically just, you know, social security really, or, or unemployment. Uh, that's all it was. Yeah. And it wasn't a huge amount of money either. It was only like, you know, 550 euros, I believe, or something, something close to that. Yeah. But yeah. And then they pulled it and they're just going to say, go, they're going to go back to trying different types of social security

type of experiments. But yeah, it wasn't a true UBI experiment. That's not enough. If it's not enough to live on, it's not universal basic income, you know? Well, and if it's not universal, everybody has to get it. Well, that was the point. It's in the name. They were getting ready to roll it out to people who were employed to see if it actually changed anything. And if they actually upped, you know, their education or use the money to do better training, but their funding got bold. So yeah, it basically wasted a bunch of money. Yep. Awesome. Good job. Yeah. Now this

is probably my favorite headline, uh, certainly of the week, maybe of all time. Shady ass Cambridge Analytica was reportedly developing a shady ass crypto coin. Now the funny thing is it was a, uh, crypto coin that was supposed to be out there to protect users data. So you could use the coins to share, you know, using the blockchain to help share your data where it was supposed to go and things like that, but it was pulled because the person who was running it actually left and then blew the

whistle on it. So it's interesting. Uh, but yeah, the, I think the, the title is better than the article for sure. Oh, definitely for sure. And, uh, another really interesting article over on the verge kind of following up with the whole Facebook kerfuffle that's been going on says AI is an excuse for Facebook to keep messing up. Now this is something you and I have kept saying, everybody does something wrong. They throw out the term AI is going to fix it and we never see anything get fixed.

And I pulled a quote from this article because I really liked this. That's what's so nice about AI as an excuse. Artificial intelligence is a broad umbrella term that can include automation of all varieties, machine learning, or even more specifically deep learning. It's not necessarily wrong to call Facebook's automatic takedown system AI, but you know that if you say artificial intelligence in front of a body of lawmakers, they'll start imagining alpha go, or maybe offensively Skynet and C3PO taking down

the terrorist beheading videos before anyone sees them. None of them are imagining Google search. Yeah. Well, that brings us back to our ongoing screaming and ranting a bit about what the definition of AI is, which we will get back to later again, because we can't seem to ever get away from this. Now something that, uh, impacts me and this is continuing on in the same sort of theme of what is going on with all of our data. YouTube is now being accused of collecting data on millions

of kids who use the site. So they are being accused of mining personal data. Um, over 20 advocacy and privacy groups have banded together to file the complaint with the FTC claiming that the website has been collecting data of users under the age of 13, a clear violation of us child protection laws.

So that's the copa. So basically, uh, not good. It just seems like if you have a kid, don't let them on YouTube. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be the case, but I mean, try stopping them. You know, my kid already knows how to use an iPad. Sure. He doesn't know how to launch YouTube. And anytime that we put on YouTube, it's because either my, either I or my wife is the one setting it up, but it's only a year or two away that he's going to figure this out. So exactly. And then, you know, a few years later, even if you have parental controls, he'll figure out how to hack

your parental controls or get around it because he's going to be smarter than you are. Exactly. And hopefully he's smart enough to stay away from Snapchat. This article came via Matt B on crooked Facebook. Uh, teens explained the world of Snapchat's addictive streaks where friendships live or die. Now I grabbed some quotes out of here because it just really made me sad.

Yeah. Katie Clark, a 13 year old on Cape Cod agreed that streaks are critical to keeping friendships alive. On Snapchat, streaks develop a level of friendship between people. The longer your snap streak is, the better friends you are. She explained. Um, no, no, no, not really. And it's, it's, it sucks that they, you know, this is what they're thinking actual friendship really is because that's not what it is. You know? Yeah. Jules Spector, a 16 year old from Brooklyn

added, I think in some weird way, it makes concrete a feeling of friendship. Like you can talk to someone every day, but a streak is physical evidence that you talk every day. No, it's not physical evidence. I'm sorry. You know what I find really sad and disturbing about this is Snapchat is gamifying friendship. Yeah, they absolutely are. That's the, but it's not real friendship. It's what these kids are just, they're, they're growing up with a false sense of what it means to actually have a friend. Right. Yeah. And yeah, I tell you what, uh, when

you hit like 18 and you go to jail for the first time or you get busted by the cops and see if the person on the other end of that streak is the one that comes and bills you out. That's a true friend. They take your phone away so you can't keep the streak going. Oh, that's true. That's true. You know, in, in the old days you used to get a phone call. So in the future, will you get, you know, I require my tweet or I require my snap, but you know, my legally

court appointed snap before I get, uh, thrown in the who's cow. Right. It could be, could be one of those things. Could be, uh, swirls are over on crooked Facebook, sent us a link about Apple and the home pod. Apple reportedly cuts production of home pod amid poor sales. Now granted Apple has definitely been struggling, uh, to get, to gain in that market. Uh, price price point doesn't hurt.

I mean, I mean, it doesn't help. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. It's considerably more expensive than the competitors, but, uh, they do make an interesting point in this article that Apple might actually just be scaling back production ahead of unveiling a new version of the device later this year. So it's not entirely all doom and gloom and they're definitely not giving up. Oh, they're not going to give up. Well, I, well, they did give up on that, uh, that boom box. I don't know if you remember the boom box. I had one of those. It was not a bad boom box actually, but, uh, uh, they, they have

known to kill products, but it would be way too soon to kill this one, especially in this market where it's talked to everything. And I, I don't know, maybe they're just pulling back for now and yeah, trying to rejigger it because it, it still doesn't do anything. They can fix a lot of this stuff in software on this one. It seems like it's a pretty good hardware platform. And from what I heard, the sound is pretty good. The sound is supposed to be phenomenal, but then again, we've trained an entire generation of people to listen to crap things on crappy earbuds and they

don't care. True that. True that. Now you put in an article here from La Dibble or Lad Bible is some people call it, but I'd prefer La Dibble. Uh, smartphones are destroying the planet even quicker than we thought. Now the, the planned obsolescence of smartphones and whenever Apple wants to give you a new one is, is a problem because it's to mine all the crap in a smartphone is, you know, very expensive and tedious because there's a lot of crazy stuff that goes into making a smartphone.

But what other people also aren't factoring in is every time you click on a link, go to a website, go to an app, that's a server you're hitting. And there's a lot of servers out there. Now a lot of servers and it's just going to keep going bigger and bigger and bigger. So it alone is going to be ramping up their carbon footprint over the next couple of years. And the article basically just says, you know, recycle your old phones. If you have them, somebody will give you money for them.

I'm actually going to get rid of, I've got 10 of them sitting in a box in the garage for nostalgia reasons. And I'm like, you know what? I don't really need them. Yeah. You really don't want to shuffle those back to Chicago when you move back. That's right. That's right. Although the pod thing was pretty nice. No weight restrictions. Yeah. So, uh, I found this one too, which is pretty cool and ties right into that. Apple unveils new iPhone recycling robot capable of dismantling 200 devices

per hour. And his name is Daisy. Oh yeah. There's a little, there's a little video in the article of it and it's pretty cool. You know, it just, it basically rips it apart, pulls the component parts out. And so you can get all the materials that you, that traditional recyclers can't and at a higher quality. And I'm just amazed that this thing hasn't existed yet. I know. So 200 iPhones an hour, they basically, I think 200 iPhones a minute are about what get, you know, bought. So maybe they,

maybe they're going to make a bunch of these robots. Maybe. Yeah. Speaking of robots, engineers at Nanyang Technological Institute in Singapore have programmed, uh, two state-of-the-art robotic arms to put together an Ikea chair. I could use one of these. I know you, you could use that. I don't understand how people can't put together Ikea furniture. I've been doing it since I was eight years old and I can do it with my eyes closed, but some people just can't figure out if you give

a good, you know? Yeah. I hate putting together Ikea stuff. It's something about that little wrench thing drives me crazy, but I would invest in one of these. I actually don't do Ikea. Well, I stopped doing Ikea for a while, but now that I have a kid, you, you buy Ikea stuff for your kid because there's no point in getting nicer furniture. That's true. I was going to say, man, I stopped buying Ikea in my thirties because, you know, I turned 35 and thought, oh, maybe I should

get some real furniture. Uh, but yeah, I guess if you're still using the Ikea, maybe go buy a $200,000 robot because you can't follow instructions. But it's pretty interesting. I mean, it's a fun little video. It's the, they sped it up so you can watch how it goes because it took them a long time to put it together. But all they, I mean, they randomly put the pieces down and the robots figured out how to put it together. It wasn't like pre-programmed. It's like had to figure out where the holes were

and slot it all in and all that stuff. It's pretty impressive piece of programming. I got to give it that even if they are using it to put together an Ikea chair. Yeah. Uh, James T over on crooked Facebook sent us a link from the verge. Oh, new privacy policy allows it to scan your Yahoo and AOL eat mail for targeted advertisers, which begs the question who still has an AOL email account.

I know a lot of people that do. It's sad. And, and Yahoo accounts. Oh, people. Now the interesting thing about this is when Gmail started, that was their big, you know, thing. It's like, oh, we're going to read your email and we're going to give you targeted advertising. We don't keep the, the content of it. We just scan it to figure out what you would like, and then we'll give you some ads. Uh, they stopped doing that back in 2017. Yeah. Uh, because they were going for more, of a corporate vibe so they could get the big corporate customers for Gmail. So they're like,

ah, they don't want us reading their emails to send them ads because they're corporate clients. So they just, they stopped it. Yeah. Uh, the free version still has some promoted messages, but it doesn't scan the email. The ads are targeted with other personal information that Google already has, which is everything else. Um, but it's interesting that Yahoo and AOL are going back to the, the way that Google already said, no, we're not going to do that. You know?

Yeah. That's funny. Uh, Matt Kaye on crooked Facebook sent us us bands, American companies from selling Chinese phone makers ZTE. The Chinese company is a top smartphone seller here in the U S obviously all your Androids. Uh, they pled guilty last year in federal court in Texas for conspiring to violate U S sanctions by illegally shipping U S goods and technology to Iran. Oh, nice. It paid $189 million in fines and penalties. It paid $890 million. Oh, $890 million with an

additional penalty of 300 million that could be imposed. Ooh. Ooh. Oopsies. So I like this little quote there. Um, we can't trust what the, we can't trust what they are telling us is truthful. The official said, and in international commerce, truth is pretty important.

Do you think is it though? Yeah. Oh boy. Uh, Amazon prime has released their numbers. We actually finally know how many people are on Amazon prime over a hundred million plus. That's quite a lot. That's a third of the, uh, almost a third of the United States. Yeah. So I thought that was really interesting that, uh, this article also gives us some other numbers as comparison, all of which I found interesting. HBO and Netflix both have more subscribers around the world at

142 million and 125 million respectively. Amazon prime, however, dwarfs many other subscription services, including Spotify, which only has 71 million users. Uh, Hulu, 17 million or 71 million for Spotify and Tinder has 3 million. There's only 3 million people on Tinder. Wow. That's crazy.

For all the news it gets, you'd think there'd be a lot more people. Oh, those, maybe they just mean people that are paying. Oh, that's free. And then there's the paid version of Tinder. That makes more sense. Okay. I was like, that does seem a little bit low. Yeah. And, uh, for some added context, note that there are more than 1 billion pay TV subscribers worldwide across a variety of cable providers, according to data from IHS market.

So, and that number is going down every day, every day. Yes, it is. Now, do you still have your movie pass? Nope. Nope. I let that one go. Remember when I, uh, when somebody stole my Amex and my, they redid my credit card. Well, that was paid for on, on my movie pass account was paid for on that credit card. So it got canceled when my credit card was stolen.

So gotcha. I, I gave up on movie pass cause I paid for it for three months and never saw a single movie. Right. Yeah. Well, that was kind of their business model was the hope that people would pay for it and never go see movies. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working out that way for them. Uh, movie passes finances show that it might be too good to be true. So the nine 95 per month that allows you to see one TD 2d movie per week or up to four per month in movie theaters. Uh, basically people are using it and they're losing money left, right and center. Oh, go figure. You have a service

that people use that costs money when they use it. Yes. Cause they have to pay the theater the full price. Right. So they are losing money every time somebody actually uses their service. Interesting business model. That one. Uh, now business insider reports that an external auditor has substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue, continue as a going concern. Uh, so the, yeah, movie pass does need to eventually solve the profitability problem. You think, uh, well,

remember when the CEO came out and said they were tracking all of us go, go, going to, and from the theater. And then they were going to upsell us with ads on different things around the theater, because what they really wanted was a cut of concessions when somebody that's using movie pass goes to the theater. Cause they were saying that movie pass brought them to the theater. So anything that they bought while they were at the theater, they should get a cut of in the movie theaters just said, suck it. We're never doing that because their margins are nothing already.

So they're like, we're not giving you no, you're not getting any money from us. Yeah. They don't even, they don't even want the movie pass people at the theater to begin with. Not really. No. So they need to solve their profitability problem. But, uh, for now they're doing what every other goddamn company we talk about on the show seems to be doing. They rely on outside investment for funding, right? They just raise more money. Yeah. Raise more money and don't need to make money. Don't need to solve the business, the obviously flawed business plan.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, their idea is like, Oh, once we have the users, then we can pivot. And that's the way it goes, but they might get the users, but they'll probably run out of money before they can pivot because they should have thought of this stuff a long time ago, like Navy before they started. Yes, maybe this episode of grumpy old geeks is brought to you by Mack Weldon, a premium men's essential brand that believes in smart design and premium fabrics.

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promo code GOG at checkout. That's right. For 20%, 20% off your first order, that's MackWeldon.com and enter promo code GOG at checkout. You're going to love this stuff. As everybody has been listening knows, I've been having a rough time of it recently. And because of that, my wife gave me my early birthday present. My birthday is not until May, but actually, honestly,

I think it just arrived and she didn't want to find somewhere to hide it for a month and a half. So I got an Apple Watch Series 3 that I'm wearing right now, Jason. Oh, finally. Yes, I haven't worn a watch in 15 years, so it's been a bit weird, but I've got to say I quite like it.

Did you get it with LTE or not? It does have LTE. I'm not sure if it's worth paying for that service moving forward. I'm trying it for a month. I have not made a phone call. I don't really go without my phone anyways. So I'm not sure that that's worth it. And Verizon wants to charge at least 10 bucks extra a month for that.

I will tell you that everybody that I know that has one has canceled their cell subscription with it. They don't use it at all. I just got the regular one because I wasn't going to pay for it. I didn't have the money to pay for another subscription. I'm like, I do carry my phone with me everywhere because I want to take pictures if I'm out.

Yeah. And so I'm glad you have it now, though. So now we can talk about Apple Watch stuff on the show. Yay! Yeah, you'll have to coach me up on things because so far I don't really find it incredibly useful, but it is fun. Actually, I do love the fitness aspect of it. The tracking, the fitness app, the activity app, all of those things are fantastic.

So because of that, I am finally thinking about getting rid of Argus, the fitness tracker that I have been using basically for five years now. All right. Which is nice. So I went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how I can leave Argus and maybe not leave my data everywhere because that's five years of my workout data.

Not that I really care. Not that it really matters, but it would be nice to be able to export it, right? So I can keep it myself because when you delete your account, they state your account and your data will be gone forever. There is no way to get it back. What they don't tell you is what they do with your data. If they delete your data, I'm guessing they probably don't.

I would like to find that out. You cannot find that out. And so at least exporting, I went to try to find out how to export my data and work out history. And they have a fact and they have instructions. Okay. I followed them exactly. Half the things that they say in terms of menu items do not exist as menu items. And I've tweeted them because, you know, Twitter is the only customer support left in the world. And I've gotten no response. So thanks a lot, Argus.

Go figure. Go figure. Well, they do have an email list form on their support center. Have you tried emailing them yet? No, that's next. But this is when I start to get so frustrated and annoyed that like, how much time and effort am I supposed to put into this? Is it really worth it? Do I really care? I know they're going to end up coming back and saying that they delete my data, but they probably won't delete my data.

And I don't really, I'm never going to do anything with the data if I get it from them anyways, because who cares? That's the past. Yeah. Just let it go. I love, I love also here under contact us. The first link is ask the community. You click on that and it says, sorry, the community that you're looking for has been retired and is no longer available. If you need help, please contact the company you're looking for directly.

So they were using get satisfaction, which I'm surprised is still around. Yes. Yes. And then email us is just a form powered by desk.com. So yes, good luck with that. I would say dump it. You're never going to look at it again.

I think so too. I'm just going to delete my account and that's that. Yeah. And that's why I waste the time. No, definitely. The one thing that you should get though is sleep watch. It's a great app that ties in with your phone and it will track your sleep at night. If you wear the watch it to bed, which I do. And so I get really good sleep tracking and it tracks over time. So you can get, you know, graphs and charts on, on what, what you did that night. And then it'll ask you the next day, like, how, how is your sleep? And if your sleep sucks, it, cause it'll tell you, it's like, Hey, it looked like you slept.

You slept really crappy last night. It'll give you a list of things to, to check, to see, you know, why you slept crappy. Mine is usually too much alcohol. Uh, sometimes it's excessive pain, uh, for different things. And, uh, but it, it tracks it over time and it gives you a really good graph. So you can like, see how, how you're doing. And so you can adjust things.

Like I got a new pillow the other night and I'm like, I'm not really sleeping that well with it. So I might have to ditch the pillow. And so you can, you know, see how that, see how that goes while you're asleep. Well, two things on that. Uh, first, I really generally don't have sleep issues. Um, the only thing that causes me to have issues is, is like intense, uh, stress, which I'm under right now. So that's a bit of a problem, but in general, I don't. So I wouldn't really need that.

Anyways, I, I, I'm a pretty good sleeper, but my major question on that is when the hell do you charge your phone? If you're wearing it while you sleep? Oh, when I go to the shower, like I go, I don't, that's enough time to charge it for the day. Most of it. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes, sometimes I'll do, uh, you know, just a little bit here or there, but yeah, for the most part, it, the, the quick charging works pretty quick.

So I keep the charge. I haven't tried that out yet. So I'll give it a, I mean, I haven't timed it to see what's going on. Yeah. The real trick is just to keep the charger in the bathroom. So if you're going to take, you know, a copious dump, take it off and charge it. Or if you're going to take a shower, just take it off and charge it for a few minutes. And those, those little bumps keep it going pretty much.

And, uh, yeah, it, mine generally never runs out. I'm at a 66% right now. And I charged it a little bit this morning when I was in the shower. The fact that seriously, the fast charging gets it like to 80% super quick. Awesome. Yeah. And I also don't have a lot. I don't have, I have almost zero notifications on, which you have to turn off or you'll go insane.

Uh, I'll give you some pro tips for, uh, next week and we'll, uh, we'll go through and give you some real good ways to use the Apple watch. Excellent. I'm looking forward to that. And speaking of Apple, I found this article on Lifehacker and I can't believe I didn't think of this myself.

We have been complaining about the stupid Apple TV remote since they rolled out the new version of the Apple TV remote. It is horrible. And I love this little, this little line here. Apple, the good design company bundles this Apple TV with a pitch black and horizontally symmetrical remote. That means that if you can't find the remote in the dark, you're likely to grab it by the wrong end, grasping the touchpad and clicking the wrong button. I do this all the damn time. So their fix, put a piece of tape on it.

Yeah. Um, this, this article's by, you know, Nick Douglas, who I can't fucking stand and I'm sorry, but I've had a piece of tape on mine for, oh, I don't know, since like a week after it came out. And I've, I've been saying that since it came out and we've covered it on the show and I've said it since it came out, but you never listened to me. So they have to wait for years and pointing at the wrong direction. But yes, mine, mine actually broke.

You can drop it. Surprisingly, if it hits right on the right way on the corner, that top is glass and it will shed, it will shatter. Great. So mine shattered. So I just put a piece of duct tape around it to hold it together. And I got a little hole in the bottom to charge it. And I know now because mine, I just put a piece of duct tape on it.

And ever since then, I'm like, oh, just put some tape on it. It works great. But apparently you have to wait for Nick fucking Douglas to write something in Crap Hacker. But that's okay. That's the way it works. No problem, man. A friend of the show, Tara Tiger Brown posted a link on her Facebook that I thought was really interesting and would have been probably for you back in the day, incredibly useful if it had existed. Nomad list.

It's pretty cool. It is pretty cool. It lists all the cities. It gives it ratings and different scores on cost, internet, fun, safety. And it connects to a site about remote jobs called Remote OK. So, you know, this is for the wandering nomad in you. If you want to just have laptop, we'll travel. Back in the day, this would have been cool as crap. Now I'm too old.

Yeah, this is really. Yeah, I'm not going anywhere now. I just I'm done. I'm done. I love how they also have a safety rating at the bottom. It's like nomad score, cost, internet, fun, safety. And so Cape Town, South Africa, you don't want to go there. No, it's very low on the internet and safety. So double whammy there.

I like how they have the weather, which is pretty cool. So you can see what it's like right now. You know, Armenia, surprisingly high on safety, medium on fun, lower on internet. This is pretty cool. I like this a lot. Yeah, I really like the I spent some time looking through the different ratings in the different cities.

What I didn't really look at was the remote job thing that I'm interested in. I wonder how many jobs that are actually out there that we could maybe even pick up ourselves. But my favorite part of the entire site, Jason, has to be the little hamburger menu because it's actually a hamburger. Oh, my God. They did use a hamburger. Nice.

Very nice. Yes, I have a new Insta scam of the week. I finally found a new one. Okay. The Orgone Chakra Healing Pendant, which I found on Instagram. They were selling it for $19.95 down from $44.99 plus $3.95 shipping.

Now, if you go over to Amazon, you can get it for $5.49 plus $4.50 shipping. What sites have you been looking at to get this targeted to you? I have no idea. I don't know what I accidentally clicked on to get some Chakra Healing Pendant action going.

Right. I seriously don't know. Oh, man. And Google Maps, I don't know what the hell they're doing over there. They're going to start using fast food restaurants as waypoints to tell you where to turn when you're going somewhere.

Because street signs are too damn hard. People can't read, apparently. So, yeah. Hang a right at the Taco Bell. Hang a left at the Pizza Hut. And after the Shakey's Pizza, your destination will be on the left. People just can't get any dumber, can they?

Media Candy. The Expanse is back. I've seen two episodes. Very enjoyable. Oh, it's good? Yeah. Okay. Good. I was worried after the season finale if it was going to be any good. That's not bad. I mean, I don't know exactly where they're going to go with it.

Two episodes in, there's no real plot line that I'm seeing. It's just a bunch of, you know, ships chasing each other around. But it's nice to have it back. I missed the show. Okay. Well, I'll definitely check it out. Yeah. And speaking of missing shows that are coming back, Westworld will premiere by the time that you hear this.

So, very much looking forward to that. Okay. Can't wait. Okay. And guess what I watched, which I can't believe I watched. And even more so, I can't believe I watched it. I can't believe I like it. Okay. What is it? Lost in Space. Oh, my goodness, Brian.

What is going on with you? I really need to relax and have some downtime and some wine downtime and wine time. And more wine. A little bit more wine. And more wine. And just a bit more wine at the end of every night because of all the stuff I'm dealing with right now.

And I've kind of just been looking for something to just put on. And I say, all right, to hell with it. I'll watch one. And I am now six episodes in. All right. I'm enjoying it far more than I thought I would. Molly Parker Posey is one fine ass combined chick. Okay. I love Molly Parker.

She's amazing. Parker Posey has aged quite a bit, but she's still Parker Posey. What are you going to say? Yeah. Seriously. And having said all of that, my only complaint on the show so far is that Parker Posey's character is so ridiculous. How nobody else on the show is questioning her or that she's evil or doesn't seem to realize that she's playing everybody.

It's starting to bump me because they make her so bad and everybody is so clueless about it. It's not even possible. Okay. I'll check it out. It's on my list. I definitely want to start watching. I just have had zero time. Yep. Before I left, though, I did watch Wild Wild Country on Netflix.

Have you seen that or the previews for it? I have not, but I've had at least six different people say I need to watch this. You know, I didn't know what it was. I heard some people talking about it. I watched the first episode, and then I didn't sleep till four in the morning and watched like almost all of it. It's pretty short. It's six episodes.

But it is this documentary about the – what's this guy's name? Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, also called – Hey, wait. Maybe this is why you were getting that Instagram ad. Oh, could be. Could be. And it had his assistant, Ma Anand Sheila.

She basically ran the operation, and she's not a nice person. Not a nice person at all. It's amazing. I don't want to say too much about it, but I highly recommend checking out the first episode because it's got a lot of – it's all historical footage. And interviews with the people that were there at this basically city that this cult built, Rajneesh Parham in Oregon way back in the 80s.

And it's amazing. It's amazing. Highly recommended. Okay. Very cool. I'll check it out. Yeah. One thing I'm going to check out – I just saw the ads this morning. Bosch Season 4 is available on Amazon Prime. I'm only saying it because every time that the new season comes out, I say, ooh, a new Bosch is out.

So Bosch Season 4 is out. I highly recommend that show. I've got to say now that you're back in LA, you will never be surprised by these things anymore because there are billboards for every Amazon or Netflix or every new show everywhere in LA. That's all we advertise here. So I've been seeing Bosch ads, billboards everywhere for the last month.

Oh, okay. Well, here's the other thing where I said at the beginning of the show, I'm staying inside. So I will not see the billboards. But I cannot wait for that one too. So I need some time off so I can go watch TV. Right. That ain't going to happen. Well, let's transition now to my old man alternative music segment.

I have a bunch of stories this week. Apparently, we're getting some new Cure music. Robert Smith did an interview about the upcoming Meltdown Festival and said that he's been, so excited about listening to new music that he started to want to write music again. So he started to do some demos.

Wow. I'm very excited about that. And I just want to make a quick note to the Slicing Up Eyeballs site, slicingupeyeballs.com, which is a good source for this kind of music. Your text is not so precious that I should not be able to copy and paste it. Oh, they're doing that crap? Yes. I hate that.

So it sucks for this article because anytime I want to use anything from them, I have to actually open it up. I can't just paste in the little bit I want to talk to. You're not so precious. Right-click, inspect element, it'll view source, and then you can just copy it from the source. Yeah, but sometimes there's then HTML tags in there.

Space it into bbEdit, remove HTML, boom, there's your copy. Yes. And speaking of the Cure, postpunk.com, another great site, has the first trip to America from the Cure. You can listen to their entire first USA concert. You can see photos of Robert Smith meeting Blondie back at CBGB's.

It's all pretty cool. Oh, nice. Yeah, some good old Cure stuff there. Daniel Asch and Kevin Haskins as erstwhile Lovin' Rockets and Bauhaus members and have reunited as Pop Tone with Kevin Haskins' daughter, which is a bit weird. It was a great show. I really enjoyed it.

And they are set to release an album called Part-Time Punks. Unfortunately, it's not new music. It's just re-recordings of the Tones on Tail, Lovin' Rockets, and Bauhaus stuff that they've been playing on the tour. And you can listen to the first re-recording of Go, probably Tones on Tail's biggest hit, over, again, at slicingupeyeballs.com.

But you won't be able to copy or paste any of the text. Nice. Yeah. And I listened to Bob Lefset's podcast. Oh! I have since deleted it after reviewing it on the show before because I got out of it what I needed to get out of it.

The only reason I listened to one episode of the podcast is Shirley Manson. Ooh! Nice. And I've never actually listened to a long-form interview with Shirley. I've heard short clips. I've read interviews with her. I love her to death, and I love her even more now.

You should go back and listen to this. She is phenomenal. She is funny. She is engaging. She is very opinionated, and she's pretty awesome, and she's so engaging that even having to hear Lefset didn't ruin it for me. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I'll go and check that out for sure. Do you remember her as the villain on that Terminator series that was out for a while?

I never actually watched the show, but I thought it was really interesting casting. I do know she was on it. Oh, she was great on it, and that was the one with Summer Glau, because I was thinking about her the other day. There was a Firefly commercial on, like, somebody's rerunning Firefly, and I'm like, I wonder what ever happened to Summer Glau, and then I was thinking about that.

And then I remembered Shirley Manson was the villain on that. She was great. She was totally great. She's pretty amazing. And I just thought this was really interesting. The Scully effect is real. Female X-Files fans are more likely to go into STEM. The Geena Davis Institute, one can only assume that Geena Davis has an institute.

Who knew? Surveyed more than 2,000 women in the U.S. above the age of 25, a significant portion of whom were viewers of the X-Files, 68%, and women who studied for or were in STEM careers, 49%. So there's not a direct correlation that they can point out, but it is an interesting pattern.

So people who were into the X-Files, women who were into the X-Files, ended up pursuing mathematical and engineering careers. See, I thought the Scully effect would be that women just still get paid half as much as their leading man. Well, there's that. Yeah. That hasn't changed at all. No.

And a while back when the whole hashtag MeToo movement was started, we talked a little bit about it. It's not really our purview, and we're not going to get too into it. But I did mention, interesting how we haven't heard anything from the music industry. Well, Wired has written an article about just that.

And it's worth a read. It's interesting. It's, I, there's, the article's title is Why the Music Industry Hasn't Had Its MeToo Movement. And there's no explanations or whys or anything in there at all. It's really just disheartening stories, stats about the horrible people that are in the music industry, the things that we know that they've done, and apathy both from the music industry and the fans.

So, yay. I ran across this this morning, and I loved it. It's the original version of Prince's Nothing Compares to You. It's really, really good. And, well? I listened to it. I still, it's all about the Sinead version.

I'm sure it is. She nails that song. I actually liked the Me First and the Gimme Gimme's version better than both of those. But the cool thing about the video is it's got a bunch of footage of them rehearsing back in 1984 when it was Prince and the Revolution, like in their warehouse space, which I thought was kind of fun to watch.

I liked it. Yeah. Very cool. So, I just took a road trip for four days across this great land of ours. I still want to know why people in Missouri, Kansas, and the middle of the country think that somebody is going to come take their guns away and invade them because nobody wants your miserable state.

Everywhere we went, people had gun shirts. We went to several gas stations that had flyers up for concealed carry classes and things like that. It was very strange because as we're driving across this place, there was nothing there. Anyway, nobody's coming for you, people.

Just calm down. Maybe get out a little bit more. I think that isolation is driving you a little loopy. So, I grabbed some stuff for the trip because I was traveling with a friend of the show, Bob Fogarty. And I got Stinker Let's Loose, which was a new audio book from Audible.

And it's a full cast production. It has Jon Hamm, Rhea Sehorne, Paul F. Tompkins, Andy Richter, and a bunch of other people. And this is hands... And it's about... It's kind of a takeoff on Smokey and the Bandit, Any Which Way But Loose, BJ and the Bear, and all those things from the 70s and 80s about road life and things like that.

Right. It is unbelievably filthy. It is hilarious. And we were crying within the first 20 minutes. I had to slow down to keep the car on the road. I was laughing so hard. It's about five or six hours long. It's about closer to five hours because at the end of it, there's an hour of a live performance that they did, which I thought was cheating and padding the time.

Right. But if you're looking for something that's just like fun comedy audio to listen to, you cannot go wrong listening to this. It is so damn funny. And I have to start looking up other stuff that this guy's made because he's a writer.

He's a comedy writer. His name's Mike Sachs. And he made up this whole thing. And it is phenomenal. I cannot recommend it enough. The trailer is on YouTube. It's linked in the show notes at GOG.show slash 256. Go check it out. It's funny as hell. Nice. Stuart over on Twitter sent us a great article.

Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles. Great. Yeah. What else does it eat, though? Well, further testing is required. Okay. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles.

This was spurred by discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic at a waste dump in Japan. Of course it had to be in Japan. Of course it did. Of course it did. Next came Godzilla. Gojira pee. That's what the enzyme is. It's in Gojira pee.

Yes. So the international team then tweaked that enzyme to see how it evolved. But tests show that they had inadvertently made the molecule even better and stronger at breaking down the plastics used in soft drink bottles. Great. So kind of cool, except, you know, we got to make sure it stops eating things. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

You don't want to pour this into the ocean to try and get rid of the Pacific garbage patch and then find out, oh, it just also eats fish. Right. Oh, man. So this next one, I don't remember if this made our show a year ago when his first version came out. It probably should have.

This is pretty good. This is a comedian named James Vetch. I'm not sure how he pronounces his name. He did a TED Talk on replying to email scams. And this, I guess, went viral a year ago. Yeah. And he's back with another round. And it is very damn funny. Okay. I remember the first one. I'll have to check out this one.

Yeah. It's very good. Yeah. So it's good stuff. I mean, if I had the time, I'd love to be doing these sorts of things. But I do not. Mm-hmm. And the last one I put in for us, Jason, just as a trip down memory lane when we used to have to do Select Your Country drop-down forms all the time. Swaziland King has renamed his country the Kingdom of Eswatini with the E lowercase and the S uppercase.

So, for all you programmers out there, time to update your Select Your Country drop-down boxes and also update any code that insists that country names start with a capital letter. Moron of the Week! This is a strong second place for my favorite headline of the week.

And I don't really think we need to discuss more than the headline. A cryptocurrency startup is investing cryptocurrency in a cryptocurrency fund that invests in other cryptocurrency startups. Yep. Oh, God. All right. So it's a company called Ripple.

It's associated with the digital currency XRP. Have you noticed that nobody really talks that much about digital currencies anymore? It was a huge thing, and now everybody's kind of went, yeah, that was a load of crap, except for these people. Yeah. Well, the nice thing about Ripple is we covered like a week or two ago. They're the company that gave all the money to DonorsChoose, that $25 million in one day.

Yeah, which is nice. Yeah. Yeah. We appreciate that, but it's investing $25 million in one of the leading venture capital funds that specializes in blockchain-related deals, blockchain capital. Fucking blockchain. So this is a startup funding a venture capital firm, as opposed to the other way around, and it's a venture capital firm that has previously funded it.

This is like a big old cryptocurrency circle jerk. It is. It is a crypto jerk, definitely. Yeah. Speaking of cryptocurrencies, there was a big Bitcoin heist in Iceland not too long ago. One of the people who were arrested, Sindri Thor Stefansson, they put him into a low-security prison, which he then walked out of and made his way to the airport, got on a flight, and left for Stockholm.

Nice. He drops the mic and he's like, I'm out. I'm out. The funny part about it is he was on the flight with Iceland's prime minister. It was very nice. I don't know. That's interesting. Yeah. These are the guys that stole 600 Bitcoin miners, mining computers, and got busted.

So I thought that was pretty funny. So here's a tip. If you get arrested in Iceland, you could probably just still catch your flight. Amazing. Okay. So there's this guy named Justin Peters over at Slate that is doing an interesting series of articles right now. It's called Watching YouTube.

So it's basically a deep dive series about YouTube itself. And this one just killed me. It's a fun read. All he's doing is basically watching YouTube and figuring out what the hell people are trying to do on YouTube. And this is, YouTube taught me how to shower.

Also, how to get out of bed, how to get dressed, and how to write this article. So he basically Googled everything that you do as a normal person throughout the day and tried to find a video that gave you instructions about it. Awesome. And I can't believe these people are out here, that people are doing this.

I just, unbelievable. And he says, as anyone who has ever met me knows, I love showers. But I'm a self-taught shower taker. I never really had the chance to formally study the discipline. The video I watched, How to Properly Take a Shower, broke it down into seven separate steps.

This was very helpful, as my normal shower routine consists of one single step, taking a shower. Insufficient! A proper shower, according to YouTube user Teaching Men's Fashion, involves deep cleaning, careful scrubbing, and exhorting the people watching at home to buy the skincare products for sale at the link in the video description.

I would love to take a shower by myself and just start talking to a sponge saying, trying to sell it some skincare products. Yeah. He says, I tried my best to follow the video's advice. I brought the shower to the appropriate temperature. I worked my way down my body from my head to my toes, and I moisturized after the shower ended.

I didn't have the fancy skin brushes the how-to expert was using, though, so I compromised by using a fingernail scrub brush on my back and shoulders. That was probably a mistake. Still, it was a good shower. That's awesome. Yeah, this is a pretty funny series. I mean, I really don't get YouTube.

I don't understand people making these videos, but then, you know, you do understand it because they're all trying to sell something. Exactly. Feedback loop! We have new Patreon subscribers, Shao W and Kevin S, and a little note about Kevin S.

Kevin was my neighbor in Chicago. He said, sorry, Kevin, that you didn't get to say goodbye to the pups, but it was a little crazy at the end there, and we just hadn't kind of skedaddled out the door. So check him out on Instagram at BamBamRotty if you want to see more. They're having a good time. Right, and I seem to remember somebody writing on one of our Facebook updates that they refuse to sign up for Instagram and want to know how your dogs are, so you might have to do double duty now.

They don't have to sign up. They can go to Instagram.com slash BamBamRotty and see it without signing up. Well, there you go. Over at PayPal, we got Steve R. who's giving us a recurring donation. Scott I. gave us a very generous donation. Thank you so much. Brian O. also gave us a donation, and he wrote in and said, Guys, I'm a geeky old IT security sales guy.

Yes, you can laugh now. After 22 years in the industry, I've learned a lot. Love your show. Have my 14-year-old hooked on it, and have recommended it to many people. Keep up the good work, and looking forward to you both operating out of California. We only have one issue between us, Brian. Go Giants. Brian O. in Northern California.

All right. Well, I don't mind the Giants, actually. I just can't stand Hunter Pence. He looks like an old-timey Matthew McConaughey with his gigantic googly eyeballs and his stupid socks pulled all the way up to his ball sack. All right, all right, all right. Let's play some ball. God. I hate that guy.

I have no idea who these people are, but go ahead. I know. Okay. Joseph L. also gave us a donation and wrote in, Hey, Brian, I hope things are perking up a bit. I don't know if you had mentioned them or are familiar with them, but if you have time and are not familiar with them, check out the band Eagles. It's a shit name, but good tunes, and it may be up your alley.

I will give it a go. So thank you so much for that. And he says, Sincerely, a grumpy Jew. Okay. And Eagles is spelled E-A-G-U-L-L-S, not Eagles like in Hotel California Eagles. All right. Swirls R. writes over on Crooked Facebook, Five-Star Review, my favorite podcast.

I love tech, and this podcast touches on many aspects of the industry. Things real enthusiasts can get behind like AI, Uber, bird scooters, and AI. These grumpy old geeks keep my attention during my long work commute and their witty banter, cynical reviews, and ability to flow between surface level and in-depth explanations of today's technology.

I've also followed their suggestions on purchases for new hardware and other products. All right. Give us that 25 cents. Keep up the great work, gents. Five stars all around. We shall keep it up. Thank you. Over at Twitter, Nerd Rewind says, Finally saw the awful hashtag bird scooters Brian has been complaining about.

They are as bad as described, if not worse. Yes, I agree. And this is, I think this is my favorite. We should have put this at the beginning of the show because it would have made the show so much more funny. James A. writes in, AI story headlines are funnier if you read them as containing the name Al instead of AI.

And you can call me Al. Oh, God. Well, I do like that song. That was a good song. Back in the day. Back in the day. Yes. Barrett writes us. He sends us a link to a do-it-yourself Google AI kit. And he says, I wonder if it can detect hot dogs or not hot dogs.

And WriteFilmSleepRepeat writes in, If you're not listening to GOG Podcast, then go subscribe. They're not shy in making their tech views clear, which is so damn refreshing. All right. Yes. And BearTheHairless wrote us. Great episode. Love the segment on Sweden. I agree, but want to add one thought. Movies are the one product that we buy that come with zero return policy.

If it sucks, tough shit. Any other product I can take back if it doesn't work or is just awful, fix that policy. Surely you can return a DVD, right? Not if you've already broken the seal. Really? I did not know that. If you take off that seal, you cannot return it. Yeah.

Well, it shows how much I bought DVDs, but it doesn't matter anymore now because everybody streams it, right? It's so old school. I still buy Blu-rays. I have a Blu-ray collection of my top 20 favorite movies, just in case. Just in case. Because they come and go on the streaming services.

And if at three in the morning I want to go watch a copy of The Crow and it's not on anything, I have it. Or hard-boiled, or like the old John Woo classics, those are hard to find. You're right. So Moz6502 writes in, just bought something that was $10.15, handed a 20 and a quarter.

The cashier gave me back the quarter, was confused why I gave it to him. I explained, slowly, eventually he gave me my change. People are so dumb. And Nicole sends us, this sounds like a genius idea. And she links to a part-estoteric's tweet.

Let's face it, you've never read through the full terms of service before clicking I agree, but what if someone did it for you and gave you the gist? My wired story on the people building the Wikipedia for terms of service. Yeah, it's interesting. Let's see what the lawyers think about it. Yeah, and who's going to, are they going to keep up with the changes to the TOS when they come out?

You know? Yeah. Tujumaster writes in, let's see, ice and wind versus traffic and earthquakes. Of course, I live in the land of lobbyists and terrible drivers, so I really shouldn't speak. I'm sorry, but you have not seen terrible drivers yet. Come to a Southern California parking lot and just drive around, go to a Target in Southern California.

No, no, no. You will see the worst in the world. You need to come to the Santa Monica Whole Foods parking lot. Yeah, that too. Yeah. That is the epicenter of horrible driving, and it's all Prius. I'm sorry, but I have to say the Target out here in the valley, it's the one that Britney Spears used to shop at. I'm telling you, they'll give you a run for your money.

Or the Trader Joe's down the street. Also bad. Okay. And Bear the Hairless also chimed in on this whole thing about Jason, of course, moving back to Chicago eventually and the betting pool on it. He says, if nothing else, he'll miss the pizza and beef sandwiches in under three months.

I never ate beef sandwiches, but the pizza I miss already. I'm just going to tell you, I miss it already. That's funny, because I actually have been desperately trying to get a beef sandwich, and there is none to be had in West LA. I might have to go to Chicago just to get one. Well, just go get a French dip at Philippe's. Philippe's is crap.

No, it's not. No, it's a good one. Oh, they're fantastic. All right. The Droidian writes in, what's your favorite routing protocol and why? Plus, plus this, quantum mechanics could solve cryptography's random number problem. Well, okay, Brian, would you like to take this? My favorite routing protocol is any one that actually works consistently.

Okay. I'll take any of them. I just want it to fucking work. Okay. So we've got some more comments here. This one comes in from, what the hell was this app? The Podbean? Podbean. That's right. Leonie Poloni writes in, I've been a longtime listener, and GOG is easily my fave podcast.

I wanted to say the show being longer than others is one of the things I love about it. I can listen to smaller sections each night. Hope Brian is feeling well and good on him for speaking about his mental health. The more men who speak out, the better. Good luck with the move, Jason. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you. I'm a goddamn hero. You know, I talked about it two years ago, and I didn't get crap about it.

But no, Brian's like, I'm sad. And everybody's like, oh, shit. Everybody, give Brian a hug. But no, guess what? I got nothing. It's probably because you call people dicks all the time. Well, if they weren't dicks, then I probably wouldn't have tried to kill myself. So there. Shit.

We'll see. Okay. All right. Over at GOG.show, we got a lot more feedback again. So thank you so much for everybody for writing us. Kate says, you guys want to pay for social media. How about mines for $5 a month? A cryptocurrency-based social media network. I clicked the article on Wired, which I subscribed to on Brian's recommendation a couple of months ago.

Thanks. And thought, this is the solution. And then I started reading and went, oh, no. Crypto. I can just hear you're ranting about this one. But I guess you have to choose which one you are more, anti-Facebook or anti-crypto. Thanks for your wonderful podcast, Kate. Well, thank you, Kate. Yeah. I will never back anything or pay for anything that is based on cryptocurrency.

It's today's version of Snake Oil Salesman. Let me pay with my credit card for a few bucks a month and reach critical mass. And I'm in. So basically, I'm sticking with Facebook. And hopefully, they'll let us pay. Maybe not. Maybe. I doubt. Dobby writes in, hey, guys. Sorry for the third message. I'll make it brief. And it's definitely a tech question.

For people like myself, minimal tech knowledge, can I do a basic test if I'm being hacked by checking resources in Task Manager's Performance tab? If someone's using my system for data mining or other devious practices, will it show my system being bogged down? And how do I check what data is coming in and out of my modem?

As I recall, it used to show the connection window in Windows. But maybe I made that up. There's no real easy way to do this without some pretty basic knowledge that you may or may not have. I would just use a reputable piece of software like Norton or something like that.

They're all pretty good. They will let you know. They know what they're doing. They do updates for the latest stuff that you probably won't know about. Let the professionals handle it. Jason and I both use a little snitch on our Macs to track who's trying to connect or whatever, but you kind of need to understand things at a deeper level to really understand what's going on with that.

Yeah. On my PC, I just, I, I, I give it up to Norton. I'm like, I'll let you guys deal with it. I do not want to learn it. I don't care anymore. And I'm like, if it slows down, then I'll just reinstall some shit. I give up. I give up my Macs on the other hand. Yeah. A little snitch. And I'm, I, I know what these things are doing every second of every day.

Yep. Exactly. Uh, Matt Z writes in, Hey guys, recent new listener and first time commentator. Excited for my Apple iTunes reviews, which was five stars. Of course. Thank you. Just wanted to stop by and say that I have been a long time Chrome user after leaving my previous favorite Firefox, which I chose at the time for security reasons.

I have tried IE, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. The Opera I tried a few years ago, wasn't too impressed with, has been drastically improved. I would like to give you a big thank you for recommending it. I just switched today and importing all my settings from Chrome and IE was a breeze. I especially like the built-in ad blocker, which is customizable as well as the VPN.

Thanks again, guys, for all that you do. I have picked up a lot of great knowledge already from the few podcasts I've listened to so far on my daily two-hour round trip commute. Keep up the good work. If people don't like the language, then maybe they shouldn't be subscribed to a podcast that has grumpy and old in the title. Guards, Matt Z. Yep. Agreed.

And you have followed my exact browser path as well. I went Firefox to Chrome to Opera. Yep. Opera's fantastic. Cannot recommend it enough. Old Man Zeus writes in, Hi, guys. Great show. Not sure if this question is late for your Q&A. Well, yes, it is. But we're going to answer it anyway.

Spotify. Why do companies use it to advertise to people like me that have little money and use the free service? Surely the subscribers are more of a qualified prospect. Respects. Old Man Zeus. Well, first off, when you subscribe, you're paying to not get the ads. I was going to say, that's the main point.

That's the only reason I give them money is so I don't get any damn ads. Exactly. So this is kind of it. And casting a wide net is kind of how advertising works. Yeah. And they have a lot of people that listen for free, and they just need some more money. They don't care if people buy or not. That's not their department.

If people buy, that's the advertiser's department. But yeah, that's how that works. And Charles C. writes in, where can checks be sent to support the show? The bank has bill pay where they send a monthly check, no fees, better than Patreon. You might consider inviting experts like Dave for topics you are not well-versed in, like DNA and drones, the Academy of Model Aeronautics, and then address and whatever phone number will help on the latter.

From Muncie, Indiana. Yep. We're happy to take money in almost any form from anyone, but are you seriously the senior citizen in front of me at the grocery store writing the check and holding up all the lines? I appreciate your desire to support the show, but we provided tons of ways to do so already, and sorry, we just can't take a check.

No. No. Thanks, though. I appreciate it. And, you know, we do have experts on the show sometimes, but nobody wants to hear from experts. They just want to hear some crap on things. Yeah. That seems to be our model. And, you know, it's more participatory if we get something wrong and people can scream at their radios at us and then tweet at us and make us feel dumb.

And, you know, that's the interaction. That's the push and the pull that makes this show fantastic. We fuck up a lot. That's what we do. That's right. Ivor writes in, the only real sensible use for Amazon's button, Amazon Fart App is the best reason to buy an Echo button.

I love it. I love it, too. I think my kid is going to really appreciate that in about a year. I since nobody's buying the the Amazon Echo buttons, I've been getting emails from Amazon saying that they're like twenty five bucks off. Yeah. You'll be getting them for free soon with an Echo.

Pretty much. Yeah. And Cameron writes in. I recently found your show on Overcast and I've been listening for a few months. You guys do a great job. I wanted to write in about the most recent episode that I listened to when Brian commented on his feelings lately and how he is seeking help because I'm sad, Jason. And I don't call people dicks. It takes a lot of courage to bring that up with other people.

Nonetheless, on a recording that is broadcast across the Internet, I respect you for that because there is a stigma around it. Most people think something is wrong with them. Thank you for your honesty. Well, I'm massively fucking depressed today, too. So I'm happy to be a goddamn hero and say it out loud. Fuck up, little camper. I really I mean, I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but apparently people are appreciating it.

So, well, if you took the if you took the outreach that came to me when I talked about my mental issues on the show, you would think that nobody cared. But apparently people like you a lot more than me. It's kind of like we did a B testing, Jason. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, you know, I get you know, I had a suicide attempt and people are like, well, try again.

And with Brian, they're like, oh, have a hug. Yeah. Fuck you guys. That's why I don't get the hugs, I guess. Jake writes in. Hey, guys, looking at reading the Andromedian Andromedian book series by Ian Douglas and was wondering what you think. Tried your search function, but didn't find it.

Thanks again. And good luck with the move, Jason. Haven't read it. Never heard of it. That's why it's not coming up in the search function. Neither of us have read it. I took a quick look at it. Looks interesting. I will throw that in the queue. Cool. Next up is Scott. Hey, Jason and Brian. Question about password managers. After someone apparently tried signing into one of my accounts from Russia, I decided to look into one password, but I abhor subscription models.

I'd rather pay once and be done. So there are any other password managers you could recommend. Totally get it if you can't consider. If you can't considering you are sponsored by one password. We're not really. We have a. No, they bought one ad. So. Yeah. They bought one ad. Is there a give them $50 and be done with it option that I missed?

Thanks, Scott. P.S. Keep up the long show format. One hour simply wouldn't be enough grump. All right. Well, we like one password. We also abhor subscription models, but the world has moved on from what we like and no one listens to us. And to be fair for services like that or for Norton or for things like that, they have to do a lot of work to keep stuff working.

They're rolling out new versions every year and have you pay for the updates anyways, unlike Adobe, which only moves shit around so you can't find it anymore in their menus and they consider that a major update. So it is what it is. Okay. And when we when they switched over to the subscription model, I was extraordinarily pissed off.

Yep. But the one thing that they do now is that they didn't do before. Like the the apps for the your mobile phones and stuff. They're free now. They I think they used to be paid. Yep. And it was about 60 bucks a year before $65 per version and they updated every year.

So you'd still be updating. I did the math on it and it's only costing a little bit more and you get more. More out of them and all of their cloud stuff actually works really well. So when it comes to one password, I was pissed off at first, but then I ran the numbers and then I stopped being pissed off and want to support them because they do a fantastic job.

They're always doing updates and you get the newest stuff as soon as it comes out and you don't have to do anything else. So, you know, it's not like Adobe, like Brian says, who I will not pay for. Yeah, but one password is worth the money. All of the other password managers I've tried are shit. So stick with one password.

I agree. Brian, the Giants fan writes in. I know you've talked about this before. What is the best OS to run the torrent browser on? If Linux, what is the best OS to run and a good site to learn how to run it? I haven't written code since basic and punch cards, but I would like to start learning and even teaching my young teenage boys about it.

Giant Giants, Brian or Brian. Oh, I don't think there is a best one. It's just whatever one you want to use. On the Mac, I run transmission and I forget what I got on the PC, but I just searched. I did a search for best torrent client and grabbed the one that worked, you know?

Yeah. So you don't really, nobody uses Linux for a desktop anymore. So not really. No. David writes in, I've noticed that in Australian downloading podcasts, a lot of the non-GOG podcasts I listen to have Australian specific advertising, yet my podcast login doesn't specify country.

Do you get Canadian slash American specific ads in your podcasts? I'm with PIA. Thanks, guys. So might download from an American server and see what happens. Well, I mean, it depends on the podcast and what advertising solution they're using. We don't have any geo-specific ads. We just have one read that stays in the episode at all times.

But many of the larger networks, they get served ads on demand when downloaded and they are geo-targeted. So yeah, it's based on your IP address. And the other thing about it is if the podcast is based in Australia, they're going to have Australian-based ads. Yep.

You know, most of our audience is in North America. So we get US and Canada ads for the most part. Those are the people that pay us because that's where the most of our downloads come from. So yeah, it does depend on the podcast and the ad solution. But most people don't have those on-the-fly ad solutions.

Those are usually big networks that have those because they're expensive to run. That's your Adam Carolla's, all that sort of stuff. They do it because anytime I'm in Toronto and I'm listening to Carolla's stuff, it's all based on Toronto's businesses. So there you go. Mad Mike writes in, you asked for ideas when arrived in my inbox today.

What's not to love about an article titled Thought Reading Machines and the Death of Love? Sounds like the title of a Philip K. Dick book. Throw in a guy with a Germanic sounding name in the first sentence talking about our Beatles frequent references to Facebook and cap it off with a Peter Gabriel connection. And this one has GOG written all over it. Jepson's name seems to ring a bell, but I can't remember if it's the good kind of bell or the bad kind.

So I look forward to hearing your comments. Yeah, I read through this article. This is another one of these companies that does what always pisses us off. They're raising money on what they could possibly, potentially, maybe, possibly do in the future, very far off in the future if things work out the way that they kind of hope they do, as opposed to what they can actually do now.

And this one sentence just killed me. The devices could diagnose cancers as well as cardiovascular or other diseases, but because the wavelength of near-infrared light is smaller than a micron, smaller than the smallest neuron, he believes that the resolution of the technology is fine enough to make thoughts visible, too.

What? If you believe that, fuck it. We can do that, too. Jason and I can also make things, make thoughts visible, so send us a few million dollars. Hey, Jepson, guess what I'm thinking right now. And Charles writes in, hey, guys, I listened to your Q&A episode and wanted to let you know that you got the definition of AI wrong.

As the Wikipedia article says in every technology textbook I've read says, AI is just computers doing something that traditionally required human intelligence. So while AI includes things like science fiction-level robots, it also includes automated tasks like driving. We very much have AI today, at least as defined by any authoritative source.

I think this is something that needs clarification on a later episode. Thanks for all the great work. Let's just run into the next comment, because this is similar. Catherine says, hey, geeks, I'm wondering if you could clarify your definition of AI from the previous episode. For my undergraduate studies, it sounds to me like you are referring to AGI, artificial general intelligence.

AI itself is a broad term that includes things like machine learning and decision trees. AGI is more likely the sci-fi stuff you referred to in your recent podcast. Am I misunderstanding something? Sincerely, KS. No, Catherine, you're not misunderstanding. The thing is, I've never heard of AGI before.

That's new to me. I think we're just old. I'm saying that basically up until about five years ago, AI was AI. It was the Turing test. It was how it was Skynet. Now, all of a sudden, it's a much more vague. It's bigger umbrella. And AGI is in the mix.

This never used to be. I'm surprised you haven't heard of AGI because that's been around for a while now. But that is just the specific term of, yeah, that is the computer that can think like a human. But yeah, the thing is, we grew up with AI having one definition. And now, you know, just because it's in Wikipedia and in the current textbooks doesn't mean that that's not the definition that we grew up with.

So we're going from, you know, 40 plus years of knowing what AI was based on our definition. So when you change the definitions, it screws us up. We're old. We don't read these textbooks. What is that?

Yeah. I mean, I think that's the only point that we've been making. And I'd like to point out to Charles that he does say authoritative source. Wikipedia is very general, very vague, and hardly authoritative. But he's talking about also his technology textbooks as well. So the thing is, it is a term that means nothing right now.

It honestly means nothing. Yes. Decision trees are not the same as machine learning, but they're grouped under the same umbrella. So right now, AI means it's a useless term, and that's why we like making fun of it. So, you know, you can call me Al is just as valid as you can call me AI.

Which is now our show title. Angela writes in, found your podcast after funding the other show, which shall not be named. I know what that one is. Thanks for keeping us updated on all things tech. My voice does not carry far, and I want to be sure my group can hear me. I'm looking for a portable public address system that I can use for nature tours.

We usually have about 40 people at these tours in open areas, and the walk is about a mile and a half, lasts about 90 minutes to two hours. So weight is a consideration as well as volume. Thanks, guys. Well, we don't do the show walking around with our little portable things talking to each other, and I don't think either Jason or I know the space at all.

Jason, you've never owned anything like this, right? Oh, you know what you can do, though? I mean, I'm just thinking about this. This is the first I've read this, and I'm thinking, oh, well, maybe just get a little Bluetooth speaker that you can put on your shoulder that'll last a couple hours, and you're talking to your phone when you need it to come out the speaker, and boom. There's your little GetOPA system. Yep, there is a solution, and I went ahead and Googled it because this is what we do for our listeners, and I did a little quick research.

There seems to be a pretty wide pricing difference between the various products out there. There are things for like $30, which is kind of like what Jason's talking about, and then there are $3,000 systems. My guess for you, the $30 option may not cut it, and the $3,000 option is probably overkill, but it sounds like you already know exactly what it is you want.

In terms of specific needs, so spend a little time looking at it. There's a lot of info out there. And just get a bullhorn, if it's really that. I mean, bullhorns still exist for a reason, you know? Yes, they do, actually. Yeah, and they're also waterproof because you're doing nature walks. And we're walking, we're walking, we're stopping, we're stopping, and look over here.

Yes, bullhorns work. Go for that. Look, there's a mushroom. Over on iTunes, Filter writes in, David Bittner for president. I don't know who those other two guys are, but they really should step aside and let Dave Bittner run the show. This is a five-star review over at iTunes. Yes, we got another five-star review from MitchSmith247.

It's a shame that Dave Bittner isn't here for this, because he's getting a love fest. He says, Greek geeks gone grumpier. Love the show. Jason and Brian, along with Bittner on security, get at tech topics in a fun and enjoyable way. Plus, I can relate to their grumpiness and frustration with the dumbing down of society.

I'd like to say just tech, but really, it's all of it. Bird scooters for everyone. And Big Bro Racing writes in, awesome conversation about Internet and security. I've been listening to the show for about six to eight months. I've gotten my 14-year-old hooked on it. Good father-son time by my dad. I appreciate you guys share similar views on privacy, social media, and what kids and adults should and could do on the Internet.

I've been in IT security for 22 years and love learning about topics I know about and don't know about. Keep up the great work and entertainment. Brian O, a lifelong and die-hard Giants fan. Wow, he's contacted us every way possible and he's gotten three plugs for the damn Giants.

Hey, man, that's how you do it. You give us money, you stroke our ego, and then, you know, you get your Giants plug. There you go. You do. There you go. 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 and snarky review.

And as always, please tell your friends. Closing shout-outs! I would like to give a big shout-out to Robert Fogarty, the man who does our voices behind our interstitials, and my best friend for over 20 years for being my wingman on this trip.

He flew out to Chicago to hang out with me and the dogs on a drive back to help me out. And see, that's what friendship is. So that's – my snap streak didn't matter into that whatsoever. So I would like to apologize for all the dog farts because they were many and massive.

Yes. I appreciate that, Mr. Fogarty. So thank you very much. Yes, and it's been an interesting week for people passing away, sadly. None of these are our fault. None of them. We did not discuss any of these people. But a quick shout-out to Harry Anderson from Night Court. He was amazing.

I can't believe he's passed away. 65, that's – Yeah, way too young. I don't know if you watch Billions, but last night – or on episode four of Billions, they actually went through the age scale of what – you know, 20 is a tragedy. 65 is far too young.

70 has had a good run. 85 has lived a good life. 90 is like, that's fantastic. You know, it was pretty funny. So – but yeah, that sucks. Harry Anderson was funny as hell. Yeah. We also lost Arlie Ermey, the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket, and in a bunch of other movies.

He was a great actor. Sad to see him gone. Yeah. Breaking news. Avicii, who I know Jason doesn't know, but he's a huge EDM guy. He's just – he's been found dead at 28 today. 28. Jesus. So who knows what happened there?

We don't know yet. And Barbara Bush passed away, and I didn't put in an article in the show notes about her passing away. I put in an article about her last night. She sipped bourbon before her death and was answering all of her phone calls. So she knew she was going. She was cool with it and had – went out with class.

Wow. It's amazing. Yeah. Pretty cool. And for everybody who's, you know, big Bittner fans, Dave will be back next week. He's at the RSA conference right now doing the meet and greet, pressing the flesh. Yep. He's all over the Cyber Wire's Twitter and Instagram feed.

There are pictures of Dave everywhere, so you can get your fill there. All right. Go get your Bittner fill. That's right. Until next time, I'm sad Brian Schulmeister. And I'm happy, Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG.

Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. Or if you'd like to give a one-time or a recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 256. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

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