266: Explain to Me Like I'm Five with Jordan Harbinger

Hello, all. Before we get in today's episode with guest host Jordan Harbinger, I wanted to let you know about a few things that have popped up and what's been going on. We recorded this episode last Saturday night. After the episode was recorded, I got really sick and really behind on work, so I missed the deadline for releasing this episode. Sorry about that.

But couple that with a holiday week here in the States, and it was a fuster cluck of bad timing all around. And oh yeah, we had a heat wave here in Los Angeles, which made my studio completely uninhabitable. It's only 95 in here today, so I'm putting a button on this one and getting it out to you. Jordan and I recorded the show for over four hours, and what you're about to hear is a very truncated version of that conversation.

Because I'm not going to lie, we both got very, very, very hammered. And by the end, we were just a couple of slurring idiots, so I don't think that's ever going to see the light of day. And you'll hear very shortly why we've had a few guest hosts on, and I hope you'll stick around for next week's show when Brian will be back by my side as well as Dave Bittner.

The gang is getting back together. It's been a rough couple of weeks all around, and we're looking forward to getting back into the regular publishing schedule, and we really do appreciate your patience with us. I would recommend listening to this one on a slightly higher speed than normal because it'll mitigate some of our obviously drunken antics.

We do slur a lot. So without further ado, here's our latest episode of Grumpy Old Geeks with guest host Jordan Harbinger. 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. Hey, I'm Jordan Harbinger. Who is that? Who's that guy? Yes. Jordan Harbinger. Okay. That didn't really answer the question. That just answered the question with the original premise from which the question itself arose. So sorry about that.

It's going to be a show like that, I think. I think so. I think so. So here's the deal, everybody. Unfortunately, if you're a listener for the show for more than a couple of weeks, you know that Brian has been absent a couple of times because his dad has been sick. And unfortunately, last week, his father passed away.

So Jordan is joining me this week to fill in while Brian takes care of the family duties. And we all feel for him. And we wish him a speedy return. And, yeah, it sucks. It really sucks. Yeah, there's not a lot you can do.

You know, as I get older, I've stopped saying, like, oh, you know, my thoughts and prayer. And I don't know why. It just seems so trite now, especially with all the other stuff going on in the world where people say with thoughts and prayers. But it's kind of also the only thing you can say.

Here's what you say. This is the way Penn Jillette said it best. You say, I'm sorry for your loss. That's it. That's it. Stop there. Because we've talked many times on the show about thoughts and prayers. And thoughts and prayers are meaningless. So we don't even go there. But, yeah, yeah. You know, we're very sorry for Brian's loss.

And we hope he's doing OK in this really tough time because it sucks. It really, really sucks. You know, Jason, it reminds me of a long time ago on the Jordan Harbinger show. You and I had a question about what to do when someone passes away, how to help a friend.

And the best advice we got came from a member of the audience. And what he or she had said was the key is to remember that person in like two weeks or two months. Because right when someone passes away, everyone's all around and the person kind of just wants to be alone and they have a million things to do.

And then two weeks or two months later, three, four, six weeks, whatever it is later, no one's really offering to help. Everyone kind of expects everything's back to normal. But they still have a crap load of things to do and worry about. And then it's also kind of sunk in for them, right?

Because their grandpa, grandma, father, mother, cousin, brother, whatever is still gone. And it's like, oh, the rush of the funeral. I don't mean the adrenaline rush. I just mean that the hustle of the funeral and all that stuff is over. And now it's like day to day living without that person.

Except now you're still kind of like, oh, yeah, I'm still getting bills for them. Oh, I still have to close their credit card. Like they're still dealing with that then. So the best time for emotional support. Sure. Right away. You can say your piece. The best time is about and I want to say it was four to six weeks in.

Yeah, it was four to six weeks. That's when you reach out and say, hey, I know this is kind of still fresh. Is there anything I can take off your plate that might be helpful? You're not going to make mortgage arrangements for their deceased grandfather. But what they might say is, you know, truthfully, my mom needs her lawn mode.

And I usually go over there, but I'm in Omaha. So the lawn's three feet long. And you can say, sure. Yeah, I'll be there on Sunday. Tell your mom I'm coming over. And that kind of thing helps a lot more than the text that you sent six weeks prior being like, hey, I heard what happened.

Sorry. Fortunately, Brian doesn't have a lawn and I don't have a lawnmower. So I'm not going to go do that for him. You're off the hook on that. I am. But I will go. I'll take him for a drink in a month. There you go. I think that's what we do. Actually, in about a month and a half or maybe two months, all of us are going to be at Fireside Conference doing live shows, which is going to be a whole ton of fun.

Yeah. And if you want to check it out and come hang out with us, Jordan's going to be doing his show. We're going to be doing Grumpy Old Geeks. If you go to FiresideConf, C-O-N-F dot com slash Jordan, you can get a discount and push to the head of the line to get through. It's pretty cool. It's usually twenty five hundred bucks, but and that's Canadian.

So that's like, you know, twelve dollars American burn. If you use Jordan's code, it's two thousand dollars Canadian. And it is basically a three day off the grid conference where we just hang out in the woods, get drunk and talk business. Is that what we do? Podcasting. Probably. Yeah, that's what we do.

That's exactly what we do. Sounds right. That sounds right. Yeah. So this is going to be literally the first live Grumpy Old Geek show, which I have to tell you, I'm a little nervous about because most of what we talk about on this show is making fun of the people that are going to be at the conference. Wait, what? Yeah.

Yeah. No, we take the piss out of everybody. So and these guys know it and they want us to be there. So hopefully like we get some shields like if they start throwing tomatoes or bottles at us, you know, that should be fun. I've done I've done my share of bottle throwing. I when I went to see Red Hot Chili Peppers in Serbia like 10 years ago, it was billed as a conference, but it was really sorry, a concert, but it was really a festival.

And so they played like three songs because it was a festival. But the problem is everyone trekked out from Belgrade and other cities, Novi Sad in Serbia to go to this nowhere place. And it was raining and cold and muddy and gross and disorganized. And they came out, played three songs and then bounce.

And everyone was like, F you. And then they were in Serbians are like, dude, we've been drinking for three hours. It was hot. Now it's cold. Now it's raining. Get your Serbians. They've been drinking for three years. Right. And it's like, get your ass on stage. I was in traffic for five hours. This is the only time you're in my country.

You're going to play three songs like I will skin you. And that was me saying that the Serbians were much, much worse. But I remember that was a time where I learned a really interesting technique. If you are freezing and someone has a car and like there's too many of you to fit in the car.

What we did is, and of course this involved other things like coats and tarps, but we held our extra coats or extra tarps and garbage bags above our heads. And someone, what they did is they pulled their car up where we were in front of the car and they turned their brights on and it got so warm underneath the brights with the garbage bags above our head that even though we were kind of wet, we were super warm.

Isn't that smart? Talk about a life hack. I'm like, who thought of this and what, what, what I, I was just remembering when I was under that tarp, I thought this is a really good idea. Whoever thought of this, right? Whoever thought of this is either like some kind of Serbian Navy seal or has been to a lot of concerts.

The Serbian Jason Bourne. Yeah. I'm like, who's like, Hey, the lights must be warm enough to keep everybody. Cause I was like, all right, back up. It's a little warm under here. And it was freaking freezing. I had no idea. And of course, some of that's the grill from the engine and dah, dah, dah, dah. But the lights were warm.

I mean, it was warm. Yeah. I was thinking you guys were going to huddle on the hood of the car and, you know. Nope. And that's, that to me was interesting because I never expected car lights to get that hot. Now, of course, they have LED bulbs. So you're just going to freeze to death, but that's okay. You're going to see your own death coming because it's extremely bright.

You can't see. And even with your eyes closed. We weren't facing. Why does it look like I'm looking at the sun? We weren't facing the car. We were facing the other way. So my back was warm. Yeah. Don't look at the lights. If I have to explain that to you, maybe you shouldn't survive the concert rain situation. There are four lights.

But yeah, Fireside will be awesome. I know they're talking about like cryptocurrency, fintech, early venture growth, the business of cannabis. And those are the edgy ones. Yeah. Those are the ones we make fun of every single week. So it's going to be a smorgasbord of fun for us. But like, you're right. It's 4am campfires, swinging around, farting around in the lake, swinging around, mountain biking, hiking, drinking, eating good food.

It should be good. I'm not getting paid to go, but I'm still going. That should say something. I'm not getting paid to go either. I'm just, it's a vacation. It's like, hey, they're like, do you want to come to Canada for three days and have a podcast? I'm like, well, sure, because otherwise I'm going to be sitting in my garage having a podcast.

So at least I get to go to Canada. And here's the best part. They asked me on the form, it's like, when you're coming, it's like, what's your favorite snack? And I'm like, okay, I'm going to own this one. I want some ketchup flavored Lay's chips on my cot when I get there.

I bet they're going to do that. That's genius. Yeah. I wonder what I put. I don't even know what I put in there. I bet Jen filled it out and put her favorite snack and I'm going to end up with like fricking celery. I'm going to end up with some weird ass like Japanese. Oh, this is the seaweed flavored crackers.

And I'm going to be like, mm, thanks. I definitely didn't want Fritos or Cheetos or something else that ends in toes that is way more delicious than Japanese flavored seaweed. Well, it is a camp out in the middle of nowhere. So you might actually get some toes, might get some toes.

I can get you a toe by 3 p.m. Today with nail polish. So we got a little follow up this week. Facebook, they used to have the at Facebook.com email service, which we mentioned on the last show. Turns out, and I knew it was shut down, but we didn't really know when. Turns out it was shut down in 2014.

So it has been dead for four years. So I'm really up to speed on that one. Classic Jason. We also talk about how Facebook is not listening to your fucking phone to send you an ad. But what they're going to do now, they just filed for a patent that uses your phone's mic to monitor your TV habits.

And we've heard about this from different smart TV vendors who are doing it without telling people. And what they do is they listen to what's going on in the background. They take the audiograms and they compare it to their database of movies and TV shows. And then they know what you're listening to and they build your profile.

Well, Facebook has tried to patent that. I wish them luck because we obviously always have prior art on this. You know, I think Samsung was the one that got busted before. Do you ever hear about that story, Jordan? No. What are we talking about right now? So your smart TV, I think it was a Samsung smart TV, they got busted for turning on the microphone and listening to what you were watching.

And they would send that back to the mothership and then they would build your ad profile based on that. Genius. I don't have a Samsung smart TV. I have an LG TV and I don't use the smart functionality at all. But that is a great idea. You don't think you're using the smart functionality.

They use it. They use it all the time. I never use it. Yeah. They use it constantly. But what if it's not connected to the internet that it can't send anything back? Then it can't send anything back. But why would your smart TV not be connected to the internet? Because I don't use the smart functionality. I don't use that.

I use the Xbox only. Well, look at you. Look at you with your OPSEC. Yep. And all that goodness. Yeah, because an Xbox equals OPSEC. And meanwhile, I'm like, Alexa, turn on the living room lights. And it's like, cool, sending all of your living room sacks to your neighbor via text. And the thing about the Xbox, it's just drives me mad.

You cannot play a DVD or even a movie that you put on a thumb drive and plug into it without an internet connection because it has to call home. Wait, you can't? Nope, you cannot. Oh, that stinks. Because Microsoft calls home to find out what you're playing. And they have to say if it's okay for you to play it or not.

Wait, but even media? Yep. Well, here's a workaround. Allow me. Set up a Plex server on your computer and download Plex for Xbox, which is what I did. And it'll play anything. We're going to get to Plex later on in the show.

But yes, that is definitely a workaround. But for DVDs and Blu-ray, I still can't get my Xbox to play a Blu-ray. That's such BS, dude. That's like such a basic functionality of a Blu-ray drive in anything. Yeah. That's offensive. Go try.

You have to download the Blu-ray player app, which has like one star ratings. And it's their own app. They built it. And you have to get it. And it doesn't work. I cannot play a Blu-ray on my Xbox. That's offensive, dude. It's like the drive itself should know how to use.

I mean, that's like the whole point of the Blu-ray drive. Read discs. Yeah. They want to gather the data and figure out what you're playing so they can market you later. It's just such crap. So moving on, we got a little bit of Airbnb news. I know you're an Airbnb customer. Oh, yeah.

Big time, dude. Yeah. So Airbnb has lost the court battle in Santa Monica. And what this is, this comes back to something that we talked about this last week, where Barcelona went toe-to-toe with Airbnb and said, hey, no, you are not going to come into our city and basically ruin our rental economy.

And what Airbnb did was say, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to set up a system where, you know, the city licenses, like they grant business licenses to the people who have rental properties. And then when they go to Airbnb, they put in their rental license and Airbnb checks to make sure the rental license is valid.

Then they can list their property on Airbnb. This is something that two and a half years ago, Brian and I specked out on the show and said, this is what they need to do. And it turns out now they're doing it and they're going to have to do it in Santa Monica because Santa Monica said, no, we need these people who they have to have a business license if they're going to have a rental property and that it's finally coming to pass.

This is amazing news. And it's great news because what Airbnb does is basically destroys the local rental economy and the city doesn't get any taxes from it and everybody keeps all the money. So this gives the city the fair share for what's going on.

Can I be like a dumb capitalist here for a second? Be my guest. Can you explain to me like I'm five, which is the usual for your situation? Sounds like a normal day at work. Typical day at work for Jason DeFillippo. Why do we want it to be harder? I like I get the people say like, yeah, it's ruining the community.

OK, but that's sort of nebulous to me. And it smacks of hipsterism because I live in near San Francisco and they complain about everything. So I'm always immediately skeptical when someone says they're ruining the culture of the area. And I'm like, can you this building was freaking vacant?

You're like, that's not the case with Airbnb. But, you know, people will complain about a new store in the mission. Meanwhile, the building has been condemned for eight years and they're going to rehabilitate the whole thing and put in like an H&M. And they're like, no, we don't want this in the neighborhood. We'd rather have homeless people peeing in it.

Your apples and oranges on that one. Apples and oranges. But tell me what's going on. Like, why is this important? What's happening that's so negative? They're not playing by the rules of the city. And what it's doing is it's screwing the locals because people who live there can't get a place to live because all of these people are coming in and buying up all these multi-unit properties and just putting them on Airbnb so people can't get a goddamn apartment.

Oh, yeah. I never thought of that. That's ridiculous. I can't believe I didn't think of that. You're right. Because I have friends that have like eight apartments in San Francisco where there's a massive housing shortage. Yes. And their family owns like two of the buildings. And so they rent 15 units and two buildings and they rent them out.

We used to call those people slumlords. But now we call them Airbnb entrepreneurs. Well, the place is nice. The places are I've stayed there. It doesn't matter if it's nice. They're still doing the same thing. But you're right. They're not playing by the rules. They should have people living there. Not at not three days a week occupancy.

Right. Because they get a premium for the Airbnb rental. And it's not like a regular rental property. Right. Exactly. That's the entire point. And the problem is you're like, oh, the Wi-Fi is kind of crappy. It's fine. But if someone lived there, they wouldn't stand for that. So what he does, and I won't name my friend. He's a great guy.

Not according to you because he does this. But what he does is he has four or five units. So he puts a router in the one that's kind of between all of them. And they all share that Wi-Fi. Otherwise, he'd have to pay cable and Wi-Fi hookup for each place. Internet. Well, no, the renters would pay for that. He wouldn't even have to pay for that.

The people who live there would pay for that. Well, that's what I'm saying. Since he doesn't have people living there, he's got the Airbnb. So he's saving a bunch of money. And I'll tell you, the city has come down hard on him. And at first I was. They should. And what you're saying is that's a good thing.

And I now get that. Before, I was like, God, screw it because capitalism. But I get it now. It would suck to live in a building where you and one other person are there and everyone else is like a tourist having an orgy. And you're like, what the hell? And it's somebody renting it out on Airbnb. That would be annoying.

I want to talk a little bit. I have my main Google account got hacked this week. And I feel I am embarrassed about this. Violated. Well, I'm embarrassed about this because, you know, we talk about security on the show. We talk about good opsec. And we talk about 1Password and all this other stuff. And this is my main account.

And I went and I looked at the password on it in 1Password. And it was an old password that I know, I know was hacked and was up on haveyoubeenpwned.com. I know that password was up there. And somebody finally found me. Is that a real site? Because I get warnings from 1Password that are like, this password has been hacked.

And I'm like, there's no way. I just made this login one second ago. So I feel like that's error ridden. Now, Have I Been Pwned, they basically, like, search all of the different databases. They buy the databases that have been breached and put them in and hash them and send you notifications based on if your email address shows up in any of these breaches.

It is a fine site. I highly recommend everybody go to haveibeenpwned.com and sign up for their alerts because it does work. And 1Password is really good about sending you those notifications. It works. It totally works. Because the funny part is, speaking of Airbnb, the only way that I found out that my Google account was hacked was I used that Google account to create my Airbnb account.

And on Airbnb, I set up two-factor auth. And then I got a ping from Airbnb that said, hey, here's your two-factor auth to continue logging in. And I'm like, oh, shit. Thus began four hours of changing everything. Oh, man.

Well, why would anyone hack your Airbnb? Do you ever think about that? Why would anyone do that? We talked about this on the show about a month ago. My friend Jeff got hacked with his Airbnb account. And basically what they do is they collect accounts. So if you can get an Airbnb account, you can pass that along and sell it for like two or three bucks or five or six bucks.

Why? For what, though? Because then if you have an Airbnb account, you can actually go to someplace, sign up for a place, stay there for a couple days. That's a couple hundred bucks. And then use the account to pay for your place and then bounce. And nobody ever knows.

Don't they realize that you're not the person in the picture? If you're the criminal going in there, you change the picture to you, but then they have your picture. Change the picture to you. But then. Well, then you change it back when you're done. Oh, that seems stupidly risky. Well, hackers are not the brightest bulbs in the bunch sometimes.

I'm more inclined to think there's a different reason people are using other people's Airbnbs. And I researched this in preparation for this show. Not that you're wrong. I just have a different option. Look, I'm wrong on this show like nine times out of ten. So what do you got? Good, because maybe you're wrong. What happened when I researched this for 20 minutes in the car on my phone was that there are a bunch of people that have had their Airbnb account hacked.

Because when you said your Airbnb was hacked, I was like, that's the dumbest thing to hack ever. Give me a freaking break, right? But what happened to a few travel blogger gals was that their crap got replaced by this weird, duck-lipped Chinese teenager.

And it was like, what the hell? Why would anyone do this? And so what this person was doing was booking stays all over China at Airbnb and then writing five-star or whatever reviews for each of the properties. And so if you run an Airbnb in Hangzhou, you can say, oh, I don't have any reviews.

So if I want people to stay with me, I need to get 20 reviews, and then I'll be the most reviewed, highest reviewed place in Hangzhou. So you buy some crappy click farm full of fake duck-lipped Chinese teenagers with hacked accounts. Because if they just start new accounts, it's not going to work as well as somebody who's got clout, I guess.

And maybe this is an algorithmic thing. I don't know. But if they've got these already legit accounts, then they'll just review the property. And then even if you get your account password back, are you really going to look in your history and go, I never stayed in Hangzhou. I need to report this.

You're going to be like, I don't care. They didn't charge my credit card. They used their own payment method. Who cares if you wrote a review for a random place? You're never going to notice. And if you did, what are you really going to do? You didn't get charged for it. Who cares? That's fucking genius. So, yeah, so basically they're building click farms on it.

Yeah, they're building click farms. They're bidding up reviews. And then probably people who are in Hangzhou, who got an Airbnb, pay 100 bucks, get 20 reviews, and they make hundreds or thousands of dollars because tourists are looking. I'm looking for the top reviewed place in Hangzhou, period. Yeah, definitely.

I don't know. I'm not going to think they're fake reviews, especially if they're from Americans, right? I'm going to be like, this is a great place. And then I show up, and it's a dive, and no one's ever stayed there. Yeah, definitely. So there's that. You know what I always wondered, and we can continue this in a minute because I need to refill my scotch here.

But I met the founder, one of the founders of Airbnb, smart guy, definitely a next level thinker. But here's the thing. When they originally started it, it was like, yeah, you can go and sleep at someone's house, and they feed you breakfast, and then you make friends. Now it's this multibillion-dollar hotel competitor.

Those are two totally different things, right? So if I start a company and I'm like, yeah, I want to be able to order a limousine from my phone because I'm a rich millennial, that's totally different than let's annihilate the taxi economy, create a completely different system for transporting people around the entire planet.

Like, those are two levels of thinking that are orders of magnitude away from one another. It's not like, oh, yeah, this thing that we created, this silly little app, turned into, like, next level, completely changed the transportation system of the world.

I'm always shocked that one person stayed in charge of these companies. And you look at Travis Kalanick, and he didn't. But, like, these people – I was going to say, he didn't really stay in charge. But it wasn't because he was, like, too dumb to wrap his head around what Uber could do, right?

No, he was an asshole. It's because he's a terrible person. But the thing is, he didn't not evolve with it. And I'm thinking, if I started an app right now with you that was like, hey, an Uber doesn't exist, what if we made it possible for people to order taxis from their phone?

There was an app called Taxi Magic a long time ago, and I knew the founder. I used that, yeah. Yeah, I used it all the time. The founder was cool. He's like, I'm really busy, blah, blah, blah. And then I remember going, like, why isn't everyone using this? And he's like, I got to hire people. I should try to get funded. And then Uber just stomped on his skull, and he's done now, of course.

But, like – Yeah. He was years before Uber was around. Years. Oh, yeah. No, I used Taxi Magic all the time in San Francisco. And when Uber came around, I mean, Uber's original vision was, let's just get all of these guys who have limos and cars.

And they're sitting on their ass for, like, seven hours a day waiting for their next pickup to go drive somebody. And that was the first time I took an Uber. I got a Mercedes 500 SL limo, and it was, like, $12 to go to the mission from the inner sunset.

And I'm like, this is the greatest thing I've ever had. Yeah. Ever. Amazing. You know? But now, since they've scaled, it has turned into a travesty, and I will never use Uber again. But even look at, like, Lyft, right?

Great company. Well, yeah, we're actually going to talk about Lyft in a few minutes, so. Oh, okay. Well, then I'll go refill my scotch and wait for that pertinent point to bring this up. How's that? All right. Jordan, you have a Tesla, right? Yeah, I do. And our license plate says Elon fan. That was not my idea.

Nerd. Nerd. Nerd. I mean, look, I do search Twitter every month to see if anyone has been like, I saw some a-hole with a license plate that says Elon fan. And pretty much quarterly, someone does that. There you go, man. Yeah. My life is fulfilled. Yeah. That's bad opsec, by the way.

But, hey, what you going to do? You know what, though? Fine. Oh, you know where my post office box is? Good. Mail me some cookies. I don't care. So, my brother has been on the wait list for a Tesla Model 3 since June 2016. Wow.

When it first came out. Wait, why is he still on the list? Because he hasn't gotten it yet. How is that possible? I know people that decided to buy it, like, last summer. They already got one, months ago. Nope. He sent me all of his screenshots today.

And here's the thing. If he wants to get the super expensive one, he can get it in the next three to five months. But if he wants to get the economy one, which is the one that they were touting is going to be the game changer for everybody to get into the electric car business, six to nine months.

I don't get it. That's so weird. I know people that have bought one after, like, they have a three-month thing. Maybe they paid someone for their spot on the list. As soon as it came out, he was on the list. Jen's brother got one. The thing is, what they did was they prioritized people who are closer to the Tesla factory.

That's why. Because we live right here. Yeah. That's why. Because he's in Chicago. So, it's ridiculous. So, I'm looking at all these options. It's like, oh, if you want the self-driving option, if you get it now, it's going to be $3,000. But if you get it later, it's going to be $6,000. All of these different things.

It's like death by a thousand cuts for this car. So, I told him. I'm like, fuck it, man. Cancel it and go buy a used Range Rover. Because for $39,000, you can get a pretty baller Range Rover. Well, also, I'll tell you this. Eventually, you'll be able to get one.

It'll be fine. It'll be like round three. I'll have ironed out a lot of the bugs. Because Glenn, my brother-in-law, he's had some problems, you know. And I love Tesla. Hell, our license plate says Elon fan, right? But he's had to take it in. There's been weird noises. They repaired those. Some of the noises are normal.

They didn't repair those. There was another thing with the power steering going out. They repaired that. And, yes, we live close to the factory. But, for real, I think you could just, like you said, get a different kind of car rather than waiting. And then you can get a different one, a Tesla, later.

Another thing is we didn't opt. We got an old 60, right? Not an old one. I mean, it's a couple years old. But the 60 is the battery size. They discontinued that. But it was like an $8,000 upgrade to the 75. We didn't get that.

Now you can't get a 60. And the upgrade for us to the 75 is like $2,000. Because battery prices go down. And since you can't buy the one that we have now, they're like, eh, who cares? Yeah. The longer you wait, the cheaper it's going to be.

But this just totally reminds me of new Apple hardware. It's like you never buy a first-generation new MacBook ever. 100%. Ever. 100%. And, you know, with all the problems they're having right now with Tesla and, you know, they've got, like, corporate sabotage and can't hit their numbers and all this other shit.

I'm like, dude, just go buy a Range Rover. Because it was funny. I talked to your wife, Jen, the other day. I'm like, hey, when are you guys going to be home? We've got to record these ads. And she's just like, oh, we had to stop and charge the car. And I'm like, okay, how long is that going to be? And I'm just like, when I go to a gas station, it takes four minutes at the max.

And you're like, oh, it's going to be a little bit to charge the car. And I'm like, okay, I like gas. I like gas. You know what, though? I will defend them on this. A lot of people are like, oh, I have to charge a supercharger. You sit in your car. You check your email. 20 minutes later, you've got, like, 50 miles on your car.

Maybe 40. Yeah, 20 minutes. In four minutes, I have, like, 320 miles on my car. Yeah, but who cares? Like, we don't need that, you know? And you pay for the gas. I don't pay for the supercharger. Okay. But your car costs about seven times as much as my SUV.

Maybe. But, you know, you can't rock around going, look how trendy I am. So there's that. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not an Elon fan. Yes. I'm a Ford fan. I'm a Ford fan. I'm a Ford family. But I will admit, the Tesla is, like, to me, remember when the iPhone came out and you looked at a Motorola flip phone and you were like, what?

How superior is this iPhone? Right? That's what I feel like kind of with the Tesla, where it's, like, it's quiet, 100% torque. The pickup is amazing. The interior, everything works great in the Model S. Star, asterisk. So, like, it's extremely expensive when everything works fantastic.

Right, yeah, and it's like, this is so next level compared to a gas-powered car. However, yeah, the Model 3, ironing those things out. Right now, I don't, I think I'm allowed to say this. My cousin works at Tesla. He's on what my dad says, afternoons, which is a euphemism for working all night.

Because, again, my dad worked at Ford for 30 years. They called it afternoons. You go in at 7 p.m. You work till 7 a.m. So, my cousin's not a manufacturing guy. He's an engineer. But Tesla's all hands on deck right now, so their stock price isn't tank.

They've got to hit, like, 5,000 cars in production this month. So, they've got... It's supposed to be 5,000 a week. That's the number they're going for. Yeah, sorry, this week. I misspoke. They've got literal interns on the production line right now. I mean, they've got all hands on deck, which I don't say that to the degree.

The company. I think that's awesome. I think that's the bomb. Like, you are going to get shit done. And Tesla, they're not unionized. I don't know what people think about that. I'm not going to fart around with that discussion. Yeah, yeah. We could go down a rabbit hole on that.

Forget about that. That's... My mom's a teacher. My dad's an autoworker. I've had unions up the schnoz for a while. Exactly. But, like, they're getting it done. And that's what you need to do to change an entrenched industry like the auto industry. Right. As long as Elon takes care of those people that were there for him, busting their ass, you know, for this time when they're in the shitter.

You know, once they get past this hump, hopefully Elon will take care of all those people that were there for, you know, the afternoons. I don't know. What are they going to do? I heard that you don't want to be around. I don't know, though. I don't know, dude. I heard that...

And look, clearly, my wife is an Elon fan. I love reading about his stuff. But people that work with him anywhere have universally told me, you just... If he's on the floor, just fucking run. Really? Just don't be there. Don't be there unless you're supposed to be there, in which case, be exactly where you're supposed to be.

Yeah. There are stories like, oh, this guy got fired personally by Elon, and it's never like, oh, yeah, I was doing a really bad job, and then he sent me this letter, and then I had a meeting with him. It's always like, yeah, I was doing more or less what I was supposed to be doing, and he had a temper tantrum, and I got fired.

You know, that's common, though. Look at Steve Jobs. Yeah, he's kind of... I don't think he's that bad, but Jobs is like an insufferable a-hole. But I think Elon is just under a lot of stress, doesn't put up with 1% shit, just not, can't do it, won't do it, and is also just kind of, yeah, like a quirky billionaire who has ridiculously high expectations that a lot of people can't meet.

And I understand... You gotta get shit done, man. You gotta get shit done. Yeah, I understand his perspective completely. I just think it probably sucks to work there. That's all. Now, I know a lot of people that worked at Apple when Steve Jobs came back from his, you know, his banishment, and they left. They're like, I will not be in the same fucking building with that asshole ever again.

And understandably so, man. Understandably so. It's not for everyone, but it's also like the bottom rung of the ladder should probably be shielded from that, right? Like, if Elon is that guy, he should probably not be down, and this is controversial, but he probably shouldn't be on the assembly line floor being like, you're fucking fired, you know, to some guy who's putting on door panels.

Lug nuts or door panels, yeah. But to the executives, yeah, they should be shaking in their boots if they fucked up. Yeah, his lieutenants should be the guys that shield the lower guys, because, you know, yeah, shit rolls downhill, but it should not roll all the way downhill. No, it should roll down to the guy who supposedly is checking in on all these folks.

Yeah, that's too bad. I was hoping Elon was a better guy, but. You know what, though? You know what, though? This is secondhand information. So this is a friend of a friend who heard this from somebody who got fired by Elon personally. Here's what I think, and this is what I said to him.

It's way too hard to acquire talent, so I don't quite believe that a founder walks around going, you know what, you have a shitty haircut, you're fucking fired. There's just no way. That's a good point. That's a very good point. Yeah, think about it. Like, you and I disagree on a lot of stuff, and occasionally, like, once every two years, we have, like, a knockdown drag out where I'm like, you know what, fuck you.

And you're like, you know what, fuck you, twice. And I'm like, ah. And then you're like, I quit. And I'm like, ah, that's not going to end well for either of us. And so then, you know, one of us calls the other person, and it's like, so what are you thinking? And I'm like, so I don't want you to quit, and you're like, good, I don't want to quit. Right?

Because, like, I'm not going to replace you. And you, do you want to work for somebody else? I mean, maybe you do. Good luck. But, like, you know, like, there's a point at which you go, eh. You put up with some shit from people who are doing really well. You do. Yeah.

It's like a marriage. It's like a marriage. Everybody's got their warts, you know? Exactly. So if you have an engineer, and they did something where you're like, oh, that's not ideal, do you fire them because you had a moist scone that morning, and you didn't like it?

The moist scone problem. Or a dry scone, I don't know, my scones. Or do you just go, you know what, this is crappy? Because otherwise, what you should have is a manager that walks around behind you and goes, you're not really fired.

Come in tomorrow. Right? Like, you need that. Yeah. Yeah. You need to have protection. Well, I've heard about this from LA Nightlife and Las Vegas Nightlife folks, and I'll leave it at this. I dated a girl for a while who, she was HR for the owners of all the top Vegas and LA night clubs, and these owners were all just ridiculous human beings, and they would walk in and be like, why is that plant there?

And the person would be like, I don't know, you said you wanted six FICA trees near the entrance, and he'd be like, you're fired. And then a GM would walk up and go, so you're not fired? We need you here at 8 p.m. tonight, and if you could just show up at 8, just go wait in my office.

And she's like, uh, it's 5. And he's like, yeah, just have lunch now, check your email, just wait, he'll be gone in about 90 minutes. And they're like, okay. And they would do that, and that would happen every weekend, and the GM knew better, because the GM has to interview all these people.

Yeah. And the owner, they're like, just indulge him, he feels powerful, it's fine, done. I don't think somebody as smart as Elon is that dumb. Okay. To be like, screw the guy who programs all our building robots, you're fired, because I'm cranky.

It's possible, but it seems a little unlikely. It seems unlikely, but it also seems plausible in certain scenarios. So we're going to leave it at that, and if anybody here works at Tesla that's listening to this show, please send me an email, jason at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

Yeah, jason at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Write in and just be like, keep me anonymous. You don't have to write from a burner, and we're not going to out you, right? No, no, no. Everybody here is anonymous. That's good, because I do wonder that, but I find it hard to believe.

It is plausible. You're right. He could just be a crazy person. There's also that. Well, thus endeth the world's longest follow-up section. Let's get into the news. That's Hyrule. In the news. New article in the New York Times came out this week about smart home devices and domestic

abuse, and how assholes are using this technology. The IoT, the Internet of Things, should be the Internet of Dicks now, to actually harass their significant others. Control. While they're at home, and make them insane.

And this is, you know, this is one of those things that I never thought about. I can't believe I haven't thought about it, because I can figure out how to assassinate somebody with a cell phone, but I never thought about the domestic abuse angle on this. You know why? Because you're not a fucking dick.

I read this article, and I didn't think of it either, but I was like, I have a smart home, and I'm not thinking, how can I make my wife think she's a terrible person using my Nest Cam? Like, it's not a real thing. I don't do that. No, and this is one of those things where it's like, okay, this is the side effect of the bullshit that we've built, and we know about it.

And, you know, and it turns out, because the guys are the ones that always install the shit. Yes. I have never met a woman who walks around the house and goes, I would like a smart thermometer. Where have you ever met a woman that said, you know what, I would like the temperature of my home to change as I drive up to the house.

Never, ever has a woman said that. It's all fucking dudes. Well. And the problem with that is, these dudes are the assholes. Let me stop you right there. My wife, she is the smart home master. Ah. But she still, look, her and I both know how to use them, and she still isn't like, oh, let's do, what, is it IFTT?

She's still not like, oh, when I. Actually, on this show, we call it. Ift. So she's still not doing. She's still like, okay, cool, you know, this thing, I can control it from my phone. She's not like, oh, when I'm within one mile of the house, please turn on the AC to do this.

Neither of us are actually that advanced. But I did read this article, and I thought, it's not hard to believe that someone would use this for gaslighting, which is the idea that you're going to make someone think they're crazy. That's the least of it, though.

So the crazy or the dangerous part is when you have cameras, for example, because then you're watching them and you're listening to them. That's extra, extra creepy because you're hearing their phone calls. You're seeing who's over, you know, the doorway. If you've got like keys or something, smart keys, then.

Absolutely. The other things, though, that were in this article were just confusing. As a non abuser, they were just confusing. Like, oh, I would walk in and the house would be 94 degrees. Like, how ridiculously silly, petty, gross are you as a human when you're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to make it hot when she walks in.

Like, how much of a loser are you where your bit of control over this woman or this person is to superheat the house? Like, get bent, man. You know, like, go find something for yourself. I know.

I mean, that's that's the crazy part. But and these people are they're they're insane. But they have, you know, they have like no power in the world except now they have a gadget. So now I've got a gadget. Yeah. And now I can express my power, my power hungriness with my gadget.

And it's like you. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Granted, we all know these people are fucking losers and we need to take them out behind the woodshed and shoot them in the head. Get rid of them. Get gone. But it's a serious problem for these people who have to live with them.

And I never thought about this angle. And I can't I've thought about so many angles with the Internet of Things. And I never thought about this one. And this one is a it's fucking terrible because these people live in a horror show. And I feel really I mean, I feel terrible for him.

But, you know, the thing is, it's like, OK, if your significant other is installing a gadget in your house, first thing you do, say, honey, where's the app? Where do I install the app? Where can I see it? Make sure that you have it on your phone as well.

And if they're cameras, what's the camera app? What's the what's the login? I need to know everything. Be proactive with this stuff. Yeah, I agree with you there. I think. And if the person won't give you that info, you should be a little suspicious. You should be suspicious.

The other thing, though, is, Jason, realistically, can't they just reset it because they're going to route it to their email account? So if they do it, well, plug it. That's what I'm saying. Like, the solution to this, unfortunately, is if you've got a Nest cam.

Yeah. Unplug that thing. If you've got a Nest thermomist thermostat, thermostat, scotches. Apparently, the scotch that Jordan has tonight works. Yes. Highly effective. Twist it until wires come out.

That's the solution for everything but breaker switches. OK, so but I've actually I don't know if I've told you this. Stop me if I have. I used to volunteer at a woman's domestic abuse, like a woman's shelter for people who are abused. No, I've never heard this. Oh, really?

Yeah. I was always so impressed. Granted, I wasn't doing I wasn't counseling or anything. I was just kind of like pulling weeds or, you know, restocking. Yeah, pretty much. But I was always so impressed by these women. I think this when people think of abused women.

Initially, when I did as a man back in college, before I started volunteering at the shelter, I was like, oh, they're really weak and meek and they look at the ground when they talk and they've got like a bunch of kids and they're all dumb or something. I don't know what I thought.

I just figured that. Right. I was like, oh, puts up with this. Yeah. These women were actually really tough. A lot were educated. Most of them also had kids, which made it even more difficult to leave. And I completely get that. Yeah. The kids are the kids are the linchpin.

Yeah. The linchpin. A lot of the time. But I was so shocked by this because I just figured these are like these just totally meek people that can't stick up. It's not the case. Abuse can actually happen to pretty much anyone. You either have to get involved with the wrong person who's just a really aggressive, terrible, terrible person and also probably very charming when they want to be.

Or it just happens so slowly that you don't notice it. And then one day you're like, this is not normal. What am I doing? And then you go, you know, I'm going to pack up and leave. And he's like, I'm going to shoot you. And you're like, oh, crap. You can totally do that. And you know where my parents live.

And I have nowhere to go because you've isolated me from all my friends. Like, this is very real. And the IOT thing, if you read this as a guy who's like, ah, abuse women, whatever. Like, I get why this might seem silly. But I guarantee you this is a thing. Oh, this does not seem silly to me.

This was chilling to me. It is. Absolutely fucking chilling. Because these guys are so small. They're so small. That's why they abuse their wives. Who does that? So these guys are going to take any edge they have. And yeah, superheating the house to 92 degrees, it's pathetic, yes.

But that doesn't make it less believable. That's kind of what I want to highlight. Like, the more pathetic it is, when it comes to abuse, it doesn't make it less believable. It actually makes it more believable. Because these guys who do this are actually super pathetic and weak. Anyway, now I'm breathing into the mic, which is your thing beforehand.

You were like, don't inhale into the mic. Don't be a mouth breather. Well, last night you told me I was rude when we were playing Far Cry for yawning. You were, every five minutes you're like, brrrr. I'm like, look, once or twice. I was fucking tired, man. You kept me up all night playing Far Cry.

We'll talk about that at Absent Doodad. Fine. But seriously, like, every five minutes it's starting to get old. Well, that means it's time to put down the game. But anyway, yes, check out this New York Times article for sure. Because this is one of those side effects of IoT devices. And we've talked about it on the show.

And I hate to say that we've talked about it on the show before. But what it is is we are building all of this tech. And we're not thinking about all the consequences that are coming with it. And this is one of those side consequences that literally had me, like, I was angry. I was unbelievably angry when I read this.

Because I'm like, I want to find these guys. I don't want to fucking punch them in the face. Yeah, they're dickbags. But also, I got one small quip. You can't think about all the implications of a tech when you invent it. Come on, man. Yeah, you got to try. Look, okay. You got to try.

Okay, okay, fine. Self-driving cars? Yeah, you got to try. A lot of people are going to die if you don't do this. Thermostat you can control from your phone? Eh. Maybe throw it in and see what happens. Worst case scenario. I'm sorry, but I figured out a billion ways to hack that to make it terrible.

You have to think about the unintended consequences. What's the worst thing? Okay, yes, making someone think they're crazy by superheating their house 93 degrees. That's bad. But does it get worse? Killing their pets when they're out of town. How? By superheating the house.

It's not going to make the house 100 degrees. You can turn up the heat to whatever the max of the furnace is and possibly actually set the furnace on fire. There are ways that you can do this stuff. You can superheat this. The max of a furnace is like 80 degrees or something. Oh, dude, dude. Don't even get started with me on this.

I can go down this rabbit hole forever. Let's move on to Lyft, though, because we talked about Uber a little bit. Speaking of self-driving cars. Exactly. Lyft has just raised an additional $600 million in a Series I. You know, when I was in startup land, I never got past a Series C.

And they're in a Series I. So does it just keep going down the alphabet until you hit C? It goes down the alphabet. And then what? And then we're going to get to a Series AA and AAA. Oh, I was going to say, what's after that? It has to double up on the letters. But this is by Fidelity Management and Research.

Here's the thing. Lyft is now worth $15.1 billion. That's it? $15.1 billion. What do you mean that's it? That seems like not that much, somehow. They have an app. They don't do anything. They don't have any assets. They have a fucking app.

Yeah, but they insure everything. They coordinate all that stuff. Yeah, I agree. But still, I don't know. There's a lot of people working there, man. Yeah, and not making any money. Are they really not making it? How is that possible? No, they're not. The average salary for these guys is like $5 an hour, and they're doing the wear and tear on their car.

Wait, what? Is that really true? Yes, absolutely. No, Lyft and Uber both put out all of these reports saying that, oh, our guys, you know, they make around $70,000 a year, and they could never actually tell you. The one guy, and everybody said, tell us the one guy who makes $70,000 a year driving for you.

They could never do it. The problem with this is, it is like, it's a sharecropper economy, and it's terrible. And we're back to the same thing. But all this money that comes in is just lost. Everybody's running at a loss.

Lyft is running at a loss. Uber's running at a loss. All of this is basically redistribution of wealth from the VCs to the drivers to subsidize how they're going to make this work until they can figure out how self-driving cars work.

Yeah. And then they can fire all the drivers. That's all they're doing. Oh, I agree. That is completely all they're doing. I completely agree. Yeah. And at this point, I'm like, you know what? If you want to drive for these guys, go for it. Take their money. That's fine. I would rather you drive them out of business now until they, you know, get to that point.

Because I guarantee you, Lyft and Uber are not going to be the people that nail self-driving cars. The people who are going to nail self-driving cars are Tesla. I think Tesla. Those are the people that are going to nail self-driving cars because Tesla has cars on the road that are actually sending back millions of data points every day.

Every hour, actually. Exactly. So I believe Tesla is the one that's going to nail it, and they're going to rent their fleet to everybody else. All these people who are trying to do self-driving cars are just, it's a fool's errand at this point. Even Waymo. Waymo is way ahead of Uber because you look at the interaction per mile for Uber with the self-driving cars.

It's about 1.3 miles. With Waymo, it's over 100. What do you, wait, interaction per hour, explain that? What is that? That means that when a human has to grab the wheel to actually interdict what's going on with the computer, that's the difference between what Uber's doing and what Waymo's doing.

Waymo has hundreds of miles per driver interaction where they have to grab the wheel and actually interdict. They share that data? I'm surprised. They have to because it's a completely regulated system. Now, once you get the license to actually test those cars on the road, you have to share that data back with the state.

I did not know that. That's interesting. Very cool. You should listen to our show more often. It's pretty good. I have listened to a bunch. And, you know, I did prepare for this one. In fact, there's a fan of Plug, the Jordan Harbinger show. His name is Harry the Rideshare Guy. Have you heard of this guy?

Yeah. So Harry the Rideshare Guy loves the Jordan Harbinger show and, of course, which you are an integral part thereof, he estimates that Lyft drivers actually make about $3 to $5 an hour. That's what I said. Five bucks. Yeah.

And I'm sure he's taken into account, like, you know, wear and tear on the car and gasoline, da, da, da. Exactly. But he's like the blogger for Rideshare stuff. Does he have a blog for it? So throw it in the show notes. We'll send it out. Yeah, I'm about to. I was just Googling it.

It's therideshareguy.com. Yeah, that's kind of what it comes down to. This is not a $70,000 to $100,000 a year job that Uber and Lyft were talking about. These guys are burning money. They are burning money, waiting for the tipping point.

They're basically waiting for the singularity when it comes and then AI can drive your car. That's what they're waiting for. And they're just suckering people in. But, you know, granted, it's a great mass redistribution of wealth. So I'm fine with that.

And on to more fun stuff, the ISS is getting an AI orb that can move in zero gravity. This thing is called Simon. It's C-I-M-O-N. I'm assuming it's pronounced Simon. But it's got 12 fans and it can run around. And, of course, it's got AI.

And, yeah, yeah. You know how we think about AI. Maybe it's French. Simone. It could be a boy. It could be a girl. You don't know. It looks like a boy. If you look at the photo, it looks like a boy. But the interesting thing is only the German guy can actually interact with it because that's the voice that it learned.

So we'll see how it goes. Simone. Come on. Come on here. Give me mal an ISS coden. I don't know. Come see here, bitte. We'll see how this thing works out. But it is the dumbest thing.

It looks like it's on, like, Mac OS 6. It's the dumbest intelligence ever. Yeah. Yeah. Well, on this show, we know that AI doesn't exist. And this is just kind of funny. But it's from Airbus and IBM. Oh, dude. This face painted on the screen.

Are you kidding me? Is that real? It's got different expressions and stuff. So it's supposed to float around the ISS. It's got 12 fans so it can zoom around. And it's like fans. It's Syrian space. It's literally what it is. It's Syrian space.

So it blows the air around inside the ISS to travel around? Yeah. Yeah. Because that's the only way it can move. So it's kind of cool. They didn't have that? I feel like they have. How did they not have that before? Is that naive of me to think, how did this take so long?

I just figured that was there. No. I mean, look at Hal. Hal wasn't there. I don't know. I obviously played too much Halo where there's a Cortana that flies around. I'm like, yeah, that clearly is a thing that we already have. Well, now we have it. Now we have it. Just now.

It's got like an MS Paint face drawn on it. It does. It solely has MS Paint. Yeah. You know what the reason for that? It has to be low power consumption. Yeah, I hope so. Otherwise, it's so shitty it's inexcusable. You got to include this picture.

I'm going to slack this to you. This picture of the face is so stupid and ghetto. Like, this is so rudimentary. Give me a break. No, it's terrible. It's a terrible face. So we'll see what the German says. Look, if it gets past the German, then we know that it at least has some value because Germans ain't going to fuck around with that shit.

This is so weak. So since we're not doing security this week because Dave Bittner wasn't available on the Saturdays, a massive cache of law enforcement personnel data has leaked. And this comes from ZDNet, and this is an exclusive for ZDNet, which is surprising because I didn't know ZDNet was still a thing.

Yeah, me neither. I was like, oh, you mean they're still reviewing like Commodore 64 games? Sweet. Exactly, exactly. So this comes from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training, known as ALERT. This comes from Texas State ALERT.

This is the fucked up thing. This is a database of guys who go for active shooter training from the government to this company, and they just fucked up, of course, their, you know, Amazon AWS database like everybody does.

I don't know how these fucking people are still doing this stuff. So basically, there's a shit ton of records. I mean, like over 100,000 records with home addresses and just training data, everything about these guys.

And it turns out that a lot of them aren't actually that qualified, which is kind of scary. But, guys, if you are going to use the cloud, remember, the cloud is always somebody else's computers. Yeah. That is the definition of the fucking cloud, somebody else's computers.

They have fucking security switches. Fix that shit. And these guys did not. And this is just a huge breach for everybody that has gone through their program. Here's the good news, though, Jason.

These law enforcement officers are most likely just going to get a bunch of really crappy phone calls that are like, hello, there is a warrant out for your arrest. Please call the IRS tax collection system now.

And that's what they're going to get. And they're going to be like, oh, crap. I done been hacked. It's not going to be some sort of done been hacked. It's not going to be some sort of like no one's going to be like, oh, my God, there's an active shooter at this place. We got your home phone number like that's not going to happen.

And they're not going to worst case. There's going to be someone the most advanced hack that's going to happen is someone's going to try to sell them ammunition or something and be like, hey, we heard you went through active shooter training. Are you interested in a better scope for your rifle? Yeah.

But the problem is, it's got their home addresses for a lot of that's bad. So if you're going to go do an active shooter event, you know, it's like it's like I'm going to go to an escape room. No, I'm going to go do an active shooter event. I'm going to go find all the people that are in my area that are going to be the first responders and I'm going to go to their houses and kill them first.

Oh, good luck tagging all the first responders first. You'll die in the process. And there's a lot, but they're here. And a lot of these people didn't pass active shooter training. That's the other issue. I'll resist the joke about getting rid of the people who didn't qualify for the training.

But I will say, put your office address for everything. If you can get email or sorry, regular mail at your office and do that. And I will also say, look, I get a lot of people asking where to mail stuff. Granted, it's kind of my business. We you and I have the show.

So we got a UPS store box. We check it pretty much every day. It's always full of stuff. It's a find you every day. OK, yeah. At different times. Randomly. Try try waiting around a UPS store without getting so bored that you just kill yourself before I get there.

Well, I now I also know to look for the Tesla that rolls up with Elon fan is the the license. OK, I have bad opsec. Do you need to make their plan for them? I told you you also need to make their plan for them. No, I'm relying on the stupidity of these people for my safety.

Always a good plan. Ups and doodads. Jordan, you and I have a long history of being overworkers. We work our ass off and do like, you know, 60, 80, 90 thousand hours a week.

And you got one of the things that I was the most happy about this week, which was an Xbone and Xbox one. And I have to say, you also got Far Cry 5 and I am loving playing Xbox at night to get rid of my fucking work tension.

And in Far Cry 5 is amazing. It is the it is like I don't know. It's it's kind of like playing. It's just it's it's a redneck shoot them up. Yeah. You know, here's here's the thing. I have a little bit of guilt around this because I generally view video games as a massive waste of time.

And I still think that if you get obsessed with them, they are. And I used to be that way. I used to play, you know, 10 years ago, I'd buy Grand Theft Auto and I would stay up for three days and not eat or exercise. And my roommates would be like, you know, we're worried about you. Literally, that happened.

And that would happen with with like the Wii and the Zelda for the Wii. And that happened all the time. And so I was like, I can't have these. But recently, my cousin who's living with us, who's interning at Tesla, he was like, hey, you play games on your iPhone a lot.

I'm like, yeah, I play him when I'm watching TV at night with you guys. You know, we'll watch like the news. We'll watch Bill Maher, whatever, some show. And during the show, my brain's not engaged enough. So I play something on my iPhone and the games are crappy for the phone. And I got a controller for my phone.

I was like, oh, I'm playing this game for my phone. I like it. You got a controller for games on your iPhone. I did. Dude. OK, that's that's that's out of bounds. That's out of bounds. Let me finish. So I got the control. And I was like, oh, it's really hard. And oh, if I want the good guns for this game, I got to like buy this package of weapon upgrade boxes.

That's like 100 bucks. And my cousin goes, don't spend money on games on your phone. I was like, I can't. I'll feel like an idiot if I pay for a game on my phone that's this expensive. And he goes, why don't you just get an Xbox? And I was like, well, isn't that expensive?

And he goes, for the price you're about to upgrade a weapon box on your phone, you're going to need like 10 of those. Just get a whole Xbox One X with, you know, modern warfare three or whatever games. And you'll you'll spend less money.

And I was like, oh, but I don't want to play so much. He goes, just use self-control. And I was like, yeah, I didn't have that in my 20s. But I do now in my 30s. I've systemized this. So I bought an Xbox, which I never thought I would do. And I bought Modern Warfare Remastered or whatever in Far Cry 5.

And I'm like, this is so relaxing because it takes up almost all of my brain to the point where I can stop thinking about all these things that are stressing me out or worrying me. But when I'm done playing, I don't feel tired. I feel good.

Yeah. Yeah. And so when I'm done playing, I'll go work out or something like that. And I just feel it. Two thirty in the morning when when we're done, we go to sleep. But two thirty. The latest we've ever played is me. Actually. Yeah. At twelve fifteen last night was the way.

That was a Friday. Totally acceptable. You and I usually quit at ten fifteen. Yeah. No. Ten o'clock rolls around and we usually say like, oh, well, we have a show in the morning and we have to prep and then we're just going to like be responsible adults and we're going to stop playing and we're going to go to bed now.

Yeah. My longest session on this thing is like two and a half hours and it was you and I. Yeah. It was like seven thirty to I don't know, like ten thirty or something like that. It was like, yeah, not even. So it's funny because I bought I bought my Xbox one about a year ago and I talked about it on the show when we got it.

And I'm like, oh, I need this to relax. I bought Resident Evil and unfortunately Resident Evil not relaxing. What do you think out the dogs? No, it freaked out the dogs because it the soundtrack is so good that it scared Bam Bam.

She would be cowering in the corner when the zombies were coming. And so I'm like, oh, shit, I can't play this. Bam Bam's a little bitch. See what I did there? Hey, hey, hey, watch it. Watch it. She's a big bitch. She's one hundred and twenty nine pounds of bitch. I just waited this morning.

She's one hundred and twenty nine. How do you weigh a dog? You're like stand on the scale and you get a little treat. Like, how do you get her to stay on a scale? I go to the vet and they have basically what's a cattle scale. So they mean, it's like it's like two feet wide by four feet long.

So you get them on that and you get them to sit down. That's how you do it. Good Bam Bam. Because she's not going on my little like bed, bath and beyond scale. Yeah, I was imagining a bathroom scale where you're like, all right, get all four of your feet on this little thing and then just sit on this cold piece of glass and then move your move your like belly so I can see the display.

Yeah, that makes more sense. In the old days with my little dogs, I could pick them up like I'd weigh myself that I'd weigh like. Oh, yeah. Weigh yourself holding a dog. Good plan. Yeah, but yeah, 130 pounds, I ain't holding her for that. Now it all makes sense. To do that. That's funny. But anyway, now that you're playing, I got back into it and I was just like, man, I'm kind of pissed that I spent a year with this thing in a box and not playing it because I had Battlefront and a bunch of other games.

But playing together is fucking fantastic. It's a great night. It totally gets you out of the work shit of the day, even though you yell at me because I like to yawn because it was 12 o'clock at night and I was tired.

Yeah, but hold on. Hold on, though. Come on. This is Jason every 10 minutes. I'm like, okay, can you like reel it in a little? I don't mind. Look, if you sneeze, you cough.

But every 10 minutes, when I yawn, I'll occasionally do that. But usually I'm just like, all right, I yawned. Right? You're like, everyone, I'm about to yawn. Hang on. Hold on to your pants.

It's time for yawny time. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of, remember Doom when they had God mode and he'd be like, and he would like launch a rocket and it would kill everyone. A magical spell. That's what it reminds me of, except you do it even more often than the guy in Doom.

You're like, dude, that's so fucking rude. It's so rude. It's so rude. And I'm just like, no, rude would be like farting on your wife's face. I've done that. That's rude. I've done that, for sure. Anyway, but Far Cry 5, like in multiplayer mode, is awesome.

I love it. I have re-connected with my Xbox and it's just a ton of fucking fun. And my roommate is just like, it's a guy thing. You guys are doing a guy thing. Yeah, yeah. It's a guy thing.

And I'm just like, she's looking at me with contempt and I'm just like, you know what? I don't give a fuck because it's really fucking fun. I don't know. I mean, Jen today, my wife, Jen, for those of you who don't know who I am and don't know who she is. My wife, Jen, was like, this looks so cool. Can I play? And I went, oh crap.

You know, we don't have what they call couch co-op where we can split the screen. So I was like, well, not really. We could get another Xbox and put it in the guest room. It seems a little wasteful because I don't know how often you're going to play this. And she's like, yeah, nah. So we went to GameStop and I looked online and there were a bunch of threads that were like, what's a good couch co-op game to play with my non-gamer wife?

Not that I'm a gamer, but she's totally a non-gamer. And the threads universally on Reddit or whatever message boards were like, okay, there's a cooking game and I'm like, eh, there's another game, Rayman Legends. Yeah, it sounds dumb. It looked cool, but it looked like it would get old fast.

There's Rayman Legends, which looked pretty cool. And I was kind of gunning for that. Rayman's fun. I love Rayman. It looks cool. And then we went to GameStop and there, luckily, the gal cashier was kind of like, oh, you know what? There's a lot of couch co-op games, but this one, this one looks really cool and I have it and she pulls out a way out, which is a prison break game that can only be played in co-op, either couch or Xbox live.

And my, my wife's like, oh, what do you do? And she's like, you figure out all these ways to break out of this jail and you've got to craft things and like figure out all these puzzles and break out. My wife and I, who love escape games, she's like, done. So we buy this game. Yeah. We immediately got that. You guys are escape game fucking fiends.

What have you done? Over 150? Over 150. Yeah. I don't know the exact number, like 154 or something. It's over 150, but yeah. Which is nuts, right? You're fucking nuts. It's weird. But, you know, I love that. You only played, did you only play one with us or two? I played one with you and it was the jankiest, ghettoist.

It was so ghetto. Nothing worked. And the guy had to keep coming in and giving us tips. But what I have to do, I have to say for, for my own personal bit, when we got to the next room, like after that main room, we got to that next room. I cleared that room in two and a half minutes with no help.

Everybody else was wandering around and I cleared that entire room myself because everything worked. Yeah. And look how satisfied you are with that, right? That's what I'm like. I love escape rooms. They're so fun. And that was, that was one of the worst. Imagine one of the best. Escape rooms are so good.

When they're good, they're, it's like sex. When they're good, they're really good. When they're bad, you're like, well, I'm still glad I did it, but you know, I don't know if I'd do it again. Yeah. It's a little itchy. Yeah. You know. I'm itching a little, but I still don't regret it. Like, I don't know. It was all right. It was all right.

It was so good. I'm still glad I stayed up all night. Yeah. I'm fine. I'll put some cream on it. So it's funny. So when we're playing Xbox and doing this now, because I live in Hollywood and you used to live in Hollywood, but when you live in Hollywood, you get to know certain people.

And I was a huge fan of the show Entourage. I loved the show Entourage. And my friend was like, hey, this was like it's season five, I think. And they said, the guy who runs the house for Entourage season five is getting rid of all the props.

So it's like a fire sale. So I went over to get the props. Well, actually, my roommate went over to get the props. I just gave her a handful of cash. And I'm like, go get us some Entourage props. And she came back with two giant plasma TVs.

Oh, that's a good prop. I thought I was like, what props are you going to get from Entourage? Like some STDs? Yeah. Exactly. Like, so these are these were these were two thousand dollar plasma TVs. We got them for two hundred and fifty bucks each.

And I went back and I watched the season and the TV that you and I are playing Xbox on is the TV that Turtle played Xbox on for Entourage season five, which is pretty fucking cool. Yeah, that's that's pretty meta. I'll hand it to you.

Not bad. Not bad for two hundred and fifty bucks for one for half. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For two. I mean, well, I sold I sold the other one to a friend who was some horrible person I was working with at that time. But yeah, no, I'm playing Xbox on the TV.

The Turtle played Xbox on on Entourage season five, which is kind of fun. So the other cool thing about the Xbox is you can download apps to your Xbox kind of like an Apple TV. Yeah, I didn't know that. Well, since this is a TV that I got from, you know, like 2014, it's not a smart TV.

So I need like apps on it. So I my Xbox is where I'm putting the apps on and I found the Plex media server and I'm like, OK, I've heard about this. I should get to know it more. And then I dug in a little deeper and then I found out, oh, shit, I can put a Plex server on my Synology, which is my my home NAS.

And so I did that and then, you know, bounce it over. I downloaded the app on Xbox and got the Synology app running on my my Synology. And now I can just watch movies. I don't need an Apple TV anymore. I can literally get rid of my Apple TV because the Xbox has Netflix.

It has Amazon Prime video. It has all the shit that I watch. So Apple TV is like on its way out. Yeah. When I got Xbox, which I thought, oh, I'll play this randomly, blah, blah, blah. I looked at apps when I was waiting for a game to download and it had this thing called Plex.

And I was like, oh, I've heard of that. The media server. Isn't that kind of like, yeah, I don't know, some other thing. And so I looked at it was one of the top five or top 10. So I looked at it and I went, oh, I wonder how hard this is to set up. So I scheduled a task. Oh, God, it's so easy. Right.

Well, I scheduled two hours for Saturday, which is can I say that's today? So I scheduled two hours for today to set it up. But at the time I was like, all right, I'll just in the meantime, it's I'll just click download, blah, blah, blah. I'll go into my studio computer.

I'll download the server software in case it's big. And it wasn't. So I extracted it and it went, hey, where do you want us to find your media? And I was like, oh, in my downloads folder. And I went, all right, click, click. And it went, great. You're all ready to go. And so on my Xbox, I was like, oh, here's the server.

And they're like, great. We only see one. So then they showed me all my media. And I went, wait, did I just accidentally set up a Plex server in five minutes? That's it. That's literally it. Yeah, it's so fucking easy. So then I was like, oh, great. I'm just going to airdrop everything from my iPad and everything from my MacBook Pro into that same media folder.

So I did that. That took like an hour because I had a ton of movies. And then Plex scanned that folder and went, oh, great. Here's this. Here's the show art or the movie art. There's the trailers. There's everything. Yeah. Yeah. Trailers. Do you want this to be available on your mobile devices?

Sure. I guess so. You want this, by the way, too. Yeah. Subtitles. Everything I want. Yeah. Because I often watch movies with like my brother-in-law or my parents-in-law. And they're, you know, they're Taiwanese. So they're like, oh, what did he say? So I always turn on CZ for that. So I did all that in literally under an hour.

Everything. Even the captions. Even the server. Even the transfer. Everything done. So worth it. It's like a private Netflix. So if you use BitTorrent or you have photos that you want to show or movies on your phone, anything that you do will automatically upload to Plex on a computer in your house.

You can add users. You can have them log in. They can share certain kinds. I can't believe I didn't have this before. It's so easy and it's so simple and so free. So free. So free. Exactly. So free. The only problem I've had is with AVIs.

It does not like AVIs. So I'm running a Synology, what is it, a DS4-16J. It does not have enough horsepower to like transcode those on the fly. Yeah, but you know the AVI is not a real file format, right?

You've talked about that before, probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but a lot of my old cameras, like these old Casio cameras that I had when I was doing family movies and stuff, they just recorded an AVI. So I have to go just transcode everything and put it through. But yeah, I was going to say just batch everything.

Everything now is MOV. You know, I've got this fucking amazing Sony Alpha that does 4K video and they play perfectly through it. So it just, it's like legacy formats that have a little bit of a problem with it.

But, you know, you're like fucking Plex is solid. It is solid. And I didn't realize it was a real company. I thought it was like one of those, hey, open source, everybody can just kind of contribute. It's not. It's a real company. That's exactly why I never got into it. And my friend was always like, just dude, set up a Plex server, you know, because I've got like literally in my bed, in my bedroom, in the closet, I've got like a shit ton of

Mac minis because we used to do like our shows were always like what we call mix minus. So I had all these Mac minis that were Skype machines and now we don't have to do that. So I have all these Mac minis and like I can set up a Plex server on a Mac mini with a like an SSD or a external USB and just have my entire media archive for all my family movies and all that stuff in, you know, I can do that in like two hours.

It's great. So what I love about Plex is that I thought, why would I ever need a private Netflix? Because I freaking have Netflix, people. Because when you have a kid, that's why you need it.

Well, maybe that. And also, Jen loves watching the show called Grand Designs. Have you heard of this? Oh God, this fucking show. Have you heard of this? We were trying to record an episode this week and you're like, I've got BitTorrent going, I'm getting Grand Designed.

I'm just like, I can't hear you because you sound like a robot. Yeah, it's this UK show that got franchised out to Australia. It's about people who build houses. I don't know how to explain this without making it sound so boring.

But basically, imagine you're rebuilding your house or you're building a new house and you live in a farm this really amazing, by the way, TV show host, whether it's the Australian version or the UK version goes to you and it's like, all right, Jason is a producer for the show and he really wants open spaces.

But they have to be acoustically perfect because he's recording a lot of audio. So we can't have a lot of windows, but we need a lot of sunlight. How are we going to solve this problem? And then they go through the whole construction process of this. They talk about all the mistakes and how much it's going to cost and da, da, da.

And my wife loves this shit so much. She cannot get enough. So she watched everything that was commercially available in America, everything. Then they released a new season on Netflix. She's like, I'm going to devour this. Of course, she went through it in like, you know, four days.

So I look online. There are like 18 seasons of this show that are not available to stream in the United States. So I'm thinking, why is it? But you go to Sweden. You go to Sweden. Well, so I go to Sweden, yeah. Or I go to, you know, IP Torrents or whatever. Well, that is Sweden.

Is that also Sweden? Okay. So since you're new to the show and some people might not understand the reference to Sweden, the Pirate Bay came from Sweden. Right. And that is where the torrent economy started. So whenever Brian and I say we're going to Sweden, it's a torrent.

Gotcha. Okay. So we go to Sweden and I'm thinking, all right, so I can grab maybe something around 18 seasons of this between Australia and the UK, but I can't legit. Oh, yeah. 18?

This is the Anthony Bourdain of houses. Holy shit. Yeah. He's everywhere. That's incredible. They're doing a ton of this stuff. This is crazy. This is the no reservations of construction. Okay. So I grab all this.

God, why haven't they fixed my house yet then? Jesus. Yeah. You're slow on the uptake. But the thing is, these are amazing designs. It's really interesting. She loves it. And when they run out, she's like, oh, I'm kind of sad. It's over. Meanwhile, there's a billion episodes that she can't see because, I don't know, IP address or we don't have the right crappy O2 cable carrier from London.

So for people who wanted to figure out where they want to go, go to privateinternetaccess.com or go to GOG.show slash PIA. But even so, you still need a cable carrier in that locale to stream the shows if they're even available for streaming.

Well, that's what the VPN does. Yeah, yeah. You can actually. But you'd still have to have the carrier membership, right? Like, you can't just log into Comcast. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. Even if you're in America, Comcast doesn't have all our content for free. So you still have to have that. And I'm like, look, I will buy things from content creators.

I get it. I'm fine with that. Even though you and I, Jason, give away thousands of hours, dare I say, of content. Thousands of hours. On GOG and the Jordan Harbinger show. Fine. But I will still, I'll still buy a movie for five bucks.

I'll, fine. I'll, fine. You know, you know, here's the thing with Grumpy Old Geeks. Brian and I have always said this. If you give us an option to pay for it, we'll pay for it. Yeah. If you don't give us an option to pay for it. I'll steal that shit. Fucking steal it. Yeah. I will steal that shit. That's what we do.

So I couldn't find it to buy. So I'm like, fine, I'm going to just download it. I drop it into, I literally just copy the files to the folder. And Plex is like, here are the subtitles. Here's the image. Here's the season. I'm going to organize it by season. Nice.

I'm going to create the art for it. It's like, it's even better than, or as good as Netflix. Only it's straight up shit. I grabbed offline. So that's awesome on online. So I think it's an amazing program. It's or server server slash service.

And you can install the app on your iPhone or our iPad. And if you have a, I think it's called a Plex pass, which costs money, but the rest of it's free. Yeah, you got to pay for that. But even if you have a Plex pass, you can click sync and it'll be like, oh, are you going to be on a plane? Download this season or this episode of this show.

So it will, it'll store it on your phone and it'll save your spot. If you played it up to 48 minutes, like it's really nice. It's really, really nice. I will say that there's, there's a caveat to this because I, when the first time I installed Plex, it, it basically took all of my home movies and tried to match them to like commercial movies.

And that doesn't work. It doesn't work. There was, there was literally a, you know, a season of how do you learn how to shoot? And it was, it was, it was basement concerts from a, uh, a band called even in blackouts that, that Bob and I went to and it was, it, they, it tagged it as how to learn how to shoot a gun.

And I'm just like, what the fuck? Well, we know you're doing free time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it takes time, time stamps and does it, but yeah. So no news here. You're kind of a weirdo. Uh, that's not news.

Yeah. That's not news at all. Oh, uh, and in other news, here's one of the co-hosts of GOG shooting weapons slash. Yeah. You know what though? I feel like normal in normal cases, that's probably an upside. You're like, I don't know what this media file is.

And it's like, oh, it's the American season six, episode eight. And you're like, oh, cool. I'm so glad it got that. Yeah. And you're like, oh, I'm so annoyed that I thought that this was season one of me teaching my nephew how to shoot. How dare you?

Yeah. That's the reverse, the reverse angle. How dare you? Yeah. How dare you little sir? Oh man. So yeah. Plex. I think we've covered it. I think we, I think we have told the people, I think we have, I, I, yeah, that, that seal is dead.

So we are going to move on. And I would like to say, just by the way, the Synology that I have is the DS4-16J. Catchy, catchy name that's got there. The DS4-16J rolls right off the tongue. It does roll right off the tongue.

But the new one is the DS4-18J. Wow. Sounds so much more impressive. Wow. I know. It's so much more impressive. Dude, that's two integers higher. So I would definitely recommend checking out that one. I've got mine with four, four gigabyte Seagate drives in it.

And if I had to do it again, I would do it with four, eight gig drives. Because it's, since it is a network attached storage drive, it is kind of slow. So what I have now is I have three, eight terabyte USB drives that I cycle through using a carbon copy cloner to keep everything up to date.

So Jordan Harbinger doesn't lose any of his shows. That's right. Because he's like so good on the microphone. And I would just say, if you want to go with the Synology route, you should definitely get the newest one. And they're great.

They are fucking great. And now with the Plex integration, so good. Now, moving on from Plex. Well, wait. This is only $300. That's not bad. Well, that's without the drives. Oh, you got to put your own drives in there.

You got to put your own drives in. Now it all makes sense. So don't buy this unless you have a bunch of hard drives sitting around. You spend, you spend $300 on the enclosure, which is honestly a Linux server. That's all it is. It's a CPU. It's still not a bad deal.

Dude, it's fucking great. It's fucking great. I've been trying to get everybody I know to buy one. I've been trying to get you to buy one for a year. I don't need one. I got an iMac up in the fridge. Dude, they're fucking fantastic. Definitely get one. So the next thing I bought this week was, and because we love our Amazon titles, I bought the Anker Wireless Charger Key Certified Ultra Slim Wireless Charger for iPhone X.

I'm sorry, it's Qi Certified? That's a Chinese term. Oh, are you saying Qi? It's pronounced Qi. I thought it was Qi. Let's not split hairs. It's Qi, and no one's going to search for that. But it's pronounced Qi. And also, Qi is a bullshit term for a wireless standard that really doesn't matter.

It charges your iPhone and your Android. That's all you need to know. Okay. Well, Mr. Pedantic. Anker Wireless She Charger Ultra Slim Wireless Charger for iPhone X, iPhone 8, slash 8 plus, Samsung S9, S9 plus, S8, S8 plus, S7, Note 8 and more.

Power Port Wireless 5 Pad. And in parens, AC adapter, not included. Oh, give me a freaking break. It's a wireless charging pad where you lay your phone on it. It comes with a cable. The cable plugs into the pad, and the other end is a USB as exactly you're imagining it that plugs into either a power plug for that or a computer.

Exactly. Here's the deal. They could not have made that more confusing and annoying. That's ridiculous. Well, there's a little bit of the show that we love these pedantic, giant, like, Amazon titles. That's insane.

That's ridiculous. This is a really, really good one. So, what I did was I got two of these. I got them yesterday, and I fucking love them. Yeah, you like to lay your phone on that pad and have it go. And you're like, I didn't even have to plug it in.

That's it. That's it. You just set it down, and it goes. It just goes. It takes, like, three and a half hours to charge, like, to full capacity from zero. It's about half as fast, yeah. It's Anker. Anker is the company that figured out how to do, like, the voltage differentials to make it charge faster.

Yeah, they're good. So, if it's Anker, I love them. I'm a big fan of Anker. Their batteries, their plugs, everything they make is really good. It's really, really good. I have a bunch of stuff from them. I got a gift from my brother-in-law for Christmas from Anker, and I was like, I'm never going to use this.

And it's the thing I use more than anything I've ever got in my life. No, Anker is the best. Anker, like, seriously, anything they do. I've got, like, multiple USB ports around the house. And when I heard that this was out, okay, here's the deal.

This pad is $13. Yeah, good luck getting anything from Apple that's not a literal pen. Not an electronic pen, just a pen they had under the cash register. Yeah, no, just a pen. For less than $13. Good luck.

If I had to get another lightning cable, it would cost $28 for the same thing, for the same length. And then it breaks in a year. And this pad's not going anywhere. Yeah. So I now have these. I bought the first two.

I tried it out. And it was, I'm just like, so I put one in the kitchen, because when I'm in the kitchen, I'm cooking, so I can slap it down. And then I put one next to my nightstand, because I always have podcasts or audiobooks playing all night long, because I'm an insane person.

And it's fucking fantastic. It's fantastic. For $13? Yeah, you can't beat it. So I ordered two more. Yeah, you can't beat it. I will tell you, oh, by the way, it's A-N-K-E-R, not anchor like a boat. It's A-N-K-E-R, like an Indian guy's name.

And also, they have really good customer support. I've had a couple cables break where they're like, oh, this can take 5,000 twists. It's like their Kevlar line thing. And I had it for a year or two, and I went, eh, I'm doing the math here. It probably only took 2,000 to 3,000 twists, and it's just a little janky.

And they were like, no problem. They're like, look, we're just going to send you another one. You don't need to take a picture. You don't need to mail it back to us. You don't need to worry about that. Where do you live? And I went, oh, I live here. And they were like, great, it'll be there tomorrow. And I was like, wait, who are you?

Well, you're just taking my word for it. And then I bought another speed charger, which is a plug that plugs into the wall. And it has this thing called IQ, where it figures out how much your device is drawing. And it's like, we're going to supply that much. I have five of those around the house already.

So nice. They charge faster than anything. This plug also has a battery in it. So when you unplug it, if you leave it plugged into your phone, it'll still charge your phone like 75, 80% just based on the battery. I don't have that one.

I need that one. Oh, you need this, man. You need this. Okay, put that in the show notes because I need that one. Oh, man. I'll find it right now. It's really, really good. It's really good. It's new, and I think this is their best product. I really think it's like the speed chargers, except it also has a battery in it.

And it's smaller than your Apple power supply, if you have that. Wow. It just also has a battery in it. And it has two or three ports in it. So you can leave those things plugged in if they're not quite done, throw it in the backseat of your car on the way to the restaurant or whatever.

Yeah. And then when you get there, you're like, oh, my phone finished charging, finally. It's awesome. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. That's so cool. They get how people charge stuff. They do. And I feel that a million surveys from these guys, they really do understand the use case.

I love Anchor stuff. And these guys, I mean, they're just killing it all the time. So when I got these $13 charging pads, I'm like, this is amazing. And I just put my phone down, and it charged. So I have them all around my house right now.

I fucking love them. It's weird because you think we would be less impressed by things like this. But the thing is, a lot of the shit doesn't work, man. So when you got the cheap pads when they first came out, they were like $60. And these are $13.

They're $12.99. And I'm just like, oh, I'll give it a shot. And they're amazing. It's just work. You know, you just put your phone down, and it charges. It's slow compared to the lightning cable, but it works. Yeah, it's perfect for, like, the one at your desk where you kind of top off.

You're overnight where you're like, oh, I'm so tired. Why do I have to figure out how this goes? Because I'll tell you, when I'm sleepy, plugging the lightning thing in is a huge pain. I can't find it. I don't know where it goes. It's kind of like midnight sex. You're just like, where's the freaking opportunity here?

All right. I just want to lay down. So you set your phone on it. It's always in the same place. This is why I'm a long happy. Scotch is working. Yeah, the Scotch is working. But, like, you just put it down, and it's like, bring, and you're like, good.

My work here is done. Yeah. It's like your college. It's like your high school or college girlfriend. My work here is done. Bing, it made the noise. I'm out. I'm tapping out. I'm sleeping. And it's great. And it's $26. So quit crying. Oh, and the pad that you got is $13, not even $13.

Yeah, mine's $13. Mine's $13. And it's awesome. I have one next to my nightstand, or on my nightstand, because if I don't have voices coming from my phone, then the voices in my head take over. So I always have to have somebody talking.

And I wake up in the morning, and I'm at, like, 4%. The voices in your head, the ones that I like best. The mobile airbag may be coming to save your phone. This comes from The Verge. This is a student at Ehlen University in Germany.

Did you get a chance to look at this video? I didn't. Please tell me that when you drop it, it explodes a balloon around your phone. Pretty much. Pretty much. It puts out these little claws that have, like, you know, bouncy bits on them.

It is the coolest thing I've ever seen. This guy is going to be a gazillionaire. I guarantee you, right now, this guy is just, oh, God. The money that he's going to get from this thing, it puts out these, like, four little legs when it senses your phone is dropping, and it just bounces.

How does it know when the phone's dropping? Well, every phone has an accelerometer. It uses the accelerometer. Hold on. This video's in German. I'm going to listen to this. I love how he just says, this took a really long time for me to make by hand, and then I worked really hard, and it finally worked.

And they're like, let's caption this for English. So what I did was create a nice accelerometer program where it knows when the phone is falling, and it opens us up. Here's the only problem with this. You have to drop it at the exact appropriate height.

If you drop it too high, it doesn't work because they aren't strong enough. And if you drop it too low, they don't open in time. But it's still very impressive because there's a large window, and it's a case. Like, it's a legit case. Yeah. And then when you drop it, it's like, okay, one, two seconds, bang.

Open the. Open the pod bay door, Sal. Sort of open the pod bay. I'm sorry, Jordan. I can't do that. Crap. My phone. My screen's going to crack. Also, I do wonder, what's the max drop height? Because it looks like it'll open up, and then it will still crack.

Here's the deal. But most people only drop it from their hip. Yeah, true story. So three to four feet is the max drop height for most of the phone. So if it can handle max drop height three to four feet, that's fine. Who cares? I think it'll work from that. I mean, looking at it, it's metal edges that kind of explode out from the side of the case.

So if you want a case that costs more than your phone, go ahead and buy this. Just make sure that he pills it by hand, because there's none available for purchase. Well, you know, Tim Cook will buy him in about six minutes. So this will be in the iPhone X1.

Here's the Apple wingsuit for your phone. Drop it off the Empire State Building, and it'll end up in fucking Reno. And then you can pick it up. It's a wingsuit. It's a wingsuit for your phone. Just drive to Long Island, and you'll find your iPhone in one piece. And, like, some dude at a gas station is like, yeah, this just flew and landed on the roof, and I went and picked it up.

And then somebody like Travis Kalanick will be like, it's Uber, but where you find your iPhone, so they get a reward when they pick it up after the wingsuit opens. All right, I'm talking too much. Next. Closing shout outs. Jason, I really appreciate you having me on the show, man.

And, you know, as awesome as this opportunity is, I loved every minute of it. We went super long. I wish I could do this all the time. And the whole time, I can't stop thinking about Brian, who, by virtue of the fact that he's not here for a very specific reason, I'm able to have this opportunity.

My thoughts are with him and his family. He's exactly where he should be right now. And I just appreciate what you two have built. I appreciate him. I've talked to him a few times. And I can only imagine what this is like for him personally. And so, yeah, I'm thinking about him this whole time.

This is dedicated to him. As ornery as we were, this is all dedicated to him, as is the show itself. So, yeah, this was a fun opportunity to be here. And I'm thankful for that. I'm sorry about the circumstances in which it arose. But I understand why you two have done this for so long.

Because it's a hell of a lot of fun. And it's an honor to be in this position. I'd like to give a shout out to Jordan for doing the show with me. He's an extremely busy guy. And he took four hours out of his Saturday night to hang with me and do the show. When he heard Brian's dad had passed, he immediately volunteered to do the show.

He's such a stand-up guy. Such a stand-up guy. And it was a ton of fun. We had far too much fun, I might add. But you know what? That's what you got to do to get the show out. And, of course, to Brian and his family. I can't imagine what they're going through. And I'm very sorry for their loss. And I'm very excited that Brian will be back with us all next week.

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