270: The Mean Cul-de-sacs

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Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Now, Brian, ranting is kind of our bread and butter around here, right? It's what we do best. It is. And now I have a bread and butter rant for you. Have you ever tried to buy a toaster on Amazon? I can't say that I have, no. I would recommend that if you do, you do not read the reviews.

I was trying to buy a toaster today because ours shit the bed. And I swear to God, there are people out there with micrometers and FLIR cameras finding the perfect piece of toast. And if it is not exactly perfect, one star. That's it. Nope. One star.

The people who say, yeah, it toasts the bread. Five stars. It's great. Whatever. I don't care. It's a toaster. What are you people talking about? Those are my heroes. Those people are heroes to me. But the people are just like, nope, nope. You got different pictures of the front and the backside and everything.

I'm just like, dude, it's a $19 toaster. What are you expecting? Nuclear fission? A lot of people have way too much time on their hands. Oh, my God. But I got a new toaster coming anyway. Good. I can't wait for your one star review. There we go. Yes. I got the new FLIR camera for my iPhone so I can make sure it is perfectly warmed on both sides.

Oh, my God. Some people. Some people. So one week on without Facebook and I haven't missed it a bit. It's like I took the bookmark out. Don't have to go there. Don't have to log into it with anything because it's not part of my day job anymore. I kind of like it.

I don't know. I would have. OK, maybe not part of your day job, but I certainly think part of this podcast would be at least on Facebook. Well, you do the socials. So there you go. No, I meant more of the experience of it. So then we can talk about it and crap on it.

Hmm. So there's really nothing that I get from going on Facebook anymore that that contributes to the show. Yeah. Yeah. I have some thoughts on that, actually, because I saw that you put this in there and I have not. I would say it was inspired by you, but it wasn't. So let's be honest. I just haven't.

I'm not that important. No, I haven't quit Facebook by any means, but there's just since since my dad passed and kind of dealing with all that sort of stuff, I haven't felt the desire to post much. Right. So so my involvement on social media has nosedived considerably over the last couple of weeks, and I don't really miss it much either.

I respond to other people's things when people write me. I respond to them. I'm still happy to see what my friends are up to, and if I have something to say about that, I'll do that. But I just haven't really posted myself much anymore, and I don't miss that very much, to be honest.

But I would miss Facebook. I don't have the issues with Facebook that so many people do, and we'll get into those in a minute. I just want I was trying to figure out why as I took my bike ride today, why Facebook didn't bother me as much as it seems to bother most people or as much as it seems to cause problems these days for our society, which it definitely does.

And I realize it's because I have such a walled off garden of my own Facebook. I have created my own little universe of people with very small exception. Dave Bittner would be one of them that I have only met in real life that I get along with, that I respect their opinions, that they're quite bright.

They're quite smart. I don't have an open profile. I use an ad blocker. I use what's that plugin that we all use? Facebook Purity. So I have a very I unfollowed basically every single brand on Facebook. I only follow news sources that are as impartial as impartial can be these days.

I don't get fake news. I don't see shitty ads. I don't see dumb people fighting. I have a very clean and enjoyable Facebook experience. You have a perfectly manicured. Yes. Curated. I've worked very hard to keep that experience the way I want to.

And sure, you can make an argument that I'm just in my own little bubble. But it's a fucking nice bubble. Yeah, it's like, hey, you know, it's my house. Yeah, it's my house. And I don't want assholes here. I keep it the way I want it. And to me, it's it's continued to be a very enjoyable experience.

But I understand why it's not for other people. And we've got some articles to talk about about that. So before we get into those articles, that's what I was thinking about this morning as well. It's like all of this communication is like I've been saying this for a long time on the show that I think that we have way too much communication.

The fact that everybody can talk to everybody else. Yeah, that's a problem. It can be a problem. The fact that there's 150 different reviews on a toaster. It tells me. Oh, no, no, no. Too much communication. I hate to break it to you. There were over 1,600 reviews on this toaster that I bought. Gotcha. 1,600.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. And you remember Path a long time ago where it limited your social networks to 50 people? You know, now I think that was a little bit extreme low. I mean, they should have they should have gone to Dunbar's number and gotten it to at least like 150.

Yeah. But I think that if I was king of the world, I would federally mandate that no social network can have a group of gatherings. Larger than 150 people. You can join multiple groups, but no one group can be larger than 150 people.

So everybody can get to know each other and hear each other. Once you get past Dunbar's number, things fall apart. Okay. I mean, that's just my thinking. Yeah. And I think, I mean, how many friends do you have on Facebook? You, Mr. Popular, probably like 500, but. I'm under, I'm like four.

I'm always around like 480 or 490. Okay. I was at around 250 and that was even too much because I'm like, there's some dicks in here. I gotta, I gotta, you know, weed the dicks out. But then I'm just like, yeah, why screw it? Unfollow is a wonderful feature. It really kind of is.

Yeah. I wish, I wish that, you know, shadow ban was just built into everything. I mean, I guess you can mute on Facebook. You just mute somebody and you don't hear it. And you still. No, you like literally, you unfollow them. You're still friends with them, but you unfollow them. You don't see their updates in your timeline. There are some people that for political reasons, I didn't feel I could unfriend, but I've certainly unfollowed.

And again, like I said, I have a very manicured Facebook experience. I've been enjoying Twitter again, though. I've noticed. It's nice. I can say if, because on Twitter, I can just say whatever the hell I want. And it's fine. It's public. Everybody knows about it and they know I'm a dick.

So I just run with it. It's fun. Well, some people have not had that experience on Twitter this week. I don't even think that made our news because we weren't the New York Times. A new hire for the editorial has gotten in a lot of trouble for old sarcastic tweets. But you also do what I do, which is we delete all our old tweets.

Yep. As I've we've got a new story about that coming right up. So let's move into some follow up. All right. Let's talk about Facebook. Facebook is having a no good, very bad week. Sort of. Their stock tanked, which meant I broke my rule.

I said I would never own Facebook stock. But when a company that is best in show in the entire universe and is the number one social media network out there loses 20 percent of its value in one day, you buy, buy, buy, buy. And I did. And it is coming back up. So that was very good for me.

I will sell it eventually because for long reasons, I don't think Facebook will be here forever. And I don't think that their team is smart enough to pivot the way that they need to pivot. So it's a temporary hold. But I've made a little bit of money already. So that's all right. But let's talk about the problems that they're continuing to have. Now, the first article I found was a really good one is don't fear fake accounts on Facebook, fear Facebook itself.

And it's basically a response to Facebook removing a very small amount of fake accounts and different accounts that they've saw that were already trying to hack the next election cycle. It's like 32 is like some ridiculously stupid line number. Yeah. And what they're saying is really unless they open themselves up to letting outside people look in who moderates the moderators is what this article is saying.

And they're saying that they're not letting anybody. We're trusting them when we know that we can't trust them to give us their own reports about what's going on. We know that Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA, are deeply involved in going through Facebook and data harvesting as well, which Facebook claims to care about so deeply.

But they aren't stopping. And they're not going to stop because at the end of the day, it's their bottom line is to deliver maximum profit for its shareholders. And we have no reason to trust them. And we don't even know what they are anymore. And we should worry about that because they are one of the biggest companies in the world and certainly one of the most influential.

So there's that. New York Times article about the expensive education of Mark Zuckerberg in Silicon Valley, which is great. Again, this gets into it about how these things have weaponized communication, which is what you were just talking about. They've weaponized digital communication. They have skewed things so far to the left or the right or yes or no or black or white.

There's no middle ground anymore. There's no decent conversation. And this works for them. This works for them perfectly because it makes the money. It gets the views. It gets the clicks going. And now it makes you money because you're a shareholder. Yeah, well, I'm part of the problem, I suppose, right? So this article gets into that how they've mutated human communication, connecting people is too much about pitting them against each other now and turbocharging that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume works for them.

I like the little thing that he said at the end. He did a the author of this article did a Q&A at YouTube. And one staffer told him that jobs are that used to be about wrangling cat videos have now degenerated into a daily hell of ethics debates about the fate of humanity. And I would argue that you may be having those debates, but you guys aren't doing shit about it.

Yeah, debate all you want to actually get off your ass and do something. Yep. A little Chris Hardwick follow up. He is going back to America's Got Talent as a guest judge, which is still a show. Unfortunately, yes. I used to watch it. And when the Hoff was on, because it's the Hoff.

I mean, you got to watch it with the Hoff. But yeah, it's a terrible show. But he's also going back to the wall. So that that basically rounds up everything that we've talked about in the past. Is NBC going to bring him back? Apparently so. Well, and James Gunn, also in the news for getting booted from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise over some old, really bad jokes from like 10 years ago.

Jim Jeffries did a great bit on his show about it this week. And the entire cast of Guardians of the Galaxy says, bring him back. It's fucking stupid. It's not at Disney. There's this PC, you know, war on just everything needs to stop. So I don't know if he's back yet.

As of this morning, he wasn't. I couldn't find anything of it if he was coming back. But yeah, you tell a few bad jokes and then you're off of your multi gazillion dollar franchise because some prude at Disney says, no, we don't like that. Yeah, it's it's a problem. It definitely is a problem.

We would be remiss if we didn't talk about Bird and electric scooters. The L.A. Times has an article called City's Crackdown on Electric Scooters. Scofflers, scufflers, trying to untangle the chaos of a new technology. This is a good getting you up to speed article. If you are new to the show and haven't heard us ranting about these things for months, I would make an argument with the headline, though, that this is hardly a new technology.

Scooters have been around for fucking ever. Right. Yeah. It's just they've been, you know, dumped on us by the boatload. Yeah. And, you know, before I mean, go back to the Razor days. I hated Razor scooters so damn much. But yeah, this now they just put a motor on it and it's a thing.

And look, it's got an app. So now it's changing the world. And then we had breaking news here in Venice just down the street. In fact, a good friend of mine posted on Facebook while this was occurring, which is how I found out about it. And then I found out more stuff on Twitter. Apparently, an entire house burned down in Venice the other night because they had about 20 or 30 of these Bird and Lime scooters charging in the house.

And what happens when you buy really cheap Chinese products? With crappy batteries. And then you put a whole bunch of them on creaky old AC. Yeah. In our third world infrastructure. Yes. Oh, man. So I did a did a search. I was trying to find something to back up the this claim that you had to see if I could find any articles about it.

And I couldn't. But in in doing so, I did a Google search for scooter charging fire. And just go look at it. It's going to be updated since since I looked at it. But yes, there are many of these scooters that are exploding when you try and charge them.

Hoverboard 2.0. Anyone? Except they're everywhere. And you're everybody's bringing them into their own houses. Yeah. I mean, have fun with that. Exactly. Let's take what's possibly a damaged lithium ion battery and plug it in and then go to sleep. What could go wrong?

Well, there's a link in our show notes that has a video of what exactly will go wrong. Yeah. That was a crazy fire. I wasn't able to find an actual news article itself on it yet either. I'm sure one will be coming. I just have the couple of different Twitter threads of people that were watching at the time and then interviews and blah, blah, blah.

So, OK, OK, I'm sure something man on the street. Yes. Man on the street type stuff. Now, we have talked a lot about 23andMe and the other DNA testing companies. Well, what did we say was going to happen, Jason?

Oh, that they were going to take our data and sell it and sell it to insurance companies. And then we weren't going to be able to get insured. And then it was going to be a bigger divide of the classes because the healthy people, we said so much about it. I don't even know where to start, man. What did 23andMe do this week, Jason? They raised $300 million from a drug giant.

I say a Doug giant. Yes. So it is happening. It started already. So GlaxoSmithKline has announced it has acquired a $300 million stake in 23andMe. Of course, that is to get at the data. Now, there's lots of language in here about how there's going to be anonymization, blah, blah, blah.

And as we all know, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. There's no such thing. The nice part about this article over at Business Insider is it goes through the process of deleting your or removing your samples and DNA data from the databases maintained by 23andMe, Ancestry, and another company called Helix.

It is a tricky process for all of them. But if you have done this, I would suggest you look into it. I just don't give a shit anymore. I know you don't. I really don't. I'm uninsurable anyway, so who cares? And The Verge is reporting that these companies are slowly coming around to the backlash that is occurring.

Like, all of a sudden, they're like, huh, people don't like the idea that we're going to sell their DNA data without their consent. So now they're coming up with some new promises that they're not going to do this. And there needs to be expressed consent from customers before transferring their genetic data to third parties. The problem here with that, though, is this deal that they made with GlaxoSmithKline when they are partial owners means they're no longer a third party.

Are they? Exactly. Yeah, well, there's the workaround. Yep. Remember how AT&T can't give the NSA or the CIA your data without a court order? But they can sell it to them. Yes, they can. You know, this is just another workaround to get your data to somebody else.

And, you know, for me, I'm just like, eh, maybe they'll come up with a drug that can fix me. Who knows? I'm not too worried about it, honestly. But, you know, when they when we get to Gattaca territory, call me. But for now, I'm like, maybe they'll come up with some decent drugs. I'm going to try and be I'm going to try and be optimistic about this.

Honestly, you go for that. I am not. And I don't think our listeners are either. A couple sent in some articles. Beta Bucket sent a CNN report. Oh, why 23andMe's new venture scares me. And they said other people are noticing the smarminess of 23andMe. Wait for them to patent someone's DNA because it has a marker that the next Viagra is based on.

Yeah, that'll probably try to happen. Rob sent us. This sounds nice and scary. I know you guys have brought up this exact thing happening with insurance companies. And it's another link to the idea that the drug company just bought out a huge stake in 23andMe. So, yes, the TLDR on that entire article.

Should you be concerned? Yes. Yes, you should. Now, I'm going to I'm going to read you a headline that breaks Betteridge's law. This comes from the next web. It's an open thread. Should Twitter users automatically delete old tweets? The answer to this is yes. Yes.

I've only been saying it for 10 fucking years. If that was if that would have happened, James Gunn wouldn't be having any problems. If that would have happened, Sarah Zhang in The New York Times, who we haven't talked about on the show, but just Google it. It's all over the place. Wouldn't be having any problems. I would argue they shouldn't be having any problems anyways because they're fucking jokes.

But yeah, it is what it is. No. Yeah. And obviously in the article, they give you a link to how to do that, how to get rid of your tweets. And it's the same service that we've talked about on the show before. And it's the one that I use. So that's why I only have about 100 tweets in there.

And I've only been on there for since, oh, I don't know, the day they started. So I use it as well. So we both use it. Highly recommended. Now, movie pass. Oh, movie pass. What could possibly go wrong with the business model, Jason?

I mean, we were talking about it last week, and I didn't mention it on the show, but a friend of the show, Chen, was like, I can't buy my movie ticket. What's going on? Because it was broken when we were recording the show. That's when they had their big, oh, we can't pay anything. So we're just turning off the service.

Well, it's been up and down. They raised a few bucks here and there, but they're going to raise their subscription price. Oh, big surprise there. I give these guys six more months and you will never hear from them again. No, because you can't just raise your prices like that, because then you alienate all the people that bought in at the price that they were at.

So they're just going to lose people left, right and center. And you know how I know this isn't going to work at all? Because you've run a subscription service on the Internet. You know that you can never raise the fucking price. Yes, I know you can't raise the price. I mean, just the movie pass itself is not going to make it. They're going to crash and burn.

I know this because somebody named Eric, the accountant, sent us some articles that they aren't going to make it. And if his name is Eric, the accountant, he must know. He must be smarter than we are. Yes, he's an accountant. He knows they're not going to make it. So I haven't been watching John Oliver's show very much lately.

I watch it because I feel like I need to. But it's sadness porn. Well, that's the thing. And if you break down the formula of the show, you know exactly how the show is going to go every week. You just wait to see what the topic is going to be. And then you can just kind of script it out. It is so formulaic at this point that I'm just like, I just don't care.

So I saw this thing on The Verge, though. John Oliver fixes Facebook's apology ad to remind you that the company still doesn't care about you. Now, it's not the bit of the show that I'm actually going to talk about here. It's the fact that when I went to The Verge, I had to go to a video that they embedded that wasn't from HBO.

It wasn't from the show. It wasn't from last week tonight. It was from some dude. And OK. And the way that some dude did his video, he did it in two parts. So the punchline at the very end, you had to go to the next video. So he got more views so he could monetize better.

And I'm like, I just thought it was very irresponsible for The Verge to link to said video from somebody who just didn't give any fucks about the actual content in it. And it bothered me. It bothered me that this news organization would just have to go and find something to link to.

I'd be like, yeah, well, we'd like to link to the video, but there is no official video up yet. So when it comes out, we'll link to it. But for now, go get HBO and then have an affiliate code to go buy HBO and watch the video. That's how you should make money. That's just my two cents.

It just really annoyed me for some reason. Understood. This episode is sponsored in part by Privacy. Privacy is the first payments product that keeps your personal information private while being even more convenient than using a regular credit card online.

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We've talked a lot about the gig economy, and I've railed about it and said, isn't the idea that we're supposed to have one job that helps us pay for everything? Apparently, that's gone out the window. So funny. So funny. The real issue here is the U.S. government doesn't even know how big the gig economy is.

By some measures, more than half of the American workforce could be participating in the gig economy within the next decade. As more Americans take unemployment from the likes of Uber and Airbnb, this type of work is becoming integral to Americans' livelihoods, and the importance of tracking it increases. But the size and scope of the gig economy is difficult to measure.

The government actually really can't do it, and that gets into a number of different reasons and different studies in this article. But the sentence that really bummed me out, the paragraph that made me kind of weep a little bit into my whiskey last night. The idea that a primary job will pay for most expenses and can be relied on is no longer the case for working Americans, says Louise Hyman, director of Cornell's Future of Work project and a co-director of the Gig Economy Data Hub, a resource that pulls together and clarifies the various studies on the gig economy.

Well, Brian, I have a question for you about that. You have never had a primary job. You've always been an entrepreneur and ran your own company. So why does that bother you so much? Because the vast majority of Americans have typically done that. My wife does that. She has a job that pays all her bills, and that's that.

And to be honest, I mean, I don't know if that's a fair comparison. I started my own business. So, yeah, I took on a bunch of different people, but it was one business that I was running. I wasn't doing side hustles. I just had my business. But you didn't have a job. You were the job giver. You were the creator of jobs.

Yes, I was a creator of jobs, in which I hired like maybe 10 people. You hired me once or twice. That's true. Yeah, cheap motherfucker. But it's funny because I'm thinking through my head right now. I'm just like, how many people do I know that actually have jobs that go to work for a company?

And we're very self-selecting sample, though, Jason. Yeah, not many. We run in a pretty weird circle of people that do their own goddamn things, and it's all internet-based and all that sort of stuff. Now, you know, pull into middle America, into any town. Yeah.

Everybody there is doing, at least used to be doing, just a job. Right. So. No. I mean, I would say, though, it's like 65% of my friends are either entrepreneurs, have their own business, or just, you know, do side jobs to make ends meet, but, you know, 35% actually work for a company.

Right. So it's kind of interesting. But nobody, I know no one in my circle of friends that drives for Uber or Lyft. Me either. But, yeah. Yeah. And if you do, if they do, they just don't tell me because they know I'd rip them apart on the show or get them on as an interview.

That's true. Well, on the other side of things, as we're talking about how people can no longer get one job to make ends meet anymore, Apple is now worth $1 trillion. Woo! Pop the champagne. Yeah. It's perhaps a meaningless milestone, but humans do love big round numbers, and when Apple's share price hit $207.05 yesterday, it became the first U.S. public company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization.

Wow. $207. That's great. I bought it $118. I'm happy. Go. You go, Apple. Yeah. Again, we're part of the problem. I agree. Yeah. All three of my shares, you know. If I sold all of them, then I could buy one more share.

Yeah. That's about how much money I made off of it. Right. I have an article in here from the New York Times, and it's not really an article. It's a cool web graphic. Somebody did some really cool JavaScript, and it's Apple's value hit $1 trillion at Disney to Bank of America, and then you're halfway there.

That's crazy. Which is pretty fun. And it's a visual representation of all of these major companies, like in, you know, the S&P 500, and like what it takes to become one Apple. Right. Because think of it. A trillion dollars is $1,000,000,000,000. Yes. And a billion dollars is $1,000,000,000.

So it's an astronomical fucking sum of money. It's insane. It is an insane sum of money. Yeah. It should almost be criminal. And some would argue it is. Some would argue it is. So while we were all busy patting ourselves on the back yesterday for being shareholders in Apple and sticking with Apple and thinking that Apple's a good company, well, how did they get to that trillion?

Largely in part thanks to tax cuts and tax aversion schemes. Yeah, being dicks. Yeah, being dicks. That's the kind of hit. Earlier this year, Apple benefited from a huge tax cut from Congress. We talked about that on the show when it happened, allowing the company to pay 10.5% of taxes on foreign earnings versus 35%. So they saved, wait for it, $55 billion right there.

That's a good chunk towards the trillion. Yeah. And since then, Apple has been using its profits from the tax cut to buy back shares of its own stocks, a process that props up share prices, makes them go up, and generally benefits the company brass while doing fuck all for the actual workers, the ones that now have to go get side hustle gigs with Uber.

There's been a lot of talks about how these buyback schemes from companies are really screwing the workers. Yep, they totally are. And the fact that this is a trillion-dollar company just kind of makes you sick. Yeah, I read at least three or four articles this week on stock buyback programs because they have all this money now, thanks to, you know, Trumponomics.

And it's just kind of disgusting, even though I'm a shareholder, so I'm a dick. Yeah, we're part of the problem. And the article goes on, says, The other shoe that drops with this is Apple also owes its outrageous valuation to its expert tax avoidance schemes. The company scrolls away much of its money in the English island of Jersey, which has notoriously laxed taxation rules.

They've accumulated more than $128 billion in profits offshore, and probably much more that is untaxed by the United States and hardly touched by any other country. $128 billion. I wonder how much that is per square foot for the island of Jersey. If they don't own it outright, they probably should.

That should be Apple's next step is just buy themselves an island to base themselves on and say, We're kings of the world. We're getting island, mate. Oh, man. Yeah. So the funny thing about this is Apple is doing gangbusters. They're the biggest company in the world ever right now.

And as we've been talking about repeatedly over the past few years, Apple's products have gotten worse and worse. Their quality control is getting worse. Their laptops are getting rid of ports. Everything about them is actually getting worse. And we got a tweet from a retired mixer on Twitter about how Apple can no longer recover data from MacBooks if the logic board fails because they started pulling out the parts that let you save them.

Yeah. There's no port to actually plug into the SSD anymore since it's wired to the board. They can't actually just plug in any kind of data recovery cable to get the data off of it, which I actually found this article before and I sent it to a couple of people who were talking about getting the new MacBooks.

And I'm like, don't do not do it. Don't do it. No. And I'm in the process of transferring my entire recording studio here over to my Tron's Taint PC because, you know, once these MacBooks fail, they've already stopped, you know, making new ones.

So they're just selling remnant inventory now of the 2015 MacBook Pros. And I'm like, you know, I do work on my iMac, but I need two computers. I need a recording one and I need an editing one. And so for recording, it doesn't take much. But I'm like, I'm not going to get another Mac to do that because they're overpriced.

You know, I was kind of not joking three years ago when you finally convinced me to switch over to Mac that we'd both be back on PC in a little while. And I got to tell you, when it's time for me to get a new computer, I might go PC again because I don't like this path that they're going down. My biggest issue is finding really good audio software for the PC.

I mean, I love logic so much. And there's just so much you can do with a Mac with audio. It's fantastic. And everything is just a hack on a PC. But, you know, it's like no ports. If you ain't got no ports and you ain't got no money, it comes down to like just how much those things cost.

I'm going to be paying off that iMac for another three years. Yeah. So I can't get another one. It's crazy. Well, I know somebody you could hit up for some money. Who can I hit up for some money? Why don't you send an email to Jeff Bezos' parents? Papa Bezos' grandpippies. I love this story. It is kind of crazy.

So he had his parents invest nearly a quarter of a million dollars in Amazon in 1995. Be nice to have parents that could invest a quarter of a million dollars in your ventures, wouldn't it? He couldn't get $2.50 for money. Boy, he really must have bootstrapped himself up from nothing, Jason. This is another one of them American success stories. Jeff Bezos is self-made.

Right next to the Kardashians. Yeah. If your parents can give you a quarter of a million dollar investment, you are not a self-made man. Anyways, they did. And the theory now, nobody can actually see this. Nobody knows how much the stock the couple still owns. But if the analysis is correct and they kept all of their bits, they are worth $30 billion.

That's insane. Right? Talk about ROI. Yeah. Oh, my God. But I do love those self-made stories. I know. I mean, self-made man. He really brought himself up from nothing. The mean streets of wherever the hell rich place they grew up in. The mean streets of the cul-de-sac.

The mean cul-de-sac. I think we have a show title. So, right film sleeper Pete sent us this article on Twitter. Uber is ending its autonomous truck program to focus on self-driving cars. There are two things about this that I really enjoy. So, Uber blew $680 million on the truck developer auto, which lasted.

So, $340 million a year to just shutter it. Yep. Again, and everybody else has to go drive for Uber to make a living. But you can blow $340 million a year. The other part about this is just I love the way that the author of the story threw this line in there.

The company remains committed to further developing its self-driving car program, comma, which has only killed one pedestrian so far. So far. Oh, beautiful. Thank you. That is just the perfect amount of, like, fuck you to Uber in that one sentence.

Just twisting the knife a little bit. Just a little tossing it out. You've only killed one person so far. I almost fell off my chair laughing when I read that line. Here's the funny bit. If you actually look at how many people Uber drivers have killed, the number is, it actually works out in favor of the Uber's self-driving cars.

Self-driving cars. They've killed considerably less people. Also, self-driving cars haven't raped a single woman. I was just going to say, their rape stats are perfect. 0% raping from, yeah, the Uber self-driving car. 0% raping would also be a good show title, but I don't think we can go with that one.

No. No. And Uber and Lyft are currently fighting a very critical battle against New York City, and hopefully this time they may not win. This is according to Recode. So, once again, City is trying to propose some rules to these people so that they just can't do whatever the hell they want.

And this one would propose a 12-month freeze on new ride-hail cars while they do a study of how Uber, Lyft, and local competitors affect traffic congestion and livable wages. Now, Uber and Lyft are saying, well, we can't do that because that's not going to work out well for us, is it? No. Come on.

Why can we ever do that? They're fighting it as much as they can, including emailing all their customers to say, go, please say that our prices are going to go higher soon unless you guys stop the government from doing something. So, we'll see what happens, but the real fear here, obviously, for Uber and Lyft is if New York City wins and does get to put the caps on and stop their growth and do some studies, other cities are going to go, hey, we should probably do that.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now, I am taking up the banner of your artificial intelligence stories this week as well because you did your rundown two weeks ago and I've been keeping up with it. This one is, artificial intelligence can predict your personality by scanning your eyes.

Yeah. What could go wrong with this one? What could go wrong with this? So, 42. Okay. First off, the study only monitored 42 people. There are 42 human participants total where they monitored eye movements and then it went into this AI program which cross-checked findings with regular, here's my other problem, well-established questionnaires.

I was not aware of the fact that we had all signed off in the scientific community that we have a big five personality traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. That's science? Is that official? I've heard that before from, yeah, generally from life-coaching people.

Yeah, it's a life-coaching thing. It's not really full-on science and we don't have a science of personality. We don't, this is not official stuff. This is, you know, some people come up with it. There's some schools of psychology that think this is how we can break things down, but it's more goopy science than it's science.

Let's be honest. Goopy science. Yeah. So, anyways. Sadly, that is a thing now. I know. I can't go off on that rant right now. It'll take up the whole show. Yeah. So, anyways, supposedly the artificial intelligence was able to reliably identify four of the five.

It was able to do neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. It could not figure out openness somehow because I probably couldn't tell you exactly what openness is because nobody can. Right. Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. No problem. And then the next one I had is the UK wants to become the world leader in ethical AI.

Is there such a thing? Well, I think we'd have to define what that is first, but good on them. The UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, announced her country's goal to become a world leader in ethical AI, and they've unveiled the AI sector deal, a comprehensive policy that establishes a partnership between government, academia, and industry to address residents' and businesses' goals and concerns with respect to AI.

I like this idea. I like it. You know, they know they can't compete with the U.S. or China with AI funding and development, so they're going to do the, all right, well, we'll do the ethics aspect of it. Okay. Okay. Hopefully that works out. Give it a shot. Yep. We'll see what happens.

Yeah. I would just really like to see what the definition of ethics are in this day and age. Well, we took a class, Jason. Oh, yeah, you didn't finish. Yeah, no. I ethically bowed out because I was ethically bored of the class. It was a good class. I'm sorry that you didn't like it. We talked a little bit a couple of weeks back about how Amazon's got two different businesses, really.

They've got their hosting business, and then they've got their store. Well, they also have a third business, which is their video business, and they are launching on Comcast Xfinity X1 later this year. This is a big deal for Amazon. It's going to get their video out there a lot more than it ever had before because, let's be honest, right now it's a bit of a pain in the ass to watch anything on Amazon.

Yeah, yeah, it is. I just got another little Roku stick for my ancient non-smart TV so I could watch Amazon video. I think the biggest problem with Amazon Prime video is that there's nothing to watch. Yeah, they don't have a good show. Yeah.

They don't have anything good on there. They have a lot of foreign movies that I think I would have been really happy with back when I was 14 years old. Yeah. There's a lot of foreign movies with a lot of nudity. A lot of boobies, a lot of boobies. Yep. I think you can really kind of sum it up that they greenlit the Man in the High Castle for season three.

That right there should tell you that they are just scraping the bottom of the barrel. Yeah, and they even took the Top Gear guys and somehow managed to make them boring. I know, I know. Last season wasn't too bad except for that, I think it was the last episode that was just god-awful.

But I liked last season. I thought it was okay. They fixed a lot of it, but they still have Conversation Street, which is just the dumbest thing ever. Although, when you think about it, our entire show is just Conversation Street. We need to put some jazz music in the background.

Now, you had your AI stories, and now I have an AI story of my own. The team from Brazil's Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sol, it's basically a Catholic, you know, school.

Yeah. They have created an AI that will slap a bikini on your naughty bits. Oh, okay. Yes, yes, because this is what the world needs from AI. Nipples, nipple, like nipple stickers. That's basically what it is.

They've created nipple stickers. Well, that's unfortunate. It's going to put, like, most of the Philippines out of work now. I know. Because that's all they're doing is going through the sites and taking off pictures of nudity. I know. All of those armies of virtual assistants that are in the Philippines and everywhere else over there are just going to be out of a job.

So what are they going to do now? Right. Oh, God, yes. That saddens me. That saddens me that brains like that that can actually create something like that are actually using it for that purpose. Makes me sad. Now, this one I call bullshit on.

This comes from Quartz, who has been putting out some really kind of not great stuff lately. But this comes actually from Nielsen, the company that tests all the media and figures out who's watching what, when, where, why, and how. Yeah. They say U.S. adults are spending more than 11 hours a day on average, or about two-thirds of their waking time consuming media in some form.

11 hours. Now, I want you to think about that for a second, and you tell me how that is possible. It can't be working. I guess if you're just sitting in your Uber and watching things on your phone. I mean, it comes across as, like, almost impossible.

I don't see how, unless, again, you can't work. You can't have family. You can't have kids. You can't do anything. All you're doing, then, is watching media. Or listening, or you listen to this, that, and the other.

It's just like, it just seems like. I mean, I suppose if you really think about it, and if you push the rule, if you bend the rules, because, again, statistics, we can make anything that we want, right? Right, you know, yeah, their loophole is, on average, yeah. I can argue that the entire time, the time I'm at work, I'm listening to podcasts.

So, I'm consuming media for that eight to nine hours a day, right? You tell me the average McDonald's worker is spending 11 hours a day. There's radio on in the background. No, you cannot count Muzak. Well, that's the only way that I can see this working.

Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, the garbage guys out there, they're not listening to music while they're going, because I've talked to them. They don't have the radio on, because I try to get them to listen to our podcast. And they're like, we can't listen to anything. We're in and out of the truck all the time. No, I can't do that. So, I mean, there's a lot of people out there that actually have jobs, that actually do the jobs, and aren't sitting there, like, on the crapper watching YouTube all day.

So, I don't know what this average is. They must have found a town somewhere that had, like, people with, like, amazing insomnia, and just couldn't go to work and had the TV on all day. That's the only way that this math makes sense. Actually, I think I figured out who they did the whole study on.

It's one person, and it's the president. Oh, yeah. He's just sitting there watching Fox News all day. That's why every, yeah, that's why Fox News has gone through the roof. All right. Well, solve that problem. Yep. Let's see. This study kind of bummed me out, but this should probably fall in the no-shit Sherlock category.

Researchers are beginning to suspect that digital media may be spurring a rise in ADHD. We now have a diagnostic rate of almost one in every ten children, according to reports conducted by the CDC. That attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is one of the most common medical disorders in the United States.

Now, a lot of people have been studying it. It's been not known what's been causing it for certain, and a new study is definitely hinting that digital media is the culprit, which makes a lot of sense. Now, people who want to poo-poo this say, well, we've already done studies in the past on TV, viewing, and all that sort of thing, and it didn't cause it.

The difference is that digital media is a completely different beast. You can switch videos every two seconds. We had an entire platform that was dedicated to 30-second videos. That, in and of itself, is the very definition. Seven-second videos.

That is the definition of ADHD. Yeah. So, yeah, obviously, I have a kid now, so this kind of stuff is really important to me, so I'm keeping an eye on these kind of studies. All right. All right. Well, you haven't gotten a Sonos yet, have you?

No, I just don't need one right now. When I eventually get a bigger place and a bigger house and all that sort of stuff, I'll invest, but right now my Echoes kind of do the job. Yeah, the old Echoes are pretty good, but I also, like, I didn't have one for a while, but when I moved back into this place, my old Sonos system was waiting for me.

And I have a five-system Sonos one throughout the house. It's fantastic. And so I was really interested when I heard that, oh, Sonos is going to have an IPO this week. And I'm thinking, should I or shouldn't I? Should I or shouldn't I? Because, you know, IPOs recently have not had the best track record, but it turns out I should have.

Anyway. Okay. As part of their IPO, Sonos was asked to redesign the NASDAQ opening bell sound. Have you listened to it? I have. I think that it sounds like a three. It's like 3 a.m. In a crappy Atlantic City casino.

That's what it sounds like to me. Even though they've got Tibetan bowls and all this other crap going on, it's like, you know, hipsters made the sound. And it sounds like a it sounds like a slot machine paying off. This is this is this is one of the jobs I would have killed to have gotten. I know. Because look, I could have found a sound effect online for free.

That sounds exactly like that in about two minutes. But they probably spent months and they like they I have to go to Tibet to listen to the sound of the bell. And, you know, they must have spent so much money on this. And it sounds like shit. It does. It totally just sounds like it's a casino. OK, thank you.

At least I'm not alone on that. I mean, I didn't go to college for audio engineering. I'm not, you know, some kind of like, you know, like hipster woo woo guys like I need to know the exact tone. What's the frequency that the bells ring? No, it sounds like somebody dropped a bunch of quarters in a bowl.

That's really what it sounds like. But again, I would have loved to have been tasked with this gig here. Have one hundred million dollars and come up with a new sound. Yeah. So I recommend everybody go. Just go watch the video of them making the sound because at the very end, they're literally just dropping quarters in a bowl and recording it.

This episode is brought to you in part by Warby Parker. Not long ago, my glass is broken. Some of you may remember that I couldn't afford to replace them because they were just so incredibly overpriced. Almost like if somebody actually listened to the show. The next day, I got an email that Warby Parker was interested in sponsoring the show. So I tried out their free home try on program.

You order five pair of glasses and you try them on for five days. No obligation to buy. They ship to you for free and they include a prepaid return shipping label. Couldn't be easier. So I got my glasses and had a little try on party with a few of my friends and we picked out the best pair for me. Then I just sent them a photo of my prescription, picked out my lenses and coatings.

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The process is pretty seamless and it takes only a few seconds. So head to warbyparker.com slash GOG to order your free home try-ons today. That's W-A-R-B-Y Parker dot com slash GOG to get started. Ups and doodads! Brian, you know it's been a little warm here in Southern California, don't you?

Oh, it's been more than a little warm. Yeah, I mean, you're at the beach, so you've got the breeze. It's still pretty warm. Yeah. Here it's been, it got up to 107 in my office this week in the studio. So I haven't been able to use my stand-up desk very much, so I've been in the house. And I had a really crappy chair in the house that finally died.

Because out in the office I've got my uplift desk, which I love. I've got my lifespan standing treadmill, you know, thing going on here, which I actually had to, like, it was in storage and I pulled it out because it's too hot to walk outside. Chicago's too cold to walk outside and too rainy and crappy.

Here you can't go outside because you will melt. So I'm glad I have this thing, so I've been able to walk again. So my chair died and I had to go buy a new chair. Now we've talked on the show about the Herman Miller Mira 2 before. Yes. I had one when I moved. I had to sell it to pay for the move.

But I unfortunately can't afford something that nice anymore. So I went through Amazon, of course, and started searching for chairs. I'm like, oh, I need something with a high back and maybe a little lumbar support, whatever. And then I got into gaming chairs. Have you looked at some of these, like, silly-ass gaming chairs?

Yeah, they're ridiculous. So I got one that is so ridiculous that I don't know if this is going to work or not. It was $189. It's the FICMAX, ergonomic, high back, large size, office desk chair, swivel back, PC gaming chair with lumbar massage support and retractable footrest.

That's right. It's got a footrest. You can lay this thing all the way out and just lay back and game. I'm like, the only thing that I was looking for, I'm like, what's the max weight on this thing? Because most people, oh, there it is, 300 pounds. So I've got a ways to go before I blow it out.

But, yeah, I'm going to be reviewing this soon, but I just thought I would share my FICMAX ergonomic high back, large chair with you because it looks so damn silly. And in other news, I got a Samsung 4K monitor that's coming today because I've said I'm moving over to the PC.

And I've got a bunch of LG monitors that are like, you know, standard res. And when I go into the house, I'm working on a 5K monitor. And then I come out here and I'm like, oh, my God, I can see pixels. I see pixel people. So I got this new monitor.

It's coming today and I'll review it next week. But I was amazed at how cheap these things are getting now. I know. I might have to update my monitor situation shortly. Yeah. I got a 28 inch for 250, which is. That's nothing. Yeah. Basically, well, it's something. I mean, it's most of my car payment, but it's better than these LG monitors that I have.

Because the problem with these is I don't know if it was the move or whatnot, but they don't get very bright. And I need it to be bright and sharp because then because if it's not bright or like if you can't if you're looking at this thing all day and you're like getting eye fatigue from it, you're tiring yourself out. So it's a decent investment to pay for a decent monitor.

So I pulled the trigger on that. So I'll let you know next week how they are and if you should pick one up. I wanted to get one of those really cool, big curved ones like you see on all the hacker movies and shit like that. But those were ridiculous. Those were like 700 bucks. I'm like, ain't nobody got cash for that.

No. I did sign up for M1 Finance, by the way. Oh, good. Three days in, I'm up $1.40. That's right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Pour that mirror chair in no time. No time. Only 17 years. And this last one comes from TechCrunch.

I found Naked Labs raises $14 million. $14 million. Yep. For a 3D body scanning mirror. Now, I put this in here because a while back, I used to run a little segment on the show called Instascam.

Yeah. And on Instascam, there was like a $700 scale with a little arm that came out and it would swivel around you and make a 3D scan of you. So, for only twice as much, you basically get what looks like a Roomba that you stand on and it spins you in a circle in front of a mirror.

And I don't know why it has to be a mirror because most of the time, if you're looking forward, you're not looking at the mirror. I don't think these people know how that works. It spins you around and you're not really looking at the mirror. So, why did they have to put it into a mirror?

But anyway, so the thing about this is I saw this article come through. I'm like, ah, it's stupid. I'm not going to put it in the show, even though it always makes me happy to see people spending too much money on stupid shit. I went and I watched the video for this at NakedLabs.com.

And, well, A, nobody was naked. That's fine because it was a dude. I'm fine with that. But the thing about it is the guy that they start off with, like, it's this tale of woe of this guy who's really just trying to make it in the world and make something of himself.

He's trying to get fit. And, you know, like, he's pushing through. He can't make his high jumps. You know, he's all this stuff. And, did you watch this video, Brian? Yeah, I don't know why you made me, but I did. This guy is like a fitness model to start with.

Oh, yeah. He's perfect. It's like, you know, you would need somebody like me to start off this video. And then you end with that guy. That's not how marketing works, guys. You don't show the buff guy first. You show the fat guy first.

Yeah, the guy's in absolute perfect shape when he gets this thing out of the box. He's an Adonis when he walks in. He's just like, oh, man, I can't make my jumps. I can't lift the weights. Oh, my God. Oh, I've only got, you know, eight muscles on my tummy. What am I going to do? It's so fucking ridiculous that I just I had to put it in here.

So this is all for the video. Everybody has to go watch the video. Okay. I you don't have to go watch the video. I feel like I need 10 minutes of my life back for four minutes. All right. So I found we talk a lot about workflow on the show and specifically how we deal with our workflow for for making the show even.

And you and I both used Instapaper for quite a long time. Long ago. There is a new thing called Mailist, which is Instapaper for email addicts. I kind of like this idea. It's a it's a free extension for Chrome and Firefox that collects your unread bookmarks and emails them back to you once a week.

So it's a little bit more efficient than Instapaper. At least it would be for me because that just collects articles and I have to remember to go back to it later and then look at it in the text only format. But this is just a pops up right in the middle of my workflow. I will just get an email and then all my articles are right there. But then I can just pop into our show notes.

Okay. I can't. There's two reasons I can't abide by this. One. Okay. You know how much cannot abide. The dude cannot abide. You know how much I fucking love Nick Douglas. And so you keep putting articles by Nick Douglas in here. So I just I cannot cannot stand that.

But I like Pinboard. Pinboard does the same thing and it's in an app and I can read it on my iPad. No problem. I want less email. I do not want more email. That's the only thing. I mean I spent hours last week just trying to get to inbox zero and I did it. And then I woke up the next morning and I have another 130 to go through.

I'm like it just doesn't end. So more email is not what I'm looking for. I mean if that's if that's where you do the bulk of your work. Oh it works for me. It totally works for me. Yeah. So that's why we put it in here to let people have their options. They can have their options. I recommend Pinboard. That is that is where I go.

It costs like 13 bucks a year. So it's cheap. You can mark everything for read later. It's got little bookmarklets. And then it doesn't it doesn't actually gum up your bookmarks in your browser. So because I never bookmark anything in my browser anymore. I always have a service for that.

But yeah. Yeah. If you like supporting that little douchebag Nick Douglas then Mailist is for you. It's too hard to keep track of all the people you hate Jason. No it's not. Everybody. I just hate everybody. You make me a pinboard of the people that you hate. Can I get you a Gantt chart?

Maybe I'll put it on your action items list. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. Maybe I'll put it on your phone. We now know what's going to happen with the, with whatever Anthony Bourdain was shooting at the time that he unfortunately passed away.

So we've got confirmation that there will be a seven episode season that will come fall of this year. And it will include at least five episodes that are in the show's traditional style, as it were. Unfortunately, only one is complete. One was completed before his death. He went to Kenya with Camus Bell, the host of CNN's United Shades of America.

And that has the, that will be the last episode that we have that includes his full written narrative, fortunately. Okay. So we're going to get four more episodes that were done, done, uh, in terms of they were completely shot, uh, one in New York city's lower East side, Big Ben, Texas, the Asturias region of Spain and Indonesia.

And these will be completed by the directors and we use audio that was compiled during filming from Bourdain, but they will have follow-up interviews and other things like that, of that nature to, to kind of fill out the episodes. And then the last two episodes details are still being ironed out. One will be cast and crew reflecting most likely.

And the last one will be a tribute, which we kind of already had. Yeah. That's just do another one. Yeah. It's like, okay, I thought we did that already, but, uh, I thought we did that already, but, uh, we'll see what happens. So at least we're getting something. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's fine. Um, I, I read a media re-deaf every day.

It's a, one of the email newsletters I get that gums up my goddamn inbox. But, um, the guy over there did a really nice segment where they took all of the articles that they've written over there about Bourdain and other articles, and it's called Remembering Anthony Bourdain, the chef of curiosity.

So there's a link in that. And it's a, it's a bunch of really good articles. If you want to go back and buy a couple of boxes of tissues and, um, really ruin your day. So that's about it. If you, if you, if you're looking for some sadness, go check out Remembering Anthony Bourdain. There you go.

Now I probably should have spent more time of my small amounts of free time this last week reading, but I didn't cause I've been brain dead. So I've watched stupid movies, a couple of them anyways. Uh, I watched the Cloverfield paradox. I don't know why. Yeah. Actually, I will say I thought the movie itself was pretty good.

If it was just the first say hour and 20 minutes of it, that was basically just a, we're on a spaceship and we're having a disaster movie and it was well acted and quite funny. The problem is the last 10 minutes when they tried to shoehorn this into the Cloverfield universe, which doesn't make any sense to me anymore.

No. Yeah. It was, this was a bad movie too. This was just a hour and 20 minutes was fine. There was no mention of anything about Cloverfield related. Nothing. It was just on a spaceship and shit was going wrong. So this movie kind of in the beginning reminded me of event horizon. Oh, I vaguely remember that movie.

Yeah. It was a, it is an okay movie with Sam Neill. I worked on that one. So I kind of, kind of remember it, but that's the only one where I actually have, I have a letter that was faxed to me from the director from Paul Anderson that said, Hey, you guys did a great job on the website.

The only director out of like a hundred movies I worked on that actually said, Hey, you guys guys did a really good job. Thanks. So I remember that, but it was very reminiscent of event horizon with just, you know, spooky shit going on in space. And right. But yeah, yeah.

Shoehorning it into the Cloverfield thing. And apparently this had like a ton of reshoots. There was a lot of drama around it because it was supposed to be like a theatrical release and it wasn't. And Netflix came in and bought it and there's a lot of controversy around this movie. And it just turns out that it sucked. Yeah.

It was okay. Look, it was late at night. I was bored and I had wine. I was going to say, you were probably drunk. Not drunk on an airplane type review, but close. Okay. Okay. Something else I started watching this week. There's a sci-fi show called dark matter that Netflix now has. I guess it originally was on some other network or station.

There's only three seasons, I believe. And then it did stop. I'm like four episodes in. It's decent. I mean, it's filling the gap until we get more expanse. Okay. Well, when you get to the end of season three, let me know what you think, because I'm going to take, I'm going to take the Brian paradox here.

Yeah. So you tell me if it's any good, because Mr. I like to quit a show after, you know, two episodes. So, so far, so good. You know, if you're looking for something to do, watch at least the pilot. Why not? Okay. One thing that you should never watch, no matter what, is Rampage with Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

Done and done and didn't even need you to tell me that. I, I was never going to happen anyways. I too had some wine the other night and I just happened to have an illicit copy in HD and I'm like, ah, what's, what's the harm of it?

You know, I kind of like the Jumanji movie. That wasn't too, too terrible. And then I'm like, ah, let's give it a shot. Oh, my brain, my brain. I want my brain back. I want my time back. I want my bandwidth back. I want everything back. And I want Dwayne the Rock Johnson to suffer for making this movie.

You know the one thing that you can't ask for back though, Jason? What? Your money. Ah, that's true. That's true. You can't ask for your money back because you spent none. Well, I spend it on bandwidth. That's for damn sure. Anyway. So yeah, Rampage. Total piece of monkey poo.

Monkey poo, wolf poo, and crocodile poo. All in one. All in one. Yeah. I did watch a documentary called G-Funk, which was pretty good. It's mostly about Warren G, but it's got a lot of that whole crew, Ice-T, Snoop, and all that stuff in it.

Really good documentary. I highly recommend this one. Cool. I actually have heard about it, so it's good to hear it's good. I will watch it. Yeah, yeah. No, I really enjoyed this one. We popped it on the other day and we're just like, have we seen this one? You know, because there's a lot of hip-hop documentaries coming out there, but this is a newer one and it came out last year, but won a couple of awards too.

I highly recommend this one because I'm not a hip-hop guy. I'm not a rap guy, but I love the story behind it. So I recommend G-Funk when you see it come out on the services where you can buy. Cool. And as everybody that listens to this show knows, we are huge fans of Dan Carlin and Hardcore History.

Somehow, I don't think we've ever talked about it. Well, common sense he just doesn't do anymore because, as he points out, there is no common sense in politics anymore. July 14th is when this dropped, Hardcore History 62, Supernova in the East, Part 1. I'm just getting around to listening to it now and it is, as per usual, absolutely amazing.

That's pretty good. It's funny, the story at the beginning, I've heard like on three other podcasts when it first started, so I'm like, am I hearing a rerun? I'm so confused. I'm so confused. Like everybody found the same story at the same time because there's so many podcasts now. Everybody's, everybody's Googling everything, trying to find something to talk about.

Right. And I ran across a fun little series that Vanity Fair is doing. I actually ran across this because my wife sent me the first one. Will Arnett teaches you Canadian slang. Okay. It's very funny. And then I watched a couple more.

The other one I can highly recommend is Henry Cavill and Simon Pegg teach you English slang. That one was really good. Now, Vanity Fair has done a whole series of these. But those two are my favorites so far. There's quite a few of them. So, well done, Vanity Fair. That's some good digital content they put together there. It is. I watched the Henry Cavill and Simon Pegg one and I loved it.

And I didn't know Henry Cavill was actually British. I didn't either. I had no idea. I mean, I know he's had digitally removed mustaches, but I had no idea he was British. I mean, I loved his Superman movie. I thought his Superman movie should have gone to like, you know, 10 episodes.

But I just had no idea he was British. And British are taking all of our acting jobs. And even Simon Pegg in Ready Player One had an American accent. What the fuck was up with that? Well, that's what they do. Yeah, I know. You can only have an English accent if you're in a period piece drama or you're an evil guy on a spaceship.

Yeah, that's kind of it. Or in Rome. Or in Rome. Or that. So, this one's for you. Han Solo's coat is going up for auction, which means we need a lot more Patreon subscribers. We need some Patreon subscribers because that is $1.3 million.

$2.3 million is what it's expected to get. Indiana Jones' original fedora, about $397,000. Either one of those I would take and put on my shelf. The original Jumanji game board is only $13,000, which is probably $12,999 too much.

And Edward Scissorhands costume, about $100,000. And Marty McFly's hoverboard, $66,000. That's what they're expecting to get. You know the big surprise about the Edward Scissorhands costume? What? It's entirely filled with scarves. I just read a really good article on Rolling Stone about Johnny Depp.

That guy's a loon. That guy is a total loon. He's fucking crazy. Yep. And broke. Well, it's all those scarves he keeps buying. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Dave Bittner from the Cyber Wire podcast.

The Cyber Wire is a free, community-driven cybersecurity news service based in Maryland. I'm sorry, Dave. Dave is also the co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast, along with Joe Kerrigan, where they take on social engineering. I've been to Maryland. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, Maryland is a lovely state.

Maryland is America in miniature. We have the bay. We have little bumps that we call mountains. We have even tinier Donald Trump hands. Yeah. I think I can. Back off, man. Okay. Dave. That brown desert that you call home out there.

We have four real seasons. Someone send us water. Yeah. Yeah. Well, how's the temperature been out there lately? We've had a lot of rain. How about you? I'm jealous. All right. Look, I know it sucks here, but Maryland is just boring. But anyway, with your seasons and things like, seasons and water and food and not being on fire every three minutes.

Anywho, Brian, how's it going this week? Pretty good. Pretty good. Yeah. Let's jump right in here. Yeah. We got some good stories this week from the Cyber Wire. One that's certainly getting a lot of press is that the good folks at Reddit got hacked.

What? Did you guys hear about this one? Yeah. A little bit. A little bit. But give us the skinny. Give us the skinny on the Reddit. Reddit said earlier this week that a hacker had broken into the company's systems back in June and they'd gotten access to a variety of things. One of the things was a backup of all Reddit data from 2007 and before.

Everything. That's a big bunch of data. I guess. When did Reddit begin? Was it 05? I don't have a good beat on that when they started. Dig was around. Dig had started. So that was like, you know, yeah, 2003, 2004. So they came off like right after that.

So, yeah, this is a long time of. I mean, that's a lot of data. Seriously. It is. And they also accessed a bunch of code and sort of behind the scenes sorts of things. So they're saying that things like email addresses, usernames and passwords may have been exposed.

They were salted and hashed, but they were salted and hashed back in 2007. Oh, MD5. Right. Right. So they use. I like the sentence. Since the salting and hashing is going back to 2006 or 2007, it's likely suboptimal.

That's one way to describe it. He's the director of the Open Crypto Audit Project. So he goes on to say everyone should probably change their passwords. So if you are on Reddit and you're well, no matter what, if you're on Reddit, go ahead and change your password. And specifically, if you are using a password that you have used on Reddit somewhere else, first of all, you shouldn't do that.

Second, you shouldn't be listening to this show anymore because you're fired. Right. You should be fired from listening on you. But, yeah, go ahead and change those passwords. So the other big story this week that's kind of exciting is the feds arrested three bad guys who were involved in a global cybercrime ring.

They were members of a group called Fin7. Were these bad hombres? They were. They were bad comrades, actually. Oh, wait. They were Russian? Imagine that. Hang on. Russian hackers are getting into U.S. systems?

Wow. News to me. Ukrainian, to be specific. And surprise, surprise, they got arrested when they left the country. So they were traveling outside of their home country, probably going on vacation or whatever. This seems to be how we nab these folks.

They get cocky. We've talked about this. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a hacker, you've got to stay home, dude. My real takeaway from this is you don't get to take a vacation if you're a hacker. Right. They take some of the spoils of their crimes and they decide they want to go somewhere nice on vacation and they cross the border and get nabbed.

And that's what happened this time. But these folks had stolen about 15 million credit card numbers and put them up for sale on dark web markets. So the DOJ is crowing about this. It was an international effort also combined with help from some of the companies that have been hacked, companies like Chipotle, Arby's, Jason's Deli, places like that.

So this is tied to a lot of the headliner hacks we've heard about over the past year or two. So the DOJ is saying, hey, we're really happy about this. By no means do we think this is going to put an end to this, not even to this group. But it's a good start.

It will make a difference. And so hats off to them. Well, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So you got a couple bites here. So that's good. There you go. And you still shouldn't eat at Chipotle. So that's the real lesson here. Or if you do, you pay cash. I would just go with the paying cash.

I don't think Chipotle is that bad. Well, there were only four stories in the news this week about salmonella and Equal Eye. Hey, you want to lose weight? That's a good plan. That is. That is. Oh. Right. It's not me. It's the tapeworm. Exactly. Yes.

I named him George. I will pet him and love him and poop him. Yep. Yep. So this week we learned about a new program. Well, not a new program. We learned about it for the first time called the Quiet Skies program that the TSA is involved in. Now. That's a placid name.

Isn't it, though? So this is the program to not let children on planes, I'm guessing? I'm just thinking the same thing. Right. Right. I feel very bad for everybody that was on my last flight. I apologize in advance. I'm sorry. I did not register for the Quiet Skies program.

Well, I did, but my son did not agree. Right. Unfortunately. No, that is not what it is. It is basically American citizens are being trailed and closely monitored by undercover air marshals as they travel on U.S. flights. Fair enough. Except for the fact that we cannot figure out why these people are being trailed or watched and observed.

There is no warrant. There is they're not part of any restricted thing. They are not on any government list or program or something that we need to be worried about is the TSA's complete internal determination that we should watch these people. Now, you're in public.

You're on an airplane. You do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy under the Constitution. So, the government and police are allowed to see you and observe you. So, to be fair, I suppose there's nothing illegal with what's happening. It just doesn't kind of feel very good, does it?

Do most of the people that they've been following have really good yoga pants? Well, I always observe those ladies. I was just going to say, is this the TSA booty program is all I'm asking. It doesn't seem to be. I mean, I guess if the air marshals have to be on the plane, they might as well make it fun for themselves by pretending like they're actually following someone.

I don't know. This is odd to me. It does feel odd. Again, there's nothing specifically illegal, but the fact that this exists and it's kind of codified tells me it's more than just an air marshal staving off some boredom because he doesn't want to watch a rampage for the 15th time.

Or the second time. Or the second time, as per Jason's review earlier. Yeah, I don't quite get it. You know, this is one of those things where I think there should hopefully be some governmental oversight, like some behind-closed-doors meetings saying, well, who are these people?

Why are you doing this? And, you know, why aren't these people on some other sort of watch list if they're of importance to you somehow? So I'm hoping we're going to hear more about this. But right now, who the hell knows? Yeah. What are the – what's the data that you're using to put someone on the follow-around list?

Yeah. I would like to know. Their Netflix viewing history, maybe? Who knows? Right, right. This person saw rampage three times. Yeah, right. He did not like The Last Jedi. Follow him. Oh, well. Oh, well.

How an American can you get? Yeah. And the other big news, which Jason and I talked about a little bit earlier, but I would love to get your take on this. Facebook has discovered a coordinated campaign of misinformation accounts to the head of the U.S. midterms election and leapt into action to stop a grand total of 32 pages.

32. 32. 32. Twitter shuts down hundreds of thousands of accounts on one go, and Facebook shuts down 32 pages and accounts. Well, yeah. I mean, doesn't this just speak to all the things we've been complaining about Facebook over the past few months?

They're just – Months? Months? Are you talking months? Perhaps I undersold it. Yeah. They're just not getting it, just not continuing to not get it. And I read an article earlier this week that I shared on social media.

I don't remember the title of it now, but it was basically pointing out that Facebook doesn't get it. Facebook hasn't gotten it since the beginning. You know, I think it might be one that I put in earlier in the show notes, which is the New York Times, The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg in Silicon Valley, because one of the things I didn't mention about that article earlier was this guy has known Mark Zuckerberg since Facebook started, has interviewed him multiple times, and basically came away from the most recent interview with him saying he doesn't really seem to think that they've done anything wrong.

Well, we know he's a sociopath, so that's okay. We get that part. Well, I think the article that I read, and I'm not sure it was that one. It may have been, but I'm just not remembering right now. But it was making the point that Facebook looks at people as data and not individuals.

Right. And so when you look at people as data, you don't empathize with the fact of what you may or may not be doing to them. You're just running the numbers. You don't approach it ethically. You just approach it as numbers.

Right. And it also gives you the ability to put them at arm's length to say, well, we're just the platform. What people do with it. Look at the foundation of Facebook from the beginning. They were looking at women as numbers. How were they rating how hot these chicks were? So this goes back to the core.

Right. Are you hot or not? Exactly. It's a foundational principle. Exactly. So this is it. It doesn't come back to don't be evil. It's just how hot are you? You know, that's what it comes down to. I really wish that we would have named the show from the beginning. We're just a platform because that is what we seem to just keep coming back to in the news, in the rants, in the security.

So how does this play out? How do we have do we have to end up with some sort of legislative thing with this where if I, you know, how do we stop? I don't mean to be to cry wolf or anything, but it seems like this is a clear and present danger to our democracy.

This sort of these shenanigans, as we see them play out, these influence operations using the amplification capabilities of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, they are a threat to national security. I would posit, I would posit. Do you generally agree?

Yes, I agree. The problem that we have here is that you and I and Jason and everybody listening to this and most people under the age of, say, 50 or even 60 understand that. But the people that are making the laws quite clearly from when they had Zuckerberg in front of them and was questioning them have no understanding of how any of this stuff works.

I do think that we need government regulation and influence on these social networks. Now, I the other article that we were discussing about Facebook earlier in the show asks who moderates the moderators. We can't have them take care of themselves because they're so obviously not doing it.

And they also have no reason to because they're not beholden to being ethical. They're beholden to their shareholders. Right. Right. It's against their business model to to block. Yeah, it's not a bug. It's a feature. I mean, that's that's why we need Dunbar's law. Dunbar's law comes in and says you cannot have a social network that you can connect to more than 150 people on.

I know it might sound like Stalinist Russia, but I think it might be better for society. A little bit. Honestly, choose wisely. Well, no, I mean, I think that we can solve a lot of this by getting back to the same thing that we kind of need with our political system anyways, which is campaign finance reform.

How about we just Facebook doesn't take any, any advertising for something that isn't a commercial product? It's an interesting idea. Done. No political ads. Yeah. No, no political ads. No ads whatsoever from any sort of NGO entities.

Now, I know that gets rid of, you know, you have to draw a really wide swath. Otherwise, you get mired in craziness. So, yeah, good stuff can't get advertised either. But, oh, well, let's just cut it. Let's cut it all. If it's going to happen, it's out. No. And because they're well, but just exploring this, but because they're a private company, they don't have to worry about any free speech types of things or anything like that.

No. They can just say we just know we don't we don't take that money from anybody. Yep. Yeah. The other thing I'm reminded of, I know we brought this up a few times, is that tip I got from someone about getting rid of the Nazis on Twitter, which is if you tell Twitter that you're in Germany, the Nazis suddenly disappear from your Twitter feed.

Yes, it can be done. That is exactly my point. They have the capability to do it. But they choose not to. And yet here we are. And yet here we are. Yes. All of this can be fixed. There's no doubt about that. Like all of it.

It's just why would they they'd lose money and it would require a heavy investment in changing their infrastructure and reprogramming and rejiggering things. Well, Brian, since you are now a shareholder in Facebook, maybe you need to go to the meetings and and voice your opinion.

I believe I'm voicing it now. Listen up, people. I am on a weekly podcast talking about this. For the press release tomorrow, Zuckerberg changes course. Listen to podcasts. I was convinced. Changed mind. Yeah.

We can dream. We can fantasize. We can say, you know, we're creating our anti Facebook army. That's right. I stay on Facebook and then invested in it because it lost 20 percent of its market value and I know it's going to come back. I see. I see. So. So. So.

So your ethics, Brian. I never said I invested ethically, said I'm trying to live ethically, but I'm also trying to retire and get my kid through college. I see. All right. Well, I suppose I can't begrudge you that. Yeah, I have some issues with it.

It keeps me awake for about a couple of minutes at night. And then I sleep. And then the sleeping pills kick in. So you're sleep deprived anyway. Then the wine and the sleeping pills kick in. From having a toddler, you never sleep. So. Yeah. I got you. All right. Oh, all right. That's good. Good to know. Yeah. Moving on from my non-ethical stuff that I'm doing.

So I listened to the new Cyber Wire special edition on data centric security. Yes. And yeah, this made my head hurt. Homomorphic encryption has always been a mind bender to me. And I thought you guys did a really good job this week of kind of explaining how it kind of works.

But my head still hurts. I know. It still hurts. I am with you 100%. And I, you know, I fall into that category of relying on people who are much smarter than me to explain these things. And yet I still walk away feeling like I have an intellectual understanding, but I don't quite feel it, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, yeah. You know, like, and I think it also falls into that category that Arthur C. Clarke said, that any significant level of technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yeah, I think any significant level of technology makes you feel like a fucking moron. Is a better quote. I'm going to go with that one, but.

Yeah, your words, not mine, but all right, we can go there. Yeah, I mean, yes, this whole notion that you can perform calculations on encrypted data and end up with an encrypted answer. So you don't, you know, neither the contents of the original data nor the contents of the answer, but you can, but you can still do stuff with it.

That just sounds like drinking too much tequila. And you just have to. That's really, or getting way too stoned or doing acid. It's just like, I know I know something, but I don't know what I don't know. Or listening too much. There are known unknowns, there are known knowns, there are unknown unknowns.

Right. Oh, God. Yeah. Yes. Well, and when you ask people to explain this, like we did, we talked to Ellison Ann Williams, who's the CEO of InVail, who's the company who's kind of leading the charge on this. She's a former NSA person, sort of spun this out of some of those intelligence agencies.

And she does a great job explaining it, but you still, I still, I'm just left thinking, okay. Well, and the bottom line from her is, it's math. Trust us. Well. And okay. All right. Well, I can't, I don't know enough math to argue with that.

So, all right. They have proofs that they say it all works and it makes sense. And the other key to this is that we've reached the era where the computers are fast enough to handle this stuff. It's really computationally expensive, so you weren't able to do this in any sort of practical way.

And that's the other development that they're making is that you can actually use this stuff for real world uses. So, it's pretty cool stuff. So, yeah, thanks for checking out the special edition. That was a fun one to do. It's always fun when I get to talk to smart people and learn something from them, even when I, like this one, sometimes I walk away scratching my head still a bit.

And I've got to say, I've been listening to the Hacking Humans podcast that you do, and I've been enjoying that very much. Oh, thank you. Yeah, we've been having a good time with that one, Joe and I. It's a fun show. We do a lot of laughing, and we've got some good guests so far. So, yeah, check it out. It's Hacking Humans.

It's short. It's only a half hour long. And talk about some interesting stuff. It's possible to do podcasts that are only a half an hour long? Well, yeah, the editor usually gets about an hour's worth of content every week that he has to cut down to a half an hour.

Oh, that's what we're missing. Yes, yes, editing, editing. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But, no, it's fun. A lot of stuff about social engineering. So, if that's something that interests you, we hope you'll check it out. Excellent. All right, gentlemen. Well, that's what I have for us this week.

I will not be around next time because I am heading out to Black Hat. Yep, heading out to Vegas. It's going to be 110 degrees. It's a dry heat. Just bring some of your Maryland water. You'll be fine. That's right. I'll bring some beautiful Chesapeake Bay water. Yeah.

All right, guys. Good talking to you. Talk soon. All right. All right. Moron of the Week. I just have some sad news this week. There's no specific morons unless the morons are just all of us collectively. Okay. Fat tourists are crippling donkeys that carry them on holiday in Greece.

Okay. So, Greece is responding by breeding a new, stronger donkey to cope with the fact that overweight British tourists want to ride them. Now, I'm sorry here, but you buried the lead. Fat tourists are crippling donkeys that carry them on holiday in Greece. This comes from metro.co.uk.

Now, if you would have said, Grecians are breeding super donkeys, I would have totally clicked on that. You are missing the boat. You know, I blame the headline editor for the Metro in the UK because they missed out on a gold mine for a headline there.

Oh, they totally missed out. Come on, super donkeys. Okay. Now, but for my second story, I have a good headline for you. Okay. The Center for Disease Control reminds people not to wash or reuse their condoms. We're done. We're done as a species. We're done.

I see this as Darwinism in action. Culling the herd. Except, wait, hold on, though. Actually, no. The problem is it works in the reverse, right? Because they're going to create more kids because they're dumb. Right. Yeah, this goes back to idiocracy. This is just back to idiocracy. And I was listening to Dr. Drew like two weeks ago, and he was talking, he like was hanging around a bunch of millennials, and he's like, so how many of you use condoms when you have sex?

And the response rate was, I shit you not, zero. Zero. God, what's wrong with people? And, you know, I mean, I guess Apple just needs to make the eye rubber for people to use it anymore because that's it. It's just like, wait, what?

No, you know, kids aren't using Apple products. It needs to be Snapchat. It needs to be the Snap rubber. God, it's pretty tight. Put a sticker on it. That's their slogan. That's the Snapchat condoms. That's the Snapchat condoms.

Put a sticker on it. Feedback loop. We got a bunch of new Patreon subscribers this week. Cody, Gordy, and Daniel. Thank you very much. And we also have a message from Jim. Hey, guys. Woke up to this shit this week.

Yay. After bird electric scooters land, Cincinnati officials left scratching their heads. So Cincinnati now has bird poop. Yes, they do. And William also writes in bird boot. Well, the damn birds have invaded Portland. And surprise, surprise. Every single bird law the city passed was violated within five minutes by nearly 90% of the riders.

No helmets. Riding them in the park. Riding them on the sidewalk. I almost got hit four times in two blocks. I hate these things, but I have an idea. For $1.50 from Home Depot, you can clip their wings without actually destroying property. Just hook up one of these on the back wheel of everyone you find in the wild. Make sure to really strip those threads.

Take care and keep up the awesome work. Love the show. Again, we cannot endorse destroying property. Well, that's the nice thing about this is you're not actually destroying property. It's basically a U-loop with some screws on it, and you can just put it on like a boot. That's true.

There you go. Yep. And Kevin writes, from the UK, never seen a bird scooter. Hmm. Okay. Oh, yes. And he donated to us on PayPal. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. Over on Twitter, the Droidian writes, Cincinnati has been infected. And he sent a photo. He also sent in something else that I just saw a few minutes ago.

You want to sell, create a million dollar idea together? When making a FaceTime, call the coolest thing that could happen when someone doesn't answer is their video voicemail, plays their video message, and I get to leave a video mail. It's 2018. I'm just saying. Wow. That sounds like the 70s. It's like you get those video phones and you can leave a video mail.

Yeah. Yes. All right. Clintie writes in, I disagree with Luke Cage. I absolutely enjoyed the first season. It's kind of coded and cultured. The second season is more about how you see the villains. I enjoy the show, but you guys need some soul or at least someone who can break it down for you.

As you've stated, the actors are B-level or worse. Guess you didn't notice it's an all black cast and a perception of the comments could be established. There's things that can be pointed out, which might make it a lot more interesting. Now, at this point, I actually wrote him back and I said, look, to each their own. At least we can all agree that it was still better than Iron Fist.

Yes. Which was an all white cast. All white and Asian cast. Yes. Yes. He agreed with that and wrote back and said, yeah, to each their own. But optics are something we should all be aware of. That's all I'm saying. Now, my point here is, isn't the optic of me needing to qualify the fact that I don't like a show just because it has a black cast.

Isn't that an optic we should be worried about? Shouldn't I not have to say, hey, I really liked Black Panther, but I don't like Luke Cage. Why should I have to do that? It's just I don't like the show that much. I love the actor that's playing Luke Cage. I love Luke Cage.

I love Luke Cage the best in all the other shows that he's in. I just don't like the Luke Cage show. Exactly. That's all. I'm like, I didn't even realize it was an all black cast. I'm like, I could be Stephen Colbert. I don't see color because I don't. I didn't give a shit about that. And for everybody's black. I just don't like the writing on the show.

I don't like the effects on the show. That's it. I never said anything. I mean, some of the cast. Yeah, it'll be great. But for the most part, it's a really good cast. They just have shitty dialogue. No story. I don't care. I don't care what color the fucking cast is.

None whatsoever. Alfre Woodard was one of my favorite characters ever in a Star Trek movie. And she was in Face Off. I worked on Face Off. She's fantastic. Now I feel like we're doing weird optics where we're having to justify not liking the show. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, Clancy.

No, forget it. No, I get it. I totally get it. But it is a different strokes thing. And everybody hits people. It hits people in different ways. I can get why people like Luke Cage. I personally just didn't. And there are lots of shows I like that Jason thinks I'm an idiot for liking. That's the way it works. And you just compared this to different strokes.

So there you go. That was 100% unintentional. What'd you talk about? Wait, was that a different show? No, we're talking about Willis. It's a pity to fool. And what are you talking about, Willis? Wow. Wow. The brain works in mysterious ways. Yes, it does. So Discord writes in, you asked for feedback on splitting up the show into two different shows.

In the words of every grumpy old man, I prefer it the way it is. Stop scaring me with change. And that is a minority opinion at this point. It is. And honestly, I don't think we're going to have much of a choice as these shows continue to be marathons. Yeah. We're going to have to split them up.

We're going to have to. Because just editing them for like eight hours on a Sunday, it's just not good. And my birthday is this Sunday. So you might get the show on Thursday. Who knows? Oh, who knows? It could be fun. Let me know if you end up doing anything. Over on GOG.show, Ivor wrote in, when I saw this, all I could think of was Jason doing jazz hands and squealing like a little girl.

Get your own Howl 9000 replica with Bluetooth and voice command. Okay. I'm not. I hate that movie. So there's the problem. You are so wrong. It is an amazing movie. Oh, God. I forgot to check the cast and the optics on it.

I fucking hate 2001 A Space Odyssey. I've never liked it. Never will like it. I don't care who directed it, what kind of hipster piece of shit it is, or how heady it's supposed to be. I found it fucking boring. So I will not get this. Now, I still may get the Star Trek OG communicator Bluetooth handset because I am a nerd and, you know, I am outside of the dating pool now.

So I don't care if any chick sees me with it. And I just don't care. So Johannes writes in, hey, guys, great pointer to M1 Finance. This really looks good. However, you guys always point out businesses with no business model. What is the business model of M1 Finance? I just don't get it.

They don't ask for fees. They don't have a markup. They do fractional shares. Everything is frictionless. How do they make money? I just couldn't find anything on their website about it. I'd appreciate it a lot if you could talk about that some more. Cheers, Johannes. Brian, how do they make money? No problem. I can tell you exactly how they make money.

You have to look at their financial, the investment services as the album and everything else that they do is the tour. They're giving the album away for free. So they're letting you come in and make investments and all that. And they're upselling you on other financial services. They do loans. They do mortgages.

They're doing all that sort of stuff. So the idea is you get hooked into their infrastructure and they just kind of constantly remind you of all the other things that they do that they do charge you for. It's very similar to another site that I've talked about in the past, Personal Capital that I use, which is basically a free version of Quicken where you can bring in all your stuff and see all your finances.

And they basically just constantly bombard you with, would you like investment advice? Would you like to do this? Do you need a new car loan? It's the go daddy of finance is what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, what they're offering you is free, much like a Robin Hood. And then they hope to upsell you on different services.

So that is their business. And they also hold the extra, you know, fractions of the share. So if something goes up, they still make money on that as well. If it goes down, they still lose money. But I'm guessing they're playing the odds on it. I'd imagine so. Yeah. Next up is Mark.

Hey, guys. Enjoying the podcast as always. My question. I'm a firm believer in offsite backups to protect over 20 years of digital family photos and other media. I have local backups as well, but that doesn't help much in the case of theft, fire, et cetera. After two years, I discovered peer to peer. OK, so he gets into about 100 different methods that he's used to do backups.

And he's basically asking what we suggest. And Jason, you have done this a gazillion times. So what's your solution? My solution is I have four eight terabyte hard drives that I cycle through. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to cycle through and keep everything up to date. And every two months, I will take one of them and ship them to a family member out of state.

So they keep it offsite and then they ship me back the old one. So it's basically a rotation circle. I've used Backblaze. I've used Crash Plan. But I've got so much data that the one terabyte a month cap on, you know, data on my internet plan basically screws it.

I can't do that because my photos alone are four terabytes. So it doesn't really work for me to use these cloud backup solutions. I did Backblaze for different things. The only problem I had with Backblaze is you can't restore an entire computer from it like you can from, say, a time machine backup.

Also, when my drives aren't actually being backed up, they're in a fireproof safe in a different part of the house. So you have to kind of work through that. The other option is you get a safety deposit box in your neighborhood and you can take your drive to that.

So you have like a rotating drive set up where you keep something off site. You always want to have off site. One is none. Two is one. And three is at least passable, you know, but you have to have something off site. Yeah. Jason writes in, well, Denver has dropped regulations on the Lime Company.

E-scooters bikes should be back in Denver by Friday. I'm sorry, Denver. Also, I hope one day I can throw some money your guys' way. We do, too. We really actually do because Brian needs to buy Han Solo's jacket. I really enjoy the show every week, always spreading the word to others about your show, making them listen to it as I'm driving them to their destination.

Well, you must be an Uber driver. Wow. Didn't you do a call to action for an Uber driver earlier? I did. I did. I think we've got one, Jason. And just a quick note on that, they're not completely dropping regulations on the Lime Company. They're doing what a lot of cities are doing, which is they're starting up, they're allowing and authorizing companies to operate cap levels of scooters, maximum numbers of bikes, things of that nature.

And they're going to do studies on it, and they're going to see how it goes. So it's all these, nobody's said no straight out to these things. Everybody's just trying to figure out how to make it work in a way that doesn't piss everybody off. So a lot of companies are opening up these pilot programs and letting people apply for it.

Fair enough. That's the way it should happen. I agree. All right. And we have no iTunes reviews this week. What is up with that, people? Get on this. Come on. We need some iTunes reviews. Make them snarky. Make them funny. And always make them five stars. Go ahead, Brian. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review. Closing shout outs. A big shout out to the US women's national team who beat Brazil last night by a significant number of goals to clinch the Tournament of Nations, the 2018 Tournament of Nations, which really isn't much of a tournament.

Welcome to the Tournament of Nations that nobody watches. Except Brian. Except Brian. I did. I got a shout out to my brother who just turned 27 years old on the second and he's finally getting his own apartment. That's the way millennials roll these days.

So good for you, bro. Well, they roll to their new apartment. He's definitely not rolling to his new apartment in his Tesla Model 3 because he's still got nine months on the waiting list till it shows up. Oh, well, until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Give us all your monies so Brian can get Han Solo's jacket and I can get Indiana Jones's fedora because that would be really cool. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever.

If you'd like to give a one time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. For show notes for this episode, go to GOG.show slash 270. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and we'll see you next week.

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