298: Excelsior!

This episode of Grumpy Old Geeks is brought to you by Privacy.com. Stop using the same card number everywhere. Use Privacy Virtual Cards and get up to $5 off your first purchase. Sign up in under a minute with your debit or checking account at Privacy.com slash GOG. 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. A little follow up on the fire that I talked about on the last time we recorded. What a hairy couple of days it's been. Yeah, all went a little crazy, didn't it? Yeah, and it's still not over yet. Nope. Last I heard, 15% contained for the one down here in Southern California, 25% for the Northern California.

It's actually 30% contained as of this morning. Ah, see, I did not look at the news this morning. I've been looking at it, which I'll tell you about in a little bit here. But yeah, we had to evacuate my roommate's mom because she was in Calabasas and mandatory evacuation. So she stayed with us for a bit and we packed.

We were ready to go because the way these winds were going, you never knew if they were going to shift. And we're only a mile and a half away from some of the bigger stuff that was going down. So it's like mile and a half, you know, 50 mile an hour winds doesn't take that long to get over here because some of the embers were going three miles and starting fires.

So it was just like, okay, let's just pack up and get ready to go. And I was pissed off. I got to tell you, I have done years and decades, decades worth of earthquake, earthquake preparation. And to have your house go up by a fire is just like the ultimate F you by Mother Nature.

It's like, okay, we expect the ground to come up and eat us at some point, but we don't expect death from above. Right. It was a, it was a quick fire drill on how to prep and go. And fortunately I pack really well for trips, so it wasn't too, too hard, but it's like, you know, it's heartbreaking to think about what you have to leave behind.

And it's, it's tough. It's really tough. Fortunately, we're, we're through the worst of it now. And it looks like our place has been spared. Thank you. But I got to say Twitter turned out to be the most useful tool in this disaster, which is if I go back to the day that Twitter started was my feedback for Twitter.

I'm like, I don't see this as any kind of useful platform except in an emergency. That's the feedback that I gave the team at Twitter the first day that I tried Twitter, which was the first day they launched. So, right. Some things never change. Some things never change. Well, let's move on to the tech stuff.

And, you know, it's been a slow week in tech when even recode, which is my go to default. I can't find anything. Recode always puts up every single tiny little story known to man. So I'll find something there. But even they could only put up a handful of useless non think pieces. So they were all like no shit Sherlock articles.

So it's been a pretty slow week with tech. But there are a few things that happen. A little bit of follow up. We talked a little bit ago about Google giving into the hashtag Google walkout claims, at least as far as the sexual harassment complaints, arbitration. Facebook has followed suit now as well without anybody complaining too much over there.

They just, I guess, wanted to get ahead of the curve for once. Facebook is doing a me too. Exactly. Yeah. We'll do it too. Me too. Me too. Yeah. Lots to version. Yeah. Different. Totally different version of me too. But they're doing the same thing. It's kind of like public shaming. We keep talking about things like deep fakes, which we talked about on the last episode.

And when, where do we go when video and audio and where nothing that comes from a computer can be trusted. I mean, we're going to have to go back to film soon. That's the only way it's going to be. Kodak. Are you listening? Polaroid. They might actually come back from the dead.

So I was flipping through articles and I saw over at the Guardian, they have a huge article on deep fakes. And it's just, this stuff's going mainstream. People are understanding what's happening now. So we're not the only people talking about it, which is good. We need more people talking about this stuff and educating people, especially the dumb people.

Well, I guess they're dumb because they're uneducated. That's why we have to educate them. Got to prove my own point there. But it's good that these things are getting out there. And it's a, it's an interesting write up on deep fakes over at the Guardian that will be in the show notes at GOG.show slash 298.

Yep. I mean, we've been screaming about this for a while. It's a real problem. Screaming from the rooftops. And I saw this one over at melmagazine.com. I don't know how I got, got this link, but it is one of my favorites. Is this like Mel Gibson's personal site? No, it is not.

Okay. That'd be jewhater.com. Sugartits.com. No, that's sugartits.com would at least be, you know, funny. But it's called Rise, Grind, and Ruin the Dangerous Fetish. Yeah, I can't even say the fucking word. Fetishization of Hustle Porn.

Fetishization of Hustle Porn. Yes. I love this article because I am so sick of this Vaynerchuk-ian view of the world. And if you don't know what I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the lead guys behind Hustle. Hustle. He, you know, Crush It was his book that really crushed it, bro.

And it drives me crazy. And I was part of this for a long time. I promoted this for a long time. Work, work, work, work, work. And as I'm getting older, I'm realizing that that's just dumb. It's dumb. I love those old advertisements that say, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

I'm like, uh, well, they'll die without sleep. Exactly. Yes. Without sleep, you will die and you will have a miserable life. You're basically a slave at that point. So I am just trying to back away from all this crap and just tell people, look, you know what?

You're alive now. Do the things you want to do because when you're dead, you're dead. Ain't no, ain't no coming back from that. And which has led me to a thing that we talked about last week. We, we fundamentally know something is wrong in the matrix, right?

Oh yeah. This country is fucked up and it has gotten me into debug mode. I'm like, okay, look, there are problems here. Let's figure out what they are. When we, when we write software, we debug it. If something is broken, we look for that goddamn one semicolon that we put in wrong.

It is going to spend the next, take the next four hours for us to find. So I'm like, okay, what are the first things I need to do? First thing I did was I turned off every notification across every platform. So I have no notifications on my computer.

I have no notifications on my phone and I have stopped wearing my Apple watch. Wow. I have completely gone away from the Apple watch. I pulled out my old fossil watch, which is a really nice watch, which I've almost never worn, started wearing that. And then like three days into the experiment, I'm like, I don't need a watch.

Why do I need a watch? I don't, I need, I know what I have to do that day and I know what time it has to happen. And I show up and I do the thing that I have to do. I check my email when I have time to check my email. I am not a slave to that little red dot, which we know, which we know from studies that have been done is there to train us to check things just on this manic schedule because it is a survival instinct because the way that they designed that little red dot with the number

in it, your peripheral vision is very acute for threats. So when it sees something in, when your peripheral vision picks up on a threat, it, you know, goes into full on action mode. That's what the red dot does to us when it comes to computing.

We see that little red dot and then we have to press the button. We have to press the button, press the lever, press the lever. I want the cocaine. I want the, I want the hit. And when you turn off notifications, things tend to slow down. Well, and the real insidious thing about this and not, this is not the case with email, obviously, because email comes when email comes and that's that.

But the social networks, they lie. They hold back notifications. They spread them out to make you check more often. It is not an immediate thing. They have an algorithm. They've, they won't really admit it publicly, but we all know it's true. Twitter does it. Facebook does it.

They all do it. They, they space these things out. This is, it's not real time. You're not getting a notification right when somebody does something. Everything is kind of dripped out to keep you on the machine. Yeah. And there, there's that one thing that we talked about. I mean, it had to be a year or so ago that was, we know that when the page loads, they can have that notification number come up right then.

They actually have a wait timer on that. That is random. It is not the same wait timer every time you come in and you have to look at it and wait and wait and see if that number comes up. And if the number doesn't come up, you're like, Oh, the number comes up. You're like, somebody, somebody likes me.

Somebody likes me. I got to go and check and see, did somebody retweet me? Did somebody follow me? Did somebody fave my tweet? You got to look, you got to look. And it drives you mad. And this comes back to what we were talking about with the people who invent the technology who won't even let their children touch it.

This is how toxic it is. So in the first stage of trying to figure out what is wrong with the matrix, I'm pulling away from the matrix. And I have, I have become much calmer. My anxiety level has dropped precipitously. And cause I'm not looking at this stuff all day long.

I'm not like, okay, there's a dot there. There's a dot there on my doc, on my Mac. I'm like, okay, well, it's like whack-a-mole trying to hit all the dots to figure, to make them go away. And you even alluded to this with Instagram stories. It's like, you hate stories, but you feel compelled to look at them all because they're there in front of you and they keep popping up.

Got to clear out those circles. Exactly. So no more. I'm just, I pulled away from it and I feel so much better. I do not feel the need to go back. It was a rough couple of days at the beginning. I will not, I will not front. It was tough at the beginning, especially with the watch.

I found myself like an idiot talking to my bare naked wrist in the kitchen saying, set a timer for two minutes because I always had the, you know, the raise to wake feature on on the watch, which was great. I loved it because I'd be sitting there cooking. I'm like, set a timer for two minutes, set a timer for five minutes or whatever.

And it would just do it. And now I'm like, oh, there's, I literally am talking to my, my arm. So I have to walk over to the microwave and type in two minutes or timer in two minutes start. And it works. You know, there are ways around it. We used to, we used to live like animals in caves.

We can go back to it. But I am, I am finding that it is a, it is just a weight lifted off me. And I recommend everybody just give it a go, give it a week and see how you feel. I'm on day eight now. And since I've started it, I feel nothing but better.

And I still get all my shit done. That's the key because you have more mind space to get your stuff done. You're not always distracted. We know what switching costs are. You know, if you're doing a task and you have to switch tasks, we know to get back to the original task takes time. And if you're always switching tasks, you're going to go insane.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I found that, you know, having a kid has kind of forced me to do this regardless. And I haven't turned off notifications, but I mean, when I'm with my kid, I, I've trained myself to not care, which has gotten pretty good as well. That took a long time though. I have to say, I don't think I was the best parent for the first like four months because, you know, I would still look and see and, and okay, somebody sent me an email or somebody, I have a Facebook notification.

What's going on? And now when I'm with my kid, I basically don't touch, don't touch anything. And the nice thing about the Apple watch, I understand getting rid of it completely, but you can set what notifications you want. And I have a bare minimum, like I only get a notification if somebody calls, which is actually a double-edged sword because nine times out of 10, it's just a, you know, it's a robo call.

It's a robo call. But, but if something were to go really wrong in my family's life somewhere, it would be a phone call that would come through. So I basically just have that on. So, uh, it is better. I mean, I think back to how I was living 10 years ago when I was super busy and working in the music industry and, and, you know, kind of not 10 years ago.

No, I wasn't single 10 years ago. So let me go another couple of years past that and single and, you know, texting with girls and I notifications constantly. Uh, you know, I was always on stuff and I'm so much more calm now, even having a kid, which is crazy because having a kid is the most stressful thing in the fucking world, but I'm calmer than I was 10 years ago.

Certainly. So yeah, I, I highly agree. Stop being a slave to the, I turned off the, the, I didn't turn off the red dots, but I've turned off on everything that I can, any counters because I don't want to know. I just want to know if things happened on that platform, then I'll go look when I have a chance. Uh, but I don't want to see the numbers because I think the numbers are fucking evil.

Um, yeah, it's it wise choices. I recommend turning off, just turn off the dots. It definitely turned off. The numbers are evil for sure, but just turn off the dots. Because when you have time, you can go check it because if, if the dot is there and you were, you wanted to do something else, that dot is still going to draw you back in.

And when you could be doing something like a spending time with your kid, reading a book, you know, cause we know that you haven't had time to read a book in a long time. Yeah. I had that like one week when I burned through two and that was about it. Yeah. That it gives you this time back where you just don't have to go back to these things because there's the dot, the death to the dot is all I'm saying.

And in strange follow on news, friends of mine were recommending CBD oil for me for anxiety, which I don't even know if I need anymore because I've turned off notifications, strangely enough. But I did some, you know, some Google searches on CBD oil and now everywhere I go, I'm getting followed around with, you know, uh, the retargeted ads from Amazon trying to make me build a grow house.

Next time I come to that studio, it's going to be weird, isn't it? It's going to be weed. It's not going to be weird. It's going to be weed. Why is there hydroponics everywhere? Yeah. I'm getting like all these crazy fans and lights and all this stuff. I'm like, I did not know that I could buy a grow house on Amazon, but apparently you can.

It's legal. It's legal now. It is legal. Yeah. The people in Canada should be getting on this since they ran out of weed. In the news. And speaking of Amazon, some of the few little bits of tech news that we actually have this week, Amazon is finally going to start selling Apple products, except for the one that they're in direct competition with.

The HomePod, I'm guessing. Yes. You will not be getting the HomePod at all. So, uh, or the, uh, what's the Apple one? Yeah. Is that the HomePod? Yeah. HomePod's the Apple. Google's home. That's right. They're all so complicated. They're all named the damn same thing. So, um, you've been able to get third party Apple stuff for quite some time.

Um, and all those people sadly are getting booted. Now they're going to have to go back and get, uh, certifications that their products are not crap, um, from Apple to be able to continue to sell on Amazon. But so for now it's, uh, they're all going to get booted and it'll only be Apple for a while.

And then slowly some third party people will trickle back in once they've gotten Apple authorization to do so. So you don't have to go to the Apple store anymore. I like going to the Apple store though. It gets me out of the house. I know. I like, I'm going brick and mortar more and more, uh, cause I, I just enjoy it and it's fun to take my kid out and do stuff.

And it's, it's nice. Yeah. I, I, yeah, this, this means nothing to me. I'm like, okay, because if you want to get something from Apple, you just, if you need to get it online, just get it from Apple. It's the same price. It's usually just, it will be the same price. That is definitely the main thing.

It's Apple, Amazon will not be offering any discounts on Apple stuff because that doesn't happen. Yeah. I think the only discount you'd get is with Amazon prime. You'd get free shipping. You get free shipping. Uh, Snapchat continuing to have more and more problems. People are, uh, leaving that sinking ship pretty quickly.

Nick bell, who has been the vice president of content is leaving the company. According to the Hollywood reporter, he's been there for the last five years. He posted a memo to a staff confirming his departure, but did not offer any specific reasoning behind the announcement. He'll be replaced by somebody named Jared Groost, who was appointed in October as Snapchat's chief new strategy officer.

Job number one should have been getting a strategy. Seriously, he did. Uh, so Bell's role at Snapchat was to help media partners produce original content for the platform via the discover section of the app. Um, you know, they did a few shows, but since they don't release any metrics, nobody knows how well it's going, but the fact that he's leaving is probably a good sign that it hasn't been going well.

That's the only metric you need really. Yes. And you know, just because I'm curious as always, I'm opening up my phone right now and seeing in the discover area, boobs, boobs, a butt, a tongue, more boobs, some more boobs, oddly satisfying scrambled eggs, boobs, Kanye, boobs, boobs, Kanye, Stan Lee, obviously, and some more boobs.

So well done, Snapchat. Well done. We love the boobs. And in continuing with your whole rant earlier this episode, limiting social media use, reduce loneliness and depression in a new experiment. Now we've all known that this was going on for quite some time, but there hasn't been a very good experimental study yet.

They finally did one. And, uh, yeah, it's not good. It's, uh, it basically, you know, they took two groups of people. They did the pure scientific method and the people that they put on social media diets were much happier and less lonely.

Yeah. I mean, it's not a huge sample size, 143, but it's good enough to get, to get at least, you know, a baseline. So yeah. Well, good. And, you know, yeah, basically saying in general, uh, the, the head of the study said in general, I would say, put down your phone and be with the people in your life.

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. Actually, you know, it made me think a lot about how we started using the technology because, uh, going back even because we're old, uh, to pagers and, and things of that nature. And when, when cell phones started in the first texting and even Twitter and social media, when we started using it, meaning us old folk in general, we used it to firm up plans to do things in the real world.

That was it as a replacement for the real world. Exactly. That was, that's how, that's how it's really changed a lot. Right? Like, cause we really did like, I, I, even now I try to keep it that to that. I don't, I have some friends that I can't be with in real life. They live in different places and things of that nature.

So yes, those are long text conversations, but for people locally, I try not to do text conversations. I, I was just texting with my friend Helen last night and the, some extent of the text was you around for a drink soon next week. Done and done. There you go. That's that. We will not be texting again.

We will get together and have a conversation. That's the way it's changed. Yeah. Yeah. Boy, has that changed. So, wow. All of our tech this week is about how we shouldn't be using tech. And this will be the last episode of grumpy old geeks coming next week.

Grumpy old hermits. Yeah. On a Moleskine. That'll be, that'll be our new show. Grumpy old Moleskine users. We'll be posting our manifestos on paper throughout the city on telephone poles. Oh, I was going to say, we're going to go to Kinko's to have our next episode printed up, but there isn't even a Kinko's anymore.

The Kinko's anymore. Damn it.

This episode of grumpy old geeks is brought to you by our friends at privacy.com. You don't use the same password everywhere. So why use the same credit card number when you shop online? Privacy.com generates a brand new virtual visa card number for every purchase you make online with just one click. It's easy.

Simply download their browser extension from the Chrome Web Store or their Android or iOS app and link your virtual cards to your U.S. checking account or debit card. Freeze and unfreeze cards and set spending limits per charge, per month, or even per year. With privacy.com, never worry about being billed twice or upgraded without your consent.

And there's no need to worry about forgetting to cancel subscriptions or free trials ever again. Refunds even work if the card is closed or paused. And you can earn up to 5% cash back. Woohoo! Virtual cards are locked to a merchant, so you don't have to worry about changing your card everywhere if one gets hacked.

And you'll get a decline email or push notification if a hacker tries to use the card anywhere else. You can even figure out when merchants likely got hacked, often before they even know it themselves, which is kind of fun. The security of your data is at the core of what privacy.com does. They're PCI DSS compliant and are held to the same security standards as your bank.

Sensitive information is secured using military-grade encryption using split-key encryption with partial keys held by separate employees. No single person can access the sensitive data on the server because it requires multiple keys to decrypt, like the nuclear launch codes in war games.

And true to their name, these cards let you use any billing info you like, so your information remains secure and private. And they support two-factor auth. Privacy.com is 100% free to use. Just like credit cards, they make money from merchants. They won't sell your information and there are no hidden fees.

Privacy.com has saved customers over $100 million in unwanted and unauthorized charges due to compromised cards, hidden fees, and forgotten subscriptions. Protect your privacy and your money with virtual cards from Privacy.com. To learn more, visit Privacy.com slash GOG.

That's Privacy.com slash GOG. And we thank Privacy.com for their support of our show.

I don't know why I did this to myself, but I did, and I'm actually glad that I did, Jason. After you told me how bad Iron Fist was, and I watched one or two episodes, and it seemed okay, but then we heard it got canceled, so I really did break a rule here, because if there's no three seasons, I try not to watch shows.

We know there won't be a third season. I went ahead, and I finished Iron Fist season two. And guess what, Jason? What, Brian? It was phenomenal. Really? It was really good. Like, the first few episodes were, eh, but it goes... I don't want to spoil it for you, because you need to go watch it.

Yeah, I'm going to, for sure. It's good. It's real good, and I'm so bummed there isn't a season three, because why do they flip the script at the end of this show? Okay, because... It's good. I saw the first two episodes, and I actually really enjoyed them. Way more than Luke Cage.

I was going to go back and finish this, no matter what, but now I'm going to go right away and finish it, so... I really, really enjoyed it, and I am, you know, fingers crossed that half the reason that it got canceled is because of the Netflix-Disney thing, and maybe Disney's starting up their own network, and they're going to need some content.

If you're listening, Disney, they did... The showrunners did a great job with season two, fixed almost all the problems of season one, downplayed the main character enough, because he's the worst. Really great. Really good. I was... I couldn't believe... I stayed up past midnight to finish, which is unheard of for me these days.

On a school night, too. Wow. On a school night, I stayed up past midnight to finish it, also because I knew I had to have something for the show since I didn't finish a book. Yeah, there we go. I also watched, on Netflix, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is a new cooking show that's getting a lot of great reviews.

I loved it, but I do love cooking shows, and this is in the Anthony Bourdain vein of things, except by a woman named Samin Nosrat. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. She's written a book called The Same Thing. She worked for New York Times Magazine, and now she's got this show on Netflix, and it's fantastic.

I mean, it's not as snarky as Bourdain, obviously, and it gets into, basically, the four flavors that make everything. Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat, obviously. Lots of great recipes, well done show, highly enjoyable. So if you're missing your Bourdain kick, but can do without the Bourdain, and just want a really good cooking show, this is it.

There's only four episodes, right? Yeah. Okay, yeah. I watched the trailer for it. It actually looked pretty good. It's kind of like Bourdain meets Somebody Feed Phil. Yeah, it's got a bit of that vein, and since I love both of those shows, I highly recommend this one as well.

Yeah, I still haven't finished Phil's new season. I've got to go back and finish that, too. I've got so much to watch, but no time. No time. But I will make time for this, because Idris Elba is coming back as Luther. I loved Luther. It was one of the best series out there. And the even better part is Alice is back.

If you've ever watched Luther, and you know what I just said, and you know that's a game changer. So you've got to watch it. I cannot wait for this show to come back. It looks awesome. I've heard nothing but good things about this show from many people I trust. So at some point with my time, after I've shut off all my notifications and burned my computer, I will get down to watching this.

You can get the VHS tapes from a swap meet somewhere. And you know, you're burying the lead here. Idris Elba was voted most sexiest man alive as well, so. Okay. Well, I didn't know that. I figured everybody knew that already.

Okay. Because he was going to be Bond. We were hoping he was going to come be Bond, but then Daniel Craig jumped back in. Well, you know, this is hopefully the last Daniel Craig Bond that's coming out next, and Idris will get another chance, because he would be the perfect Bond. I'm telling you.

Oh, man. He would be so good. I just love his stuff. You know, we're not going to be getting any more of those crap gunslinger movies, so. That's true. God. Although this is Hollywood, so you never know. Netflix might just start putting out a series on them. Oh, man. And if you're a Narcos fan, Narcos Mexico starts on Friday.

That'll be interesting, since they're leaving Colombia, so we'll see how that goes. But I was a huge fan of Narcos. I really liked it. So, we'll see. I'm trepidatious on this one. And we do have, finally, a teaser trailer for the next season of Game of Thrones, which is boring.

Well, shit. I mean, it's still six months away. Yeah. Yeah. It's coming out. It gives us a lot. And it's just the teaser. This is just basically, hey, guys, you're going to have to wait until April. Remember this show? Remember this show? Yeah. Remember this? Yeah. Dragons and Boobs? Yeah. Dragons and Boobs is coming back in April.

But there's no new footage. It's all just classic footage to reintroduce you to the characters again, just to make you remember that they're still a thing, because it's been so damn long since they put anything out. Yeah. Well, the Star Trek world is expanding rapidly.

First, we've had an announcement. Well, first, we're getting Picard. That's the best thing. Then there was an announcement of an almost kind of comedy show that they're going to be doing called Beneath the Decks or something like that. We'll see what happens with that one. I've heard there's some sort of new cartoon that potentially is being worked on.

And Deadline has now found out that basically we're going to get yet another Star Trek series on CBS All Access. So we could be looking at four to five different Star Trek things going at once. What a world. Star Trek apparently didn't get the memo from Star Wars that if you keep making stuff, people get tired of it.

But yeah, I don't know if we need that many shows going at once, but this one does have a bit of promise. This is going to be starring Michelle Yao. I believe that's how it's pronounced. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. I should have Googled that first. Michelle Yeo as her current Star Trek Discovery character, Captain Emperor Georgiou, who appeared on the first season of Discovery and will return for season two, which will premiere January 17th.

But it looks like they'll do a spinoff of her character based on Starfleet's Section 31 division. The X-Files, basically, of Star Trek. But we'll see. I mean, she's a great actress. I love the character. I could be up for this. Yeah. No, I mean, I thought she was decent in Discovery.

It wasn't great. I've seen her much better in much better roles. But it's Michelle Yeo. I'm down. I'm totally down with that. Except the whole X-Files type of thing. But that could be interesting. You know, we'll see. I'm happy that there's more Star Trek in the world. I'm hoping they don't screw it up.

Yeah, I'm definitely happy for that. And this is Discovery is going to be coming out about the same time that the Orville comes back. So. Right. So it's good. If you don't like Discovery, just go watch the next generation comedy style. Basically. Basically. I got to go back and finish that.

My favorite band in the world, Underworld, is kind of doing a new thing. Instead of working on a new album right now, they're doing something they call Drift, which is an ongoing experiment that will regularly publish new Underworld material, music, film, stories, et cetera, online. You know, it's going to be the band in collaboration with Tomato, which is the longstanding art collective that they're part of, and Friends Old and New.

So it's pretty interesting. There are two episodes so far. The first one is some great music shot with a lot of driving footage. Cars and things like that. I haven't had a chance to see the second one yet, but it looks pretty different. But if you're a fan of Underworld, you should be aware that this is going on because it's going to be a year-long collaboration series.

So there will be no new album anytime soon, but we'll be getting new music and interesting art stuff. Wait, do I have to sign up for a new subscription service to pay for this? No, it's completely free on UnderworldLive.com. Thank you, Underworld. Thank you, Underworld. We appreciate that. And one of my favorite bands in the world, The Prodigy, has a new album out called No Tourists.

I don't know if you've heard this one yet. I've listened to some of it. Yeah. The Prodigy is always consistently pretty decent. Yeah. This kind of reminds me of old Prodigy. It's loud, it's noisy, and it's really fucking good. It's just one of those ones that are just gets the blood going. I was listening to it while I was cleaning and working yesterday, had it blasting through the speakers in the studio, and man, it was good.

I really enjoyed this album. Excellent. I'll give that another read. Yeah. A read? Or listen, even. Well, you know, you listened to all your books, so I'm now using read interchangeably. You gotta read, yeah, you gotta read the music and I'll listen to the books. Yes, I have the, I have all the musical notation from the Prodigy album down and I'm going to play it on my clarinet later.

Awesome, awesome. And a hat tip to a friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, for tipping me off to that one. All right. And we unfortunately have a lot of media candy news related to the fires that have been happening here because it's basically destroyed a bunch of things. We've lost the Westworld Ranch.

It's actually Paramount. It's gone. Yeah, Paramount Ranch, which. The Paramount Ranch where they shot Westworld. Yeah, the main drag of Westworld is gone, but the church survived, surprisingly. Surprisingly, yeah. So it's going to be interesting to see what they do when they try to shoot next season. I guess they're going to have to basically rebuild it, which is kind of nice.

But then they also, I mean, they shot Firefly there too, like the first, well, it wasn't the first, it was the first episode that aired because somebody at Fox is a moron, but the train heist episode was shot there and we were speculating, me and my friend of the show, Joey Rabier, were speculating if this is going to affect Deadwood as well, because Deadwood has been known to shoot there also.

But, you know, fuck it, it's Hollywood. We've got the most skilled carpenters in the world and it will take them a week to rebuild that and make it look exactly the way it did because, you know, it's just wood. It's fine. That's true. Unfortunately, what they won't be rebuilding is another area, the Reagan Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, where I don't know if you've ever done this, but it's been kind of a right, right of passage for people that like to hike here in Los Angeles is that you can do this hike up there and there's a bunch of the set of the of mash that they just left there.

Oh, man, you could hike out to it and hang out on the mash. Basically, what was left of the mash lot? That's all burned. That's all gone. And obviously, there's going to be no rebuilding of that because why? Which is pretty sad. Yeah, man, that sucks. I didn't know that was a thing. It was a thing, man. I've been there many times.

I used to like when there'd be big meteor showers, we would hike out there and just hang out in the mash area. A bunch of people would show up and you just sit out there and watch meteors. Oh, that is so cool. The one hike that I haven't done is you can still go hike to the Batcave from the original TV series. Oh, I've not seen that either. Yeah. Yeah.

A friend of mine used to go and like post pictures when he was up there before Instagram. He posted them on his blog. Kids, look it up what a blog was. But right. Yeah, you can still you can still definitely check out the Batcave. But man, I didn't know the mash set was there. I totally would have done that. Yeah, it was pretty damn cool, man.

But that's all gone. I am a big fan of the Frosty, Heidi and Frank show. They're L.A. talk radio staples. I've been listening to them for over 15 years now, which is crazy to think of. And, you know, if you listen to somebody for even a couple of years, you know, maybe even just a year.

If you listen to talk radio, there's something strange about talk radio or even podcasts where you really start to feel like you know them and you're they're part of your family and they're part of your life. And it was sad to hear that Frank, unfortunately, lost his house completely in the fires. Just gone. Everything. He's fine. His family's fine.

His everything is fine. But it's just it's crazy. He just he's he posted a photo and there's nothing. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of people that happened to Gerard Butler lost his home and he posted it on Instagram when he got back to his house and there was nothing there. But as always, classy, you know, he's just like he thanked the firefighters for all their efforts and was just like, yeah, it's just a house.

You know, everybody's safe. It's just a house. Right. And in strange news here, Kim and Kanye turned out to be our some of our heroes of the week. They hired private firefighters to basically save their house. And it's going to be rich.

Yeah, it is good to be rich. I'm surprised a lot of other people that live up in Hidden Hills didn't do it because they're all rich. That's that's kind of what you have to do to live in Hidden Hills. You know, that's the place where Justin Bieber used to get in trouble because he'd be driving his Fisker around at three in the morning, coked up out of his mind, shirtless, waving, waving to the neighbors.

But what they did was they hired a private firefighting company to come in and basically build fire breaks for this big field next to their house, because if the field burned, their house would burn and then there would be a domino effect to half the houses in the neighborhood. So basically, they saved the neighborhood.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. You know, the fact that there's mercenary firefighting organizations out there. Why? Why? Mercenary everything out there, dude. I know it's fucked up. If you're rich. That is messed up. I would have much rather. I'm disturbed.

And I think morons of the week are these mercenary firefighters you should have been throwing in with the main battle, getting in there, not going out for hire. Well, here's the deal, man. They were still in the fray. They saved a bunch of homes. They just got paid to do it. So I'm glad that they saved the homes for the people that can afford to rebuild easily.

Yeah. That's the other thing. It's like, you know, you look at the campfire up north where hundreds of people are probably dead and thousands of buildings have burned. And down here, it's like hundreds of buildings have burned of people that have enough money to rebuild. Well, not everyone here. There are some.

There's some. The fires even in Southern California took out some low-income areas and even not low-income, but people that don't have the means to have a $60 million house go up in flames. Yeah. It's sad all around. But yeah, I mean, it's nice that they did that, but it just leaves a weird taste in my mouth.

That's all I'm saying. It's one of those things, but you know, hey, less people losing their houses is good. No matter who's paying for it or who's doing it. I'm okay with this. I'm okay with this one. You use your money to do what you got to do. Okay.

But yeah, it's a weird situation. But I got to say that I am still flabbergasted that only two people died in the fire down here so far. That's incredible. No firefighters. Well, three firefighters were injured, but they're just, you know, basic injuries that they're going to recover from, but no firefighters have died, which is for the size of this fire.

Pretty incredible, especially in the terrain that they're working on. So kudos to those guys. I am always impressed with the firefighters around here. Anyway, moving on. I was listening to Sam Harris's podcast this morning with his guest, Johan Hari. And I've never heard of this guy, but he is now one of my favorite people.

And I'm going to go pick up his books. It's about addiction, depression, and a meaningful life. And it is a fantastic podcast. It covers some of the stuff that we talked about at the beginning of the show, but also other areas of depression and anxiety and addiction.

And what people around the world are doing to combat depression and addiction. And what the long and the short of it is, we're doing it wrong. We're completely doing it wrong. There are some tribes out there that were, this one story is really cool.

This guy, like, used to work in the fields and lost his leg. So they got him a fake leg and he went back out to the fields, but he couldn't work in the fields because the leg hurt too much. So, you know, they basically gave him depression medicine, which was they bought him a cow because then he could become a dairy farmer, which did not hurt his leg so much.

And he recovered. The depression was gone. He had meaning in his life again, and he could still give back to the community. It's just one of those little stories from the podcast. It was great. I highly recommend everybody listen to this one. It's really good. Right. And on a final happy note in media candy, I went back and I watched the SNL skit.

On NPR's delicious dish, Shweaty Balls. I have not seen this for over a decade and it is so good because SNL was making fun of podcasts last week and it was kind of fell flat. It wasn't that funny. The only funny part was the golden blue Yeti, which I chuckled at.

But the Shweaty Balls NPR one, they take the piss out of NPR so much and it is so perfect because, you know, I love NPR so much. It's a very specific show on NPR that is on Sundays generally, and I tend to intuit if I'm driving down to see my mom or something like that.

And I've, for 10 years, I've not been able to hear that show without thinking about the Shweaty Balls. That's great. Norman Goldwasser, by day, is an Orthodox Jewish therapist at Horizon Psychological Services who compares homosexuality to obsessive compulsive disorder and misleads clients by claiming that their sexual orientation can be changed with a special brand of quack therapy, which is rejected by every respected medical and mental health association.

You know where this is going, don't you, Jason? Oh, I think I know where this is going, Brian. I've been around the block a few times. By night, an undercover investigation by Truth Wins Out has found he solicits sexual partners on Manhunt, a gay dating app, using the profile Hot and Hairy 72.

During our operation, Goldwasser, going by the pseudonym Dave, offered to meet for sex with our operative Brandon at a Fort Lauderdale motel room. Goldwasser also has a profile in Bear Nation by the same name. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I love it.

I love it. Yeah, if we didn't have a show name already, I wanted to do Hot and Hairy 72. Excelsior! Hot and Hairy 72. Excelsior. Now, another great story. L.A. band Threaten.

Without the G. Never heard of them. No, I have not. Neither has anybody else, really. Actually, I kind of almost give this guy a little bit of props. The band's frontman and leader, Jared Threaten. That's his name, I suppose. No idea if that's his real name or he changed it as more self-promotion for himself.

And also, he's apparently the only original or real bad member. We have some updates on this. He posed as a non-existent booking agent slash promoter to get a European tour using faked live footage. Here we are back to the deep fakes and other things of that nature. It just sounds like regular fakes.

Yeah, well, it's not a deep fake, but again, it's everything we're talking about. It's using faked video to prove something that isn't true, right? So he used faked live footage of allegedly packed shows in Los Angeles. He bought Facebook likes, RSVPs, and YouTube views, and lied about ticket sale numbers to swindle venue owners and talent buyers in taking on the shows in Europe.

So they went and did a tour, and posts started making the rounds on social media when the tour kicked off on November 1st in London. Posted by the venue The Underworld, which hosted the show, alleged the band's agent claimed the band had sold 291 tickets in advance, but only three people turned up. And this has continued on.

So the tour has now been called off because all the venues have found out that it was bullshit, so they're canceling it. And his band has quit mid-tour and is headed home to the States with four more shows remaining. And they're just all getting canceled. So on one sense, he gamed the system and good on him.

Yeah. On the other sense. You're going to get caught. What were you thinking? I know. Oh, well. This is the social media world that we've created. I love it. This is the world that we've created.

Exactly. You got to think two steps ahead, man. You got to think two steps ahead. Now, here in Los Angeles and across the United States, we have a chain of gas stations called 76. Right. We've all been to them. They had the big orange ball. Well, now they're running ads on KROQ here in Los Angeles.

And I heard one the other day as I was driving to go get supplies to abscond from the fire. And they said, here's a 30-second podcast. Okay. And I listened to it and they were kind of advertisements podcasty.

And it was terrible. And they said, this 30-second podcast was brought to you by 76. And I just scratched my head and said, okay, not a podcast. It's an advertisement on a radio station. It's a broadcast.

Yeah. It's a broadcast. Not a podcast. Nothing about this was a podcast. Nothing. It's on the fucking radio. Although that could be said for anything that NPR puts out and calls a podcast too. But that's a story for another day. So if there was ever an ad agency that deserved to be out of business, it is the one that created the 30-second podcast because it doesn't exist.

It's not a podcast. What the fuck? What the fuck? I love how you get so riled up about anything about podcasts. But like, you know, last week we were talking about the White House putting out a faked video and you couldn't care less. Well, I expected from those douche nozzles, but come on.

Okay. Feedback loop. We've got a ton of new Patreon subscribers and thank you all so much. We've got Josh, Bree, Jeffrey, Ricky, Say, Danny, Vincent, Cameron, Gianni, Liz, and Eric.

And Eric sent us a great note. The internet like it's 1990-something and it's a link to neocities.org. Neocities. So it's basically Geocities. It is. And I checked it out and it is awesome. They've got 209,000 websites that are bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web.

We offer free static web hosting and tools that allow you to create your own website. Join us. So I haven't made my own site yet, but it looks. It looks kind of cool, actually. I know. It's old school. 2,291,994,312 site hits so far.

Almost a billion visitors and 26.5 million site updates. This is cool. And it's open source. They actually publish the code. Nice. Yeah. And zero advertising. Neocities will never sell your personal data or put advertising on your site.

Instead, we are funded directly by people just like you with supporter accounts and donations the way it should be. I am down with that. You know what this reminds me of, though? We are growing up in Southern California, and I'm sure they were in other places as well. There was a grocery chain called Vons.

Yes. So if you know it, at some point, a lot of them were sold or something like that, and they were bought out by another company, which changed the name to John's. Yeah. And they left up the O and the N and the S, and they basically just took down the V and put up a J, and you could see the outline of the blasted concrete around where the V was with just this J sticking there.

So Neocities, Geocities, Vons, and Johns. That's funny, because I used to see Vons and Johns at the same time, like back in 96. And then there was another one called Ron's. I don't remember Ron's. Oh, Ron's was in Hollywood down by Santa Monica.

There was a Ron's and a John's, and you had to go up towards Sunset to get to the Vons. But Vons is still around. Yeah, they're still around, too. So they're all there. But for a while, somebody in the neon sign was doing really well with selling J's and R's, apparently. Not so much the O and S's.

Those were staying on the shelves. You could recycle ours, yeah. The R's and the N's were flying off the shelves. That's so awesome. Good stuff. And thanks over on PayPal, where we got a lovely donation from Linda. Thank you so much. And I believe that one was actually a recurring one. So thank you.

That's amazing. RightFilmSleepRepeat writes in, thanks to GOG Podcast for not recommending you Google fisting. Now, that's a rabbit hole. Okay. Yeah. Moss6502 sends in, kind of fucked up the Google walkout people posted on Medium and not Blogspot.

Oh, I didn't even think about that. Yeah, because Google still owns Blogspot. Good catch. Good catch. Yeah. And Gwydian writes in, listening to you talking about Roomba made me think of a project I was doing which led me to find that pictures of the inside of any house sold in the last several years seem to be listed online forever.

Seems to me that they should be removed after the house sells. But it's all public record anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Yeah. And again, it comes down to, it's all public record, but you used to have to go to a public record. Right. You had to go to a physical building and pull papers.

Yeah. Now it's just online and super easy to see. Yeah. I mean, yeah, MLS, the real estate site, you can just get anything you need there. You certainly can. Scott writes in, is this AI? We drew you a flowchart to work it out.

And this is from Technology Review, and it's very funny because all things end up being AI. There are some, there's some, there's some like avenues that you can go where, you know, what was the, I saw one that was pretty funny. It's like, start. Then it's just a camera. Yeah. Can I see it?

No. Okay. That's just a camera, you know, or can I hear it? No. Start. And it just goes back to the beginning. It's, it's a pretty funny little, uh, little flowchart. I dig it. I love the MIT tech review. I liked it. It was good. I used to subscribe to that. I wonder what happened. Oh, I ran out of money.

Kevin writes in, I'm one of the four listeners that use Spotify for the podcast on my Android phone. Is there a better platform? I'm all ears. Oh, hashtag I'm all ears. Sorry. Uh, yeah. Check out the Google podcast app. It's really nice. And it's basically baked in now. If you have a somewhat newer phone, if you have an ancient phone, then upgrade.

Agreed. Derek writes in, I drive over an hour to and from work each day, looking for a way to get my thoughts into my phone hands-free with the Apple watch help plus Evernote yelling at Siri is not working. I recommend checking out just press record. It's a great little app that you can put on the Apple watch and it even has transcription using the, you know, the basically speech to text feature of the iPhone and Siri and all that stuff.

It's a, it's called just press record one button, press it, put it on. It's got a complication in the whole nine yards. I had it on my, my watch and I used it all the time when I was out walking with the dogs and I needed to make a note and I'd come home and just import it in. I don't even, I, you might even be able to use it to grab it and move it around, but I haven't tried that.

So that's just me. And Moss 6502 wrote him back on Twitter as well, saying that he uses the iPhone voice memos for that, which are pretty good and works well with CarPlay. So a couple of suggestions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The voice memo app does work, but just press record has the transcription built in.

So it costs a few bucks, but I like it because it is one, you can just press the button and go. It's, it's nice. Right. Over on GOG.show, Taylor writes in, is there a ranked list of books and movies you like? I wanted to ask before I simply go through all the podcasts and create one.

Thanks for all the hard work you put into this podcast. Well, Taylor, that is one bit of hard work that we never did. So if you want to do it. But we'll thank you for the hard work that you'll put into our podcast and please send it over when you've done it. Yes. And we'll post it on the website. We would love that. But yeah, we've never gotten around to that.

Yeah. Brian writes in, what is the name of the book I and my teenage kids should read on the manipulation gamification of all social apps? It was short, you said. And like 14 bucks on Amazon is a download only stuff we all know, but what my 14 and 15 year olds need to read. I've been searching your past episode notes and having trouble finding it.

Get on that, Taylor. Come on, Taylor. And I wonder if he's referring to 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now by Jaron Lanier. That's what I'm thinking as well. Yeah, that might be it. That'll be in the show notes on this show. GOG.show slash 298. We'll leave you a link. Yes.

And Ivor writes in, hey, Jason, I don't know if Bam Bam has been at your computer or something, but the GOG.show website is looking pretty munted right now. He sent us a couple of screenshots that had a bunch of JavaScript code at the top. It looked like it was virus-y code because I saw stuff in there about crypto.

Oh, you did? Oh, well, I guess we need to get on and fix that. I couldn't replicate it, so... I couldn't either. And we've had one other person write us a couple weeks back about a problem with our site that I wasn't able to replicate and it seemed to clear it up. But, well, it's WordPress.

Yeah, we're moving over to WordPress.com eventually here, so that might clear it up. But I'll take a peek under the hood this week and see what I can find. If it's mentioning crypto in there, then we definitely need to fix that. Because wouldn't that be ironic?

It wouldn't be ironic. Oh, yeah, CoinHive. Okay. Okay, I'm on that. We'll get that taken care of. Rob writes in, hi, Jason and Brian. Great show this morning as always. I've long been of the opinion that the mass shooting phenomena is better addressed through mental health reforms rather than new gun laws. The way I see it, guns are just the tools and people with evil plans can usually find a different tool, plus putting more laws in place to stop people that are already breaking laws doesn't seem like an effective plan.

So now you know my own bias, but I'm hoping you'll give this article, this analysis article a read. The site obviously has a bias, but the conclusions seem pretty logical to me. I'd love to hear your take. And it's armed citizens that are successful 94% of the time at active shooter events, FBI on concealedandcarry.com.

The biggest point I took away is that the presence of concealed carry gun owners reduces violence and there are no incidents of the good guys hurting innocent bystanders. I've loved your show for years and look forward to more years of listening. Thanks, Rob. Well, thank you, Rob, for writing. I think we'll talk about that a little bit right now, but it's interesting you bring this up.

Well, it's obviously it's in the zeitgeist right now, but Dave Bittner actually mentioned off the air that he'd like to have a little bit of a discussion about guns. And we're going to do that in an upcoming episode. So we'll save a lot of our thoughts for that. But here's a few. Yeah. In my youth, I advocated open and concealed carry for everyone, kind of like Switzerland.

That way you never know if anyone that you were fucking with was packing heat. But now I'm older and wiser and I realize that most people are dealing with a lot of shit and a lot of people are on drugs and booze a good portion of the time and not in their right mind all the time. So my opinions have changed quite a bit, which leads us into the next story.

Brian. I did find this actually randomly and I read it myself and it was never meant to be for the show. But since you brought this up, this is over at fatherly.com. What I learned about gun owners by becoming one myself. And this is a guy who they did.

He's written a book and done a big interview about it. He hated guns. Then he became a gun owner. And the takeaway from this is he was asked, given your assertion that gun ownership is about fear. Are you currently carrying? And he said, no, I don't carry a gun because that's not the way to ask someone to change their behavior. You can't change anybody's behavior by threatening them with violence.

A gun on your person is a threat of violence. There's only one reason for a gun to exist to do violence. It's a decent paperweight, but I can buy a paperweight. It's a decent hammer, but I have a hammer for that. If I want to kill someone, I'd get a gun and I don't want to kill anyone. I don't believe that anybody's life is more valuable than my own.

So I don't give myself the option of even going near the gun as a way of communication. I like that. There you go. There you go. So we'll talk about it more with Mr. Dave Bittner when we have a slow security week. Peter writes in asking for suggestions for shortcuts, the new app that came with iOS 12.

And we don't yet. I'm still digging into shortcuts and you can do some pretty cool stuff with it. I mean, you can do some really cool stuff with it, but I just haven't had time to dig into it yet. And we're going to cover that in a future show on apps and gadgets. Peter. So thank you for the letter and we'll let you know how this goes.

Yep. And Nick writes in. Hey guys, last episode you talked about listener preferences for podcasts, specifically Spotify. I'm probably one of the few listening on them. Well, we got one other one on the show because my cell phone provider T-Mobile offers unlimited media streaming via Spotify. I don't pay for unlimited data, but it's nice because I can constantly switch between a dozen or so podcasts and my music playlists.

Yeah, I mean, that's the game that we all have to pay now because of net neutrality. Well, the other thing about it, though, is you can download podcasts before you leave the house over your Wi-Fi so you don't have to have it ding your plan at all. That's what most people do. That's what I do. Yeah, that's what almost everybody does.

If you subscribe to a podcast with an app, you can actually download the show over your free Wi-Fi and then you don't have to worry about streaming it because streaming is, you know, it's a pain in the butt. So if you just have them there on your phone, you can just switch between them. And if you lose signal, you can still listen to your podcast. Which is great.

Right. Graham writes in, just catching up and I thought I'd be grumpy at you in return. Love the show. RT may be a propaganda device, but it's still valid to read things on. Society polarization is made a lot worse by people only seeing news from sources that they agree with. We've talked about this. Yes, filter bubbles. We know all about filter bubbles and it's good.

But my point about RT is that it is just propaganda. It's not a... I mean, you could say Fox News is propaganda, too, for the right. But the thing about it is it is just not our propaganda.

So that's why I try and stay away from it. It's one of those things where I am for reading other people's stuff. You know, I advocate that. I'll even read Fox News just to see what's going on over there. But there's something about RT that just rubs me the wrong way.

I don't know. Brian, what do you think about RT? It doesn't bother me, but I am not on Twitter anywhere near as much as you are. No, RT is not retweet. It's the Russian video channel. Oh, sorry. I thought all of this was about Twitter. No. No.

I was totally tuning out. I'm like, I don't care. No, because there was a clip last week. Because we were talking about retweeting a while back. No, this is how you hated that. There was a video that somebody sent us on RT that they wanted us to cover. And we're like, what's on RT? Well, it's totally a propaganda device.

It sucks, but they're all out there. And I think it's a good enough thing to just see it all. To see it all, look at it all. Except for when it's so obviously bullshit and fake. That's the thing. It's like, I know it's going to be bullshit. It's, you know, how do you tell a lie? Wrap it in truth. So you know that there's going to be a lot of truth.

But there's one kernel in there that they're trying to get across to you. And you need to steer clear of that because they're professionals at selling bullshit. That's the only reason I am so down on RT. And he also writes in, secondly, for Ubuntu, if you use the NetInstall ISO, you can get a pretty small install.

The CentOS minimal install is actually bigger than using the Ubuntu NetInstall ISO and not installing anything other than the SSHD over the top. Can't speak today. It's fucking dry as hell out here. Yeah, that's cool.

I'll give it a shot. I really don't care either way. You know, the only thing I really like CentOS for is because it's more secure. And that's really the security on Cent is pretty good. But now that it seems like we might have a crypto miner installed on our website, I need to go. Look at that. Yeah, we got to check on that.

Mad Mike writes in, Brian, this may be old news by now, but I'll just I just finished listening to an audio book. I'm sorry, but listening to a book is still not reading a book. Yes, I'll piss off now. Jason. Yeah, I'm going to go. I'm going to go read some music now. Yeah. By Mary Akin called The Cyber Effect. It's a 2016 book and it has an excellent section on kids and technology.

From what you've said on your show, you and your wife are already very aware and conscientious when it comes to your son's internet exposure. But as the father of a 10 year old who got her strictly supervised iPad at six and is obsessed with Minecraft and whose mother is in the crime prevention line of work and thus super paranoid. I think she calls it aware there was still enough in the section on kids that surprised and disturbed me that I wanted to pass along this recommendation to you added bonus.

If you listen to the audio book at one point five X, the narrator sounds just like Lori from Silicon Valley, which is kind of funny. All right. I will definitely check that out. I've been trying to read up a lot more on this stuff. And obviously, you've heard Jason and I ranting this entire episode about how bad social media is.

So more fuel to the fire. Disappointed, Mike writes in. I'm sorry, Mike, that you're so disappointed. Welcome to the family. A while back, I was extolling the virtues of Mozilla and how they really knew their customer. And to this day, I love the emails they send me. I love what they say and I love what they do.

It turns out I just don't like their product. As you'd already told me, they don't know how to build a good browser. So it's back to Opera I go and it is so much better. As you both had indicated many, many times. Correct. We have indicated that many, many times and I still stand by Opera is a great browser.

Right. Me too. That's what I'm using right now. Holly writes in. I am a cybersecurity professional and programming was never a skill I picked up. As web designers, can you tell me if the rubber duck theory is true? I had not heard about it until today. And then it said rubberduckdebugging.com. And I'd never heard of this either, but it seems about right.

This is debugging software with the rubber duck. Did you watch the original video about rubber duck? Yes. It's a pretty funny video. And, you know, the theory, I think, holds pretty true because there are a lot of people I know in the software industry that did have a rubber duck on their desk.

And I did not know why. I thought it was just a thing. Now I do. Now we know. So, yeah. Check out rubberduckdebugging.com. It's just, it's basically a way to talk yourself through the problem, which can be solved by actually specking out the software that you're going to build before you build it. This is, this is for people who just fly by the seat of their pants, which I am.

It's not for the work quickly and break things crow, which is seems to be the world now. Yeah. And I'm guilty of this. I used to do things like that until I got a job at a professional software organization where you had to actually spec things out and figure out how it was going to work before you wrote the first line of code.

You know, it's like that old Abe Lincoln quote, you know, if I have five hours to cut down a tree, I'm going to spend four hours sharpening my ax first. It comes back to that. So PJ writes in just in the middle of your spiel about autocorrect. Any thoughts on Google's smart compose that is just, that is just being rolled out in Gmail?

I find it to be quite accurate, but it fails the hookers and blow test. Okay. I don't know what the hookers and blow test is, but I'm intrigued. I hope it doesn't involve a rubber ducky. Oh, loving the show. We'll throw you 20 bucks. Once I'm done throwing my money at no sleep, keep it up. Well, I don't know who no sleep is, but obviously they don't need it because they're not sleeping.

Send us the money because we need four hookers and blow. Apparently there's a test we have to look into. I haven't tried it because yeah, I neither have I. Yeah, no, I don't use Gmail in the browser, so I use airmail three. So I don't know about this, but I'll look it up.

I want to, I'm curious about the smart compose. Right. Sean writes in, gents, love the show. Been listening for the better part of a year now. I have to say, though, today was the first time I was truly disappointed. Oh, no. I felt your lighthearted humor regarding the fires around LA that have taken numerous lives at this point and destroyed people's homes and property.

I really felt you were out of line and I hope you can be better people in the future. Well, Sean, here's the thing. We aren't a live show and it bites us on the ass a few times and it did here as well. We generally record anywhere between one to three days before the show goes live.

And when we recorded early in the morning on Friday, the fires were bad, but they were not that bad. They had just started. By the time the show came out, they were very bad. So, you know, we call it fire season here. It happens every year. Sometimes they aren't bad at all.

And that's what we thought was probably going to happen. And unfortunately, we were very much wrong. Yeah, the deal here is that, yeah, we do record early. And as someone who is living next to the fire, I'm allowed to be a little funny about it because humor kind of breaks the tension because it's been scary as fuck.

And numerous lives, two people lost their lives because they got confused and they basically couldn't make it out. The fires in Northern California are the serious ones. The ones in Southern California are tragic for the people that have lost their homes. And we feel terrible about that. We live with these people. These are people we know.

So, yeah, and we're a comedy show. So, sorry that you got butthurt about it. But, you know, since I'm sitting here living through it, I feel that I can say whatever the hell I want. Sorry. I think the time shifting thing is the more important aspect. Okay. You do.

You follow up with that one. Okay. FT writes in, hi, guys. Love the show. You've always mentioned you respect DuckDuckGo, but don't use them because they're not as good for search as Google. Correct. Well, I was wondering if you knew the main benefit, besides privacy, of course, to DuckDuckGo is the shortcuts. Oh, we've heard about the bang shortcuts before.

Yes. So, we just haven't really dug into it because it just seems like too much work. I just want to type in something and get to where I'm going. That's it. That's all. So, I don't want to add work to my workflow. I want to be out of, I want to be away from my computer as much as I can. So, that just adds on a level of pain in the assitude.

Yeah, I'm too lazy for all that. I learned all the Google shortcuts. I don't need to learn another search engine one. Yep. So, there you go. Over on iTunes, we got a five-star review from LowenMensch408 from Taiwan, of all places. He says, favorite tech podcast? It's been almost a year since I started listening to the podcast, although most of the stuff Jason and Brian talks on the show has not much to do with my 23-year-old life here in Taiwan, except for stuff I had, like I had to start using Facebook and switching over to Opera from Chrome.

I just really wanted to show my appreciation for the weekly Grump Show, now semi-weekly, as we've learned. Therefore, the five-star rating, subscribed on Patreon, stay grumpy. P.S. I don't make much now, but I'll try to support more once I do. Well, thank you so much for the rating and whatever support you can give us.

We do appreciate it. We greatly appreciate it. And if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review. Closing shout outs!

We lost a couple people this week, sadly. Douglas Rain, the voice of Hal 9000 in 2001 A Space Odyssey, passed away at 90. He was a veteran Canadian stage actor, and he did the voice for it, so very cool. The first drafts of the script had Hal being voiced by a woman that was called Athena.

Afterward, it was decided that the computer should sound more like a man. Interesting. And we also lost Stan Lee. Yep. That's a tough one. At 95. He had a good run. He had a really good run. He had a good run. And reportedly, he had already shot his cameo appearance for the next Avengers movie.

So we will see him on screen one last time. Yep. Sorry, Stan. And I found a really interesting link that came up. The Godfather of Goth, Peter Murphy, performing a duet of that old black magic with Stan Lee. So the link is in the show notes. I gotta go look at that one.

That sounds awesome. It's pretty cool. And we have also a link in the show notes about ways to variously help the victims of the Wolseley Flyer here in Southern California. So if you want to throw a couple bucks in to help, there's a link in the show notes there as well. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and help keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Cost 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 side. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 298.

And there you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. I love you all. And my parting word, of course, is Excelsior! At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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

Shop now at QVC.com. Transcription by ESO. Translation by —