309: Stay Furry

This episode is brought to you by Eero. Never think about Wi-Fi again. Get $100 off the Eero base unit and two beacons package and one year of Eero+. Visit Eero.com slash GOG and at checkout enter GOG. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How are the holidays for you, Brian? And by the way, Happy New Year. Oh, thank you. Happy New Year. It's good to be back. The holidays were fun. I did almost a digital detox, really. I spent most of the time with just family and friends.

And the one thing I have to say for the Apple Watch is it really kind of allowed me to leave my phone in my room. I probably cracked my laptop open twice the entire break. What? Yeah. I really just didn't do much tech-wise. I didn't pay attention to any news and I didn't have any work to do.

So it was pretty awesome. I managed to weather two flights, hang around a whole bunch of kids, nieces and nephews, and was in the freezing cold in Toronto and did not get sick until I came home. Yeah, that's how that happens. That's how that happens. It is literally 47 degrees now in my studio.

We call that the warm day in Toronto. Yeah, trust me. I'm from Chicago, man. I know. I'm wearing my Zane Lamprey Adventure hoodie to keep me warm because hopefully at some point we'll have Zane back on the show because I love that guy. But man, it has just been redonkulously cold.

But I did something this year, Brian, that I may regret. We're only four days into the year and you've already done something you're going to regret? Yeah. Okay. I'm a drone owner. I'm a droner. Well, you've been a drone owner for a while. You almost lost fingers and other things.

Okay. Well, the first one was a $25 gadget that I gave to Monkey 13, friend of the show. And he fixed it up. He actually had to go in and patch the Chinese firmware, which kudos on him for making it work. Then I got a little Telo drone, which was like, you know, a hundred bucks.

It's got some DJI software in it. And so it's like, you know, in the DJI family. But I bit the bullet. I bought a Mavic 2 Zoom. Okay. I spent $2,200 on this fucking thing.

And yet you don't have health insurance. I don't have health insurance because you know what? Health insurance is more expensive than that. Do you know how much my health insurance would cost me a month? I don't want to know. $1,400. And guess what the health insurance doesn't do?

Make me any money. Make me any money. Because I've been losing gigs because of my side hustle. Because if you're, you know, an internet influencer, you always have to have a side hustle. My side hustle is I do real estate photography. That's what I do.

That's what like fills the gap. Because podcasting doesn't really pay the bills. Surprise people. Just letting you know that. So I do real estate photography on the side. And I've been losing all these jobs because these people will come in with a drone. And they will do panoramics of the house for 15 minutes.

It's all it takes. It takes 15 minutes to do a panoramic cover of the house. And they're getting paid $300 more than I would for just the stills on the inside for what I used to get paid for the whole house. So it's a whole, the math doesn't work out if you don't have a drone. But the math works out if you have a drone because it will pay for itself in like four shoots.

Okay. So I got one. So you have a drone. All right. I got one. This thing is so fucking sexy. We'll talk about it in a little bit when we get to absent doodads. But my God, I love this thing so much. It is so cool.

It is so cool. But remember, there was a story in the news about Gatwick Airport getting shut down because of drones over the runway. Yes. They arrested two people and put their pictures on the news.

So these two people were, you know, were publicly outed as being like the drone bandits. Turns out it was probably the cops. It was their own shit that was over the airport. Yeah. So I do want to say that I have registered my drone.

I'm going through all the paperwork. I've paid for it. You don't live anywhere near LAX, so we're okay. I don't, but I'm, well, I'm not, I am not close to any airport whatsoever, actually, out here in the valley, in the San Fernando Valley. So I think I'm pretty good.

But, yeah, it's just, I mean, come on, guys. Come on. I mean, thousands of, I mean, hundreds of thousands of man hours were probably wasted because of these drones flying over the airport with people missing flights and not being able to get to their families.

Because, oh, it just, it tears me up. It tears me up. I have another one here from Digg. And I generally, I mean, I like Digg, the new Digg. I like the old Digg because my friend Kevin Rose was the guy who founded Digg.

But this is how much paid leave and holidays workers get in America compared to the rest of the world charted. Yes. And it is a chart of how much time off people get paid for in other countries. We get nothing.

No. Nothing. Nothing. Looking at the U.K., they get 37 days a year. I figured France was going to be the king because, you know, they've got the four hour. Well, it's only one day less. It's one day less. Yes.

Yes. France and Spain, the siesta capital of the world. Although I hear they're banning siestas, which sucks because that was the one place I wanted to go to retire. I wanted to move to Spain to retire because I'm like, I like this idea of the siesta.

I think that sounds fantastic. But, yeah, the U.K. wins. France and Spain are right behind at 36. Germany's at 33. Chile at 30. And it just goes down from there. We basically have 10 public holidays a year, but there is nothing on the books.

There's no mandatory annual leave. Nothing at all. We are working ourselves to death because it's just not there. Yeah. I mean, Canada's sitting at 19, and I know my wife was a little bit shocked when she moved here and started to work here and realized that she lost a whole bunch of vacation days every year, much to her dismay.

Yeah. Yeah. So it is crazy. You know, I mean, again, I haven't worked a real job in 20 some odd years. So, you know, I work when I work and I don't when I don't. But, yeah, there's no regulation here at all for any kind of mandatory annual leave.

And we can, you know, we can certainly don't even get into maternity. Well, yeah, family leave and things of that nature. It's, you know, if you work for a company that is international and is good, they're aware of these things. My wife is doing fairly well with universal music.

They're pretty good about actually giving them days off. So, but there's no requirement at all in this country to do that, which is, of course, ridiculous. No, I mean, I in this whole thing just still just boggles the mind with Brexit. I'm like, why is the UK leaving?

You're at the top of your game. Why are you leaving the EU? It's like it sounds like a great place to be. But anyway, that's that's a story for another podcast. My friend, my friend Jason Sanderson actually just moved to Prague because he lived in the UK.

He was born in the UK and he left because he's just like, fuck this Brexit shit. I'm getting out of here. I'm out. So he moved to he moved to Prague with his girlfriend and I'm sorry, his fiancee. And they're just living happily ever after.

Not worrying about that. I do love Prague. I've never been. I always wanted to go. Yeah. Yeah. Now, all the all the backpackers I met when I was backpacking around Europe were just like, get to Prague. Go, go, go. And we just never made it. And I'm just like, damn it. Anyway, did you watch Black Mirror Bandersnatch?

I did not. It was it was all the the the fucking rage here about. It was all the rage. It's all I heard about. Everybody was tweeting about it. And when I did look on social media, everybody was talking about it. I was going to watch it. Apple and Netflix are in a little bit of a pissing match.

Oh, no. And you cannot Netflix has not updated the app on Apple TV with the technology required to be able to do the choose your own adventure. And the only option I had while in Canada to access Netflix unless I wanted to sit and watch it on my laptop was through Apple TV.

So I did not watch it. And I went long enough that I was able to now realize that a lot of people don't seem to particularly care for it. And there are there are people who I share kindred interest with. So I think that I probably don't want to watch it at this point. You may have dodged a bender bullet.

Yes. Yes. So I was never a big fan of choose your own adventure stories anyways, because I figure the whole point of me watching something is to be told a story. Yes. Yes. That is exactly the point. I'm watching this thing and I have a Roku TV so I could do the whole like, you know, choose your own adventure thing.

And I'm just like, I'm like, I'm a bottle of wine in and I'm just like, show me a movie that makes me sad because that's what Black Mirror is. That's all it is. I mean, I get it. It's it's an impressive use of technology. It's pushing the boundaries of storytelling, but not in a good way.

Can we accept the fact that it's an interesting experiment, but let's not do this again? Yeah. No, you have to watch the same shit over and over and over and over and over again to get to the end of the plot line. It's like, oh, you have chosen poorly, you know, it's like a dragon's lair. Yeah, it really is.

It's it's actually not quite as infuriating as dragon's lair is because, you know, I I hate that video game. Friend of the show MXV right now is banging his head on the fucking glass right now because he is like a he's a Guinness world book record holder in dragon's lair.

I hate that game. I think it's useless and stupid, but yeah, this was like playing dragon's lair. I'm just like I'm sitting there. I got my pretzels, my my my mustard. I'm just having I'm having a pub night. I was having a pub night, so I had a pint.

I had pretzels and I had mustard and then every three minutes it has to be like press a button on which way I want to go. I'm like, I don't care. Tell me what the fucking story is. And then they're like, you've chosen poorly. Yeah. And then you have to go back and do it again.

I'm just like, just show me the fucking show. Yeah. So I heard from a lot of people that it was just too much work and not enough payoff for it. So, yeah, I will not be watching it. However, I was going to wait until our regular media candy and more on the week segments to discuss this. But it seems to fit here pretty well.

I watched the other big B on Netflix because it was the B. It was all the rage about the B's. It was Bandersnatch and Bird Box. I watched Bird Box. Oh, you watched Bird Box. Oh, OK, cool. I'm excited about this. Tell me what you thought about Bird Box. I enjoyed it. It was two hours long, which is roughly 30 to 45 minutes too long.

It could have used much better editing. It drags and drags and drags. The acting is, of course, phenomenal. The concept is really interesting. What's it about? I have no idea what it's about. I don't want to say right now because I think this is one of those things like you remember like going into the Matrix and the reason it was really good is because you had no idea what was going to happen.

Yeah. Same thing here. OK. Only if you go into this and you know what the story is, it will bore the shit out of you. But if you don't know, if you don't know, it's pretty good. Like I had no idea what it was going to be about at all. But you don't know what you know. And yeah, I did enjoy it.

It just went on way too long. It should definitely have been edited down quite a bit. And then for the moron of the week, I can't believe that people are this stupid, but they are. Netflix has had to warn people not to take part in a Bird Box challenge. OK.

We'll get hurt. OK. And this is kind of like the Tide Pod challenge. When you when you watch Bird Box, you'll get it. OK, I'll check it out. Yeah, just avoid reading anything about it before you see it. It is worth seeing. It was very like it's extremely well done.

OK. And very well. The acting's phenomenal. And the concept was decent. Just it really needed a good editor. Yeah. Now, we've got a lot for media candy for the next show because I watched a ton of stuff. And thank God the Orville is back because it just makes me happy.

It just makes me happy that the Orville is back. I do have one other bit of a couple of bits of follow up here. They'll talk. Just talking about A.I. We had Kai-Fu Lee on the Jordan Harbinger show last week, and he was the head of Google China and he's an A.I.

expert. Right. And very smart guy. I mean, supremely fucking smart when it comes to A.I. And I thought it was one of our better shows because he just talks about what it really is. And he wrote the first Othello A.I.

engine. This guy is this guy's smart. I mean, he's no joke. And he talks about general A.I., you know, artificial general intelligence, which we always say is what A.I. should be the definition of. God damn it. Everything else is machine learning.

But he also talks about all of the breakthroughs in A.I. in the history of A.I. and in the machine learning breakthroughs that came about. He's like, there's only been a couple breakthroughs in the history of this whole field. And, you know, machine learning is the new newest breakthrough.

And that's been around for a while. And he's just like A.I. is just not coming anytime soon. And also, there's another article on VentureBeat where Jeffrey Hinton and Demi Hazibizib say, yeah, A.G.I.

is nowhere close to becoming a reality. And it seems like everybody in the industry knows that. And we've said it for fucking four years. So, yeah, so we're smarter than all of the all of the experts in A.I. So take that, people.

Take it. Put it in your pipe and smoke it. And a final follow up. I know we got a lot of follow up this week, but F you M1 finance. Damn it. What do they do? I got an email that's like, you got ten dollars because somebody signed up with your link.

The next email I got ten minutes later was, hey, this is so cool that you can, like, send people to M1 finance. We're going to raise the rate to twenty five dollars. I'm like, oh, I want my fifteen bucks. Damn it.

So, yeah. So if you go to any of the show notes where we talk about M1 finance and sign up with them, then, yeah, now you get twenty five dollars, we get twenty five dollars. But I was just I mean, it was just like boom, boom, right back to back.

I'm just like, damn it. Why didn't you give me twenty five dollars? I want my fifteen dollars. I want my fifteen dollars. In the news. Tesla is back in the news.

OK. They have figured out how to fill that board seat that Elon Musk is not allowed to have anymore. Right. They hired Larry Ellison, the head of Oracle. Right. I don't know if you know much about Larry Ellison.

He's batshit crazy. Is he? I mean, he's certified batshit crazy. His entire house is like a Japanese, like, you know, shogun warrior garden because he thinks that that's what he needs to prepare himself for the battle against the other tech moguls.

Go back to the history of Larry Ellison and just check out his house. He's he's a nut job. He is a total nut job. Sometimes you feel like a nut, Jason. Look, they're just replacing one nut with another.

That's fine. Look, Larry Ellison is is a good, stable choice, regardless of what you think about his home furnishings. I guess Oracle is still there. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, he seems to know what he's doing in terms of running a business, regardless, again, like I said, about he is a business out at Ikea.

Yeah. So he is a businessman. So, yeah, we'll see how it goes. I mean, I'm sure that we'll see a stock bump based on that because everybody kind of wants Elon to take a step back. And they also got this woman from Walgreens, which is very strange.

So, yeah, that's not even like a tech, you know, business is business. But business, I mean, selling widgets, right? Yeah, it's literally where's our P&L? Let me look at let me look at the spreadsheet. Tell me what you're you know, how much you're making, how much you're spending. And that's what you need. And I guess it really does make sense because that's, you know, Elon Musk is the great thinker, as it were, the idea guy.

And you don't want the idea guy doing the doing the P&L charts. You want a business person doing that. So good, I guess. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know if my stock's gone up any since since then. So, yeah, but anyway, it's interesting. But just Larry Ellison is is batshit crazy.

All right. Well, Apple stock has had one of those rare drops. Apple stock trading was halted on Wednesday when the company dropped its revenue expectations. Nearly eight percent to eighty four billion had they had previously said that they expected eighty nine to ninety three billion in sales for the holiday quarter.

By the way, that's ninety three billion dollars. I'm going to say it's like, OK, we're going to make eighty nine billion dollars this year and you halt our stock. What? Yeah. Well, this is the problem. Where does this happen? This is this is the problem with shareholder value. You know, we've talked about this many times.

Apple is an insanely successful company. And the fact that they didn't quite hit a sales number just seems insane to me that that would cause stocks. Well, whatever. I just buy. That just means I buy. So I bought a drone, so I can't buy any Apple stock.

God damn it. The funny thing is that basically Tim Cook is using this to clap back at Donald Trump and basically saying that the reason that this happened is we didn't get the sales in China that we had hoped for because of the trade tensions and all the things going on with that. So we shall see. I think that's I honestly believe that's bullshit.

I think the reason that Apple is not selling as many iPhones as they used to is because they're overpriced. They are overpriced. They are. They're too good. The year upgrade cycle is dead. Why? Like I'm using a phone that's three years old and it works perfectly. Yeah.

I've got an eight plus and I was looking at my upgrade price and it was like $270 to upgrade to a 10 and then I'd have to get back and pay pay back the 10. I could buy this this phone out for another $499, which I'm not going to do because I got an eight plus and but my eight plus works great even with a cracked screen.

It works fantastic except for the fingerprint recognition, which we've talked about on previous shows. I still think that they're doing that because they want you to move face ID, but that is a conspiracy theory where you have to go buy your own tinfoil. Anyway, yeah, no, there we're hitting peak phone.

We are seriously hitting peak phone. There's not much more shit you can put in a phone to make it do more than a phony phone phone does. You know? Yep, exactly. Yeah, it's too bad because I really wish I would have sold my Apple when it was high.

All right. Now, in continuing stock news of a sort, this article actually just really pissed me off. This is how Facebook's slumping stock price could hurt Mark Zuckerberg's philanthropy plans. What? So this article is basically saying that Facebook stock is plummeting and Zuckerberg has pledged to give away or spend 99% of his Facebook stock over his lifetime to fund issues that are important to him, like education reform and curing disease.

So far, he's sold over $5.6 billion in stock, according to Bloomberg. But after nine months of aggressive selling, Zuckerberg didn't share any sales in quarter four. The likely culprit, the struggling stock price, which is down more than 37% since it's high in July, thanks to all the problems that they're having over there.

Because of Zuckerberg. Yes. So the article kind of gets into it's understandable that he didn't sell shares because you don't want to sell when it's at a two-year low. But it's a good reminder that Facebook stock price can have some serious impact on Zuckerberg's philanthropy. No.

Fuck you. He's worth $86.5 billion, which has now dropped to $53.8 billion. Cry me a motherfucking river. $53.8 billion. He can fucking keep doing his philanthropy. It's fine. If he wants to, he can.

He's not hurting. No, I got 350 bucks in the bank. Fuck you. I don't care. You know, it's just kind of, yeah, this is the idea that we should somehow be worried about Facebook stock because he's not going to be a philanthropist anymore.

Screw you. Do a fucking Bill Gates. Get the help. By the way, Zuck, leave Facebook. Just leave it. Go do philanthropy full time. If I had $5 billion, that's what I would do. You've got 53. Well, next week, I'll probably have $1 billion.

That's what I'd do. So somebody go over to patreon.com slash GOG and give me a billion dollars and I will just do philanthropy. I would give me a million dollars. I'll do philanthropy. I mean, shit. I'm trying to figure out how to pay rent. Yeah, I know.

Oh, man. We'll talk. Oh, we'll talk about the stars soon, too. But, yeah, this next one comes from David Teeter. How much of the internet is fake? It turns out, a lot of it, actually. This is an NY mag. Again, something we've been saying for four years now. But thank you for New York Magazine for pointing out.

Actually, Brian, on this one, we have been saying this since day one. So this is six years. Right. Six fucking years we've been saying stats are fake. This does not exist. So it's a really good article that, you know, displays everything that we've been talking about.

Basically, it says how much of the internet is fake. Studies suggest that year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human. Some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot based. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported a full half of YouTube traffic was bots masquerading as people, a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake.

We call this hypothetical event the inversion. I love it. Which makes sense. You build a system to analyze and monitor traffic. You follow the greater majority. And if the greater majority is now bot traffic, that's what you're monitoring. And that's what matters to you because that's the hits.

Those are the clicks. That's where the advertisers are going. And it talks about all these, you know, advertising spoof websites and scams that have been running on 99 percent of the web is bullshit. I mean, it just is. And even former Reddit CEO Ellen Powell tweeted, it's all true.

Everything is fake. Yeah. Mobile user accounts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged out mobile users, as I learned at Reddit. Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. As we've been saying, it's all bullshit. And the article gets into, like, the people are fake.

The businesses are fake. The content is fake. Our politics are fake. And we ourselves are fake. It's all a stack of fucking lies. It's a house of cards. That's what the Internet is. And we base so much business on it now. I know. I know. I just it drives me crazy when I see this.

It's like, OK, you switch cell towers. You know what you do? You assign a UDID to everybody. Oh, well, the UDID is the phone device. But you you you assign a unique ID to everybody and you tack it on as a fucking query string. Any fucking competent programmer can do that.

But you don't do that. Yes, but if you did that, then you wouldn't have these. You wouldn't have the numbers that you want to have. Exactly. That's the fucking problem. You love these numbers. You fucking you want fake numbers. Numbers are good. Real numbers would depress the hell out of you and your entire business plan would go.

Exactly. That's what pisses me off the most. And now she's coming out saying, yeah, former net. I mean, she was the CEO and she knows it was fake. Come on. That was your fucking responsibility to fix that. It is upsetting to me that after she leaves the position, she says this.

Exactly. It's just like you knew this when you were there. You could have fixed it when you were there. But Reddit is owned by Condé Nast and Condé Nast wants fucking money. So they don't want to hear bad news. They only want to hear how are our numbers doing? Is the hockey stick going up?

Fuck you. Honestly. It's like never. OK. If Ellen Powell comes to your company to get a job, do not fucking hire her because that's some bullshit. She has no spine. Pisses me off so much.

It's just like, oh, yeah. OK. I was a hitman for the cartel. Yeah. We shot some people. It's OK. But now, hey, can I flip burgers at your at your restaurant? Sure. OK. Come on in. Anyway, God drives me up a fucking wall.

Oh, God. Well, so now we have a new company. We have a new company out there who is autonomizing freight trains and they have fully optimized freight trains. Now, I knew this was coming.

We all knew this was coming. Well, of course, this is coming. And this actually makes some degree of sense because they're on a track. I can't go anywhere else. This is it goes the trolley problem. The trolley problem is actually the only thing they have to figure out. It's like, oh, well, how many people are on the track when we switch to the tracks?

But yeah, this is this makes so much sense. But they are still keeping guys in the cabin, which, as we know, living here in Southern California doesn't mean shit because since we have crashes because they were tweeting, tweeting, doing whatever, exactly, paying attention.

And we've seen this with the autonomous drivers, all the vehicles when they have somebody in there, they're not paying attention because they're bored. The studies are coming out saying they're bored and they just lose track and stop paying attention because they literally have nothing to do. Yep. So I think this is actually a good thing.

I think this is a very, very good thing because if they put sensors on the tracks in the front and can figure out if they're people and they can stop the train, but, you know, trains are really hard to stop. I don't know if you've seen a, you know, a two mile long train try and stop. Takes a while.

Takes a while. But other otherwise, I think this is actually a good thing. And I mean, it's basically for mining. They're they're moving. They're moving or from the mine to the port to get out, you know, out to sea. But anyway, I think this is a fine use of automated technology.

I really do. Because, yeah, I just after being here in Southern California and in just watching train crashes around the world, people do get bored and they fuck up and just just no, I'm down with this. Yeah. Look, this has been going on for a long time on the Isle of Sodor with Thomas and his friends.

You parents out there will get that one. OK, but if you watch the first scene from Unbreakable, you know, that's the same thing. Yes. I would rather have an automated system that says, hey, OK, this next corner is rated for 24 miles an hour. You're going 74 miles an hour.

Slow down. OK. You know, I'm OK with that because trains scare the shit out of me. I don't know if you knew that. I am terrified to be on a train. I love train travel. But when those trains get cooking, especially like the Muni in San Francisco, when, you know, the underpaid person who is driving the trains just starts cooking through the tunnel, I get terrified.

I would like to know that there's an automated system in place to slow the train down when it has to. So for me, I think this is a good thing. This episode is sponsored by Eero. Eero is a home Wi-Fi system unlike anything you've ever seen.

The single router model doesn't just work for our increasingly high bandwidth world. It's simple physics like light waves. Wi-Fi waves don't go through walls well. Imagine asking the light bulb in your living room to light your master bedroom. Yet so many people just get the crappy Wi-Fi system from their ISP. What you need is a distributed system.

That's what offices have had for years at considerable work and expense. Current Wi-Fi routers are really tough to manage and optimize. The Eero app lets you manage your network from the palm of your hand, so you know how many devices are connected at any given point, as well as the internet speed that you're getting from your service provider. You can also easily create and share a guest network.

Eero is protected with state-of-the-art WPA2 encryption, and just because it controls the hardware and the software for your entire network, it ensures that you're always secure. Since traditional routers don't push software updates to their customers, they are left vulnerable to cyber attacks. Eero updates automatically so that you not only have the latest features, but the latest security at all times.

And now they've got Eero Plus, which is designed to provide simple, reliable security that defends all your home's devices against threats like malware, spyware, phishing attacks, as well as unsuitable content. A combination of Eero with Eero Plus provides complete protection for your network. Eero Plus offers the ability to block malicious and unwanted content across your entire network.

Advanced Security. By checking the sites you visit against a database of millions of known threats, Eero Plus prevents you from accidentally visiting malicious sites without slowing anything down. Content blocking. Eero Plus automatically tags sites that contain violent, illegal, or adult content, so you can choose what your kids can and cannot visit right in the Eero app.

Ad blocking. Get rid of annoying ads and pop-ups on all your devices. Ad blocking also improves load times for ad-heavy sites so you can browse and stream faster than ever before. And with your Eero Plus subscription, you get a bunch of goodies, including VPN protection from encrypt.me, password management from 1Password, and antivirus software from Malwarebytes.

Never think about Wi-Fi again. Get $100 off the Eero base unit and two beacons package in one year of Eero Plus. Visit Eero.com slash GOG, and at checkout, enter GOG. 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. Dave is also the co-host of the new Hacking Humans podcast. I don't even know if it's new anymore.

You've been around for a couple of episodes, a few weeks ago. Yeah, he does that with Joe Kerrigan where they take on social engineering, and we do love that show. I highly recommend checking it out because it is one of my favorites of the week. So Dave, what happened this holiday season?

Well, Santa was very nice to me. Grumpy old Santa treated me well. And if you have not yet seen the series of photos that I posted on Twitter, Jason, you just saw the photos. I just saw these.

Do you want to provide the narrative for what exactly went on here? Dave has had the first furry unboxing on Twitter I think we've ever seen. Well, certainly the one we've ever seen. Right. Not that any of us ever sought one out or anything. Well, let's put it this way.

At least the first ones that Jason and I have seen. Yes. We're learning a lot more. That's right. Yeah. Hashtag furry unboxing. Oh, yes. No, we sent you Mr. Fox in the mail because we love you, Dave.

Well, thank you. I wanted to send you something nice for the holidays. Well, I like it a lot. And it's been getting lots of attention around here, as you might expect. And I went home last night and I said to my son, my younger son, who's 12, I said, so I explained to him this thing that I got.

That had to be awkward. Yeah. Well, you know. So he kind of paused for a second. And he looked at me and his gaze narrowed and he said, so are you a furry now? And I paused and I looked back at him and I said, well, I don't know yet.

Maybe. So we'll see. This could be my gateway drug into being a real, you know, full blown. I mean, it starts with the head, right? I mean, just. And then it's Fox is all the way down. Yeah. Patreon.com slash GOG because full body suits ain't that cheap.

So help us out. Yeah. If we've got to find a full body suit for Dave, this is going to be a whole full body furry costume for me. If there was ever something our listeners could get behind, it's public humiliation of Dave. So that's good.

I don't think it's public humiliation. I think it's just finding your North Star. That's all. That's true. Yeah. All right. Well, you know, who knows? Who knows? I have to say the mask is fun to wear. I think that answer to you being a furry might be yes.

It is. I can. I mean, it is. Well. People walk by. See that coming. I'm sitting there in front of my computer and I and they sort of they do a double take and they stop and they look. I'm not saying I wear it all the time. I'm just saying that I do wear it sometimes for fun.

And it's good. I can't wear it when I'm working because obviously it changes the sound. Although one of the cool things about this one is that the jaw on it moves when your jaw moves. So when I talk, the mouth moves with it. So that's a. See? Yeah.

We get you premium furry here. Spare no expense. Spare no expense. Yeah. So folks, go on Twitter if you haven't already. There are photos of me. There's a whole unboxing experience with my new fantastic new fantastic. Yeah.

A lot of fun. So thank you guys. It was a wonderful surprise. And I laughed a lot. And it's going to bring me joy for for for for time to come. So very nice. Thank you. That that that that might be you might want to ask your wife about that.

Very thoughtful. Yes. Yes. So far, she has not said bring the costume home. That has not happened. Nor do I expect it to. But who knows? I don't know. Who knows? You will be ready. It's going to be a whole whole new thing. You're right. We just had our 25th anniversary.

This may just need the shake it up spark. We need to get to that next 25. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Who knows? So Foxy Dave. Foxy Dave. I think we have a show title. Well, thank you, gentlemen.

Very thoughtful of you. I really have absolutely no idea how to transition into what we're actually supposed to be talking about here. This is yeah. This is the worst, worst like a handoff ever, because we're going to talk about home security and non-lethal weapons.

Yeah. You know what? If you stand naked in the doorway with a fox head on, I don't think you might scare people. I think you might be able to scare people away. Well, that's true. Yeah. I didn't think about that. I can answer the door for solicitors. Yeah. This thing has so many useful uses around the house that just are being revealed to me.

Right. Oh, have you guys ever answered the door naked? No. No. Yes. I've answered the door in a towel. Okay. Does that count? No, not really. Because you're not, you're not at that point, you're not a sexual predator.

But, uh, I have, I have seen the, the, uh, the guys with the watchtower coming up to the door and I have answered the door naked. Oh, wow. Just to scare them away. And they're just like, uh, would you like to bring Jesus into your life?

And I'm like, oh, come to Jesus. Come on in. Alternatively, Jason, you could just not answer the door instead of stripping down naked and opening it. I used to be young and dumb, so I did a lot of stupid things.

And now you're only one of those things. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now I'm just dumb. God damn it. All right. So I'm going to try to make this transition now. Let's explain briefly. Over the six years of doing the show, we have had numerous discussions about, um, gun control.

Um, certainly whenever the news hits with another major tragedy, we, we talk about it much to the dismay of, of, of some of our listeners. Um, and I kind of have swung Jason around a little bit to my way of thinking. I am very anti gun. I think there should be a heavy legislation and restrictions and things of such nature.

Um, and one of the reasons I think that, and I, this article doesn't really get into what we're going to talk about, but I saw these stats, uh, in this article has just come out and, and this is just shocking to me. And I, I think it, it, it tells a story of a gun culture that's kind of gone mad in our society, specifically in America, because we don't see this anywhere else in the world.

Really? Uh, in 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, a record 300, 3,957 firearms, nearly 11 a day were discovered in carry on bags at airport checkpoints across the country. That's insane to me.

84% of them were loaded going on a plane. Wow. I would like to also point out that the nine 11 hijackers did not have guns. Yes. So they, they did everything they did with box cutters. So as we've had this discussion and we've had various incidents happen relatively recently, uh, Dave proposed off the air, kind of a thought question about, well, what about non-lethal stuff versus lethal weapons?

And we decided we would cover that at some point. And what better time than after the Christmas break so that we actually didn't have to do any research and, and security fuckups. Yeah. So here we are. Yeah. There's no, no security fuckups. I'd like to point out that Brian's objection to guns overall has affected me personally because I used to own a gun.

I used to have a shotgun and there was at one point where I put that shotgun in my mouth and I pulled the trigger and I got lucky. I got extremely lucky that the, uh, the actual ammunition misfired.

And did not shoot me in the face. So after that, I have been on kind of a tear about non-lethal, uh, you know, alternatives to protect your house. And the fact that you shouldn't have a fucking gun in your house because you don't need one.

You're not a hunter. If you're a hunter, fine. You have a safe and you put the guns in the safe. But for me and for everybody else, you don't need a gun in your house because as Jim Jeffries so famously said, sometimes you get sad and when you get sad, you do stupid shit.

Well, I did stupid shit. Yes. And if you look at the statistics on this sort of stuff, you know, it's almost always an accident within the house and a relative gets killed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah. And the other main argument that people always seem to use is, you know, it's the second amendment militia thing.

And I just got to tell you right now, if you, you and your bowling buddies, I don't care how big of an arsenal you have in the back of your house, you ain't going to stop the government. They've got jets. These guys are fucking good. They've got drones. So, you know, that as an article, sure, in 1776 may have been valid.

It is no longer valid. So, um, you know, and I, I, I don't have anything. I, I, I don't, I probably shouldn't broadcast that to a, the entire world. Um, but I don't have anything, but what does interest me is, you're going to have something in your house, but going back to Jim Jeffries, it's just like, if everybody had muskets, everything would be okay because it gives you time to change your mind.

You know, it gives you time to change your mind, but let's get into non-lethal options for your house. Well, let, let me walk through this a little bit of aware, what brought up my desire to talk about this, and it was really triggered by a video that Jason had posted, uh, with these guys, uh, and this paintball gun with, um, Jason over at modern rogue.

Yeah. Yeah. Brian Brushwood is a friend of mine and I love his show and he's killing it over there. So, yeah. Yeah. So, these guys posted this gun or this, uh, video with this paintball gun that, as they say in the video, it looks like RoboCop's gun.

Oh, dude. I, I, I wish I would have shown it to you when you were here in my house. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. It is RoboCop's gun. It's huge. It is. It's huge. Yeah. And so, you load it with these special paintballs that are pepper spray kind of paintballs.

Military grade pepper spray, by the way, that are not legal in California. So, I don't have any here in my house, just to say. And basically, you just have to aim at the right side of the room and unload a couple of these things. And that person is disabled. They can't see.

They, they both went blind in the video. As soon as they got like the, the pepper spray in their face, they went blind. They could not see, which is what you want. Yeah. So, I saw that video. I saw that video and that got me, first of all, after watching it and going, wow, that was cool.

I was, I just was thinking about it over time as you do. And that led me down this path of thinking, well, if someone breaks into your home and the police come and they arrest that person, that person was there to rob your home. I don't think many of us would think, well, the proper punishment for that person breaking into my room to steal stuff is the death penalty.

Right. Uh, well, I would disagree with that 100%. Do you think this is where Jason and I have some philosophical? Yeah. We have some philosophical differences here because if you come into, if you come into my house and you're coming to, I don't care what you're coming into my house for.

If you come into my house, game on, game on. Okay. But having said that, Jason, if there is a non-lethal alternative, I do not prefer that. Okay. But I'm not, but I'm saying the death penalty after the fact. In other words, the police come, haul this person away.

I think most people would agree that we're going to put that person in jail. We're not going to kill them. Yes. Yes. Okay. So that was my first step down this, this pathway. Um, and yet we have this notion here in our country and many others, and this is what we get to, which is the castle doctrine, which we'll talk about here in a minute, where if

someone comes into your house, then you have the right to use deadly force to defend yourself. And it just got me thinking in an era where there are effective, non-lethal ways to defend yourself in your house, like this pepper spray gun, um, do we need to just take another look at this?

Does it make sense to, for lethal force to be authorized in these situations when so many accidents happen because of this? So many suicides, uh, are successful because of this? Um, it just got me thinking about it and I thought, well, who better to talk about it than you guys?

Cause we would enjoy going through and kind of puzzling through these things and see where we agree and where we disagree. Yeah. No, no, no. Let's definitely break it down. You know, if somebody comes into your house with a gun, you are fully authorized to kill that person. Right.

I believe that 100%. If you can stop them, great. But if I shoot them in the face with some pepper spray and I blind them and then they just start shooting wildly, what does it like? Where is my liability based on that?

Because, you know, they might shoot through the wall and hit the neighbors. They might shoot, you know, a baby in a crib. They could do anything. They could shoot my family or they could shoot me. Right. And that's where it's like, where's the stopping power with non-lethal alternatives to the point where it can actually like, you know, stop a person that is going to kill you.

Mm hmm. Because there are people out there that just don't give any F's, you know, they will kill you as soon as look at you. And, you know, it happens in my neighborhood all the time. That's why I have so many safeguards in place.

So I'm just wondering where that line is. And I do not have any lethal safeguards in my house right now. I mean, granted, besides my butcher knives and baseball bats and things like that, where I can actually kill somebody. Your dog.

I also, yes, that was actually, there's a part that I'm going to get to in the future that is escalation of force. And I used to, I used to hang out with a bunch of Marines and we're going to talk about escalation of force in a minute. But, you know, when you have somebody breaking into your house, where do you feel safe with non-lethal alternatives versus lethal alternatives?

Because that's the trick, you know, that really is the trick. It's like, okay, guys pointing a nine millimeter at me. I got a paintball gun with some pepper spray. How does that, how does that work? Okay. But what if you're coming at this from the other direction? Which is right now I have nothing in my home to protect myself.

Right. And I do not feel comfortable with a handgun or, you know, a sawed off shotgun because of all of the other possible things that can happen with that. The kids getting it, you know, my killing myself with it, all the accidental things that we, that we, I think the three of us can agree that statistically are bad, bad.

More likely. Yes. Yeah. You're going to kill yourself more than likely with a weapon in your house. Right. So on the pathway to a gun, I think along the way, you have to consider something like a pepper spray gun, I don't know, a taser, you know, whatever.

What my point is, it's not a binary thing. There is this in-between thing for folks who want to protect themselves. And is it worth, is it A, worth considering, is it B, worth considering at the level of legislating? Right.

I don't know about legislating, but I do know that you should definitely have something in your house. I mean, honestly, for me, it's like, I, I, it's 50, 50 for me between the paintball gun and a baseball bat. It's, it's, it's really that close.

Cause it's like, if you're close enough to that person to take the, take the gun away from them, uh, use the baseball bat because you're closer. You can take them out. You can get it out of their hands. And that's what I have. I mean, I've, I've got a baseball bat under my bed. I've had a baseball bat under my bed ever since I went off to college and I was a pretty good home run hitter.

So I'm reasonably confident that as long as sports ball, as long as the person is close enough, I can do some serious damage. Right. But if they're 25 feet away, then you want, luckily I live in a smaller condo. So when, when Brian gets his mansion, then we'll reassess his, his baseball bat theory, you know, again, coming out, this is somebody who doesn't know anything about this world.

This is, this is something that you were into Jason and I am not, I did watch the video and I've looked into the paintball gun thing with the pepper spray. It seems insanely effective. Um, no different than a regular gun, except it's basically for the most part, non-lethal. Obviously you could still kill somebody with this.

If you, if, you know, if things just worked out, right. Oh yeah. Just wait for that. So, so you can't, but it is primarily a non-lethal weapon in a perfect world. In, in my imagination, this would be the only option that you could have at home. In fact, I would prefer that police officers only carry this and maybe have a lethal weapon on them, but they have to use this one first or only within certain circumstances.

Can they use a real lethal weapon? That's what I would like to see, but I don't, I don't know how you make that world. Now, if you watch the new special murder mountain on Netflix, which is about the, uh, basically the pot trade in Northern California, when they did a raid, the cops had paintball guns.

Great. They were, they, they literally had paintball guns and I was just like, holy shit, that's great. That's great. Um, but the thing is in the middle of the night, when you're woken up by somebody breaking into your house, what do you want?

You know, cause your, your limbic system is going to kick in. Your lizard brain is going to kick in. And what you want to do is protect your family at that point. So what do you want to have on hand? And if that guy is 15 feet away, you can't hit, you can't get to him with a baseball bat.

That means you're going to get shot before you can get to him. That's why I like this option. Right. But again, I would state with this the same way that I feel about regular guns is I would want as a requirement, as a part of legislation for selling these things training, because for me to just buy this thing and have it in my house, I'm better off just using the baseball bat at this point, because I don't really know how to shoot a gun.

But when you buy a gun, you should go get trained as well. You can't, you can't buy it. You can't buy the, these paintball pellets in California. So you're shit out of luck anyway, because it's illegal to have apparently pepper spray in California. I can go, I can literally go down to the store tomorrow morning.

I can buy an AR 15, but you can't get pepper spray. But I can't get pepper spray. Yes. So it's, it's there. There's just so many crazy, stupid things. So, but what I want to talk about next is escalation of force.

Well, before we get to that, let's, let's talk through the comparative stopping power of a handgun versus this, this pepper spray gun. Okay, absolutely. And, and we can also talk about different stopping powers with shotguns and different types of ammunition.

Right. Cause there are, yeah, it's a good point. Cause there are people who say, I've heard it. I've heard the case made that the best weapon for home defense is a sawed off shotgun because it doesn't have to be sawed off though. I mean, I just, just get it. You can get it.

You can buy an 18 inch Mossberg, which 500, which is what I had. And I used different ammunition I had, cause it was a, um, an extended barrel. So I could have eight rounds in it and each round starting from the beginning to the end was birdshot.

And then it went into a buckshot and then it went into deer slug. And so it was like, okay, you can survive birdshot. I can shoot you in the fucking face with birdshot, just like Dick Cheney did. You know, you will survive that.

All I want you is out of my house. I don't care. I don't want to kill you. I want you out of my house so I can shoot you with birdshot. So I had two rounds of birdshot so I could shoot, you know, multiple people with birdshot. Then I went to buckshot buckshot will kill you. I'm sorry, but I might miss.

So I want to have another round deer slugs at the end of the, of the force escalation chain is like, I will explode your spine out your back. That was where I was at. So I always went with that kind of stack in my shotgun that I kept next to my bed because I have a lot of very expensive stuff in my house and people know where I live.

It's not hard to find out where I live. Anybody can do that. So I always had that escalation of force. It's like, okay, boom, I shoot you with birdshot. You're not going to get the fuck out. Okay, boom. I'm going to kill you or your buddy because most people don't do crimes alone.

And then I'm really going to kill you at the end with, with the deer slugs, you know? So in terms of the stopping power of the pepper spray gun, what's our, what's our evaluation of that? I think the problem with that is it, it, it negates the fact that I have a giant Rottweiler who will eat you in six seconds.

Because if you have dogs in the house, it is going to destroy the dogs. That's the biggest problem with pepper spray because, and it's, it's also going to affect you as a person who is going to be in the same room with the guy who's coming to kill you.

So you're both down. That's the biggest problem I see with using the pepper spray in the house. One thing I wonder about in this conversation is, is like what you just said, the guy who's coming to kill you. And I wonder in a, in a robbery situation, I don't know what any of the statistics are, but what, you know, what is the percentage of robberies that turn into people brandishing or using deadly force?

I would suspect it's probably pretty low. In other words, the, the intent of most people coming in your home is not, is probably not to kill you. The intent is to come in and get stuff that they can go off and, and sell and so forth. They want to get out of there unscathed as well. So is, is this what I suspect is, and I'm totally talking out of my butt here cause I don't know what the stats are, but what I suspect is, is that, you know, they, their first line of defense is retreat.

I would guess. That's, that's, that's what you want. That's definitely what you want. You want cowardice thieves, but in my neighborhood, we've had people come in, ring the doorbell, like a 80 year old woman opened the door. They banged her on the head with a hammer and went in and stole her stuff.

So it's, it's very kind of different based on where you're at. You know, it depends on how desperate the people that are in your area are to get your stuff. You know, it, in some places they just want to come in, get your stuff and leave.

And they, they're, you know, they're, it's crimes of passion. They're just like, I just need some cash, whatever. But sometimes they are going to be violent. And that's why I, I tend to put my preparation on the side of violence. You know, if somebody is coming into my home to get my stuff, I assume they're going to be violent because if you don't assume they're going to be violent, you could be making a fatal mistake.

What do you think, Brian? Uh, I don't, it's gotten, I mean, we're starting to, to question motives of thieves and things like that, which is a little bit out of the purview of where, but is there, is there, is there a way to have non lethal tech in your house that you can use to get people that are intent on violence out of your house?

That's really the, like, I, there's this paintball gun. There's, there's tasers, there's all sorts of stuff, but without, I guess my argument would be, you need to be trained on all these things. It needs to be almost a second nature. Of course. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. But I, if you're trained up on, on all of these non lethal means, they seem to me to be more just as effective, if not more so than, than an actual gun.

Right. Yeah. No, I, I, I totally agree with you on that. I think you need to, if you, if you buy some kind of non-lethal technology that you're going to use on somebody that's coming into your house, you have to train with it and you have to, it has to be second nature. It has to be second nature.

I train with my, my paintball gun all the time. I have a, everybody. Yeah, no, I've got a big, you know, just giant plank of plywood in the back. And on in here, here's the fun part. When I talked about force escalation, my paintball gun has three rounds of paintballs in it.

So first time you come in my house, I will shoot you in the face with a paintball, which might kill you, but it also will just blind you. Next up are riot rounds. So I have hard PVC rounds. Those are like those, uh, those like beanbag palette things.

Not really. They are, they are solid PVC rounds, which will knock the shit out of you. They have penetrated quarter inch plywood. They will hurt the fuck out of you. And then after that, then I've got the, um, the rounds with the pepper spray.

So it's like, okay, I'm going to try and try and just warn you off that I'm pointing a gun at you. You know, it's not like you don't know it's a paintball gun. You're just going to be confused. And then you just might run. That's what I want. I want you to run away. So I will shoot you with paintballs in the face and you can't see.

And then the next is just like, oh my God, I just got hit by a train because they got hit with riot rounds. These are the rounds, the copies, you know? And then after that, then I resort to the pepper spray rounds because I do have dogs in the house and it is going to ruin my house and it's going to ruin my dogs for a long time because these dogs live by their nose.

So I don't want that to happen. And I don't want my dogs to get fucking killed by some guy coming to my house that just wants a cheesy TV. So it's just, that's really kind of how I stack my aggression, you know? And at the very end of the day, if the guy won't stop coming, I will pull out my knife and I'll cut his throat.

So I'm sorry. That's how it goes. That's that is the stack of aggression. It's like, I'm going to give you every chance you can to get the hell out of my house. And if you don't, I will cut your fucking head off. All right. So, so to stop your alpha male ranting for a second and kind of get down to what we're talking about here.

It's not alpha male ranting. It's just we're basically it's okay. What we're basically saying is, yes, there are non-lethal alternatives that work just as well. So there's no need to go get a gun. Find a non-lethal thing that you're comfortable with and train, train yourself on it and you're going to be good.

There's no reason to have a lethal weapon in your house. Also, I'm going to I'm going to add on a few different things that you can do that are cheap and easy. Get fake security cameras outside of your house. You put fake security cameras out. Just not the ones from China. Everything's made in China, Brian.

Just get over it. Just put up fake security cameras and put stickers on the door and get motion detected lights. Motion detected lights will deter 99% of anybody who's coming into your house. And, you know, I've got I've got a ring system.

I've got my Logitech system. But the ring system is fantastic. It is if somebody comes in the yard. All of that stuff is definitely first line of defense. And if anybody wants to go above and beyond that, then, you know, yeah, that stuff stops 99% of robberies. Exactly.

That it's all preventative care. What about the person who's listening to this and is yelling at their computer right now? Oh, there are so many people yelling at their computer right now. Yeah, it is my right to have a God. Well, but I'm but I'm thinking coming at it from the point of view is why are you giving any thought to the person who's coming in your house?

You know, why are you giving any nonlethal thought to that person at all? If they cross the threshold, I want them dead. And that is my right because my home is my castle. Because I'm American. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, you come after my family to stand my ground stuff and all that.

Yeah, I get that. I understand that. Do you like your son and daughter? Do you like your wife? Do you like you? Because as we all know, the statistics state, there's a far, far greater chance that somebody in your family is going to die than anybody even ever breaking into your house.

Right. That's my main argument. Right. Like, I have a son. I would kill myself if he killed himself accidentally with a gun. Yeah. I can't even fathom it. Like, I would never have a lethal weapon in my house because I have a kid.

And I know he gets into everything. It doesn't matter what I say. Yep. That kid gets into everything. They don't listen. Yep. But what would you do if somebody came into your house and killed your son? Kill him with my baseball bat. There you go. You know, I'm looking, I'm going to look into having something non-lethal besides my bat.

I fully support that. I don't have a problem with that. All the links for these guns will be in the show notes. And there are certain states where you can't buy the pepper spray, but you can still buy the riot rounds. And if you have friends out of state, they can just mail them to you.

I'm just saying. Again, I understand the concept, but this is one of these, like, technology has moved on things, right? Like, we have a better alternative now. We do. We have a better alternative than a gun. We have a non-lethal thing.

That's what I'm getting at. Yeah. Yeah. Given the fact that if a gun in your home is much more likely to kill someone you love, including yourself, are we better off having non-lethal weapons for self-defense? And that is my, and is it still effective enough?

Is the difference between defending yourself with this pepper spray gun versus a handgun or a shotgun? Is the difference small enough to be without distinction? Here's what I've never seen. I've never seen a cop tase a guy with a gun that has been shot by the gun.

That's the one thing that I always worried about. It's like, okay, I've got a taser, you know, I'm going to shoot this guy with the taser. How many times have you ever seen of, you know, like a body cam video where the guy that has the taser shoots the cop? Zero.

Yeah. It doesn't happen because the taser knocks them down instantly. Yeah. Even if they squeeze their finger, they're on their way backwards. You might end up killing your upstairs neighbor if you live in an apartment. So caveat emptor. But yeah. And when we're talking about stopping power, you know, we mentioned earlier that if you hit someone with the pepper spray round and they're blinded and they just start firing off rounds, well, how's that different than if I shoot them in the leg or the arm and they

just start firing off rounds, but they can see. If you shoot them in the leg or the arm, you have not been trained up on your weapon. You need to be trained on every weapon that you have in your house. That's what you have to do. But. So I'm off to the batting case. Right. Yes.

Yes. And in a what I would say is with a handgun, the the degree of accuracy that you have with a handgun that you're going to be in a high pressure situation. So, again, yes, training will help with this. But like we said, with the pepper spray gun, you have to be in the right neighborhood to disable this person.

You know, you hit the wall next to them and they can't see. And I just think that lack of need of accuracy is better. It's the, you know, equivalent of the shotgun blast. Yes. Right. There's also a lag between from when you shoot to when they can't see.

There's a probably a two second lag. So between that two second lag, they can just kill you and then get over and then go to the sink and rinse their eyes out. You know, I mean, possibly it's yeah, it's totally possible. That's that's the argument that I'm anticipating all the arguments that people are going to send us.

But there are definitely many arguments with non-lethal force, and I just don't want to kill anybody. I really don't. Well, that's what it comes down to to me as well as I don't want to have lethal force. Yeah, I don't think people should have lethal force, especially as we were stating now that there is this technology to have a non-lethal variant or option.

I would much rather I'm way more. I would never actually have a real gun in my house. I might have one of these. Definitely. So because I don't want to kill anyone, even if they break into my house, they're really kind of fun just to go shoot on the weekends. They're really kind of fun because as you as you noticed in the video, they're like, no, this is not a paintball gun.

This is a gun gun. Yeah, it's it is no joke. The force that this thing comes out with. It is ridiculously strong. And the video is about the salt pepper gun. And there's a cheaper version that we have linked in the show notes, which is the one I got, which is the Tipman TPX paintball pistol starter kit.

That is the exact gun I bought. And then I bought the salt pepper spray separately. You can save about 75 bucks or 50 bucks on that. Oh, conveniently, you can restock with Alexa. Oh, nice. Nice.

But Jesus Christ. Yeah, I've had these things for for ages and I it is loaded, ready to go in my home. I have I have because the the way the way the gun works is the first trigger squeeze is it pierces the CO2 cartridge.

The next trigger squeeze is it shoots a bullet. So so basically what Jason is saying, Dave, is do not show up at his house in that fox mask, at least unannounced, unannounced, unless unless you're into that kind of thing.

Yeah, that's right. No, believe me, I having having met Bam Bam, I am not sneaking into Jason's house. Bam Bam will will. That's the other thing. Having that defend his master. Yeah. Having having 115 pound Rottweiler who will kill you in point seven seconds is also another deterrent.

Right. Right. So have we covered everything? What do you guys think? I mean, where are we at? Are you guys going to actually go out and buy something? Well, these are decisions that both Dave and I as married men probably cannot make individually. There's some discussions that need to happen with our families.

Yeah, let me give you some context in that I had I had a handgun in my home that I inherited from a relative who passed away. It was a 38 caliber revolver and I had the old 38 special.

It was a 38 special and I had it in my home unloaded, you know, gun in one place, ammo in another place, trigger lock on the gun. And I came home one day, came downstairs and my 15 year old kid was playing with the gun.

Yep. There you go. And with a gun that I had hidden, right, hidden in the house, tucked away. I mean, and find everything. Yeah. And so, you know, my child learned a whole new level of discipline when I came across this because it was, you know, and it was basically, do you want me to have to explain to your mother

how you lost your life? And of course, he's crying and he's like, I was just curious and I just thought it wasn't it. No. Do you want me to explain, to have to explain to your mother why you are dead, you know, at the hands of your grandfather's gun?

And so at that point, I was like, well, okay, guns out of the house. So the gun is out of the house. The gun is, is a, the gun is in a place where I can get to it if I need it. If the zombie apocalypse comes, it is within walking distance, but it is under lock and key and it is not in my home anymore.

And it is because I, I do not, the neighborhood I live in is safe enough that I do not feel any sense of danger where I really feel like I need a weapon in my home. So I don't, I don't anticipate myself getting one. And I guess part of the point of me telling this story is I'm not inherently anti-gun.

I, I, you know, I wasn't against having a gun in my home, but I would say I learned the hard way, dare I say, dodged a bullet with thinking that I was smarter than my kid by having all these things that I thought were in place.

No, my kid was smarter than that. Right. Right. Or, or, or stupider than that, depending on how you want to, how you want to say it. So that's where I'm coming at this from. I wouldn't say your kid's stupid. You could, your kid's curious. Yeah. He's the natural curiosity. And there's just everything that goes with being a teenager or a younger child.

So, yeah, that's, so I, I, you know, at this age with my son being two, I would probably have, feel comfortable with, with something. Uh, but when he gets older, I don't know. And that, that is a discussion I would have to have with my wife. And, uh, you know, right now I stand by Mr. Baseball bat.

There you go. Honestly. Yeah. Just stand by Mr. Baseball bat and, uh, go get the, go get the, the Tipman TPX paintball pistol starter starter kit and the salt supply pepper spray balls or whatever. Um, uh, here's the thing. I, I, I just, I just, I just, I just got to say, Dave, that would, that, that story just kind of resonated with me.

That was terrifying. I would be so terrified if I came home and my kid had the gun. Yeah. I would be so terrified. Yeah. But the, but again, like we know from the statistics, that's the reality of what actually happens. That is what happens. And what almost happened to you, Jason, is also what happens that I find terrifying that either me, my wife, one of my kids would get in that place and none of us would know it.

So you had a bad day. Yep. And none of us knew it and they did a great job hiding it from us. And because of the opportunity, we don't get a second chance. Yeah. It's too much power to have in the home. I think honestly, because I mean, go, go read up on Chekhov's gun.

You know, if the, if the gun appears on the mantle in the first act, then it's got to be fired by the third act. You have to, you have to do that. And it is just this potential energy that's in the house. And if you know, it's there, it is always an option to use. And I don't like having that option to use anymore.

Yeah, I agree. I I'm right there. And you know what? Everybody thinks that they're better than they are. Just like Dave thought he had solved the problem. He had, you know, done everything with everything that they tell you to do to keep a gun safe in a house. And it still wasn't because shit happens.

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Shit happens. Shit happens. Yep. So it's not, it's not something that you need in your home, but there are ways to get around that to still protect yourself and be safe and not feel like, you know, Oh God, I, I, I might be a victim someday because I don't have a gun.

Uh, no, you can, you know, get good with the paintball gun. You can get good with the baseball bat and you can also protect yourself on the perimeter. So people that are looking for easy targets don't come into your home because unless you have a shit ton of enemies, nobody's coming into your house.

If there's like 17 security cameras outside that go whoop, whoop, whoop when they walk up to the front door, there's an easy way to get people to go away. Yeah. It sounds like we're pretty much all on the same page. So I'm very much looking forward to the one star reviews and hateful tweets that we will be getting for this segment.

Thank you for your unsubscribe. If there's, if folks out there who feel as though they have a thoughtful response, if there's something that we've missed and you have a thoughtful, reasonable response, we would like to hear that. If you just, if on the other hand, you just want to rant and, and, you know, guns because America will keep it to yourself and, and enjoy your gun and enjoy your life and live the life you want to live in this great nation of ours.

And that's fine. We can agree to disagree. But, but if you really think we'll reiterate, none of us are trying to take your guns away. That is no, not at all. And if you, but if there's something that you feel like we're, we're missing out on something that, you know, we're legitimately just not getting, please let us know. Cause I, I would, I seriously would, would like to consider other thoughtful points of view.

Yeah, no, definitely. Cause I've been looking at a 30 out six that I want to get to, for long distance shooting. And when I get that, I will keep it in a safe, you know, two miles away at my friend's house who has a gun safe. It's not something for home security. This is all about home security. Right.

You know, I think you can have a gun and own a gun and be responsible with it, but I don't think you need it in your house for, to protect yourself. It's all I think, you know, because you do sometimes get sad and as someone who literally had a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, please believe me, sometimes you get sad and sometimes you get really fucking lucky and we get to still do this podcast together.

So thank you guys. Yeah. Yeah. If you get sad, you know, take a shot, not a shotgun. That's my advice. Or call your friends. Call one of your friends. Well, whiskey was the problem. Oh, well, okay.

Okay. Whiskey and guns, a staple of all country songs. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you're really sad, tweet Jason, because he'll probably be awake. My friend Andy Preboy had a great line in one of his songs. It says, whiskey, wine, and gin make nitroglycerin. And I think that's pretty much what I had.

So anyway, gentlemen. All right, thanks, guys. That was a good time. Next week, we'll get back to the usual stuff. That we solved the problems of the world. Yeah. Let's just get back to people hacking into other people's shit next week, please. Brick-a-brick.

I read a great article over on Edge.org called Childhood's End. The digital revolution isn't over, but it's turned to something else. And did you get a chance to check this one out? I skimmed through it, yeah. It's a pretty good article talking about how we're in this weird phase of computing versus digital versus – what's the word that I'm looking for here?

It is – what's a record player? Analog. Analog. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah, yeah. There you go. Yeah, digital versus analog computing. So it was written by this guy, George Dyson, who's a very smart cat. And he's talking about how there's going to be a change in computing going forward.

And I thought it was a really fun read. Yeah, I mean, I enjoyed everything that he was saying. I mean, he was talking about how models are no longer models. Search engines are not models of human knowledge. They are human knowledge. Social networks are no longer models of social graphs. They are social graphs.

It's a winner-take-all game, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it's all super interesting. I mean, I definitely think he's right. And it's a little worrisome when you read through the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. When you take it – when you pull the thread to its logical end, it's like, okay, people aren't learning anymore.

They're just using search engines and all these systems that we have in place that are, you know, the oligarchs, as they say, of data, like Google. And they control what you get to know. And it's scary.

It's kind of a scary proposition. Because in the old days, we would go to the library and we would learn from different sources. Now, it's just like you type something in, if it's at the top of the list, you click it, and then that is what your knowledge is. Yep. And sometimes it's not correct.

Yeah. Oh, Wikipedia. So, anyway, it's a very good read, and it's something to think about when you're doing research online. Now, this one is my favorite of the week. Colin O'Brady. Colin O'Brady. He completed his crossing of Antarctica with a 32-hour push at the end.

But this is a New York Times story. This guy broke the record for going coast to coast to Antarctica. And he did a side trip to the South Pole. Okay. Which is pretty baller. It's like, I am going to go coast to coast to Antarctica, and while I'm doing it, I'm just going to go, you know, grab a Sammy at the subway at South Pole.

You know? I love stories of cross-country trekking. And this guy, he did it alone with no power, no wind, no nothing. He just dragged his shit across Antarctica. And, you know, hats off, man.

Hats off. Because that is a feat that I would not in a million years ever want to do. Because it was like 43 degrees in here this morning. And I'm bitching about that. And you're driving across Antarctica towing a sled on skis.

Okay. You, sir, are a baller. Better you than me. Yeah. My second favorite article this week was from the Huffington Post. I was a cable guy, and I saw the worst of America. And this was about a six-foot-tall lesbian who was a cable repair person for 10 years.

This is a disgusting article. I mean, the people that she had to deal with were basically just the worst of humanity. And over this entire break, I've had nothing but horrible stories of horrible people.

That's all it's been. It's all it's been. And that's why I love our audience. Because you guys are not those people. I am so happy to have you listening to us. Because there are so many garbage people out in the world.

And it just drives me crazy when I see stories like this. And it's a long-form article. It's worth the read. And, yeah, it was one of my favorites of the week, for sure. All right. Well, I had an interesting article that I found this week.

Watergate was the world's first hashtag. I had never heard of the computing system called Play-Doh, which was the first digital public forum. And the first time a president threatened to censor online speech. So the article says, contrary to what Silicon Valley would like you to believe, the rise of social computing, using computers to connect people, enabled them to interact, collaborate, and communicate, and be horrible, not only happened long before the personal computer era even got underway, but it happened far from California.

The Play-Doh computer system, which I somehow have never heard of, launched in 1960 at the University of Illinois and was designed to be a platform for online learning. But by the early 1970s, it evolved into basically a message board system with an enthusiastic user community, high school and college students, and all that.

Within one 12-month stretch from 1973 to 1974, Play-Doh's users created online messaging forums, chat rooms, graphical multiplayer games, instant messaging, email, and even early forms of emoji. And this is all kind of basically forgotten about. It's not really.

It's not forgotten about. There's actually a book I'm trying to find. It's called The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Deer. If you check out that book, that is exactly what that book is about, that whole system. I forgot. I had to go to my Audible app because I'm like, for some reason it got deleted from my app.

But I started to listen to that book, and it talks about all of that stuff way back in the day. It's The Friendly Orange Glow. I'll dig it up. Oh my God, it's crazy fascinating. Yeah, basically in 1973, the Nixon administration came really close to killing the Play-Doh Project and also ArapNet as well, because people were using those networks to talk politics and politics that the White House didn't agree with.

So there was already, even in the very first beginning days, there was threats of online censorship. Oh God. Pretty crazy. Nixon. Dick. Tricky dick. Tricky dicky. And my favorite article of the entire Christmas break that I had bodes well for all of us and our listeners.

Is it better to be grumpier or happier? According to the BBC, on average, the crankier you are, the more chance you have of being a good negotiator, a better decision maker, and also you have a lower chance of having a heart attack. They also say that the most grumpy in society have steadier marriages and can expect to earn more.

Whereas, according to a study, those who are more positive and happy-go-lucky, those little bastards, can be slightly more gullible and can take part in riskier behaviors, such as alcohol consumption, binge eating, and drug use. In addition, a 2009 study carried out at the University of Amsterdam suggests that being angrier can help people think outside the box and become more creative.

As part of the study, they took on a group of students and tried to make them as angry as possible, splitting them into two groups. He made one half right about a time that they were very angry, while the other half were made sad, and they both had to come up with ways of making education in the psychology department. The angrier group came up with more ways of improving the department and were also more original.

So. We win. We win again. And gosh darn it, people like us, even though we hate them. Ups and doodads. So, Brian, I got my new DJI Mavic 2 Zoom.

Yeah, I'm going to go make a sandwich while you talk about this for a half an hour. No, you're not. You're going to sit the fuck back down. We're going to get over this. I'm actually going to make money with it. So I am getting my FAA pilot's license. Nice. I've already registered it as a, you know, one of the drones that you do the registration thing, and then you get an FAA number and all that stuff.

So this is, you know, this is like, we've talked about this on the show for so long. Mm-hmm. I think it's kind of cool that we actually get to, you know, see the process. Right. You don't think so? No, I do. Okay. I wasn't sure you were still with me there.

I'm still here. But, yeah, no, I'm going through all the government regulations, and there's a lot. There's a lot of shit you have to know to be able to fly a drone legally in this country, unless you're a hobbyist. And, yeah, I'm actually really excited about learning all the stuff that I have to learn because it makes me a better drone pilot, because this thing is scary.

Yeah. It's scary. I took it up to 85 feet the other day, and I'm just like, that's $1,200 floating in the sky. And then when it comes back down to land, I'm like, please don't cut my throat. Please don't cut my jugular.

I just don't. I don't want to die. I mean, this thing is powerful as hell, and I've got a fairly low-powered drone. I mean, this thing is the DJI Mavic 2 Zoom. The great thing about it, and the reason I bought it, was because it has avoidance detection on all sides, which means that it's really hard to crash.

And I bought AppleCare, which is not AppleCare, but DJI Care. I was about to say. Yeah. I don't think Tim Cook signed off on that one. But nowadays, who knows? He's probably signing off on everything because the stock's in the shitter.

But yeah, I can crash it twice a year, and they will replace the entire aircraft twice for $135, which is great. So there's going to be a ton of links in the show notes for how to do the FAA stuff, the before you fly mobile app.

And I'm dealing with people at 3D Robotics right now, which is kind of interesting because I was on the phone with Dr. David Teeter the other night, a friend of the show, and he called bunk on a lot of the stuff that 3D Robotics was doing with surveying for construction sites.

So I'm like, oh, okay. So what does he do? He writes Chris Anderson, the owner of the company. And the owner of the company wrote back the next morning. He's like, oh, here's our head of app development. Do you want to come to the office and hang out and learn more about it?

So I got to give these guys serious props for what's going on with that, and serious hat tip to David for doing that stuff. And yeah, I'm all in on this because there's a lot of money to be made if you can actually fly a drone.

It's kind of crazy. I mean, fuck this podcasting thing. We're out. Okay. You're on your own, dude. All right. Sweet. And I got Sky Guide for iOS, which is a one of those apps where you point your phone at the sky and you can see what all the stars are.

Hat tip to G Davis on Twitter for that one. I was trying to figure out what this star was. I thought it was. I figured it was a planet, but, you know, might have been a star. It's always in the sky at 530 in the morning, and it's super bright.

And I'm thinking, ah, that's probably a planet. And so he sent me some stuff. And then I'm just like, okay, I'm going to go get the app. And it turns out it was Venus. So if you go to a photo a day.com, that's my new site that I've got up spinning on node host. Check those guys out. That link will be in the show notes. Yeah.

It's a really cool app because you can just see all the stars, even though we're living in Los Angeles where you can't see shit because of the light pollution. Right. So it's very cool. It's a very cool stuff. So I just, I don't know. I'm, I'm going for the stars. I'm like Casey Kasem.

I'm going to keep my feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. You're like Casey Kasem. You're frozen in unknown land. Yeah, probably. And I downloaded a new app. I live here in Los Angeles, land of earthquakes and bird scooters. There's an app called Shake Alert LA that has just come out.

It basically gives you a warning of up to 20 seconds before an earthquake hits on your phone, which may not sound like a lot, but if you have to do an earthquake, it's enough. It's enough. Holy shit. I got to get this. Yeah. So you can go to Shake. Shake Alert LA is available for both Apple and Android phones.

Um, I, you know, I'm glad we have something like this. Um, I'm not entirely sure with Eric Garcetti, the hashtag mayor of LA branding this app with his name and hashtag mayor of LA. Oh, he's a douchebag. Yeah, he is a douchebag. And when you click on recent earthquakes, uh, nothing is coming up.

So the app doesn't appear to be working all that great. Um, but there's some information in there. And, you know, as soon as we actually have an earthquake here, I'm hoping to see that I get the warning. So, you know, it's, it's, if you live in LA, get it, it, there's no reason not to, you know?

Yeah. I mean, I just go to the NGS site and they always have everything. Well, yeah, but that's after the fact. This one will give you that warning in theory. In theory. In theory. I'll try. We'll get back to you after we fall into the ocean. Yeah. When the sinkhole opens up under our houses, we'll tweet you from there.

Yes. I will tweet on the way down. I got the warning. 10 seconds. Yay. Closing shout outs. I just want to give a quick shout out to all my friends in Toronto that I got to hang out with and particularly Kevin who showed me his local there.

That was a good time. And a shout out to friend of the show, Megan, because she asked for one. And I also owe her a few drinks. Okay. Did I meet Megan when I was up there? Is that the. Yes, I believe so. She. Oh, she was awesome. ACRW. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She was amazing. Yeah. That's very cool. My closing shout out is to Sir Billy Connolly, one of my favorite comedians and one of the greatest comedians of all time.

Unfortunately, he's got Parkinson's and there's a there's an article that we'll link in the show notes. He's like near the end of his life. And it's all that it it it breaks my heart. It really breaks my heart because he's he was so. Sharp and so amazing.

And it's, you know, I don't know. It just it one of those ones that it kind of hit me really hard. Funny guy. Oh, yeah. Super funny guy. So. We're going to miss you, Sir Billy, and hopefully you'll stick around a bit longer. But, yeah, I understand.

Yep. 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. 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.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 309. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. And stay furry. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC is has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.