315: Under Pressure

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, we've got a little follow-up here on the tech revolt, which was an interesting story in CaliforniaSunday.com, which I've never heard of. Neither had I. Yeah, but it's a laundry list of people in the tech industry who are pushing back on people being assholes. I thought it was a very nice read. It was a breath of fresh air.

Wish there were a lot more of them. Yes, yes. I highly recommend everybody check it out. It will be in our show notes at GOG.show slash 315. But there are quite a few people in some of these big companies that are pushing back. Sadly, some of them get fired for doing it, which sucks.

Most of them from the stories that were in this particular paper, yes. Yeah, it was a great article. I really enjoyed it. And it's nice to know that people are trying to take a stand. If only we had unions. Yeah, no, that's why some people got fired trying to unionize. It doesn't really work, I guess.

No. What you gonna do? What you gonna do when they come for you? And I got a thing in here because I talked about Bohemian Rhapsody on the last episode. Yes, and I believe you went down a bit of a rabbit hole that night as I got many a slack message from you. Oh, yeah, yeah. A little wine, a little Freddie Mercury trip down every lane.

I thought a little wine might have been involved. Yeah, yeah, there was. So I was just having some cab and going through and watching tons of old Queen videos. But one of my favorites that I want to put in the show notes is the acapella version of Under Pressure. So you get to hear David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sans music. And I love it. I've listened to this thing like a hundred times. I still get goosebumps every time I hear it.

Yeah. Well, if you want to completely ruin that vibe, go ahead and listen to the acapella version of Dancing in the Streets with David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Oh, no, I'll pass on that. I'll pass on that. Wise. Yeah, yeah. No, but it was just it's a fun little video. I highly recommend everybody check it out.

Now, I would have liked to have enjoyed all the videos that you were sending me last night. But, you know, I think it's probably because I've worked for myself for the past 20 years and I'm rarely in an office environment. But I've always kind of bragged about the fact that I really used to never get sick. I would get sick like maybe once a year. It lasts two days and I wouldn't feel bad at all.

And I remember when my wife was pregnant, my friends that had kids already and they were a bit older said, oh, you're going to be sick for the first four years. And we dodged the bullet for two years. But once we put the kid in school in that Petri disgusting dish, I literally think I've been not sick two days this entire month.

So I was I was down for the count last night on a NyQuil high. Oh, man. So you need to maybe up those up those vitamins. Yeah, we're going to be doing a little supplements, which I loathe to take. But I think it's time because, you know, the constant dousing and with soap and water is not is not doing it.

I'm tired of being tired. You're sick of being sick. Poor guy. That's what happens when you breed a disease factory. Yes. In the news. Apparently, we're getting some stats from Netflix about how many people are watching his shows.

His shows? All of them? Sorry. Netflix is a dude? Netflix is a dude. Sorry. The show is called You and I was reading Hunky Emo Psychic Killer. So then I said, dude, I don't know why that all went. I guess again, it's the today. It's the day quill. OK. So, yeah, they put out a bunch of numbers.

40 million member households in the four weeks since Netflix have watched the show You, which I have not seen. Sex Education, which is great. It's absolutely fantastic. I'm watching it. It's on track to be watched by 40 million member households. The service said that the Sandra Bullock movie Bird Box was watched by 80 million member households over that period of time.

So that's a lot of people watching stuff. Now, here's the problem. Netflix is providing these stats. Yes. They are not third party stats. They're saying this is how many people are watching us. Do you have to take their word for it? You have to take their word for it.

And as we all know, people lie. Really? I haven't noticed that. I haven't noticed that. Not on the Internet. Yeah. No, no, never on the Internet. Not on the Internet. Everything you read on the Internet is true. It's big money. You know, if you if you figure that you would pay the average American movie ticket costs about nine bucks and 40 or 80 million people watch Bird Box, that's serious.

No. But so they're doing pretty well. And it's interesting based on their stats, of course, a Netflix show in Turkish would have landed in network TV. Here's top 10 shows based on audience. Pretty crazy. It's a new world out there. And what we thought was a new world was BuzzFeed becoming this massive journalist, a wonderful place where where they became a real news organization and were giving us real news.

But unfortunately, they are now laying off more than 200 people, which is basically 15 percent of its employees throughout the company, not because they aren't making money, but because they want to reduce their costs and improve their operating models so they can thrive and control their own destiny without ever need to needing to raise funding again.

So. I love that. Over the past year, revenue growth alone wasn't enough to avoid the cost cuts. I. What is then? Exactly. Isn't that the whole point of being in business? That's the whole point. Revenue growth. Revenue growth. And you keep going and you get bigger.

That's the whole point. There's an article on BuzzFeed this week. The top 10 reasons why you can't trust your CEO. That's going to be it. Yeah, pretty much. I hope these 225 people that are getting cut are from the listicle division. Please be from the listicle division.

Or the headline writers. Let's get rid of that. But it was a bad day all over for the media world. The same day, Verizon, which owns AOL and Yahoo, also announced it as cutting 800 jobs. Although, to be fair, they are from AOL and Yahoo. So, they could probably go away. But it does make me wonder, is there now a business model at all for news in this current environment?

Not that there ever really was. We all have to remember, news divisions were sinkholes. The entire rest of everything else paid for news. News was not supposed to pay for itself. That's something that started in like the late 80s and 90s. So, we thought there might be a model.

Probably even before that. Yeah, probably the 70s, late 70s. Well, the way it worked out was when the FCC gave you spectrum for your TV show, you had to devote a certain amount of time to public awareness programming. So, what they did was they created the news. That's why we have the news.

Because that got around the FCC regulations for how much they can give back. And then everything did go to shit when Ted Turner was not killed as a child. And he decided to create CNN. And then we got the 24-hour news cycle.

And that started the whole debacle. And now we've got, you know, it's ridiculous. But there are too many news outlets now. And everybody's fighting for that little tiny piece of the pie. And it's ridiculous. A lot of people don't really care for news anyways, especially now that they're being bombarded with other things that they can watch instead.

So, yeah. I don't know if there's an actual business model for news out there anymore. I really don't. We see any organization that gets out there and tries to do it is getting layoffs right now. Yep, yep. HuffPo had a round of layoffs. So, 20 employees from HuffPo are getting gone.

So, again, HuffPo, AOL, Yahoo. Not too big of a loss there. Oath. We're at Oath. Anyway, yeah. It's part of that $4.6 billion write-down. Oh, my God. It's so great. I love it so much. But, actually, I don't feel bad for the Huffington Post registry getting laid off because I don't like the Huffington Post at all.

I used to enjoy it. It was a great – as an aggregator at the very beginning, it was great. But as soon as they started to try to develop their own content and all of that, it just went off the rails. Yeah, whatever. Ariana, bite my Wonka. Gannett, which is a major, major news publisher, had a huge round of layoffs because they own 109 local media companies.

They own USA Today. USA Today, tomorrow, the world. But a company called Digital First is trying to buy them, and it's been a whole thing over there. But, I mean, they're laying off Pulitzer Prize winners. It's like, guys, you know, if you're trying to make the news, you might want to have the guys who are good at it.

Yeah. Stick around. But, you know, those guys, I'm sure, will just go off and start their own podcasts. Oh, great. Just what we need, more podcasts. All right. Well, in continuing journalism news, there is a whole new group of companies out there that are trying to solve the fake news problem, as it were.

So they are basically – there's a U.S. startup called NewsGuard. This is one of the big ones that basically goes around, reads all the websites, and kind of ranks them based on deceptive headlines, source linking, editorial transparency, etc., etc. For instance, the Mail Online in the U.K., the Daily Mail Online, got a crappy rating.

And because they've made a deal with – which browser? Microsoft. They made a deal with Microsoft. So this NewsGuard plugin comes shipped with Edge, and you can switch it on, and it'll basically tell you any news source that you're reading will get a reliability score, which, in theory, is not a bad idea.

But, again, who watches The Watchers? Exactly. Yeah. We need multiple sources on this because, you know, their bias is going to creep in, and then they're going to get, like, oh, you're too liberal. Oh, you're too conservative. Oh, you're too libertarian. I don't know. Whatever they're going to, you know, try and label them.

Whatever brush they want to paint it with, yeah. Yeah. But, luckily, it's only in Microsoft's Edge browser, so no one's seeing this. And Edge is going away, so we know that because they did a deal, and they're using the whole Chromium – is it Chromium? Whatever the rendering engine is that Chrome comes with.

So they're getting rid of Edge anyway, so I think that'll be interesting, how that goes. Well, we'll see. Microsoft always has this amazing ability to just keep coming back with shitty-ass browsers all the time. I know. Let's see what happens. They need to get out of the browser business altogether.

But, like the proverbial cockroach from the nuclear war, much like Microsoft's browsers, MoviePass is coming back again. Oh, God. They just cannot die. I don't know who is continuing to give them money, but they are still around, and they are once again making changes to their membership plans.

They have announced that they will be bringing back the no price for – it hasn't been announced a price yet, but they're bringing back the unlimited plan. Now, the only way they can make money, as we know, is if this is going to be very expensive. So we shall see if we're just going to be doing – we can actually just run reruns of our shows if they just do the same shit again.

Yeah, exactly. We can just go back to the well because the only way that they're going to make anything is, yeah, they've got to jack their price up, but they also are selling your data. And the guy came out and said, look, we know where you're going to dinner before you go to the movie. We know where you're going to dinner after the movie or things like that because they're tracking your location because they have to do the geofencing when you open the app because you put in your credit card that you get from them.

And it has to be within, like, 300 feet of the theater for it to be activated, which means they're tracking you all the time. And he came out and said it, and then he backpedaled right away and said, oh, no, no, no. Did I say that out loud? I meant to use my indoor voice. I wasn't supposed to say that. Yeah. Oopsie.

So, yeah, just stay away from MoviePass, honestly. Just stay away. And I love this one. MIT researchers claim Amazon's recognition, of course, with a K, is susceptible to bias. Now, this is their facial analysis software, and it apparently has problems with different skin color and genders.

Go figure. Amazon is, of course, coming back saying, no, no, no, no. Of course it doesn't. We're fine. We're fine. Everything's good. But, you know, the study kind of bared it out. And all of these facial recognition programs right now have a problem with gender bias because they just can't quite figure it out.

So it's going to be a while until this thing is really a thing. Because remember Google Photos when they were identifying African-Americans as gorillas? Yeah, that was a fun one. That went over real well. So I think this stuff is not ready for prime time, and they should just kind of shelve it for now.

But, you know, they're not going to. Any more Amazon news? This is mind-boggling. Amazon has 10,000 employees dedicated to Alexa. Is that not crazy? I'm actually not that surprised by that. It's their flagship product right now.

And they're in a war, and they know it. It's going to be Google. It's not going to be Apple unless something massive changes. Or it's going to be Amazon. So, yeah, I'm not surprised. Yeah, I mean, the big things they're really working on, of course, machine learning and making Alexa more knowledgeable. They want it to be. So when you ask Alexa a question, it gives you an answer no matter what.

So they've got a lot. I think a lot of people are just doing data entry out of those 10,000. It's just like they're copying Wikipedia entries. I don't think they're fact-checking them, but I think they're copying Wikipedia entries. And they're also working on giving Alexa a personality. Right. So I have not plugged my Alexa back in in quite some time, or my Echo, in quite some time.

So I have not heard the new newscaster voice for the daily briefing. Have you heard the new newscaster voice? No, because I got so annoyed at the daily briefing system a long time ago, I stopped using my daily briefing. I should probably go back and try it again. Because I liked it at first, but then, you know, everybody, instead of plugging in their own podcasts and their own voices, it was just using the voice to read headlines.

And that was so stupid and annoying, I couldn't take it anymore. I don't want robot news, so. No robot news. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, all you have to do is upload an MP3, guys. It's not that hard. Remember when we were briefly thinking about trying to do that? Oh, we did do that for a while.

We did 40 episodes of Up to Speed. And a lot of people really liked that. But, man, it was just, like, taking me way too much time every day. That was the goal, was to get it on the Echo at some point. But just doing the top five news stories and recording it and writing it took four hours a day.

Yeah, it was crazy. Ain't nobody got time for that. Yeah. Who knew? News is hard. Oh, wow. Well, actually, we weren't even reporting the news. We were just stealing the news and re-recording it, kind of like we're doing right now. And so we'll see. I need to plug my Echo back in because I kind of miss it.

But I have to do it on the DL. Just keep it in your studio. Yeah, we'll just keep it in the garage. Now, I ran across this this morning. This was I think this was on Instagram is a sponsored post in its Amazon beta testing program.

And it was a video of Harrison Ford opening up this, like, crazy sci-fi box and going in like, you know, Alexa talked to him. And he's like, no, don't like this already. And close the box, which I thought was funny. I thought it was cute. What this turns out, though, is this is just a tease for their Super Bowl commercial that's coming.

That's really all it is, you know, and there's a couple of videos that they have up there. It's like you've been granted visitor access to the following research files to see more declassified testing footage. Tune into the big game on 2319. So, yes, this is just a tease. Yeah. Have you noticed that nobody in L.A. really cares that we're in the Super Bowl?

Oh, I think you run you run in non sports or sports ball circles. I have quite a few more sports fans in my life and quite a few people are excited about it. OK, I mean, I was even listening to Kevin and being the other morning. They're like, nobody seems to care that we're in the Super Bowl.

So it wasn't just me, you know, but I mean, I'm not a big fan of the football anyways. It's not it's not my sport, but I'm excited about the Rams. I'm going to go out and watch the game. So I'd root for them. Go Rams. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Go Rams. Sports ball. Yeah.

Anyways, over on Bob lefts its blog. You still read that crap? Not much anymore. I basically delete them when they come in because 99 times out of 10, they're just ads for his podcast now. So but this one I did read because it's about pledge music.

I don't know if you are aware of pledge music, but it's, you know, it's your crowd fund. It's your general crowdfunding platform that tried to niche themselves for music and music being in the name. Awful lot of bands use it. We went with Patreon. Bands use Patreon as well. The pledge is kind of set up. You know, they have default tools that basically make sense to musicians touring albums, all that sort of stuff.

Well, do you remember the band Fastball? Fastball. They did the song called The Way in the 90s. That was a huge K-Rock hit. No, not really. Ringing a bell. Well, I've got the link in our show notes to the video, and I think it's a pleasant enough song.

They were basically kind of one hit wonders, but they're still kicking around, as you can do if you go out and directly crowdfund things and don't rely on labels anymore. So good for them. Unfortunately, they're not getting paid. Pledge music doesn't have the money, which is theirs.

Wait a minute. So people give money to pledge music and then the money just disappears? It just goes away? Well, apparently, I guess you get paid in stages by pledge music and they are owed money. They were due $20,000 on January 1st, and pledge said, well, hold on.

Wait a while. We're going to give it to you over time. And their manager pushed for the money, and the pledge went silent. And they have now not gotten a return call from pledge music in over three weeks. So obviously, they don't have the money. So pledge music basically has absconded and they're in the Cayman, so they don't have a phone.

That's something like that. What it seems that's been going on is the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme. They take in some money and they use the money that they just got from you to pay somebody that they owed money for months from. And it just keeps rolling and rolling and rolling because they didn't have a good business plan. And it's a very low market business plan to begin with.

And they've not been using their cash well. So, yeah, it's as he points out, it's one thing to run out of cash. It's quite another to use other people's cash to keep the lights on. And that seems to be what they're doing. Somebody is going to do it. Well, one would hope so.

And it isn't a single case. After he wrote this, there was a follow up as, you know, he gets he does his reader's mailbag things as well. And it was story after story after story of band after band and solo artists and management saying pledge screwed us, too. They kept our we had to fight them for almost a year to get our money back.

Some of them took deals to take less of the money that they should have got because that's all they were going to get. Wow. This is insane. This stuff is happening. Wow, definitely. So I'm wondering who the guys behind this are. And the problem is we don't have a government right now, so there's nobody probably at home at the FTC to.

Well, the thing is, this looks bad for the band. Like at the end of the day, we used to have these frustrations all the time back when I was working in the music business. If the label screwed something up, nobody goes, I use stupid label. It's no, you stupid band. What are you doing? So the band looks bad, not pledge.

And this had become a real industry. I mean, this is what a lot of musicians are doing now. Now, obviously, they can go to Indiegogo. They can go to Kickstarter. They can go to other platforms. But is this a sign of things to come with all these other platforms as well? How well are they doing financially?

Are they on razor's edge with money as well? Because it's not a big business, apparently. At least it's not a high margin business. They have to raise their rates. They have to raise their percentages, I suppose, which cuts back into band stuff again. And hey, wow. We're kind of back to being a label, aren't we? Yep. And I want you to tell me if any of this reads true, because Pledge Music has just released a statement about this.

Pledge Music has always been committed to serving artists and fan communities. It was established by artists and was born of a need to change the way in which the traditional music industry operated. That sounds like it's pretty much the traditional music industry so far. It was designed to help artists and their teams at entry level.

That said, we deeply regret that recently we have not lived up to the high standards to which Pledge Music has always held itself. We acknowledge that many artists have and continue to experience payment delays. These delays to artists are unacceptable, not only to them, but to us. While the company has made progress, we still haven't reached our goals.

Pledge Music has been in discussions with several strategic players in the industry who have an interest in the Pledge Music platform. Meaning they're trying to get more funding. Exactly. Rob Peter to pay Paul. We are evaluating a number of transactions with those potential partners, and we plan to announce details of this in the next 60 days.

It's our expectation the payments will be brought current within the next 90 days. As of now, we are working through the backlog of correspondence with artists and teams to clarify their payment plans, and your patience is appreciated as we complete this task. I think that the landlords for these artists are probably not as patient, and they would like their rent.

That's just... Yeah, well, or even if you were about to embark on a tour. If you don't get that money, you can't go on tour. So now you have to offset... You have to cancel your tour. You have to reschedule everything. You lose more money. That's a load of crap. Furthermore, we are also working to address the fulfillment issues that some of our customers have experienced in turn, often as a direct result of artist payment issues.

Despite the unfortunate circumstances, the passionate inquiries and messages of support on social media from fans are appreciated, acknowledged, and understood. I highly doubt they're getting messages of support on social media at this point, but yeah. Me too. Because social media is well known for being a place where people go to and don't kick people when they're down.

Oh yes, it's so uplifting. We're all so supportive. We all go to Twitter to be uplifted every day. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We are deeply... Yeah, finally. We are deeply sorry that we have not lived up to the high standards to which Pledge Music always held itself. We are committed as a company of passionate music lovers to get things back on track as quickly as possible.

Sincerely, Pledge Music. And, uh... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hate to see this happen. I mean, I was so against the crowdfunding stuff when it first came out, but, uh, it did become... It has become a viable way for bands that, uh, let's face it, the major labels aren't going to be signing old bands anymore.

But there's still a market for it. There's still an audience. These people... There are people out there that still love fastball, apparently. Enough to put $20,000 to them to do an album or whatever they were doing. This is the market now for anybody that isn't Cardi B or Rihanna.

This is where musicians go to do things. Crowdfunding. And to see a big company like this, the biggest... I mean, that was their whole point. They niched themselves completely as, we are doing nothing except for working with musicians. And to see them fail and fuck up and screw all these musicians is just sad.

Thumbs me out. No, it sucks. But, uh, maybe guys try Patreon. Because they seem to be on the ball. They've got enough funding and they've got enough people that work there that actually get shit done. So... Fingers crossed. Mm-hmm. Hopefully we won't get an email from Patreon next month saying it's going to be a three-month appointment program.

It's true. Anyways. Uh, now I was going to read this entire article, but I've decided to keep all of our sanity. Did you read, uh, Mark Zuckerberg's op-ed opinion in the Wall Street Journal? I did not. Would you care to summarize it for me? Can I have the TLDR, please?

Uh, here's the TLDR. I don't know who the fuck he wrote this for. Okay. I don't... Other than he's trying to convince himself that they aren't that bad. Um, because people who don't give a shit about everything that Facebook is doing and people who don't care about the past two years straight of negative news about Facebook don't need to read this and won't read this from Mark Zuckerberg.

And the people who will read it and who do care about it know this is a complete load of shit. Like, all this is, is word salad, as you were so fond of saying. Mm-hmm. Uh, talking about how we're sorry that we screwed up. Uh, things that we're doing aren't really bad. This is actually in your best interest.

Uh, hey, it's all going well. Don't worry about it. Sure, we collect some information. But ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice, and control. Of which, Facebook gives us none of those. No transparency, no choice, and no control. So, everything that he writes in here, it's almost like he's trying to convince himself that this is the way his business runs.

But we all know it's not. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Yeah. So, it's, uh, I suggest, go read it, Jason. I know you're one of the few people that has managed to get off Facebook, and I'm going to get to that in a second. But I think this is a really good look into the, how the mind of a Silicon Valley CEO slash God thinks about themselves these days.

I'm scanning it right now, and it just, it reads like a page, pages of bullshit. It just really, it's like, pages of bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. If this was the print version of the Wall Street Journal, this is toilet paper. Somewhere that ads create a misalignment of interest between us and people who use our services.

I'm often asked if we have an incentive to increase engagement on Facebook, because that creates more advertising real estate, even if it's not in people's best interests. We're very focused on helping people share and connect more, because the purpose of our service is to help people stay in touch with family, friends, and communities. Fuck you.

No, it's not. No, it's not. You're a public corporation. It is, that is not the point. Yeah. And you have never acted like it's the point, and that's not what Facebook is doing right now. And so, it's so frustrating to read these things. Yeah. Clickbait and other junk may drive engagement in the near term, but it would be foolish for us to show this intentionally because it's not what people want.

But you still do it anyway. You don't do anything that people want. Where's my straight up news feed? Non-algorithmic. That's what people want. That's what everybody wants. Everybody wants the timeline. Yep. Yep. I do. And I got to say, the new Twitter app, which is still a steaming pile of garbage for iOS, you still, you can turn on the, see it in chronological order now.

Now, if you don't pay attention, it will switch back to the other one. Yeah. It switches back all the time, which is beyond annoying. As soon as you blink, you know, every time you open it, you just got to check it and see what they're doing because they will, they will try and flip it back on you no matter what, because the algorithm is what they're trying to push.

And same with Facebook. So, yeah. God, if I had balls, I would quit Facebook. I'm pretty proud of you for this. But related, Cashmere Hill, we talked about her and how she's going through and blocking the tech giants. And we talked about Amazon in the last episode that we did.

Her Facebook one has come out. And I cut Facebook out of my life. Surprisingly, I missed it. And she went through and I'm going to give her full kudos for this. She didn't just quit Facebook, no Facebook, no Instagram, no WhatsApp, no Facebook Messenger, no Anavo, no Oculus Rift, anything that Facebook owns, she got herself off of.

So this is true for once a journalist saying, OK, it's not just Facebook. It's everything Facebook owns. Good on you. So she quit them all. And for like a week or something like that. And basically, she found out everything that I've said about Facebook. It sucks to be off of it because so many people rely on it now.

It is the main way that so many of us stay in touch with our friends, that we learn about things. People assume if they post it on Facebook, you know about it and you don't make the phone calls or anything anymore. She talks about like not knowing that one of her friends was pregnant because she wasn't on Facebook when she made the announcement.

Her friend made the announcement about it and all that sort of stuff. So it's pretty. God, this between Zuckerberg's stupid op-ed and then reading her struggling with leaving Facebook, it's totally bummed me out. We need another solution. We need something else out there.

There is such a fucking gaping hole in the market for something good to come out that everybody can jump to. Yeah, just nobody's building it. Nobody's building it. And in fact, at the end of this article, not only did she end up going back to Facebook, but she ended up convincing one of the person, one of her editors who was never on Facebook or Instagram read a draft of this particular story that she submitted and he ended up joining Facebook.

Oh, no. Oh, man. Because he was reading everything that people now do on Facebook and the way that it really does connect us, even though we're getting fucked and screwed left, right and center. He's like, I guess I need to be on Facebook. The law of unintended consequences. Yep.

So, yeah. There you go. I have fallen out of touch with a lot of people that I used to talk to on Facebook because that's the only place that they talk. And, you know, I've started to build an email, like just like a part of my contact list and set reminders to just reach out to people and just drop them an email or a text just to say hi because there are definitely people that I've lost touch with because of it.

And, you know, I'm not going back to Facebook. There's nothing that's going to get me back on there, period. It is just a dumpster fire. So I'm just reaching out the old fashioned way. That's all you can do. That's all you can do because, you know, I can't change their behavior, but I can change my behavior.

So that's what I'm going to focus on. All right. Well, in case you're keeping score, first up, she did Amazon and found out that the web is entirely unusable. And if you want to avoid Amazon and secondly, she quit Facebook and ended up convincing somebody who wasn't on it to join. Not looking good so far. Next up, Google.

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And I didn't know where this came from. And I had to fight with American Express several times to get the charges reversed. And I thought somebody stole my credit card. We've got new credit cards and everything just kept happening. But it turns out it was just a stupid add-on from Amazon. But Privacy caught it. And it told me exactly where it came from.

So I could go in and fix it. So I'm never going to get charged again. So right there, Privacy was worth the price of admission, which was free. And I am extraordinarily happy with the service. You have to get this. If you use a password manager, and why don't you?

If you listen to the show, you should be using Privacy.com. You don't use the same password everywhere, and why should you use the same credit card number? I have changed all of my cards over to Privacy, and it gives me just peace of mind at night. Cards are locked to a merchant, so you don't have to worry about changing your card everywhere if one gets hacked.

And sign-up takes less than two minutes. And like I said, it's free. To sign up for free and get a $5 credit, just go to Privacy.com slash GOG. That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up. Privacy.com slash GOG. Get on it now.

And I'm telling you, it works. It worked for me. It can work for you. Security? Ha! We're back this week with Toothless 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, along with Joe Kerrigan, who filled in for Dave last week while he was getting his little toothy fixed, where they take on social engineering. How are you doing, Dave? It's great to be back.

Let me tell you guys. It's really, really super. Siblings. Siblings. No, it's fine. You know, had my tooth pulled last week. First time I'd ever been through that experience. It's weird having somebody in your mouth with a pair of pliers yanking.

It's weird. But all's well that ends well, and it seemed to be healing fine. It made me wonder, boy, what must this have been like in the days before we had Novocaine and painkillers and things like that?

Whiskey. Whiskey. Yeah, that's true. Right. Good point. Lots of whiskey. Lots of whiskey. But yeah, doing dental work, you wouldn't even have anything to bite down on, I guess. Right. Yeah. So, anyway, all's well that ends well. I'm feeling pretty good. Today's the first day I really feel like I'm not noticing the missing tooth.

So, you know, getting old ain't for wimps, let me tell you that. Right. It's a real man to get old. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having Joe on. I listened to the show. It sounded great. It sounded like you guys had a good time. We did. We did. I appreciate it.

No, I appreciate you for hooking us up with Joe. I thought he did a great job. Yeah. So, moving on to the news this week, I saw this in the New York Times, and I wanted to put it in here because this made me happy. The article's titled, In the Rush to Join the Smart Home Crowd, Buyers Should Beware.

And this is a story about how people need to be aware of the security risks that are inherent in buying these IoT devices that are rushed to market. And I'm happy about this because it's in the New York Times, not some weird nerd blog that we usually source from.

Right. Right. Like, real people are reading this. So, this is a good thing, I think, that, you know, it's finally hitting the mainstream, even though we've been yelling at the mountaintops for years. But it's good that people are starting to be aware of all of the crap that is out there that people can buy.

And like, oh, Chinese video cameras and things like that that never get updated or have default passwords. Right. Right. And certainly all the commercials for the IoT refrigerators that we're seeing everywhere now, which God knows why anybody would want or need. But, yeah. And toilets. Don't forget toilets. Toilets. Yeah.

Toilets. That's the IOP, not the IOT. Yeah. And some good stuff in here. Things like, you know, aim for big brands because they're more likely to be around and continue to do updates and follow up on things. You know, that, as we've learned, that super cheap, no-name brand camera on that you get from Amazon that's on a direct boat from China might not be secure out of the box.

Yeah, it comes with a lifetime subscription to Shodan because that's where you actually go to watch your videos along with everybody else. Probably easier than using the app that they provide you with anyway. Yeah. Definitely better than the Amcrest app. My God, is that thing terrible. I have to say, you know, we often joke about how, why would anyone want this?

Why would anyone need this? And last week, it was really, really cold around here in Maryland. We had temperatures in the teens and it was also my wife's birthday. And so I was, yeah, I was going to, it was a big one.

She turned 50 and I was going to get up and make her some breakfast. I was going to bake some cinnamon rolls in the oven and it struck me as I was there in my nice, toasty, warm bed with my flannel sheets. I was thinking, boy, this is the moment when I would love to have an IOT oven.

If I could just reach over to my phone and not have to, you know, put on my slippers and throw on a robe and go downstairs to the cold kitchen and heat up the oven. Okay, I get it. This is, this is, this is the moment when it would be worth it.

Well, you can always get a nest just to heat up the house if you want one of those. Yeah, there are steps you could take that, uh, before that, or, you know, have a maid. Yeah. So you have a maid. Yeah. You have children.

You can just text them and say, go, go heat up the oven. I'm cold. Right. That's what I made you for. Yeah. That's what you're here for. I use that line a lot. That works very well for walking the dog on weekends. I send the, send a couple emojis of walk the dog and then the dog gets walked. So yeah, that's good.

Yeah. It's like, it's like, it's remote control for children. Little robot for the house. It's funny. I'm actually getting a nest next month because there was a, like this secret program in California where you can sign up and they will come clean all your ducts and give you a free nest for your house.

Really? And yeah, we found out about this through some builders that we know because my, my roommate's a real estate broker and they, one of the builders she was dealing with told her about this. So we signed up for it. So they're coming next month. We get free duct cleaning for all of our vents and everything, all of our duct work.

And they're giving us a free nest on the state of California. So I'm like, just swing. Why are they doing this? Is this to, to, to incentivize you to, to put in the technology? Yes. Well, and also just the general cleaning out the ducts and all that energy savings.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. They often, they often drop off just free, uh, LED light bulbs with different tips on how to save energy, which I thought was pretty cool. So like most of the lights in our house, we got for free because they, they just drop them off in these little bags with, you know, pamphlets and things like that.

So we throw the pamphlets away and put them in a landfill. So they, you know, basically destroy the planet, but then we, we plug in our LED lights. But you're offsetting that. Yeah. Exactly. Have you warned them that, uh, they're going to need to bring extra vacuum bags for the, the clogs of dog hair they're going to be in all of the, all of the ducts?

Seriously. You have no idea. I actually have to replace the furnace filter like once every two weeks. It's really, we also, we also have a fireplace. So we're always running the fireplace because now that's what I would like. I would like an internet enabled fireplace. So I don't have to go out and get wood all the time, but I need a little robot that'll come in and put the wood in and then, you know, light it up.

So when I come in, it's just nice and toasty warm again, a child, but I basically have that except, you know, I have an electric fireplace and I got one of those little switches that I could connect to my, uh, my lady in the tube, uh, to put it on. So I can basically just say, uh, Alexa, turn on the fireplace.

And it's quite nice. Nice. I saw they're offering those now where they have, I guess it's some sort of pre-recording that sounds like a wood fireplace. So it, it clicks and pops. Oh, you get the crackles and all that. Yeah, it gives you the crack. Cause to me, that's one of the, the, I don't know, sensual parts of a, of a fire is that the sound and the, you know, all that sort of stuff.

So that's neat. You know where we need that first. We need, we need the car noise put on the Prius. So I hear those fuckers when they come around the corner and don't stop at a stop sign. Same thing with a Tesla too. And the BMWs, any electric car, they need to go vroom, vroom. Cause those things are deadly. Well, we got a little off the rails there.

So let's get back to what we were talking about. Yep. So let's, uh, to go back to those geeky blogs that nobody reads, uh, somebody sent this from VPN ranks.com, um, public internet access, which is Jason and I's a VPN of choice. The weapon of choice has, uh, appointed the ex CEO of Mount Gox, Mark Carpellez as CTO.

Is it time for me to get a new VPN? I don't know what the fuck they were. I don't know what they're thinking with this. He's still facing charges of embezzlement. Uh, Japanese authorities have arrested him and they're still carrying out the investigation just as a company.

Would you hire somebody under investigation for what's going on here? Yeah. Do you have any insights? Uh, I do not. I can, I can relate this to, um, you know, the guy who was just grabbed by the Russians who, um, you know, the Russians nabbed this guy.

They, they handed him a flash drive full of names and they nabbed him for being a spy. Um, he was the, um, God, what was he? He was like the CISO. I apologize if I get this, don't get this precisely right. But he was the CISO at, um, like Borg, Borg Warner, a major parts supplier in the automotive industry.

And, um, but he also had some not perfect things in his past, uh, with run-ins with the law and so forth. And that was something we were wondering with him. How does, how does a guy get to be as high up in the ranks doing security for a company?

If you have a checkered past, I mean, I suppose some people wear it as a badge of honor. You've got the, you know, the Kevin Mitnicks of the world who, uh, who, who have traded off of that and, and, you know, say they're reformed and so on and so forth. But this doesn't seem quite like that. Yeah.

This does not seem like that at all. He's still under investigation and nobody knows where the money is. So it's kind of like, I'm scratching my head on this. I want to, I want to make a phone call. I want to talk to somebody over at London trust media and ask, well, me too, because we not only personally use it, we have been recommending this to all of our listeners as well.

So this is a bit of a head scratcher and a cause for concern for, for us here. I, I need to know what's going on. So yeah, the response online has been, uh, in line with yours, lots of, uh, lots of head scratching and what's going on here. So I don't know. It's all right.

We'll be following up on that. And in the meantime, I guess I should pull out the, uh, the plugs on our social feeds, at least temporarily. Put them on pause. Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, in case you missed it, uh, we had the big massive mortgage and Dota loan data leak the, uh, a couple of weeks ago from the exposed elastic search, a server that was found without a password, which contained all this highly sensitive financial data as one would expect since it's mortgage and loan data.

Uh, it's gotten worse. Uh, the data has been exposed again, but this time it's all the original documents. Um, as the, as this person said in this article, I would assume that after such publicity like these guys had, the first thing you would do is check if your cloud storage is down or at least password protected. You'd think wouldn't you, you'd think, but they didn't.

And once again, it's of course on an Amazon S3 bucket. Right. And, and also third party risk. This is a, this is a supplier, you know, company hired a company, hired a company. And that company who wait for it is a startup, um, had, didn't secure the, uh, the bucket.

And off we go. So yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I heard a, again, another sort of related story to this where folks were using these sorts of data dumps, um, as part of a social engineering thing where they were getting people's direct deposits rerouted.

So they would take the information you can get from these things, which includes signatures, social security numbers, all sorts of personal information. They would basically send a note to HR in a large, if someone worked for a large organization, they'd send a note to HR, including the person's signature, all the information they need.

And they'd say, Hey, I got a new bank account. Um, can you please transfer my direct deposits to this new account? And HR would look at it and say, well, this all checks out. This is all the information. And then the next time it was pay period, um, that money goes to the bad guys instead of to the person and usually takes them a couple of days to, to figure out.

And by that time they're long gone. Look, I mean, I could easily fall prey to kind of social manipulation with my mortgages. I, a different company buys my mortgage out every month. It's always a different company. And if I got a letter just telling me, I would probably just be like, okay, well, there you go.

Oh, it's another company now and send my money off to somebody else, not on purpose. And it could happen so easily if all this information is out there. It's unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, this next story, uh, comes from, uh, the, uh, foreign affairs committee from the house of representatives in our fine us government, which as we record, this is still shut down.

Wow. Yeah. I'm actually half surprised I could get to this webpage, but, um, uh, bipartisan cyber diplomacy act of 2019. Um, take phone away from president.

Right. Step one. Uh, this is, uh, yeah, uh, this is the, uh, build a wall around the phone head of the house foreign affairs committee. This is a Republican, uh, Mike McCall. He is from Texas, uh, along with the chairman, Elliot Engel, a Democrat from New York have introduced this, the cyber diplomacy act of 2019.

Um, and this is basically just recognizing the importance of cybersecurity, um, saying that, uh, there will be a high level ambassador for cyberspace to lead the state department's diplomacy efforts, um, help create international policy, particularly when it comes to folks like Russia and China, outline objectives and, and all that sort of thing.

So it's, um, representative of what continues to be a, uh, a nice bipartisan recognition that, that we need to do something about the cyber. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is one area where it seems as though you don't have anybody saying that it's fake news or that it's a, it's, it's a vast conspiracy from either side.

They, they, they all seem to agree that, but also nothing really seems to be happening. I, I, I just want us all to cast our minds back to two years ago when this horrible administration came in and there was the one glimmer, glimmering, a bit of hope was that they seem to have a plan right about the cyber.

Yep. Nothing's happened. Well, yeah. And I think a lot of that has to do with the hollowing out of the state department, which has absolutely happened. They've lost so much, um, uh, so many people, so many experienced people have left or, and it just trickles down.

So we're in a bad place. I, I, in terms of this diplomacy stuff, thanks to that. And I think it's going to take years for our country to recover, but certainly recognition here from some folks in Congress that this is important. And, and I guess one of the few bipartisan things we can still point to and say, well, maybe there's some hope here or there's something we agree on.

Right. Right. Well, I like the fact that it's an ambassador, not a czar. We, we've, we've stepped away from the term czar for all of these, these appointees because yeah, you know, Russia, but, uh, we just have, we just have the, let's not point out that connection.

Yeah. I mean, we've got a czar in the white house already. We don't need one in the, in the state department now, I guess. But yeah, but this is a good thing. Yeah. So this last one I have this week, um, this is from the folks at, uh, reveal news, uh, it's the center for investigative reporting.

And, um, this is, uh, the title of the article is Facebook knowingly duped game playing kids and their parents out of money. Shocking. No, no, surely not. Mark Zuckerberg just wrote a huge opinion piece in the wall street journal about how wonderful a company that they are and never do anything bad.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This is another one of those articles where the, the farther through it, I reach the angrier I get, the more disgusted I get. Because when you think it couldn't possibly get worse, it gets worse. Um, basically what the crux of this is, is that, uh, you know, kids go on Facebook to play games and they ask their parents, is it okay if I spend 20 bucks on playing Angry Birds?

Yep. And their parents say, sure, here's my credit card, give them the credit card. Uh, and then the parents are unaware that Facebook stores the credit card and Facebook doesn't require any additional authorization to purchase more on the credit card. So, you've got kids racking up hundreds of dollars, in some cases thousands of dollars, playing these games.

Mm-hmm. Uh, then, to make, here's step one of it being worse, when, at, when people request refunds, Facebook denies the refunds. Shocking. Then, to make it even worse, um, Facebook realizes they have a problem, they spin up some internal solutions within the company, um, by the way, they refer to these incidents as friendly fraud.

That's what Facebook refers, refers to it as internally. Friendly fraud. Yeah. Seriously. Yep. When the kids are spending the parents' money without the parents' permission, the, uh, internal term at Facebook is friendly fraud. Well, isn't that just a nice PR move?

I love that. I mean, somebody marketing really came up with that. My blood pressure's going up. And, uh, so, they had folks within Facebook who recognized that this was a problem and came up with solutions for it, requiring, doing things like requiring kids to enter, or anyone to enter the, the first few digits of the credit card just to verify, um, that they would do this.

And, uh, sure enough, the higher ups at Facebook said, nope, nope, that'll, that'll hurt our revenue. More important to have revenue than, oh, I don't know, do the right thing or have ethics or any of that stuff. Um, a couple interesting little tidbits from this.

Uh, Facebook was getting a chargeback rate of 9% on these, uh, credit card charges from kids. Uh, the article points out that the average chargeback rate for a business is 0.5%.

Yeah, they should have had their, their merchant account suspended for that. Yeah. That's ridiculous. Well, they go on. They say, uh, they say a chargeback rate of 1% is considered high and, uh, the federal trade commission considers 2% to be a red flag of a deceptive business.

So we just went right through that level, right up to 9%. Um, the 9th level of Facebook, that's where we've gotten to. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. This is, oh God, how are we all still on Facebook? And they just continued doing it, um, again, thousands of dollars.

Uh, there was a class action suit about this. Oh, by the way, also, guess what the, uh, internal Facebook documents revealed how they referred to these kids who are racking up these charges. Cash cows? Whales. Whales. Oh, yeah. Whales.

These kids are whales, like the, the gambling, the term for big wigs or, uh, the high rollers. Yeah. Whales. So imagine that your 13 year old kid is a whale in Facebook's eyes. I love this. For years, the company ignored warnings from its own employees that it was bamboozling children.

I love any article that uses the word bamboozle. I really do. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I need Facebook to be gone before my kid is old enough. I just really need it to be gone. Well, you know, I mean, what's funny thing is I have a 12 year old and he has zero interest in Facebook.

Oh, that's good. Well, that's, I think is, there's some hope there. Do they don't seem to be successful? What horrific things does he like to use? Oh, everything else. Yeah. He's snapping the chats and he's, you know, tubing the use and all that stuff. So, yeah. But just another brick in that wall of Facebook showing their true colors.

And when given the opportunity to do so, even from within, choosing the, the evil path. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. You still going to stay on there, Brian? God, it's getting.

Come on, man. Come on. It's getting harder and harder, but again, go back and read. We just, I just talked about this, this, there's, I don't know if you knew this, Dave, but there's a journalist named Kashmir Hill over at Gizmodo that is chronicling quitting the big five, Amazon and Facebook.

And next up is Google and they're fascinating reads. And she wrote about leaving Facebook and how it really made her life a lot more difficult, made her relationships with friends, coworkers, family, a lot more difficult. And at the end of it, she ended up, uh, her editor wasn't on Facebook or Instagram and her editor read the draft of the, what she submitted and ended up joining Facebook.

It's that difficult. Right. Well, I'll send you the link for that. Yeah. I'll look forward to reading that. Um, well, and, and so much of our social circles now run through it. Yes. Events, parties, in invitations to things, just, um, even just news runs through it.

And so they've, they've got us. They do. Yeah. It's interesting to see if, uh, try to imagine what it would be like if they get broken up or somehow meaningfully regulated. Uh, hard to imagine. It seems like they're, they're just rotting from within and built on a rotten foundation in my opinion.

With all the op-eds he can write all he wants about how wonderful that they are and how they're trying to address the issues. The track record is they're not addressing the issues. And like you said, they're given two choices almost every single time. And they always make the wrong choice. Yep. It's not getting better. Yeah. You chose poorly.

Yep. Well, unless you're a shareholder, right? Well, even not there, it hasn't been going so great. So, I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Good point. All right, gentlemen. Well, as always, uh, we end on that chipper note and, uh, always a good time.

Send everybody off. Makes dental surgery seem like a lot more fun, doesn't it? Yeah, that's true. Maybe I'll go get another tooth pulled. I need a little lift for today. So, uh, just grab a pair of pliers here and do it myself. What could possibly go wrong? All right, gents. I will talk to you next time. As always, thanks for having me.

Cups and doodads. There is a great article in The Atlantic this week. Actually, it's not this week. It's a couple of weeks old, but I just ran across it this week. It's called Don't Reply to Your Emails. Okay. And we, you know, we. That's not going to work well for you who's building an email list to stay in touch with people because you won't be on Facebook.

That's true. That's true. But going back to unintended consequences, everybody's been on the Inbox Zero train since 2007 because Merlin Mann coined the term, did a great Google talk about it on how to keep your inbox at zero and just clear everything out. You know what the problem is, though?

It's just a treadmill. You cannot do it. You cannot do it. So this article is just like, screw it. I never bought into that idea personally. I never bought into Inbox Zero. I don't care about having Inbox Zero. I leave emails front and center until I'm done with the conversation or done with the task.

There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not bothered by having 50 emails sitting there in my email box. I never understood Inbox Zero. Fuck you when you were Inbox Zero, people. Fuck you, Merlin. No. I mean, I love Merlin. He's a great guy. But yeah, this whole thing is just put you on a treadmill that you can never win because every day there's more email.

And you have to get down to zero. You have to get down to zero. But I have 15 emails in my main inbox right now. And some of them have been there for three months. 15. Let's see what I'm at. Well, I'm only down to 122 now. I had 500 last week. So I get about 100 emails a day.

So I have to go. See, I get far less than that. So yeah. Yeah. No, I. But I'm not hell bent on clearing them out. I don't feel the need. It doesn't cause me any stress. I can it's almost like it's like my to do list. I can see everything that I'm currently working on right now. Yeah, I can't do that.

That's just one of those things where it's the biggest thing now is just like I cannot check my email in the morning because you know what happens. It's other people giving you shit to do. And it drives me crazy. The morning dump. Yeah, never. There are three times I refuse to check my email. I won't check my email in the morning.

I wait until like I've had coffee and all that sort of stuff. I refuse to check my email around 6 p.m. when everybody's getting off work because then they send you the I'm leaving work dump and don't check your email on weekends. Yeah, you know what I really miss. I really miss Jordan Cooper's the morning dump podcast.

I really wish he would go back to that and get rid of the sports ball crap. I really enjoyed that. I mean, the last one was in 2016 and it feels like yesterday, but he's so sports ball. I don't even understand half of his tweets anymore. It's all acronyms and I'm kind of into sports and I have no clue what he's talking about.

About half the time. Yeah, no, I just miss that guy tangent tangent random tangent. But yeah, this is a good article about just saying screw it, man. Just screw it. Don't even worry about it anymore. And hey, I've been there forever. I've been there since there was email. It's it's a better place to be.

Don't try to get inbox zero. Knock it off. People relax. Yeah, let it go. Let it go. Some people just don't deserve to be replied to. You can delete. And I found this one over at Mac rumors and I was just gobsmacked by this monitor. This is I want this so bad.

It is hands on with Dell's massive 49 inch 5k ultra wide display. It's a beautiful. It is a 32 to nine aspect ratio. It is ridiculous. 5120 by 1440. And it's curved and it's beautiful and you can hook up two computers to it.

It's amazing. I love that. I love the shot of one running Windows and one running a Mac. I know it's beautiful. And if I wasn't using a standing desk where I had my laptop and on on the top, that's the problem. I have a big monitor and then I have the side thing with the laptop screen. So I've got the laptop.

I don't have the room for it on my standing desk, but I want this. So I know this is this is the case to like get a bigger house, you know, and a bit and a better job at a bigger podcast because it ain't cheap. No, it's twelve hundred and fifty bucks.

But and you know what? It was even cooler when they had it in portrait mode. Oh, yeah. I wanted to hang that thing on the wall and just just have art like cycle through it all day long. I want this monitor. I you know, I'm not really much of a monitor snob, but man, this thing really got me going.

I really, really liked it. So this is the U four nine one nine D.W. It's a clever name. Glad they're glad they're really knocking it out over there at Dell. I've used Dell monitors almost all my life, and they always have these really horrible names. They've never given anything a decent name.

Yeah, I mean, I'm on a twenty seven inch iMac right now, and unfortunately, I have no more room on my desk because I've got studio monitors because I have to listen to podcasts all goddamn day. But yeah, there's this would not fit on my desk. I would have to get another standing desk just for the monitor.

It is beautiful, though. It is a beautiful thing. What's not beautiful, though? Deep Mind, the people behind, you know, the AlphaGo AI that beat the Go player and all this other stuff, they've decided to go into the world of StarCraft 2.

OK. Stay out of StarCraft. Leave StarCraft alone. Well, they put their new AlphaStar AI up against two of the top players in the world, and they got spanked. Right. They played ten matches or five matches each and AlphaStar swept all ten.

And it just makes me sad. Stay away from StarCraft. I love StarCraft so much. Apparently. Yeah. It's a fun game, man. I've been playing it since StarCraft 1 on floppies back in the day. But no, now AI has come.

They've only gotten to two. Yeah. Seriously. If StarCraft 1 came out on a floppy disk, they're only on two? Well, what happened was World of Warcraft came out, and they really kind of put all their eggs in that basket. There is the one that I'm going to do is they're releasing the original StarCraft, but they've revamped all the graphics to make it all HD, so you can play the original StarCraft on

like a retina monitor now, and it has better graphics, because it was all 2D graphics back then, and now it's going to be nicer. But StarCraft 2 is fun. It's all 3D now. But yeah, they just never really ramped it.

And I was always waiting for World of StarCraft. Where is World of StarCraft? But nope, they stuck with this damn Warcraft. Only made him a couple billion dollars, I guess, so who am I to say? Right. Brick-a-brick. My Facebook feed exploded yesterday with Jeff Bridges' video.

It's a teaser of The Dude. The Dude. The Big Lebowski is by far one of my favorite movies of all time. I've even been to a Big Lebowski Fest before. Oh my god, you nerd. Well, I was just at a bowling alley. You bowl and drink white Russians. What's wrong with that? I'd do that without the movie.

Were you dressed up as the Nihilists? Oh no, that would have been great though. It would have been awesome. No, it's a great movie. So everybody was super excited about this because it looks like we might be getting a sequel. But unfortunately, as we've discovered, the date that he mentions is the date of the big game.

We can't say what because we have to pay them for that if we say that. So it looks like, unfortunately, it's just going to be another very expensive commercial. Okay. So it's the day of the puppy bowl. Yes, the day of the puppy bowl. Yes. That's right. Because that's what I watch on that day.

I watch the puppy bowl because the puppy bowl is awesome. Yeah. So unfortunately, it does not look like we will be getting his dudeness in another movie. But hopefully, we will be wrong. We shall see. We shall see. So this next one came in from a friend of the show, Bob Fogarty, through his friend, Jenny Dreadful.

And it is a page of vintage Yugoslavian computer magazine cover girls of the 90s and 80s. And it is glorious. This was, I don't even know what the hell's going on over there. But did you go through all of them? Good hair. There's some good hair in there.

Oh, my God. Very excited women with their large computers. Yes, with their large computers. Both of them. Yeah. It's a very strange Yugoslavian computer magazine, I must say. No, it is weird. I mean, some of them are like S&M, like there's a woman tied up and blindfolded.

It's pretty crazy. It is. A woman on a motorcycle holding a laptop, apparently. This is pretty awesome. Yeah. No, they're really fun. I highly recommend you go check them out because it'll take you down memory lane if you're old like us. Now, this is a random one.

Sweethearts will not be available this Valentine's Day. The little hearts with the sayings on them. Right. They're gone. They're absolutely gone. Hold your horses, fake news. Okay. They're not gone. Oh, what?

As I found an article, follow up, relax, your shitty Valentine's Day candy hearts are still around. Really? Now, they've shut down production. Yes. Production will not resume until next year, but they have a backlog of these things and they have a long shelf life. They spend 11 months out of the year manufacturing these things and a cursory Amazon search by the author found a three pound bag available for just over 20 bucks.

Okay. There's plenty of these fucking things around. Okay. Okay. Well, they are basically Necco wafers, which, you know, those are the only things besides cockroaches that are going to outlast the nuclear apocalypse. But, and Mark Zuckerberg, but yeah, I, I hate these things.

They're just disgusting, but they are disgusting. But I, what I thought was great is every news organization in the world has picked up on this and has led with, you're not going to be able to buy it. And of course, they're all available anywhere. Journalism at its finest. Oh man. Maybe that's why everybody's going out of business. Yep.

Could be. Yep. And in really fun news, this would, I would have put this in media candy, but we don't have one this week. David Tennant is launching a podcast. Go figure. Cause everybody's podcast, but I love David Tennant. He is, he is hands down.

I mean, he's actually beaten Tom Baker now is my favorite doctor. And I just love all his movies. He's amazing in Fright Night. And it's just anything that he's in, he just rules. So he's doing a new podcast and it's called David Tennant does a podcast with dot, dot, dot.

So it's an interview podcast. So the main people that he has coming up are Whoopi Goldberg, Sir Ian McKellen, John Hamm, the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, Michael Sheen, Kristen Ritter, and Samantha B. So, and the new doctor. So Jody Whitaker is going to be on as well. So I'm looking forward to this because I love David Tennant.

He's a smart dude and he's got the best accent in the world. So I'm looking forward to this. My closing shout out this week is to the man, Cesar Milan and the entire staff at the Dog Psychology Center up in Santa Clarita.

We went up there yesterday and we had a blast doing an interview for the Jordan Harbinger show. Everybody up there was so amazingly nice and cool. We had a great time. We, you know, did the interview, took a lot of photos, walked around and it was just really cool.

This, that was one of my bucket list items to like eventually go up there and see the place. Unfortunately, it was a little too windy for me to bust out the drone because we had crazy winds yesterday. But I'll be going back with the pups next time and getting some drone footage of the place that we'll be sharing out.

So if you want to follow Jordan Harbinger on Instagram, we'll be putting stuff up there. But man, what a cool place. I mean, I saw llamas, alpacas, a macaw, sat on my shoulder. It was really fun stuff. Is he trying to diversify? He's basically trying to make the Disneyland for dogs up there.

It's pretty cool. Okay. Yeah. I want to be the llama whisperer. There you go. 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 315. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

All you need is music, sweet music. There'll be music everywhere. There'll be singing, swinging, records playing. And singing in the streets. Oh.

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