318: Sweet Dreams

This episode is sponsored by Privacy.com. It's like a burner phone for your credit cards. To sign up for free and get a $5 credit, go to Privacy.com slash GOG. That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up. Privacy.com slash GOG. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. We got a little follow-up on the net neutrality, kerfuffle, fisticuffs goodness that's going on. Yeah, I feel like we've been talking about this for the entire life of the show. It's because we have been.

Yeah, I had a really weird dream last night that I got in a fistfight with Ajit Pai at Davos, of all places. That is an odd dream. And he hit me in the head with his ridiculous mug. Right. I called him a c**t. But what are you going to do?

I think we just broke a record for the C-word being dropped in the earliest the show ever. I'll see if I can put it in the pre-roll next time. Yeah, so the EFF has a breakdown of the court battle so far. And it sounds like they're killing it, but you never know.

You never know. Well, look, as we discussed last week, none of the trickle-down benefits that we were told we were going to get, investment in infrastructure and all that. None of that's happening. So, yeah. Yeah, we didn't even get our flying cars either. No.

Oh, what are you going to do? I want my flying cars. So, I found another article on Vox called, Why Are Millennials Burned Out? Capitalism. And again, not just millennials. Sorry, fuckstick. And this guy wrote a book about it.

We're all burnt out. I did six 12-hour days last week and haven't had a day off, and I can't remember when. And even, Brian, when you and I were out in the woods at a fucking digital detox retreat, I still worked every day. Well, to be fair, we were there as part of work. Right.

Yes, I get it. Yeah, we did our show the second day, but there was not a time when I stopped working at a digital detox retreat of all places. And I want these guys to stop shoving the American dream down our throats. I mean, dreams are just dreams until you put in the hard work to make them reality.

And according to, you know, our founding fathers, we are only, only entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness. Nothing is guaranteed in life. So, just shut the fuck up already and get back to work and stop writing these articles. I'm tired of them.

Well, that's good work. They are actually work. Okay. Point taken. Point taken. All right. Sorry about that. That's okay. I did like your rap, though. I agree with most of it. Okay. Thank you very much. And there's a link to the American dream on Wikipedia if you want to go do some historical deep dives.

And one thing that I've found that is just really, if you have Google Alerts set up, go make a Google Alert just for scooters. Just the word scooters. And it is worth hours of entertainment. I'm angry enough, Jason. No, this is amusing.

It's amusing. So many people are ending up in the hospital now, and every local news outlet is covering them. And there's three types of articles right now. There is, dumbass gets hit by car, now has Dane Bramage. Right. Then there is, city decides to expand scooter program, or city kicks out all scooters.

That's it. Those are the three types of scooter news that you can have. So I cherry pick the ones that we use on the show. There's a laundry list every day. There's at least 15 to 20 scooter articles out there. So I still like to say that we were on the cutting edge of the scoot news by far.

We scooted way ahead of the competition. We've been talking about these things since they first got dumped in my beautiful little city here. Yeah. No, the day that they got dumped, we had an episode about them because you walk out your door and like, what the hell are these things? Well, speaking of Google, this is a bit of follow-up because last episode we talked about how Facebook has had a no good, very bad year or three in a row.

But none of that seemed to matter because their stock price went up and investment went up and engagement went up and users went up. Google pretty much the same thing. Revenue went up. Yeah. So Google has pretty much had the exact same thing. Google had a very tough 2018 as well, as this article in the gadget points out.

Not Facebook-level bad, but they did spend a lot of time on the defense about consumer data that has access to, some data breaches, some YouTube conspiracy theories, and that's what some of it. Google+. But none of that, again, seems to matter. The company is raking in more and more cash.

They just released their earnings statements for 2018 quarter four, and both revenue and profit have continued to grow. The holding company Alphabet pulled in revenues of over $39 billion, up 22% year over year. Net income of $8.9 billion represented a big turnaround from a year ago.

This is insane. Like, again, in our security segment with Bittner, we always talk about the lack of repercussions for any of these big security mishaps and data breaches and what happens with these companies or the people that were supposed to be in charge of that. Nothing. Nothing ever happens.

And nothing is happening with these big five tech companies either. It doesn't matter what they do. They keep making money. Well, the thing is, here's the repercussion. Profit. That's the repercussion. They make more money. Yeah. So failing upwards on a grand scale.

Yeah, seriously. That is a way to fail up. Definitely. I do have to say, though, that I hear the new Pixel 3 that Google put out. The camera is supposed to be insane, like way better than the iPhone camera, which is which is saying something. Right.

The problem is, at the end of the day, you're stuck with a Pixel 3. Still Android. Yep. Yeah. Packed as a service. That's what we call androids. In the news. I've been a bit worried about our upcoming robot overlords and AI and all that sort of stuff and what it's going to mean for our economy and way of life and et cetera.

But, you know, all the news stories basically not ready for prime time. There is no AI. We know all of this sort of stuff. It's all mechanical Turks and smoke and mirrors and whatnot. So some hope that, you know, I'll live out my life and perhaps my son as well.

But unfortunately, there seems to be a big step forward, as it were, that has occurred now. We, as humans, are unique in being able to imagine ourselves, picture ourselves in future scenarios, past, revisiting past experiences, reflecting on what went right or wrong.

Robots have not been able to do that yet until now. So thank you, Columbia Engineering researchers, who have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is from scratch with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Initially, the robot does not know if it's a spider, a snake, an arm, or a world-killing overlord.

It has no clue what shape it is. After a brief period of babbling and within about a day of intensive computing, the robot creates a self-simulation. The robot then can use the self-simulator internally to contemplate and adapt to different situations, handling new tasks as well as detecting and repairing damage in its own body.

What the hell were they thinking? The work was published this week in Science Robotics, which is a magazine I think I'm going to have to start checking out just so I know when my checkout date is. Yeah, seriously. Wow. That's, I mean, from a tech standpoint, that's kind of cool.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, I mean, do they dream of electric sheep is all I want to know. Yeah. Wow. Times. Oh, man. So on the dystopian future that we all think is coming, we do have a new episode of the Jordan Harbinger show that came out this week with Jaron Lanier, our favorite futurist and smart dude.

Our favorite dystopian futurist. Here's the thing, though. You haven't listened to the episode yet, I take it. No, I did not get a chance to. He's a total tech optimist. Right. He thinks that we're able to figure this stuff out. And he I think if I was in the room, he would probably bitch slap me for all of our naysaying about AI and the future that's coming because he thinks it's disingenuous for everybody to be saying the sky is falling because he sees a future that actually might be better for everyone.

And he explains it in very good detail. So I recommend everybody, if you if you like all of our bantering about Jaron Lanier, definitely check out the episode. There'll be a link in the show notes to it. Jordan did a great job with him, and he he really kind of like got Jaron to talk about some stuff that I was really impressed with.

So, OK, and it kind of like made me think, OK, if that guy who is smarter than anybody I've ever met is still an optimist, maybe there's hope. Maybe there's hope. OK. Until the robots figure it out. Yeah.

Yeah. Until the until the robots figure out the hope algorithm and then we're all screwed. Exactly. A bunch of our listeners sent us this story. Snopes is has ended its fact checking partnership with Facebook, which led me to the question. Snopes had a fact checking partnership with Facebook. Yeah. Yeah, they did.

They were never saw it on Facebook. Yeah, I didn't either. Didn't seem to help, but it's over now anyways. Yeah. A couple other companies have quit, too, because it's a burden on them. They're like, we're doing all this work for Facebook and they're only giving us like a hundred grand. It's like that's like, you know, it's a median of fifty thousand dollars a year for an employee.

Well, that's two employees for fact checking or all of Facebook. No change from Zuckerberg's hoodie. Yeah, seriously. I mean, that's that that is couch lint for him. So, yeah, I'm not surprised about this at all. And, you know, I mean, Snopes has been doing doing the Lord's work for a very long time.

And I'm glad that they're pushing back against Facebook because I do think it was an exploitative relationship. Definitely. So we finally figured out who made the egg that broke Instagram. And guess what? They're marketers. Of course. Goddamn marketers. So Chris Godfrey is the guy who originally came up with it and he had two friends that did it with him.

But the thing now is that's coming out. They're going to. Why do they need two friends to open up an Instagram account and post a picture of an egg? How many people does it take to turn a light bulb? I mean, well, you still you need you need people to push it and get the word out. You know, multiple accounts.

All right. It helps. OK, you can't do it by yourself. So the thing is, he's only twenty nine, which I thought was pretty amazing. The digital native. Yeah, definitely. He's an advertising in London at the end partnership, which I thought was an interesting name.

But the crazy part is they worked on a Super Bowl commercial. And what they're doing is they're using the egg for good, which I think is pretty interesting. So the ad is for this, like basically for mental health. Right.

And how how going viral has affected the eggs, mental health, which I think is genius. I have not seen social media. Yeah, exactly. Which we're going to talk about in a little bit here. I haven't seen the ad yet. I'm trying to find it, but I haven't been able to because honestly, I haven't really looked because I didn't want to sort through all the Super Bowl commercials, which I heard were just awful this year.

But it's interesting because they're using it for a nonprofit for mental health America. OK, which is good. It's good. I like what they're doing. They're not trying to profit off it, really. I mean, I'm sure they made some money off of it, but they're they're using the egg for good. All right. Until we find out that eggs are bad for us again, this next week, yeah, next week on cholesterol today.

Exactly. Ah, man. So the EU is a little pissed at Facebook. Join the club. Yeah, seriously. I'm like, OK, yeah, yeah, pretty much. But at least they've got the Internet police of of Europe over there, which we're we're thinking about, you know, maybe starting here someday.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe not. So Europe has kind of got their panties in a bunch over this unification of the back end of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Right. And they're like, excuse me, we would like an urgent briefing on your plans regarding integration of the underlying infrastructure of those messaging platforms, because they've I mean, Facebook has been fined already for actually the WhatsApp thing.

They got fined for one hundred and twenty two million dollars because they were saying that, oh, no, we're we're going to buy WhatsApp. Let us buy it. It'll be fine. We're never going to integrate the two. And as soon as the deal was done, it's just like, OK, let's integrate. Let's integrate them. Yep.

And so now people are worried about the integration of the messaging platforms, which they damn well should be. So they're going to the EU is looking into this, which I really think that they should be. I think, well, I think we should be because, you know, antitrust and corporate antitrust.

What's that? Yeah. You know what it is? Yeah. It's a toothless 90 year old woman gives great head, but you definitely don't want her to, you know, send you to court. Oh, that's a hell of a metaphor. It is. It is. You know, I'm just I'm just coming up with these boom, boom, boom.

That's how I roll. OK, there's another article on The New York Times called This Is Your Brain Off Facebook. And there are some studies out now talking about what happens when you quit. Right. And it's interesting. It's very interesting. People. I mean, this is a controlled study.

Very well done. Everybody that looked at the study said, hey, this is actually how you do science. This is great. Well, a couple ups and downs. Well, the most striking result from the study may be that deactivating Facebook had a positive but small effect on people's moods and life satisfaction.

The finding tempers the widely held presumption that habitual social media use causes real psychological distress. And the problem is, though, it keeps going on. If heavy Facebook use caused mood problems, the researchers would have expected to see the moods of heavy users improve by a greater amount relative to lightweight users.

But that didn't happen, which suggested that heavy users were moody before they sucked. They were sucked deeply into Facebook, which means, OK, your personality type depends on how much you use Facebook. It's like, OK, if you're a grumpy ass, then you're going to spend more time on Facebook because you just do it anyway.

Well, I mean, social media is custom built for screaming into the void. So that would make sense to me. Mm hmm. Yeah. But the interesting thing was that people didn't actually switch to other social media platforms or start reading more news. They took time off and spent it with friends, family, watching TV, doing the things that we used to do before Facebook was invented.

They didn't try and replace it, which was the interesting, you know, correlation of the study here. And I like that. I'm like, OK, you know, I'm down with that. I'm down with the sickness. And I, you know, ever since I got off Facebook, it's been great. I don't think about it.

The only time I think about it is when I click on a link that somebody sent me and it goes to Facebook and says, you can't see this. And then, right. Would you like to log back in and reactivate your account? I'm like, fuck you. And then I close the window. That's all that it does. I love it. I have not missed it one bit.

And we'll be talking. Well, we'll be talking about some other things soon, too, specifically regarding Instagram. And you're haranguing me of my Instagram usage. I just think it's amusing. It is amusing. It is amusing. And I am making headway into unamusing you.

I'm sorry about that. But I will. And in other news, Slack, sadly, is trying to go public. Of course they are. It was a nice run while it lasted. You know? Are we going to have to find a new application to use for our communication, Jason?

We're going back to email. I think we're going to have to spin up our own AIM server. Maybe we can go back to ICQ. Oh, God. I miss that. I miss AIM. I miss it so much. You have no idea. ICQ is still around, though. We can go back to ICQ. That's true. I can go back to IRC.

Yeah. I can open up an IRC channel and people can just chat with us all day on IRC. Fine with me. I'm down with, like, retro tech. Right. Okay. Well, I found a story, and I didn't even entirely know what to make of this. I mean, talk about irony of the year award.

Russia wants to outlaw fake news. Yeah, sure they do. Well, not for us. They're okay with that. Yeah. Internally, the state doom of the lower house of the Russian parliament approved the first reading of a bill package that, if passed in its current form, would prohibit Russian citizens and news outlets from publishing unreliable news and from expressing disrespect towards the government.

Okay. What if it's not fake? Yeah, see, there's two things going on there. There's two different things. Publishing unreliable news is one thing. Expressing disrespect towards the government. Completely different. Completely different. Completely different thing. Yes.

So, I think we're seeing a superpower grab from Putin who, you know, he's going to be there forever. Rooting tootin' Putin. That's right. So, good luck. Good times there. Yeah. Dos vidanya. Or dos vidanya. I think that's how you hear it. Oh, whatever. Njet. I don't know. Those are my two.

Yes. Nupa ruski? Njimnoga. That's all I know from Hunt for Red October. So, according to the French summit on fintech in Paris, crypto is over. It's done. Crypto fever has truly broken, says Bloomberg.

And apparently, all the people who were big into crypto have just decided to go back to traditional, basically, finance. Right. And then, you know, the stuff that works. Yeah. Yeah. The regulated stuff that works. Yeah.

And it's a pretty funny article because there's that company up in San Francisco called Ripple, which is a big crypto company. And Ripple is known because they funded all of the actual projects at one time on DonorsChoose.org.

And that was amazing. I've personally given over $10,000 to DonorsChoose because when we were running Metblogs, we had a discretionary fund for, you know, that kind of thing. And I love them. I think they did great stuff. I literally have a stack somewhere in my boxes of it's two feet tall of letters I got from kids thanking me for all of the donations and what they could do with it.

I mean, if you want to give to a charity, I'm going to tell you right now, DonorsChoose.org. You cannot go wrong with that. So tangent reset here. Sorry, I went on a little tangent there. But there was apparently a big fight between one of the guys who started the Swift banking system and the guys at Ripple because the Ripple guys are like, oh, no, blockchain going to save everybody.

And I love this final quote. Banks are not ready for a model where you convert into a crypto and then convert back again. It's not clear to us that blockchain is better than what we have today. Boom. Drops the mic, walks out, go get a scone or baguette or whatever. A baguette, I believe.

Yes. So it's a pretty interesting article. I highly recommend checking it out. But that gets us to the next one, which is awesome. Quadriga CX. I don't know if that's how you're supposed to say it.

It's just a dumb name. Right. This is the Canadian crypto exchange. They were like one of the biggest exchanges up in Canada. And they've been going through a lot of problems, a lot of problems. But now they have on a cryptocurrency. He's been going through problems. Well, then exchange.

Yes. Yes. Mount Cox. Anyway, I've been going back and forth with so many people about this story over the past like two days. The founder died. And I put died in air quotes right there because he died in India while he was over there opening an orphanage.

Oh, well, we have no body. We have a death certificate from the Indian authorities, which, you know, is just as good as a piece of Charmin as far as anybody's concerned. And the problem is that there's about one hundred and ninety million dollars in client holdings that were stuck in cold storage that only this guy had the password to his should use one

password and given it to his wife because she's the one on the hook right now. Because, yeah, apparently, you know, she didn't have the password either. So they're working with a with a crypto expert to try and unlock the cold storage vault, but yet to no avail.

Now the plot thickens because there are a lot of researchers out there saying they never had the money to begin with. And people who are doing forensic analysis on the blockchain, because you can see everything that happens on the blockchain. That is one of the upsides of that's the point.

That's the entire fucking point of the blockchain is that everybody can see it. So there are some crypto researchers that say they never had the money that they said they had. And the interesting thing about this, which is a hat tip to Ross Rader for sending me this. Ross Rader is the guy that did Hover dot com and a couple other things.

Unfortunately, there's an article on Medium that I can't get to because the person's account has been suspended, which is interesting, saying that, yeah, no, these guys are frauds. These guys are just absolute total frauds. And that's where it comes down to.

Is this guy dead? Is this guy really dead? Or is he just hanging out, you know, doing his thing in India, waiting for it to blow over? And then he can pull up the cold storage, get the money and then go build his giant island somewhere and retire. Who knows?

Who knows? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I mean, you know, if it weren't for the scooter thing, I think our whole thing for the past two years would have been cryptocurrency. But the scooters came along, but we've made our we've made our position on this so freaking clear.

It's it's a scam. It's all a joke. And I'm not surprised by any of this. And I bet this guy's going to pop up to I'm with you on this one. Yeah, I do not believe for an instant that this guy is dead, period. It's like I'm going to honey, BRB, hold my beer.

I'm going to go open an orphanage in India because I run a crypto company. OK, how does that make sense in any universe whatsoever? Oh, man. Well, let's get back to let's get back to some more of our bread and butter here.

Self-driving cars. Oh, God, that again. Yeah, yeah. New research in Transport Policy magazine suggests that self-driving cars could more than double the volume of vehicle travel to and from and inside metropolitan areas. And it's very interesting.

They're using game theory to figure this out, because if you have a self-driving car and you have to park it while you're waiting for another ride, it could be very pricey in metropolitan areas. What's cheaper is letting the car drive around very slowly, not using a lot of juice and or gas, because I think most of them are going to be electric cars.

And they're saying that, oh, well, in our simulations, everything is basically going to be traveling at about two miles an hour because there's going to be so many self-driving cars just waiting for a ride that you can't. I mean, I do not personally share share in the premise for this, because I think self-driving car companies are going to know to I don't know, maybe buy a parking garage if they can.

Right. They're worth billions of dollars. I'm pretty sure that they can buy a parking garage to park these things in or several parking garages around town. And that would mitigate this entire study and make it sound completely stupid, which I do kind of believe it is.

I mean, it got sent to me and I was reading it through and I'm just like, you know, this does not have the ring of truth. The interesting thing about it, though, is I mean, I know from my dad who works in downtown Chicago, he works at Watertower Place and he's like Uber and Lyft are the bane of every city dweller's existence because you get these morons coming in every day from the suburbs who first don't know how to drive in the city, which is a skill.

Driving in downtown Chicago is a legitimate skill. And they also there's so many of them that come down, they make the traffic worse. Yeah. And they don't follow any of the rules of the road. They just pull over anywhere like you. You're not supposed to do that. Right. Yeah.

No, it's like, you know, the God, the the, you know, hustle economy is just killing everything. And he's just like, we hate them. Everybody down here hates them. My dad's been working downtown in Chicago for 25 years and he drives in from Aurora every day, which is a 50 mile commute.

So he knows he knows the roads and he knows how people drive down there. And he's just like this. It's ridiculous. Since Uber and Lyft came into business, it has gotten, you know, just exponentially worse down there. And it was never good to drive in downtown Chicago. So imagine once the autonomous cars show up, it's going to be a it's going to be a shit show.

That's I mean, that's what you and I have always talked about. It's like all or nothing. We need to have that. It's got to be all or nothing. All or nothing. It's just you can't do both. It's never going to work right. It's well, I think it's going to eventually be all. But I think there's going to be this, you know, 10 year cluster F cluster cluster fuck of growing pains.

Yes, absolutely. So, yeah. Check out these studies. They're interesting. I think they're completely wrong because they taken they don't take into account the fact that these multibillion dollar companies could just buy a parking garage or, you know, they'll do the bird route and you'll be able to sign up and give away your own personal parking spot.

That's true, too. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. This episode is sponsored by Privacy dot com. Privacy is the first payments product that keeps your personal information private while being even more convenient than using a regular credit card online.

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And I even set up a new card for a site that I had to go sign up. And you have to put in your credit card number for their trial. And of course, when the trial is over, you have to get on the phone to call them. Well, I didn't have to call them. I just deleted the card and boom, they couldn't charge me.

And I got my free trial. It was fantastic. You should definitely be using this. If you use a password manager, and why don't you, if you listen to this show, you should be using privacy. You don't use the same password everywhere. So why use the same card number? Cards are locked to a merchant. So you don't have to worry about changing your card everywhere.

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That's $5 free to spend anywhere by just signing up. Privacy.com slash GOG. Get on it now. Privacy.com slash GOG. Media Candy. I am so getting tired of Netflix canceling all the shows that I love.

Travelers has now been canceled. So no fourth season. Once again, laziness wins for me because I was intending to watch it. And now I'm not going to. And I knew you were going to say that. And here's my counterpoint to that. The way they ended season three was a perfect series wrap up.

Oh, really? It was. Yeah. And everybody I talked to on Twitter who also was a fan of the show said the exact same thing. They're like, yeah, I'm OK with that. It's fine. The way they ended season three was a perfect series wrap up because I can't tell you why. But OK.

The way that they did it was flat out perfect. And I'm just like, OK, you know, if this show doesn't come back, I'm going to be OK with it. Because I think I had all my questions answered. All right. And unlike some other shows like the fucking bird challenge, whatever fucking thing it was.

Bird box. Bird box. Yeah. Still a stupid name. But I think that the way travelers ended made it a perfect three series or three season arc. OK. So and I just I really love that show. I really did.

And I was very upset to find out the guy that wrote that series is the guy that wrote Stargate. And somebody somebody posted it's like, OK, great. Now that that show's canceled, maybe he'll get back to doing a Stargate reboot. And I'm like, no, no, do not ever let that man write another Stargate episode because I can't stand Stargate.

Hated that show. And I hated that show. Don't don't you can write me, Brian, at Grumpy Old Geeks dot com. Stargate killed Farscape, which was, I think, the best still the best sci fi series outside of Star Trek ever made because they spent all the money on Stargate to get it.

From Showtime. Right. And which made, you know, Farscape just didn't have any more budget. Sorry, we're bringing Stargate over. You guys go away. And there was there were many campaigns. I own save Farscape dot com because of the guy from Stargate. Hey, man, got me.

I'm friends with Gigi Edgley, who played Chiana on the show because of it. So it's all good. It's all good. So next up, I watched Gotti. The one of the only movies on Rotten Tomatoes with a zero percent tomato score. My roommate and I, we were just sitting around and we're like, what the hell are we going to watch?

And we're flipping through, you know, flipping through Amazon and flipping through Netflix. And we finally saw it that Gotti was available. And we're like, oh, we got to we got to got we got to Gotti, got to Gotti. And the first scene is John Travolta, like playing John Gotti.

And he does this little monologue to the camera. He breaks the fourth wall and talks to the camera. He's like, there's never going to be anybody like me because I'm John Gotti, you know. And then we both just busted up laughing. We're like, this is going to be good because we have my roommate and I have both seen everything that there is to see about Gotti and his son and so many documentaries.

Here's the here's the twist. It was a decent movie. All right. It was actually a decent movie. Knowing everything we know about Gotti and watching how the movie played out. It was really good. If they wouldn't have put that stupid thing at the beginning and they do it again at the end.

He breaks the fourth wall at the end and like they bookend it with it. If they wouldn't have done that, John Travolta was actually a pretty decent Gotti. It was it was it was really good at it. And the kid who played his son, Junior, pretty much looked like him.

He was good. He could have been a little fatter because Gotti Junior was a fat fucker. But otherwise, everything about it wasn't bad. It was not bad at all. What we're what we're hypothesizing here is that, you know, everybody in New York loves John Gotti.

He was like he was basically, you know, a hero to the neighborhoods. And when they hear that a gay Scientologist is going to come play John Gotti, we pretty much pushed back against it. So that's kind of it.

If it wasn't John Travolta, if it was another actor and they did this movie exactly the same way, it's it would have been a good movie. It wasn't bad. The acting was good. The dialogue was good. The story was pretty much spot on. I mean, of course, you can't compress everything. It's like, you know, Bohemian Rhapsody.

Like, you know, there's a lot you have to cut out to do like a biopic this big. But for the most part, I we had a good time watching it. All right. We did crack up at certain parts because, you know, there's some parts that are just so bad that they're good. Like those those bookends.

But all in all, I thought it was a decent movie. I give it I give it a, you know, I B minus. I give it a B minus. The ratings on Amazon do not reflect the Rotten Tomatoes ratings. They're not they're not as horrible. So, yeah. And, you know, that's what I'm thinking.

There's a conspiracy here. I think there's a conspiracy. Yeah. Fake, fake tomatoes. We're going to call it fake tomatoes. OK, moving on. I was very happy about this. Jim Jeffries has signed a first look deal with Comedy Central because we all know that I love Jim Jeffries beyond belief.

And his show is coming back for a third season for a 20 episode third season, which is great. He's over in Asia right now filming some stuff. And here's the funny part. This is the this is the release from Comedy Central. We love Jim's unfiltered, insightful, hilarious and global comedic perspective on the insane world we're living in right now.

And Jim Jeffries, he made a statement. He says, I love my unfiltered, insightful, hilarious and global comedic perspective on the insane world we're living in right now. I'm excited for me to continue to connect with my audience through the Jim Jeffries show and further projects that I developed together.

That's great. He's very good, man. He is a very funny man. And definitely check out his podcast if you haven't. It's pretty good. And Star Trek Discovery. Have you been keeping up to date? I have seen the first two episodes. I got episode three hot off the Swedish press last night, but I haven't watched it yet.

Yeah, I got I got all three. I got to say, episode two directed by Jonathan Frakes. Hell, yes. Come on. Bring the Frakes man back. I thought it was a brilliant. I thought it was a brilliant episode. I loved it. Yeah, it was really well done. They're they're killing it so far. So we'll see how it goes.

Much better. Yeah. First season. Much better. Oh, my God. It's night and day. It's night and day. And even episode three is really good. I got to say, it's really good. So, you know, when when you're watching, because we were joking that you I mean, you haven't gotten into really the Seth MacFarlane show yet.

So because we're saying that that was like next gen and all that. What I it is a breath of fresh air to see Discovery, like kicking it up a notch and being like true Star Trek. Right. Instead of comedy Star Trek that I have to deal with. Right. It they're so different.

But I got to say, this season of Discovery is awesome. It is awesome. So highly, highly recommend it. Definitely enjoying it so far. I haven't watched anything else, really, because I've decided to take time off at night instead of just sitting there just mindlessly thumbing through Netflix.

I've decided to get back to that. My TV time at night is now back to learning stuff. Right. And so I'm going back to some courses that I bought on Udemy. And I'm going to say right now, fuck you, Udemy, because I saw an ad on Instagram.

It said, you know, music theory, the complete course, $10.99. And I went and I looked at it and it's like a massive course on music theory. It's a college level course on music theory. Right. It was $10.99. So I click on it. I go. I'm like, do, do, do, do, do. Sign up.

I logged into my account for Udemy. As soon as I logged into my account, price just became $17.99. I'm like, squeeze me, squeeze me. How does that happen? Because they know that I'm already a customer.

So I didn't get that discount. Yeah. Initial that that stuff used to drive my dad. Absolutely. Ape shit. It drives me ape shit, too. And so I'm looking at it. I'm like, OK, it's seven bucks, but I want this course. So I click on it, add it to cart. And then it says, hey, so you're adding parts one, two, and three to your cart.

Would you like to add part four, five, and six for another $2? Right. So I got this entire course, which I, of course, paid for. But under 20 bucks for a music theory course that looks to be pretty much college level. Right. I'm fine with that. Yep.

And because the reason I'm doing that is I also bought a course on Udemy a long time ago called Music and Audio Production and Logic Pro 10, The Complete Guide. Right. So that's what I'm working my way through right now. So I'm going, I'm alternating between the two.

Right. I'm doing my music theory. Like I'll do half an hour of music theory and then a half an hour of Logic Pro. And I'm learning a lot about Logic Pro that I didn't know, even though I use it every single day for 10 hours a day. I only use the same things. You know, I've got my my shuttle down.

I've got everything like wired in. So I don't dive into the deepness of Logic anymore. And I got to say, these courses are pretty good. The guys that are teaching them are actually pretty spot on. But yeah, no, fuck you, Udemy for charging me another seven bucks. Jerks.

Right. And finally, I saw an article over on Vulture called The Matrix Built Our Reality Denying World. Because The Matrix, believe it or not, is 20 years old. I know. Crazy. Does that not just freak you out? We're old.

Yeah. At the same year that The Matrix came out, we got Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, The Sixth Sense, Office Space, Fight Club, and The Blair Witch Project. Nice. Wow. What did we get this year?

Nothing. Aquaman. Aquaman was last year. That was last year. Right. Who knows what we're even getting this year? Are we getting another 17 Star Wars movies? Who knows? But I recommend reading this article if you were back back there in the day and watch The Matrix when it came out, like I did several times in the theater.

Because I'm like, whoa. Whoa. And it breaks down the movie and everything that the Wachowski, back then, Wachowski brothers did. Now, they're the Wachowski sisters, which if that isn't enough to bend your fucking mind, I don't know what is.

But it's a really good article talking about what The Matrix did and how it affected society and things like that. I really enjoyed the article. It's a long read, but it's well worth it. All right. Very cool. I finished Sex Education. That was awesome. Really probably my favorite show right now.

I can't wait for that to come back. It ended great. It was very well done. Very funny. The only weird thing that always bumped me about the show the whole time is it's obviously set in current day. Cell phones, internet, all that sort of stuff. But it feels so 80s.

They're all listening to 80s music. Everything looks 80s. It's weird. Now, I think it's, you know, stylistically, was it a choice because Stranger Things did so well and that was all 80s set? I don't know. I don't know why, but it's hard to shake that because like no 18 year old right now or they're not even supposed to be 18.

I think the 16 year old kid is listening to The Cure. I'm sorry. They're just not. But no, they're not. Hey, I appreciate it on the show. So good enough. Okay. No, I've got it in my queue. I'm definitely interested in checking it out. Sounds great. It's really great. So I can't wait for season two. And I finished the fifth season of Grace and Frankie, also great.

So I'm looking forward to that coming back. It's very funny show. So very happy about that. When I finished off those, I needed something else. And, you know, Netflix does their very good job of pushing their new shows at you. So boom, Russian Doll came up, which is the new show with Natasha Lyonne. No good.

I hated the first episode. It felt like hipster groundhog day and it felt forced hipster. Now, I did see an article that said that there's a twist in the third episode that makes it all better. And the first even that article said that the first episode was a hot mess that made the writer of the article upset just like I was about it being hipster groundhog day.

So I don't know if I'm going to be able to stomach going through two more episodes to get to what is supposedly the game changer of a show. And I don't think you should have to. But I don't know how I feel about it right now. I'm probably not going to go back to it. I'll rather watch Travelers or something like that and see how this plays out.

But God, I hated the first episode. OK, yeah. I mean, we got we got like 30 seconds in and my river is just like, no, no, that's it. Yeah. So, yeah, if you go back, let me know. Or if anybody's listening that has seen the thing, let us know. Podcast at Grumpy Old Geeks dot com.

But I highly recommend you skip that and go and watch Travelers. I think you're going to really enjoy it. All right. I think I'm going to do that. And lastly, I had a link in here for the most and least awful commercials of this year's Super Bowl. But then I realized I hate people talking about commercials because it's just commercials.

So we're not going to do it other than the commercials were as boring as the game this year. That's what I heard. Yeah, there was no real nothing. Nothing great. No dancing monkeys from E-Trade. Nope. At the library.

I needed a break from my hard sci-fi reading and the various series that I'm kind of halfway through right now. And I found an Instagram ad from Carrie Byron for her book on sale for like a buck ninety nine on Amazon or whatever. So I'm like, OK, a buck ninety nine.

Why not? I was I'm reasonably interested in reading the book. And anyways, that totally worked on me because I was like, sure. OK, so Crash Test Girl, an unlikely experiment in using the scientific method to answer life's toughest questions by Carrie Byron, who, of course, was part of the B team on Mythbusters.

OK, I'm intrigued. I'm intrigued. I'm intrigued. Loved it. This girl's got some depth. She's really there is some craziness about her that I never would have guessed. She had a pretty rough upbringing. She had some definite dark periods in her life.

And I thought the book was incredibly well written. She did a great job. I, you know, a little bit heavy on the go go female empowerment. But that should hardly be surprising because it is go go female empowerment. But other than that, reading it, I really fucking love the book.

I love her even more than I did before, which is. Well, that is a shocker. That is a total shocker. Yeah, it was surprisingly good. I think you would enjoy it as well, Jason. It was really well done. And she goes through basically her whole life and explains how she kind of like, you know, happened into this whole testing things out and how it's really worked for her and changed her life around.

And you learn a lot of the stuff behind the scenes about Mythbusters. Not surprisingly, you know, they barely made any money, all that sort of stuff. Love doing the job. And you hear a little bit about what she's currently doing, which is all great. But it's I really liked her voice. She's she's got a strong one.

And I enjoyed reading the book a lot. All right. Added added it to the list in in Audible. She reads it, which is good. Does she talk about her first appearance on Mythbusters? Yes. Yep. Her butt. Her butt basically. Was more famous than her for a very long time.

Yes. She does talk about that. So it was very funny. Yes. I love that episode. And she does talk about how does most of the male Internet love that episode. Yep. Yep. I'm going to stop. I'm going to stop.

I'll be back in five minutes. Just give me a second. Well, you should read it. You'll like her even more. Not just her butt. Yeah. So I listened to Power Moves Lessons from Davos by Adam Grant, which was an audible original that came out that you could get for free last month. And we just had Adam Grant on on our other show on the Jordan Harbinger show.

And Adam's an awesome dude. He's written some amazing books. And this was an interesting one for me, mainly because he was at Davos and he was interviewing like, you know, all these huge heads of companies like Microsoft and all this stuff. I had Eric Schmidt and Sundar Pichai and all this stuff going on.

But the one thing that threw me for a loop was Stuart Butterfield. Stuart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack. Yeah. I used to know Stuart long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away when Stuart did a little company called Flickr and we all ran in the same crowds.

And, you know, Stuart was really nice to me for a long time until the one day where he wasn't. And then we never spoke again because we fired his friend from our company. And he's just like, I didn't fire him. It wasn't my thing, but he took it up, took it on me. But to hear him in the in this billionaire boys club now is like, OK, yeah.

I know so many people back then who are still working paycheck to paycheck. And every now and again, one of them pops up as a billionaire. And we were talking about the American dream before. Yeah. Well, Stuart's Canadian, so I guess it doesn't really count. But there were so few people that won the tech lottery.

And listening to this kind of made me go back and think about all those people that I knew back then that did not win the lottery. Yeah. You know, all the people that went to Silicon Valley to get their fortune, do all this great stuff and, you know, become millionaires. Almost nobody I know came out with, you know, more than a living wage.

And just it just made me think of that. But it was a really good it was a really good little, you know, it's not a book, but because it's all live interviews. So it's built for Audible. Right. And it was really fun. Listen, so if you have Audible credits for Audible originals, I recommend picking it up because it is a really good piece.

It's like four and a half hours long. And Adam is just amazing. I mean, he's one of the smartest guys out there. And it was a good listen. It was a really good listen. But it just threw me off that Stuart Butterfield was in it so much because I it's just it's weird. It's weird to know, you know, be ex friends with a billionaire.

I don't know, you know, you still it's hard to wrap your head around that. Moron of the week. Gwyneth Paltrow's goop is coming to Netflix. Now, some people might say, oh, you guys have beat up on poor Gwyneth enough and just leave her alone.

Let her leave her and her crystal butt plugs alone. But the moron of the week is not Gwyneth Paltrow. The moron of the week is Netflix for signing up Gwyneth Paltrow to Netflix is canceling series that are great left, right and center.

And then signing a deal with they know this is all the load of shit. I mean, how many articles have to be out there about there being no scientific basis for 99% of the stuff that she talks about? In fact, it's actually anti-science and it's lies. And now they're giving her yet another platform.

I don't care that she does it. I don't care that she has goop dot com. I don't care that she has a goop magazine. I don't care about any of that stuff. But people like Netflix and Hulu and signing off on this stuff and giving them money. Oh, it boggles the mind. Somebody had to do due diligence on this.

You know, it's you know how every however every show like has a wrap up show now like that's the big thing that should have like a Penn and Teller wrap up of every single goop episode that I'd watch. Brian, I hate to break it to you. I think we need to do it.

Yeah, I think we need to be the Penn and Teller of goop. So when this thing actually comes out, we can even have do it as a special episode. So it's not part of the show for people who don't care. But I think we need to have goopity goop. Right. We'll call it goopity goop.

What a load of goop. Load of goop. Yes. Load of goop. That's what we're going to call it. And we are going to do the hard the hard news on right. Because I think I think between the two of us, we have the wherewithal to call bullshit on just about anything in the world right now.

And this one is a softball. I mean, this is a softball. Oh, God. What's Netflix? I'm so disappointed in you. Feedback loop. We got some new Patreon subscribers. Kyle Roderick, our friend and sometimes co-host of the show, is actually giving us money.

Look, see, this is the way to do it, people. We actually have you work for us and you give us money. Come on. That's the way it goes. And Renate, Pranathi, Lucy, Chris, his enormity. The Marquis of Chipping Sudbury and Jacks of Diamonds.

I love the new names. I just love his enormity. The Marquis of Chipping Sudbury, Chipping Sudbury, I guess. I don't know. It's great. And Vinny writes in, Dear Jason and Brian, thank you for all you do to make morning, evening commute so much easier. Lots of grumpy love from an Irish born Chinese renting in the pale.

That area of Ireland, which was historically known to be ritzy and full of rich, evil English landlords. Not much has changed except the English part. Gong hai fat chow and wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2019 year of the pig. Thank you. Thank you very much. I just want to make a quick note that we used to go back and write every single one of you that joined us on Patreon personally, but apparently that option is broken in Patreon right now since nobody can write code for shit anymore and nobody tests anything anymore.

So every single link that I tried to go so I can just send you a quick note, I can't I can't do it, you know, guys don't showing up. So sorry, none of you got a personal thanks from us this time around. Yeah. You can still kind of you can still send us messages and stuff and we can kind of get to those, but they've got some issues.

Yeah, there's some issues going on. They have ish. They got ish. And over at PayPal, Joseph, Ivor and David send us some donations. So thank you very much. Thank you so much. Over at Twitter, right film sleep repeat sends us this got to market how and it's a children's smartwatch recalled over data fears.

The European Commission has ordered the recall of children's smartwatch because it leaves them open to being contacted and located by attackers. Yeah, it's the Enox safe kid. One device is a serious risk. Okay, not what it says on the tin.

Definitely not what it says on the tin. Yeah. Oh, nice, nice. Third and command rights in. Am I the only one who constantly updates his hue bulbs firmware shooting at the kids to leave the damn lights on while I wait for three hours for it to download an update?

Yep. You are the only one. Yeah. EO writes us. Mark Paul Gosler. Is that how you pronounce his name? I never really knew is not a poor man's Chris Pratt. If anything, it's the other way around. Also, the passage trilogy books are amazing. I haven't seen the show yet, but the books are definitely worth reading. Highly recommended.

I might pick up the books after the show's done, but I'm loving the show. And he's definitely a poor man's Chris Pratt because Chris Pratt makes millions. This guy's on network TV. Come on. That's the way it works. Scott writes in Google Chrome will warn you of lookalike URLs.

So this is interesting. So, you know, the old days we used to be able to type, if you wanted Coke.com, you type C-K-O-E, you know, because people would obviously mistype things a lot. So apparently Google is going to build that in, which is pretty good. That's not a bad idea.

Moss6502 says, I thought this was a solid business and sends us a link. Patreon CEO says, the company's generous business model is not sustainable as it sees rapid growth. Uh-oh. Oh, boy. Oh, man. Here we go again. This is why we can't have nice things. Yes.

Sending 90% of the money to the people that it's supposed to go to is apparently not profitable enough for Patreon because they take 5% and save 5% for transaction fees. So hopefully they are not going to change their core business. They seem to be looking into adding more services that they would charge for, like merchandising and things of such nature.

So we'll see. We'll see. Not good. Not good. And, uh, Moz also writes in, what the fuck? Spotify isn't talks to buy Gimlet for more than 200 million. That's a big deal for the podcasting world. This has been going, this has made the, made the rounds here in the business.

And I hate Gimlet. I've always said that I hate Gimlet. It is, it's built on a bunch of people from NPR. This is, uh, who's Neil Gaiman's wife again? What's her name? Um, uh, God, you love her. You don't, you tell Amanda fucking Palmer, Palmer, fucking Palmer.

That's right. Amanda fucking Palmer. You have bitched for years that she basically made her money in crowdsourcing after the label spent millions of dollars on her to build her audience. Yes. That's exactly what Gimlet is. Gimlet comes out of NPR and Alex Bloomberg and taking his money that he got, or actually his audience that he built doing, uh, it wasn't Freakonomics.

He did the, uh, the other one on NPR, the other finance show. Um, right. That you do. I can't even remember because I try and put him out of my head so much. So he took that leveraged it to get money from a bunch of VCs and starting his podcasting company. And he's got a bunch of shows over there.

Like two of them make money. Reply all also known as shit. We already know. And a couple other ones kind of make a few bucks, but they, they cancel shows all the time. Startup. I don't think is a thing anymore, but it's not worth $200 million period at all. Anywhere in any way, shape or form is that company not worth $200 million.

And they just signed a 10 year lease on this Brooklyn warehouse where they built seven podcasting studios. And no, there, there are things that I hate in this world. NPR saying that they make podcasts is one of them because all they do is play reruns of the shows that were publicly funded and then make more money off of them and screw up our entire market.

But Gimlet is my second most hated company on the planet for podcasting. Not, not, not in general, just for podcasting. I have other companies I hate more, but I just want to put this out there. I cannot stand Gimlet. Nobody I know in podcasting can stand Gimlet because they're carpetbaggers.

They're just complete carpetbaggers. They came in, they're going to make a bunch of money. They're going to go out and then probably start over again. Hopefully if Spotify does buy Gimlet, which I hope they don't because it's just dumb idea that they'll kick everybody that's on Gimlet's platform off, take the IP and let none of them ever work in podcasting again.

So if, if I have made my position in unclear in any way, please let me know. I had a little personal note in our show notes right after this link that was sent in that said, uh, leave for 10 minutes while Jason. There you go. Moving on over at GOG dot show.

PJ wrote in, go see the Ned Flanders band. The fans come dressed as Ned Flanders and seeing a Ned Flanders mosh pit was the highlight of last year for me. The lead also does a song or two in sexy Ned Flanders ski suit. All right. Sadly, the show has come and gone, but I will keep an eye out when they come back to town.

It's funny because since I, I am slightly dyslexic, I read mosh pit is mop shit. I'm like, what's a mop shit. Okay. Thank you for clearing that up. Lawrence Lee writes in. Hi, grumpy guys. Just had to comment on Jason's idea about limiting the top age for those holding public office.

Many, if not most of the elders in Congress are tech stupid and out of touch. Sadly, about half are also invertebrates, but I'm going on 72. And though I'm not an IT or a coder, I think I'm pretty tech smart. I mean, how could I listen to your podcast for all these years and be anything other than tech informed?

And though I've likely lost some IQ points since my college days, I'm still in the top 0.1%. So smart tech informed elders do exist and should be encouraged to run for public office. Term limits. Yes. Mandatory exclusion from elected office based on age.

No. And I thought about this for a second. You know, you and I have had age discrimination put upon us. And I'm going to talk about that in a little bit. Okay. And I just did the same thing. So I do feel a little bit guilty about that. And Lawrence has been a friend of the show for a very long time.

We love you, Lawrence. And I think you make a very good point. But can we just have an entrance exam? Can we have the SATs for public office? Do you know what a Twitter is? Do you do you post when you make a blog post? Do you post a post or a blog?

You know, things like that. Just little things like that. Is it a software or is it software? If they answer those questions wrong, then boot them out. But all in all, I do believe that you may be correct that I may have over over spoke on that one. And since I thought about it, I think you should run Lawrence local office.

Go for it. Go for it, man. Definitely. Totally. Next up, Joseph writes. So can we look forward to a no knock raid going after Jason's pup and sends in a link from Bloomberg? Major DNA testing company sharing genetic data with the FBI? Will the rubes never learn or are we too far past caring these days?

Now, I'd like to say for the record, once again, I said this was going to happen. And now it's happening. Rhonda writes in. Hi, Jason and Brian. Love you guys. Plus David Bittner. OK. He got a paren. Plus David Bittner. And the show. I've listened to you guys for a while now, and I heard this topic brought up several times.

But I wanted to ask again for your honest opinions. I'm in the process of transitioning careers, and I thought about attending a coding boot camp. It seems the new buzz now is to learn how to code and become software engineers or programmers. I don't have a background in tech, however. I do want to pursue this field in order to gain better paying job opportunities.

If possible, can you please explain to us tech virgins again if this field is really worth it, especially for novices? And ask Dave if the future in cybersecurity is more promising. What is there for a 40-plus something to do? Love you guys and take care.

We just talked about age discrimination. It 100% exists in the coding world. Do not go become a programmer. You will never get a job. You're too old. And a caveat to that is if you do want to get into cybersecurity, they are always looking for people.

You can get a certificate in cybersecurity and get a job out of the gate. I don't believe there's age discrimination in cybersecurity. But if you want to become a programmer at a startup, yeah, yeah. Because they need people so bad. They need booties in the seats.

That's what they're looking for. And if you can get a certificate in cybersecurity and work your way up in that, I think that that is a promising career. I would never tell anybody to become a coder right now. Yep. Period. Exactly. You'll have to learn some code to get into the cybersecurity realm.

And for that, I recommend Python. So if you want to take an online boot camp in Python just to get your basics down and then find a good school to get ramped up in cybersecurity, that is the most promising field in technology that I see right now.

And it's been that way for, what, four or five years now, don't you think? Totally. Yeah. Do not become a coder. Get into cybersecurity. Yeah. It's also way more interesting. Oh, tell me about it, man. You're going after the bad guys. It's like cops and robbers. Yep. How fun is that? And Cameron writes us, hey, guys, I just wanted to send this to you since I've heard you mention multiple times that there needs to be an alternative to Facebook.

And it is a link for what are the best alternatives to Facebook. He says, it seems like Diaspora is the most similar in terms of functionality, but I'm not sure. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Okay. Diaspora is the one that is actually partially funded by Mark Zuckerberg, funnily enough. I've been around for years.

One of the founders killed himself because he couldn't make it work. And now it kind of works. But here's the best alternative to Facebook. Offline. Honestly, that is the best alternative to Facebook. Facebook offline because their second recommendation in this article is, wait for it, hello.

No. Hello. Hello. I'm a t-shirt company now. Well, and Vero's on here, which, you know, had a buzz for one weekend and then nobody ever went on it again. There is no alternative. That's the problem. And the problem isn't the software or anything of that nature.

It's all out there. It's getting to critical mass. It's moving everybody. It's getting all your friends and families to move over. That's the real problem. So there is no alternative to Facebook right now. There just isn't. Nope. Market opportunity. Michaela writes in, John 12 Hawks isn't Native American.

Rather, like the two of you, he's very privacy oriented and didn't wish for his real name to be that easily searchable. And she gave us the Wikipedia link to him. And the interesting thing about this is I listened to John 12 Hawks actually speak when he did the intro to the book that you recommended last week that I picked up.

And he sounds Native American to me. So I know that he might say that he's not. But, yes, he was walking through the forest and encountered a hawk's nesting area. Twelve hawks circled around my head for about 10 minutes. So close that the tip of their wings brushed the side of my head.

That was why I picked the name real hawks, not symbolic ones. Well, he sounds Native American to me. So if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, there you go. Anyway, I'm started to dig into that book and it's really good so far. Yeah, it's a great book. I really enjoyed it. So I'm glad you're enjoying it as well.

I'm starting up on the second one this week now that I finished the Gary Bryan book. Excellent. We got another email, but I think they put in their name on purpose for you to read, Jason. So please read the person's name. Deliveroo! There you go. On the topic of self-driving cars, do you think they're going to be able to deal with things like this anytime soon?

And it's a link to a video of basically something smashing into a car. Okay. The driver having to deal with it. No, they're not going to be able to deal with anything like that anytime soon. They can't even deal with stop signs that have been spray painted on. Let's be honest. And NoSec writes in, So it seems that scammers have started to blackmail people on YouTube by reporting copyright infringements, and apparently YouTube doesn't give a shit.

I've heard about this. Yeah. Oh, God. YouTube not caring about anything. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So shocking. Link to that will be in the show notes. Yep. And over at iTunes, we got a couple five-star ratings. So thank you, everybody. First up is from CarComp.

Better than FM. I listen to the show because it is at least better than what is on the FM radio. Damned with faint praise. But it was a five-star rating. So thank you. Yeah. We'll take it. We'll take it. And BigDropAZ writes in, CupOfJava. Great podcast that gives the listeners a dose of sweet creamer in the coffee cup of life.

I like that review. Right. And we got another five-star from D. Bataro. My Listen or Die podcast. Nice. Yes. These guys are the bomb diggity. Highly irritable, well-informed, and amazingly informative and entertaining. Makes my commute and work route exceedingly enjoyable.

Sorry, not feeling too snarky at the moment. Well, thank you. We appreciate the rating. I don't think I've ever been anyone's bomb diggity before. I feel special. Taylor94 writes in, a grumpy young geek enjoys grumpy old geeks. I consider myself pretty plugged into the tech world, being a video game nerd who works in IT, but these guys keep me well-informed on the current happenings twice a week, which I find really enjoyable.

The only times I get mildly annoyed with the show is when they rag on millennials, because it gets kind of old, especially when people have literally been doing this about the generation after theirs for millennia. But to complain, rant, rave, and call for a boycott would be about equivalent to saying, meh, but not all men. So I'm only doing one of those things, complaining.

Duh. But it's a good show, updates frequently and consistently. The guys aren't afraid to disagree with each other, so the show isn't just a circular look at us, we're so smart and hashtag woke kind of deal. Highly recommend if you want to know what's going on in the world of tech politics as it relates to tech, pop, media, books, and more. P.S. How have the scooter companies not crashed and burned as much as their scooters have been crashed or set on fire?

With as many as get dumped or destroyed because humans are garbage, you'd think that they'd be hemorrhaging money for those things. Well, because idiots keep giving them money. Yeah, when you have millions of dollars in the The scooter costs 400 bucks. Yeah. It's funny. Yeah. I saw a couple of Lime scooters this morning.

I was so tempted to pull over and take a picture and knock them down, knock them down. But then I'm like, I just don't do that anymore. Anyway, next up, Quibble writes in favorite podcast. They have the best show notes in the business. I like reading along while I'm listening to them. Well, thank God somebody appreciates the hard work that I do on all these show notes.

I appreciate it, Quibble. Thank you very much. I think that's actually three times we've been complimented on the show notes. Yeah, it used to be. All your work is appreciated. I appreciate that in return. I get no appreciation for the album artwork. Yeah, Brian does the album artwork and he does all the socials.

So maybe thank him sometime unless you hate them and then let us know. So then we might have to fire him and find somebody else. I would love to be fired. Trust me. Love to be fired from the job. Grumpy Indeed says, Pickles and Fish. One of my favorite podcasts because these guys are real.

They aren't fake. They're real people and they're really grumpy. Sometimes they're really, really grumpy. Sometimes only mildly grumpy. If they were cartoons, they would be grumpy bears. Grumping here and there and everywhere. Good book reviews, too. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I'm glad you like our book reviews. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review. And if you're listening to the show in overcast, please click that little star next to the episode because it gets us up in the recommendations and more people listen to the show, which means we can afford to keep doing it.

So we really appreciate it. Closing shout outs. I will echo the sentiments of everybody that isn't from New England. Fuck the fucking Patriots. Well, I didn't I didn't actually watch the game or give a tinker's cuss about it.

So I worked. You didn't miss anything. It was like watching paint dry. Yeah. I mean, I watched last year's game and it was pretty damn exciting. And from what I hear, this year was not last year. No, no, it was not. So a shout out to Sarah Schaefer for sending us her awesome artistic rendering of our all I see is Hitler episode.

We really enjoyed it. We really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to share that to you, our faithful fans, because it does in part of it depict Hitler giving a blowjob. So we think that it might not. It's weird that you you're deciding not to share that, but you opened up the show with the Seaward.

Well, that was it was that was that was a factual representation of my dream. So, OK, yeah, no, but we really appreciate it. Sarah is a great piece of art and we love it. And a shout out to my contractor, Marvin, who has finally finished my new studio.

I sent you pictures this this morning. Brian, did you get to take a look? Good. Yeah, it looks great. Looks fantastic. The problem is it sounds like crap because it's all drywall now. There's so much echo. So I'm recording this still from the bedroom with two sleeping puppies snoring and farting gently next to me.

But next week, we'll be back in the actual studio. And I cannot wait because, man, it's been it's been a journey to get that thing that I saved up for a year to get get this drywalled and insulated and painted and looking like a proper Marc Maron garage.

And I finally got one. I finally have my garage. So now I need some Marc Maron money. So please go to patreon.com slash GOG to support the show. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG.

Cost us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give a one time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the side. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 318. And there you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

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