415: Up Shipt Creek

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. So, Brian, we went to podcast movement. Well, we attended four hours of one day of broadcast movement. Yes, I've had BMs that lasted longer than PM. But so, yeah, went in, checked it out.

It wasn't what we thought it would be. I thought I thought first off, there'd be a lot more people. People. I thought we wouldn't be, you know, one of the top podcasters there. Yeah. I thought there would be more than just a bunch of weird ass companies selling their iffy ass products to podcasters.

Yeah, that was the, yeah, the, the, some of the talks we attended were basically just advertisements and sales pitches. It was all sales pitches. And, you know, I looked at you at one point and said, well, we kind of have our entire process dialed in. We don't need any of these people.

Yeah, and I went to one of the early sessions before you got there and they had two sessions going side by side in the same room with a very thin curtain between the two. Even though the room was huge, they were right next to each other. And it was impossible to hear the presentation that I was watching because the person in the other presentation knew how to project their voice very well.

And the person in the presentation we were watching did not. So it was pretty maddening. And there was this whole thing. I got the badge that they gave me the wrong badge when I came in. I got this super duper deluxe industry professional badge. Turns out, if you pay the most money, you can't go to the basic ones.

I'm not sure I buy that. I think you just had a bad security guard. She had the sheet and she says, I can't let you in. Only people with these badges are allowed in here. And I checked on some of the other boards around the event. And sure enough, the basic ones, if you had an industry professional badge, you couldn't even go into them.

Even if you had a pro podcaster badge, you couldn't get in. Having worked in the music industry 20 plus years, we don't need no stinking badges. Jason, you just got to project that air of I'm supposed to be here. You know, that would be fine if there wasn't a small Asian woman outside of every room who was basically tasked with looking at everyone's badge when they came in, comparing it to a sheet of paper and going, no, no, yes, no.

They took their job very seriously and it was very annoying. Well, do you feel like you missed out on something, Jason, by not getting in there? Well, I kind of would have liked to seen some of them just to see what the state of the state of the teaching industry and podcasting is. Yeah. So we were down there with our friend Dan Clark, who graciously bought us lunch.

So thank you, Dan, very much. And he went back actually the next day and he went to the party that night that we went. Oh, OK. So I asked him, how was it? Well, the highlights were the subway ride and lunch at Union Station. So that pretty much sums it up right about there. All right. Well, the highlight for me was finally getting your iPhone 8 Plus.

So this is my first Plus form factor phone and I've been trying to live with it for a few days and boy, it's big. It's a biggie. Yeah. I don't know. My kid likes it. Kid likes it, picks it up, scrolls through the photos. He's very happy with my larger phone. I have a feeling when I get the iPhone 15, because that'll probably be the next time I actually update, I will go for the smaller one.

Yeah. I'm kind of liking, I mean, I had Pluses since the 6, so I'm pretty used to them. But I got tired of having to take my phone out of my pants when I bent over. So I just, I went with a smaller iPhone 11 Pro and it works for me.

It's good enough. It's smaller, but it's still not small. That's the thing. Well, yeah. Thanks for the phone. I do like the wireless charging. That's a plus. Yeah. Yeah. You're welcome. It's very nice. It's very nice. So I got a note this morning, my Lumi, again, moved to March now.

Maybe you'll get it for next Christmas. Yeah. Could be here for Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, I'm going to get an extra year free of their music system with all the songs that teach you how to play, which I'm going to need.

That doesn't just come with it? That's subscription based? You get like the first six months free. And then after that, it's a subscription. You gotta be shitting me. Well, they're adding new music. They have to license the music. So it's, you know, as they add music, they got to pay for it. So it makes sense. Well, yeah, I could just purchase the ones that I want on a piecemeal basis.

They might have that at some point. I don't know if they do because I don't have one and I can't tell you. Yeah. I love that. Well, at least they didn't start your subscription yet. They're good enough for the company to figure out not to start rolling the subscription before you get the product. It better be from the time I register because if it started when they were supposed to ship, well, then, yeah, I might have like a month left by the time it actually gets here.

Oh, and oh, yeah. Shingles suck. I was talking to somebody at podcast when I'm like, yeah, I got this thing on my back. It itches a bit. So I was just scratching around and then a couple days later figure out, yeah, I've got shingles. So anybody who says that we're not grumpy old geeks, I beg to differ because you don't get shingles when you're that young.

And I am certainly fucking grumpy. I think you can get shingles pretty young. I seem to remember knowing a couple of people in the 20s that got it. So, OK, it's rare. It's rare. It's usually people over 50. I'm not even 50 yet, but I got to tell you, man, it sucks so bad.

I will be getting the vaccine as soon as possible once this clears up. But there you go. You know, we were worried about getting coronavirus going to this and you left with shingles. I know. That's it. You come with one, you leave with another. You know, I went to podcast movement expecting quality. I came home with a bag of crap and then I thought I was going to get coronavirus, maybe get to be on the news.

And no, I just got shingles. What are you going to do? Bummer. So some actual follow up here. Jeff Bezos has been in the news a lot lately because of his staff pissed off at him about, you know, working with the oil companies, man, and killing the baby seals. And you got to stop this, man, because, you know, we're Amazon employees and we think you suck.

Quit your job. Go work for somebody that you respect. Exactly. So he just put in $10 billion of his own money to start a fund to fight climate change. So I would say suck it. But the Amazon employees for climate justice have come out with a statement. Would you like to hear it, Brian?

Sure. As history has taught us, true visionaries stand up against entrenched systems, often at great cost to themselves. We applaud Jeff Bezos's philanthropy, but one hand cannot give what the other is taking away. The people of Earth need to know.

This is real. The people of Earth need to know. When is Amazon going to stop helping oil and gas companies ravage Earth with still more oil and gas wells? When is Amazon going to stop funding climate, denying think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and climate-delaying policy?

When will Amazon take responsibility for the lungs of children near its warehouses by moving from diesel to all-electric trucking? I guarantee every single person that wrote that they had a hand in writing this and is part of the Amazon employees for climate change did not get there on a bicycle.

They were in a car. They're in a home that is heated by, you know, burning oil and natural gas and the like. So unless you're outside writing this on a stone with a stick, shut the fuck up. Well, first off, we just talked about a story about a company called Riven that Amazon is buying like 10,000 electric trucks from.

So that's good. You probably shouldn't be in too much of a rush for them to switch to all-electric trucking because the next step is no people trucking. So you're going to lose a bunch of employees. I agree. Why is Amazon funding climate-denying think tanks or any think tanks for that matter?

I don't understand how that's core to its business at all. But, you know, if it's his business, he can do what he wants. I like this $10 billion fund. I think that's a great step. I love that he did it personally. I think if you're going to be screaming and yelling about anything for Amazon, I think the next step is how about they pay some taxes?

That'd be nice. Yeah. Let's work on that first. Uh-huh. That's fine with me. Fine with me. And I found this next story just delightful. Sex robots may cause psychological damage. Sex can kind of cause psychological damage.

Life causes psychological damage. Come on. Yeah. U.S. researchers have warned that the availability of sex robots with artificial intelligence poses a growing psychological and moral threat to individuals and society. Wait, wait. I think they've been reading too many sci-fi books because last I checked, there are no sex robots with artificial intelligence.

I don't believe there are even anything that I would technically call a robot out there. Yeah. It's a plastic fuck doll. There's a plastic doll that's got a little motor in it that goes. And that's about it, people. I know. I know. And this actually, I love this.

This is from Christine Hendren, Dr. Christine Hendren from Duke University. She says, the stakes are high. Some robots are programmed to protest to create a rape scenario. No, they're not. Well. Are they? No. Come on.

Well, here we go. Some are designed to look like children. One developer of these, of course, in Japan, is self-confessed pedophile who says that the device is a prophylactic against him ever hurting a real child. But does that normalize and give people a chance to practice these behaviors that should be treated by just stamping them out?

Well, good luck stamping them out. Loneliness. You're going to stamp out loneliness. Because I'm guessing a lot of these people who buy sex robots or just your average run-of-the-mill fuck doll have a lot of social problems. You think? And if, yeah, seriously.

And if this helps get them through the day, who the fuck are you to get in their way? You know, she's got to be one of the same idiots that thinks video games causes real-world violence. And just, look, if people want to fuck a toaster, let them. Who cares what they do in their own home?

You know, quit shitting on everybody else's parade. And, oh, by the way, Dr. Hedren, please turn in your sex toys and vibrators on your way out the door if that's how you think about it. Very passionate about this subject, Jason. Is there something you need to tell the audience? No, there is absolutely nothing. Yeah, yeah. Let people get their freak on if they want to.

And this comes from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. What the hell does this have to do with that? No, you know, this is basically the podcast movement for them. So everybody has to say something. And the more incendiary it is, the more you're going to get your point out there and you're going to get in the papers.

The one thing that they did say from this particular confab that they were all at that I do agree with, though, is they are saying the technology is escaping oversight because agencies are too embarrassed to investigate it. I kind of believe that a little bit. But, you know, I'm just getting on my high horse about regulation and oversight again.

Why do we need a government regulation body for a fucking sex toy? Well, you know, I'm not saying that you do, but I could see if there are firms out there that are marketing it as, you know, pedophilia, that's probably not good. I don't want to see things marketed that way because that does normalize it.

So there you go. Well, you stay out of Japan. There's your fix right there. Don't go to Japan. You know what they should be marketing for Japan, like giant sex octopi. Yeah, they probably do. I would not put that past somebody now that from the same conference.

I think this is definitely a whack job conference because now astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search. The head of one of U.S.'s national observatories says the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe needs to be taken more seriously. And he wants our money to do it. Well, no, it's got our money doing it already.

Well, they want looking. They want more and they want it to be normalized as part of regular science. Um, no, it is technically we have astronomers looking at everything that happens out there that we can see, especially stuff that's out of the normal.

And then we investigate it that I would classify as the search for extraterrestrial life in as much as anything else that they're looking at. They want more. They want more. They want more. Everybody wants more. Tough shit. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and it says NASA once funded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to the tune of $10 million a year.

But the funding was scrapped in 1993 following the introduction of legislation by Senator Richard Bryan, who believed it to be a waste of money. You know, then I think after that, that's when we got steady at home. Yeah, I ran that thing for years. Everybody did. Did we find anything? No. So, hey, what are you going to do?

What was it called? The dark garden? Dark forest? Uh, the dark forest. The dark forest. The dark forest problem. Let's just stay here and be quiet. Let's not let them find us because they will probably kill us. Or at least take our sex robots. In the news.

Ah, the gig economy, Jason. Oh, what do we got today? Isn't it helping everybody? Isn't it going just great? Well, Target has their own delivery app now called Shipt, which is S-H-I-P-T. Okay. Apparently, you just need to remove the P, and that describes how well it's going so far.

Okay. In late October, Ashley Johnson, a single mom and seasoned gig worker. That's a sad statement. I don't do net. If you ever get that on your business card, just quit. Now. Stop. Yeah. Become a seasoned gig worker. Tweeted about the decline of lucrative work on Shipt, the Target-owned grocery delivery app.

So, they've taken the model of hiring so many shoppers per area that those of us who have given our blood, sweat, and tears can no longer even get orders unless we pre-schedule shifts. I haven't had an order in weeks. Weeks? I'm hungry, Shipt, she wrote. I went from making $200 a week with Shipt to making $0 to $25.

So, I guess this is a practice that these companies are using. Shipt flooded its markets with new workers and began rolling out an algorithmic pay model in certain cities like Seattle that many workers have said left them scrambling to piece together gigs and took a chunk out of their paychecks. So, you know, you got a high demand, get a whole bunch of willing and waiting people that don't get paid unless they're actually used.

That way you have enough to meet the demand when it comes and everybody else is screwed, right? Makes sense from their business model. Correct. Well, an hour after she tweeted, she received an email from Shipt telling her that she had been deactivated and was not eligible to reapply for her job, according to an email reviewed by Motherboard.

So, you know, she tweeted about it and they went, well, you don't work for us anymore. You are off the list of people that we will hire to do grocery delivery. She is up Shipt Creek. Without a paddle, yes. And the company, of course, has a track record of censoring and retaliating against workers for asking basic questions about their working conditions or expressing dissent.

It's important to point out that they're actually not employees. They're not workers. They are independent contractors. And when you're an independent contractor, which I have been for 20 plus years, you know to keep your mouth shut publicly about your clients. Seriously. This is not surprising that this happens and you don't have a union.

You don't have anything. You're not an employer. You need to shut up. And I'm sorry. It's just true. Now, find ways. Band together. Talk to journalists anonymously. Don't tweet it. Don't tweet it, you dumbass. Oh. So, yeah, it sucks that this happens, of course, but it's not surprising.

Motherboard spoke to several other current ship workers, each of whom anonymously, so they didn't get deactivated. Described a culture of retaliation, fear, and censorship online. They told Motherboard that posts for asking for advice on getting higher tips and how to avoid liabilities on the job never get approved by moderators.

So, yeah, Shift is controlling their online environment. Shocking. So, yeah, it's just they've switched the model, which is a real concern, from a clear commission-based pay model, $5 plus a 7.5% commission on all orders, to a new model that takes estimated shop time, substitution, street traffic, and estimated travel time into consideration.

But it does not explain how any of those factors are weighed. Duh. Of course. Which is, yeah, see, this is horrible. Of course it is. So, I don't know what, I don't know what to do. I understand that people can't, for whatever reason, get a regular job.

I understand that. I understand that the gig economy is very attractive to people with certain timelines who can only work when they want. I get all of that, but why are we surprised that these companies are doing this? This is, of course, what they're going to do. It is in their business model, and it is in their best interest to do this sort of thing.

And you don't really have a lot of retaliation, which is horrible. So, but the one thing that got me, this really chapped my hide, as it were. Workers say ship customers often live in gated and upscale communities, and that the app encourages workers to tack on gifts like thank you cards, hot cocoa, flowers, and balloons onto orders that they have to pay for out of their own pockets, and to offer to walk customers' dogs and take out their trash as a courtesy.

Are you kidding me? What the fuck? So, you're going to screw them, and then you're going to ask them to be super nice to the wealthy people that are making their business run out of their own pockets. And get this, this is such a Disney-ification of the fucking gig economy. Ship calls this kind of service bringing the magic.

Oh, my God. Which can improve workers' ratings from customers that factor into the algorithm that determines who gets offered the most gigs. Wow. And I bet you they want you to buy that cocoa with the travel cup from Target. Oh, yes, of course. All of these gifts should come from Target.

Yeah. Okay. So, you're basically working for free. Five bucks plus – well, actually, no, that's right. They changed it. If it was five bucks plus a 7.5% commission on all orders, then the five bucks would be gone because you have to buy an overpriced cocoa from Target. Yes. And then you're just making commission. But if you have to spend your time waiting for the cocoa and then cleaning up your car if it spills, you know, that's not bringing the magic.

That is not bringing the magic. Now, it's something I want to bring up here. We have talked many times about the only way to get anything done nowadays online is public shaming. Now, we need to give people a primer on how to publicly shame someone because this person did not do it the right way.

No. The anonymous way to go. Publicly shaming someone is like when my mom is upset because Spectrum has not fixed her cable problem for three days. That's when you hop on the Twitter machine. You're a paying customer. Yes. If you are dissatisfied with your service, then you have that.

I saw John Cleese make a tweet this week. He was in his hotel. I saw that as well. Yeah. And he's just like, let's see if the Twitter works. And he's like, I'm cold. I need a heater. They say they can't give me a heater. And like two minutes later, he's like, lo and behold, the tweet works. I have a heater now.

Except he did have bad OPSEC because he did actually name the city and state and hotel that he was in. Yeah, you don't do that until you've left. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so yeah, when you're a contract worker, shut the hell up.

Look, I still do small gigs here and there as contract work, generally for friends or friends of friends. And I have somebody that hasn't paid me in three months now. I'm not taking to Twitter to publicly shame them. I'm just emailing them incessantly. Right. Yeah, that's how you do that.

Now, Brian, we have a long history on this show going back to the very beginning of trivia apps. Well, I think right when we started this show, it was the big trivia boom where everybody was convinced this was the future of the Internet. And they were all getting tons and tons of funding.

And we just looked at each other and went, it's a fucking trivia game. It's a trivia app. And they were like outsourcing questions. It was insane. Yeah. And all of those have gone the way of the dodo. Well, shocking. Yes. Well, the biggest entrant recently has now done the same.

HQ Trivia has shut down after its acquisition bids have fallen through. So, no more HQ Trivia. Sorry, guys. Shocking. Yeah. I mean, seven years. Somebody needs to listen to this show because, especially if you have any inkling ever that you want to start a trivia app, please go back and listen.

But now there's a hole in the marketplace for a trivia game. There's no trivia game out there. You could be first in field, best in show. We can crowdsource all the questions and then get some VC. I bet you could buy their HQ Trivia's database for cheap. I bet you could. I bet you could. Fire sale. Fire sale prices.

Fire sale. And speaking of more gig economy, DoorDash drivers use their forced arbitration clause to force DoorDash into arbitration. Well played, sirs. Well played. So, apparently DoorDash has 5,010 labor disputes on the table right now.

DoorDash. Yeah, exactly. DoorDash thought that they could say, you know what? We're just going to do this in the courts. We want everybody to sue us instead. Right. Because they've got the monies and the workers do not. Yes. Let's put the onus on the taxpayers and clog the court systems with, you know, just stupid lawsuits.

Well, DoorDash contractors have said, no, we want to use arbitration, which means DoorDash is going to have to pay for it, which is millions of dollars in arbitration fees. Nice. Nice. Yes. DoorDash also originally hoped to dismiss a pending class action case about the same dispute by arguing that the workers had a duty to arbitrate.

In other words, the company's trying to have it both ways. They're going back and forth. Yes. And you can't sue us, but we can sue you. Yes. And it goes on to say, the irony of the situation was not lost on Judge William Alsop. The employer here, DoorDash, faced with having to actually honor its side of the bargain, now blanches at the cost of the filing fees it agreed to pay in the arbitration clause.

No doubt, DoorDash never expected that so many would actually seek arbitration. Instead, in irony upon irony, DoorDash now wishes to resort to a class-wide lawsuit, the very device it denied to the workers to avoid its duty to arbitrate. This hypocrisy will not be blessed, at least by this order.

Hear, hear. Hear, hear, Judge. Way to go, Judge. Way to go. Good job. That's awesome. Love it. And I found this one over at the New York Times, and it's fantastic. It's a little bit old, but it's basically, someone has invented the bracelet of silence.

So, Alexa and smart speakers cannot eavesdrop on you. How does that work? This comes from Ben Zhao and his wife, Heather Zhang. Well, Ben went out and bought an Alexa. First mistake without clearing that with the wife, because we know the wives are the ones that always want those things taken out of the house and burned, which is what she did.

So, since they're both computer science professors at the University of Chicago, they decided to channel their disagreement into something productive. They got another assistant professor to help out, and they designed basically a bracelet of silence that will jam the echo or any other microphones in the vicinity from listening in on the wearer's conversations.

It uses ultrasonic speakers, basically, to flood the spectrum, and you can't actually hear it. There's a video in the New York Times piece that actually shows what happens. It's pretty cool. Excellent. It's pretty cool. I'd rather have the cone of silence from Get Smart, but okay.

Yeah, yeah. The cone of silence is actually much more stylish than this ugly-ass bracelet they made, but... Oh, I could have seen people wearing this at all the goth clubs we used to go to. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, that's the Mondo 2000 cyberpunk aesthetic going on right there.

Now... I just want somebody to build this into a jacket so I can just press it. It's kind of like a TV be gone, but an Alexa be gone. Yeah, it's... That's a great idea. That's amazing. That's very cool. They should definitely market a whole wide variety of stuff. There would be a marketplace for this. Now, the New York Times, the problem I have with this is the New York Times, which is normally pretty good at this sort of reporting, but the tagline, microphones and cameras lurk everywhere.

You may want to slip on some privacy armor. This does not work against cameras. Just... Just... Just microphones. They do talk about some of the stuff that does work for cameras in the rest of the article, though. Right. So, it's just not... Not this device. Right. So... But what you need to do is couple the two. So, you have the glasses that bounce back the IR, and they have speakers in the side that blast out the ultrasonics, and everybody has brain cancer in three years because they've got so much fucking, you know, spectrum getting flooded into their brain, but...

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Media Candy. Netflix has dropped the first teaser trailer for Stranger Things 4. Yep. Yep. And we have one of our... They say, teases the return of a missing friend. Well, yes. Someone that left us last season seems to be back and in Russia for some reason.

The fact that we're being careful about spoiler alerts with a teaser that has the massive spoiler in it. That's true. That's true. Okay. Sheriff's back. That's about it. I do. I'm excited about this. I do hope this is the last season, though. I do. I do. It's run its course.

You said that about season... Yeah. You said that about season three, though, too. Well, I think I would have been fine with the season three ending. We'll see. I have a feeling that this might be jumping the shark a bit, but we'll see. I don't know. I mean, I really like season three, so I'm fine with this. I'm ready to go. No date yet, though. So we're waiting on that.

We also got another trailer for Amazing Stories, which is Steven Spielberg's reboot coming to Apple TV+. I was about to say, this is a reboot, right? Because I seem to remember that he had this show a long time ago when I was a young child. You don't remember watching Amazing Stories? I mean, you remember the show, but oh, man, it was a great show.

It was an amazing show, actually, because that's right there on the tin. It's coming on March 6th, and I was like, oh, man, Apple TV+, I don't want to pay for that. And then I was going through my phone trying to find something about my Wi-Fi hotspot on my new iPhone 11, and lo and behold, in my settings, it's like, hey, don't forget, you get your free year of Apple TV+.

Make sure you get it before your offer expires. And I'm like, oh, nice. So last night, I went and got it, and I browsed through Apple TV+, and there's absolutely nothing on there I want to watch. Well, you didn't want to watch Goop? That's Netflix. Goop's on Netflix, but the- Oh, Gwyneth Paltrow has something on Apple TV.

Was it the morning show thing? She's not on that one. I watched that. That was actually pretty good. She was on Planet of the Apps, which is- Oh, it must have been that one. Okay. Yeah, that one was terrible. And they've got the Ronald D. Moore show on there. No. Out of respect for you, I'm not even going to bother watching. I think it's called For All Mankind.

Yeah, I watched two episodes of it, actually. That was enough. And? That was enough. Not good? No, I didn't like it. All right. All right. Okay. So, I will definitely be watching amazing stories. It's only four or five episodes, so.

Yeah, excellent. Which is fine. Which is fine. I get some Spielberg back in my life. And turns out, my ire against Showtime over Ray Donovan was justified, and I was not alone. Oh, boy, was I not alone. And Showtime has gotten the message, and Ray Donovan will get a proper ending.

There you go. It's been confirmed, so, yes. Ray will be back to button it up. So, I'm sure it'll be only a partial season, but I don't care. I just, they gotta put a button on this thing. It's been, you know, eight seasons, Dan. Yeah, you can't go that long without giving a proper ending.

You just can't. That's ridiculous. I know. I mean, they gave Homeland one. Come on. Can you imagine if MASH just never had their final episode? Exactly. Exactly. That's just not a world I want to live in. No. Or, like Deadwood, you have to wait another ten years. Although they did nail, they stuck the landing on that one so hard.

It was beautiful, especially coming after Game of Thrones, who basically landed on their head and broke their neck on the landing. Well, since you mentioned Ronald D. Moore, I will say I would happily have gone through all of Battlestar Galactica with the last episode. Okay.

Yep. I watched the movie The Farewell. It is on Amazon Prime now, so you can watch it for relatively free. It was great. I really enjoyed it. A little slow-moving at points and times, but I found it absolutely fantastic.

My wife really enjoyed it as well, obviously, because, you know, it's about a Chinese family returning to China. We've talked about the story. It was good. It was really good. I was just laughing hysterically, and my wife was, like, throwing pillows at me because food is so important to Chinese culture.

Everything is about food. Every decision is made over food. Every discussion is had over food, food, food, food. Halfway through the movie, my wife had to pause it to go make noodles and dumplings. Go make food. Because there were so many beautiful shots of food, and they were delicious. So I enjoyed my noodles and dumplings for the second half of the movie.

I do recommend it. It was great. It's a really good movie. So did it really ruin the movie, though, since you knew how it ended? No, no, not at all. Because, you know, it's a character piece, and it's a character study and conversations and all that. So it's not like you needed the shock surprise at the end. Okay.

Okay. Well, and I mean, the other news that she's fine. Yeah, it was a cute little ending, actually, because they showed the real grandmother. So it was nice. Yeah. Okay. So they went back and, like, spliced it in after? They put it in the credits, of course.

Got it. Okay. Like the Marvel ending type of thing. Yeah, that kind of thing. So it was cute. Last week tonight with John Oliver is back. Enjoyed the episode. Really enjoy the poster key art that they're using for this season. I don't know if you've seen that yet, Jason, but billboards are all over town. It's quite hilarious.

Is it the picture of him as a young man? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. When I saw this was in the notes, I meant to go back and watch it, and I went and watched it last night. A fantastic episode, as always. As always. He's got a crack team behind him. Really good researching. Really good writing.

Yep. Glad he's back. Nice to meet you. And speaking of really good writing, or perhaps not, I have caught up with Avenue 5. I let it slip for a while, because I really just didn't care, and realized I'd let three episodes go by without trying to watch it, so I watched all three episodes.

And? The only gag in the entire show so far is the recurring gag of shit floating around the ship, and this time, literally. Okay. I'm done. I'm done. Okay. I was done after the first episode, and I saw it last night on the list, and I'm like, should I?

And then I'm like, I'm going to go read a book. Yeah, it's just not there. It's so close to being there, but it's just not. That's too bad. That's too bad. Yeah. And after that, I watched something I probably shouldn't have watched, but I did anyways.

I watched the Netflix series Pandemic. I'm about halfway through it. Oh, you will shit your pants. Have you wrapped your house in saran wrap yet? No, not so bad yet. You know, it's good because you realize how much money and how many people are working all the time to try to avoid and catch these things early and stop them from spreading, which gives you a lot of hope.

And then you realize that nature always seems to find a way, and we're fucked anyways. Okay, Jurassic Park, man. Yep. Okay. Yeah, I am purposefully avoiding this. It's very well done, Jason, and it's really interesting, and it doesn't doom and gloom you.

It really gets deep into individual stories of about six to seven people and what they do and how they do it and their concerns and their triumphs. It's fantastically well done and very enjoyable, but you may want to wait until the coronavirus hasn't killed us all.

Yeah, see, I'm not worried about that. Once we get past this one, then get in there and watch it. I've been through all of them. I don't care. I'm still here. I mean, I was even thinking about, should I resurrect my Do I Have series because it made me so much money last time? But no, I'm going to leave that to the kids nowadays. But I live with a hypochondriac, and I don't want her to actually see any of that because then it'll just be, are we going to die?

Are we going to die? Are we going to die? Oh, my God. Who's got the sniffles? Oh, no. Oh, no. I can't. I can't do that to myself. I am still working my way through book two of the Expanse series.

It is dense and long, but highly enjoyable. I have not finished it yet, but hopefully I will for next week. But as I was perusing on Amazon, I did discover that The Laundry Files Book 10, Dead Lies Dreaming by Charlie Strauss will be out on October 22nd of this year.

Very exciting. He's been upping the ante with every single book, so I fully expect that this to be the final book and the Earth is destroyed, because what else can he do at this point? Yeah, it's getting pretty close to the end, I think. Yeah, I think so. I hope so. One of the side effects of having shingles is, like, massive amounts of pain.

But one of the things that fixes that is long walks outside. Turns out that when I'm walking, I'm not in pain. I thank the gods to the person on the CDC who put that in as one of the, you know, the potential remedies for the pain without doing drugs. And so I've been walking a lot, and I got through two books.

All right. Amazingly enough, I got through The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray from No Such Thing as a Fish and QI fame. Ah, yes. I've heard the ads on No Such Thing as a Fish for this book, and it sounds like it'd be pretty interesting. It's fantastic. Really? It is really, really, really good.

Well, what a pleasant surprise. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's just fantastic, because the guy can write. That really helps, you know? It's not one of those crazy books where it's just, like, you know, hacky writing. It's really good writing, really interesting story.

Makes a couple conceits with the premise, but you just have to give it to him, because otherwise it wouldn't work. Well, that's just sci-fi. Yeah, yeah. It's basically the Earth's rotation stops. Right. And so there's only a very small band on the planet that, where life can be sustained.

Habitable, yeah. Yes. And, of course, England happens to be in that band, since he's British. You know, it really works there. But I got the audiobook, and it was read by Gemma Whalen from Game of Thrones. She played Yara Greyjoy. Oh, well, I'm actually bummed that Andrew Hunter Murray didn't read it.

I enjoy his voice. He does do a bonus chapter that didn't make it into the book at the end, but she does a fantastic job. Well, the protagonist is a woman, so it makes more sense for her to read it. Gotcha. And it is a fantastic book.

I cannot recommend this more highly. I enjoyed it. And, you know, I'm like, oh, God, is this going to be another freaking trilogy? They do do a Q&A at the end of the audiobook, where Gemma and Andrew actually talk back and forth.

And he's like, I would like to revisit it at some point, but I've got other books in me first. And it works as a standalone book. So if he does go back to it in the future, it can work, but it doesn't have to. So if he gets hit by a truck, you're going to be fine, you know? I'm sure we should tweet him that as part of your review.

Yes. Oh, he would call it a lorry. Oh, yes. If you get hit by a Guinness lorry, you'll be okay. We'll be okay. You won't be okay, but we'll be okay. But, yeah, highly, highly recommend this book. Excellent. It was really just fresh, you know, like a fresh sci-fi type of thing.

And it's not even that much sci-fi. There is some sci-fi in it, obviously, just from the premise of the book. But a lot of it is just a really cool, like, mystery sleuthy book. It's kind of like a, yeah, it's kind of like almost a spy novel. It has that feel to it. So it's different.

It is totally different. And it was just a breath of fresh air. And then I read Terminus. Or I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Brian. I listened to Terminus by Peter Clines. The link is to Audible, so it is not a book. It is. Well, it is not available as a book. It is only available on Audible right now.

He does this with a lot of these books. This is part of the threshold universe of books. And this series, it started with 14, which came out in 2012. Loved that book. Really, really loved it. This one, Terminus, is pretty much kind of a direct follow-up to that one.

The other two books in the series are The Fold and Dead Moon. You've read Dead Moon. That was a pretty good one. I like that. But it works as a standalone novel as well, which was good. The Fold also works as a standalone novel. But it's all kind of in the same Cthulhu-ian universe, which is really cool.

But yeah, this is basically just a direct follow-up to 14, because one of the characters from 14 is actually in this book. And also, if you're into Peter Clines, it's fantastic. I mean, I really, really, I was so glad that this came out, just right when I needed it.

So, two definite wins this week from The Last Day and Terminus. And since I was stuck in the car for three hours yesterday, I finally started the William Gibson book, Agency. Loving it. Got past the first 10 minutes of it, and now that I'm into it and I see what it's about, loving it.

So, I'll have that finished probably by the end of the day, because I have to go walk another 20,000 steps so my back doesn't fall off. That's always a good thing. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what you think when you're done with it. I'm always hit or miss with Gibson, so we'll see. Yeah, me too. Me too. That's why I was like, okay, I don't know.

But it started to pick up, and I'm like, ooh, this is actually getting good. But in between then and now, when you're done with The Expanse, I highly recommend The Last Day. That's my favorite of the week. Moron of the Week! We're going to delve into a little sports ball really quickly, because I am angry, and I'm pissed off.

Okay. And I apologize to Houston listeners, but screw you and screw the Astros. They cheated. We all know they cheated. There's no question about them cheating. So this story broke in the offseason, and the reason this is coming up again this week is because spring training has started.

So all the teams are back, and they're doing press and all that sort of stuff. And Jason, you may not be aware of this, but in the 2017 baseball season, the Houston Astros narrowly beat the Dodgers in the World Series. Okay. It's not just us Los Angeles fans that are pissed. They also beat the New York Yankees to get to the World Series.

And they beat a lot of teams that year and had, frankly, a pretty phenomenal record because they were cheating! What did they do, Brian? Well, stealing signs from the catcher so you can try to figure out what pitch is going to the batter is as old as time. However, there are very specific rules about not using electronic devices to do it.

Okay. You are supposed to, if you've got somebody on second base, the pitcher kind of knows and the catcher knows that this guy is going to be eyeing what signals you're giving and trying to relay that information to the batter to give him a better chance to hit the ball. What you can't do is you can't set up a camera in center field, train it on the catcher's fingers, and then relay that signal electronically to the dugout where they then banged on trash cans to let the batters know what pitch is coming.

Wow. And then they lit the hell up out of the pitchers and won everything. And this has all been proven. It has happened. There is no doubt about it. They got fined, but that's about it. And most of the players in the league are pretty pissed off right now, and a lot of us fans are as well. So Houston Astros have gone to their spring training camp and are now getting press and questions.

So they've had a lot of time to think about this and come up with a story. They didn't do a very good job. Okay. The players and owner Jim Crane held a team meeting on Wednesday to plan a course of action for the next day of camp when they would have their press. On Thursday, they severely underwhelmed.

Astros hitter Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman provided roughly two minutes of insincere, vague remarks, while Crane issued a strange denial that the team's cheating actually didn't affect the outcome of the games. Okay. Somebody can try to tell me that. The players said most of them didn't speak out earlier because they wanted to get together and address it as a team, or perhaps they wanted to get their stories straight and not admit any more than what was in the MLB's investigation already.

They were sorry that they didn't do more to stop it. They hoped to move on and be better in the future. They also didn't specify what exactly they were supposed to be sorry for because they're not really even admitting it. So screw you guys. Okay, so the MLB has determined that they cheated and they won the World Series.

I almost said they won the Super Bowl. They won the World Series. Yes. Now, that title should be stripped from them. Yes. And the entire team should not be able to play for an entire year. Yes. That's what I think would be fair. Yes. I mean, it's hard to take a team out of the rotation.

That would definitely be crazy. But strip the World Series, win from them. That's not on the records. Take away their World Series rings. Take away their World Series bonuses, which was in the 20s of millions of dollars. Take all of that away. Yeah. They need to be, they literally need to be like, you know.

Spanked. Shamed and punished. Yes, they do. And everybody is going to the Twitter machine to shame them. So, let's keep it up. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. How much did the MLB fine them for this? 20 bucks? A lot, but a splash in the bucket compared.

It's a Google-type coffee fine. Okay. So, nothing real. Nothing real. Wow. All right. So, the next Moron of the Week is the Athletic Leisure brand. Well, no, not them. They're called the Textile Fashion Group. Okay. So, they are the driving force behind Kate Hudson's athleisure line Fabletics and also Rihanna's brand new lingerie collection.

I'm sorry. You said athleisure and Fabletics in the same sentence. That should be a crime. Well, I know I'm going out of your comfort zone here a little bit, Jason, with this Moron of the Week segment. I mean, we got sports ball and now we're talking lingerie. But run with me here.

You run with me here. You'll see why they're in Moron of the Week. Go for it. Because this is the kind of bullshittery that you and I have fought against many, many times when we've been working with and consulting with companies. So, on Tuesday, Truth in Advertising, a non-profit organization, said that the Savage X Fenty, which is Rihanna's line, ensnares consumers into unwanted monthly charges through a membership plan that was difficult to opt out of.

We've heard about this many a time, have we not, Jason? Yes, we're not. You should use privacy.com slash GOG. Yes. It said it also alerted the FTC to the line's business practices, which it believes violates the agency's rules, and the Restore Online Shopper's Confidence Act. So, in addition to the basically almost impossible to get out membership plans, it's almost impossible not to get into them in the first place because on their website, they enroll people into the $50 monthly subscriptions without disclosing all the material terms and conditions of the offer.

And pricing on their site, say $19.50 for a pair of leggings, requires a membership and it doesn't state that. So, for non-members, the price can be more than double the price that they list on the site. Wow. Okay.

So, it's a whole lot of bait and switch and bullshittery to get you into a membership that they make it almost impossible to get out of. We've seen this a million times in tech, have we not? Yes, we have. Does anybody ever get punished for this? Nope. Sure doesn't. Yeah. Textile has raised more than $500 million in funding and is valued at $1 billion.

Whoa. It's a unicorn. Yes. Awesome. So, the founders have specialized in these types of subscriptions for years without ever getting any trouble whatsoever. In 2014, Adam Goldenberg, the company's co-founder, was named in a complaint against Senza, a company he led that sold a bogus miracle weight loss powder.

Ah, the powder is... So, they got $5.50 million, one of its biggest it's ever been given for deceptive advertising. So, well done brands, well done company, well done Rihanna and Kate Hudson's people for not looking into this or, frankly, just not caring because I'm sure the pitch deck said they'd make a lot of money.

Yeah. It just comes down to how much are they getting paid. Do whatever you got to do. Yep. I doubt they even knew about the subscription. Oh, I'm sure they didn't. No. Their people might have, but I'm sure they didn't. Yes. So, we have a hero of the week. We actually have two heroes of the week.

This is a little bit older, but we were at Podcast Movement, so I didn't get to put it in the last show. An Australian couple quarantined on a cruise ship because of the coronavirus. They needed some vino, so they had it delivered by drone to their stateroom.

Yes, yes, and yes, all the way down. This is fantastic. Can you imagine, first off, you're stuck, well, first off, you're on a cruise ship. That's bad enough to begin with. I like cruises, do it. Oh, fuck that. Then, you get stuck on a cruise ship because there's a deadly virus flowing around and you're quarantined.

You're in the middle of a zombie nightmare plague, yeah. And then, they run out of booze. See, that's the nightmare. I can deal with the viruses and the zombies and being trapped on a cruise ship. When they run out of booze, that's a problem. Somebody get Captain Stubing on the line because we got a problem.

We're going down, Captain. So, I have to say, the Naked Wine Club, these guys nailed it. So, they flew over two bottles of Pinot Noir and dropped them off at their stateroom. And I'd be just like, you only ordered two bottles?

I'd be like, can I get an hourly subscription? That's a subscription I would pay for. I went two bottles of wine to my stateroom every hour until they let us off this ship. If I remember correctly, the Naked Wine Club is kind of one of those deceptive subscription things. Oh, could be. Could be.

Okay. I might be thinking of something else that's just top of mind, but I joined one of these ones and it was not fun to get out of. Oh. I only, I signed up for those things. I mean, it was fun to drink it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know about that, but yeah. Yeah, I only get these things nowadays for, you buy them in six month, three or six month packages.

Right. And so, you don't do the ongoing subscription because those are a pain to get out of. But my brother keeps sending me wine subscriptions, even though I don't really drink wine anymore. Send it my way. And anytime you sign up for any subscription, people, remember privacy.com slash GOG.

Feedback loop. Over at Patreon, we've got two new subscribers, Andy and Jonathan. Thank you very much. And over at PayPal, we've got Nicholas, David, Andrew, Linda, Michael. Michael says, sorry, guys. It's been a while since I last donated. Note, I don't mind the ads. It is strange, however, to have a woman selling makeup foundation right after you guys are raving about shaving your balls with a lawnmower 3.0.

Yes. Hey, man, we have a big tent. We take all covers. We do. And Michelle writes in, also a PayPal subscriber, just started a recurring donation on PayPal for y'all. It's not much, but hopefully it will prevent y'all from going the way of other podcasts. Going exclusively to Spotify.

More to say on that in a minute. One of my faves just went Spotify exclusive, but I don't want them tracking what topics I like to listen to. Also, even if you pay for Spotify premium, third-party ads are still being included in the podcasts themselves. We need to look into that, Brian, because if Spotify is putting ads in our show without paying us, we have a class action lawsuit.

I have no problems with the ads when content is provided free or with optional donations. I mean, y'all got to make some money somehow. However, I refuse to pay for a service that still includes ads. Good God, I sound like my father. Stay grumpy and off of Spotify. Well, just a quick note that if you're going to refuse to pay for services that still include ads, good luck with that.

I don't mind some ads when I pay for a service. I think I was ranting about this. Remember, what was it, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that we pay for? New York Times. The New York Times that we pay for. Fine. I expect small ads, but full-page ads? Three-quarter-page ads? That's ridiculous.

It was 95% of the page because there were two ads at the top, two ads at the bottom, and all I could read of the article was the headline. Yes. That was it. That is not something you should get when you are paying. Right. I mean, you pay for cable and the TV shows still have ads in them, so it just comes with the territory, but I'm with her.

I'm with her. Damn it. Yeah. Your father sounds like a smart man. Over at Twitter, disgruntled Cincy Sports Fan says, I guess drones aren't always bad, and sends us a link. A police drone finds blind man in the woods after he'd been messing for 33 hours. I hope they brought him wine. I seriously hope they brought him wine.

And John writes in, your ideas made real? Britain to make social media platforms responsible for harmful content. Yeah. They say they're going to force social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Snap to do more to block or remove harmful content on their platforms. Good luck with that.

I think Britain's got a lot of other things to worry about at the moment, but they can take a shot at it. So basically, this is a non-story because all they've said is they're going to plan to legislate to ensure companies had systems in place. They don't have a plan. They don't have a policy.

The policy is being developed in the coming months. Like I said, I think Britain's going to be a little bit busy in the next few months with legal issues that don't involve social media. But good if they do something, but they don't have rules yet. They're not sure what the rules are going to be. They haven't even turned on the fucking power in the building yet.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. A little early. A little early. TrippinFool writes in, here's a head scratcher for y'all on the Samsung Fold by Escobar. Wonder if the Escobars would be a sponsor. Pretty sure we know a cough-cough few of their old clients. And this is an unboxing video for the Escobar Fold.

Is everybody into these Fold phones? I don't get it. I don't know. It's actually the Escobar Fold 2. I'm sorry, 2. Yeah. I watched the whole video last night. It was kind of interesting. And basically what they're doing is they're buying returned Samsung folding phones. And rebranding them?

Yeah. And basically rebranding them. They got returns, overstocked, demo units, and things like that. Because it's a $1,500 phone that they're selling for $399. Right. And the guy in the video actually peels off the Escobar sticker and everything.

But he said the people at Escobar Inc. were actually very nice, which was very interesting. They just talk really fast and they're really, really excited all the time. They really are. They won't shut up. They cord you in the bathroom and they talk and they talk and they talk. The phone actually looked kind of interesting. I would never buy one.

But it's kind of cool that you have a phone that opens up and you've got kind of an iPad. Well, Android tablet. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And definitely knew a few of their old clients, for sure. And GE Scott Nauss writes in, is this for real? Sounds like a great plan. This app automatically cancels and sues robocallers.

This comes from Vice. This has been all over the place, at least on my feeds. People are very excited about this. So this is by Do Not Pay, the family of consumer advocacy services meant to protect people from corporate exploitation. So they are launching a new app aimed at helping end our long national nightmare surrounding robocalls by giving you a burner credit card to get the contact details, then giving you a chatbot lawyer to automatically sue them.

Not quite as advertised by the short, sweet bits everywhere, which basically, the way it's being promoted seems to be, get this credit card and you'll take money from them. Well, it's not that simple. No, it's not. It is not that simple, but not that simple.

No, it's really not because I was having a dinner with a bunch of my wife's lawyer friends and they said that these ridiculous chatbot lawyers don't do much of anything. They don't work very well. They're definitely not going to work for these companies that are overseas a lot of the time or shut down immediately and change their names and change all their phone numbers.

Good luck getting any money out of these companies is basically what their sentiment was. It's a great idea. It's a wonderful idea. And by all means, if you want to waste your time, you will screw them a little bit, but you're not going to be suing them and you're not going to get money from them unless you put in a lot of time trying to chase down these companies.

The chatbot lawyer ain't going to do it for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they do say that if they're overseas, then you're shit out of luck. This chatbot has a history, though. This is the one that was actually fighting for parking tickets. I believe it was in London. Yeah. That's where that comes out of. That's where you're going to deal with than these scam companies.

Yeah, yeah. This is, I mean, it's a stretch. It's definitely a stretch. But the chatbot ticket guy saved a lot of people a lot of money, if I remember correctly. So, I mean, it's the next step. It's an evolution, Brian. It's an evolution. Okay, fair enough.

And Mariana writes in, Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who's looking. This was kind of fascinating. This was fascinating. I pulled a lot of points, but let's go read it. The basic thing is they're, of course, using geolocation to basically show borders that are politically expedient for the countries in which you're looking at things from.

And it's actually caused problems. It's caused a lot of problems over the years. Borders should not be malleable like this by any of these companies, you'd think. But I get that sometimes borders are a bit of an issue, but they do exist, and Google should show them, not modify them and cause problems for different countries and people.

Well, the thing is, the thing that is buried in here that you have to kind of, like, read between the lines with, and other companies do this, like Apple as well, they have to respect the local laws of the country. So if the country says, no, we have this, and the other country says, no, we have this, when you're showing a map to a person in that country, you have to show them what the country says is fact.

So they might not have as much leeway as people are thinking here, but it's just Google doing it. Do you have to do that, though, Jason? Because that sounds very Chinese. Because the country says it, we have to show it that way. No. Well, this is India and Pakistan. I don't know if you've noticed they have border issues. Yes, I am aware of that.

I don't know. This is just weird to me. Okay. Who's the right map, then? Use your private internet access. Go through the States. Yeah. And also never go to Pakistan. Just saying.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Moving on. Write film, sleep, repeat, writes, are you dumping opera? If so, who are you picking? Vivaldi? Thanks. Someone hasn't been listening to every episode. Tsk, tsk, write film, sleep, repeat. We've only mentioned this about half a dozen times in the past month or so.

Yes, we have both moved over to Vivaldi. And it seems to be working pretty well for me so far. I'm not having any issues. Yeah. I'm enjoying it so far. A couple weird tweaks here and there that I'm not crazy about, but it's just a matter of getting used to it. Yeah. It's got this weird side panel.

So when you download something, the side panel pops out and it keeps your download tray open. I need to look in the settings to see if it will disappear once the download is complete. Because I'm always having to close that because I download it. See, I want to set it so it doesn't pop out at all. I know I'm downloading something.

Yeah. Or just give you a, you know, give you the little red mark that something's there and downloaded. Right. Yeah. No, but so far, yeah. Vivaldi, it seems faster than Opera, actually. Especially if you're trying to do any of those predatory loans that Opera's into nowadays. You know what, you know why Opera is so much slower?

Because it's got to take all that time to send your data back to China. That's it. That's true. And speaking of browsers, Quantum Leap writes in, so ironically, the new Chromium-based Edge browser is pretty good. You might want to look into it. I do like it a bit more than Brave or Vivaldi. It has a very good balance between usability and privacy slash security.

I installed it last night. Snappy. I'll give it that. But I don't know how much time I'm going to have to go try out another browser since I just switched everything to Vivaldi. Yeah. I think we need to have like a three-month off policy after major switches. Yeah. Yeah. And Brave, delete on-site.

Brave is definitely delete on-site. That whole cryptocurrency crap that they've got going on in there. Yeah. I get that. Yeah. No. It has been proven across the board that if you install Brave, your CPU will peg to 100% several times an hour.

Yep. It does. And David writes in, I'm a Patreon subscriber but use Overcast, so I guess I'd still just get the standard ad version. Sure, I could play it from Patreon, but ain't nobody got time for that. Is there an easy solution for this? No. That's why we floated the idea of potentially doing ad-free versions on Patreon, but there's no easy way to do it, and we'd screw all the PayPal people and blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but hold up. He's talking about being a Patreon subscriber and using Overcast. The thing about Patreon is once you're a Patreon subscriber and if we start uploading the ad-free versions, you get just a custom RSS URL that you just paste into Facebook, and that subscribes you to your own particular feed.

Yeah, in Overcast. Not Facebook. You can paste it into Facebook. Fucking Facebook. Facebook on the radio. Yeah, you paste that into Overcast, and that's your subscription, and you get everything straight out of the gate there, which also means probably we'd be able to do early releases as well.

But who am I kidding? We never get this show done early. Yeah, right. Anyway, but yeah, that's the thing. Patreon takes care of that for us, but with people on PayPal or other donation sites, then it becomes a sticky wicket, unfortunately.

Holly Weird underscore Wood writes in, my God, that was a sad podcast. I may see other people's viewpoints that may affect my self-created beliefs. I'm done with you. This was to us, yes. This was in response to us. When we get the one-star ratings, or we get the tweets telling us how much we suck and how they're done with us, I always do like to take a look at the accounts, because, you know, is this a rational, measured person who has interesting things to say?

No. Or is this just a person that uses his entire account to bitch at people to create things? And that's all this account is. So, yeah. All he does is bitch at people. And yes, I am confident saying he, because women tend not to be such assholes. You put in way more time than I ever would on this.

I'm like, okay, I just don't care. It's three minutes. Just click on it right now. Go find his account and just look at his timeline. All he does is yell at people. He doesn't post a single thing once that isn't at somebody and going, you suck. That's all he's using Twitter for. Yeah.

I just don't give him the time of day. Fuck him. Don't feed the trolls, Brian. Don't feed the trolls. I didn't respond. We just talked about it on our show to 12,000 people. Thanks. Yeah, but he's not listening. He quit. He's done with us. You know he's listening right now.

That's the funny thing. The people who bitch the most listen the longest. That's the best part. Yeah. And Joe Fizz writes us, I think this would be right up your alley, a social media platform with no people on it. I was tempted to put this in more on of the week, actually. This is a link over from Vice.

Finally, there's a social network without any people. Yes, somebody came up with the idea of making an app that is a social network that does not allow you to interact with anybody else that signs up with it. Nope. They just have a sea of bots. It's called Botnet, a social media simulation where you're the only human in a sea of bots, and they use their machine learning and artificial intelligence to respond to you to make you feel better.

I kind of like this. I think this is very dystopian, and I think I might actually install it because it sounds kind of fun. I think, you know, this is just like a material generator for us. Do you like the fact that there are upsells?

There are upsells? For a dollar each, you can buy bots that will troll you or make dad jokes. I get that for free on Twitter. That kind of defeats the purpose. Oh, man. Okay. Well, Moz6502 writes in, what do you think about the new Facebook web client redesign?

Black mode is okay, but seems busier and harder to read. How do you get this? I haven't been able to find it. This is... I'll send you a link. Okay. I can't... It still looks the same to me. You could have just Googled it. It would have taken you two seconds. It's okay, but dark mode has been proven to basically do nothing for eyesight, so it's just good for you.

Quite the opposite, actually. Yeah, it's just good for you if you want your browser to look goth. So, the design, of course, has tried to make you do anything else other than what you actually want to use Facebook for. So, I hate that because all they do is push Facebook Watch and groups and all that sort of crap, all of which I don't use.

I just want a timeline that goes in time. Oh, yeah. That's all we all want. I think we should just rename dark mode to cure mode. Okay. Yep. Oh, no. No, you can't do cure because then people still think it's good for eyesight.

Wow. Morrissey. Morrissey. Morrissey mode. Morrissey mode. That rolls off the tongue better. It does. And over at GOG.show, Phil writes in with a link to Twitter, a rental car that won't start unless you have a sell signal. Makes perfect sense. Yeah. So, this is another one of these new startup rental car companies.

This one, I think, let me... Sorry, I'm waiting for it to load because I forgot to grab the name of the company. This is a customer that was using this company called... Where the hell is it? Sorry for the... We're not always prepared. How far down do I have to go? Gig Car Share.

Gig Car Share. Yes. And apparently, you need to use their app and have to have a cell phone signal to start the car. Or not, because she was having some problems with it. But for sure, you need the app and a cell phone signal to reset the car, which she was unable to do because she could not get a cell phone signal.

So, she had to call tow trucks, and it took hours upon hours upon hours. This is... We have been in so many meetings where we've sat in the back of the room, Jason, going, you need to have a backup plan here. Yeah. You need to think about worst-case scenarios here.

You can't shut down the entire car if they don't have a signal here. Well, this comes... I'm going to read you something from Gig Car Share. Okay. Here we go. Gig is an app-enabled service, which means you need cell service to use many major features, like the locking and unlocking of the cars.

This can become problematic if you've driven out of cell service. Even if you have Wi-Fi on your phone, the car still needs to communicate over a cellular network, so you won't be able to unlock in an area without service. No worries. We thought of that. These RFID cars will lock and unlock your car without cell service.

Don't leave town without one. No one wants to get towed or stranded. To reserve and unlock... Okay. To reserve and unlock, tap the card on the card reader on the windshield. The light should turn from green to orange, indicating you are in a reservation. Tap again to lock the car.

To end your reservation, blah, blah, blah. How about you give somebody a fucking key? We figured this problem out years ago. Yes, we've made new problems for no reason whatsoever. Thank you. Yeah, so it turns out she had to reboot the car.

I shit you not. That was the problem. She had to reboot the car. She had a car towed three miles to get cell service again, even though she had enough cell service to tweet about it and post pictures of the car that was dead. Oh, my God. Yeah. Fixing problems that don't exist, people.

Give them a fucking key. Okay. And Brian writes in, privacy fear sparked by new AI camera. This is a link to msn.com. Yes, in Australia. So he's also said at the 22 second mark of the video. So are you spying on people?

At the 25 second mark, no spying involved while spying on everything that moves and doesn't. And he says, I'm so sick of this is just to start the conversation rhetoric. Number one, regular people are not listening to the conversation. Two, regular people don't understand the conversation or what their stake is in it. Three, this can be stopped.

It is here. I am terrified. Maybe not so much for me, but at least for my kids. What is the next step after all movements of all people and vehicles are tracked? I deleted and spared you the rant I had. Does not seem like you did. Doesn't seem like it. There's a lot of words here. Yes, but pretty sure I've heard the same on your show once or twice.

And the main point of this is there's a new highly advanced surveillance camera that has sparked a debate about privacy and AI in Perth. The camera was developed by a private Perth-based tech company called AeroRanger is able to track every vehicle, number plate, and model at a busy intersection and stream it live on YouTube.

And the CEO, John Colbrook, basically said, we just put it out there because we wanted people to talk about this. Sure you did. And they're claiming, of course, that the camera collects no data and that the live stream is harmless, except for the fact that they're probably collecting data and throwing it up in public on a live stream is probably not harmless if people wanted to use it appropriately.

Yeah, I'll use the live stream to capture all the data. I'll just run it through my license plate recognition software and now I have another data point. Thanks, guys. Silly people. Nathan writes in, talk to me about browser plugins. Specifically, I've been hearing a lot of ads for Honey, including on the Jordan Harbinger show.

I assume Honey and plugins like it make their nut-selling user data, which might be okay if their service is worth the price. But what about the security of plugins in general? Do browsers handle it better than others? Are there any plugins you guys love? Thanks, Grumps. Well, now that I'm on Vivaldi, I barely use anything.

I've got 1Password. I've got AdBlocker, which I got to talk about maybe switching. They're the biggest one out there and everybody's wise to their game now. I feel like I need to use a young upstart that still blocks everything. That uses AI to steal your data. Yes. I use FB Purity to make my Facebook experience somewhat okay.

And I use Instapaper still for show notes when I want to grab something and I'm too lazy to paste it in right away. And that's it. That's all I use. Yeah. I'm not a big plugin guy anymore. I don't really need them for anything. I had more on Chrome than I could shake a stick at. I had plugins for screen capping an entire webpage built into Vivaldi.

Don't need that anymore. I used a bunch of those EFF tracker plugins that blocked all the trackers. Don't really need that anymore. I do use AdBlock as well. And yeah, Facebook Purity for the next week or so until I kill my Facebook account.

And that's it. Yeah. So yeah, one password. Yeah. I installed Honey once. They're supposed to find you the best price when you're shopping for stuff. It's fine. It's just I end up ordering from Amazon anyways because I'd rather get it in two days than save five bucks and wait three weeks for something.

So I kind of stopped using that. And yeah, they do. When the apps are too good to be true, when they're saving you money but not charging you anything, they're making money selling your data. And I'm not down for that. Yeah. I do have one other plugin. I use the privacy.com plugin to generate credit card numbers.

Well, there you go. Privacy.com slash GOG. And Ralph writes in with a topic suggestion. He sends us a link from CNBC. Why EBITDA earnings are used by some tech companies. We call it EBITDA in the business. I've never worked for a startup.

So why don't I let you take this one, Jason? Yeah. It's basically it's why EBITDA earnings are used by some tech companies like Uber and Yelp are bullshit. And this is a link over at CNBC. And Charlie Munger basically called it bullshit earnings metrics, which is completely true.

We generally made these things up on the spot to get funding for different companies I worked at. And everybody wants to know, what's your EBITDA? And it stands for earnings before interest taxes, depreciation and amortization. And it's bullshit. It is bullshit. I mean, if Charlie Munger is coming out saying it's bullshit, it's bullshit.

But we all knew it was bullshit. So yeah, that's just one of those things you have to learn when you're when you get into the startup game and are looking for VC money. And and yeah. So yeah. EBITDA is bullshit. All right. AJ writes in. Hey, guys, this one was mentioned in the Smashing Security podcast and made me immediately think of you guys because there are so many grumpy people out there complaining about bad website design.

And this is a link to grumpy.website. And it is people complaining about bad website and app design. I didn't think people still complained about that. I mean, I know we've done 25 fucking years, so yes, people still complain. Shocking. Yeah.

Oh, my God. People complain like us. Steven writes in regarding the G Suite unlimited storage. This has been an open secret in the Reddit data hoarder community for some time now. While it's true that the EULA in advertising states that you need five users for unlimited storage, Google doesn't actually enforce it.

I have a single user G Suite account and I've had unlimited storage since I signed up. Now, here's the problem I have with that. They don't enforce it until they do. And when they do, how they enforce it can become a problem. If they give you some time to maybe like have to pay for five users and go back in time and say, well, you've been you've had unlimited storage for three or four years.

So you owe us, you know, four user accounts going back four years. If you want your data back, that could be a problem. They could just say, OK, you have to up your fee to either get five users or pay the ninety nine dollars a month. If you've gone over the two terabyte limit for the twenty dollars a month, that could be a possibility.

So I like to stick to the letter of what they're selling, because that way I have recourse if something does go wrong. Yes. But we have about it. Yes, I will tweet about it vigorously. I will vigorously tweet about it. But yeah, just using a loophole to get free unlimited storage.

Storage to me is sacrosanct and I need it to work. So I would never use the loophole or at least rely on it. If I'm just throwing up, you know, movies you get off BitTorrent because you need a place to stash them, that's fine. But I'm talking about my entire photo archives. I need something that's going to be robust and has, you know, has an uptime guarantee to it as well.

And that's why I pay for what I pay for. All right. David writes in. I know you guys have talked about Spotify and I believe you mentioned its recent acquisition of The Ringer. Matt Stoller has done a bang up analysis of Spotify's strategy to do to podcasting what Google and Facebook did to publishing. I thought it might interest you.

Thanks for the show. And he sends a link to an article called, Will Spotify Ruin Podcasting? Betteridge's Law? Actually, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is the anti-Betteridge's Law. This one actually is true. Spotify can very much ruin podcasting. Because there's another one that we have after this from Eric Hundley.

Spotify is trying to become podcasting's gatekeeper. We mustn't let them. So you've got some pieces here you want to talk about. Talk about these and then I'll talk about mine. We'll go ahead and skip that because that was more about the music industry. And I've talked about that ad nauseum over the last seven years. They just did the same kind of crap where they basically tried to take over music, did, and then charged everybody for it, including the artists and the music labels.

So it's all in that article. Really interesting. And, you know, they're going to try to do it to podcast too, in theory. We'll see. So take it away. Okay. So yeah, Adam Tinworth wrote this other article over at onemanandhisblog.com. Good domain. I like that. So yeah, the thing about Spotify and podcasting is it makes me queasy right now.

I mean, we have to be there because we're a small publisher. People need to get the show. More people listening to the show is better for us right now. So we're making that Faustian bargain with Spotify, even though like 14 people out there listen on Spotify. But, you know, I hear more and more people every day saying, oh, I found you on Spotify.

I'm like, oh, fuck. Yeah, it's starting to work. People are actually going to search for podcasts on Spotify now. Not a lot of them, but it's starting to turn. Yeah. And the problem is Spotify is an open standard. I mean, not Spotify. I wish Spotify was an open standard. Podcasting is an open standard that anybody can play with.

It's just an RSS feed with enclosures. And that is the powerfulness of podcasting. Anybody can do it. You can write your own player for it if you want. You can do whatever you want to with it. But when you start to give these big companies this much power, you do get, you know, the next Facebook.

You do get the next Google. You start to build these walled gardens where the general public doesn't understand that you can get a podcast anywhere. You don't have to go to Spotify. And I also see it as fucking predatory from Spotify because the only reason they like podcasts so much is because they have to pay less for music when you're listening to a podcast and not listening to the latest Coldplay album or some crap like that.

And so I just, I see Spotify's, you know, interest in podcasting is supremely disingenuous. They don't care about the medium. They don't care about any of the art that we create. What they care about is not having to pay for music and getting your $9.99 a month. And especially when it comes down to the, you know, the, the walled garden aspect of it, which is we are going to create shows and we're going to keep them to only Spotify listeners, which technically means they're not a podcast anymore.

That's just a paid piece of content, but I can go on for a long time here. Let me just ask you a quick question about this, Jason. Are, is this a good argument that we're happy that Apple has never bothered paying attention to podcasts or giving a crap about their podcast system? Because if they had, they'd be doing the same thing that Spotify is now trying to do.

I don't think Apple would do that because it is an open standard and they do kind of have a history of, you know, believing in things like that. I do think that Apple, if Apple did pay attention to it, um, we might just have a better ranking algorithm in the store.

Uh, and I think what Apple has done has been fantastic because they really bootstrapped the entire industry with keeping, with putting it in iTunes, you know, that was one of Steve jobs. By staying arm's length away from it. Exactly. They're just providing you a gateway to find more podcasts. The, the Apple podcasts directory is basically, you know, that's the gold standard.

That's it. It is the old Yahoo. And nobody has come along to unseat them. And I don't think anybody is going to unseat them. That's where everybody turns to get their podcast listings. I mean, everybody, so I mean, what Apple has done by not giving a fuck about podcasting is the best thing that has ever happened to podcasting.

When you think about it, that's what I was wondering. So, yeah, having said all of that, if Spotify would like to buy us, we are whores. You know, that's the, that's the other thing. If you want to give us a bucket of money, I'm getting closer to retirement age and I can only tilt it so many windmills.

Yes. And Josh writes in, are you entering puberty because you just dropped two balls? One, your balls must pivot. Testicular torsion is not a joke. Two, what should have been a joke is mentioning that Manscaped isn't available in Australia. You can't trim down under if you live down under.

It was a major missed opportunity. Well, here's the funny thing. Testicular torsion. Yeah, it's a joke. Sleep with your underwear off for an hour. They kind of come back to where they were. Not a big deal. The Australia joke is pretty funny, but the funny thing about getting this is the last time we did Manscaped ads, they were geo-targeted to the U.S. and Canada.

So, the Australians didn't even hear it this time. So, sorry, Josh. You basically, you dropped two balls on your own. Just keep them nice and clean. Keep them clean with the Lawn Mower 3.0. Jason writes in, I'm listening to Science Rules with Bill Nye.

The recent episode speaks of memory and much of the research shows that forgotten memories are not lost. We just lose access to them and they can sometimes be recovered during brain surgery. It made me think of you guys because it seems our brain also does not delete anything. It just sets visibility to zero.

Thank you, Jason. And Adelante writes in, hey guys, thought I'd share this. I know it's long, but I thought it was interesting, though not surprising. Makes you wonder what else we don't know about? I'm sure plenty. And this is a very long article over on MSN. The intelligence coup of the century. For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries.

Yes, this happened quite a while ago. So, this for more than half a century. And this is the kicker. Governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers, and diplomats secret. Boy, that was dumb. The company was called Crypto AG and it got its first break with a contract to build code making machines for the US troops during World War II.

Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and finally silicon chips and software. It's a Swiss firm that made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century, including Iran, India, and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But guess what? Crypto AG was actually secretly owned by the CIA and a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. They rigged the company's devices, basically put in back doors, so they could easily break the codes that countries use to send encrypted messages. There you go.

I love this. This is why the CIA is the CIA. Well, and this is why there's a big argument about not using Huawei devices for our 5G networks. That's true. That is true. At least, you know, at least we were smart enough to keep it under wraps. Huawei is pretty much right out front saying, yeah, not us.

Yep. Not us. So a good lesson if you're trying to start a foreign government. Build your own secure stuff. Don't outsource it. Yep. All right. Over at iTunes, radio teacher writes in, Papa Bittner pointed me to GOG a few years ago, and now I'm a full member of Team Grumpy.

Thank you, and keep up the great podcast. And that was a five star. Thank you very much. Thank you. They're actually all five stars this week. Woo-hoo! So thank you. One fat DJ writes in, sarcasm, tech, and middle-aged men. What more do we need? Been listening to the podcast for over a year now. It even inspired me to try my own with a good friend with a British twist, but we realized how much effort is needed to make it work.

Ain't it? The fucking truth. Keep up the grumps and continual joy twice a week with your ramblings. Love it. Oh, and more geeky nursery rhymes, please. Amen. When inspiration strikes. I started writing some, actually. Oh, great. We're going to, I'm going to try and roll some of those out.

Yeah. It's going to be fun. And Jack Eber writes in, best grumpy tech podcast ever. These guys are great. They don't just grump about tech. They grump about everything. As a 66 year old, I can dig that. I listen at work where I grump about everything too. Grumpiness is wonderful. Even the ads are great, though.

No one cares if I manscape or let nature run wild. Thanks, Jack. Thanks, Jack. J.V. Ander Beans writes in, episode one, LOLs. Can't believe all Apple is making is a watch. Of course, oil will always be oil. Thus, Exxon having a higher market cap than Apple. Where's your Google Glass, Brian?

I've only been listening since 2018, but dug out the original fossil. You guys have been killing it for years. And please keep going. Stay grumpy. Thank you very much, J.Vander Beans. And JV9876 writes in with another five star. Great show. Also, testing Slack integration.

Testing to help out the podcast to see if they got Slack notification. Also, these guys are fortune tellers. They humorously illustrate how over-optimism in tech can be dangerous or just plain entertaining. It's good to get a cautionary take on tech security and pop culture. Keep on grumping. And by the way, to everybody who wrote in, yes, it fucking worked.

It did work. The Slack integration worked. It was one of the other highlights of podcast movement because we were sitting listening to a boring talk. And I went, hey, Jason, it worked. It worked. Oh, man. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air.

And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and snarky review and keep clicking those stars in overcast. We love it. Closing shout outs. Quick shout out to our friend Dan Nitro Clark, who bought us lunch at podcast movement.

That was very nice of you. Oh, yes. Thank you for that. That was a nice lunch. Delicious. It was a very nice lunch. It was basically the highlight of podcast movement. And go check out Dan's show. It's over at thegladiatorway.com. We've actually rebranded the show, Calm the Beast, to be a little bit more Gladiator-like.

The new episodes will be coming out very soon. But we've got 23 episodes back in the can. And I hope you go and subscribe and join us on that journey. And we appreciate all the feedback we've gotten so far. So 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 GOG.show slash donate. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it. Show notes for this episode are GOG.show slash 415. Is that the area code for Silicon Valley? No, it's 415.

Yeah, it is 415. I've got a 415 number. Yeah. There you go. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

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