418: Seven Miles per Hour

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. I got a weird email this morning, Brian. Okay. From Insight. All right. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, hmm, this is interesting. It's talking about the Data Privacy Act of 2039. And I click on the link and it says, let's get real.

We all know your data is out there, but it's your data. It's your life. And the person who benefits from that should be you. After years of lobbying from Insight and other privacy advocates, Congress has finally taken a stand against big data companies. Recent class action lawsuits and congressional subpoenas have exposed decades of corruption in Silicon Valley.

Now the days of corporate exploitation and political manipulation are finally over. Going forward, all companies will have to comply with strict consumer privacy protection laws that will allow you to control your data. Starting today, your life will be yours again. And then as soon as I was done reading that, boom, up pops a trailer for Westworld.

I forgot that I had signed up for their fake company emails. Oh, there you go. That's pretty clever, actually. I like to see when shows do these sorts of things. I miss it. We used to do this. I miss it. It used to be guerrilla marketing back in the day. Back in the day.

Very nice. Very nice. So if you still haven't seen the trailer, we talked about it last episode, go watch the damn trailer. It's great. Yeah. Doesn't that start in a couple of days, weeks, next week? I don't know. Sometime soon. Very exciting. I didn't watch the trailer again. It's like, I don't know.

When it shows up in my little app and says, hey, there's a new episode of Westworld, then I'll watch it. Excellent. And a little more follow-up here. State court says it isn't theft to remove an unmarked law enforcement tracking device from your car. This comes back to an episode that we did on security, huh?

About the Warwick County Sheriff's Office who got a search warrant for this guy's house because they had put a GPS tracker on his car. And when he found it, he took it off. Oh, surprise. Hmm. Shocking. Yeah. Yeah. So they waited 10 days to see if it started working again.

And then they applied for a search warrant for his home and nearby property because they thought that he had stolen it. And remember, this is an unmarked GPS device that he just happened to find on his car. Well, when they did that search warrant, they found methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.

Evidence, police say, to show that he had been dealing drugs. So this has been going through the courts. And well, guess what? But it apparently is just fine to take somebody's GPS tracker off your car if it is unmarked.

And the state court said last Thursday, Indiana's high court made it official, ruling that the search warrant that allowed police to recover hearing's meth was illegal. The police had no more than a hunch that hearing had removed the device, the high court said.

Classifying his action as theft would lead to absurd results, the court noted. Gotcha on a technicality. To find a fair probability of unauthorized control here, we would need to conclude that the Hoosiers didn't have the authority to remove unknown, unmarked objects from their personal vehicles.

Chief Justice Loretta Rush wrote for a unanimous court. So, you know what? Granted, the guy's a meth dealer and he's going to get off scot-free on this one. But rightly so. Rightly so. Yes. It doesn't, you know, he did something wrong, but that's all right in this case.

Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. That's interesting. So good job, courts. Well done. Yeah, we finally have a good outcome from the courts. I don't know what to do with this show. We had something positive here. Well, positive because a meth dealer got to go free.

Well, you know, it is our show. That's about as positive as we can get. You take the good with the bad and there you have the facts of life. It really is the facts of life. The facts of meth. In the news. Well, we've talked quite a bit about Clearview AI and their kind of horrible situation and business model.

But guess what? The company that has the largest facial database in the world, probably close to it anyways, that is being hired by law enforcement agencies to help with their facial recognition, got hacked. Yeah, this is a good one.

They actually got their entire list of customers in private data. Whoopsie. Yeah, so they didn't get the whole like facial database or anything like that because I saw a lot of misleading headlines that said that they got everything. They got the client list and some other stuff, but not good, not a good deal.

So if you're a law enforcement agency, obviously it's a big deal because you depend on them as a service provider to have good security. And it seems like they do not. No, they do not. Yes. What are you going to do, man? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Well, guess what you're going to do?

You're going to go buy some DoorDash stock because they're about to go public. No, I am not. This is another company I will never invest in. Yeah, because when you get your stock from DoorDash, it's from some other company and it's probably upside down and cold.

That's right. So, yeah, they have finally filed and they're doing a, what is this thing called? A confidential IPO filing, which allows startups that are still in quote unquote growth mode and in parentheses, I love this, often unprofitable to explore the early stages of setting themselves up for a public listing without the public scrutiny that comes with the process.

WeWork may have wanted to, like, check that out first because that's what killed them. Oh, by the way, have you finished the We Crash podcast yet? Not yet, no. Have you started it? Not yet, no. Don't. Oh, okay.

Here's my pro tip for the week. If you were going to listen to the WeWork We Crashed podcast on Wondery, you don't have to because if you've been a fan of this show, you've heard all the headlines all along and all they do is basically read off a lot of the headlines. And when you get to episode two, there's a giant hole, two or three, because they stole an interview from Rich Roll, his podcast, that he didn't give them permission to do.

And then they just took it on their own and said, hey, we're going to run your interview. And they said it was just a clerical error and they were going to ask for permission and give him credit. But no, they did not. So that episode now has a complete hole in it that kind of makes the rest of the episode fall apart. So skip that podcast.

It was, you know, it's really well produced. I mean, Wondery does really good production. But the problem is the entire thing was pretty thin and it was just a lot of stuff we already knew, honestly. Right, right. Yeah. But yeah, skip that and skip the DoorDash IPO.

Will do. Found another really interesting article here. I don't know if you know who Dennis Prager is, Jason. He's been a long time Los Angeles area talk radio staple. Yeah, the name's very familiar. He's a very religious guy and he does a show called, I think, Prager on the Right or Prager on something or other.

A lot of stuff about morality and things of that nature. And he takes phone calls and all that sort of stuff. Oh, something I would never listen to. Yeah, something you would never, ever be interested in. But I've listened to him on and off in the past and I found his show to be generally pretty good. But apparently he has this thing called Prager University, which basically, what's the number one rule about building our own castles?

We should do that not on other people's land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's built out Prager. Don't build it in somebody else's backyard if you don't want them to turn on the sprinklers at night and get you all wet. Well, that's exactly what happened to him. So he built out this thing called Prager University, which has a lot of right wing propaganda, apparently.

And he built it on YouTube. And YouTube, I guess, started to pull some of his videos because they did not like some of the stuff. I guess apparently lying about climate change, denying that straight people get HIV, viciously vilifying Muslims, and declaring that men get turned on by any sight of female flesh.

I've never heard these things out of Dennis Prager before, but apparently this is up there. And YouTube said, well, we're going to pull some of this down. And he said, no, I have a First Amendment right. And he's been suing, basically. And finally, the court said, no, you actually don't have a First Amendment right.

YouTube does not, as a private company, does not have to host your videos if they do not want to. No shirt, no shoes, no service. No service. So, yeah, I mean, it's good to know this. I think it was somewhat ridiculous. You can't force a private company to do anything.

That's just not right. So there you go. Yeah, it's called terms of service. Maybe read them next time. Yes. And this isn't really tech, but it's certainly in the news. And I just, you know, I love it when the headlines are questions. That's something we do here on this show.

And this is over on Slate. So should you panic about coronavirus now? No. No, you shouldn't panic about the coronavirus. However, there are some reasons to be concerned here. As we heard the news this morning, I don't know if you heard, but friends of the show, Sean and Tara, who live in Tokyo, posted that Tokyo or Japan has closed schools until April.

Yep. All of them. All about that. Yeah. Yes. So while we have had the CDC here announced that basically there will be an outbreak, it's most likely going to happen here in the States. There's no way it's not going to happen. Something is going to happen. One should not panic about getting the disease so much as you should probably start to prepare for the possibility of things like your kid not going to school for a while or maybe stocking up so you don't have to go to the grocery store for a while or things of that nature.

For people that live paycheck to paycheck, this could be a very serious issue. So that is something that you may want to prepare for a little bit. Yeah. And, of course, because my roommate has been going crazy with her friends and do we got to prep, prep, prep, prep, we need beans.

Everybody go buy beans. I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ. Okay. Prepper 101. This is what nobody thinks about and as being an ex-prepper from the old days. Yes, you are. You are intimately familiar with these thoughts. I am a reformed prepper.

Here's the thing that you need to really buy the most if you're going to be hunkered down that nobody thinks about. There's two things, actually. First thing is alcohol because you're going to need it to get through the days. The second thing is toilet paper. That's really what everybody forgets.

They're all worried about the food, the consumption, but they're not thinking about the next day when you got to wipe your booty. So that's the one thing that everybody forgets to put on their shopping list. So if you are thinking about the coronavirus and you do want to be a prepper, which you shouldn't because it's dumb.

Oh, by the way, I went to go get doihavecoronavirus.com. Since I had doihavepigflu.com, it's taken and it's for sale for $10,000. And I found a couple other variants of it because I think these people read my blog post back in the day when I made a bunch of money from doihavepigflu.com.

Well, I got to tell you, the amount of spam email I'm getting related to the coronavirus is through the roof at the moment. Oh, I haven't gotten any because I use Gmail and they filter shit out like that. But yeah, yeah. I mean, and we're in Southern California, which is probably Southern California, like here in L.A. and San Francisco, probably San Francisco more than L.A.

will probably be where any major outbreaks happen because these are the landing spots for most of the flights from China or anybody coming from China. So we'll see. We'll see. But I'm not worried about it one bit. Well, you don't leave your house. I'm literally more worried about an earthquake than I am the coronavirus.

And yes, I do not leave the house. I can always order DoorDash. You can always have the coronavirus brought directly to you. Cold and lifeless. Delivered directly. Exactly. I ordered coronavirus. Why did you bring me hep C? Come on.

Amazing. Now, there's something going on over on Twitter, shockingly enough, and regarding the presidential race and all this sort of stuff. And I just get so confused by Twitter and all the social media pronouncements about what their rules are and their actual enforcement of them.

So Mayor Bloomberg is running what I guess could be considered a groundbreaking online campaign. Because he's a guerrilla campaign. It's a guerrilla campaign. There's no doubt about it. He is spending a lot of money and has hired a lot of very smart, maybe not necessarily on the straight and narrow people.

He hired the guys that did the Fyre Festival. Did he really? Come on. That's amazing. Yes. Yes. The people that are doing his media campaign are the people that created the Fyre Festival. Well, one cannot... You tell me how well this is going to go. Well, the end result may not be good, but you cannot deny how good they were at getting people to go.

Which is exactly what his campaign is supposed to be doing right now. It's supposed to be getting people to vote for Bloomberg. So he's doing a whole bunch of stuff online. A lot of memes being done. There's the ones in question in particular is he sent out a few tweets, which the Bloomberg campaign called satire, featuring fictitious quotes attributed to Bernie Sanders, in which Sanders appears to praise dictators like Kim Jong-un, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin with the hashtag, hashtag Bernie on despots.

So Bernie never said any of this stuff, obviously, and they're attributing these quotes to Bernie, and they're saying that, you know, of course these things were satire and a joke. And to their defense, if you see all the tweets in context viewed together, it is kind of obvious that they were satirical.

However, that's not the way algorithms on these social medias work, does it? That's right. You see one, and you do not see them together, and you do not see them in context. So Twitter is saying, well, we don't have to pull these, but a lot of people are saying, well, maybe you should have, because that's kind of going against some of the terms of service that you guys have set up.

Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Here's the deal. I mean, I read the stats on Bloomberg so far. He spent over $400 million on Google ads and Facebook ads, which comes down to 30,000 ads being shown to people on the internet per minute.

Yep. Per minute. So here's the thing, though. The only people that are going to get rich off this campaign are Google and Facebook, because he is never going to get the presidency. Everybody is piling on this guy. He's like, you know, trying to rewrite the history of stop and frisk at this point.

It's just not going to work. Oh, man. Oh, well, just more money in Facebook's pocket. But, Michael Bloomberg, if you're listening to our show, we will run your ads. No problem. We will definitely run your ad. We'll take your money. Yes.

And in the autonomous driving area, still 20 years out. Moving on. No, just kidding. Yeah, moving on. No. So there's a company called Easy Mile, which is autonomous shuttle rides. They're running in 10 U.S. States right now. But U.S. Vehicle Safety Regulators have suspended operations for them after a passenger in Ohio was injured in a braking incident last week.

According to the NHTSA, the battery-powered bus service will be halted in 10 U.S. states while it investigates safety issues related to both vehicle technology and operations. This is the second incident that has occurred. So somebody gets injured in a braking incident, and they stop operations for the company.

Tesla kills how many people now? They've actually killed people with their faulty technology, and they still get to sell the cars? Where's the fairness here? Oh, wait. We don't live in a fair world. That's right. What are you talking about, fairness?

You want fairness and consistency? That doesn't happen on this show ever with any company ever. What I was confused about by this is a passenger fell from their seat after the shuttle made an emergency stop. The vehicle had been traveling at a blistering seven miles per hour.

It's like the ad where your hair is flying back, and you have to grab your martini because it's going to go flying off the table. Oh, seven. Seven miles an hour. So I think this could have easily been solved by, I don't know, I didn't look. Seat belt. I think a seat belt would have solved this problem.

Yes. Oh, God. You have all the technology and brains in the world to create an autonomous vehicle that has cameras and LiDAR all over it, and you don't put in fucking seat belts. Yep. I love the future, man.

I fucking love the future. We got you a jet pack. No breaks. Apps and doodads. And we talked a couple weeks ago, a couple episodes ago, God knows when. I don't remember anything anymore, about Venmo and mobile payment apps.

I didn't know quite how many people were actually using them, but it's pretty shocking. About four in five Americans use mobile payment apps, according to a new survey from NerdWallet. And two-thirds of payment app users say they have kept a balance in their payment apps. Bastion of journalism, NerdWallet.

Hey, man. Go back to our early shows. We said BuzzFeed was a piece of crap that would never amount to anything. Now it's the major news stores of the country. We ate massive piles of shit on that one, didn't we? Yeah, we're usually right. We were not right about BuzzFeed. Yeah.

Yeah. So just how much may surprise you, 46% of people surveyed keep more than $100 in their account. And the average for how high users will let their balance get before withdrawing is up to $287 now. Now this is the time to point out that while bank accounts are FDIC insured, which means if you're a victim of fraud or your bank fails, the government covers up to $250,000 in your account.

Mobile apps, not so much. So don't leave your money in there. Outside of the fact that you could, of course, be making a tiny amount of interest if you actually kept it in a real account. Take your money out of these things. Don't, don't, don't, don't leave it in there. So on some of my accounts, I actually do keep a fairly high balance.

And the one that I keep my bias balance in is PayPal, which is honestly, I know, the dumbest one to keep a balance in. Because they are so draconian and they could just say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We have, we have reports of you doing something bad.

So we're just going to keep your money and we're going to never tell you what you did bad. You use the word Cubano sandwich. Yes, exactly. So thank you very much because now we're going to take your money and go buy a bunch of Cubano sandwiches. So I, I, I need to get better at this.

I, I'm, I'm guilty of this. I think everybody does just clear, clear it out, leave, leave, you know, 20 bucks, 30 bucks in there for, so you can Venmo your, your, your employees for the lunch payments and things like that. But don't leave a lot of money in these things ever. Yeah.

Cause refunding them is free. Like it's tied to your bank account. So refunding the account doesn't cost you anything. So take the money out and do it that way. Because I mean, that's the, really the way to do it. I, I did find out cause we just talked about Apple cash on the last episode and I did, I was able this morning to actually tie my Apple cash account as a payment source on Apple pay.

So I actually went to Trader Joe's this morning and I paid for my eggs and my chips and my, my, uh, hard kombucha with my watch and Apple pay. So it works. It actually works. So I'm trying to clear that out. Yeah.

Oh yeah. I know we live in the future, man. I pay with my fucking watch. Come on. Seven miles an hour, Jason. Seven miles an hour. Exactly. Without a seatbelt. Brick a Brick. I found this story and I just thought this is great.

Um, oh, Apple. Oh, lawyers. Gotta keep them busy. According to Knives Out and Star Wars, The Last Jedi director, Rian Johnson, Apple has strict stipulations in its product placement contracts that its devices cannot be used by any villainous characters.

This explains a lot. Doesn't it though? I don't know if you remember like when 24 first started, you could tell if, if the good guys or the, who the good guys are. The good guys and the bad guys were before the, before you got to the part in the story, like if they were using a Mac or a PC, because the good guys always used Macs and the bad guys always used PCs.

That was just something that we all, all knew. We were like, oh, that guy's going to turn. No, don't listen to him. Don't listen to him, Jack. No, no, no. He's going to stab you in the back. He's got a PC. He's running windows. You're screwed. And without fail every time. So now we know why.

Yes. He went on to say, Apple, they let you use iPhones in movies, but this is very pivotal. If you're ever watching a mystery movie, bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera. Every single filmmaker who has a bad guy in their movie that's supposed to be a secret wants to murder me right now. So they all know the code.

And it's not clear when this policy was implemented, though, because if you go back to 2013 and you think about House of Cards, Frank Underwood, he was always using Apple devices. So he wasn't a villain. Come on. Oh, you see him as the hero. He was the hero. He was the hero.

You have such an interesting outlook on like. I'm sorry. I still miss Doug Stamper. He was my favorite. Well, he does hair commercials now. Yeah. And he killed Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Oh, yeah, that's right. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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

Shop now at QVC.com. And we are here with Andy Stochansky, who wrote our awesome Exit song.

And I've known for quite some time. And I wanted to have you on because we talk a lot about the music industry and music on here as well as technology. And I thought, who better to talk to because you've been doing this music thing for a very long time. You want to give us some of your career highlights?

Toot your own horn a little bit. Introduce yourself. Okay. First of all, thanks for having me on. Okay. Highlights. Started with a ton of bands in Toronto when I was around 20 years old.

And then was seen by Ani DeFranco. So I did a tour and recorded with her for seven years. After that, decided I really needed to do my own thing. Like, I was just really chomping at the bit for that.

And jumped the Ani DeFranco tour and found myself writing on guitar. You started as a drummer, right? Were you always a multi-instrumentalist or did you pick all that up as you went along?

You know, I did the piano lessons at the end of the street thing when I was a kid. And I hated it. But now, of course, I'm so glad that my parents made me do that. So, yeah, I was always making songs. If it wasn't piano and my parents bought me a drum kit, I have no idea what they were thinking on that.

But, yeah, I practiced when they would be out of the house. And so, okay, so I'm doing seven years with Ani and suddenly I got to teach myself guitar. And I was seen in a bar. It was like a scene from a movie that never happens and it actually happened.

I was seen in a bar by RCA Records and got signed as a singer-songwriter with them. So, suddenly I made two records with them. And at the end of the two records, that's when all the kind of reshuffling happened.

And when Napster was around and everybody was losing their deal and I lost my deal, lost my manager. You were in the process of writing your third album at that time, right? That's actually when we met. Yes. Yes. And, you know, I thought, okay, when the whole record company thing ended, I thought, what do I want to do?

Like, what actually makes me really happy to get up in the morning? And I realized it was when I was co-writing with other people because it allowed me to kind of just jump the genres, which is something I've always, I've loved all kinds of music.

So, suddenly it was like, this is the job for me. I can kind of, you know, jump all these different kinds of things I love, co-write with other people. And that's what I started to do. So, I moved to LA and started co-writing about 10 years ago.

And, you know, I've had success with co-writing, nothing major in the U.S. I mean, I think the most major thing was doing, you know, something with the Goo Goo Dolls, with Johnny, or having a track with Cider Sky and Twilight movie.

And I thought, I really want to make another record on my own again. So, around a year ago, I decided to make my own record. And I wrote and produced everything on my own, which is something I haven't done in 10 years.

I thought, God, there's no way I can write on my own. I need to co-write. But I did it all on my own. And I called it White Elephant Orchestra to be able to just give me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. And I made eight songs.

Excellent. Now, one of the interesting aspects for me that I think has changed so much, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Think about the first album that you recorded and the technology that you used. You were probably in a studio with an SSL desk and all of that sort of stuff, right?

And I bet you did 99% of this album in your room on your laptop. Exactly. That's exactly what I did. Yeah. Do you find that freeing? Yes. All right. The only negative of that is that I start getting complete cabin fever because I'm all alone.

Right. So I'll, you know, I'll go out at night or, you know, talk to people and I'll be just like, hey, how are you? Like just completely psycho because I haven't talked to human in days. That's the negative side of it.

Yeah. You're talking to two people who work from home too. So we totally get that. Yeah. The other thing, do you think, do you think there's a negative to it that the barrier to entry is so low now? Yes. So, yeah, that's what, that's what I see too. I just see a lot of really, really bad music out there.

People who haven't put in the time. You have to basically, and to anybody who's listening is about to dive in, you have to get above the fray of the billion songs that are being put every day.

I talked to a music supervisor and she gets, you know, a few hundred songs a day. Right. So not enough time to even listen to them. No. How are you going to stand out from that? Like you, this, yeah, it's almost impossible. So, yeah, because I think you're, of all the people I know, you're probably one of the most, you consume the most music.

You listen to so much music, which I assume feeds into the inspiration for your own stuff as well. But you probably know better than I do just how much music out there is not done well or isn't fashioned well because there is such a low barrier to entry now.

Anybody with a laptop can write a song and put it out. Yeah. Yeah. And we see that. The other thing about putting out songs in the day of, you know, getting, you know, music supervisors getting hundreds of songs a day is that the shelf life of a song, if you have it, if you have some fans or listeners or somebody's interested, the shelf life these days is like two, three weeks tops.

And you have to keep putting out content. So that's why you always see people doing something new every four or five weeks or else they'll just kind of lose momentum. Yeah. Well, that's another thing that I think technology has done, streaming certainly.

The album as a format is dead. It's just releasing singles regularly, right? Yeah. So everything has to be a single. Everything has to be a single. That's something I really fought hard against. Because my entire life, my life has changed because of albums that I've loved.

And I know that's, you know, for you as well. Yeah, definitely. The best songs were usually the deep album cuts, right? Completely. The ones that you grew to love more. But we don't have that time frame for music anymore, like you were saying. A song lasts two to three weeks tops and that's that.

You don't go back and revisit and discover new things. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird. But, you know, you have to kind of, for me, I had to learn that. And I had to learn that, you know, I put out a record that was eight songs and people are like, what's a record?

Like, I had to release it single by single against my will. Here's the other thing against my will is that I'm a completely private person. So, for me to Instagram something is, you know, like cutting away part of my soul.

You can't survive in today's day without they doing that. Yeah. Well, that was actually the very next thing I wanted to talk to you about. You know, back when you started again, you, you know, the record label would come and take pictures of you. And then they would set up some interviews for you to do.

And that would be that. Yeah. They don't even do that anymore. You need to do it all yourself. The technology, again, in one hand, I assume it can be a very powerful thing to be in control of your own presence. But the need to do it, you have to now be on every social network and you have to promote yourself constantly.

Constantly. Yeah. Yeah. And that, like, for me to do that is the hardest thing in the world. Well, yes, I know you so well. But the funny thing is I found that a lot of musicians, especially front people, be them male or female, or I guess in this age, we have to say, be they, they, whatever they may be.

I find them generally, most of the ones I've met are very private people. And it is difficult. Like, the old style format of just, you know, having to do some interviews with a journalist, fine. But, like, actively being out there and engaging directly with fans is very uncomfortable.

Here's, yeah. Like, for me, going live on Instagram, like, I haven't crossed that hurdle yet. You have to do it. And here's another thing, like, things that I see throughout my day, you know, just used to privately inspire me to make art or to make music.

And now, those things that I see, I have to put up on Instagram, and I feel like I'm worrying out the very things that used to, that are now, you know, used to inspire me. You're giving away your mojo. Completely giving away my mojo.

It's like, but you've got to do it. Because now, you are your own A&R guy, your own A&R person, marketing person, and you have to do it all now. Yeah. Yeah. It's a completely different world than the one we came up in, isn't it?

I do like one of the things that you are doing, I think, which is really ingenious to get your kind of promote yourself. I love the Spotify playlists that you're building all the time. Wow. Thank you. I used to have a radio show that was, like, Wednesday afternoon in Toronto.

And it was one of the coolest, most powerful stations in Toronto that kind of seriously, like, politically left of center, but underground. Little college station that was incredible. And I would imagine someday somebody's going to do a documentary about it.

Okay. So I've got this afternoon show. Somebody gives this, you know, this person gives me this radio show, but says, you can't just play the stuff you love. You have to find new stuff every week. And that was like going to school, literally, for me. Because suddenly I had to learn what, like, you know, a free jazz song mixed into, like, a reggae song mixed into an African song.

It all had to blend. And that still, today, I still use that today, all the time in my work. That's amazing, yeah. And I think that's really a great way to consume music. But do you find for people that you know, or you obviously come in contact with a lot of younger generation listeners at this point now, too, do you think that the technology, the streaming has inhibited that?

Because, you know, you get the algorithm. You listen to this, so you're probably going to want to listen to this. And you get more and more kind of stuck into a genre rather than skipping about. Actually, believe it or not, it's gone the complete opposite. And I only know this from asking people from younger generations, like, what they like.

And genres, as like, there are no walls with what they listen to. In a playlist, young people who make playlists will jump genres like they know tomorrow. It's awesome. So that's a positive. I have no idea how that happened, but maybe it's because everything is so up there on the table on Spotify that they just click through a thousand things.

Right. You know, I've definitely noticed it in the younger musicians. I think about musicians like Lorde or Kay Flay or even Billie Eilish. There are no genres in their songs. No. They're all over the place. It's, you know, it's a goth vocal over a reggae melody.

It's great. It's great. I love seeing that. So going back to your question about technology and what that's done today's music, I pulled over the car in Toronto because I'm listening to, you know, the Billie Eilish single, you know, it's bad guy.

And the vocal, that vocal goes into like this kind of like a white noise feedback thing at that. When she says bad guy, it goes into this like static white noise. And I thought if they wouldn't have made that in their bedroom, that would have never have happened.

Every A&R person would have gone. No way. That's not that's not a single on radio. And there it is getting played on radio. And that was incredible. So there's another positive that you could, you know, they really found their thing, her and her brother in the bedroom because of technology.

That sounds wrong. Oh, Jesus. No, I see what you mean. And I actually hadn't even really even considered that before because I remember sitting in on so many of those meetings with the bands that I worked with and, you know, watching the creativity being kind of dialed back in terms of because of the corporate boardrooms.

Right. And if you can find a way to find something special now, you can avoid that, which is a good thing. The other plus I want to mention is being able to release your music so quickly, like, you know, you could write and record something and have it out the next day on the socials.

And that, I think, is such a great thing. That's true. That's true. Actually, that makes me think about one other thing which I wanted to ask you about, which is how do you get paid now? Because before you'd put out albums, people would buy them, you would get checks.

Now you're basically putting your music out for free. Well, you have, there are people out there who check your royalties for all the things that pay. You can, you know, join these different associations to do that.

With record sales, you have to play live to be able to sell merchandise because you're not really going to sell it unless you're on tour. And so, you know, hence, I predicted that all these bands from the 80s that are now coming to tour, I predicted this four years ago.

I told Lisa that, I said, streaming is not going to pay. They're going to have to go live. And all of a sudden we have reunion tours. Yeah, because those checks stopped coming in, didn't they? Those checks stopped coming. And now we have, like, the police or whoever, you know, talking heads or, you know, we're going to start seeing all those bands or holograms of those bands touring.

And, you know, I don't want to picture somebody post-60 having to tour to pay the rent, but that's going to happen. It's our reality. Yeah, that is the reality now. So I am looking forward to you starting your tour. Oh, thank you.

I cannot wait for somehow, somewhere this is going to happen. Excellent, man. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. We'll have all your links in our show notes so people can find you. And I do recommend checking out Andy's Spotify playlist. They are amazing. Oh, thank you, Brian.

Thanks, Jason. Closing shout outs. Big thanks to Andy Stachansky for coming on. Make sure you check out his site and go listen to some of his music. I did so myself last night, and I forgot how much I like Andy's stuff. Good stuff.

And a bit of sad news from one of my other favorite bands of all time. Mazzy Star's David Roback has passed away at 61. No word why or how or what happened, but, man, I love Mazzy Star. What a great band. Sad news. Never listen to them.

Never listen to them. Never will. Never will. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister, cruising on at 7 miles an hour. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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 at gog.show slash 418. From there, you can find links to old stuff. From there, you can find links to old stuff. Fuck. Just old stuff. Old stuff.

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. And a special shout out to our Montreal Quebecians. 418 area code Quebec.

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