430: Another Day in Paradise
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Summary
Jason DeFillippo and Brian Schulmeister discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic is changing daily life, work, technology, and entertainment. Dave Bittner joins them to consider reopening plans and the uncertainty surrounding testing and immunity.
- The hosts describe disrupted routines, isolation, and the strain of working from home.
- They discuss Jack Dorsey’s relief fund and WhatsApp’s limits on forwarding frequently forwarded messages.
- Technology news includes weather observations, internet capacity, Amazon’s employee testing plans, and lunar resources.
- They consider virtual concerts on StageIt and how prolonged remote work might affect offices.
- The hosts review headphones, a USB-C hub, a portable jump starter, and rechargeable lighters.
- They discuss HBO support on older Apple TVs, gaming, and a TikTok video of Jason’s dogs.
- Parenting, Disney recipes, solitude, and COVID-19 slang feature in their discussion of life at home.
- They recall Swingers and The Coach and Horses before closing the episode.
Key moments
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Life at home
The hosts discuss television, daily routines, an iPhone typing tip, and online groups.
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Technology and pandemic news
They cover relief funding, misinformation, weather observations, internet capacity, employee testing, lunar resources, and virtual concerts.
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Dave Bittner joins
Bittner joins the hosts and describes a phone call purporting to come from his congressman.
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Reopening and its consequences
The three discuss reopening proposals, public health uncertainty, supply chains, and government budgets.
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Coping with prolonged disruption
The speakers discuss pandemic stress, isolation, family routines, and the future of office work.
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Headphones and practical gadgets
They review wireless headphones, a USB-C hub, a portable car jump starter, and rechargeable lighters.
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Streaming, gaming, and TikTok
The hosts discuss HBO support on older Apple TVs, a model of an avid gamer, and TikTok videos of Jason’s dogs.
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Parenting and life at home
The conversation turns to parenting, Disney recipes, an emergency doctor’s article, solitude, and pandemic slang.
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COVID-19 slang
The hosts discuss terms from an article about pandemic slang.
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Swingers closes
The hosts recall visits to Swingers and discuss the closure of its Hollywood location.
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The Coach and Horses
The hosts share memories of the pub that later became The Pikey.
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Closing remarks
The hosts sign off, give the show’s web addresses, and ask listeners for feedback.
Full transcript
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Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.
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And I'm Brian Schulmeister. It's another day in paradise, Jason. Oh, yes, it is, sir. Yes, it is. So last night, I still had that little tiny bottle of Jameson lying around. Jameson's lying around. You can tell I partook of the Jameson's last night. I had what was basically equal, like a glass with two shots in it. Took me about 20 minutes. I think I'm still buzzed from last night. I am so not used to the hooch, but it got me going last night.
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I'm like flipping through Hulu because you knew I had to be drunk if I'm playing around with Hulu because that's the only way that interface makes sense. Yes. So I found Big Brother because they were just putting it up on every screen. So I'm like, I want to go back and watch the first episode of Big Brother. And I watched like five minutes of it and I remembered everything from it. It's crazy because I remember watching it live when it happened.
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And it dawned on me, Big Brother is dead. Nobody, I mean, nobody is going to want to watch people stuck in a house for three months after this ever again. You know, it's, it's, uh, the wife likes to watch her Grey's Anatomy on Thursdays and, uh, she's, she's missed a few and, uh, we actually, you know, got the kid to bed a little bit earlier than the normal last night.
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Praise be to the, the great spaghetti monster or whatever. But, uh, so, um, she was watching some of the old ones and, you know, uh, people have updated, uh, their marketing since this started in the last month. But, uh, if you go back and you watch any TV and any commercials from over a month ago, oh my God, it just feels weird because it's all hippity skippity and, and like problems that aren't actually problems, uh, that people are trying to solve.
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And people hugging and shaking hands and, and running about outdoors. Oh, how nice. What a different world that was. Uh, I scream at my TV, six feet, six feet. People are starting to get a little punchy. I've noticed a friend of the show.
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Mike actually sent me a text this morning before I was even up. He watches, uh, Dan Patrick, which I guess is, it's a sports thing. Jason, you don't know. Okay. Yeah. I'm like, uh, and he sent me a clip of the Dan Patrick show and they're drinking beer and, and Mike just waves a bud light across the screen.
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And this is 6 30 in the morning. So, uh, Mike's going to have a good day. Uh, another friend of mine, as, as, as Bittner said, you can't, you can't drink all day if you don't start early. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, thank God it's Friday, I suppose. And another friend of mine sent me a, uh, uh, here's the new, she's a, she's a single mom, two kids. Um, so that's gotta be a lot of fun. She sent me a picture the other day of her kids, butt ass naked sitting there doing schoolwork saying this is the kind of office environment I'm in now.
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I think that's the kind of office environment most people are in, except they're the ones that are butt naked. Pans optional. Yeah. Everything optional apparently at this point. So yeah, hang in there, everybody. I, I, I did predict this. I said this, uh, I said at the, one of the shows earlier this week that this is going to be a rough week for everybody. And I think it is. So I, I pulled the, I pulled the rip cord. And, uh, uh, yesterday I went down the pajama hole. I did not get out of my PJs.
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I mean, I've been good. I've been really good. I, I take my shower, I take my vitamins, you know, shit, shower, shave and dress up and ready to go. And yesterday I'm just like, it's raining. There's nowhere to go. Why am I going to put on pants?
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Yeah. Yeah. With the rain, there's like no point. At least I was putting on shorts or pants when I was out taking the kid for a walk every day. But as soon as the rain hit, who cares? Exactly. Exactly. So I, I found a little something in the, the read the fucking manual followup that we've been talking about, particularly with the iPad, but this is, this applies to the iPad as well. But I did not know this Jason.
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So this could be one of these tips that I have that you have been aware of the whole time that I just wasn't. Okay. It's the simple iPhone cursor hack that will make texting easier. I have struggled since day one to try to edit texts that I've written. I had no idea that you could do this rather than pausing your typing to hold your finger down on your texts and trying to move your cursor within the magnifying glass that pops up. You can just hold down the space bar and put your little cursor anywhere you want.
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This is proof positive, Brian, that you don't listen to a goddamn thing I say, because when this came out two years ago, I covered it on the show and you're like, that's cool. And I, I think you made fun of me and you go, Ooh, that's neat. And, uh, yeah, yeah. You've known about this for two years, but you just decided to willfully ignore me to find known.
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I know you're trained to not listen to anything I say much like everybody else on the planet, but that's okay. Just say, you know, 10% seeps in Jason, 10%. See, this is a trick that I've learned that, uh, and I'm sure you've learned this as well, being a married, married man. If you tell your wife something, she's never going to listen to you.
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No, but if somebody else tells her, it is, it is gospel. That is the way it works. And Jason, we've been doing this seven years. That's a fucking relationship. Dude, we are definitely married. We're common law. We are absolutely common law at this point. We're common law podcasters.
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You can tell me anything you fucking want. I'm not going to believe it until somebody else tells me. So I need life hacker to tell me. Great. So I'm on a couple of new Facebook groups now for my comedy writing classes. I thought you were not going to do that.
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Well, this is, this is for specific. I got rid of the podcasting ones. The podcasting groups were just a waste of my time because I know more than everybody there. So I'm just answering questions and nobody's helping me. So it was a one way street. I'm like, this is boring. Don't buy a blue Yeti. That's all I have. Typing that over and over. I had a text expander snippet for it.
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So I posted my intro to one of the groups because these are all very private groups. You have to be part of a class to get into them. So they're very small and focused. Right. But I got this and it popped this up. Changes to what group admins can see. This message is just for your information.
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It's not in response to anything you've posted and does not mean we've removed any of your content. Our community standards help keep Facebook safe and welcoming for everyone. If we find that content in a group goes against the community standards, we just remove it from Facebook.
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It doesn't say anything. We remove it from Facebook. Here's where it gets fun. We may also tell the group's admin which standard the content violated. In some cases, we may allow the group admins to see the removed content for up to seven days. What is the point of that response?
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I don't get it because they might do something. They might not do something. Here's what we're going to do. They may not tell them. Yeah. Yeah. I actually pulled my story. We might not. I don't know. I actually pulled a story that I had in for the show later because it was just got awfully written and boring.
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But it was just basically about all content moderators are gone and we're relying on AI and this is the great AI experiment. And I think we already know it's not working. Yeah, please do not talk about your Cubano sandwiches on PayPal if you want to keep your monies. We learned that one.
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And Brian, something that I have not heard anyone say so far is, oh man, I'm so glad I bought all that VR gear so I can go out for virtual walks while I'm stuck at home. Well, you must have stopped listening to our brother podcast from Canada, Geeks and Beats, because that's all he's been talking about.
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The tech guy is so huge into VR and they are so out of topics to talk about that all he does is spooge all over his VR stuff. So there is one guy in the entire universe that is saying basically just that. Yeah, no, I haven't listened to that show for years, but I have not seen anybody anywhere talk about VR as the saving grace for being shut in.
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Well, there's always one. In the news.
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Breaking news. Jack Dorsey has created a $1 billion COVID-19 relief fund using his equity in Square. The problem is you have to go to Africa and he's only giving you $140 at a time. Well, I will give him kudos for creating it, how it gets distributed and all that sort of stuff.
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We'll see. I'm sure that'll change over time. I like the fact that he particularly name checked universal basic income as one of the possible uses of this. That's great. I think the billionaires of the world should actually be particularly the billionaires of the United States.
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You know, this is kind of the thing that we've been talking about even before we were horribly hit by COVID-19, the fact that these companies and this is what Andrew Yang was was kind of talking about, about how he would fund his universal basic income or what he called it, the freedom fund, because, you know, he was running for office and you have to buy freedom fries with your freedom fund.
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Exactly. You know, is the idea that the tech companies that have made their fortunes, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, that have ended up with these billions upon billions upon billions of dollars fortune, they made it off of us.
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And maybe they should be the ones funding the universal basic income. Well, you mentioned Twitter in there. I don't know if Twitter would be any one. They're not really making a lot of money. Well, Twitter hasn't made the money, but Dorsey certainly has. Right, right. That's why he's using his equity from Square, the one that actually does make money.
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But you forgot to mention the second largest company in the world, Apple. They might have a few bucks. Microsoft, they've got a few bucks. Yes, exactly. So, you know, I'm torn on this because I've read tons of articles about the economics and the finances and it's just all screwed up anyways and having to rely on billionaires to save us when the shit goes down is kind of bullshit.
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And it's not the whole point of the federal government was to save us when shit goes down. But apparently that's not happening. So here we are. You know, I applaud this. It's the first thing that Jack Dorsey has ever done that I've applauded.
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And I'm down with it. Do something good with this and figure out a better way to do it. And how about you all hook up together? You know, billionaires, Oprah and Apple and Gates and Zuckerberg and Buffett and everybody like, don't do your own separate thing.
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Let's let's make a gigantic fund to help the American people like our taxes were supposed to do. Yeah, that whole social safety net. Yes, the social safety net that we've all been paying into and we're getting fuck all from. I really like this, that he's like, everything is going to be well, it's called the start small fund.
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And he's posting a tally of the disbursements and receipts in a public spreadsheet. Why not put it on the block chain? That is just a public spreadsheet. That is true. It should be on the block chain. Yes. Oh, God. Well, yeah. I mean, kudos to Jack for this one.
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Everybody jump in. Come on. Yes, please. We desperately need it. The rest of the world seems to be able to take care of their people. Don't get me started. All right. Anyways, moving on. Too late. Move on. On Tuesday, WhatsApp has announced that it will impose strict limits on forwarding of messages.
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It's part of the push to slow the spread of false information about the coronavirus. WhatsApp has been called a petri dish of coronavirus misinformation because we do forget that the rest of the world does use other programs than Facebook or whatever we all use here in the U.S.
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WhatsApp is hugely popular throughout the rest of the world. So it is only permitting users to send frequently forwarded messages, ones that have been sent through a chain of more than five people to just one chat at a time. They will not be restricting how many people a user can send these forwarded messages to consecutively, but the new measure makes the process of mass forwarding slow and inconvenient.
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The goal is for monotony to become a barrier to viral content. Question here, Jason. Go ahead. I have a response. I thought that WhatsApp was end-to-end encrypted and they wouldn't be able to see the messages you were sending, which would make it difficult to put in these kind of filters.
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Actually, no, it's not. If you hash the message, then you have a hash of that message so you know what the individual message is. Granted, if they change one character, then the hash changes. But if they are actually just forwarding along a message, like a message is an entity. That entity has a unique fingerprint.
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They can watch that fingerprint as it goes. And then you can say, okay, this message, and also message ID, they can see the initiating message ID. And if that message ID is being forwarded along because it's a single record in the database, because if you're doing your database right, you're only forwarding on the record IDs, blah, blah, blah.
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Right. So they can fingerprint that without actually having to read the message. Okay. Fair enough. Yep. So, yeah, we'll see. Does it really matter? No. Doubtful. Because the people that are forwarding misinformation are getting paid to forward misinformation for the most part, except your grandmother and your extended family who still think, you know, the conspiracy theory wing of your family.
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They just still. Yeah. The contrail crowd. That's what we'll just call them. Yes. And in another bit of information that makes total sense to me, but I had no idea existed. The coronavirus shutdown is making weather prediction more difficult.
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I assume this is just dark sky trying to apologize for never being able to tell me when it start to rain. But, you know, whatever, I had no idea that this was actually happening, but commercial aircraft help with weather prediction. They take. I did not know this.
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I it makes total sense to me, but I had no idea that commercial aircraft are part of the whole World Meteorological Organization's global observing system. They report weather and they report, you know, temperatures and change in temperature as they're flying along and they provide over 250 million weather observations per year.
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And now that planes aren't flying as much as they were, it's actually starting to affect the amount of data coming in. Now, they're quick to point out that it's not really well, they're saying it's not really affecting how our weather computations are going through because there's so many other vectors and points of information that are coming through, but it is taking a bit of a hit.
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They aren't getting as much information and data as they normally do. So there will be some decrease in skill in some specific situations because we're no longer getting aircraft data. Pretty crazy. That is pretty crazy. Who'd have thunk it? Again, I was like reading this article and I was like, that's fascinating.
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That makes total sense. I had no idea that Delta was helping us figure out what our weather is. I wish they would just help us fly, you know, more comfortably. But, you know, what are you going to do? I found this over at the MIT Technology Review.
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It's why the coronavirus lockdown is making the internet stronger than ever. Now, yeah. I mean, you almost don't even have to read this article. It's like, okay, everybody's using the internet a hell of a lot more. So everybody has to step up and build extra capacity, build extra infrastructure, even though we're all supposed to be staying at home.
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But, you know, that's kind of how things go. So I think after this, this kind of reminds me of the dot-com boom, where all of those companies are like laying fiber and all of this stuff on the promise of a brave new world where everybody will be connected at more than 28 kilobits per second, because that's what we started at.
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And so everybody right now is just like, okay, things are going to change drastically after this is open. Let's get the capacity in there now. So I think that's pretty good. I think it's good, too. And obviously, they're making it so it's scalable up and down, because we won't need this kind of capacity in theory if we ever get out of our goddamn houses.
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But yeah, it's great. It's forcing people to basically invest in the infrastructure that they wouldn't have done if times were good. Right, right. And I don't know about you, but I have noticed in the past three days, I have dropped my like my bandwidth has dropped by 50 percent, which sucks.
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I think it was hitting me before it was hitting you. But that kind of makes sense because I'm sitting here in Silicon Beach, where people are have been using a lot of bandwidth, particularly immediately, as soon as everybody was work from home because, you know, everybody here is working from home and they need a lot of bandwidth because they're working in tech.
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So I think you remember two weeks ago, I told you that that my Netflix was definitely being throttled. So, right, right. But that was that was just Netflix. I don't know if you do like you don't do you don't have an Eero at your home. That's at your mom's home. I do have Eero. I have Eero here and at home, but I just never checked because we've never had slowdowns really.
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OK, yeah, I checked my but we don't use a ton of bandwidth. So, yeah, I checked my speed test. It normally it's usually two fifty two down and twenty two up. Yeah. And it is like one thirty down and eight up. Right. So they have definitely cut it off at the source.
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It's not just Netflix throttling. Right. It is my ISP throttling, which sucks. Yeah. It's not what you hope for. But yeah, you know, I mean, it's not it's not Netflix hasn't changed that much because it still buffers fine because I don't use that much for that. But it's the, you know, the massive files I do.
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No, no, no. It's my job. I'm moved. I had to upload a six hundred and fifty megabyte file this morning. It took forever. Right. So, you know, because I work in audio and these files are big and not just those little MP3s. There's a question about whether we're going to be getting the Expanse or not now because video files are a lot bigger, Jason.
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Yeah. What did they say? They had 12 terabytes of footage that they have to work on. Yeah. Yeah. You ain't getting that over your cable modem, buddy. And I saw this one over at the Amazon blog. Surprise, surprise. So we've we've made fun of them recently for, you know, not stepping up and doing the right thing, the right thing for the Rona.
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And what they've decided to do is they're building their own testing labs. So they're going to be able to test all of their employees instead of having to go out to a third party lab and wait for the tests to come back. Or, you know, our federal government. I don't know if you saw the news this morning, Brian, but they're not doing that anymore.
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No, they've decided they're out of the testing business. So, yeah, that's that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and hey, look, you know, yeah, this weekend is Easter. Isn't everything supposed to be open by now? Oh, that's according to the. Yeah. Well, anyway, so this is a pretty good step up for Amazon.
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So they'll be able to start testing their their employees regularly. And I like that. I like that a lot because. You know what I'd like to if they open their doors to let the public come and do it. Oh, Prime members only. Prime members only. Yes. Welcome. Yeah. For five dollars more, you get Amazon Prime pandemic coverage.
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So. But, you know, they got to start somewhere. So let them. They're not in the business of, you know, testing the public. Like that's what your health care provider is for since the government hasn't done it. So you have insurance. Since you probably don't have insurance and you don't have a job, go apply for Amazon. They're hiring and then you can get tested.
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Get a test. Yes. They're looking for one hundred thousand people right now. So you can get that. That's a perk. That is part of your plan. You have two ways to get testing. You can go get a job with Amazon or you can spit in the face of a rich person. That's right. Or or buy a tiger. That's true.
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Yep. And I saw this in the news just to get away from a little bit. But I'm not sure what the hell we're doing here. But water, ice and other lunar resources will help the United States establish a long term human presence on the moon are just there for the taking, according to the White House.
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Yes, in the middle of all this, when we could be doing things that are important to save American lives, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off Earth resources. We have decided and not joined in with any of the other treaties, including the 1979 Moon Treaty, which stipulates that non-scientific use of space resources be governed by an international regulatory framework that the moon is ours.
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We've got a flag on it. We planted the flag, fuckers. I can see it from my house. It's mine. Exactly. So this new executive order makes it official, stressing the United States does not view space as global commons and sees a clear path to off Earth mining without the need for any international treaty level agreements.
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Stuck a flag in it. It's ours. Fuck off, rest of the world. Well, technically, we were there first. Okay. You know, eminent domain. We'll take it. We've read enough sci-fi books. We know how this works out. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. Next thing we have. Star Wars.
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Space zombies. I found this story over at Variety. And if you're going to go look at this story from the show note links, turn off your ad blocker because otherwise it will reload in a loop endlessly and crash your browser. This is Stage It. The music live stream platform finally comes into its own.
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Well, it turns out since nobody's doing concerts like you mentioned the other day. These guys have a platform that lets artists do virtual concerts. I feel super bad for a friend of the show and a friend of mine, Thomas McNeil, who was working for a startup called Busker that did exactly this that shuttered their doors just last year.
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If they could have held on a little bit longer. Oh, man. Oh, that's got a sting. Oh, man. That's got to be so bummed right now. They just ran out of funding last year and they would have been gone through the roof right now. Oh, man. You should send him some flowers because he's going to need to pick me up.
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He's going to need to pick me up. So, the interesting thing about this is the artists get 80% of the take, which I think is probably better than Ticketmaster. It's better than Spotify. It's better than anything. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good amount of money. I actually, I've checked out the service.
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I had a couple artists that I know that actually did some shows on it. I'm not big on watching the virtual shows. It's not for me. I need the whole live experience. Yeah. I'll never get it again. But as far as these things go, it's pretty nifty. It's, as you would say, neat.
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Okay. You know, see, the problem with the virtual show is there is no virtual audience like you just mentioned. I watched a little bit of the Dropkick Murphy's St. Patrick's Day performance that they did virtually and gave away to the world. Yep.
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It sucked. Yeah. It absolutely sucked because there's no audience. They're trying to get pumped up, but there's nobody there. Eventually, a couple stagehands came in and started a little mosh pit six feet apart, which was really boring. But it was silly. What I find it works for is it doesn't work for band experiences.
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But if you can get the lead singer with an acoustic guitar just sitting there by himself on his couch. Okay. Like, I'm a big fan of the band The Wonder Stuff and the lead singer, Miles Hunt. Now, he's not using Stage It. He's just doing it on Facebook Live. But I've watched those. And, you know, he's just sitting on his couch and he's banging out a couple of his tunes.
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And for that, I don't mind the sit at home and watch the performances. I think that's kind of nice. But if you're trying to recreate a stage show, it doesn't work. It doesn't work at all. You know, I mean, that was one of those things where, like, VR was supposed to be the great savior. And, you know, put in a digital audience.
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So at least we feel like there are people around or something. But, I mean, hey, look, any port in a storm, if these guys can make some money, I don't know if this is going to last because people are going to figure out that, oh, virtual concerts are really fucking boring. Yeah, well, who knows? But what I've found shocking is that they've been around for 11 years.
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They've had some somebody's fun in this thing because nobody's even heard of this company until now. But they've been kicking around for 11 years. Well, hey, man. Well, I tell you what, then. They deserve the paycheck if they've stuck it out this long. So, yeah, good on them.
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Good on them.
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We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast. Dave is also the co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans, with Joe Kerrigan, as well as the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law, policy, and policy, I guess.
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Not law policy. Law and policy. As well as surveillance and privacy, and not surveillance privacy. Yeah, lots of choices there. Yeah, it's word salad. We're just making word salad today. Yeah, it's fine. That works. Everybody else seems to be. Why not us?
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Well, shall we begin our segment as has become our ritual? Yes, please. Oh, yeah, there we go. And guess what, guys? There we go. All right. I'm joining you because to hell with it all.
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Very nice. There we go. Ooh, tasty. Oh, God, I've only got two more shows to do after this. This should be a fun day. Oh, God. So, guys, I got a call from my congressman this week, and I thought, I thought this is the best option for a scam nowadays.
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Because it was like, hello, sir, this is your congressman, blah, blah, blah, because who the hell knows who their congressman is? Right. He's like, well, good for you. Then you would not be taken in by this. You'd get a gold star. What do you want, a cookie? Yeah. And he's like, we know these are troubling times, and if you need some financial assistance or you're in trouble or whatever, call my office at number, number, number, number, number, number, number, number.
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And I'm like, okay, that's a good option for a scam because somebody could just take that and put in one of those numbers where you get charged like 100 bucks every time somebody calls. That's a totally easy one. Yeah, he could also, anybody who calls back, you could say, hello, you know, congressman's office, we'd be happy to deposit that money.
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All I need is your banking information. Yes, or your social security numbers so we can check you on our rolls. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Totally easy one. So, don't call back, people. Don't call back. That's all I'm saying. Don't reach out to representatives at all.
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Trust no one. If you do, go to their website and find the number and then call them. And just don't go from a call from somebody that you don't know with their number because they may have actually taken the original call and then swapped in their number. Yep. Yeah. So, hey, let's talk about the fun stuff.
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Okay. What would that be? I don't know. Got any? Got any? I'm hoping somebody's got something. What is fun these days? You know, I read an interesting article today. This is over on Vox.
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This is written by Ezra Klein, who we're all familiar with. And it's titled, I've read the plans to reopen the economy. They're scary. There is no plan to return to normal. And it's a pretty good article.
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I think it's worth your time. And basically, Ezra has read the plans so that you don't have to. And he's read a variety of them. He's read one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University, SAFRA Center for Ethics, and a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Romer.
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And basically, what it comes down to is that bringing our economy back online in any sort of meaningful way is going to take extraordinary measures, measures with which we are probably not capable of dealing.
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Wait, hang on a second. The individualism of Americans. Yeah. That's Easter. Yeah, come on. That's true. Game over, man. Game over. We're screwed. I just kind of scrolled through it. I hadn't read his take yet, but I have kind of – I've read briefs on three of these plans.
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None of them sound good. Let's put it that way. And nobody has any other thoughts. Yeah. This is kind of – it's going to be some combination of these things. Until there's a vaccine. Right.
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We're not going anywhere. Right. Nothing's going to happen. Well, here's the plan. Chaos, anarchy, and social unrest. That's what's going to happen. Well, and as we're rapidly discovering, there really is no safety net here as opposed to some other countries which will deploy those safety nets and be able to last considerably longer.
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I don't know what's going to happen here. That's the race against time, isn't it? That it's getting a vaccine, which seems to me will be the thing that makes it possible to restore some sort of normalcy. And all of those estimates are 12 to 18 months.
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Right. Right. To do it safely. Yep. Mm-hmm. Fuck safely. Let's just do it. Yeah. Well, you make that as a joke, but I do think that that's eventually going to probably be what happens, which is – We're going to determine that to a certain degree the ability to keep our society held together will overweigh complete safety measures, and I think that that's probably going to happen.
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You want to go outside and get the vaccine. Or prove you've had it. You know, you get the test to show that you have the antibodies, and then you get a piece of paper that is probably easily forged. Papers, please. Yes. Show me your papers and then you can go to the McDonald's. No, no. There's not necessarily – we won't necessarily have papers.
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We may be able to do this electronically. Oh, because we know that is bulletproof. Yeah. Even better. Show me your phone. I want your QR code. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be something like that.
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I mean, and they were talking, obviously, you know, how they're going to try to phase out the end of stay at home, and then it's going to be younger people first. And I had one of those moments where I actually realized I'm not in that group anymore, and it was a bit shocking.
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And you popped another beer and said, have at it, kids. Yeah. So, it's – there's no bright side to any of this.
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No, and I think it's an important – like, I realized today that part of what I think I'm feeling and part of the difficulty I'm having with the many of the things I'm feeling – and believe me, I'm feeling many things – is just the mourning of what's lost.
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It's just the mourning that we're not going back to the way things were, that this is a change, and we're in this for a while. But even on the other side, things are going to be different, and so you have the anxiety of not knowing what that's going to look like.
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You have, I think, the mourning of the loss of what was, and then also the anxiety of feeling that there really isn't anyone at the controls who should be, certainly on the national level. Yeah, well, I have to say, it's been made clear that there is no federal policy here or help.
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You're on your own states. Well, fortunately, Gavin Newsom just came out and said that California is a nation state, and we are going to use our collective bargaining power to buy the stuff that we need, and we will export our goods that we get to the rest of the other states. So, basically, I think this might be a coup.
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Well, it's starting to feel that way, and one of the things that I'm talking about, feeling many, many feelings. I've been feeling many feelings as well, and one of the silver linings that people were potentially talking about in the first couple weeks of this is maybe this will be that proverbial threat from outside.
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The aliens come, and the world unites, and maybe this is going to be one of those things that would unite our country, but I actually see it, obviously, becoming more fractured now, and then we're going the other direction. So, that's not good either, unless you're in California, because, you know, I like my nation state.
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We're doing good over here. We're doing A-OK. It's funny. It's like, yeah. What about Maryland? Here in Maryland, our governor declared today that the Easter Bunny is an essential worker. So, he will be hop, hop, hopping along. Yeah.
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Yeah. Well, you know, I think that's fine. I'm very pleased with what our governor has done so far. Our state is in an odd situation. We have a Republican governor in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, and I have to say, I think he's doing a hell of a job.
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You know, not perfect, but he is showing strong leadership through this, and that's reassuring when it ain't happening at the federal government. Yeah, well, I mean, I will say my wife was from Toronto, and she was in Toronto when SARS happened, and Toronto eventually did get back to normal.
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I mean, it was nowhere near as overwhelming a thing as it is here, but their life will change. Their handshakes are gone. That's not going to be a thing anymore. I mean, you look at the cultures and the countries that were really hit by SARS, South Korea, you know, Asian countries.
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Masks are normal. It's just a thing. If you're sick, you wear a mask. That's it. It's part of the culture. That's going to happen here, I think. I mean, yeah. And, I mean, I just can't even start to talk about the economics and the businesses that are going to be decimated.
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Right. I was worried about Amazon before. This might as well be the United States of Amazon now. We don't even have to change the letters. That's true. It's funny. I actually, I thought I had a link that I was going to put in here about how facial recognition is basically being completely broken because everybody's wearing masks.
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And, of course, because these idiots are stuck at home. They're like, oh, we're trying to fix that already. Like, just, dude, take a break. Take a break. Well, and what an opportunity. You can walk into a bank now wearing a mask, and no one will look twice at you. It's pretty good.
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Well, it was kind of a joke, but I've got this, like, handcrafted Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta, and my N95 mask fits perfectly inside, so I could literally walk in with my Guy Fawkes mask and say, no, I've got my mask on.
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Well, luckily, this is America. Nobody knows who Guy Fawkes is, so you're fine. Well, everybody's seen anonymous, so they'll just shoot me as a hacker instead.
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Yeah, the other, I guess, disappointing but not surprising thing is that it seems like a lot of folks on the right are coming around this message that the fact that it looks like we may have fewer cases than some of the predictions had called for means – doesn't mean that we were all doing a great job and we all followed the rules and we helped bend the curve.
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Yes. No, it means the experts are wrong. Yes, it was all a hoax. Yes, we didn't need to do any of these things. Well, that's why I think eventually we are going to end up breaking – choosing the economy over safety because that's the prevailing thought is we're breaking our economy and, look, it's not anywhere near as bad as people said it was going to be, which is – Well, here's the thing.
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Dave, you're probably on board with me with this because you have winters where you're at. Brian, you've never probably been through an entire winter. You visited winter and you leave. Well, no, I've stayed a full winter multiple times in Toronto, so I am aware. Okay. Okay, so then you'll be familiar with this phenomenon.
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It happens all the time. Every year, you're inside for four to five months. Don't leave. You basically go to the grocery store, come home, and you sit in your house. Then the first day where it hits 45 degrees, everybody is out in shorts, going to the park, walking around, and then three days later, all of those people are sick again.
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And that's what happens every year. I mean, I lived in Chicago for, you know, it's like 10 plus years. And every year that was like clockwork. Everybody's like, hey, oh, my God, it's so great out. I'm used to negative 30. I can wear shorts.
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It's 45. I'm going to go out and party and walk the dog in the park and play Frisbee because there's grass again. And that's what's probably going to happen. I see that snapback. Everybody's going to be like, oh, my God, it's over. We can leave the house. It's like, then it just all starts over again.
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I expect that to happen. They're seeing that in China already. They're seeing it in China. People are getting – the cases are starting to flare up again because they open up borders and people are – asymptomatic people are flying in. And here we go again. Yeah, it's going to be cyclical until we've all got it.
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It's until we get a vaccine. This is it. And the scary thing is there doesn't appear to really be any immunity. If you've had it, you can get it again. That's what they're seeing now. Yay. It's a double whammy. Yeah.
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Although, I mean, I guess we can talk about this here because, Jason, you and I were talking about this a little bit on the Book of the Face. There is a theory that we've already had it here in California. It's been here since October. I think I had it.
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You think you had it, Jason? Three or four of our friends, mutual friends, have thought they had it too. Yeah. I had the craziest, worst illness I've ever had in my entire life in December. And I went to go get tested for the flu and they said I didn't have the flu.
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I had some other virus. There's a theory it's already burned through a lot of California. Although, it doesn't matter if you can get it a second time. Right. We'll see how that goes. You know, because it all depends on the amount of exposure is what they've also been saying. I love how we're all just armchair epidemiologists at this point.
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Well, what else do we have to do? Anything else but watch CNN or whatever news channel of your choice. You know, that reminds me. There was – I saw something come by today on Twitter and I thought I would share. Okay. This is just someone's rant on Twitter and it resonated with me today, so I'll share.
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It says, Please stop saying you researched it. You didn't research anything and it's highly probable that you don't even know how to do so. Did you compile a literature review and write abstracts on each article? Or better yet, did you collect a random sample of sources and perform independent probability statistics on the reported results?
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No. Did you at least take each article one by one and look into the source? That would be the author, publisher, and funder. And then critique the writing for logical fallacies, cognitive distortions, and plain inaccuracies? Did you ask yourself why this source might publish these particular results? Did you follow the trail of references and apply the same source of scrutiny to them?
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No? Then you didn't fucking research anything. You read or watched a video, most likely with little to no objectivity. You came across something in your algorithm-manipulated feed, something that jived with your implicit biases and served your confirmation bias and subconsciously applied your emotional filters and called it proof.
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Scary. Damn, that's good. That is good. Please put that in the show notes because I want to copy and paste that to all my social too. Yeah. All right. Let me... Yeah, because... That rant perfectly matches up with my confirmation bias. It does.
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Oh, God. Absolutely. Absolutely. So my roommate went yesterday to go get the test to see if she's got the antibodies. And we will see... Okay. Unfortunately, it takes a week. This is one of the new ones that's not FDA approved yet. So, you know, we're taking it with a grain of salt.
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No, we're taking it with a grain of salt. Her doctor took it, though. Some guy named Lenny down on the street corner was selling them. I got some coat hangers over here if you want an abortion, too. That's what we did. No. So her doctor, he's convinced he had it as well because in the same time frame, he had the same thing that you had, Brian, and our other friends had.
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He's like, this was... He's a doctor. He's a trained doctor. He's like, this is nothing like I've ever seen before. And so his whole office sent in the test. It unfortunately takes seven days to get back. And he's like, okay, if I come back negative, then the test is bullshit. So we're going to go with that.
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But it's a full blood draw test. It's not like a regular pinprick five-minute test that they just put out. So I'll follow up next week to let you know what the results were. Yeah, I'd be curious. Yeah, we're definitely trying different things. So that's just how you do it.
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You just test and move on, test and move on. That is science. Yeah, that's it. It's like, okay, we'll see how this goes. And if she was exposed, then I got to go get the test to make sure if I was exposed to see if it works. And here's the thing. We're still being careful.
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We're not going anywhere. We're just like, screw the world. We're perfectly built for this already. And I still come back to... I get that, Jason. It's just... It's not everybody else. Not everybody else is. Unemployment is staggering. Oh, yeah.
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Businesses are shutting down left and right. There's only so... We can sit here and say, sure, I can hold up in my house for four more months as long as there's still a supply chain. And my restaurants are in DoorDash and instant, you know, as long as stuff is coming in the doors.
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But there's only so long that those supply chains are going to hold on for. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. No, that's the thing. It's like once... Because right now, we're basically living on borrowed time. So things have to restart soon. All of the survival training that I went through, you know, there was a common term.
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It's like every city is three meals or 72 hours away from anarchy. Because if the supply chain cuts off, you have 72 hours for most people to run out of food, run out of water, run out of supplies. And then shit gets real. So if everything shuts down, you know, just start to look for that indicator on how things are going.
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And right now, we've got enough money coming into the system that things probably will be fine for now. But when people go back to work, people will still get sick. But I think the entire point of this whole staying at home thing is everybody doesn't get sick at once. And we have time to ramp up because everybody's probably going to get sick at some point.
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And we have time to ramp up the infrastructure to handle those people so we can cycle them through, you know. And then at the end of this, everything should hopefully go back to normal in case we just all get it again and it starts all over. But yeah, I would like to see some of our government start talking about a serious stimulus bill when people start getting out again.
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We're going to need, you know, basically small business loans the size that this country has never seen and preferably ones that small businesses don't even have to pay back. We're going to need a lot. Yeah, that's another thing our governor announced today was basically the big gigantic gaping hole this is going to blow in the state's budget.
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And so he's already announcing, you know, hiring freeze, spending freezes, looking for cuts from all the departments. So I think that's a cascading effect that's on a delay where next year when the state has no money.
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And so – and where is it going to get money if people are still out of work? How are you going to raise your tax base? Yeah, can't tax the unemployed. Right, right. So does – again, does it all fall back to the feds to provide?
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And I just don't – I don't know the answer to that. It'll be interesting. I don't think anybody does. It'll be interesting to see if people change their tune. We're watching the train wreck in slow motion right now. So that's kind of it. And I – you know, everybody's freaking out.
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Everybody's worried. And I still go back to – did you guys ever see – was it Bridge of Spies? Is that the Tom Hanks one? Yes, yes, I did, yes. Yeah. If you remember the guy that was in prison, you know, the spy that got caught, and Tom Hanks kept asking him, he's like, aren't you worried?
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You know, you might get the death penalty. And all he kept saying was, would it help? So that's kind of the attitude that I've taken with this whole thing, with everybody freaking out, running around like chickens with their head cut off. I'm like, are you helping anything? No. Just relax.
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Get through it. Do the best you can. Help your friends. Help your community. And you'll get through this, or you won't. Worrying about it isn't going to help anything. Well, so, yes, and. Yes, and.
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Go ahead. I agree, and I do think that it's reassuring that folks like us who are able to help entertain and inform people, that is part of it.
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And being able to have a sense of normalcy, that these things that people have come to expect as part of their lives, that we're still able to do these shows, that, you know, we're able to do Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm able to do the Cyber Wire, Hacking Humans, all those kinds of things. I think that helps, and that makes me feel good that we're able to do those things.
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What's hard for me personally is, evidently, my subconscious is having a lot of trauma right now because I'm having crazy dreams. I'm not sleeping through the night. You know, I typically wake up around, I don't know, 2.30, 3 o'clock every night, and I'm up for about an hour just with my head spinning on who knows what.
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So I'm not resting well, and I'm also finding that by Wednesday, I feel the way I used to feel on Friday. Yes. You know, I just don't have the reserves of mostly emotional energy to just function day to day. Well, and the real fun part about that is there's no difference between Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and Sunday.
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Every day is the same to some degree. I mean, you're going to an office, so you have a bit of a difference. I'm not. My days are exactly the same. I couldn't tell you. The thing about Dave going to an office is Dave is stuck in an episode of The Twilight Zone because there's nobody there, and he's still doing his job and talking to people he never gets to meet or ever gets to see, and there's nobody on the road.
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I can't even imagine. The last man on earth. Exactly. You have to be, like, having some weird shit going on in your brain because it's like, yeah, it's got to be weird. It's got to be crazy for you because you are continuing on as normal except everyone's gone. Yeah, there are funny things I think about.
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I think about locking myself out. So, like, you know, if I go to the bathroom, which is, you know, out in the hallway, and we have little electronic key passes, what if I forget my keys? Then what? I'm sure there's somebody who can call and they can, you know, unlock some door or whatever.
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Right, if it came to that. So, you know, just get on the horn with one of our pen testing buddies who will tell me how to break through all of the stuff. Oh, we know your code. Here it is. Yeah, exactly. Get in any time. Just stand by, and then five seconds later, beep, click, and the door opens.
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But even things, I was thinking the other day, like, what if I got hurt when I was here? Right. There's nobody here. There's just nobody here. I mean, we know you're drinking all day. What if you slip and fall? Hit your head. Right, exactly. Right. You need to wear one of those.
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We got to get you a boy in the bubble for your office. Mm-hmm. Drown in my own vomit. Yeah. We'll get you one of those sumo blow-up outfits. Right. Just wrap me in bubble wrap. Mm-hmm. With the furry head. Yeah, put my furry head on, of course. I mean, yeah, kind of put my furry head on.
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It's like you're having your own comic on, though. No, it's very strange. There are other people in the building, and every now and then someone from one of the other data tribe companies will show up to pick something up or check the mail or something like that. Well, you know, I'm going through a daily protocol of wiping everything down.
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You know, we have a little kitchenette here, and I start every day by wiping down the fridge, wiping down the sink, just anything that I might touch. Because the cleaning people are still coming at night. Yeah. Right? So I don't know. I'm just trying to be mindful that they could – it's plausible they could bring something in.
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Yeah. What an awesome job that would be. They're cleaning an office that nobody comes to. Yeah. That has to be the easiest job in the world. Yes. But if you're an hourly employee, what does that mean? Are you just basically you go into sandbagging mode where, you know, you've got to fill the time.
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I would imagine that's what I would do. Yeah, exactly. You know, I mean, I still got to feed my family. So I'll just do the thing – all the things I did, even though there aren't very many people here. By the way, speaking of things like never really returning to the way they were and a new normal that we will hopefully eventually get to, if you have faith in the stock market, I would highly recommend purchasing stocks in any of the companies that make these disinfectants.
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Because as my wife quite rightly pointed out, your protocol in the morning is going to be part of the new normal. We will be wiping things down on a regular basis. We will be disinfecting things all the time. It's just going to be what we do. I bought stock in Smirnoff because there's no chance you can buy any Lysol or Clorox products.
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So I'm just wiping everything down with vodka. Well, they say that that's actually not high enough proof alcohol, unfortunately. Well, I've drank half of it, so I don't really care. Wipe down your throat with the Smirnoff and just assume that's a protected vector. Exactly.
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All that matters. It's like a really bad old heavy metal album name, Wipe Down Your Throat. Spinal Tap's unreleased Greatest Hits. Right, exactly. Yeah, it's a Spinal Tap album.
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Right, Wipe Down Your Throat. Oh, God, I'm delirious and punchy. We all are. We all are these days. I don't quite have the jarring effect that you have, and I'm not having trouble sleeping, but I have to say I'm so just kind of out of it all the time.
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I easily forget things. Sometimes I'm just like, I don't even know what I'm doing. Why did I walk into this room? Why did I wake up this morning? Why did I wake up this morning? There's a lot of that going on. And it's really, especially because I do have a three and a half year old and I'm trying to maintain as much normalcy as we can under these circumstances.
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It's very frustrating. I find myself frustrated with myself a lot because I just can't seem to keep shit together as well as I'd like, but it is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we all just have to recalibrate our expectations of ourselves while we're in the middle of this, that we're not going to be able to run it at full speed.
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Yeah. I think everybody's kind of figuring that out. You know, there was this process of like, oh, everybody's going to go work from home and it's going to take two to three weeks to kind of settle into a routine and then everything's going to be great. And we're finding out that, well, not really, not really.
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We need to lower down those expectations on what's happening. And what do we got? Two months to go? At least. At least. At least. Yeah, at least. I've been thinking about just dialing back my interview schedule on CyberWire because it's just, again, it's just, it's just hard.
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Doing as, as certainly as Jason, you know, and I'm sure you know also, Brian, you're doing interviews is not like many other things in that the amount of emotional intensity that it takes of mental energy is different than just sitting at your desk doing regular work or talking or whatever.
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Right, right. Yeah. And like I said, this is like us talking right now is like a 10 on the energy scale. Doing an interview is about 99. Yep. Right, right. This shit's easy, but when you're doing an interview, there's a lot going on, especially if you're doing the engineering on it as well, doing the recording, making sure that the levels are right, the recording hasn't stopped, plus also trying to come up with questions.
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I'm just telling you. Every other podcast that, every other podcast sounds like shit now as they've all gone to work from home. Who cares? Oh, don't even fucking get me started on that. That's my new, that's, that's what I'm going to start doing. I'm just going to start sitting here telling people how to make their podcast not sound like shit. That's.
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Yeah. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I, I'm with Jason on this one. It is strange times, Dave. It is strange times. It took a pandemic. Yeah.
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It's okay. It's okay. I just don't remember when I get that email from Brian go, I need to ask you for prepper advice. And I'm like, Oh, that just made my year. It made my year. I'm still smiling. I, I, my heart grew three times that day. I did not. It was nowhere near as extreme as prepper advice, but I did preface it with that because I knew it would make you smile.
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You said exactly. I need advice on prepping. To a very limited degree. Yeah. Revisionist history. Fake news. Fake news. Well, everybody else is doing it. Why not me? But that's the, I mean, but that's part of it too, is this, like this internal, um, struggle of the slippery slope.
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Like you want to be, you want to protect yourself. You want to protect your family. You want to protect your loved ones, but you're also internally, you're saying to yourself, okay, don't, but don't go crazy. Don't, you know, how do you manage? Don't hoard the toilet paper. Right, right, right, right, right.
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How do you keep rational through all this? I'll tell you one of the, one of the last grocery store runs that I actually did in person, which feels like a lifetime ago now. I, I was dealing with that even way back then where I was, I was walking around Trader Joe's going, okay, they said a two item limit on all items.
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I should buy two of everything in this store. And then you fight against that, you know, two by two, they entered the arc. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, on that note, what, here's the thing, okay, oh, go ahead, Dave, sorry.
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Well, we, we, so we've got a couple more months, right? I mean, at the very least, we're, we're, we're in this through the summer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. It's hard to imagine now a baseball game.
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Oh God. You know, I'm so, I can't even express how much I miss that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a big part of it is just knowing that you can't. Yeah. And that's what I mean. That's what I said at the beginning about the mourning for the things that you've, that we've lost the, and a lot of that is just the freedom to, to have those options.
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Those options are taken away and you understand why and you support all the reasons why, but it's still a loss. Well, and it's, it's, it's the lack, I have been talking a lot with, um, some entrepreneur friends of mine, people that run companies that are, that are, you know, trying to plan out their runways, right?
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Yeah. And, oh yeah. And it's the, it's the inability, there's no end date. There's, there's no date to plan for. And the goalposts keep shifting because many reasons, but you know, a lot of, a lot of our leaders have decided that it would be better to not panic the populace and say, and keep doing these two week goalposts that keep getting moved.
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When the reality is the science is telling us at least two months and finally people are coming out and saying that, but, uh, you know, when it, when it, in the early days, it was like, okay, I can do this for two weeks. And then you hear two more weeks and that psychic pain just keeps hitting you too. Well, here's the, here's the thing, put it in the back of your head that this is going to be five years.
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Think about when nine 11 happened, things weren't right for five years. And honestly, probably still weren't right up until this happened because look at all the crap at the, you know, the security theater and the airports and there's, there's, there's going to be everlasting issues with this. There is. But I mean, at this point we're, I think we're all just going, when can we fucking leave our house?
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Right. Right. And I talked to, well, my roommate talked to her friend who had to lay off 380 people the other day. Over zoom, like a, like a Zanderberg. No, she just, no, no, no. It was, it was through email actually. So, um, but, uh, it was just the, actually I don't, yeah.
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Cause everybody had already been working from home. They couldn't actually do any in-persons obviously. And, you know, she's just like, look, everybody's working from home. Mike, my business is going to change completely when this is done. This, the, you know, we pay seven, she said, she said, literally they pay $7 million a month in rent for their New York office.
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Yep. Why? Yep. So commercial real estate is just going to be gutted. So we work might actually have a comeback. Commercial real estate was already being gutted because retail was dead. Now we'll see. That's something I was actually thinking about was, um, how much of having office space is about, is about, uh, the tour.
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You know, like I remember when I had my own office and when we were in the, you know, the sort of the video business and doing animation and motion graphics and all that kind of stuff, you know, a big part of selling your company was having people come through to see the tour, you know, Oh, here's, here's our fancy edit suite.
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And it's all, you know, it's all well lit. And here are the machines in the racks and here's the, here are the workstations, you know, where we're doing the, all the 3d rendering and all that sort of stuff. And I remember certainly in our early days, like when we were in an aspirational mode, we would have workstations put together for people who didn't exist, you know, like, you know, like the old hand-me-down computers and monitors would be in cubicles and we'd make
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it look like someone was working there. Uh, so that when someone came through on the tour, they, you know, they, they, they think there were more people working there than there were World War II, like airfields that they had in England with the blow up tanks to show the Nazis when they flew. I mean, I'm thinking about the ridiculous, you know, web companies that I worked at right when I got out of college, when, when we were going through the first big kind of, uh, dot com explosion is like we had to show that we were creative. So they put
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in a fake golf course over where the, you know, where the illustrators and, and all the graphic design people worked because they're creative and look at that. Right. Dude, I worked in an incubator with a slide from the first floor to the second floor. Come on. Well, and so, you know, I'm part of the tour here at DataTribe. The, the, the Cyberwire is, but you know, me in particular, since I'm the one that most people know about. So when people are, when the folks who run DataTribe are giving the tour and they come by where I record things
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and they know, and here's the Cyberwire and people, Ooh, the Cyberwire, you know, like, but I wonder how much are, is the tour going to matter anymore? Are people going to jettison? I, I, I, I don't necessarily think so just because, and Jason and I have been talking about this a lot for the past month, obviously it's, I think when the all clear is given people, many, many people, not all, some people will be very comfortable working from home, but I think many people are
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going to run back to offices. Um, because yeah. And then it all starts over again. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, people aren't made to do this. People are made to socialize, right? There's a reason there's so many self-help articles and we did two shows about tips for working from home and how you can survive it. It's, it's hard. So I, I, I know my wife as soon as she can and wants to go back to the office immediately. So, yeah. And think about this, here's a thought experiment for
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you. So let's say, let's say, you know, the person I was talking about, they're paying $7 million a month in rent in that office. You cut that office space, you know, in half. Yes. Then you take the rent that you were paying, pay your employees that other half so they can get a better place to live, which has a dedicated workspace. Yes. And everybody can, you know, do the things that they're doing from there because it doesn't have to be, you know, I mean, that's a lot of money every month. I think we're definitely going to see a split when we come out of this. I think, I think
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workforces in office workforces will probably be halved or just something like that, or it'll move to, you know, three days in office, two days at home, that sort of thing. There's going to be a lot more working from home, definitely. But it's not going to go away because a lot of people, they need the escape, if nothing else, and they need the socialization. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, absolutely.
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All right, gentlemen. Well, uh, it's good talking to you. No, I have to say, I mean, it really, it's, uh, it's good to talk to you guys. Yeah, it's good. It's good. It's good to talk to you guys. Uh, yeah, it is actually. I just feel good. So yeah, yeah. And the beard. All right. Well, uh, I will talk to you guys. The beard never hurts.
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All right. I will talk to you guys next week. Do take care. Sounds good. Well, Jason, we've kicked it around a little bit on Twitter about a podcast listening being down and all the reasons why for that is happening. Um, we won't get into that here, but I found that I've actually been listening to a lot more music, uh, particularly when I do get the chance to get out of the house and say, take a bike ride. I'm not interested in listening to podcasts.
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I'm listening to music and I found my Apple AirPods. Uh, don't cut it for the music really. Um, now we talked in the past about Sennheiser. We had some really good Sennheiser headphones. The problem with those is they actually, uh, had a plug and I still use mine with the plug.
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I love plugs anymore. Um, so I decided I needed an update in the Bluetooth one. So I got the Sennheiser HD one free Bluetooth wireless headphone, Bluetooth 4.2 with Qualcomm apartment X and AAC six hour battery life, 1.5 hour fast USB charging multi-connection to two devices. Um, and it's great.
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It's really, really good sound quality. I I'm enjoying it. Um, it's, it looks old. It doesn't look like it's a space agey futuristic headphones like the AirPods or all the different ones coming out now, but, uh, the sound quality is phenomenal. I'm happy with them.
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So yeah, that's what I wanted to know. How do these compare to the wired Sennheisers that we love so much? Not as good, uh, but close. Um, I think the only thing that's lacking is the wired ones had better bass, uh, than these do. These are a little lacking in bass for me, but you can, they have an app that lets you, you know, basically do an EQ on it so you can pump up the bass a bit. It'd be nice if it just sounded a little bit better straight out of the box.
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Pump up the bass. Yep. Uh, there's another version, the momentum free special edition, which are a lot more money, but I don't know if they're any different. I don't know either. So if anybody from Sennheiser is listening and would like some free plugs, feel free to send us a pair. I didn't buy the more expensive ones. I went for the cheaper ones.
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Send us two pair, please. Yeah. Jason at GOG.show. Let us know. And because my wife and I are sharing our only office in the house, the bedroom, uh, and we both have a Mac, uh, Macs that don't have any ports or plugs. Uh, she's been using my USB hub adapter, the bolt that we have to put on the side of our computer to use Frank and Mac. Yeah. The Frank and Mac to plug anything in. And it was getting a little tiresome, um, unplugging and switching
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them every single time we have tagged each other out to go into the office. So I ordered a second one. They have a newer model out now. Uh, the Pergo USB C hub adapter for 2020 slash 2019 Mac book bear 2020 slash 2019 through 2016. Mac book pro 16 inch, 15 inch, 13 inch ultra slim type C hub with 4k HDMI, a hundred watt power delivery, 40 GPS, Thunderbolt three and two times
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USB 3.0 space. Great. Uh, this one is a bit smaller than the original model I had. It doesn't have the, um, the, um, memory of the little card adapters that, Oh, the card readers are great on the originals. Well, if you use card readers, I don't use card readers ever. So I do. Yeah. I have a camera and a drone. So they work. So for me, this one is a lot better because I don't use them and it's smaller and, uh, it's great. It's nice. So, yeah. And I don't have to switch them every two hours
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anymore. So. Yeah. I do like the original one that we originally pimped that, uh, you have, I use mine's basically, I could just super glue it to the side of my, my air. It'd be fine. It's just, uh, it's just annoying that it exists and has to exist because obviously those two ports can power all that other stuff. So, you know, make it a little bigger and put the ports inside.
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Yeah. I'd be fine with the look. I mean, I love my air, love it to death, but I would be okay if it was just a little bit bigger and still had the ports. That's all I'm saying. Agreed. I talked last show about, uh, you know, how my car battery died and how everybody should, uh, run their car at least 20 minutes a week. I've been getting hit up from neighbors to help them get a jumpstart when they have to go to the store. So instead of, you know, getting a pair of jumper cables for my car, because I didn't have any, I'm like, I should have jumper cables. I grew up in the
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seventies, eighties, nineties when we always had jumper cables in our trunk. That was a thing. I had two things in my car at all times. I had jumper cables and I had a Thomas guide. Yep. That was it. You always had those things. Yep. So nowadays, uh, we have technology for this.
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I got the car battery jump starter, Trek pow, G 22 1500, a car jump starter, portable jump box up to eight liter gas, 6.5 liter diesel engine, upgraded jumper cable with volt meter, 12 volt auto battery booster with smart charging. Basically it's a cell phone charger with jumper cables at the end.
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I am adding it to my cart now. It's tiny. It comes in a little like hard case. It's great. I think everybody should have one of these in their car. I juiced it. It came like three quarters juiced, plugged it in, juiced it up and, uh, sticking it in the car. And I watched a guy on the Amazon page who took a battery that had been dead for over a year because he was just like, I need to see if this thing's going to jump a completely totally dead battery, grabbed it from his junkyard, put it in
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his truck, boom, done. And it even has, it even has an alert on it. If you get the polarity wrong. Right. He's like, Oh, the thing says I got the point. Oh, I do have the polarity wrong. And he switches the cables, plugs it in. Boom. Starts right up. Nice. So, and it's got USB ports. So if you do need to charge your phone from it, if you're stuck out somewhere, you can do that. That's, um, yeah, it's really nice. And it was 80 bucks, you know, after tax and all that and well worth it. Cause like,
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you know, it, it takes up a, it takes up a tiny bit of space compared to a pair of jumper cables. Right. Which ain't nobody got room for that. So, uh, I highly recommend picking one of these up because I'd, you know, like I said, people are asking me for jumps all the time and I'm like, Oh, well, I think four people this week have needed to have their car jumped in my neighborhood.
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So it's the struggle is real people. The struggle is real. So if you can help somebody out and you can hand it to them. And then when they give it back to you, you wipe it down with all your wipes and your Lysol spray and all that, good to go. Excellent. So I also, I talked about this one on the show before, but I have been using these a lot because we light candles around the house because, uh, our house stinks because we don't have a cleaning lady and we have dogs and it's
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been raining. So we, the house smells like wet dog. Right. Um, uh, this is the lighter 1000 times per full charge with USB rechargeable 2600 mah 18, 650 ion battery, lithium, lithium electric candle lighter, windproof for bbq comma fireworks. Interesting that they would choose those two things as a use case, but okay. Yeah. Um, these are little USB lighters. I bought three of them.
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It's, it just, you know, it's like the, the little electric arc thing that people have been using forever to light their cigars and stuff like that. But they're only like, I think what, 12 bucks each. They're pretty cheap. Um, and I swear to God, yeah, it's 1197. They run forever. I've charged them once since I got them and I got them four months ago and we use them at least two or three times a day.
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Right. So, um, and that's, and the great part is, like I said, it's their USB. So you don't have to change lighter fluid because we used to get those little big stick lighters to light candles and light the barbecue. Yeah. Yeah. Throw those things away. You'll never have to buy them again. It's like buying three of those. You get one of these and you never have to buy another one. So just from a financial perspective alone, they're well worth it. Well, excellent. Very cool. And since you have a kid, they do have a very nice safety feature where you have to slide this, slide the guard up,
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which takes a little bit of effort, then press the button. So there, there is a safety on them. So you don't have to worry about the kid lighting your house on fire. Well, those, those have been built into regular lighters for like 20 years now too, Jason. Well, I know that, but I'm just saying that these have it too. Okay, good. I'm saying that these are on, these are, these are on parody with the regular lighters. So you don't have to worry about your kid burning down your house. All right.
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That's always a plus, uh, HBO, which has been putting out some content for free, uh, maybe now throwing a wrench into your binging plans, particularly if you happen to have some older devices as many of us do. The company is pulling HBO go and HBO now apps from second and third generation Apple TV units. Uh, Mac rumors spotted support pages, which state that the apps will no longer work as of April 30th. Um, I mean, the devices are 10 and eight years old respectively.
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So this isn't terribly surprising, but it does feel as they point out poorly timed. It is because we actually have one of these in the house and we do have the HBO app on it and we do actually use it. So fuck you, HBO. Sorry, but yeah, it does kind of suck. So if you're in this situation, you either need to pony up the 150 bucks for a new Apple TV or, you know, the 20 bucks for a fire stick or a Roku Roku stick. Yeah. I, that's, that's the thing. I just, you know,
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I'll go in my drawer and find one of my umpteen Roku sticks that I have lying around and plug that in. I think I've got like three or four fire sticks just sitting around too. It's kind of funny. I think I got a Chrome stick somewhere too. I don't know. Oh, I definitely have a Chrome stick. It's not, it's not a fire stick. I have an old Chrome stick somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I got, I got the free Chrome stick when I signed up for the YouTube TV when it first launched, they're like, we'll give you a free Chrome stick so you can watch our really
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shitty service on it. I'm like, okay. So I kept, I kept the service for 30 days cause that was the minimum. And then I canceled it and I still got the free stick, which I've never used since. So look for mine. It might've climbed into your drawer somewhere too. It might've been that bag of echoes that I gave you a long time ago.
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Probably. And then I saw this and I just, I love this. Um, this is great. Terrifying model shows what avid gamers could look in 20, could look like in 20 years. Yes. Researchers have created a model of what a gaming addict could find themselves looking like in 20 years time. And, uh, the model, which has been named Michael was created by online casino.ca and shows the physical changes in avid gamer might undergo over the next two decades. Now, quick question here. Is there much of a difference
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between an avid gamer and an avid gambler? I think online casino.ca might, uh, not have thought this through completely because exactly. This is what somebody that's sitting there playing like video poker looks like already. So exactly. So poor Michael has a hunched back from poor posture, dark circles under his bloodshot eyes from sleep deprivation and excessive screen time, pale skin and vitamin D and B12 deficiencies. Lack of exercises made him obese and he has repetitive
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strain in his thumbs and ulceration on his hands from using a controller for long periods. He also has varicose veins from poor blood flow caused by sitting down for long periods of time and swollen ankles. Lack of sunlight has led to bald patches while his ears are hairy because of poor air circulation. I was not aware that ears would grow hair because of poor air circulation, but apparently so. Life finds a way, Brian. Life finds a way. His shoulders have become rounded and
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he has an indent in his head from years of consistent light pressure from wearing a headset. He also has stress induced eczema and repetitive strain injury in his trigger finger. So this research was carried out using globally sourced reports on the physical impacts of gaming addiction. Somehow, I don't think this is terribly scientific, but it is fun.
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So go take a look at the image. It's a little bit disconcerting. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. But the problem is, it's pretty much spot on from all the people I know that are gaming addicts. I also thought it was funny. Yeah, that tracks. I thought it was funny that the name is Michael and friend of the show, Mike, who just bought an Xbox because he's stuck at home. So this is your feature, Mike.
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Mike, this is it. Yes, this is this is your future. You look into that black mirror and see where you're about to go. So I mentioned on a previous episode that my roommate got into tick tock. Yes. Well, she was just viewing it before, but now she has become a tick tock creator.
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Oh, she and she an influencer now. Here's the fucked up thing, Brian. She's she's well on her way by her like fifth or sixth video. She hit. She's got a video up there now of our dogs that has twenty three thousand in change views.
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All right. Thousands of likes. And now she has hundreds of followers. And I put a link into the show notes for her name, Shay. And it's she's shay 50 on tick tock and link to the actual video is up there. And she's been deconstructing how to make a hit video.
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It's it's fantastic. It's fun to watch. She's just like, oh, well, this one did this and it had this. And now this one did this and it had this. So let's let's make more videos like that. And I'm like, hey, man, if it keeps if it keeps you entertained, rock on. But now I'm getting roped into the video production side.
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So it has backfired. So, yes, you need to do special effects now. We actually had one of the videos I did do special effects on already. So now we have to do the weekend is being planned around what the dogs will do. These are all videos of the dogs.
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So if you like dogs, you can see all of our pups. And what really annoys me is the one that has the super views. She didn't tell me she was filming it. So I'm lounging on the couch with like 17 chins because I'm like kick back.
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I got my tea and my hat on and I look like I look like Michael. Let's just say that the future is now the future is now. So I'm like I like we have to have a safe word whenever you're going to do a video that I'm going to be in the background for because I have to sit up straight, shoulders back, chin up so I don't look like Chet from Weird Science.
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Yeah, pro tip through making it through the pandemic. You have to tell the people when you're filming them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because I watch this and I'm like, oh, Jesus. Oh, I'm like, at least nobody's going to see it. I'm like, shit. So, yeah, links for those will be in the show notes.
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But yeah, if you want to see me at my absolute utter worst, go check out our pups in the great cheese heist on tick tock. Yeah, I hate I hate this new world so much. Yeah, it sucks. And speaking of this new world sucking so much, I just have to do a little bit of a parent rant here.
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This article has been doing the rounds. It's unfortunately over on Medium, but it's very true. I've been commiserating with a bunch of other parent friends. And, you know, the initial idea was, oh, we're going to settle into a routine and it's going to work and we'll figure it out.
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And, you know, everything's going to be OK. That's not happening. Everybody I know is saying that the kids are becoming worse. They know something's wrong. They're out of their routines. They don't need less time with us. They are basically sitting on our laps full time now.
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And it's just this is not working out. So just a couple of key points from this article. I think everybody should read it, particularly if you have a kid, you'll feel a little bit better because you tend to feel like you're failing. We're all failing together.
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That's another new show title. All failing together. The current situation is almost prophetically designed to showcase the farce of our societal approach to separating work and family lives. We are expected to work from home full time and care for our children full time. And we cannot have anyone outside our immediate household help.
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It can't work. And we are all suffering at the illusion that it does. Our kids are losing out on peace of mind, education, engagement, socialization for which they are built. Our employers are losing out, too, whether the office policy is to expect full time work or whether, like in the author's experience, we are offered a lot of flexibility.
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Work is less good. There is less of it. And returns will be diminishing the longer this juggle goes on. And I agree. And he says, to be honest, I'm not sure what the solution is. But unless we step back and redefine where the burden of responsibility lies in providing care for our most vulnerable and reprioritize what work matters, we're going to emerge from this pandemic with some of our most powerful forces.
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Parents and young people, not up to the task for building a better future. And in the meantime, remember this. Parents are not OK. Nope, we're not. I have thoughts, Brian. So I'm a latchkey kid. I grew up. I was born in 1971. I grew up with a single parent who worked all the time.
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Yes. And there are a few key takeaways that you can get from my upbringing that would be that you should put in your quiver, I would say. One, and this is what I read the beginning of this article. And like the kid's not listening. He's not doing this.
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He's not doing that. In my day, you would get smacked and say, don't talk back to me. Get your shit done, kid. And we would do it. That's how things worked back in the day. Yeah. Everybody, nobody, nobody's touching their kids. No, no, no, no, no spanking. No, no.
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Everybody, it's an equal footing. Kids are just as good as adults. Let me just quickly counter your point. Now, child services would come and take your kid away, which at this point, I'm considering. There's no child services. So, you're free and clear. You're free and clear. Spank away, people.
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And when it came time for mommy to go do work and focus on what she had to do, this was the rule of the house. Go entertain yourself. Here are your toys. Here's everything. Figure it out, kid. And if that meant sitting in your room alone going, what the fuck am I going to do?
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That's kind of what it was. So, what a lot of kids did, they read. That did work. Yes. When there was outside time with our kids. Nope, nope. I'm talking about being inside. I'm talking about inside time. Yes, Jason, but not when you're inside 24-7.
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That is the difference here. Well, well, you know, I learned how to take all my kids. I learned how to take them apart. I'm going to do one of the rare things that we can do on the show, which is a shut the fuck up card. You know not of what you speak. I'm sorry. I just grew up in that kind of environment.
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And I think that... No, you didn't. You didn't grow up in a pandemic, Jason. You did not grow up at home 24-7. So, shut the fuck up. Okay. All right. No, I just lived in places... Okay, moving on to happier topics. Okay. Places with winter where you couldn't leave the house. Yes, I know a little bit of what I'm talking about.
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But anyway, go ahead, Brian. I grew up the same, Jason. No, you didn't. You had fucking family. I'm sorry. You come from a completely different lifestyle. But okay, go ahead. Go ahead. I'm just saying that, you know, there's an opportunity here to make your kids tougher and more self-reliant.
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That's all. We're all trying, Jason. We're all trying. Try harder. Fuck yourself. You do. Move on here. Moving on. Disney has tried to make us fatter, apparently. I was going to say make us feel better, but it's basically just make us fatter.
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They've released two of my favorite recipes from my childhood because I wasn't a latchkey kid. I was a Disney kid. I basically got an annual pass and was go to fucking Disneyland, which I wish I could do for my kid right now. Anyways, Disney has shared its churro recipe online, which you definitely need right now.
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These things are freaking delicious and I can't wait to make them. It's unbelievable. Link is in the show notes. Here's the thing about this, though. There's a key line in here that caught my eye. This recipe is inspired by. So it's not the exact recipe for the churros. They're giving you an inspired by recipe.
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Yeah, because they're bites. They're not the big long ones because who the hell has a deep fryer at home? Me. You make the big ones, Ben. Come on over. Leave them in a box right in front of your house. I'll come by. Yeah, I'll make some churros and I'll give you a couple dozen eggs because you can't get them anymore.
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So, yeah, I'll hook you up, man. We're actually having a Friday this weekend. So I'll take a look at this recipe. Why are you not doing the Friday today? It's Friday. Come on. Oh, dad joke. Dad joke. Bad joke. Okay. Just saying. Do you really want these churros?
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Stop that. And they've also released their official Dole Whip recipe. Now, this one appears to be the official thing. It does not say inspired by, but this is the actual frozen pineapple treat. And these things, I swear to God, I lived off these when I was a kid. They are frigging wonderful, so I can't wait to make them.
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All right. I'm looking forward to that one because I do love pineapple. Everybody loves a Dole Whip, man. Orange Whip. Orange Whip. Three Orange Whips. And I found this one that was crazy. It's over at riotfest.org. And it's an article from Daryl.
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It's titled, Daryl Wilson from the Bole Weevils Wants You to Stay at Home. Now, God, I haven't thought about that band or heard about them in, like, 20 years. Well, see, that's the thing. They were – I've known them for 20 years, all of them. They're friends of mine. They were from my neighborhood. So I know Daryl. I know the whole band.
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Some of them are actually in Rise Against now, believe it or not. Oh, actually, no, that was – those guys were from – oh, God, 88 Fingers Louie. Never mind. Anyway, a friend of mine, he stopped doing the band when he went to medical school and became basically an ER doctor.
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And he's been an ER doctor for 20 years. And now he's like the – what is he? He is the director of emergency medical services at Edward Hospital in Naperville, Illinois, which was right down the street from where I lived. And it's a fantastic article because he's talking about basically, guys, we're not superheroes.
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We're people just like you. We're scared just like you. So stay the fuck at home and don't really – like, don't overburden the system because that's what's happening a lot. You know, it's like people that come in that aren't sick might get sick. And also, stop looking at us like we are, you know, Marvel superheroes.
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We're not. We're people just like you. And it's a great article. And I hope Daryl's staying safe. He's one of my favorite people in the world. The Bull Weevils got back together a couple years ago. I've been doing – I saw him a couple times. I saw him with Agent Orange, believe it or not, when I first moved back to Chicago for the 17th time.
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And this guy, it's amazing how much energy he has. So, you know, he's a punk rock superhero, but he's just a normal guy in the ER. So take it easy on these people. But go read this article, it's really fascinating, and I'm really glad that he spoke up about this.
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Excellent. That's very cool. I saw an article, and I obviously didn't put it in the show notes because it has nothing to do with what we talk about. But since we just kind of talked about it, some of the medical frontline people are doing something really cool because they're all wearing, you know, PPE and, like, crazy masks and headgear and all that sort of stuff.
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But they're taking photos of themselves, just normal, without wearing anything, and putting it on their outfits. Yeah. So people see what they actually look like and, you know, to calm them down, and that's pretty cool. Yeah, I've seen that. And I've seen a lot of videos where, like, when they're done with their shift, they'll do, like, you know, a little dance video or something fun.
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Because, like, I saw one where they saved a patient and got them off the respirator, and everybody did, like, the happy dance and everything. That's amazing. And I've heard people say that it's like, no, they shouldn't be doing this stuff. They should be professional and get back to their jobs. I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? No, let them celebrate. Everybody needs a release valve.
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Yeah, they need a release valve because they've been working for probably 40 hours trying to save people. And if they want to have a little fun once they're off the clock, let them and support them and celebrate them. So, you know, and don't be an asshole. Anyway, speaking of time alone.
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It all kind of boils down to that, doesn't it? It really does just come down to don't be an asshole. I found this over at eon.co. Time alone, choosing or not, can be a chance to hit the reset button. What's this alone of which you speak? I, you know, that's the thing, yeah.
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You and I have talked about that during the week. Alone time is very important, but very hard to come by. You're doing TikTok videos now with your roommate. This is true. This is true. But, you know, a little extra NyQuil in the wifey's wine before she goes to bed.
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You can go in the living room and have your alone time. Or my favorite alone time, obviously, the bathroom. My bowel movements have turned into 45 minutes, basically endurance rounds. I've been taking the longest showers of my life, I'll tell you that.
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That's the way it goes. I need to put a mini fridge in my fucking shower. I have a beer. I've done that. I go to the shower with a beer. It's just like, oh, quiet time. Everybody leave me alone for 20 minutes, for the love of God.
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Yep. How much water can this water heater eat? I love this thing, though, because it talks about the difference between introversion and loneliness and solitude. Right. And it's just a really smart read because, you know, I'm an introvert.
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I love being alone. And I love my alone time because it, you know, makes me happy. I'm not lonely. I'm never lonely when I'm alone. Right. And a lot of people are because they haven't really kind of embraced just being alone and thinking. You know, they're just like, I got to talk. I got to need somebody to talk to.
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Well, get a dog. There's a pro tip. Get a dog if you want someone to talk to. Or be on 18 Podcasts. Or be on 18 Podcasts. Or get a Twitch account. You know, just talk to the ether if that's what you got to do. But it's really good. It's a really good article. So I highly recommend checking that out.
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And I found this one, Do You Speak Corona? A Guide to COVID-19 Slang. And there's two here that I really like. COVID-Idiot. Someone who ignores public health advice. Oh, yeah. That one's all over the place. I like that one. I've never heard that one until I found this one.
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And this other one, I can't even pronounce because it's in Chinese. But the translation is, if you don't come, I won't come to any harm. Which means stay the hell away. There's a really good explanation. A lot of these are in different languages. And they have words that, you know, are way more eloquent than ours and cooler than ours.
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Is there a German one? There's a German one about, was it ghost matches? Where people, it talks about like the ghost soccer matches where people don't show up. Oh, there is. Geisterspiel. Yeah, exactly. And the, of course, COVID-Idiot side effect of that is people would show up to the Geisterspiels and stand outside and chant, hoping that they would let them in.
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It's like, you're missing the point, dude. You're missing the point. Yeah. Closing shout outs. I've got two shout outs here. And this, these, these, one makes me sad. One does not. I'm with you.
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Okay. 27 year old late night diner legend Swingers has closed permanently. And this is, last time I went to Swingers, Brian, I was there with you in Santa Monica. And we were with one of your British friends who stopped to get gas and was, maybe shouldn't have been driving and pulled out and went the wrong way.
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Or in the, on the wrong side of the road, as it were. And I'm like, oh, I guess I know who's driving. His British friend is driving. I was a friend of the show, Carl Wallinger from World Party and his friend, because Carl doesn't drive. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
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Yeah. I don't know if you remember that night. It was a long one. Vaguely. I have photos. I can, I can jog your memory, but I've been to all of the Swingers. Well, at least the Hollywood Swingers and the Santa Monica Swingers. Those are the two. But they're, after 27 years, they're finally closing the doors.
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I believe you have thoughts about this, Brian? Well, I mean, I'm, the Santa Monica Swingers closed a couple of years ago. That was no big loss. Oh, okay. But the original Hollywood location, man, I spent a lot of time when I lived in Hollywood in my 20s at that place. So it's a bit sad. It was iconic.
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You know, it bore the movie Swingers. It was named after that place. So, yeah, it's sad that it's gone. But 27 years is a long run for a kitsch restaurant. Yeah, basically, it's an overblown Denny's. It's kind of sad. Exactly. It was a Denny's with tattooed waitresses before all the waitresses had tattoos.
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It is funny. I've had one dish at Swingers every time I go because it's always after a night at the bar. You're still lit as a mofo. My go-to for late night dinner like that is a giant plate of fries with a side of ranch.
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That's it. Because that will give you the best chance of not having a hangover in the morning. So, anytime I do that. Now, here's the one that really bums me out, though. The company that owned Swingers also owned a British pub called The Pikey on Sunset Boulevard.
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Now, The Pikey was not The Pikey for most of its run. It was called The Coach and Horses. Oh, yes. I've had many, many a drink there. We had, I have pictures. The picture of me and you that I use all the time for a lot of our press stuff, that was taking at one of my going away parties that we had at The Coach and Horses.
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I grew up there when I first got to Hollywood, and I loved that place so much. And then when it was sold, when the owner died and it was sold, and then it was shut down for a long time, and this, you know, of course, hipster place opened called The Pikey, which, because it was a dive bar.
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Yeah. It was a total dive bar. I don't know if you remember my girlfriend, Blue, the dominatrix. Vaguely. Yeah, she got, she went in there one day for like a drink about one o'clock, and she ordered her cocktail and sat down and was talking to the bartender, and she looks over, and there's this guy just sad, like head in his hands, having a beer.
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She's like, who the fuck does that guy think he is, Morrissey? And the guy looked over at her, got up and walked out the door, because it was Morrissey. That's the kind of place it was. Yeah. I'm going to miss that place, and hopefully they'll, they're selling it, and hopefully it will come back as something akin to what it is now, because so many good memories at that place.
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It was just, that one I'm going to miss. Swingers, not so much. Yep. Well, we're losing a lot of things through this. Good luck to all the restaurants out there. Hang in there. Until next time, I'm Brian Shulmister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.
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