496: "I'm Fired"

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

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I thought we were going to be able to stop complaining about things somewhere mid-January. It's almost March. Are we there yet? No, no, no. So, tons of things still going wrong. And, you know, you and I have been complaining about California's issues in the last couple of years and how we're basically living in a third world country.

Oh, yeah. Texas stepped up and said, hold my Shiner Bock. Hold my Shiner Bock. I thought they'd be like, hold my Coors. Shiner Bock is a Texan beer, man. I know. Coors is from Colorado. Golden Calderado, yes. I think it's Smokey and the Bandit when I think of Texas and beer.

All right. By the way. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. What a week for them. I'm not saying, you know, I might have been wrong about the regulations thing. They wanted their own grid. They wanted their own grid. They got their own grid. They didn't want to spend the money to winterize it because, you know, it only happened exactly almost 10 years to the day.

But almost exactly 10 years to the day. So, yeah, you know, I feel really bad for everybody there. I have quite a few friends that, of course, live mostly in Austin, a couple that live in San Antonio. And, you know, they were screwed big time.

No water for like five days. Crazy. Well, they can go outside and melt the snow. That's exactly what they did. That is exactly what they did. They brought in tubs of snow, put it in their bathtub and did all that sort of thing just to get by. So, well done, Texas.

Well done. And I, for one, and personally, am very much looking forward to the follow-up podcast from Joe Rogan and Elon Musk telling us again how much more competent Texas government is than California. I know. Cannot wait for that. Yeah, that's not going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of third world countries, last night I texted you.

I'm like, I'm not going to be able to finish my notes, man, because the entirety of the San Fernando Valley and half of Ventura County went out. The internet went out. Thank you, Spectrum. Right. And it's like, not like we're the second largest city in the country. Why would we need internet here when everybody's working from home?

Yeah. You know, at some point, I know it's not going to happen anytime soon, especially since we just had four. Four years of deregulate everything and government steps out of absolutely everything and it's worked out so well for us. But, you know, and we're bitterly divided as a country, so it's not like we're going to come together.

But at some point, at some point, we're going to have to realize that the internet is basically a public utility like water or gas or electric. And we should probably take it away from some of these companies. Yeah. I don't know if that's going to happen. No. It's not. No.

We talked a while back about John Deere and they were going to start to let people buy manuals and software to update their tractors. Yeah. How's that going? People were going to. Yeah. Well, it's not. It's not going. So if you have a John Deere tractor, you're still probably going to Poland to get your fixes and your software and your patches and your hacks because John Deere says it's there.

You just got to go ask for it. And of course, Vice did a, you know, a deep dive like they always do. And they tried to find somebody who would sell them some diagnostic tools or even some manuals. No go. No way. No. Right. Harder to find than the Hulk Hogan porn video.

It's about it. It's about it. And this one, this one just cracks me up. I saw this over at BuzzFeed. Mark changed the rules. How Facebook went easy on Alex Jones and other right wing figures. Now. Wait, hold on a second. Isn't there a bias against the left or against the right on social medias?

See, that's what you're led to believe, but it turns out, turns out, yeah, Zuck stepped in and said, you know what, I don't even want to do this. But yes, Alex Jones will be deplatformed. He's gone. But what we're going to do is we're going to leave his fans up and we're going to let them say whatever they want, which I'm like, okay, so you take away one Alex Jones, but you leave how many million Alex Jones is lying around?

It's like you're eventually going to step on one and you're going to, you know, it's like, it's like, like Legos in the dark. You're going to step on one eventually. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Okay. That's it. Yeah. Tell me again, everyone, about how social media is completely biased against the right so much so that they have to go start sites of their own.

Yeah. That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Squeaky wheel gets the Zuck. That's pretty much what it comes down to. And I saw this one this morning and I was just, I'm scratching my head around here. WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann is going to settle on his stock and sell it back to SoftBank.

For, oh, I don't know, a measly $500 million. Oh, that's next to nothing. Yeah. I mean, it's half of what he wanted before, but still, it's amazing how in this country you can fuck up so badly and still win so hugely.

He's winning bigly. Never has failing upward been as profitable as it is in this day and age. We got to start doing a really shitty job with this podcast. Stop making it sound so good. I'm on it.

Now, I recognize it's been a long time since Google quietly removed the do no evil from their internal guidelines, but I'm not sure what's going on right here anymore.

Does Google have an AI problem or AI ethics problem or do they have a problem with AI ethicists that aren't ethical? I'm not sure which it is anymore. Yeah. So they've fired another one. It's strange. Yeah. They've pushed out AI ethics researcher Timnit Gibru, sparking a response from the team calling for her to be reinstated at a higher level.

Instead of doing that, Google announced Dr. Marion Croak as lead for the responsible AI research and engineering center of expertise. And according to reports by Axios and Bloomberg told employees on Thursday, it would adjust policies around diversity and research. It followed those moves by firing Gibru's former co-lead and co-founder of the ethical AI team researcher, Margaret Mitchell, who had reported her account remained suspended for weeks while the company investigated her.

She then tweeted, basically, I'm fired. Yes, I know. It's my favorite. I'm fired. Yeah. But they're saying that she violated the code of conduct and security policies, so they may not have an ethical ethicist, or are they just not ethical? What's going on?

It's really hard to tell. It's unethical all the way down at this point, it seems. It seems to be. It's turtles, unethical turtles all the way down. Yeah. I don't know what these people are doing over there, what they're thinking even, because it's just all over the map. It's all over the map. It's, yeah, I don't know what's happening.

It's very confusing and somewhat troubling, given the amount of money that's going into AI over there. Yeah, you know what they should do? They should write an AI that can tell them who they can fire and who they can hire, because it seems the people are really screwing that one up. Couldn't be any worse than the people. This is one of the key demonstrations of AI.

Can it do better than a human at hiring and firing your AI ethicist? I'm guessing yes. Yeah, at this point. Even if it's just a 50-50 shot. Yeah. I don't know how many people are in that department, but it's not going well. No, not at all. Something else that's not going well is, oh, Uber.

Oh, Uber. I don't know how many people sent you this article when it came out, but about 400 sent it to me. The UK slaps Uber with the law rules drivers are employees in the final verdict. The final countdown to the final verdict. Is it final?

Seems to be final this time. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. UK says no. I mean, there's nowhere else to appeal to. That's true. This is like, you know, they're super duper court. There's nowhere to go, but unless they can get the queen on the horn. And I don't even know if she's got any pull nowadays.

But yeah, they say that you're not a taxi firm. Or they say you are a taxi firm. The not a taxi firm argument did not seem to hold crumpets over there. So they're done. They're done. And what are they going to do? I'm curious.

They're going to pull out of the UK. I mean, that's what they're going to do because their business model does not support actually being a taxi firm. It just doesn't. Even though that's what they are, they cannot afford it. They cannot afford to pay their drivers because they have to pay everybody else tons of money.

Yeah. Yeah. And they also, you know, lower their prices to drive everybody out of business. And everything else we've said for seven years on this show. Yeah. I'm very happy about this news. Yeah. Me too. Me too. If we just get it happening here in California, we'll be back in action. Well, you know, precedence is set. Yeah. Well, I mean, we set the, yeah, we've got two, we've got two competing precedents.

Yes, that's true. Not precedents. But we'll see how it plays out. But this one was just fun because we've been talking about how Google and Facebook are against this new Australia law that's in chambers that says, oh, you're going to have to pay news operations for the ability to take snippets of their articles and link back to them.

Yep. And Google last week talked about it. They settled. They gave them some money and said, eh, we're done. Just deal with it. Here, here, here's cash. Go, you know, leave us alone. You're going to do. Yeah. Yeah. Go fuck a kangaroo. We don't care. All 25 million of you out of our sight.

And Facebook just doubled down and said, nope, nope, nope, nope. They took their shrimps off the Barbie and headed to the hills and said, we are just not going to play in your sandbox anymore. Right. Which basically, you know, a huge backlash from everybody saying, this is dumb. This is dumb. Why are you doing this?

And well, turns out they're back. As of today, they are back in Australia. And I heard this on another podcast. I can't remember which one it was, but they made a very good point that Facebook took all the news, which is what most people were using it for, you know, because since we know you can't actually get in touch with your friends anymore, they like the last thing to do is get news.

Well, once Facebook said no more news, people did things that you would expect people to do who were looking for news. They went somewhere else. They bookmarked new sites and went other places. Right. You know, it's like, oh, you know, there are plenty of other news outlets out there that I can just go to instead of going to Facebook.

And turns out we don't need you anymore, Facebook. And I think maybe some of that backlash was probably going to hit home. They saw the numbers trending down and said, oh, you know, maybe we should come back to Australia because the curtain has been lifted. The veil has been flung aside. And it's like, oh, they really don't actually need us for anything because we are fairly useless.

Yeah. I mean, Facebook has been trending that way for quite some time now. You know, like you just pointed out, you've removed the ability for us to actually connect and see our friends updates. All right. I still went to Facebook and basically, yeah, I've been using it as a news source and a great source to find links for the show and things like that because of all the different pages that I've followed that were news information sources.

If all of a sudden that went away, what? I would stop logging into Facebook. They're literally taking away every bit of value that we got from them. Yeah. And then they wonder what happens. I think they are running the playbook that they used with businesses. Let's get them in. Let's get them hooked.

And then slowly over time, we're just going to take away everything and make you pay for everything that was free before. And now they're just like, they're on the path to just take away everything. What's it going to be when you log in now? It's just going to be, there's nothing there. It's just a blank page. Zuckerberg looking at you with that vacant expression.

Yeah. It has become literal Facebook. It's just his face. In other Facebook news, this one was great. Unsealed court document claims Facebook knew for years that a metric was inflated and ignored an employee warning to avoid a revenue hit. And this one goes all the way to the top.

Shocking. Indeed. Indeed. I think the only surprising thing is it took this long for anybody to come out and basically prove it and say it like we've known this, like we've known that all the metrics are bullshit and lies and we know it's unbelievable to me.

And people are legitimately, apparently surprised by this news. I don't know why they're surprised. This is not the first time that this has happened with them. You know, we've, they've got busted with their hand in the stat jar before. And this is not the first time.

They've been fined for it publicly. So why are we surprised when they did it again? We're not. And they're probably doing it right now too. Look, businesses that happen to be listening to us, I'm sure you aren't, stop. There are a few legitimate cases in which I could see that Facebook ads would actually be a worthwhile endeavor.

But in general, given the way that Facebook has moved and everything we've talked about, establish yourself as a business page and post, because those are the only posts anybody will see because nobody will see their friends' posts anymore. And never, ever, ever, ever purchase an ad. Ever. Ever. Yeah. Yeah.

Any other places to buy ads? Even, dare I say, LinkedIn? I hear, I hear good things over there. Yeah. That's, that's, yeah. Sure. I get emails from them constantly, even though I've unsubscribed to every single one. So I am hearing things. Yeah. WhatsApp news as well.

So we have known that WhatsApp has been taken over by the house of Zuck as well. And so they have planned privacy updates, et cetera. And basically, if you do not agree to their changes to the privacy changes, you will, something, it's been unclear. So they have clarified what exactly, what exactly is going to happen now, if you do not click on the button that says, okay, to their updated privacy policies.

So you have until May 15th, at which point you will have, something will happen, something will happen for a short time, you will be able to receive calls and notifications, but you will not be able to read or send messages from the app after that point. And this is a, that will be a short time, which will span a few weeks, at which point your account will then be put into inactive status.

And it says that accounts are generally deleted after 120 days of activity, meaning visibility set to zero. So, and you have to click on the, and you have to click on the, I now agree with your policy changes to reactivate your account. Got it. So that's what's going to happen. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Are you a WhatsApp user? I am, but not for any sense of privacy or anything. It's a, I have a family group on WhatsApp where everybody just uses it to kind of talk to each other rather than, you know, individually texting or group texts.

And it's great for that. And I really, you know, it's the same as basically like using Facebook messaging. So I have agreed to the same privacy policies that I would get with Facebook messaging. So I, I'm not, uh, I'm not trying to, you know, basically start a union at some podcasting firm where I need to keep things secret.

More on that later. And I found a really interesting article over at the Atlantic, America's health will soon be in the hands of very minor internet celebrities. And this is all about, uh, the inexplicable, uh, reason that we have to spend a lot of money as a country to try to convince people to take a fucking vaccine to stop a pandemic.

And one of the ideas that local, uh, health, uh, people are coming up with is let's get these influencers because people pay attention to them. Hashtag ads, uh, to give us, uh, you know, fun and, and little updates about how you should stay home for the Christmas holidays and you should wear a mask and you should stop the spread and all that sort of stuff.

So yeah, basically here's a bunch of money. You're an influencer. Tell people to be safe. And now people are kind of going up and going, is this really a good idea? I, I would just like to point out that the influencers and their parties were one of the biggest, you know, vectors of spreading COVID during the holidays.

This is true. So, you know, all you got to do is just either just lock them in their house. You don't have to pay them anything. Just lock the gate and keep them inside their little mansions, throw some hot dogs over the fence every now and again, you know, turn the sprinklers on so they can get some water out of the hose and that's it.

Just lock them up. Don't give them money to come out and do a dance, the COVID dance, you know, get your jabs, get your jabs. Some influencers have decided that this would be good for their brand to do the right thing and they're getting paid to do it. And the concern of course, obviously is here.

Are we training a bunch of people to listen to influencers rather than, oh, I don't know science? Well, as long as somebody's listening, I guess maybe it's a good thing. I suppose. Yeah, I suppose it is. At this point, just get your goddamn vaccine there. We influenced.

Somebody give us money. We influenced you. I wish I could. I wish I could. Oh, but if I only I could. Oh, but here's great news, Brian. Cheese is not bad for you this week. What if I put cheese on my eggs? Well, then you're playing with fire.

Okay. You're playing with fire there. All right. God, I miss eggs. I have to get that goo in the carton, you know, that no cholesterol goo now. But I'm getting better at spicing it up. But anyway, yes, this was over at Wired that came through yesterday and I'm reading it and it says, there's actually no data that supports the fact that cheese is bad for you.

If anything, it's middle of the road and could possibly be good for you. Okay. So I was not even aware that cheese was bad for us. Yeah. That's one of the things my doctor told me to stop eating when I got those terrible numbers back that like, yeah, you got to cut down on everything, knock out the eggs, the cheese, because I was eating, you know, a block, a block of government cheese a day, but block of cheese and did like, you know, a dozen and a half eggs a week.

So right. I did love cheese. I still love cheese. Vegan cheese has come a long way. I must say. It's not cheese though. It's nuts. Yeah, it's not cheese. No. So next week, why cheese is bad for you. All right. Can't wait.

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Shop now at QVC.com. Media Candy. Now that the kind of okay, but not really 2020, the Stand miniseries is done after the 1990s miniseries, and given the book has been out forever, so no spoiler warnings here.

You're shit out of luck if you haven't read it and want a no spoiler. I guess you can fast forward now because saying a no spoiler warning is basically a spoiler warning. Spoiler warning. So yeah, I am curious as to why you hated the ending of the book, since it wasn't the much derided Hand of God sequence. Why did you despise the end of this book?

I thought the run-up took so long and it was so detailed, and then the end just kind of happened very quickly. And I didn't see what I wanted to see, which was like something a little bit with more substance in it. It's like, okay, they show up, they get put on trial, and boom, it's over. Done. It's like, it just happened so fast, and it was just like anticlimactic.

It was, for me, it was completely anticlimactic. Okay. I wanted just something out of it. And then, of course, the Lord of the Rings, like, seven-hour finale after Vegas blows up, it's like, oh, God, we got to, like, every fucking single storyline has to get tied up.

I'm like, you can leave some MacGuffins in there, Steven. So. All right, fair enough. I disagree with your take on it, but I understand your take. Now I understand. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I just thought it was anticlimactic. But at least there wasn't a fucking alien.

That's all I cared about. That's always a plus. I hate it. I hate it when the alien swings in on the Stephen King book. That means I'm out. Okay. I'll take a hand of God. We agree about something on Stephen King. How's that? All right. Sounds good to me. In other news, last week tonight with John Oliver is back, and I would like to, I will say I did miss him.

I also did not so much miss that feeling of depression and sadness every time the episode ends because he's totally destroyed something and told us how horrible our country is. Yeah, pretty much. My wife looked at me at the end of the last one, and she went, why does he still live here?

He could actually leave. And I was like, I think England's actually probably a bit worse. Yeah, and money, and lots of money. He doesn't have to get, he can get the good chicken. He doesn't have to buy the crappy chicken. I got caught up on him last night on my iPhone watching it with my cell signal because there was no internet access in Los Angeles.

Right. But yeah, it was good having him back. It's pretty much the same. You know how the show's going to be for the most part. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm happy he's back. I just, I completely forgot. I completely forgot. And it was weird because I was on HBO Max the other day watching The Hot Ones.

I'd seen this bounced around. I'm sure you've seen them on YouTube ads for, you know, recommended celebrities go get interviewed and eat some hot wings. Yes. And I thought, okay, maybe I'll try it or whatever. And I had nothing to watch. So I popped it on because they've got 20 episodes on HBO Max.

And I watched the Gordon Ramsay one and the Idris Elba one. It was a fantastic little show. It's a clever concept. Yeah. Yeah. This guy, Sean Evans, though, is a great interviewer. He has some really interesting questions. So if you haven't seen it before, it's a good short little interview show.

I was pretty impressed with the quality of the interview and just made me want to eat some chicken wings, though. But yeah. Yeah. Then I watched John Oliver and I'm like, I'm never eating chicken again. I saw this story making the rounds and it was pretty funny. I'm not a Twitch person, but Twitch does broadcast an awful lot of stuff.

And apparently they broadcast BlizzCon, the entire thing. And Metallica performed at BlizzCon 2021 because, you know, it's not like you can go play concerts or anything. So might as well stream yourself playing a show. And they abruptly cut off and dubbed over the performance with a wildly out of character accordion driven folk piece because they were concerned about being taken down for copyright issues.

I know, but you've got to give them credit for what they played over it. Oh, no. Very clever. So very funny. Yeah. So people were very upset about this. And apparently Twitch was not, even though they had permission to broadcast all of BlizzCon, nobody had talked to the lawyers and dotted the T, crossed the T, dotted the I.

You don't want to do it the other way around. Then you look like an idiot. And basically didn't make sure that they had the rights to actually stream the music itself. So better safe than sorry. They just didn't do it. And this is one of my rare defenses of the music industry. I will say that they are, all the labels are attempting to make deals with all of these digital services.

I know this because everybody has worked from home, including one of the persons that is trying to make all these deals with all those services. So I overhear a lot of phone calls and they're definitely trying to make all the deals with digital services and they are doing it pennies on the dollar, typically, because the digital streaming services all claim they can't afford any of this.

And there's definitely a prevailing attitude of why should we pay you? So you got to pay. Sorry. You don't get to just broadcast music for free. Nope. Nope. And yeah, I had just an episode this week. Every now and again, I like to go back and listen to the Blues Brothers soundtrack.

A couple of songs on there. Really enjoy it. So I pop open Spotify because I know I've got it on there. And I really was in the mood for some Ray Charles, Shake a Tail Feather, get to the album, scroll down, great out. What the fuck? What the fuck? The whole album's here, except that song and the other song that I wanted to listen to, which is Minnie the Moocher by Cab Calloway.

Both of the songs that I like are gone, except the rest of the album is there. Why? Why, why, why, why? So go over to Apple. The whole album's there. What the fuck? Why would, if you're licensing the album, ask your wife this. If you're licensing the whole album, why do some tracks disappear every now and again?

Or do you know the answer to that? Depends on who owns the publishing. Especially for something like a soundtrack, because it's not one artist. It's a bunch of different artists. So you will typically see that on soundtracks because there could be 20 different rights holders.

So they don't have a deal with one of the rights holders. They can't put that song up. They need to fix the law on that. That's bullshit. If you're on the soundtrack, you have to like pool in with everybody and all the deals go with the everybody on the soundtrack. Well, I mean, effort. It is now, obviously, because that is part of the deal now.

But when these original contracts were written for the Blues Brothers, nobody knew what a streaming network was. They did not exist. So there was no deals made for streaming networks. So what they have to do is they have to go back and make those deals for all the old stuff, which is a slow process.

Yeah. And it's annoying, too, because I own the damn CD. I own the plastic of it. And I can't get any of these shitty-ass streaming services to just let me use the stuff that I own. I used to be able to do that. Not anymore. And of course, you know, killing a fucking Arab, you can't even get that anywhere.

Nope. So dumb. So stupid. But speaking of Spotify being dumb, they are going to launch Spotify Hi-Fi. Apparently, they've never heard of Pono or Tidal. You can listen to all the other songs from the Blues Brothers soundtrack in very high definition through your shitty headphones.

Yes. Yes. Well, I listen on my Bose QuietComfort 2, which actually are very nice headphones. But not when I'm out running. I stick the little plastic nubs in my ear, and I couldn't care less if it's Hi-Fi or not. Exactly. You know, good on them.

There is a market out there for this, obviously. They must have done the research. There are enough people, I guess. We'll see. Yeah. It's like, ah, we got it. Maybe we'll get a few shekels out of somebody, and then they'll forget, and then they'll just keep paying for it.

That's really what it comes down to, is they've got all this stuff in Hi-Fi, so why not offer it? It's, you know, flip a switch, try to get some more money. Mm-hmm. And it's going to be in CD quality. Woo! CD quality. That's Hi-Fi now. CD quality. From the, you know, shit we had in the 80s.

Yeah, no comment. Like, if I'm going to pay extra for Hi-Fi, then I want, like, I want flack. I want above CD quality. 192-bit flack, you know? Exactly. I want somebody to drive to my house with a Studio Masters and play them on ancient hardware.

I want Metallica in my front lawn. See, that's why Pono failed, because Neil Young would do that. He would just drive to your house, and if you played his song, he would just play it for you. He actually delivered the device if you ordered one. Yeah. Because there he really could have the time to do that for all 12 that were sold.

And in Tickle My Heart, I'm Fired news, host of Reply All podcast takes leave of absence after accusations of toxic culture. Now, we always say Reply All is the podcast that we call Shit We Already Knew.

Pretty much. Yeah, except they get 5 million downloads a month, and I don't think we've ever hit 5 million downloads. I think we might be at that total. Yeah, we're pretty close. You know what? We definitely are, because I think we had 1.2 million last year, and we're coming up on eight years, so extrapolate that out over time.

But anyway, they were doing a piece on Bon Appetit, and somebody is about the toxic culture at Bon Appetit. And somebody pointed out, hey, guys, this is pretty funny, because what you're pointing out at Bon Appetit is exactly why I don't work at that company anymore, you lying, hypocritical bastards.

And yep, two people have left. One of Mr. Vunked, PJ Vunked. Okay. He was one of the hosts and senior reporter, Sruti Pinamineni. I practice this one, too. Pinamineni. There you go. I guess it's close enough.

They've left, or they've stepped back from their work. Also, they may be back at some point, but... I am also stepping back from my work. Yes. Instead of saying, I'm fired. All right. Yes, they have stepped back.

Well, okay. There you go. Apparently, they were doing some not very good things, and this is deserved. So, cancel culture my ass. It's consequence culture. I love that term. Here's the great part. If you have friends that were really big fans of Reply All, and they didn't know about grumpy old geeks, tell them about us to fill that void in their life, because we don't have a toxic work culture, and we're not racist.

So, there we go. And even if we were, there's only two of us that work here, and I'm not offended. Exactly. There we go. I did see the Mortal Kombat trailer for the new movie. It's the Mortal Kombat series, so I was like, oh, what are they going to do?

I mean, I still like the first one. You know, the Tracy Lord song in that was fantastic. I like all the music in the first one. I really, really enjoyed. The actual movie itself definitely left a lot to be desired. Shocking.

Yeah. The Johnny Cage scorpion fight, though, is still the best part of the movie. I still like that fight, but this actually looks really good. I'm amazed. So, it's coming out on April 16th on HBO Max and the COVID theaters around the world. So, if you want to go catch COVID and catch a matinee, go for it, or you can stay at home and watch it on HBO Max.

And maybe listen to the whole soundtrack on Spotify, or maybe just a few songs. Ups and doodads. Brian, I miss our Kickstarter segments on this show. Kickstarter in the balls. I know. We should bring that back sometime, except then we'd have to look at Kickstarter.

No, don't want to do it. But apparently, we don't have to anymore, right? No, Amazon has launched a program like Kickstarter that lets people vote on new products to build. Woo! Now. And then, if the product is successful, how long before Amazon rolls out their Amazon's basics version of it?

Well, I'm pretty sure that these are Amazon products, aren't they? Are they? Are they developed internally by Amazon, or are they actually outsourcing this to? Oh, okay. Good on them. We call that market testing, but I guess that's public. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. They're trying to find product market fit, and they're going to use you to do it.

All right. You still can use Kickstarter for that, too. That's what a lot of people do. They iterate on a product. If it doesn't have traction, then they don't make it. All right. So, there. There you go. All right. Well, I've been trying to deal with this massive monitor that you and I both purchased, and you mentioned the Magnet app last week, I believe, and I bought it and downloaded it, and it is very good.

It does what it says on the tin. It's very nice in terms of snapping windows around very quickly so I can do podcasting or switch back to whatever else I'm doing with my life, which is not much these days. But would it kill them to add preset options? That's the only thing I'm missing.

I was very surprised. I looked around and I was like, how do I save this window set as a preset? So, when I launch it, I can just go, boop, click a button, and all the windows go exactly where I'd have them set. But that does not exist, unsadly. So, which is a bummer. I would like to see that, especially since it's not a free app I paid.

Yeah. $4.99. Yeah. $4.99. I got a question for the audience here. I am going to learn Premiere. I've been working in Final Cut Pro, and all my friends use Premiere, and I'm asking everybody I know, and I'm sure that there are a lot of Premiere users out there, because it seems Premiere is the de facto.

It's Premiere. Everybody uses Premiere. Yeah. It is the Premiere product. So, I'm looking for good tutorials or classes on Premiere. Something I can get up to speed really quickly with, since we have some video here now that I'm going to be working with. I found that ScreenFlow Pro is actually my favorite video editor at this point, because their timeline setup is so easy to use.

You just drag, drop, cut, put in all your effects and everything, and it's done. Just do the audio separately. But I need to learn Premiere. So, any tips out there from the audience, please send them to jay at jpd.me.

I stepped out of the books that I was reading, because the new book by Adam Grant is out, called Think Again, The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. And I love Adam Grant. I love everything about him. And so, I'm like, I jump whenever his new books come out.

And I love this book. It's mostly about how to come to grips with yourself and not freak out when you don't know something and admit you don't know something and change your opinions easily and not get hung up on, you know, it's not Bader Meinhof.

What's the one? Dunning-Kruger. You know, there's a lot of Dunning-Kruger in here. And I love how he talks about making trips to the top of Mount Stupid, which we all do all the time, and how to just change your beliefs. And it's a really good book. I'm actually on my second listen to it right now.

Excellent. Everybody should read this book. It's really, really good. Yeah. That would be nice if people actually did that sort of thing. So, good. I'll check it out. But you'd love it. Yeah, I'm sure I would. I've finished two, what I call my crapper sci-fi books.

So, it's just simple, easy, boring sci-fi by some authors that just basically, literally spit the shit out. Like, these guys probably drop a book every three months, which is pretty crazy. So, I finished Cyber War, which is World War C Book 3 by Matthew Mather. It was a fun little series.

You know, a lot of stuff that we've talked about, near future, drone wars, destroying everything, people hacking into satellites, all that sort of stuff. Woo! Good series, you know, normal sort of stuff, run around, you know, basically written to become a movie, but never will happen because limited people that would be interested in this sort of thing.

And then I also finished The Lost Colony, The Long Winter Trilogy, book three. So, I finished off a couple trilogies this weekend by A.G. Riddle. Now, this one surprised me. I have to say, the first two books, standard sci-fi, world is getting destroyed, let's figure out a way to get off the planet, let's find somewhere else to live, cue problems with, you know, alien pathogens and all that sort of stuff.

Some AI involved in there, too. You got some robots running around doing nefarious deeds. Kind of your bog-standard stuff. Halfway through book three, this thing took a fucking turn for, like, I am shooting for the stars. I am trying to write a foundation. I am trying to solve the mysteries of the entire universe.

All of a sudden, he introduced all these insane ideas about the universe, and it got really super interesting. And then it went right back to just a standard sci-fi, crapper sci-fi ending. And I was like, what the fuck was that middle part? Did he sit down and write all three of these books, drop a tab of acid, the fucking shit hit right for these couple chapters where it got fucking crazy and insane, and then all of a sudden it wore off and he just finished the series as per normal.

I've never been so blown away by one portion of a book that did not fit in with anything else at all. But was it really good, that one portion? Yeah, it was great. I was like, I want more of that. Yeah, write them and tell them, man. Just say, hey, yo, AG, get on it.

Yeah, yeah. You reached for the stars briefly and you fucking nailed it. Anyways, that was really interesting. But they're all just great, simple sci-fi stories. Elon of the week! Elon is back in the house. Oh, deary, deary me.

Elon, let me teach you something here. When you buy something like Bitcoin and you tweet about it and it goes up, the thing you're not supposed to do is say, well, it's worth too much now and watch the price drop. Now, if I was a Tesla shareholder, which I know you are, I would be about as pissed off as pissed off could be at this because, yeah, they own a lot of Bitcoin now.

And Bitcoin has been dropping like a stone. So has Tesla, it seems. Oh, and Apple and every other tech stock. Yeah. So they call it a correction. A correction. Well, I'm keeping an eye on that correction because I got my finger on the trigger to jump back in.

Right. Yeah, I mean, you know, somebody said, I can't remember, somebody tweeted us saying that Elon Musk should go to jail for gaming the market, at which point you got to remember, Bitcoin, not a market. Not a market. Not regulated. People can do whatever the fuck they want, which is why you should be very careful with Bitcoin.

Very careful. Very, very careful. And what you should also be very careful about is Zoom. Every week, there's some moron. And this goes along again. An entire California school board has had to tweet, I'm fired.

Again, because this is the Oakley Union Elementary School District up in Northern California. And so they were just having a little fireside chat and just pissing and moaning about how stupid the parents are and how much they hate them and they hate their job and they hate the kids.

And then somebody tapped him on the shoulder and said, this is being broadcast to the public. Oops. Oopsies. You're fired. Somebody who should be fired, but can't be, apparently, is Gwyneth Paltrow.

She's back. She's back from Goop Land. Took her about a year, but she finally figured it out. She figured out how to monetize COVID. Okay. And she's going with the long COVID story now. Like, oh, I had it early and now I've got long COVID.

All right. Not like the Long Earth series. Those were much better than the Long Earth series. Let me guess. She has a bunch of very expensive products that helps her get through her travails. Including an $8,600 gold necklace that she wears when she's hiking. Yes. All right.

Everybody out there hiking. If you see Gwyneth Paltrow, you know she's carrying some serious cash. Here's my Goop bear spray that I'm going to use to rob you. This is bad operational security, Gwyneth. I'm just saying. Exactly.

I don't know. So, yeah, I just thought it was funny that she is now cashing in on... Well, she's been cashing in on bullshit for years now. Well, yes, her exploding vagina candles and... Oh, Gwyneth, Gwyneth, Gwyneth. Security?

Ha! We're joined again this week by Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast and 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 and policy as well as surveillance and privacy.

Nice to see you, Dave. Thank you very much. Good to be back. So, I take it, looking at the notes here, that we are taking a hiatus from the Wars of Star to talk about the Muppet Show. It's time to get things started. It's the new content that we have.

So, yes. And I am thrilled by it. I am enjoying my journey through these old Muppet Show episodes, some of them which haven't been available for a long time. Yeah. And it's been great.

And it's really reminded me just how good these shows were and just how good the original Muppet performers were. And I put a link to a little clip in here from one of the episodes from season four. I believe it was the Linda Lavin episode.

But it's a scene with Statler and Waldorf, who are the two hecklers up in the balcony. Us. You mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And, but it's this tender moment between the two of them.

They do this song together. It was a very good year. And it's just striking to me how this kid's show, you know, this kid's variety show has these, these deep, tender, moving moments between a couple of puppets.

And, and I think that was the magic of what Jim Henson was able to do, he was able to imbue these characters with real depth. And they weren't afraid to love, to love each other, to show that they cared for each other and they felt each other.

And I think that was a real part of that magic. And I feel like that's a big part of what's missing with the modern incarnation of the Muppets that somehow that slipped away. You know, you should try actually, believe it or not, watching the Muppet Babies cartoon. The writing is phenomenal.

It's not obviously to this level, but they do do that. It's, it's, it's one of the rare instances. And this is what the Muppet show was when we were kids of, of, uh, children's programming that was written for the entire family, uh, adults could enjoy as well, uh, because they put the real human issues in there.

So much so that I saw, and this could be because we no longer have, um, a president that likes to tweet from the crapper at three in the morning, uh, that I saw the Muppet show caused a kerfuffle online because apparently Disney felt the need to add trigger warnings to the Muppet show.

To the Muppet show? To the Muppet, well, they did deal with some real issues and, but apparently kids these days have to be warned that there might be a reality coming. There's something like, I, what do we, I think we have, uh, 118 of the 120 episodes are available.

There are two that aren't available. One is the Brooke Shields episode. Evidently there's some music rights and there's another one with a gentleman whose name escapes me right now, who turns out had a little issue with child pornography. So the Michael Jackson episode, no, wait, no, they left that one.

We probably never see that episode, certainly on Disney plus ever again. Just on YouTube where it belongs. Yeah. I'm sure. And right. I'm sure it's available in Sweden, but, um, uh, but there's a dozen or so episodes that have this little 10 second thing. And it's the standard thing, like you see in front of Warner brothers cartoons that say it was a different time.

People had different sensibilities, you know, that, uh, that joke was funny back then and it may not be now. So. Basically they just show that the entire time of song of the South. You actually never see any of the movie. You just see that. Yeah. Right. Right.

Um, so as, as is the way these days, the folks on a certain cable news networks have, uh, revved up the, uh, the engine, uh, the outrage engine that, um, we can't, and I think they're saying like, we can't even have the Muppet.

Even the Muppets are being canceled and then they're not, they're not, they're actually all, they're all, they're all there. And there's a little 10 second warning ahead of time. And if they didn't put that warning up, you know, they'd be outraged that they were. Broadcasting this to our children.

Right. Without, without a warning. How dare they? So it's a very similar to the whole idea of tweeting that you were being repressed and have no free speech. Well, you just tweeted it. So. Right. And I read it. Right. I'm on the most popular cable news program in the free world, complaining that I'm being censored.

Yes. So what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Oh God. Uh, let's talk about Clubhouse for a second. Do we have to? Okay. I know Brian signed up. Uh, yeah. We're just going to talk about this for a second. Okay. It's been bugging me a lot that every, every news story that you see talks about Clubhouse and how it's such a nice private network and the people can't be recorded and, you know, you can talk freely and we all know that's BS.

Brian and I talked about this a little bit, uh, on the show last time, and I've actually been doing some little videos that I'm going to start releasing to say, no, this is how you do it. Don't do it because it's against the terms of service and it might be illegal in your state, blah, blah, blah. But this is how you do it. If you would like to, um, I'm sure Ben Yellen would probably yell at me for that because it's probably not the smartest thing, but, uh, now cleverer people than myself have figured

out a way to tap into the actual APIs that Clubhouse uses to get to their provider, to just pull the stream straight and rebroadcast them to everybody else. Now this seems like, uh, I don't know, bad security to start with and, uh, like how can, how easy is it to hijack these streams and put them out there?

If you're just like, what, running Wireshark on your network so you can see the access tokens and pull them and go. It's really just, I mean, piss poor operations over there and, uh, they're saying, oh, now we're going to ban people who do it, who we catch and things like that. But I just want to keep reiterating to people, if you're on Clubhouse and you're saying things, it's not private and it's probably being recorded and, uh, probably being recorded in Beijing as well.

So since the parent company is a U S and Chinese company and they've even put in the new terms of service in Clubhouse that we are recording you for quality assurance. We're recording you, but don't you record it? Yeah. Yeah. You're not allowed to record it.

Do as we say, not as we do. Exactly. Yeah. I, I read the terms of service on Clubhouse and they say that, uh, no recording is permit permitted without written permission from all the participants. So if you get written permission from everybody and I don't know if that, oh, wait, there are no comments that you can write in.

So you can't get written permission on the platform. They should have verbal permission as well. If you got to fax it, Jason, you have to fax it. You have to fax it. Yeah. That's the way it works. Carry your kitchen it over. Yeah. I suspect that's a CYA thing for the States. Like my state where we're a two party consent state.

So they're just trying to cover themselves for that sort of thing when it comes to audio recordings. Yep. Um, I've seen a lot of, first of all, Jason, yes, you are right that the security is lacking. Um, but I've seen a lot of people commenting about how, um, clubhouses, uh, uprising their, their, their, their origin is very much mirrors Facebook in that you have this app called in to say hot or not.

Well, the fact that it's, um, the first thing clubhouse asks you for is all of your contacts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And I'm like, I'm not making that mistake again. You know, uh, made that mistake with Facebook a decade ago. Um, so it's this contact list that I don't even really remember anymore from Facebook.

Right. Thanks. Right. Um, and that they're, you know, this starting up quickly, uh, before getting all the security things in place and, um, move fast and break things. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So, I mean, I used to give companies like this a bit of a pass.

It's, it's like you, you build your product and okay, you didn't, you're, you're in a hurry. You've got a low budget. You have, you don't have a huge staff. So you don't, you don't stress test it. You don't, you don't see, you know, okay, how can everybody, anybody who wants to break this, but at this point in the, in the evolution of our internet and technology, how do you launch a product without stress testing it?

I don't understand that anymore. Right. Right. And that was another element that I think people are comparing to Facebook is that it's in this invitation only mode where, you know, Facebook had limited access when it started. And, um, so, you know, I suppose they could say that they're still, they're still in, are they still technically in beta?

It's in invitation only beta. Is that what they're calling it? I think it's still hard. Yeah. It's not hard to get an invite certainly, but, um, yeah. So I don't know. I, I honestly, um, I got as far on clubhouse as them asking me for all of my contacts and bailed.

Um, so I have it on my phone. I actually checked before we did this recording today to see, just to sort of refresh my memory on it. And I have not been in any clubhouse activity. So I can't, I can, I can claim only ignorance about how it actually works. Have you guys been, Jason, you must've been checking it out, right?

Yeah. I went to a bunch of rooms and, uh, there's a lot of hustle porn stars on there trying to teach you how to get rich, how to, you know, level up your social media game, how to take the perfect selfie and crap like that. And, uh, you know, they're all basically trading tips and tricks and things like that.

I've been in a few podcasting rooms where they give out terrible advice, um, uh, basically all the podcast rooms I've been in give out terrible advice. And yeah, the blue Yeti, uh, the $149 butt plug.

So it, um, but yeah, you know, it's one of those things where it's like, you have to kind of have it on and listening to it. And it's just not that entertaining because people that are on there aren't really professional speakers. So they're just trying to have, it's, it's like a really boring phone call for the most part, which is, which is what I find absolutely hilarious, especially since, because Clubhouse has somewhat taken off now.

Now all the social media companies want to roll out competitors. We have a beta test or a longstanding, uh, uh, social experiment going on with these things that we are holding in our hands called cell phones. We do everything we possibly fucking can to avoid actually using the phone portion of the cell phone.

Yet the app that is popular right now is basically a fucking phone call, a party line. It's a, it's a party line. Yep. It all comes full circle. Yep. Crazy. It all comes. And you can still do that right. I mean, you can just do that on your discord channel. It comes with free audio chat, so you can just do the same thing there.

I don't understand why you need a new thing to do it. Well, it is partially, partially, again, it's the way it rolls out and it's human nature, right? It became this, they were very smart with the way they rolled it out. In addition to making everybody that's using it beta testers, it was exclusive. Everybody wanted to get the invite.

Everybody wanted to get in there to this cool new thing. And that's all it is. So. And now that everybody's in there, it's not cool and it's not new and it's, it's barely a thing. Yeah. But people are still, but the new people are coming in there, aren't the tech savvy people. And it's just like when they get on the internet for the first time, they're going to do stupid things that are going to come back to haunt them later.

Yeah. We did see this morning, it came by, I think we got a press release from a security company who is, instead of doing a standard webinar, they're going to be doing the webinar in Clubhouse. So. I've seen those. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Why? You want it to sound terrible?

Thanks. And have less people access it? I guess just because it's the cool, shiny thing. So look how cool and hip we are. We're doing our webinar in Clubhouse that I think that's all there is to it. I think from a security point of view, the old advice about email, don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't put on a postcard.

I think that applies to Clubhouse as well. Use it at your own peril. The nice thing about Clubhouse over Zoom is you can't get caught. You can't get caught masturbating easily on Clubhouse. Well, not via video. There's a will, there's a way. If you're particularly vocal.

Yeah, exactly. What are you doing, Dave? I'm being chased by a bear, I swear. I've just really worked up about this security news. I win. I win. I win.

I win. Yeah. Oh, good times. All right. So moving on, we got a message from Yuri from Simi. I'm assuming Simi Valley. I'm a couple episodes behind, so pardon if you have already discussed, did you hear about the Mac malware that seems to infected 30,000 devices that keeps calling back to some control server every hour asking for new commands?

So far, it seems that nothing has happened, but the assumption is one day some criteria will be met and it may do something kind of creepy. More here and a link from Red Canary talking about it. So, yeah, I heard about this pretty quick, pretty quick that they got into those M1s, right? Yeah.

I checked mine this morning and it's squeaky clean, so I'm not one of those, but yeah, it's very interesting. Oh, is that, what did you, what did you use to check it, Jason? Because I've been looking around for, I mean, I've seen indicators of compromise, but I haven't seen any kind of, you know, run this tool and it'll tell you if you have it or not.

Is it, what did you do? It was a series of command line copy and paste, basically just some grepping and things like that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You can find out if you've got it, but nobody's really said how to get rid of it. It's like, it's like herpes.

It's kind of like COVID. Yeah. Evidently, it has some kind of kill switch built in, so I don't understand why they're not artificially triggering the kill switch. There's no payload so far. There's no indication of where it came from or how people are getting it, but the fact that they think about 30,000 Macs that they know of so far have been infected with it, that's troubling.

And as you said, Jason, I think they're, what, compiling it for the new M1 chip, which means it's current, it's up to date, they're staying current. So, it's mysterious. Better than most of my Adobe apps. Yeah. Right. Really, for sure.

So, yeah, I don't know what to make of it. It's sort of creepy that nobody, there's no indication as to what it could be used for. Might do or when. It's not good. It could be just a proof of concept that got out of the lab. Could be. Kind of like COVID.

Yeah. What I hope we'll see is some kind, don't start. What I hope we'll see is some kind of, you know, easy, tool that's easier than using the command line so people can quickly check to see if they have it or not and maybe even remove it. That's, that'd be nice.

Yes, that would be good. I guess Malwarebytes already has it built in to check for it. So, if you're using that, that will scan for it. Yeah, I did see that Apple has revoked the certificates of whoever it came from. That's kind of, you know, horses left the barn. That stops new infections.

Apple has, I mean, Apple has stuff running on your system that's looking for malware. Apple just tends to be really quiet about it. And they can go in and kill a file if they want to. They have, they have the ability to do it. They, I can only think of one time when they've actually done that, that, that I know of where there was a bit of malware that Apple actually went in and remotely wiped something.

So. U2 album. Yeah, that's the opposite of that, right? They will never live that down. Courage. No, they will not. So, time will tell, I guess.

This is one of those mysterious ones. Nothing bad has happened yet, but it is ominous that it occurred at all. Yep. I put this last one in here, which I thought was fascinating. NVIDIA has released some new, with their latest round of graphics cards, they come with anti-crypto mining software drivers.

Sold my Bitcoin at the right time. Well, it's kind of fascinating because, at least what they're saying in their press releases, is that they're doing this to try to make it so that gamers can get their hands on these graphics cards because the crypto miners buy them up so fast and, you know, game the systems, no pun intended, to just buy them in bulk.

And so if you're a gamer, it's been hard to get your hands on these. So, they put in some software that basically looks to see if you're crypto mining. And if you are, it slows the system down by about 50%, they say. And NVIDIA is making a special version of the card just for crypto mining.

So, if that's what you want to do, buy this version. It makes total sense. It reminded me, this is a total sort of side story tangent here, but it reminded me of years ago, probably a decade ago or so, when Adobe was doing some acceleration in After Effects based on some of these GPUs, NVIDIA, I think it was NVIDIA GPUs.

And at the time, NVIDIA had, they had their gaming GPUs and they had their workstation GPUs. And they would run about the same speed. I mean, they were pretty comparable technology, but the gaming CPUs cost about a third of what the workstation CPUs did.

And for some reason, they had throttled, they'd figured out a way to throttle the gaming CPUs so that you couldn't just, they wouldn't work so well to accelerate things like After Effects. And I did some digging on it at the time, and it turns out that what they had done is, they had throttled the ability of the machine to get the information back from the card back to the machine.

So, the machine, the card was able to get the information from your computer, render it out, and put it on the screen really, really quickly, which for gaming is what you want. For 3D rendering programs, you want to get the information to the card, have it render it really quickly, and then send it back to the computer to be used in your rendering, in your compositing, in your, you know, your 3D stuff.

And they had purposefully on the gaming machines crippled the ability to get the data back from the card to the CPU. Right. I know that's scintillating content, and everyone's, but it was interesting to me at the time, and so I share for no other reason than to hear myself talk.

So, there you go. Well, while you were telling that story, I actually, I went up in my own head and got really sad, because when you said, oh, a long time ago, perhaps maybe even a decade ago, my mind went, oh, the 90s, and then I went, oh, no. Nope. No. 2010s.

Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. And then I got very sad. Isn't that a funny thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, I just thought that was interesting that NVIDIA has recognized that they need to get these cards in the hands of gamers, and have crippled it for crypto mining to do so.

It's also just incredibly smart to recognize that there is an entire other audience there, and to build cards specifically for these miners. I mean, you've known for five, six years now that people are buying your cards just for this. Why not make one and market one directly to them?

I mean, I'm surprised it took them this long. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The great part about the whole crypto mining with the card thing is that you can get really cheap cards as soon as the next ones come out. You know, if you just want to stay one generation behind, I mean, they throw these things away as soon as they're done with them, so you can get them super cheap.

Yeah. Yeah. I was also one max and can't use them. I mean, we know that these things use up an incredible – like if you build a rig, it's just using tons of energy and it's generating all these heat. And I was thinking, you know, in college kids these days, when I went to college, they used to, like, kind of scan the area for heat signatures because you were growing weed in your closet.

And these college kids have these Bitcoin mining fucking things stuck in their college closets. I'm like, how times have changed. Yeah. Yeah. No, I remember I had an office space once, you know, about five years ago when all this was first starting.

And with the office space came free electricity. I didn't – I was not paying for utilities. There you go. I got asked by more than one person, like, so, they're not metering your electricity. They said, have you ever thought about installing some Bitcoin mining rigs?

And I was like, you know, I think if we got to the point where just my unit was heating the entire building, that would probably draw some attention and they'd tell me to cut it out. So, never pursued that. But evidently that's a real thing. The irony of it all is people, like in colleges, are mining Bitcoin so they can use the Bitcoin to go buy weed.

They could have just skipped a step and just grown the weed. Cut out the middleman. Yeah. That's true. That is true. Come on. Save the planet, you know, by organic. All right, guys. Well, that's what I have this week. Good seeing you guys. All right. Seeing you as well.

Yep. Until next week. Talk to you next time. Feedback loop. Over at Patreon, we've got nobody again. What's going on? What's going on over there? And just so you know, if you're a Patreon subscriber, you get the show a little early, without ads, and in high definition.

Just like Pono and Spotify Hi-Fi. But over at PayPal, we've got John Andre, Tom, Vincent. Is that John Andre or John and Andre? John Andre. It is John Andre. Wow. You never use last names.

Well, we have two Johns. You might have to be a special donator. It's not a last name. It's a second name. Middle name. Thank you for the clarification. John Andre, Tom, Vincent, Michelle, Joseph, Michael, Andrew, John, Mark, and Jeffrey. Thank you all so, so much. Thank you.

And over on Twitter, Klepto. Shout out to Jason for recommending Kim's Convenience on the last episode of GOG Podcast. Binge it all in three days, and I can't wait for the new episode. Thus continuing the new trend of Jason getting complimented for things I've done. Yep. Hey, at least I pointed it out.

I reversed the credit. Okay. And Warrior writes in, I bet one can find you both sexist for not being open about all real and made up genders, though. This is in response to my tweet about Reply All. He says, let's see if they even touch this only losable topic.

I'm not going to touch it because you're right. It is only losable. Yep. There's no winning there. There's no winning. Anthony writes in, I feel like a horrible person. I've missed like 15 episodes. I need to work outside again. And dude, I am so far behind on all of my podcasts. It's ridiculous. So I feel your pain.

But listen to us, or at least just download us. Yeah. Don't give him an out, man. Come on. JC writes in, it's old but interesting. Who would you kill and play this killer self-driving car ethics game? This is the old MIT game from back in 2016. The trolley problem game.

I'd kill them all. Kill them all. I actually did it. I did it. And I thought it was an interesting study. I do, you know, in the real world, you don't get a little button that tells you information about the people that you're choosing to kill. So, you know, I'm not going to know if that's actually a professor that I'm about to run over or not.

So it's a good. Yeah. Yeah. You use your intuition. So yes, you got to figure out if the guy in the hoodie is actually a tech billionaire or if he's a homeless person. It's hard to tell nowadays. It is. Homeless or tech billionaire. New game.

Adam Starbuck writes in, I accidentally listened to the Expanse on Prime spoilers on your podcast. I was still surprised when watching episode 10, but I think it was a good warning. So thanks, guys. Yeah. Yeah. We gave a lot of warnings on that one. Yep. And Dave writes in, you've done it again.

You killed Daft Punk by talking about them on the show. A few episodes back, you led to an amazing live concert for them that was just released after listening to it. I've been nonstop binging all old Daft Punk. Now they're broken up. Yeah. A lot of people wrote us about this.

Mark Andre did as well. So you guys talked about Daft Punk, didn't you? Sad news. The best concert I've ever been to as well when they came to Montreal for the Alive tour. Yeah. I mean, you know, they've had a very good run. 28 years is a long time for a band and actually made me feel extremely old. Can you Daft Punk spin around for 28 years?

I was like, God, I'm fucking old. But for me, yeah, the 2007 was kind of the end of it. They changed sound after that. So I haven't really followed them too much. But, you know, it's always sad when a band you like goes away, calls it a day. I personally think they're just driving up their reunion price for Coachella whenever that comes back.

Yeah, that's just priming the pump. That's all. Yep. You lost. Oh, it looks like I got Vincent Roulette. Oh. And actually, we just had another one come in that I didn't paste in for you. So lucky you. I'll save that for next week. That's okay.

That's okay. Hi, Brian and Jason. Just heard the latest episode and I'm happy it brought a cheer to your day as it did to mine. To be honest, I don't remember much of what I post to you. Maybe it's the whiskey. No shit, Vincent. We know that, but here's a $30 American U.S. dollar donation on PayPal.

We'll take it. This is also a good chance for me to test my new Revolut account with PayPal. I actually had to look it up to see if he misspelled it, but nope, it's actually a thing. Revolut. And he talks a little bit about transaction fees and things like that, which will save you the time and care about listening to.

And then he writes in, oh, shite. The Warner Music lawyers are coming for the police. Tell them that we are not home, Ted. I'm scrolling and scrolling and it's still not at the end of his message. No, no, no. We've got a lot here.

Brian, I'm not sure if the wife will find this one funny. A clip from Father Ted as I'm an Irish Chinese. It still got a good laugh out of me 15 years later. Oh, Lord. Did you play this for your wife? No. Okay. Not the Father Ted fan. Okay.

Well done to Instagram and Snapchat for shutting down this ticketed event to a St. Patrick's Day rave party. And this was basically some Irish rave party that got shut down. Woo-hoo. It happens here every day. So we have lots of these. And even the Irish prime minister won't be flying out to meet U.S.

President Biden at the White House this year. It's a weird one where a small nation like Ireland gets guaranteed access to the U.S. president once a year on St. Patrick's Day. And ain't any St. Patty's Day raves out in your parts, grumps? Does Brian or Jason have a public Spotify playlist for listeners to enjoy or expand their musical tastes?

That little fiend from Ireland. Thank you, Vincent. You made it. I don't have any public playlists on Spotify. I've never really made too many playlists except for when all of this started almost a year ago. I made the all alone together COVID-19 playlist. So we have the link in the show notes for that.

All right. Well, I've got one called Patty, not Patty. Irish music and Irish-ish music for St. Patrick's Day. Friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, puts this one together because there's an Irish place down in Long Beach that we used to go to called Clancy's. Loved that place.

Missed that place so much. And it was an 11-CD compilation that he would go and DJ there or gave to the DJ and all that stuff. So it is a very long Irish music playlist. And he did tell me to warn everybody that at the very end of the playlist, like the last two quote-unquote CDs, are the things that they would turn on to get people to leave the bar at closing time.

So that is the caveat. So it's a pretty comprehensive playlist because Bob and I are both gigantic Irish music fans. So check it out. All right. And Barrett writes in, Brian, I started watching Kim's Convenience during my Christmas vacation.

Love the show. And thanks to the private internet access VPN, I can also watch all the new season five episodes on the CBC player. Excellent. And he points out that Daft Punk will not be playing at your house anymore. True. And he says, just when I thought there weren't enough idiots in this world, TikTok users are burning snowflakes and viral videos to prove that snow is fake.

I'm trying to figure out their logic. Apparently, it must be one, create snow, two, I don't know, three, profit. Yeah. Yeah. Stupid trend. Yeah. People are so stupid. Elaine writes in, hi, guys. Thanks for the great show. I live in Australia.

A friend sent me a message saying that he has uninstalled Facebook in protest. And he sent that to me in a message via WhatsApp. That's awesome. Oh, dear. That's a good one. I guess you clicked on the privacy policy then. Matt UK writes in, hi, Jason. Since you previously mentioned the Chinese legend of Monkey, I sent you a link to a series that I watched as a young lad.

And there's a YouTube link there. And are you aware of the Netflix series, The New Legends of Monkey? Yes, on both. Yes, we've covered those both. But I will put the links in the show notes for people who have not seen them. Yeah, the Japanese version is odd because the original book is a Chinese folktale.

So what are you going to do? Christopher writes in, Reddit is cribbing your material. Just thought you'd enjoy. No, I don't enjoy. I'm very pissed off about this. It's a cartoon over at Reddit called Excel Spreadsheet, where they basically say what we said when Bitcoin first started to really trend.

It said, Bitcoin is nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet that everybody has access to. That's it. Oh, but it's encrypted. It's encrypted. Yes, yeah. God. And Scott writes in. It's a funny, yeah, but we did it first. You know.

Scott writes in, I've had the issue with more than Discovery Plus with the app when you resume playback after pausing to just stop playing and hang up. If you don't pay for a channel, it seems to forget your provider's info every few days for many of the apps on there. I'm not sure what on there means.

Roku? Is that what you were talking about? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Because Discover Plus, it's all Discover Plus, so you don't pay for extra channels inside of Discover Plus. Yeah. So you know what it might be if he's watching on the Apple TV and you can subscribe to different channels, that might be it. Maybe.

But I got to say, Discover Plus, I'm watching that more than any other service I've got right now. So that one has actually turned out to be the best deal so far out of all the different services that I've got, surprisingly enough. Well, it's a lot of content. It's just out of date.

Or not up to date. That's my problem with it. Yeah. That's not my problem with it because I get to catch up. So by the time the new seasons are there, I'm just going to be a year behind for everything. That's all. There you go. Yes. And Mark from Vermont wrote us a novel about LastPass and how it is fucking over its free customers.

And so- If you don't pay, are you a customer? Exactly. Exactly. Here's the trick. Pay for your software. It won't fuck you over. And he says, P.S. Special thanks to Dave Bittner for his fuck you guys spontaneous response in episode 490.

It made my year so far. Ours too. Ours too. Yes. Over at iTunes, we have a five-star rating from Maung One. Extremely entertaining and informative podcast. These guys are like my grandpa if he was technologically literate. They are informative and give you your opinions without any sugarcoating.

Extremely entertaining and the best podcast I've been put onto in years. Grandpa. Look, even if I was like, if my family's lineage was from 16 and pregnant on MTV, I don't think I could be a grandpa at this point. Not yet.

Soon. Soon. In an alternate universe, you could have been. You could have been. That's true. And Rhema328 from Australia writes in with a five-star, please don't talk about Bitcoin. Love you guys, but please don't talk about Bitcoin. If Bitcoin doesn't crash within the next three months, like you said, I think the Bitcoin community deserves an apology.

Wait. I don't think anyone's going to care. Carry on, gents. Hold on a second. Let me check really. Yep. Going down. What's it at now? Not good. What are we at? You want the real number? I closed the window already. I just checked to see if, uh, yeah, nevermind.

Who cares? It'll be out of date by the time that this comes out. Probably be another 10 grand lower. If you want your question or comment right on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a five-star and snarky review and tell us how much you love Bitcoin and try to drive the price up.

Yes. Just like Elon. Too bad you sold all yours. You're out. I got out in time. Yeah, you did. You got out right in time. And if you're listening to us on the Overcast player, click on some stars if you get a chance. We could really use those to get back up in the listings because it's fun.

It's fun. Why not? My closing shout out is to President Joe Biden. Since I don't really care what you do anymore, my life has become better. I don't have to watch the news because I know Papa Joe's in town and he's just...

I don't wake up to horrible tweets every day. It's my favorite thing ever. I found Twitter really stepped into the gap there and found horrible things to tweet about all the time anyways. But it is nice not having it at such a high level. I'll agree with you there. Until next time, I'm...

It just left room for the other people to say horrible things. It's opened up the space. That's true. That's true. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. This show, it is a labor of love.

And if you like it, please go to GOG.show slash donate and help us out. Or you can go to GOG.show slash shop and pick up some of our swag. And if you can't do that, just pass the show along to our friend. And if you just go to GOG.show, we've got links to everything. We've got links to our Discord channel. We've got links to all the old episodes and, you know, stuff.

So just go to GOG.show. Or if you want to specifically go to show notes for this episode, go to GOG.show slash 496. You can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, buy our swag. Get links to stuff we like. It's just everything I just said. We should really rewrite this again someday.

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