505: Hammin’ It Up

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. And I just learned that apparently gleaming the cube in Swedish means an orgasm. Oh, well. Things you learned from our Discord channel, Jason. Interesting. That puts a whole different spin on that movie.

I guess wax on, wax off. Well, the funny part is that, so they changed it from orgasm to a brother's love. Hmm. What are they trying to say about that movie? Because I didn't really get that. I'm not sure, but this is pretty deep 90s nostalgia right now. Yeah, yeah. Christian Slater's not his finest work, I must say.

No, no. It's no... Oh, God. I can't even remember the name now. Which one? The one where he's the pirate radio space. Oh, that is... Something in the noise. Oh, people are screaming at their podcast player right now. But I mean, come on. Heathers is still his best work.

Oh, by... Heathers is Winona Ryder's best work. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I got... You got to say it because Mr. Robot, really. No. No. Not so much. I totally gave up on that show. Pump up the volume. That's it. Pump up the volume. That's right. Finally came to me. Finally came. Dance, dance. Do, do, do, do, do, do.

All right. Anyways, we got a bit of follow-up. Josh wrote in, who said, just updated my iPhone, which is funny because we got a brand new update just yesterday, well before he did this. And he said, oh, the regrets. The update completely upended my meticulously curated podcast library.

Oh, you're so just this generation. Let me tell you about how the iTunes updates completely upended my meticulously curated music collections over the years. So yeah. Okay. Basically the TLDR is... You're probably not hearing this if you're listening to us on Apple Podcasts anymore.

This was the push I finally needed to get me over to Overcast, which I'm now using for podcasts. Yeah. Their new update, Fubarred everything. I don't even know if it's been solved yet. Oh no, it hasn't. It's worse than you can imagine. It really is.

So I'm using Overcast now because he asked for any tips on better podcast players. A bunch of people are using a bunch of stuff. Are you an Overcast guy or do you use something else? Well, I mean, I've been an Overcast guy for, you know, since they came out, but I have surprisingly... Yes, but you're fickle, Jason. I have been moving to CastBox mainly because the feature parody is about the same now. The speed improvements are about the same. I mean, Overcast has that reduced white space in between the words

to crank it down. I've saved like over a thousand hours with just that feature. So that's why I kind of like it. And what have you done with those hours, Jason? Listen to more podcasts. But CastBox is killing it on Discovery. So if I want a new show, I open CastBox and I use that. So like slowly over time, my subscriptions are shifting over to CastBox. I've got a bunch of, you know, private RSS feeds still in Overcast. So I'm sure that there's an import button that

I could go find in 30 seconds and just switch to CastBox. But I paid for Overcast for the year, so I still want to get my money's worth. But both of them on the iPhone are just fine and dandy. But yeah, Apple Podcasts is, there are still people that can't get into the podcast portal after two weeks. It took me eight days before I could get back in.

Right. And yeah, they completely shit the bed on this whole new, let's be good about podcasts. Let's be, you know, let's throw our hat in the ring. And they just, you know, crapped in their hat and threw it at the window. Nothing's working. Yeah, they probably should have waited to announce it until they had actually built the system.

But that's not the way the world works anymore. You jump off the cliff and you build the plane on the way down, Brian. That's how Silicon Valley works. Yeah, apparently it does. Have you been able to switch on the button since you got in that makes us millionaires? No, no. Oh, we haven't been able to hit the button that monetizes our podcast yet.

Well, we can monetize our podcast. But the one thing that wasn't really clear about that, if you want to sell episodes of your podcast, it costs you 20 bucks a year just to join the program. They get you going both ways, Brian. Both ways. They charge you to charge. Yes, they do. And then they take 30% of the charge.

Fucking assholes. Starting to really get on Epic's side, aren't you here? Wow. That's... I did not realize that they charged you to charge. I figured that they would take their 30%. I mean, that is what it is until lawsuits prove us otherwise. And Tim Cook realizes that 30% is a hefty fucking cut. But the onboarding $20 charge, that's a load of shit.

$19.99 a year. It's just like the developer program. A year! A year. It's not a one-time onboarding charge? No, it's a year. Oh, for fuck's sake. We're sticking with Patreon. Patreon.com slash GOG. Yeah, well, the only reason we're sticking with Patreon is we're fucking grandfathered into the original plan, because their fucking real plan is bullshit, too.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We couldn't afford to be on Patreon now. Wow! So, basically, all these, like, pay for... I'm sorry. I'm so over the internet. Dude, you have no idea. It's such a load of shit.

Uh-huh. Okay, so, yeah, all the basic options out there for you to monetize your stuff so you can just do small things and make money from small things with your 10,000 listeners, because it's all you ever needed, they charge the shit out of you, and you basically can't make any money.

You still got to do all the work, and, you know, even, like, you know, podcast networks, if we joined one of those, they take, you know, 50% usually, so that's half out the window. Oh, they take 50% now, as opposed to just basically promising us the moon and not delivering anything like these. Oh, they still do that. You still get that for your 50%.

They still tell you that they're going to promote your show and get you on other people's shows and boost your audience to the moon and back, but, yeah, they still don't deliver on that, and they also take 50%. Wow. We, you know, we started, Jason. Jason and I started when the internet started.

And, boy, did we miss the boat on fucking lying. Mm-hmm. Who knew that we could have just lied about everything and just been rich? Uh, yeah, that would have been nice. Oh, well. Anyways, so I guess the way to get rich now is to farm chia.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-chia! Ch-ch-ching-chia! Jake wrote in, and I thought I'd follow, we'd use this as a launching board to follow up with your experiment so far. So, Jake wrote in my experiment with raspberry pie and chia is going good. Good. I found it's excellent for maintaining a farm once it's been fully plotted, but the limited processor speed takes forever to make new plots. I'm using my eight-year-old computer to make all the plots on a hard drive and then moving that over to the raspberry pie when it's filled up. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And a bunch of stuff I can't understand.

I do have a question about this. How do we define it's going good as nobody's made any money yet? Oh, well, Brian, Brian, here's what happened. Yesterday, yesterday morning, chia finally started trading. So you can actually exchange tokens.

Well, the fact that you're here this morning doing a podcast tells me it hasn't gone well. It's actually gone better than I expected, but the thing is we're waiting on – there's no exchanges that have it yet because it literally just started yesterday. They're talking to all the big exchanges. It will eventually be on the exchanges. And people have been trading and buying and selling stuff just to be the first one. I think somebody already bought a pizza. I'm the first guy to buy a pizza with a chia in.

So he can be that Bitcoin guy, the story about how you bought a pizza with your Bitcoin, which is now worth a million dollars. Yeah. So anyway, because the speculation on what the price was going to be has been all over the place. But it seems to have settled between $700 and $800 a coin.

And how many coins do you have? 18. All right. So – Okay. Yeah. You had to change the tone there, eh? Not really. It's not changing your life. No, it's not. You're just going to buy another fucking drone. Oh, still. Yeah. Well, I've made more than I've spent so far. And once you get – There you go.

That's all that matters. Brian, I did it for fun. I've made more than I've spent so far. That is fucking cryptocurrency in a nutshell, isn't it? Yeah. I've made more than I've spent. So that's how the stock market works too. It's fine. No, no, no. What? You make more than you spend. I spend – Look, I should not have $2 million for retirement, but I do.

Well, fuck you. I got chia, so shut up. Some of us have nothing. Okay. I have – you know my retirement plan is suicide, so fuck off. Sorry. I'm a little hungover.

I – there are some weird fucking – remember how we talked about the wave of our pandemic life? I am on a fucking low right now. Okay. Anyways. No, but I've got that and the thing will just keep mining away. But he goes on to say, additionally, it seems like small farms of 10 to 20 terabytes are becoming far less viable.

10 to 20 terabytes are not going to get you almost anything anymore. I was listening to a – it was basically a live stream yesterday with Bram Cohen and the whole Chia team as the thing went live. And Bram's saying that maybe 100 terabytes is considered a small farm now.

And in about two to three weeks, a petabyte will be a small farm. So, yeah. Yeah. So, if you're in now, you've got your plots going. Just stick it in a corner. Every now and again, you might get a coin. But – and I'll probably end up tearing down this rig and selling the hard drives because the hard drives are going to be worth a fortune soon.

They already are going up. They're very hard to find because the downside is when you're mining Chia, you're mining on SSDs and you're destroying the SSDs in the process. So, especially if you're using consumer-grade SSDs, you can get maybe a couple hundred plots out of it and then boom, those things are going to melt.

So, there is a hard cost to it. And so, there is an environmental cost to it as well. Shocking. I thought the whole point of Chia was that it was – it didn't have the environmental cost that all the other crypto bros did. See, I thought that too. And now I'm like, well, I'm just sitting here destroying hardware to do this.

And I'm like, eh. So, once I'm done with this round of SSDs that have already been like half-baked, I'm pretty much done with it. I've got enough – I've made enough to, you know, pay myself back and then some. And I'll just let the farm run in the background without burning any more SSDs to the ground.

But it's been a fun experiment. It's been a fun experiment. Cool. So, there is – I put a couple links in the show here or the show notes. To check it out. There's one for the CoinMarketCap website. So, you can kind of see where it's at now. And let's take a peek. $708.82 is where it's at right now.

But – and also a Business Insider article. And then we get down to Charlie Munger, which I thought this was pretty funny. You know, we are turning into just old white men. And – because I have to agree with Charlie. Charlie Munger calls Bitcoin disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.

Oh, yeah. So, he's not down with the Bitcoin. I mean, a lot of people aren't. Let's just leave it at that. Hey, but did you keep your Ether? Because that went up. It peaked. I do. I have my Ether and my Filecoin still. But, yeah.

I mean, look. This shit's wrong. This shit's totally wrong. I mean, we've been saying it since day one on this show. I mean, it's just wrong. It uses tons of energy for nothing. There's no backing to it. There's nothing. And, yes, I understand deep down money is only money because we say it's money.

Well, and it's the same for Bitcoin. I understand that. However, there is countries and gold and all this other stuff that goes behind real money. Oh, but, Brian, we're not on the gold standard anymore. Yes, I know that. I know that.

And for Bitbros, that's like they fucking throw that card down immediately. But we're not on gold standard anymore. Yeah, do you have an army that backs Bitcoin? Yeah, it's true. Because I've got one that backs the U.S. dollar. So the thing that has been, you know, I signed up for a lot of these, you know, Bitcoin podcasts and newsletters and things like that just to see what it's like out there.

And it's kind of like going down the Alex Jones conspiracy theory. Well, it's a fucking cult. Yeah, the mental gymnastics that these people have to do to make this viable in their head is astonishing. If you listen to them speak and talk about how this is changing the world, that nothing is going to be the same again.

It's like, come on, dude. I know. I know we've been locked up for over a year now. But, I mean, they were doing this before then. It's just gotten worse. Okay. So here's the really interesting thing. And I didn't put anything in the show notes about this. But I was listening to some news the other day.

Okay. So Tesla came out with their earnings report, right? Yeah. And they actually beat expectations. Kind of. The reason that they beat expectations in terms of the money that they're making is through their Bitcoin investment, which Elon Musk actually fucking orchestrated.

He tweaks the market on that because if he tweets about Bitcoin, Bitcoin goes up, which he did right before earnings came out. And the only reason that Tesla beat earnings was through their Bitcoin investment that he artificially inflated. And everybody's going, what do we do about this?

Because this is brand new in finance. It shouldn't exist because it's a fucking illegal and it shouldn't happen. By all rights, Tesla did not beat earnings, but they did because of their Bitcoin investment that he artificially inflated. We are in such a fucking weird place right now.

Oh, yeah. No, this is like mirror universe. What the hell's going on? Everybody's got beards. Oh, yeah. Pandemic. We'd all do. Well, some of you do. I can't grow a beard. Star Trek reference there. I know. I know. I could probably glue on a goatee and be evil, but yeah.

But I mean, at least the market has responded to the fact that they didn't actually meet earnings, you know, if you go by the standard definition. The stock did not go up. I know. I know. It's really sad. I really wanted to go back up. I know. I'm waiting to sell it. I'm waiting for Saturday Night Live, though. Yeah. You dogecoin people and me with my Tesla.

I'm hoping. I'm hoping. Come on. Get back to 700, please. Please. And in other news, all I got to say is fucking PCs. I'm talking to you now on a PC for the first time in a very long time, Brian. It is – there is a thing that happens with, you know, software ecosystems and hardware ecosystems, like everything being Apple in my home usually.

Yeah. There's so many things that I take for granted that I don't have anymore with this PC. I'm like, oh, just, you know, text me, the thing. I'm like, oh, wait. There's no Messenger on the PC. Okay. Thanks, Tim Cook. Can you fix that?

Now I'm starting to see why all these people are getting pissed with the antitrust. I'm like, can I just please have Messenger on the damn PC? I have an iPhone. I would just like to get my messages on my computer, please. Just little things like that over and over again for the past couple days because I'm getting ready for this Twitch stream that I have to do tomorrow night.

And every Wednesday from 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern for two hours, teaching people how to podcast on Adorama XP. Go check it out. Link will be in the show notes. Come talk to me because I feel like I'm going to be talking to myself for a while. Please come. It's like being on Clubhouse.

It kind of is. And so I had to get a PC because just the streaming software works so much better. OBS works a thousand times better on a PC. But man, it's rough. It's rough. It's rough out there for Microsoft.

It is. It is. Especially when you're trying to do demos on one computer. I've got multiple micro. Dude, this, I got to say, at least it's kind of been, you know, tech interesting like it used to be. Like, you know, like our old rooms used to be with cables everywhere and computers. I really do feel like I'm 20 again with all this technology strewn about the place.

But yeah, man, this PC thing's rough, I got to say. You still feel like you're 20 when you're on your knees crawling underneath something to grab some cables? I did that yesterday, actually. I was crawling under my desk trying to route HDMI cables and audio cables from one side of the room to the other.

And here's the difference. In our 20s, when we got up, we didn't have to go find a heating pad. Exactly. That's, I didn't have to, you know, roll over, get on all fours and slowly drag myself up off the floor. I could just do a quick kip up and I would be done. I'm like, okay, next cable.

Now it's just like, it is, it is a process, Brian, to get back up. In the news.

Well, we're going to find out, well, actually, by the time most of you have heard this podcast, we know, is Trump back on Facebook? That's true. That is true. Facebook's oversight board has delivered its ruling, but we're not going to hear about it until tomorrow, Wednesday, May 5th at 9 a.m.

Eastern time as to whether he's allowed back on or not. Well, given my experience with Facebook, I wouldn't know, even if I followed him, because I'd never see any of his updates because Facebook is a fucking shit son. If Trump is on Facebook, does anybody ever follow?

It doesn't matter, you know. If Trump shits on Facebook. Yep. Oh, wait, that's the Pope. Well, whatever. Same, same. I, you know, I got 20 bucks on the fact that he'll be let back in. There's no. I think so, too, because so far all of the decisions basically overturned Facebook's decision.

So that seems to be a thing. They're going to say, of course, that he's a public figure and he has every right to be on Facebook and they can ban specific posts if they want to, but they can't ban them completely. That's my guess on the ruling. So we'll see. Yeah. That just shows how stupid this oversight board is.

Exactly. Yeah. I'll be, I'll be shock ed, shock ed to my core if they, they keep the ban in place, even though he has violated the terms of service multiple times. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it doesn't really matter because Florida now is putting a bill through that will find social media platforms for banning politicians unless Florida, unless you're Disney, unless you're Disney, they can ban politicians.

No. Oh, yeah, they can. They can. Because, you know, if, if Trump, if they want to ban Trump from Disney Plus, they can, I guess. That's the whole thing. It's Disney Plus isn't a social network. I know. I don't understand.

They just, they just wanted it in there just in case. Okay. So he can't watch Frozen. Let him go. Let him go. Okay. All right. Yeah.

I don't understand anything that's going on in Florida. Florida just basically said, hey, by the way, coronavirus done. Sure. We got a bunch of variants floating around our state, but fuck it. We're done. Yeah. Fuck it. Fuck it. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, they actually, it's going back and forth between the Senate and the House because the Senate's version had fines for $10,000 a day for banning a political candidate and $100,000 if the candidate was running for election.

That's per day. Now. And there's no exemptions. Except if, except if you're Disney. Well, no, I mean, for, okay, don't get me started on that, but say said politician advocates, I don't know, going and shooting up a pizza parlor because obviously they're, of course, higher, you know, protecting Hillary Clinton and her child porn ring.

No exemption for that. You're, you're not allowed to ban them even if they do something crazy. You can temporarily ban them. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Temporary bans are fine. Permanent bans are not. So, I mean, I guess you could just string together a bunch of temporary bans until this law is overturned.

But, so I did, to finish up the house version, they, they changed it from $10,000 and $100,000 to $25,000 and $250,000 a day. Okay. So now they have, they have to get approval on that. But, uh, yeah, yeah. Your temporary ban can last 60 days, but anything longer will result in a fine.

And the platforms would have to make available to users any content the candidate posted before their account became inactive. Okay. Does the, uh, does the bill, uh, take into account? Oh, I don't know, geolocation and the fact that, you know, theoretically a social network or say Disney plus, uh, could, uh, basically let posts go to people that are logging in from Florida IP addresses and block them from everywhere else.

The bill doesn't take into account fucking reality, Brian. So what do you expect? Oh, okay. Just checking. What do you expect? Yeah. Okay. What a world. Yeah. Okay. Moving on. Moving on. Moving on. Let's get back to some Elon Musk news. Okay. Uh, so Tesla got the NASA contract.

They're not Tesla. Uh, SpaceX got the NASA contract to land people on the moon. Yep. Uh, and Bezos now who I, I, I, I don't know what it is with this guy and his sour grapes. You know, he lost the, uh, the, was it the Jedi contract to Microsoft?

Yep. And so he sued. Now he lost this one to, to SpaceX and now he's suing again. Talk about a little pussy. Come on. It's not a good look. And that's what a lot of people are out there saying. It's, it's pick one to be angry about. Not both. Yeah.

Because now you just look like a, like a whiny little bitch. Well, I don't know if he looks like, I think he might be. He just might be. Sour grapes. Yeah. But I mean, honestly, I think this is a good thing. Um, I mean, it's unfortunate that it's old white men, uh, that are running both of these things, but it's a good, it's a win for NASA and it's a win for humanity that we have two people that, uh, basically have raging hard-ons to get out of this, uh, out of this, uh, planet.

Um, and they're going to spend a lot of their money, uh, just trying to piss each other off to get there first, which is great because we win. Yeah. We're, it's, it's basically super villainy for the greater good. Exactly. It's wonderful. Yeah. It's fantastic. Um, Atlassian, have you ever used their software?

Uh, I did briefly once. It was fine. Um, I've, I, I use Trello mostly, which is, I, are they connected to Atlassian? I can't even remember. I can't remember, but Jira was the one that I had to use as a software developer. And, uh, I hated Jira.

Everybody I know hated Jira. Fucking Java. Still better than Bandcamp. So they, uh, they have decided now that their employees can work from almost anywhere without needing managerial approval. Now I just put this in here because I like this. Well, that is the point of their software.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It would be hypocritical for these companies not to allow that. Employees as a service. So, and they're saying it's because, you know, in this, uh, global talent war that they're in, it's, uh, it just helps them, gives them a leg up so they can get talent from anywhere in the world without requiring them to move around the world to, uh, where an office is.

Subtext, uh, also without requiring, oh, I don't know, most of the labor laws involved. Well, no, you have to work in a place where it's legally allowed to work. Um, they've got, they've got offices in 12 countries already, so they have, you know, uh, local, um, you know, uh, liaisons there and things like that, but you have to be legally allowed to work in that country and be able to have the proper visas and things like that.

So it's, uh, it's all above board as far as I can tell. There's no shenanigans going on here. They're not trying to do, uh, like sneak anything through. They're just trying to make it easier for their employees. I think, I think it, it, as far as most of these companies go, these guys are actually some of the good guys, even though I hate their software.

Fair enough. Yeah. All right. Well, Uber and Lyft and DoorDash have been signaled. Uh, U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh. Sounds like a. Sounds like a standup comedian. Back to the future there. Oh, yeah. Oh, Marty, uh, told Reuters on Thursday that gig workers should be treated as employees.

Now, this does, this is not law, this is not, uh, any decree from the government yet, but it has signaled to these companies that, uh, look, I don't care how much money you spent in California trying to pass a law to convince people otherwise through deceptional tactics.

Uh, you got employees and you better start treating them as employees and, uh, we'll see what happens. But, uh, it's a good sign as far as I'm concerned, because I've been screaming about this since day one. Yep. We'll see. I mean, every time we think that, you know, this is a nail in the coffin, I feel like John, John Oliver with the, we got them button.

And then no, we don't. Exactly. You know, it's like they always weasel their way out. Cause you know why? Cause they have very powerful investors who don't want to lose the billions of dollars they've invested in these companies until they can flip and, and, uh, get something back out. So, yeah, because as we know, they're not making any money.

They're still living on investor fumes. That's exactly right. Investor fumes smells delicious. Ah, smells like desperation. And a hat tip to TJ on Twitter, who sent this one in Zoe Roth, who is the disaster girl.

I don't know if you knew the disaster girl meme, but this is the woman that was in it. She was four at the time when the picture was taken. She is now 21. Uh, she became an internet hit when she was pictured aged four standing in front of a burning building with a devilish smirk on her face. She has sold that picture as an NFT, of course.

Yep. Yep. In an auction for, uh, $500,000, half a mil. And, uh, there you go. So, uh, I'm not sure why she was able to sell the photo as opposed to her father who took the picture. I was wondering where's the split. Theoretically owns that.

Yeah, where's the split there with that, with dear old dad, maybe dear old dad burned to get to death in a fire and she has rights now. Well, she said she would donate the proceeds from the sale to charities as well as meaning after she used it to pay off her student loan, which is probably a hat tip to dear old Dan.

Yeah. Dad that, uh, he doesn't have to pay off the student loan for. Hey, fuck it. Hey, anybody that can make money off of NFT, NFTs right now, I'm like, go for it. Take the money. Cause it's such a scan. Get it before it goes under. Now, you know, the story of, uh, in my involvement with this photograph, right? No.

Disaster girl, uh, it's very briefly mentioned in the New York times article that her father won a photo contest with this photo after he took it, which then became an internet meme. That photo contest was basically, he was featured in a magazine I used to work for called JPEG magazine.

Ah, so he was in our magazine. We put it on the website. We pimped it up. We got it out there. And unfortunately, JPEG magazine is no longer, it is gone. It was bought by the, uh, the photo mafia in New York city. And apparently they ran it into the ground.

So I can't remember who exactly bought. I think it was just, I think all of the main, um, photography companies went in and bought it and they were going to turn it into a big thing. But anyway, yeah, this came straight out of JPEG magazine where, uh, where I used to work. I was the CTO there for two years. Excellent.

All right. Well, there's a story behind this photo and actually I, I, I, again, like I said, I'm, I'm on a bit of a low right now, but I was on Twitter last night and friend of the show, Sean Bonner. Good guy. We like him. Good guy. Uh, he's gone all in on NFTs.

Oh yeah. So his Twitter feed is nothing but like, let me teach you about NFTs. Come into my clubhouse and I'll talk about NFTs. And by the way, here are all my photos that I'm selling as NFTs. Yep. And I was thinking last night that, uh, photographers have become the new fucking, uh, recipe bloggers because now I have to listen to all these fucking stories about why this photo is so meaningful that I should buy it.

Every photograph has a, has a story. Every photograph has a story. So now I have to, so now I need a plugin, uh, that basically does the same for recipes. So it destroys all the soul, the story. So I don't have to fucking read about how you were doing whatever with your significant other and why this photo is so important to you.

And just see the fucking photo. Let me look at the photo. That's all. Yeah. Or, and you can go buy it. Which I don't need to buy because I just looked at it on Twitter. Exactly. You just saw it. Okay. It is now in your brain hole. And speaking of that, uh, Vincent sent in this link, uh, from CNN.

This is a guy who tried to cash in on the NFT craze by auctioning a house and selling an NFT of the house along with the actual house. Because why would I need an NFT of the house? Because I bought the fucking house, which is the TLDR on this and why it didn't work.

So he was hoping to get over $20 million for a house worth not even a million dollars because you get an NFT too, right? Yep. Nah. No. And nobody cared. So. Yep. Didn't even make his reserve price of $2 million.

No. Because the house isn't worth $2 million and that is the problem. And this is what everybody said. I don't care. This is, you're trying to, you're, ah, I'm sorry. My head is starting to explode with this shit. I told you the mental gymnastics are fucking amazing.

The mental gymnastics on this stuff is insane. And people are trying to convince each other of this. It's a house. It has tangible value. He fucked up by actually including the house with the NFT. If he'd have just sold the NFT, maybe he would have made some money.

Which is, which some people have actually done. Yes. I looked into this when I was looking at this story and people have sold blueprints for houses as NFTs. God knows why, but they have. And the whole point of this article is that people were saying people that are trying to buy NFTs aren't trying to buy actual property.

And people that are trying to buy actual property, which has valuable value, it's fungible. Don't give a shit about an NFT. So, no, the whole thing is just, it's silly. It's silliness. Silliness. I, you know, I love Sean, but I can't go down that rabbit hole with him.

I'm sorry. I just can't. No, I'm, you know, I'm glad he's got something to do. Exactly. I've got Chia. He's got NFTs. So there you go. The shit you guys get up to when you don't have kids. I know. He's got kids.

What are you talking about? Yeah, he's old now. That's true. He just throws a baseball at him and lets him run around. No, he throws a raspberry pie at him, I think. So now Epic, the Epic Fortnite Apple case is going along gangbusters now. It's been one day.

But right before the case began, this is the one that I really liked. Alex Russell from Google came out with an article that basically took a huge chunk out of Apple's defense argument saying, well, hey, you don't have to use the App Store.

Or you can create a web app and share that via, you know, the in iOS browser. And he's like, no, you can't. And here's why. Because every browser that goes into an iPhone or iOS device has to use WebKit.

And WebKit sucks. Well, WebKit is the main reason we all had to update everything yesterday. Oh, there you go. It was a known hole in WebKit. Yeah, so basically what he's saying is that Apple's lock on the browser technology inside of iOS is a massive hindrance, putting people years behind.

And it's true. I mean, WebKit sucks. Come on. Yeah, it does. They really need to let go of that stranglehold on being able to use a different browser in there. I mean, you can use a different browser now. I use Brave on my phone, so at least my bookmarks sync, but the actual rendering engine is still the piece of shit WebKit under the hood.

So he's saying that, yeah, so with Apple doing that, they still have a monopoly on the technology because you can't run a high-end game using their shitty browser. So it's like, you know, Apple is wrong on so many fronts here that it's sad because they're going to win.

I'm almost positive Apple is going to win this Fortnite case with the 30%. So. Yeah. I mean, I still think Tim Cook is one of the good guys and Apple is one of the good companies and they'll come around to all this. But, yeah, I agree with you.

Shareholder value, Brian. Shareholder value. Getting a lot of it. Speaking of shareholder value, Verizon just unloaded AOL and Yahoo for. Oath? Yes. Yeah. See, that's the difference.

You got a jingly tune. Yahoo! Oath. What branding genius came up with Oath? I don't know, and it didn't last long, but I'm sure that guy got paid a lot of money. Yes, he did.

So, they unloaded AOL and Yahoo for five billion bucks. So. Well, I mean, it's not chump change. It's not chump change, but it's half of what they paid for it to Apollo, which is a private equity firm that owns the Venetian. So, get ready for some poker on the Yahoos.

It's a pretty decent deal, I think, and they're going to try and rebuild it. And guess what brand they're going to go with? Oh, God. Yahoo. Just fucking Yahoo. They're smart. They're like, Yahoo. It's the 11th most visited website on the internet.

Why wouldn't you just go with Yahoo that everybody knows? And I'm just going to throw this out there now, but somebody go find Yahoo Sirius and hire him to be your spokesperson. Is that guy still even alive? I hope so. All right.

So, and in other use, the European Commission and the executive branch of the EU basically has put out a regulatory framework that if adopted could have global implications for the future of AI development. Unfortunately, as everybody is starting to point out, the TLDR on this is they basically didn't define anything very strictly and nothing is particularly clear.

Everything is open to considerable interpretation and all of this framework is basically useless. Oh, they really embraced AI because nobody knows what the fuck it is. Well, exactly. And they would definitely regulate robot surgeons. But you know what?

If you're in the military and you want kill bots, fuck it. Do what you want. Oh, that's so stupid. Yeah. Yeah. So that was a big waste of time, people.

At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Media Candy.

Well, today is May the 4th, so May the 4th be with you. The ultimate Hallmark holiday. But it's only 8 in the morning, so I haven't watched anything or seen any news or anything like that yet. But I guess we get the Bad Batch and all that, so I'll probably watch that except it's animated and I'm not really big on the animated stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Okay. That's all I got. We've been – the wife has finally decided to watch Ted Lasso, so I've re-watched all of it. We watched the last episode last night. My God, that was such a good show. Next one's coming soon. Just feel good. Feel good stuff.

Awesome. Awesome. I watched – I finally finished Lovecraft Country. I watched two episodes of that and I just couldn't get into it. See, I had to stop in the middle, but it's – you know, it's just – I was – like you, I was on a down – one of the ditches of the COVID.

Yeah. Yeah. Those are dangerous. Yeah, yeah. But now that I've been maxinated, I went back to it because I have a much better mindset and finished it out and it was good. It was really good. Okay. It's strange because it goes through all these different side stories as you go.

And I kind of want to go back and watch the whole thing from start to finish just to get the whole thread. But yeah, no, I actually quite enjoyed it and I quite enjoyed the ending too. So I don't think there's going to be another one, which is great. So it's like a one and done. Right. But yeah, I thought it was well worth the watch.

So give that a shot if you like. Godfather of Harlem Season 2 was out, which if you haven't watched Season 1, fantastic show. I love that show. Never even heard of it. It's on Epix. It's got Forrest Whitaker as Bumpy Johnson and it takes place in Harlem.

The guy that they have playing Malcolm X is Malcolm X. I swear to God, they cloned him and brought him back for this show. It is eerie how good this guy is. It's crazy good. But yeah, it's got Vincent D'Onofrio in it too and a bunch of heavy hitting actors, but it's got a great story.

Highly recommended. And because every now and again, you've got to turn the brain off. We've been starting from the beginning on the great food truck race on Discovery+. 13 seasons of it. It's so old. It's in 3-4, the first season.

They have flip phones and they have flip phones. But yeah, it's a fun show. It is so great to be able to turn it, turn off your brain. And it's funny, the first season, they have the Grilla Mall truck. Have you ever seen that around LA? No, not that one.

Oh, they used to be by BLT when I worked there because we had a little food truck park and they would come in every now and again. So it was fun to see them on the show. But yeah, that is a great, like, really turn your brain off type of show. See, I do diners, drive-ins, and dives for that.

Like, it's always on Food Network at night. So I'll switch over to that and take a look at it. And it's so crazy when you see the old school footage. Like, all of a sudden, his face is like five times fatter. It's hilarious. We've been watching Guy's Grocery Games Home Edition because everybody's been cooking from their house.

And it's really fun. Recommend that one, too. Actually, we look forward to that one every week. Guy Fieri gets a bad rap. He does. He's a nice guy. But, I mean, come on. Look at him. Kind of hard not to. Apps and doodads.

I found this cool little app that you can take articles from the web and send them directly to your Kindle. They've got, like, a little bookmarklet. Why, though? Well, some people like to read. Like, no. Back in the day, when I was commuting, this would have been perfect.

It's kind of like Read Later or Instapaper back in the day. You know, all those save for later types of things. And some people like to use their Kindle app, you know? So you can send it to your Kindle app and read it that way later. It's really good for long-form articles. For short articles, why bother?

But, you know, like, if you're reading really long stuff, which every now and again you do, why not just put it with all your other stuff that you use your Kindle for for long reads? Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. Yep. It's pretty cool. I mean, most people won't do it. I know that. But I just thought it was neat.

Neat. And I was talking the other week about my Apple Watch and how I upgraded to the latest and greatest and basically kind of went like, meh, I don't have any of the problems that this health, the updated health stuff takes care of. But there are reports now, the Telegraph and Forbes are reporting that UK health tech firm Rockley Photonics confirmed in an SEC filing that Apple has been its largest customer for the past two years.

And what they do is they focus on sensors that track blood glucose pressure and even alcohol levels, suggesting that some of these features will be available in a future Apple Watch. So, like I talked about, the main thing that I would like in another watch is tracking blood pressure.

So, we might get that. We might get that. I don't know how accurate it's going to be. You know, then we can unlock our Apple car depending on our alcohol levels from our watch. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I want that. I don't want that feature. You talk about tracking that I don't want.

No, thank you, ma'am. You don't want to know how much you're drinking? I don't want everybody else to know how much. That's exactly how much I'm drinking. I don't need this. Yeah. I don't need anybody else to know that. Thank you very much. And I just love the name because it sounds fake. Rockley Photonics. I know it does.

It sounds like it's a Jetsons company. Yep. And Facebook has rolled out their iOS notices to try to sell you on app tracking. They've been, since the latest update, iOS 14.5, which basically allowed you to opt out or you actually have to opt in to, yes, please do track me all around the web.

I'd like that. And everybody said no. They're rolling out all these ads saying, if you don't let us do this, you might have to pay for us in the future, as opposed to getting it free of charge, to which I say, I've been asking you to do that for 20 years.

I know. What the fuck took you so long, you assholes? I would love to pay you for Facebook that actually worked and was useful to me. Oh. How stupid are they? Everybody wanted to pay them. Everybody will throw you a couple bucks to stop tracking us and actually give us a fucking timeline.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Doesn't anybody over there listen to anyone? No, they don't. Okay. Well, they listen to Mark. Mark's off busy slaughtering a goat or some damn shit this week. He is truly a fucking psychopath. Yeah. Like, I can start listing off and talk about all the tech giants and the people that are running all the companies.

And I have problems with all of them. No doubt about that. But for most of them, they're fine. They're normal human beings. Mark Zuckerberg is a fucking sociopath. Yep. Yeah. Pretty spot on there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And Slate came out with an article talking about the problem with Apple's plan to stop Facebook's data collection, which basically, in a nutshell, is they can still get all that information from you from other channels.

Yeah. Which is what we said. That's why Google said, okay, we're cool with it. Never mind. Yeah. We'll see you over here. Not a problem at all. Yep. So I read a really weird scholarly tome.

I was – I wanted to, like, kind of read a little bit about Irish history because given the amount of time I spent in Irish bars, I knew very little. Your motivations made me suspect. I feel like I'm ignoring a part of my history even though it's not – I'm German.

Yeah. But I've got so much Irish whiskey in me, I was like, hey, I should really look into this a little bit. And I was trying to look around for a good book on Irish history and I didn't – I wasn't really finding one and I was talking to a friend of mine, a really good friend who's been my bartender at my Irish bar for the last 20 plus years.

And she said, you know, my dad wrote a book. And I was like, did he? So I got her dad's book. This is In Search of the Irish Dreamtime Archaeology and Early Irish Literature by J.P. Mallory. And I read it cover to cover and it is very scholarly.

Like, this dude's serious. Like, it is not a fun time read of Irish history. It gets deep into the weeds. But I still really enjoyed it. So if you're really ready to take a deep dive into Irish history, this is the book for you. Right.

Okay. Yep. Yep. Look, I had to break stuff up. I've been a lot of shitter sci-fi recently. Needed something different. Well, we got some new sci-fi. Andy Weir is back with Project Hail Mary. I feel like he might be a one-trick pony for me.

You tell me otherwise. I will. It just came out today. So, I mean, his last book was pretty good. It's all right. Hmm? It was all right. It was all right. It was all right. I mean, The Martian was a tough one to top there. Look, it was no Armada from Ernest Cline for his, you know, follow-up.

Come on. So he gets props there. And he's got pretty good blurbs. If you go look at the page on Amazon, some pretty heavy hitters. Although Ernest Cline is one of them, but Brandon Sanderson gave it a good review. And so did George R.R. Martin and a bunch of other people.

I don't know, but I don't care. I'm going to read it anyway. Okay. So I'll have a review. I'll have a review next week. This is mainly, I put it in here so everybody can go get it. Because I found it by happenstance. Because even though I follow Andy Weir on Amazon, I got no notification that he had a new book out today.

Thanks, Amazon. Yeah, I would like to have a word with Amazon about their notifications. Because I follow a bunch of authors, including Andy Weir as well. I got no notification. However, I got notifications about all the stupid fucking Dune books that are coming out by the sons and grandsons and whatever that don't matter.

Like, where's the consistency on this? There's none. There is absolutely none. Like, even Neil Stevenson. You threw out the new Neil Stevenson that's coming, like, in 2027. I didn't get a notification on that either. And I follow Neil Stevenson. So that'll come out in 2026.

Security? Ha! Dave Bittner is back. Dave is the host of every podcast on the internet, but also host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy as well as surveillance and privacy.

And finally, he's the co-host of Recorded Future, where he takes you inside the world of cyber threat intelligence. And every now and again, he shows up on our little show. Welcome, Dave. Hello. And if anybody is going to make Joe Rogan normal, it'll be Dave. Yeah, that's right. Here's on the Joe Rogan experience. Maybe I could be permanent guest host for Joe Rogan.

I could be Joe Rogan's Jay Leno, you know. I don't know. I think his listeners would probably get whiplash going from Joe to me. I don't know. Although I do like a good UFO story. So, you know, we'll get to that. And a spliff. I kind of put that one in there for you because I am aware of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so gentlemen, I have some follow-up on the Amazon delivery ring camera mystery. Yes, I am on the edge of my seat. Go on. What have we discovered? Beyond the few listeners that wrote to us and said that absolutely does not happen to me, you have more follow-up.

Okay. Since we talked about it on the show, it has absolutely not happened to me. I have – I actually had to order more stuff to have more data points because – I like the judicious use of the word had to.

I had to. I had to. Mom, he made me do it. So I went to my wish list and I'm like, okay, what's cheap that I can order to make sure – so I got a headlamp, you know, one of those strap-on headlamps like Spurlunkers. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Well, it comes in handy at night when I'm trying to take the dogs out, coyotes are in the neighborhood and I have to pick up the poop.

So try picking up poop with a – like holding a flashlight and trying to keep the coyotes at bay. So a headlamp actually came in handy for $12, okay? The pandemic has affected us all in strange ways, I have to say. Is that the first time you've purchased a strap-on, Jason?

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Okay. Just checking. Just because I worked for JPEG Magazine does not mean I was a pegger. Just checking. By the way, we had to educate our then-CEO before he was fired. He used to sign off all of the emails and say, thank you for reading the email, peggers.

And we had to take him aside and introduce him to what pegging is. And they were like, you live in San Francisco. How can you not know what pegging is? Yeah. Yeah. No, it's – Okay, so here was the plan.

I was going to put up the Amcrest camera and the Logitech camera and have – plus the ring camera. So I'd have three points of failure here. I only got the Logitech camera up at first. And they delivered and they walked right in front of both cameras and both cameras caught them.

No problem there. So I'm like, okay. And even my roommate was like, well, you got to order more stuff. They're not going to take this because maybe that guy doesn't have the clicker to turn off the cameras. You got to get more stuff. So I'm like, okay, let's get more stuff. We're starting to see an enabling situation. I know. Yeah.

So over the course of four deliveries, none of them turned off the ring camera. And that's four deliveries that made it to the door because the lazy bastards on Sundays and Saturdays just kind of throw it over the fence and leave it in the middle of the yard.

So they don't even bother to come in the gate. Yeah. Just hurl it over the fence. They literally do. So, yeah. Thank you, weekend Amazon delivery, you know. But I had four separate data points where people came to the door that were visible on both cameras and neither camera had any problems.

All right. Well, are we going to continue the experiment? Sure. If you want to go to patreon.com slash GOG. Patreon.com slash GOG so I can buy more stuff, then we'll continue the experiment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it felt to me that it sounded a little overblown. I have heard from a number of our listeners. Nobody has experienced this. I have a feeling this is, you know, urban myth getting blown out of proportion. I don't doubt that it's happened to some people and there probably are some Amazon delivery drivers that have the little, you know, highly illegal button to jam Wi-Fi.

But I don't think this is anywhere near as widespread as the internet had led us to believe. Yes. I also think that I also think my first theory was more plausible with the truck picks up the ring. It registers as motion, records for 30 seconds and then disappears.

So the camera, the camera sees the truck starts recording. The truck is out of frame. So there's nothing there. And then it just kind of goes blank for five minutes when the package is delivered. And then, boom, the camera resets and comes back. Because that's the default setting on the ring. So my rings are set for keep recording no matter what.

Come on. Get them on camera. Right. Yeah. I think the most plausible scenario is that all of our phones were listening to us. And so it knew that we were talking about this. Exactly. It went in and it altered the settings of your ring so as that we would not be on to their plot here.

To me, this makes total sense. There is a ring camera with a microphone within listening distance of me right now. So they could have been listening. Strangely enough, as I am not a ring owner, all I've had is ads for ring cameras for the last two weeks. You know, this also reminds me, when I was in college, I think I may have mentioned here before, that my roommate was president of the Ham Radio Club at the university.

You guys must have had awesome parties. We did. We did. Yeah. So let me tell you, boy, it's everything you think it would be and more. And so we had lots of radio stuff in our room and it was actually kind of fun. I enjoyed it being, you know, nerdy like I am.

I sort of lived my ham radio life vicariously through my roommate. But he had a little device in his car, a little, you know, Radio Shack project kit that was just a single red button. Right. And you'd be driving along and somebody would come blowing past you in a fancy car.

Let's just say a Porsche 911 or something like that. He would hit this button and it would light up their radar detector. They'd slam on the brakes and slow down. So he was, you know, just blasting out on one of the radar detector signals.

And I said to my roommate, I said, Ken, you know, you're a radio guy. You know the rules. Isn't this against the rules for you to be blasting a jammer on this frequency? He said, aha, I'm a licensed ham radio operator. I am licensed to operate on this frequency. Oh, nice.

Captain loophole. Right. Nice. Exactly. Right. He said he would say stuff like, I'm just broadcasting really, really slow Morse code. Yeah.

Anyway, it was fun. It was fun. Human nature's ability to justify one's actions is always amazing to me. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of makes me want to go get a ham radio license now and see what other things you can get up to. Right. Right. I don't even know where to get one of those nowadays because didn't you use to take the test at Radio Shack?

Well, I can get a T-shirt at Radio Shack dot com now, but I can't get a ham radio license. Yeah. And I think there are much more accessible licenses that you can get than it used to be. Because ham radio is, you know, not as popular as it used to be. Do tell.

Do tell. It was once the rage across college campuses. Yes, I do remember that. Just to say that it was ever really that popular. But once the internet happened and you could use your computer to talk to people on other side of the world, the need for radios and antennas to do that kind of fell off.

Well, the telephone also kind of usurped the need for ham radio. Are you guys saying that I should – the van that I was looking at for us to catch the Amazon people had a very large ham radio antenna on it. Should I not bother with that one?

Yeah, yeah. Let me tell you, the ham radio club were often called on to even stop crime. At the University of Maryland, they happen to have – right next to the campus, there's one of the oldest airports in the world.

It's a little general aviation airport. I was thinking an airport extreme. Like one of those old apple pucks? Yeah. No, no. It's an actual airport. Real airplanes fly in and out of it. And it's one of those places that doesn't have a tower.

So the lights for the landing – the runway are turned on by keying up on a certain radio frequency. You know, you key up on that frequency, lights turn on. Key up, lights turn off. So you're coming in to land. You broadcast on the frequency. Lights come on. You land.

Everything's great. So some knucklehead was somewhere in view of the runway. And when planes were coming in on their final approach, he would sit there with his little handheld radio or whatever and key on the frequency and turn the lights off.

What a dick. That's a dick move. Yeah, exactly. So the ham radio guys teamed up with their friends at the FCC, and they basically did a fox hunt. They got directional antennas, and they knew what frequency this dick was on.

And they tracked him down. They triangulated, figured out where he was, and he got busted. Well, listen up, kiddies. If you want to know why Dave is the co-host of many successful podcasts and Jason and I are the host of this one, it is because Dave was stopping crime in college while Jason and I were committing crimes in college.

Yes, and it's an interesting life well lived, right? Climbing up radio towers, chasing after people, trying to come at the general aviation community, and memorizing Star Wars movies. That's pretty much it.

I think your autobiography should be, this one time at ham camp. Yeah, CQ, CQ. Three people out there are laughing. I know. Yeah, exactly.

It's just us. And you know what? We're going to hear from all three of them. Well, you will. I don't have a ham radio, so. No, well. Okay, a little more follow-up here. Digidog, the New York Police Department's robot dog that they got from Boston Dynamics, they had to take it back to the shop because of the, quote-unquote, public outcry.

And I love this. John Miller, the Police Department's Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism, told the New York Times that the contract was a casualty of politics, bad information, and cheap sound bites. No, I'm sorry, it wasn't.

I think it was the fucking terrifying video that did it for me. It was the fact that nobody wanted your death dog walking into their apartment building. Yeah. Yeah. They thought by giving the dog a nickname like Spot would be all the PR that they need for this little monstrosity to put people at ease.

Like after this terror gets at you, you will be left in a little spot of blood. That is it. Exactly. That's all that's left. A smoldering spot of goo on the ground. Well, good. You know, it's unfortunate that we've all paid so much money for this fucking thing, but I'm glad it's gone.

So my favorite story of the week and the one I put in here mostly for you, Dave, came from former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who has revealed, I suppose if it's going to be any state, Nevada would make sense, that he was told that Lockheed Martin has actual UFO crash fragments, but he was not allowed to go look at them.

Mm-hmm. Yep. Told by who? Who told him this? Mulder. Who? Did this come to him in a dream? Was it the actual aliens who told him this? Who told him this? I don't believe he actually fingers the person who told him that, but it is what it is, and he says that it has happened, and this story is coming in advance of a widely anticipated report from the federal government's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which is going to come out sometime in June.

We're going to get an actual report from them as part of the COVID-19 relief bill, because of course it would be part of a COVID-19 relief bill, because our government. Well, you know what, if, maybe this is the one good thing coming out of the Trump administration, right, so get this report.

I can already see what this report is going to look like. It's going to be a lot of black lines, and then the word the, maybe, unknown. That's true. Right, right. Well, maybe we'll finally know what happened in Roswell. An air weather balloon, yes. Yeah, yeah.

I love this kind of thing, just because it's crazy, and it's fun to think about. Yes. I'm sure it is probably nothing, and somebody was probably pulling Senator Reid's leg when he was visiting a base somewhere, and, you know.

Yes. And that's it. But who knows? You know, there are lots of things out there we don't know about. It's fun to think about. I like to think that even just is a mathematical probability that we are not alone in the universe, and so it's fun to think about all the what-ifs.

And so this sort of story delights me. I think what the Pentagon should do is get some of the guys from Hollywood to come over and do like a room in the basement that's a mock-up of that scene from Independence Day, where they walk in and you have like the aliens floating in the tubes.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. And just have some guys in the suits when they have special people come through and just, boom, scare them. Like do a little shock scare, just for shits and giggles, because, you know, that's my tax money that I would pay for. I would gladly give up some tax money for that.

Yeah. Did you guys see this week, you know, this past week or so, Michael Collins passed away? He was the astronaut who did not step on the moon but orbited the moon while Neil and Buzz were down there bouncing around. Yes, the luckiest introvert in the world.

That's right. Yeah, I mean, in some ways what he did was way cooler than what they did by landing because he was like the first human being completely disconnected, completely from all of humanity. Yeah, yeah. They said at that moment he was the most isolated human in history.

Oh, God. And he didn't even have COVID. But Jason's dreaming right now. I know. If only. Please. Right. Not even any Wi-Fi. And he was quoted as telling Neil Armstrong when they were asking about, you know, what should I say when I step down onto the moon?

What should my first words be? And Mike Collins said something like, if you had any balls, you'd say, good Lord, what the hell is that? And cut your radio. How amazing would that have been? Yeah. What was the one?

Was it John Glenn that went back up in the space shuttle? Yes. Yeah. And when he came back, the running joke was, okay, when he gets off the shuttle, everybody wear an ape mask. Right. Right.

That would have been a good one. Four other people are laughing. Let it sit for a second. It'll come to you. Yeah. Yeah. Damn dirty ape. So I put this last one in here. This came by, of course, as we're recording this, it is May the 4th.

And so the folks at the National Air and Space Museum put a photo out from one of their warehouses. I had to check to make sure that it was real and not a joke. And sure enough, it is real. The Air and Space Museum is getting a freaking X-wing. All right. The Air and Space Museum has a freaking X-wing.

Let me say this. So they got a real full-size X-wing that was used in the Rise of Skywalker movie. And it was donated to the Air and Space Museum. And they're going to put it on display in the main museum in Washington, D.C. next year.

Which technically makes this the only thing good that came out of the Rise of Skywalker. I was about to say, couldn't they have gotten an X-wing from a decent movie? Well, I think it's interesting. I mean, you know, the Air and Space Museum has had Star Trek stuff there. Yes.

And actually, I went to that museum to see one of the Star Wars touring shows, you know, which had lots of artifacts. Chewbacca the musical? Well, chimpanzee to chimpanzee.

No, it was – they had all sorts of artifacts like, you know, real Millennium Falcon and costumes and all that sort of stuff. It was very cool. But I like it. I like an X-wing hanging – the idea of an X-wing hanging with all the other real aircraft, I think that's cool.

And if it gets more people to go to the Air and Space Museum – not that the Air and Space Museum is wanting for traffic. It's probably the most visited museum in D.C. Because it's the best, you know. Yeah. Well, you know, if you can inspire kids to want to serve their country or, you know, pursue something in aeronautics, why not?

Why not hang an X-wing there? I like it. And also, I just like X-wings. And it's right down the road, so I'll be able to go visit it. So there. So right after you go to the Ham Museum, you can head over there and go check out the X-wing. That's right. Well, you know what? Maybe next week I'll tell you guys about all my new adventures because in the past week I purchased – wait for it – a software-defined radio.

Ooh. Ooh. I thought maybe you purchased a fake vaccination card and you're like, I'm going everywhere. No, I have a real one of those, but I've been playing with software-defined radio. So maybe next time we can talk about that because it is kind of fun. Excellent.

Cool. All right. Yeah. All right. I'll talk to you guys next time, next week. See you. Take care. Be good. May the force be with you. Closing shout outs. Over on Patreon, we've got Eric, Raj, and Eric again. Hopefully a different Eric.

Yeah. And over at PayPal, we've got Simon, Nikolai, Matt, Shaleen, Doug, Michael, Judge, John, Matthew, David, Nicola, and Jonathan. Thank you all so much. Thank you. And no new reviews anywhere. What? Sigh.

I mean, I guess we did take a week off. Sigh, sigh, sigh. And you're getting this on Wednesday, hopefully. If you're not doing anything Wednesday night, 5 p.m. Pacific time, 8 p.m. Eastern, hop on over to the Twitch channel. That'll be linked in the show notes at gog.show slash 505.

And come hang out with me on Twitch. Ask me, you know, podcasty questions if you have any podcasty questions. Or just come keep me company because I want some company. But, yeah, that'll be over at the Adorama XP Twitch channel. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'll be on TikTok. No, I'm just fucking with you. I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, please consider visiting gog.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on. And we'll love you forever. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 505. A very bad drum machine.

From there, you can find all the links we talked about in this episode. You can also head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. If you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash review and toss us a five-star and snarky review. And if you don't already, follow us in your podcast player of choice that isn't Apple Podcasts.

Because if it's that, you're not hearing me at all. Seriously. What's the point? Go to gog.show slash follow where you can find convenient links to every podcast player so you can get the show as soon as it drops. And if you know someone who has too much hope in their hearts and spring in their step, then definitely tell them about the show, Misery Loves Company.

Stay grumpy.

Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love. From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.