517: You Know, for Kids!

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo and I'm here with my special guest.

Eric Hundley. How are you doing? Doing good, Eric. Doing good. This might be a little rusty show. I've been gone for a week. Maybe. I've got to work on being grumpy. Last time I heard of that, I wasn't grumpy enough. I thought you were pretty grumpy, but, you know, you can ease into it. You can ease into it.

So I got a little follow-up. Brian has made it to Toronto and should be back next week. And I'm sure he'll be grumpy with a cross-country move or a multi-country move, which is enough to make anybody grumpy. But I do have a little follow-up on the last episode.

I got a few emails saying that I was a misogynistic pig dog mofo for calling this influencer who got COVID and was going around with no mask, getting people I know sick. And I called her Cunty McCuntface. Well, nothing like saying the C word to piss off a bunch of Americans.

Everybody else around the world, because we do have a very international audience, they're like, what's the big deal? I'm like, I don't know. Your Aussies are saying, isn't that just saying hello? Exactly. Exactly. So the story just kept going with this chick, and it was worse than I even thought.

So she was asymptomatic. She got a positive test, but was asymptomatic and ended up just living life like normal. No mask, going out. Then I see on her Instagram stories, what's she doing that day? Oh, she is delivering Uber Eats and Postmates all day.

Typhoid fucking Mary. Lovely. Yeah. Isn't that great? Don't you just love how we went through a year and a half of all this bullshit just for influencers to go out there and say, doesn't matter to me. I'm special. Good Lord. No matter where you fall on it, if you have something, stay the fuck home.

Yeah. I mean, she could have had the flu. She could have just had the flu and stayed at home. Yes, please. No, let's drive around West Hollywood and give away food to people. Coughing on it. So I'm sure the driver, the cameraman and her influencer sidekick were all very happy to have that in the car on times.

Yeah. No kidding. Good Lord. If they got it, I'm sure they did. Or they already had it. Who knows? All these people have had it a million times already. Share the love. Mm hmm. Definitely. In the news. We always talk on the show about how nobody ever gets fined for anything.

And nobody does ever go to jail. We know that. That's a sure. That's a given. And fines have usually been, you know, coffee budget for about four hours for most of these companies. Well, the EU has hit Amazon with one for eight hundred and eighty seven million dollars. That's not chump change.

No, that's like a company party. Yeah, exactly. You know, it might be the balloon budget for the year. But no, but this is the biggest GDPR fine so far. Of course, they're going to appeal it and probably get it knocked down to like twelve bucks.

But at least at least they're trying. They're trying over there. You know, I have mixed feelings about some of the stuff. I I'm wondering if GDPR and things like that may force a change because, yeah, that that fine obviously isn't gonna hit the bottom line.

But if they keep hammering, you know, it won't even be a thousand cuts. Let's say they get a hundred of those fines. I guarantee they'll start paying attention. Yeah. Then we'll start talking real money. You know, every little bit counts. Every little bit counts.

I think we need more. Well, we got another one here. France has cracked down on Google's ad tech for a two hundred and sixty million dollar fine. So, yeah. OK, I think that was the let's see here. Yeah, this was they're basically, you know, more GDPR ad tech stuff.

This was from the French. The other one. The other one was actually in Luxembourg because that's where Amazon has their headquarters. But this one's coming from the French. So, you know, these things are adding up. They're adding. Well, this one's two. There's two. It was the two hundred. Double dip. Yep. And she came back to five hundred ninety four million dollars.

Exactly. So maybe in third round, it'll be a billion. That's what I'm saying. They're going to change if they keep getting their door knocked on. Yeah. The thing is, though, are they actually paying up? Because as we saw with the some of the Uber stuff here in California, they basically got it knocked down to a parking ticket.

So it's are these guys really, really going to end up paying it? If they start having to pay out on these, that's when the change is going to happen. It's Europe, though. It's not California. That's true. That's true. We're just a bunch of damn hippies over here. So my fingers are crossed.

My fingers are crossed. But we do have another one. So this is a Zoom one. Remember when Zoom was saying at the beginning of the pandemic and everything was end to end encrypted and we're all good. And it turns out they weren't. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, they got slapped on the wrist for eighty five million dollars. So that's not that's that's more in line what we see here in the States, you know. Sure. I don't know what their bottom line is, because God knows our market share has gone up so much. Oh, yeah. Just COVID alone. No, they're a multi, multi, multi billion dollar company.

So it's like I said, this is this is coffee, coffee mate. This is what's irritating, though, is really the incentives on all of these companies. It's to just do it. Well, yeah, this is a little bit of a cost of doing business. Raise everybody's rate a penny or two.

And thank you very much. Yeah, that's it. We end up paying for it, obviously. But always. Yeah. I mean, that's part of it. We end up paying for it. So so we might not want to wish too ill upon them, but it would be nice if they did change their tune every now and again. So, I mean, that's OK.

We got three or two good fines and a fine so far last week. So that's something. It's something. Well, this is a sidetrack. What are your thoughts on? What Apple is doing with the iPhone? And I'm not talking about the story later. I'm talking about right now where they're saying, hey, they're tracking you.

Hey, this app's tracking you. Do you want to do it? Hey, this app is tracking you. Do you want to do it? And really, really pushing that. Do you think that may actually have more of an effect than these lame ass fines? Nope. I think it's an inconvenience for a lot of these companies.

But what they've known this was coming for a long time. So they've worked around it. They know other ways to get your data. They don't have to get it in the app track. I mean, yeah, it's much easier for them if you let them track you in the app and on the phone. But if you turn that off, they've got other mechanisms to get your data.

It doesn't really matter. I mean, you can't win. You just can't win. So it's like loyalty cards at the grocery store. Just borrow somebody else's. Yep. Always use 8, 6, 7, 5, 3, 0, 9 and whatever area code you're in always works. Except guess what?

They track your credit card. Oh, that's true. Then just pay cash. Just pay cash while we have it. No, just pay Bitcoin at the grocery store, right? Can I get some doge, please? Some doge. Oh, man. And Amazon is going to be in a little bit of trouble here, maybe.

The National Labor Relations Board said that, yeah, what they were doing with the employees that were trying to unionize, yeah, against the law. They were not allowed to take away people's, basically, the long and the short of it is people were handing out literature at the warehouses and the Amazon goon squad came out and basically took the literature and said, get the hell out of here.

You can't have it back. So, this guy, Connor Spence, actually went and filed charges. Good for him. And turns out, yeah, they're not allowed to do that. So, what they're saying now is that the NLRB is saying, you have to redo the elections because we've found that you can't be trusted, Amazon.

You know, you're strong-arming the people that work for you into voting the way you want. So, they're going to probably have to redo the elections. You know, I get confused. I don't know all the labor laws out there. I know there are certain requirements.

So, because I haven't gone deep into it, I remember I used to work at Gateway. Yes, the cow spotted boxes. Yep. And they were trying to unionize there. And there are certain rules, you know, about it. And I don't know where the laws start and stop.

But if it's somebody who is not an employee going onto the premises, they can be kicked off. That would be a question. Another issue, too, is I believe they were not allowed to hand out literature during working time.

They could do it, but, you know, it had to be, like, in the parking lot when you're leaving or going or whatever. So, I'm kind of, you know, I'm just looking at it on the surface level. And obviously, Amazon's going to strong-arm them. No question. Yeah. But I do wonder, were they illegal or not illegal or not?

It sounds like they're being ruled that they were. But I do feel like there's always more questions. Does that make sense? Yeah. Everything's, you know, shades of gray. But the fact that the NLRB actually investigated Conor Spence's claims and found that Amazon acted unlawfully means that at least somebody has looked into it.

Oh, yeah. So. Definitely. We've got that. And the Conor Spence case was in New York, but the re-elections are going to be down in Bessemer, Alabama. That was the big one that everybody was watching to see how they voted. So the vote down there was 1798 to 738, which is a pretty big swing to reject the union.

So it's going to be interesting because, you know, you get to a tipping point where people are like, well, I just want to be on the side of whoever's going to be right. So it's like, you know, I watched enough Big Brother to know that the votes that you see generally aren't always what people want to vote for. But they see that the way the wind is blowing and then try and throw their hat in at the last minute.

Yeah. And it's weird, too, because going back to the Gateway time, we had a complete split because upstairs at the place was tech support. And downstairs were manufacturing or assembly. Well, assembly wanted the union.

Tech support did not. So you even within the organization often have a conflict. Probably with pay disparity, I'm sure. Oh, there was definitely pay disparity. There's the people upstairs, the tech support got more money, a ton, but they did get more money and had a considerably higher scale.

Skill level. In perception. Right. And they had chairs, you know, yes. Things like that. If you're standing all day putting together PCs and you're making less money than the guys that are upstairs talking on the phone, I can see where you would be a little pissed off and want a little bit of extra.

You know, you're all on the same team. And arguably doing the manufacturing job is harder just from a physical standpoint. So I can, you know, I can see why they would want to unionize and you guys wouldn't. But I honestly, though, I can't see why anybody wouldn't want to unionize.

I've been in I've been in a bunch of different unions over my career and it's always been a net plus for for us. You know, I mean, I got it probably still in the grocer, the grocery baggers union from when I was 14 back in Chicago. I think I'm probably still I was in that, too, and it's not always a plus because I, you know, everything has two sides.

I find that the union does enable a lot of slackers. No offense to move up the chain that aren't necessarily deserving. So if you're into meritocracy at all. Unions can be anathema to that. Yeah, but I mean, you know, are you still going to are you going to stop nepotism, too?

You got to fight your battles. So I don't necessarily mind nepotism. I know. I know that sounds terrible. No, let's be realistic. No, I mean, let's be realistic. It's a nepotism is bad or as good as whatever.

However, you look at it, even if there's no supposed nepotism, if you're working at a corporation and they say, hey, do you know anybody who can do this job? Well, who are you going to pull from? Somebody you went to school with, somebody who's your buddy, somebody who's, you know, I mean, how are you looking at those relationships?

We're this strange creature called a human being. Yes. And we are going to pull from those we know. And that's a weird one to nepotism. It's like, well, any family restaurants completely nepotism. That's a small business.

That's a small business, though. If you're talking about corporations and, you know, bring in little cousin Joey who has no skills whatsoever and he gets to jump up the ladder because Uncle Bob is running the department. And then, you know, Steve over there who's worked his flight work for 20 years gets, you know, the can because little Joey's coming in, you know.

Which is obvious abuse. But if you bring up your nephew and put him in the mailroom. Yeah. That's perfectly great. Right. Why not? Why not? Getting the kid a job for the summer. So, I mean, again, I'm a pain in the ass, but everything has levels.

You know, if the person is truly qualified in what they're doing and they're not knocking somebody out, you know, who has a lot of years, often, hell, I used to work for my dad and believe me, the other employees felt sorry for me. Yeah. Because they're like, oh, dude, I'm glad I'm not you.

Because he would dump every shit task on my head to prove that he wasn't showing favoritism. He was showing favoritism. All right. Anti-favoritism. Yeah. Favorite place to dump. No.

I don't know. I don't know either. It'll be fun to watch this one, see how it plays out. And if they get to redo the vote and if they do redo the vote to see how it falls then, because that might it might might flip the script. Who knows? Probably not, though. It's Amazon. You know.

Now, in some fun news. Well, fun for me, at least. It's raining influencers, Eric. Okay. Literally, raining influencers. I know. I know. Okay. The first one I saw, 160 feet from a crane.

I'm like, what the fuck are you doing on a crane? They're like, oh, that's her job. It's her job. But she Instagrammed from the crane all the time. She was very famous for it. But she was Instagramming from the crane. And she slipped and fell. While. Yeah.

Sorry. Oh, God. Darwin. I'm scared. I look at a crane on the building. Oh. When I just look at it and I'm on the ground, it makes me nervous. Oh, I'd never get up in one of those things. Ever. Ever. No. Oh, my God. No, there's no way.

And if I'm up there, I'm hanging on for dear life. I'm strapped into everything that I can get strapped into, you know? Yeah. And then I'm envisioning the bolts. Are they holding? Is this son of a bitch secured? Yeah. Did I feel a breeze? Because you can see this going. Yeah. Did I check the weather report this morning?

Is it going to be, you know, breezy with chance of death? No. How about some lightning? That'll be fun. I'm sure they're grounded. I'm sure. I hope. Well, go check for me, Jason. No, thanks. No, thanks. I'd ask Xiao Kwai Mei, but she's dead.

Yep. That's how you say it. That's how I was going with it. Xiao Kwai. Kwai. I think I got to write the first time. That was close enough. And then we've got YouTube star Albert Dryland. He fell 656 feet from a mountain while he was doing a video.

He was 22. So, see a little trend there. Yeah, he's making a video in the Italian Alps. Slipped, fell, boom. All right. Next up, we've got Sophia Chung. She died after falling while taking the photo at the edge of a waterfall.

Don't go chasing waterfalls, Sophia. Don't go chasing waterfalls. Yeah, at least you will for about 20 seconds. Yep. What is up with that? I mean, how many times have we seen? There's probably a Darwin Award category for this. I mean, it's so common.

It's like, oh, no, you're not even a runner-up. No, I know. It's like, it is one of those things where it's like, you got to do it spectacularly or you're not even getting on the ticket. Because, I mean, there's got to be hundreds of these over the years. Since Instagram came out and cameras on phones came out, I mean, how often do we hear these stories?

It was just crazy that there were this many in such a short period of time. Well, I mean, and we all see them, right? I'm like, how badly do you want a picture? And do you need a picture of yourself over a cliff? I got it. Here, why don't you just take a fishing line and a GoPro and throw it?

Or get a drone like everybody else. Or get it. Yeah, there you go. Oh, my God. I'm just like over and over and over and over and over. Okay. Population control. Cleansing the gene pool. Cleansing the gene pool. I can't feel bad. I'm sorry. I literally can't.

My body will not let me feel bad over these people. It just doesn't. I feel bad for the crane operator, oddly enough, because of the experience. And, you know, it's like she's 23. How much experience did she have? I don't know. I mean, she's been on it a while. It's kind of like that that YouTuber who rode the trains for a while and finally he died of doing it.

You know, I don't know. The only guys that I haven't heard much about are the Russian parkour guys. Those guys are, they make some terrifying videos doing parkour on skyscrapers. And it's like, you're insane. You're insane. Well, they're Russian. That's true. Yeah. Oh, man.

Anyway, also in the news, Mark Zuckerberg in the metaverse. He's going virtual because he can't make it anymore in the real world. Everybody's coming after him. So he's like, I'm going to make my own world. Damn it. We talked about this a little bit on the last show. And I love it. Everybody wants to be God. Yeah, pretty much.

Everybody's calling it the Zuckerverse. No, suckerverse is more like it. If you believe any of this crap, I just want to put this in here to reiterate the word metaverse, because you're going to be hearing it for the next six months as a buzzword, because AI is getting tired. Bitcoin yawn.

You know, they need something new. The tech press needs something new to grab onto to say, hey, this is the next big thing. And it's not. It is not going to be the next big thing. These are up there with self-driving cars. It's still 20 years away. And it's always going to be 20 years away because you need to build, you know, massive protocols and get everybody to agree on them.

That takes committees. That takes time. That takes engineering. This is not something you can just go flip the snow crash switch and say, okay, put your headset on and you're, you know, your hero protagonist. Now grab your swords and pizza and get to work. It just is. It's so silly that people are like making such a thing out of this.

I've got an idea. Why don't we just roll it all together and we can have the AI meta chain. There we go. AI meta chain. That works for me. Since everything is blockchain, blah, blah, blah. You got an AI, you got metaverse.

Let's just roll it all together for every hack idea. Put it on NFT and ship it to the man. Exactly. You got to NFT it too. Facebook. Let's get back to the real world with Facebook though. They cut off the NYU researchers who were doing the ad tracking.

This has been making the rounds. And of course, Facebook did. But a couple of things about what they did this time. They, they claimed the FTC was behind this one. And the FTC came out and said, excuse me, sir. No, we're not. We told you to do a certain set of things.

And this was absolutely not one of them. So what are you talking about? So now the senators are getting on them saying, we want answers. We want answers. Blah, blah, blah. So. Okay. Well, we'll see what actually happens because I'm over it.

I'm over the little tap dance of bringing Jack Dorsey in, bringing Zuckerberg in, and then everybody yelling at them and us watching them going, yeah, you tell them, man. And then they go home and then we move on. No legislation, no changes, changes, nothing.

Only thing we schedule. You know what? Might as well be a corporation because the only thing we schedule is the next damn meeting. I know. I mean, I could have watched another episode of Ted Lasso. I don't need to watch Jack or Zuck or any of these people on TV anymore because nothing happens. Nothing happens. All we get to do is get a new picture of Jack with a new beard saying something redonkulously stupid.

That's about it. Oh, yeah, we're looking more content. Well, actually, it's funny because they have their pattern of behavior. You have Mark Zuckerberg, who doesn't look human. Yeah. He's looking more like Data every day. And I'm sorry, Data is a good actor, Brent Spiner. But, you know, Zuck's changing into him. And then Dorsey always has that hippie stone look.

Like he's on mushrooms all the time. He's such a weirdo because he's like trying to look concerned and serious. Yeah. But, but you're kind of looking. I'm going, oh, man, don't ever. If I ever had a daughter. Oh, the shotgun's coming out.

God help us. Yeah. You know, Jack's a piece of work. None of these people are normal in the head. That's the thing. They are just not normal. No, no. Because people aren't meant to have that much money, especially people that young and that dumb shouldn't happen. Should not happen.

They need adult supervision. So, and, you know, the senators are not the adult supervision we need because nothing's happening. So. No, because they're all grandstanding for their base and they don't want to change. Here's, this is where I get really cynical.

Any organization that is created to march about or complain about any problem. Do you think they actually want to solve said problem? Hell no. They'd be out of a job. Thank you. So, what do the senators do? They have hearings.

So, if they actually pass legislation, we won't need another hearing. That's right. But then what are they going to do? I don't know. Maybe do their actual job. But ain't going to happen. Ain't going to happen. But anyway, I don't think these guys' accounts are getting turned back on anytime soon.

I don't think so. I don't think that plug-in's coming back. There ain't no coming back, man. There ain't no coming back. No, you got to hack your way around. I mean, the only way they'd be able to pull something like that off is to open source it, put it on the blockchain.

Ooh, no, no, no. And make it just wide to work. Yeah, well, I mean, just the point is, decentralize it. Anonymize it. And just hammer it. You know, have everybody donate their time. And it's like, oh, I don't know. I don't know.

Whack-a-mole. Go for it. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. I don't think anything's going to happen, though. No, of course not. No, no. Apple is shutting down employer-run surveys where employees are trying to get to the bottom of some pay equity issues.

And... Now, this would be the same Apple that, let me see, Steve Jobs was prosecuted along with Google for having little agreements between all the Silicon Valley companies that, hey, you know, if we fire, you won't hire, we're going to...

It wouldn't be that Apple, would it? No, not the same Apple that backdated all their stock offerings for Steve so he could get his money back from getting his $1 a year stipend. No, not that Apple. Not that Apple. Okay. Good, good. So basically, people on their own time are trying to run surveys to find out where people work and how much they're getting paid and what their gender breakdown is, what their ethnicity is, and things along those lines.

And yeah, well, it turns out they might actually be breaking some labor laws by having them turn off these surveys. So, well, it's kind of the same thing as Amazon taking away people's flyers in the parking lot.

Not allowed to do it. And I know what they're worried about, but you could just tell them, don't worry, it'll be anonymized. Yeah, we're going to anonymize it. Nobody will know. Nobody could reverse engineer and figure it out. No, no.

Yeah. What Apple could actually do is instead of paying the lawyers to, you know, keep hammering these people down and do that, it's like, I don't know, maybe pay everybody the same. But, you know, we also don't know what the hiring practices inside Apple are, you know?

Just because you are a transgender African-American working in AI, let's say you're that person, and you've got another person who is a little bit different, maybe, you know, a white male, but just because they have that different set of breakdown, you don't know if they have different skill sets.

So that's not, you can't correlate those two with the pay disparity because we don't know what the, you know, what degrees do these people have? What accomplishments do they have? They're not asking that in these surveys, which is kind of a...

Well, I think it's a, the transgender could be making more for all we know. Exactly. I do know they don't want it getting out quite simply because everything is negotiated and, you know, the longer you're with a corporation, I've got a lot of years in it, the longer you're with them, the less you're making.

So if you start a corporation year one and you keep getting promoted every year, whatever your bumps, your raises, the person who's hired in year five is probably going to make as much or more than you on day one. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And then the percentage of their bump is going to be higher relatively.

So a lot of this is not even necessarily dealing with protected classes or anything of that sort. It's just simply, you don't want to know what Jimmy makes because you're going to get pissed. Yeah, that too. That too. But I can see, but I mean, I can just see where they don't have all the information just from these surveys.

They're getting a very narrow slice of, of the entire picture from these surveys, which can, you know, honestly put Apple in a bad light if they don't know if they're, if they're not releasing all of the information and nobody wants to release all the information. You know, I would, I would, if I'm working at Apple, I don't want anybody to know what I'm making, especially if I just cut a sweetheart deal because I was over at Google and, you know, they dropped me an extra 250 grand signing bonus just to get my butt over here.

Which, which, or, or you're on an initiative, um, where, you know, it's, uh, let's say they're stealing you from Tesla because they're building a car and you're an engineer. Somebody else is an engineer, but I can get 500 of those other engineers, but I really need that car engineer.

I really need the car engineer. I need the car engineer that worked at Tesla because he's got other information that he can bring to the team. You know, that's because there's so many variables that go into this. Exactly. So I, that's why it's like, yeah, it sucks that they're doing.

I see it though. Like I can kind of see it. It's like, if I was running the place and be like, Oh Jesus, I can't let this stuff get out. Yeah. And you know, that's, it's just one of those things where on the surface, there's a lot of these things this week that on the surface, it looks like, Oh, Apple's being bad. Wait a minute. Let's dig a little deeper and think for more than a headline in a paragraph and think about why things might be the way they are.

So that's just my take on it. Anyway, I got to take on the next one because this is the Tim apple sized elephant in the room. Yes, it is. Uh, the extended protect protections for children, frequently asked questions that came out this week and all of the other brouhaha on the internet about everything with their new child safety initiatives.

Now, everybody has gone bug nutty bat shit crazy over this because Apple says they're going to be looking at the photos on your phone. And if there's any kiddie porn, we're going to call the popo, which is an, a gross oversimplification of what they're doing and why they're doing it.

Uh, I've, I've listened to probably 10 different takes on this hours of podcasts, dozens of articles, blah, blah, blah. I'm, I'm tired just from all of the, uh, the research, but I'm going to ask you right out of the gate before I get into jabber jawing about it, gut reaction from you.

What say you, Eric? It's wrong. And I will give you why, because I just had a huge debate last Friday on civil rights. Okay. I know this sounds crazy. I always have lawyers on it, argue with lawyers because I'm dumb, but it was brought up that it's ridiculous that by filling out the warrant with the wrong date or whatever, that this

potential monster may be free because all evidence collected is a fruit of the poisonous tree. That's where the statement was going. And our counter argument and where I stand, stand is essentially a civil right is kind of like being partially pregnant.

You either have it or you don't. So you're either pregnant or you're not pregnant. And I know that the slippery slope is a fallacy, but there's a reason it exists. Just because something is a fallacy doesn't mean it's not also true. They always, always start with child porn.

Terrorism. They don't start, you know, this is like San Bernardino. Unlock the phone for us. Well, no, no, we can't do that because we're going to have to build a key to it. Anyways, no, you should unlock that phone. Apple doesn't care about terrorism. Apple's going to let people die.

Well, now we're going the other way. Okay. I'm with you so far. We'll scan your phone and we'll, we are doing it for, you know, a God, just reason. And yes, I hate child porn. It's disturbing beyond all belief, but then, oh, well, you're already doing the child porn scan.

Just add this up to the algorithm. Now I want, I want to know, uh, are there guns in the house? Is there a gun in the photo or, uh, let's run against this database. Are you with that known terrorist? Maybe it just keeps going.

Shouldn't be scanning. Okay. Now my turn. I want to back up a second. Did you read the technology brief on what this does? I have not. Okay. This is where, this is why, this is why we're having this conversation because nobody fucking does. It's driving me crazy. So what they have right now is a hash database of verified child abuse images verified by the, the people who do this sort of thing and have to deal with verifying these images.

Right? So those hashes will get matched from a hash, not from an actual image. There's no, they're not scanning images, looking for actual items. They're not doing recognition on them for anything. It is basically a mathematical hash against a mathematical hash for one specific use case, which is when you share a, one of those images with iCloud.

So you're going to take that image and put it on Apple servers. Right? So by, and I read, I did read that. Okay. And I understand. Right. Every other company does this already. They do this, but they do it in because nobody is end to end encrypted quite like Apple is.

So to get around the constant hammering of law enforcement saying you can't have end to end encryption because of the children, what they have done is sidestep them and gave them a giant middle finger saying, we're going to do this and we're going to do it right.

We're going to keep end to end encryption for our users. But if those images are on the phone and they're coming to our servers, which is what we don't want, then we are going to track it. We're going to trace it and we will report it if necessary. That's what it's doing. It is not saying, give me a database of gay people and we're going to match all the photos of this person's in that.

It does not do that. It is taking. Once you're matching though, you're matching. No, but you're matching against the database. That's the thing. I understand that. And you can also make the argument and I actually am not completely against it that if it's on the phone, you're fine. If it goes to iCloud, it's scanned.

The iCloud is the Apple server. You're putting it at risk because you're putting it on their server. They're checking it. That I actually think is fair. If they're doing it on the device itself, that's why I start getting into even more issues with it. They do it on the device before it hits the airwaves to get to their server.

So it doesn't actually land on their server. That's why they do it on device. Yeah, you see, I don't like the idea of the device. And now when you're saying about law enforcement hammering, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I would with my legal mindset would say, get a damn search warrant and then run on that phone with that search warrant.

Now you see this. And I'm just pointing this out because you have, for example, the phone lines, right? People are talking all the time. So unless they're monitoring your calls, you have an expectation of privacy. Well, we did.

But remember the room in San Francisco that the end of the state? Yes, I know. Edward Snowden. I know. I know. And I'm saying they're breaking the law. So I'm always going to side and be a pain in your ass by saying no. Well, I'm all... That's my immediate answer is no.

You've got to really get Herculean in your efforts to overcome it and should be that way. See, I disagree. I thoroughly disagree here because I see this as an appropriate middle ground to actually keep the users safer.

And also remember that this is a private company, a consumer product that nobody forced you to buy. So always had to remember that. This is not government intrusion into your phone. This is a private company protecting their ass to make sure that some scumbag somewhere isn't putting kiddie porn on their server that they are liable for.

Where are they getting the hash? The hash is coming from... What's the name? There's so many acronyms in here. It's ridiculous. There's no FBI involvement. There's no government involvement. The NSMEC is where they're coming from, which stands for...

That's what I'm saying. There's so many damn acronyms with this stuff. That is a pain in the butt. But Apple, NSMC, or law enforcement. Let's look that up. It isn't real-time Googling fun on the internet, kids. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Okay. I think that that's a non-profit. I don't know if it's government. No, it's a private, non-profit organization, yes. Founded by John Walsh and Ronald Reagan. There you go. Before presidency? Probably not. Probably not. Yeah.

Anyway, and I'm just pointing that out because you're like, it's not getting away. It's like, when you have the private company acting on behalf of the government, and now you have a state actor. So that is a question, too. No, I mean, all of this stuff is checked and rechecked before it goes to law enforcement.

So they make sure that everything matches before anybody's even notified. Because they don't... I mean, it's a nightmare for them if they send in a false positive. That's the whole point of this, is that they can't have false positives. So that's why they're mathematically matching it against those hashes, against those images.

So they're not doing any kind of recognition, image recognition, because everybody knows that shit doesn't work. Everybody knows that shit doesn't work. So this is a perfect middle ground, as far as I see it, from a technological standpoint, to let us still keep the end-to-end encryption on everything without having to put in a back door for government and say, hey, you're hammering us all the fucking time about, we can't have end-to-end encryption because of the kids.

Here, boom, fixed it. Now leave us the fuck alone and leave our users alone. Yeah, and we'll see how it goes. I mean, I imagine that they're running these same hashes against BitTorrents and things. They're running against everything. How do you think Facebook turned in 22 million images last year to law enforcement?

22 million. Apple had 264 because they weren't doing anything because everything was encrypted. So this is how they actually, like I said, give the middle finger to law enforcement saying, we're going to do what you want to do. But also, they're still going to actually try and protect the kids, which is a good thing.

And everybody wins in this scenario because Facebook's doing it. Microsoft's doing it. Google's doing it. Any major company is doing this. And they're doing it probably in not as responsible a way as Apple is doing it. So that's my case. I understand that. I hear you. And I get so freaking annoyed, though.

And it's always like, protect the kids. It's about the kids. And it's like, yeah, maybe. And of course, I come off sending like, oh, what kind of photos does he have on his phone? Nothing exciting. I promise. No, but I mean, that's the thing, though. You don't yell at Dropbox for scanning for copyrighted materials.

Do you get on your high horse about that? No, most people don't. But most people also, you know, never pay attention to it. But you try and upload a movie to Dropbox. I guess the difference is because in that case, you're sending it to Dropbox. In this case, you're sending it to, you're trying to, you are attempting to send it to iCloud.

Right. But I'm saying once it's, when it's on your phone, that that's the difference. That's a device in your possession. Same with Dropbox. It's on your computer. If you try to send it up to their server and they catch it coming in, I'm okay with that. That's, that's the, that's the difference.

It's a difference, distinction without a difference, because the intent to send it is when it hits the wire, they're stopping it before it actually goes out. But the intent is there to share it to iCloud. The intent is already there. It is going to go. So they're just putting a layer in place so it doesn't get there.

Right. But are they scanning it ahead before it can even be intended to go anywhere? No, it's only, it's, where's the scanning stop and start? And this is very important. It does not scan when your phone is at rest. If you have iCloud photo sharing on, when, when you take a photo or you upload a photo and it tries to sync it with your photo library in iCloud is when it happens.

But if you turn off iCloud photo sharing, never happens. It doesn't even get scanned. Okay. So you can opt out instantly by just turning off iCloud photo sharing. And then there, that, that is a fair compromise. So that, that's my biggest worry. So when it just slips to her, oh, we're just, you know, looking into everybody's phone.

No, read the fact. Are they going to stop at that point? Explains this in great detail on how it works. Well, that's why I have you to read the white paper. Yeah. Yeah. I know. And I'm here to just say, look, everybody's got the, you know, they're shitting a bunch over this and I think everybody didn't read it.

And that's why all the arguments aren't as good as they should be, because it's not what everybody thinks it is. Well, I do want the limitation. I actually liked the fuss that was raised. Okay. Well, because they need to be having to really justify it.

Really be careful. Don't just make a move. Of course they know that they're, they're one of the biggest companies in the world. They're not making this like they didn't just come into the office one day and say, Hey, I've got an idea, you know, this is, Oh, okay. Facebook's one of the biggest companies in the world and they do it every day. So give me a break.

Don't give me a break. Apple's a little grown up than Facebook. Come on. If size is a factor or how about Google? They're grown up. Sort of. Anyway. So there it is. There's, there's, there's my take and your take in a, in a nutshell.

So everybody make their own decision, but go read the shit. Everybody, please. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day.

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Ups and doodads. Eric, I got the greatest birthday present ever. I got the Sennheiser Pro Audio HD 650 open back professional headphones. Oh my God.

I've been using the Sony MDR 7501s or whatever for eight years, nine years. And because everybody's like, oh, everybody, radio stations have nice neutral response, blah, blah, blah. And they always hurt my head. I hate wearing them.

I can't stand wearing them. And I'm like, you know what? I'm a professional. Let me ask for something nice for, for my, my birthday. And these are the best ones that you can get from Sennheiser for, uh, for, you know, studio headphones. Well worth it. $500, but then I have the Apple AirPods Max, so I can't say anything.

Exactly. Exactly. So, uh, these, I, these were actually on sale for like three 70 or something from the 500, but, uh, they are amazing and they're comfortable. I can wear these all day cause I wear glasses and, you know, crappy headphones push into your head, but the sound on these is just insanely good.

So, uh, I feel that my production quality might even go up some cause I can hear, but if you have somebody, if you have somebody else around though, don't you have a leakage problem? No, not with these so far. Can you, you can't hear yourself leaking coming through. So no, I mean the open back, I thought that sound would be heard by anyone in the room.

Uh, yeah. I mean, I can hear a little bit going on in the room, but it's no big deal. No, I mean, they hear what you're listening. Oh, I have no idea. There's nobody in the room with me when I'm working. Nobody wants to be around me. So I don't know. This is for me. I don't care about anybody else. If they want to listen to my shows, go for it. This is, I'm working when I'm wearing these things, man.

I don't really, I'll, uh, I'll check them out when we're done and see if I can, uh, hear anything, but I don't really care because for me, I mean, I'm, I'm pointing it out because that's always been a consideration. Like I have a wife and kind of want to keep her. Okay. If you say so.

It's like, uh, it helps if I keep, uh, what I'm listening to inside, but if I, you know, by myself or whatever, I wondering if they breathe more. Because of the open back. Oh, they're definitely cooler. They are definitely way cooler. And the foam on them is just stunningly comfortable, stunningly comfortable.

And I'm not getting any bleed back from you into the microphone, which means they're probably pretty quiet because I've got you pretty loud in my headphones right now. And even on the, the Sony's that I use, um, I can get bleed back from those and I'm not getting any from this. So, so far so good. Okay.

Yeah. They are pricey, but oh my God, they're worth it. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking them up. Dude, that's got a good base response. 10. Sounds good, man. They sound really good. No, you can listen to sub base on that. It's good stuff.

I'm telling you, except they're wired. They're not like your max that are wireless. So, yeah, the AirPods max. Oh my God. Not good. They're, um, how do I put it there? They sound fantastic. I love them, but it's taking me three units.

Oh, really? You got some, some lemons. Yeah. The quality control has just been awful on the ones that I had. And finally, it seems knock on whatever heart surface you want. Um, seems like they're finally going.

Okay. And it's frustrating because. You know, everybody always goes on and about the, uh, the Sony. Um, four thousands or whatever. Those suck. Um, the UHX, whatever the hell they are. They suck. They don't sound good. I don't know why they get every, um, great review out there.

I think they're getting paid off, but I got a pair while I was waiting for the apples to come back and they do a terrible job. You have to like constantly press them to switch back and forth between things. And maybe that's a factor because I'll be listening on my laptop and then switch to my phone.

I'm walking around. And I like the automated switching. Oh, that never works, man. That never works. I don't know. I, I can't, I can't stand automated switching. I have my air pod pros and I've got it turned off everywhere. And it's still, I'll like, I'll be walking by a random computer in the house and it'll just start picking up that one.

And I lose what I was listening to have to unpair them, repair them, do all this crap. It's like, I hate auto switching. Just I'm listening on my phone. Leave them on my damn phone. Yeah. It works for me. I mean, I don't know. That's, that's odd. Um, uh, the Sony MDR 75 Oh six. Those are the ones that I've been wearing for years.

There's a standards, you know, everybody has those in the studios, but yeah, I have the, just the audio technica, uh, um, fill in the blanks, whatever. Yeah. The, you know, 70 to $90 on sale stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these are fine for the Sony's are fine for interviews, but if you're doing like, you know, really, if you want to get deep into the audio and do mastering and stuff like that, I think these are going to be much nicer, much nicer.

When you're listening all day, I'm not, you know, sitting here all day doing this. If I was literally interviewing four times a day or something, then yeah, we might have to talk. Yep. And they look good too. They're stylish. I got to give them that. All right. Moving on. We've got some software stuff here.

Uh, BB edit 14 is out. I always keep up with my BB edit upgrades because if you miss one, then you got to pay more down the line. And I always like the new features and BB edit 14. Actually, they, they, they figured out people like me keep BB edit open all day long and just create new documents all day long for different notes.

And you got to, so you got a whole sidebar of unsaved, untitled text documents. And sometimes every now and again, it crashes and you lose all those text documents and you have to go find the save file and the cash file, rebuild it. There's a, there's an old show, uh, probably in the under one hundreds of grumpy old geeks where that happened to me.

And I bitch about it for like 20 minutes. So it, but now BB edit has come in with a new notes window. So you can just do that all day long. You just make new notes instead of having to make new text documents and it just automatically saves them as you go. It's great. So that alone was well worth the, uh, the update.

That's cool. You know what I would wind up doing is, um, just notes. Yeah. I don't like notes. I use notes all the time. Well, I'm in, I use BB edit because a lot of this stuff is I'm doing, uh, text transformations on it. So I'm doing, you know, links and customized shortcuts and grepping and things like that.

So, well, I use the other tool you talked about a while ago and I have an assault everywhere tyke. So I'm constantly pulling text, dropping in tyke, and then we'll put it over. Oh yeah. That's good for just doing a quick conversion from formatted text to as straight ASCII. But I've got, I've got lots of, uh, custom things built into BB edit for different shows and show notes and formats and things like that.

So I'll do transformations on it. Like, you know, just, just the way to save documents and stuff like that. So I actually do use it more as a text editor, but I still use notes in there for just saving crap easily and quickly, which will bite you in the butt eventually. Yeah. I, it's, it's funny because I think you got off of one and went to just Apple notes.

Didn't you get rid of, uh, something you were using? I was, well, I was using reminders and, um, well, no, I got off reminders. I went to things, uh, Apple notes. I was using, I can't even remember the one before that, but Apple notes is so good now. It's like, great. It's, it's, I've used it for a couple of generations now.

I can't even remember what the old one was that I was using for just basic notes, but yeah, Apple notes is awesome. Yeah. I've been happy. I do all my interview notes on it. And since I have the phone and everything else and I'm neck deep in lifestyle, it's, it's everywhere.

Yeah. It's quick and easy sync gets the job done. Um, but I also, I've been using, uh, a new one called Ulysses for, for writing. Cause you can, you can, it's a really cool writing app. So it does Markdown, which I don't like Markdown.

I never learned it, but I got this because I got set app set app is the subscription program where you get like 200 apps for your Mac, uh, for just, you know, one monthly price. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen that when they do the donations or whatever.

No, it's, well, it's like you, you, you basically, I think it was $107 a year because I paid for the year and you just get access to all the apps. You can install it on two computers and you get all the apps on two computers, which is what I've got now. So it works perfectly. Um, because I found an app called time mater, T I M E A T O R time mature, which is, you listen to Gruber too.

No, I don't. Oh, really? He, cause he, he had a pixel mater as a sponsor and he called him pixel mature for like four episodes. No, I think it's, it's, it's an old joke between Mac people. I think, uh, yeah, pixel, pixel mature. I, I've, I've actually used that line on the show when I, uh, did pixel mater back in the day, a couple, a couple of four or five years ago, I think.

Uh, anyway, this, this is a time tracking app, but it's a smart time tracking app. Uh, I've been using one called timeline, which you start and stop. And it's got a iPhone app and you can sync on iCloud to all your machines. It's great. But this one is cool because you can set a task.

Like say, I've got a client, I have client name under that. You can set triggers. And so all of my stuff, all like all my clients are broken out by folder and you can say, start timer when working on files in this folder. So if I opened up a logic project for that client, it'll start timing right then and there.

So you don't have to think about it. It's just trying. Oh, dude. That's. And the other cool thing is you can set URLs too. So if I'm working on their WordPress site, putting in the notes, keeps track in there. If I'm in Libsyn, putting the, like uploading the show keeps tracking. And then you can set it for like, if there's no activity on these tasks for like 10 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute, five minutes, then it'll pause the timer.

It's great. It is absolutely great. And it gives you a running list of everything you've done for the day too, which is pretty cool. So like, if I open it right now, I've got finder and then a couple of URLs that I was on, like this one is tracking me right now because I'm on the quit page for grumpy old geeks.

So it's actually tracking my grumpy old geeks time. So I can keep an eye on that. It's really cool. That's, you know what that you could use that too. Even if you're not charging clients, like you obviously are, so that's huge. You could use it as like a budgeting tool for your time.

Like you're wasting your time on Facebook today, four hours or whatever. You could literally set it up yourself and go, what am I, I never have time to do anything. And then, yeah, kind of like rescue time. You can use it in that way. Rescue time is the app that does that too, that tracks all your usage or, I mean, it's built into the phone now.

I don't even think rescue time is a thing anymore because we've got screen time. Built into the phones and all that stuff. I got Sherlocked. Sherlocked. Yeah. So TimeMater is $39, right? And I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I don't want to pay $39 for it because then I was checking out Setup and I'm like, okay, well, I just unfortunately paid for clean my Mac for the year, but that's in Setup too.

Then Ulysses is in Setup, which is the app that I wanted to try. I mean, it's like after about the first five or six of these things, it adds up. iStat Menus is in there. All of these little widgets that I pay for, bartenders in there, it pays for itself the first year if you want to try out all the stuff that most of us use.

It's a great deal. I was amazed at what it was because in the old days, it wasn't that great. A lot of the apps in there were just kind of janky, but they've actually got some heavy hitters in there now. So definitely check out Setup. The link will be in the show notes for it. But so I basically I canceled my subscriptions for the stuff that's going to flip over and just pay for this one-stop shopping.

Oh, that's great. Yeah, I discovered, got an email. I don't even remember how I found out about this, but Fountain, I think it might've been on the pod news site. Are you aware of this, Jason? Fountain podcast player? Yes. I haven't, I don't pay attention to new podcast players that much because they come and go so fast.

There's a lot of stuff happening in that world right now, but so I'm waiting for a winner. I want to let these guys fight it out and then I'll figure it out because, you know, I've been using Overcast for years and now I've kind of switched over to CastBox. You went to CastBox, really?

A couple months ago, about a month ago, a month or two ago. So I got CastBox Premium. Mainly I got that because discoverability on Overcast is so terrible. So I wanted better discoverability for new shows because I get bored and I want to hear a new show and they never update any of the recommendations on Overcast.

So it's useless to find new shows. So I was playing around with CastBox and I'm like, oh, I found a couple of new shows in there, tried them out. And then I'm just like, yeah, I can just import my RSS feed from, or my OPML file from Overcast into CastBox and everything's tracked over. So I just stayed.

It was just easy. So I'm, I'm horrible. I actually use Overcast, PocketCasts, Apple Podcasts, and for like different purposes. I know that sounds silly, but it doesn't. I mean, you're PocketCasts is like for my tried and true regular shows.

Okay. Locked in good playlist functionality and then a good play next, but it doesn't play them in an order. Like in Overcast, I could start a show and then just start binging it. That doesn't work well in PocketCasts. So it's like every one of them has a flavor and Castro, I don't care that much about.

So when I'm researching shows, I always, you know, check them out on other podcasts to see, you know, what they talked about and I put them in Castro because I don't necessarily want to clutter my entire feed. I hear you. No, that's, that's the nice thing about when you're, when you're actually working in podcasting, you do need different apps that do different, different things.

Like I'll keep Overcast because it's easy to upload shows to for quick testing and I can run them at double speed, get the silence removed and all that crap. So, you know, everything's different, but yeah. Or unpublished audio books that you can upload into it. Another tool.

Have you checked out ListenNotes at all? A long time ago, long time ago. It is fantastic. And they have a custom playlist that you can put in. So when I'm searching out a guest, let's say, they will show up on ListenNotes better than anywhere else. And then I can just say, add to playlist, add to playlist, add to ListenLater.

It's called ListenLater, whatever. And I just add them to that. So then through the playlist and PocketCast or Overcast, whichever mood I'm in, I can just start binging through the person I'm going to have on. Very cool. Very cool. But Fountain that I was talking about to be back on track, it's, you know, it's got the standard fare, share your podcast clips.

That's a new thing. I think Marco started that first really with Overcast and then everybody's kind of jumped into it. No, he wasn't the first. There were other players that did it first. He came in and did it better. But there are players that did it first. Okay. He got the fanfare for it.

Yeah. But now they're adding supporting with Bitcoin to it. Now, this is interesting because, and I don't know how they're going to pull it off because I don't know if you've heard of Odyssey, which is a video player competitor to YouTube, doing very well.

It's growing, but they're in a battle with the SEC. And the problem is that how, how do you go about paying people and tracking this and things like that? I kind of, I'm wondering if, if these guys may run into some problems now, Odyssey may be trying to do their own currency.

I'm not sure, but that would, that would be a concern. I do like the idea that it seems to be a new trend of trying to get podcasters money through audience support. I think that that's a great trend.

And the more everybody does it, the more normalized, I think it'll be for the audience to say, oh, yeah, yeah, let me, you know, super chats on YouTube are a really wonderful thing. I promise you. Yeah. This is kind of like that. And, um, yeah, yeah. I mean, everybody, trust me, every, everybody wants this to happen because nobody wants to hear another fucking better help ad.

Um, so, uh, what fountain is doing is they're tapping into the new value for value system, which is basically Bitcoin payments in real time over the lightning network. Um, it's complicated to get set up for all parties involved. The onboarding is shit right now, but they know that this comes out of the podcasting 2.0 thing that Adam Curry is doing with, uh, so the guy, Dave, I can't remember his last name.

Um, and I'm not a huge Adam Curry fan. I'm actually, actually, I can't quite stand the guy, but what they're doing here is they started off with a new podcast index to take the way the thunder from Apple because Apple kept screwing the pooch. And we, it's an open source, uh, basically podcast index that is crowdfunded, um, that doesn't have the oversight.

You'd like it because nobody can get banned from it. Um, but, um, out of that came this whole idea of the value for value thing that, uh, Adam Curry has been doing for years with his show. No agenda. Yeah. Um, so it's a, it's a whole system that they're working on.

There's a, there's a lot of shows that have it set up right now. I was going to set it up for grumpy old geeks, but then I looked at the onboarding process and it's just like, oh, my head hurts. I don't have time for this, but I might end up getting it done. But if you go, there's an, there's an actual link in the show note called new podcast apps.

If you go there, there's other, there's a list of other players like fountain that are new players that are actually implementing this lightning payment system. Ooh, podcast addict. So yeah, people are, people are really kind of starting to embrace this because you know, the big players are like, they're kind of stale.

This is like the only innovation that's going on in podcasts, like serious podcasting right now. All the big boys are over there trying to squeeze out ad dollars. All of these people are trying to figure out how people can pay you in micro payments. You get a couple of Satoshis here, a couple of Satoshis there. Well, it's all man. I mean, and, and if you could, a lot of people can support themselves on like, I'm not a huge Sam Harris fan, but I'm a big fan of the fact that he's completely listener supported.

Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully, you know, within the next six months, hopefully Grumpy Old Geeks will be listener supported as well. So we're, we're, we're working towards that. So that's why I think I'll probably end up setting this thing up soon. Cause nobody wants the ads anymore.

It's a, it's a crappy market to play in. It really sucks. It is. And then the, it sucks in multiple ways too, because unfortunately you're on a podcast, you swear, you do whatever, and nobody gives a damn. I can't say fucking words half the time.

Yeah. And it just gets ridiculous. I mean, it gets crazy. The self-censorship you have to do to dance around on YouTube. It's like, you know, we're coding everything. We might as well be running a drug deal because it's like, okay, you know, you have these donuts and what's the donut?

Is that crack today or cocaine? Or it's very much like that. And I'm like, it's very, very frustrating. So any way that you can get the listener support and they don't even realize it, the ads actually pay you so little.

Like if every person who listened to Grumpy Old Geeks paid a dollar a month, just $1, you would be going, oh, screw you. Never, never, never again. Yeah. We need two bucks for that. With your audience? Our audience has gone in the tank after COVID.

Everybody's did those. So that's, that's neither here nor there, but yes, if we, if we made X amount of, but here's the thing, we just, I, me running ads and buying ads or not buying it, but dealing with advertisers takes up so much time. It is such a drain.

It is a drain mentally that, you know, the listener supported is kind of the only way to go anymore for, unless you've got 25, 30,000 listeners, which we don't have, not even close to that now. So it's like, yeah, let's just do it. Listener supported, tighten the belt a bit and see where we can get.

And that's why things like this are, are pretty cool. So you finding fountain at the right time, you've got it in the right time. Go check out the stuff on the podcast 2.0 site that I linked in the show notes and other podcasters. If you're listening and you didn't know about this stuff, go check it out. Um, cause I want to support these guys.

I actually own, I don't own, but I, I donate a server every month to the podcast 2.0 index. I've been doing that for a year now. So I want these, like I said, Adam Curry, not a fan, but the project big fan of, Hey, you know, we're complicated creatures.

Yeah. You can hate somebody for one thing and they can be good at another. Yeah. Well, we'll see. Hopefully I'm looking at podcast addict because podcast addict has been, um, big in my stats. I'm like, Oh, people use that. And it's like number one or two for, um, people listening.

And then I opened it and of course sponsored number one ad. Take a guess. Who? The Jordan Harbinger show. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Jordan's everywhere. Jordan is everywhere. So yeah, everybody go check that out. It's good stuff.

Closing shout outs. Due to time, we had to cut out a lot of stuff this week. So if you sent stuff in, thanks and sorry, we couldn't get to it. Brian will be back next week and I'm sure some of it will still be here. Because, you know, he's moving and doesn't have a lot of time. So recycled content.

Woohoo. Over at Patreon, we've got S and Exalted Slayer. Thank you both so much. And over at PayPal, we've got Sheila, Michael, Simon, Matt, John, Judge, Matthew, Jonathan, Melissa, Nikolai, David, Doug, Nicola, Shaleen, Vincent, Andrew, Breed, Ralph, Mark, and Jens.

Oh, thank you very much, everybody. And over at the tip jar, we've got Michael Z and Melanie G. Then we've got NQ with a subscription, John L with a subscription, Glenn B with a subscription, and Linda M with a subscription. Thank you all so much. You are helping keep the lights on and bringing us back every week.

And I cannot thank you enough. Over at iTunes, we got a five star from Hubone. Great show. Wish I found it sooner. This show is my podcast of choice on my commute day every week. Well, thank you, Hubone. And we've got Chris in Rochester, who says, friggin sweet. The show is great. Strike that.

It's fucking great. It's as advertised and always entertains. Grumpalumpa, everyone. Well, thank you, Chris in Rochester. And Twinks sends in a five star and says, five stars for Cunty McCunty a lot. Yeah, see, some people did like that. Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining us today.

Much appreciated. Thank you. And we will get you in next time when Brian decides to move to Botswana or wherever the hell he is next. Okay. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo with our special guest. Eric Conley. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

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