539: Apology Not Accepted

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 Brian Schulmeister. How is it up there in the great white north? Cold. White. North. There you go. I'm tired of it. We got through a blizzard two weeks ago and barely got rid of enough snow to get my car out of the garage and it's snowing again.

I'm going to show you exactly as much sympathy as you gave me when I lived in Chicago, which is none. Yep. I'm not expecting any. I'm not asking for sympathy. You move there. It snows. I'm doing good. Doing good.

Good. Good, good. It is the Canadian equivalent of winter down here. It is 55 in my studio, so cold enough for podcasting. I can see my breath. Excellent. I understand that one of our topics that we touched on in our last podcast became a wordle word.

Yes. Yes, it was. Moist. Fucker. I am still the only adult in the room not playing, but my wife has started playing and told me that the word was moist, which was very good. Yes, it was. All right. And something we talked about on the show last week, got a lot of people asking me about where the link in the show notes was for the paintball gun that Bittner bought and that you were considering getting.

So that'll be in the follow-up links, and I've sent it around to the people who asked. If I missed you, sorry, it's in the show notes now. There's two links. One is to the Tipman TPX Paintball Pistol Starter Kit Black. This is the same gun that you can get from the Salt Supply Company, which will sell it to you for generally more money, but that's where you also can get the pepper spray rounds.

A lot of places won't let you ship pepper spray rounds, so if you just want the paintball gun and want to get the PVC rounds, go with the Amazon link. If you live in a place, at least, where you can get the one with the pepper spray, go to Salt Supply Company. Otherwise, have somebody order the Salt Supply that lives in a state that you can get it to and have them rewrap it and ship it to you surreptitiously, which is what I did.

So there you go. I sent a listener and informed me that I am salt out of luck up here in Canada, and these are illegal here, so I shall not be getting one. Well, you can get one. You just get the PVC rounds, which honestly are just as good. I'm just going to go ahead and follow the rules in the country that I'm in right now.

I know I'm old school that way, and we'll get into that later in the show, but I'd like to follow rules. Yeah, and also a little bit disheartening that of all the things that we ever talk about, by far the thing that has gotten the most feedback and engagement recently, a gun.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting that now, see, when I talked about it, you just would usually shit on it and nobody would care and nobody would ask about it. But as soon as Bittner jumps on the bandwagon and says, I'm jumping in with you guys and getting me a gun, everybody is like, hey, that sounds great. Let's join in.

Maybe we should have Bittner tell people about 1Password and all of the other things that we have promoted on the show. Rebrand is the Bittner show, even though he's only a part of it, and we'll just go from there. We'll go from there. Well, someone has seen the light that listens to our show, so obviously they've been listening to us a little bit and not just Bittner.

This is from Thomas, who wrote in and said, hi, guys, longtime listener and longtime staunch Windows user. I finally had enough. When my work laptop was due for replacement, I requested a new MacBook Pro. Holy shit. What have I been missing all my life? Hours and hours of pain and gnashing of teeth, fighting and screaming at MS when I could have been computing.

This new MB M1 Pro is stupid fast. It's a bit like using an iPad. It just works and instantly. I feel like these MacBooks are made for humans and Windows is some bad science project. Never again will I put myself through that pain again. I can easily run Windows 11 or in parallels if I really want to.

Next up, I'll be losing my Android and ordering an iPhone. Life's too short for shit computing. That's right, Thomas. Smart man. Welcome. I always like to say life's too short for ugly software as well, which is the corollary to life's too short for shit computing. So I'm glad Thomas has joined up.

And yes, these new MacBook Pros are just stupid fast. Yeah, I mean, I'm still running an old Mac at home. And as I've talked about on the show, I've got a PC for my day job now. And, you know, the Mac is just better. It just is. In the news.

Beep, beep, beep. Breaking news, Brian. Facebook is dying and their stock has taken a dump. I mean the metaverse. I mean meta, whatever the fuck you call it today. Yes. Yes. Meta's shares have dropped to the floor in after hours trading. And I just checked since it is now in hours trading and they are not jumping back as fast as they usually do.

This is big news. Big news. Is it? No. No, it's not at all. It's not. Because it will go back up eventually. It's just going to have to. They're almost too big to fail at this point. A correction, maybe. Maybe it won't come back up as high as it was before, as it shouldn't be.

Um, you know, there's nothing new here. There's nothing that all of us haven't known for a long time. Uh, you know, it's like all of a sudden people's eyes opened up and went, hey, those, those ad metrics that they were feeding us. Those were bullshit. Yeah.

And at some point growth is going to have to stop because the entire freaking world has been on Facebook for how long? Yeah. Well, see, that's what we always talked about. That's why they need the Facebook baby making machine. But, uh, you know, turning it into the, you know, the battery farm on the matrix.

But the kids nowadays don't want to join in Camp Zuckerberg. So this is the first time we have empirical evidence, though, that the actual, you know, the numbers are shrinking by a teeny, tiny, teeny, tiny bit. Yeah. You know, it's cold outside. That's all. Yeah. It's just a little cold outside.

Yeah. There's shrinkage. There's shrinkage. Uh, yeah, all of this, none of this is surprising. And it's nice to know that, uh, Apple has had at least a little bit of impact on it. Definitely. I mean, that's, that's a big part of it, right? Like, uh, that's, that's also a huge part of it. It's, it's, how are they getting all this data?

Well, they were mining it from us. Apple kind of said, well, we're going to let people know about that. Okay. And shockingly, people, when they've given the option, can you mine my data or not? Say, nah. Yeah. Yep. So there's definitely been a hit there, but we, I mean, we theorized that there were other ways that they would be able to get this data and, uh, seems like it's not really ready for prime time yet.

Well, they're too busy and, you know, investing their entire, here's the, here's the problem with the company and they're all in on the metaverse. They've pushed all in on people without legs, walking around doing stupid shit. And there is no metaverse. It doesn't exist. Won't exist for a long time.

It's going to take billions of dollars in investment to make something exist. That most people seem pretty, eh, about anyways. That's the company now. You want to invest in that? I don't. No. I, I, well, I took my money out of Facebook a long time ago. Yeah. Long time. For other reasons.

Yeah. Just because it's a shit company. I don't invest in Uber either. All right. Well, I've got a story, Jason, that I think I don't, it's depressed me beyond the scope of what the story actually is. I feel like it's almost a straw that broke the camel's back. And maybe it's because I was watching it unfold in real time since Tuesday on Twitter.

Maybe it's because while I was watching the story unfold in real time on Twitter, I was also working on my taxes. And I realized that fucks like this guy that started this company has probably never paid anything in taxes, even though he makes millions of dollars a year somehow. I, I, I just, I'm done.

I'm so angry about this and I'm so done with NFTs too. Okay. What are we talking about here? Tell me the story. I'm on the edge of my seat. A new website trying to position itself as the place to buy music NFTs called Hit Piece came out basically on Tuesday. Probably came out a little bit before that, but artists on Twitter discovered it on Tuesday.

They claimed that their marketplace was selling music and you could buy an NFT for every song known to man. Independent musicians discovered this on Twitter and started to go, why are, why is my music up there? I didn't give permission to this.

Musicians checked in with their labels. Labels did not give permission for this. Everybody's music was up there. Disney's music was up there. Lots of people's music was up there. And we ended up discovering that the site basically scraped Spotify and grabbed everything through their API and just put it up in their system and allowed people to start buying NFTs of this music.

Was it music? No. No, it wasn't music. Was it just album artwork? Yes, it was just album artwork. Why? Was it even really album artwork or was it just a link to album artwork? It's a link to album artwork because that's all NFTs are. It's links to things anyways. So it's nothing, of course.

Now, news and outrage spread, of course, and Hit Piece was eventually forced to issue an apology of sorts. Their website has gone dark, save for a seven-word masterclass in cancellation avoidance. We started the conversation and we're listening. We started the conversation and we're listening. You know what I'm fucking sick of, Jason?

Oh, hit me, Ryan. Hit me. I'm sick of fucking tech bros doing something illegal and saying that they're just starting a fucking conversation. Fuck you. One of the tenets of Startup Bro School is it's easier to apologize than to ask permission.

Well, let's flip that on its head and really make it harder to apologize in the future. I think we're going to see a lot of things change if they find out, wait, apology is not accepted. No, it's not. And, and, god damn it. You know, it used to be move fast and break things.

That was Facebook's. Now it's move fast and just fucking steal shit. That's really what it's coming down to. Uber started that trend. Come on. I mean. So they expanded a bit more in a note that they shared on social media, writing, clearly we have struck a nerve and we are very eager to create the ideal experience for music fans.

To be clear, artists get paid when digital goods are sold on Hit Piece. Like all beta product projects, we are continuing to listen to all user feedback and are committed to evolving the product to fit the needs of the artists, labels, and fans alike. So in response to that note, Dear Booth, which is a band, gave them some feedback.

They steal your music, auction NFTs on it on their site, and when they get caught, they say, don't worry, you'll get paid. Yeah. Nobody's getting paid. Nobody's involved. None of the artists are involved. None of the labels are involved. There's nobody for anybody to pay. They've never reached out to anybody to pay anybody.

And here we go. Hit Piece was co-founded by Rory Felton, a tech entrepreneur who also has a background in music, having helped form the indie label, The Militia Group in the late 90s. And I think I found this the most depressing of the whole bit. The fact that somebody who knows the music industry, understands how it works, had a label, made money, paid artists, is now just raping them.

You know what it is? His label failed, so now he just wants to take it out on the world. You remember, Brian, some people just want to watch the world and have to. Burn. Yes, that's true. Felton said the beta version. They want to watch the world, mint. Yes. That's good, actually. Felton said the beta version of Hit Piece was built over the past year and a half, and of course they have over $5 million in funding.

Yeah. So, yes. Awesome. I don't know why this one got to me so much. It just did. It's so infuriating seeing people just steal stuff and this NFT stuff. I think it's all just building to a head in my mind and I just can't handle it anymore.

And, of course, the digging on Twitter got even further because they found his personal Twitter account. Of course he's an anti-vaxxer. Of course he is. I don't even care about that anymore. I mean, that's just – look, the NFT thing.

Look, here's the deal. Even Commander Moron of the World of the Week that we have banned from the show for being so stupid, Yee, has come out and said, stop asking me to do NFTs. I'm not Finacosan. For now, I'm not on that wave. I make music and products in the real world, says Yee.

And if Yee is on the side of the anti-NFT, then you know you're on the wrong side of the law, people. People. There is an interesting article on Rolling Stone about the girl who did come up with the Bored Ape Yacht Club artwork. It's kind of sad.

It's kind of sad, actually. So she is very optimistic about the space, even though she's got utterly screwed by it. Because these – it's a cult, like you've been talking about, Jason. It's a cult. It's a cult. Yeah.

Wrapped with mental illness. And the sunken cost fallacy, too. They're in it now, and they want to make sure they get a win, or at least break even. Yeah. I mean, still, it's like the most depressing thing – like the poster children of this entire movement now are Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon.

I mean, that was some of the most uncomfortable television I've ever seen in my life, and for good reason. Because it was pathetic. It was absolutely pathetic. And to that point, Vice has an article saying the NFT ecosystem is a complete disaster.

Yes, we know. We started talking about this. The instant NFTs became a thing. We have not changed our position. In fact, we have doubled down on the fact that it is now just such a super scam. And if you're buying an NFT, you're an idiot or a thief. And yeah, I don't know.

It's just – it's insane. It is insane. Just look at – look up wash trading. At least there's a term for it. Now, before we just called it artificially inflating the price of a piece of quote-unquote artwork to basically bilk somebody else out of it, manufacturing value.

And now it is the price of doing business. If you don't have a couple million to boost your NFT, to make it more valuable, nobody is going to want it. So this whole thing is such a scam, and it is such a small portion of the population that is taking up so much oxygen. It's pissing me off.

That's crazy. Like, I mean, all – celebrities all over the place are now talking about the bullshit ones that they've bought. And, of course, they're just trying to pump it up, you know? It's just – Yeah. It's so frustrating. No, it's musical chairs. It's musical chairs. By the way, my entire Twitter feed now is basically split.

And it's mostly because, unfortunately, I really need to unfollow a friend of the show, Sean Bonner, because he's drank the Kool-Aid so hardcore. And all he does is tweet good things about it. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Fuck Sean Bonner. Unfollowed him a long time ago. Unfollow is happening. And the other side of my Twitter feed is about people complaining and basically screaming for help and saying, you stole my artwork and put it up as NFTs, which my position now is NFT used to be an acronym for non-fungible token.

It should be for now funding theft. Yeah. That's all it is. That's all it is. Although the Verge would like you to pronounce it, Neft, Brian. Oh, Jif the fuck out. I have an alternate – yeah, my alternate pronunciation is, fuck you, Verge. Come on. Well, let's go back to Wordle, the game that everybody is obsessed with except for me.

It's been bought by the New York Times. Oh, God. Here it comes. The sky is falling. The sky is falling. That is exactly, of course, what happened. I actually think this is a wonderful thing because this guy created something for nothing. There was no advertising on it. He just made something delightful that the world enjoyed.

And guess what? He got a payday. And apparently part of the deal is it's still going to be free on the New York Times. So what's the problem, people? Why were there so many articles about people screaming bloody water? Oh, it's over now. Guess what? It's going to be over anyways.

Is anybody still playing Words with Friends? No. These things come and they go. They shark fin. Enjoy. Yeah. How many trivia games have we covered on this show? Come on. Yes. I mean, yeah, the graveyard of word games is vast. Is vast.

And yeah, it's fun until it's not. I still find it fun. The problem now is that the guy put everything in JavaScript. So because it was never meant to be. This isn't bulletproof software, people. So, you know, everybody is downloading it now because you can just download the whole thing and play it as you wish.

So you can get the next 2000 days of Wordle if you're clever and can download it. And I'm just like, that takes every bit of fun out of it because I'm hoping that as soon as the New York Times takes it over, they will change it and fix it. So the words are, you know, I don't know, slightly more random and non-downloadable and non-cheatable.

But the thing is, if you enjoy the game, you're not going to cheat anyway and you don't really care. It is what it is. It literally passes three minutes of my day and makes it better. That's all it does. It's something to do for the morning poop. It really is. I actually, it's even before that. I do it to prepare for the morning poop.

That is like, to get the juices flowing, literally and figuratively. Yeah. So, you know, to coin your normal phrase, Jason, tempest in a teapot, all these people screaming bloody murder. So what? The New York Times bot. Yeah. Guess what? Guess what that means? There's going to be a print version in their paper.

That's it. That'll be difficult. I wonder how that's going to work. It's going to play out over the full week. Scratchers. One line a day. One line a day. But no, I, you know, my initial gut reaction was, oh, no. And then I'm just like, you know what that is? That's the jealous rage inside of me that this guy got paid over a million dollars for doing something fun that he liked for his wife or his partner.

So, yeah, good for him. After about 10 seconds of thinking about it, it was a win. You know, it's a win for everybody except for the New York Times, who spent an outrageous sum of money on this thing. Exactly. They can afford it. They can afford it. Now, we talked about the new features that come with the Teslas.

Yeah. Not working. Oh, the aggressive driving mode or whatever it was. Assertive. I can't remember the exact. Yes. Assertive. You can change your car's driving style to chill, average, and assertive. Or just plain asshole. Yeah. I was about to say. They're going to start with the ass.

They just stick the asshole. So, they're going to recall 53. Yes. 53,822 cars. Now, the thing here is a recall. They just have to update the software. But I guess for, you know, the old school paper pushers, they have to call it a recall.

Right. But here's the fun part. I was looking at the actual recall notice from the government, the NHTSA. It says, population, number of potentially involved, 53,822, estimated percentage with defect, 100%.

Estimated percentage with defect. That should be a, that should come with every Tesla you buy now. Because even if it's not defective today, you could wake up and it could be defective tomorrow. You know, the horrible thing about all of this is they're still, they're phenomenal cars if you drive it yourself.

But Tesla is really like, they're bringing defective as a service to the forefront, which is great. You know, if I bought a Tesla, I would like, I would rip out like Wi-Fi or whatever. Because I was just like, I don't want your, I'm sure they're auto updates. Like, I bet they don't even let you like, not update.

You probably have to. Oh, you have to, I'm sure. I'm sure there's no way to turn it off. Oh, there may be. I don't know. You know what? I don't own a Tesla. I've never actually even been in a Tesla. Oh, dude, you should go do a test drive. They're awesome. That's what everybody says, but they've turned into the new Prius around here. I can't, I don't want one.

I literally don't want one. Well, do it for the show. You'll have knowledge of driving a Tesla. Plus, I think you'll really enjoy it. You still don't have to buy one. Nobody's forcing you, Jason. Nobody's got a paintball gun to your head. Look, Brian, if you're not going to play Wordle, I'm not going to drive a Tesla. I'd be contrarian.

You know how I work. I join the games at the very end of the shark fin. I will play Wordle right before everybody stops. Perfect. I will drive a Tesla when everybody's bought a Rivian. Okay. Well, they've only made like 15 of those. So, good luck. Yeah. Speaking of Elon Musk, a teen wants $50,000 to stop tracking his private jet.

So, this 19-year-old Jack Sweeney, who should probably be calling the New York Times to see if they want to buy this bit of code that he wrote. He wrote a Twitter bot that basically reaches out to publicly available air traffic data and follows Elon Musk's private jet as it takes off and lands.

He also has bots that do the same for a lot of other celebrities like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. So, Elon Jet account is by far Sweeney's most famous creation because of the cult of Elon Musk. This is not surprising. Although, you'd think the anti-vaxxers would be on Bill Gates, but maybe they're worried about the chip automatically frying in their brains or whatever.

So, he actually contacted Sweeney about the Twitter bot and said, can you take this down? It's a security risk, he said, which I suppose it just makes it easier. Again, it's publicly available flight data. It's publicly available air traffic data. Yeah.

So, Musk told Sweeney he would give him $5,000 to delete the account and keep crazy people from finding out about his whereabouts. He made a counter offer. Any chance to up that to $50,000? It would be great support in college and would possibly allow me to get a car, maybe even a Model 3. So, Musk told him he would think about it, but then never got back in touch with him.

And now he's like basically saying, the kid is basically saying, well, if he's not going to get back to me now, I definitely want even more money. So, we'll see what happens. Musk should have just given him a car. It would have been a win-win for publicity. It really would have been. It really would have been. But, I mean, the kid didn't even go public until after Elon ghosted him.

Well, define going public. That's true. That's true. The account was out there already, so I guess. But with the actual story that Musk tried to bribe him to take it down. So, yeah. If he'd have given him $50,000 off the top, do you think this would have been an issue?

Nope. Well, it might have been because then the kid would have been like, you know what? $50,000 is a little low. Can I get $500,000? Because he could just be, you know, doing it for the publicity. He could have parlayed it into Gates like, Musk gave me $50,000. I want $100,000 from you. Yeah, seriously. Come on, man. Yeah. There you go.

And Barrett sent in this story. How about not focusing on either Bitcoin or Diem and worrying about not fucking up our democracy? And this is Jack Dorsey basically took a shot at Meta and said the problem with their proposed cryptocurrency, formerly known as Libra, was that they should have just focused on Bitcoin instead.

Yeah. Don't make your own fake currency. Use the one that we've already got. Come on. Use our fake currency. Hopefully they learned a lot, but I think there was a lot of wasted effort and time, he added. Oh, gee, Jack. You're the one lecturing somebody about wasted effort and time? I'd like to. Yeah. I want my years of Twitter back that you fucked up, asshole.

So come on. Pot kettle black, bitch. And the Joe Rogan Spotify thing keeps on going. Shortly after Spotify announced that it would add a content advisory to COVID-19 podcast episodes, Joe Rogan issued his own response to the controversy, and he uploaded a video to Instagram.

And it was a good video. I actually, I think Joe Rogan had a better response than Spotify did, to be honest. Oh, definitely. He at least took some modicum of responsibility, but not really. He at least paid lip service. He paid lip service to responsibility without actually saying he was responsible or saying that he would do anything about it.

Again, he went back to the bro, the internet bro thing of we're just having a conversation. That's what everything is now. And I mean, everybody else in the world has already weighed in on this. And the basic gist is if you believe in human decency, you understand that Joe Rogan actually has some responsibility.

With great power comes great responsibility. The bros on the internet should know that because they all fucking love Marvel. Listen to your goddamn Spider-Man. Yeah. It's Tempest in a teapot still. I believe this is Tempest in a teapot because it is what it is. People are going to still listen to Joe.

Nothing's changed. Yeah, there were a lot of unsubscribes, blah, blah, blah. Lost some market share, blah, blah, blah. Some other old ass fucking songwriter pulled their stuff today. Tony Mitchell. Blah, blah, blah. Somebody else. No, it was after that. I think David Crosby got his stuff off of there.

Oh, Crosby, Stills, Nash, they all showed. Yeah. What I think that the good thing that is actually coming out of this is a bit of the dark money that's behind the music industry is coming to light. Whether or not normal people give a crap or not, they don't. But, you know, we're at least seeing like, oh, well, some people have the rights to their music.

Some people have sold the rights to their music. Some people's label deals would let them do what they want with their music. Some people's labels deals won't let them pull themselves off Spotify. And the really, the big story here is the fact that the labels actually are massive investors in Spotify. And where that money goes that's supposed to be going to the artist is kind of not very clear.

No, it's fairly clear. It goes right to the execs. Well, yes. I mean, there's nothing unclear about that. No, it is a securitist route, but we do know where the final destination is. Yes, yes, we do. Not the artist's pocket. Yeah, exactly.

So what else we got here? We got after the Microsoft deal where they bought their big gaming company, Activision Blizzard, for $69 billion. Sony has planned to acquire Bungie, the studio behind the hit sci-fi MMO Destiny, and a deal worth $3.6 billion. Little tiny billions compared to Microsoft's big billions.

Well, the funny thing about Bungie is that it used to be owned by Microsoft. Yes. They're like, yes, you can have it. So basically, I mean, the only real thing that I think anybody needs to notice here is that there's massive consolidation going on in the gaming industry. So if you run a small gaming company, cash in now.

Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, you know, and it makes sense that these things should be consolidated to these big, you know, conglomerates because the gaming industry is nothing but giant sweatshops anyway. So who really, you know, we know about this. So it makes sense that they can, you know, go under bigger sweatshops.

And, you know, so maybe they'll get better treatment under the bigger sweatshops than they will under the little sweatshops. Yeah. And as the Olympics are about to kick off in China, the dating app Grindr has disappeared from Apple's App Store in China. Completely. Okay. No immediate explanation for this, but it came just days after China's Cyberspace Administration launched a campaign to purge illegal online material, porn, and rumors ahead of the Winter Olympics.

Sexuality is not a crime in China. However, they have occasionally censored gay and other LGBT content. Basically, what happened? We don't really know. But it seems to be more financial than anything else and about private data. The law there requires that any cross-border data transfers go through the Cyberspace Administration.

So China gets, you know, all your base are belong to China. And Grindr basically said, well, that's a problem for us. And they've got to kind of figure that out. So it seems like they took it down themselves because they didn't want all the data to go into China's black hole, basically.

All right. Good for them. Yep. Yep. So just don't go download Uyghur Match. That would be bad. You would definitely not have a good date in China with that one. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Brian, have you seen the trailer for Super Pumped, the battle for Uber? I did. What'd you think? Well, I don't have showtime, so I won't be seeing it anyways. But it seems like an awful lot of validation for things we've been saying. Yeah, I didn't read the book because we kind of lived it, so I didn't really feel the need to read the book.

Because generally the book is kind of everything we already knew with just a little tiny sprinkle of stuff that we didn't. And you just end up feeling shittier after you read the thing. I feel that if I watch this as it unfolded over the several weeks that it will be unfolding, I will need to go buy a lot of plexiglass to put in front of my television.

Because I would like to throw things at it randomly throughout the show, I'm guessing. So I think I'm going to have to pass on Super Pumped. I did try and watch House of Gucci this week. Okay. We lasted eight minutes. It was that bad. I can't even last through the two-minute trailer.

Yeah. Yeah. And the really thing, the annoying thing is it took me longer to move my Xbox into the living room because the savages at the Golden Globes who send out the screeners, they sent us a DVD. And, well, let's be honest here.

They sent my friend's client a DVD that he borrowed and then lent to us. Yeah, that's the way it works. We're really not on the Golden Globes board here, but we do profit from that. Yeah. I wouldn't even have – I don't have anything to play a DVD on anymore in the house.

Not a thing. Yeah. I got my X-Bone and somewhere I've got a little USB DVD player somewhere. But, yeah, I had to drag it out and move it. It was a pain in the butt, but, eh. I did watch the Janet Jackson two-night event on Lifetime.

Since you're a music guy, I thought maybe you'd have checked it out too. But I don't – maybe you're not a Jackson person. I mean I've got nothing personal against Janet Jackson. I think the whole Super Bowl scenario, she got totally screwed on that. That was – Yep. That was total bullshit. Not a fan of her music and, you know, everybody knows my position on Michael Jackson.

I just can't. Yeah. And it just kind of extends to all the Jacksons because I just don't think that that family was good. I don't know. I mean it was a good breakdown. Obviously, it was, you know, fairly well sanitized. But, you know, it was pretty long, so they covered a lot of stuff.

I didn't know much about her life, so it was – I thought it was pretty interesting. Yeah. And, you know, you take it with a giant grain of salt, everything in it. But, yeah, she did get screwed on that Super Bowl thing. That was such bullshit. Yeah. But anyway, for some reason, we watched Aziz Ansari, Nightclub Comedian, yesterday.

All right. He dropped a quick 30-minute special. I don't like his stand-up, and I generally don't like him. This was great. It was fantastic. I thought he was really good. I like his stand-up, so I definitely should watch this. Yeah, no, he took a very – and it's only 30 minutes.

He just literally does a short set at the Comedy Cellar in New York, and it's really good. And he's a very measured approach on vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. And it was – I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even my roommate liked it. So I got to say for – everybody should check it out.

It's worth the watch. Very cool. And I saw in the news that Eddie Izzard's last big tour, Wunderbar, is actually finally coming out in the U.S. and North America in general. I think right now it's – you got to pay for it or rent it. Eventually it'll stream. But very excited to watch that.

Love all of his specials. And I finally started watching the show that was all the zeitgeist a little while back, Manifest. Okay. What is it? I've never heard of it. It's on Netflix. It is a plane that disappears but then comes back, and then mystery ensues.

Okay. I wish the acting was a bit better. I wish the writing was a bit better. But the concept is good. I'm sticking with it so far. It's not bad. Okay. I've seen this show before. Yes.

There's a thousand times. Yes. We have. Many planes that have disappeared and come back. Lost. Most don't have good endings. Lost. And there's – I don't know. I think – I feel this has been played to death. Lost. So, yeah, I think I can skip Manifest.

Lost was better. I'll give it that. Oh, that's sad. That's really sad. Well, it was just more interesting. They were on an island. You know, here they're back in the world, and they're trying – and they're getting these psychic callings, and they're trying to figure out what's happening. And it's not bad. I mean, yeah.

Look, we've read this story a thousand times. We've seen this story a thousand times. There's nothing groundbreaking or new here, and it's – like I said, it's not, like, excellently crafted, but it's fine. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Look, we're in calendar year three of a fucking pandemic.

I am running out of shit to watch. Okay. Here's what – but I need you to take a breath and step back, find out who wrote this, and find out when they started, if they knew how it was going to fucking end. Because if this is another one of those goddamn shows where they're like, oh, something mysterious happens, and then we're going to figure it out on the way down, then – I'm 100% sure that that's what's happening already because I think it was – Oh, God.

To me, it feels like there should be two to three seasons at max, and, of course, the Netflix thing has got – another season is coming. I'm like, oh, God. They've got some success, and now they're trying to desperately extend this. Okay. You sure this isn't a Ronald D. Moore joint? It's not him. I did check for that.

What about the guys from Lost? It's not one of them? Oh, shit. I forgot to go there. I'm just saying, man. I'm just saying. We've been down this road before. We've been stuck on this island before, so. Yes. Apps and doodads. Speaking of Netflix, they are finally rolling out a bit of an upgrade to their operating system and their UI.

The option for users to delete titles from their continue watching list is going to be rolled out soon. I do not have this yet because I am desperate to get Don't Look Up out of my continue watching list because I do not want to continue watching it, and I hate seeing it all the time, and it just reminds me of how vacuous and lame that movie was.

You know what? I wish I could delete the continue watching list because it is a graveyard of shit that I don't want to continue watching. It's fantastic for my kids' version because there's so many shows that he's into, right? And so I just find it and continue watching list, and boom, I'm right back into superhero girls or whatever the hell he's watching today.

But for me, yeah, it's just like if I haven't finished it, I'm never going to finish it. Okay, here's another thing. This doesn't even require AI. I'm giving this one to Netflix for free. If I stop watching it and immediately give it a thumbs down, do not put it in my fucking continue watching queue because I just told you I don't like it.

Anything with a thumbs down shouldn't show up in there. This is just bad programming. Yeah. I mean, honestly, everything in my continue watching queue right now has a thumbs down on it because I've started it, I thought it was shit, and I stopped it, and every time I come back, they want me to keep watching the shit that I didn't like.

And I get emails, hey, you should come back and check out that shit you didn't like. Please, come on back. Yeah, for this much vaunted machine learning AI universe, the emails, the promotional emails I get from Netflix and Disney+, et cetera, have nothing to do with anything I like.

You should know what I like. You should promote what I like in the emails being sent to me. Remember when they used to give away millions of dollars to up their algorithm? You know, their you-might-like algorithm? They gave up on that a long time ago. I think now it's just monkeys in a dartboard.

It does seem to be getting worse, doesn't it? Yeah. Monkeys in a dartboard. That's all it fucking is. Anyway, a little bit of fun tech news in the apps and doodads here. There's a new Wi-Fi standard they're working on called 802.11bf, your best friend.

This is a new spec where they're going to actually try and figure out how to do motion detection with the Wi-Fi signals. We've talked about this before. There are a couple products out there that can kind of do this already, but there's no spec, so it doesn't really work across routers and across systems.

So they're trying to, you know, get the spec down where you can have room level and even device level sensing going on, which is kind of cool. I think it's neat. This one I'm going to say I am up for this one.

I think it's time to, you know, juice the spec a little bit. Let's get some new functionality instead of having, you know, all of these shitty IoT devices that half-assed everything. Let's move the spec forward. Did you get a chance to check this out? I looked through it a little bit. It seems nice. I can't wait for all the people complaining about how this destroys plants or your brain, but, you know, low-frequency waves now.

Okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, you know, given the speed at which things that actually work move as opposed to, you know, just stealing stuff because that moves at the speed of light. That moves fast, yeah. You know, we'll get this when we're 80. Yeah. I mean, they're still going to be discussing the spec until 2024, so we got some time here.

But – and I found this when I was still on the Next Web. I found out why metaverse avatars don't have legs. I'm like, okay, another slow news day. But it actually had some pretty good points where we don't actually have sensory input on the legs. So making them move and look normal is kind of a waste of time right now because we've got no input for it.

There's also some cognitive issues that go with it because, you know, when we're standing here in the real world, we look down, we know kind of how far our legs should be from the ground and things like that. And since we don't have, you know, height-adjusted avatars, I think this one is kind of a – yeah, we're just trying to kind of shoehorn an explanation in here because I think the TLDR really is – it's kind of hard, so we're going to skip it for now.

That's fine. That's what it really comes down to. That's fine. And I'll just skip the whole metaverse. So we're even. Lots of skipping. Yeah, I'm digging my Oculus, but that's, you know, that's playing games. Yeah, that's games. Yeah, not real life. And speaking of real life, I love this one over at Dig.

They did a very hardcore breakdown of why Noom, the weight loss app, is a scam. It's weight loss. Of course it's a scam. Diet – anything that anyone is selling you a diet is a scam. But they're not a diet, Jason. That's their whole marketing campaign. Oh, they're not a diet.

Which is why one of the best tweets I've seen about it is, tell me again why all Noomads sound less like a diet and more like an eating disorder. It's because that's exactly what it is. Yes. Yeah. As somebody who has lost a lot of weight recently, I have my own – I don't recommend your approach.

Well, no. Actually, the stroke part is not the approach. It's what happened after the stroke, which is my approach. Which is, you know, I'll tell anybody that asks. It's – if you keep your sodium under 1,000 milligrams a day, you can eat whatever the fuck you want and you are not going to gain any weight.

So that's it. Mine's easy. And that's for free. I'm not even going to make an app for it. Or a video. Or a package. Or a DVD. Or a TikTok. I might make a TikTok because I am liking the food thing nowadays, actually. I actually just bought my next item here, an Atomos Shinobi, which is a 4K monitor for my – I was going to say DSLR, but it's not a DSLR anymore.

My Nikon Z7 II because I've been making some cooking videos and it's really hard to do it by yourself when you don't have a monitor. So I got this snazzy little monitor for $299. It's beautiful. Does what it says on the tin. I put it on a little boom arm and I can see – I can do framing from my side of the camera because I've been doing a lot of cooking stuff because of the diet that I'm not selling because it's just fun to cook.

And that's what my brain can handle nowadays. And yeah, the Atomos Shinobi is pretty good. There is a little bit of lag. I have found that out. So it's not perfect for real time. But if you're framing and you just want to monitor, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.

I recommend it. I am reading – I'm sorry. Listening to Quantum of Nightmares, a Laundry Files book 11 by Charles Strauss. Yeah.

You know, in the Bob-less, you know, Laundry Files universe. I hear he's coming back. I haven't gotten to the end of this book yet. I'm three-quarters of the way through. I'm digging it. I'm starting to dig this world that he's building, you know, the side world that came out of the main overarching Laundry Files world.

I'm actually kind of gotten used to it now and it's pretty good. I've got to say, once I got, you know, my head wrapped around that this is not your Laundry Files that you grew up with, this is not your father's Laundry Files, I'm still digging it.

The characters are still funny. The stories are still well thought out and well written. So I've got no complaints. It's better than that Neil Stevenson, one that I've already forgotten the name of. Well, speaking of that, I have pushed forward on Termination Shock and I think I have crested the peak and I'm starting to enjoy the ride down.

I got... Were you 800 pages in before that happened? Something like that. I'm at like, you know, when you're reading on a Kindle now, it's like I'm at like 65% of the book and it's finally getting good. But I'm really starting to enjoy it right now. So I'll... Okay, good. Hopefully by next week I'll be done and I'll be able to actually give an informed opinion about it, which I think Neil Stevenson needs to fire his editor.

Well, we've said that for the past eight books. Come on. Yes. Yeah, the job is to not add words. The job is to take away words. Yes. Maybe we didn't need the first 400 pages of exposition. Maybe. Yeah.

That's what I said. It's a very long, short story at this point. So, okay, good. Well, I'm glad I'm... Well, here's the thing that makes me happy, that there is a point where you actually do crest the mountain and it starts to get far. Yeah, like two nights ago I was reading and all of a sudden I was actually...

I was surprised. I thought in my own brain, I was like, holy shit, I'm actually enjoying this now. It's funny because I had that same realization when I was reading Laundry Files' book because I expected it to be garbage and I'm just like, wait a minute, this is actually really good.

I should actually pay attention to what these characters are doing because it kind of... Oh, that's exactly what I did. And all of a sudden, instead of just kind of mindlessly, like my brain and my eyes were just scanning the words, all of a sudden I was like, oh, what was that? What just happened? I should pay attention.

I know. We're really good at reviewing books. I read good one day. What happened to me? I used to be like the most avid reader on the planet. Like I would read... Has it just been like so many disappointing books recently?

Like even Christopher Moore, like with his noir book, which is just crap. Like there's been so many bad books by great authors recently. It's just been painful. Yeah. Yeah. The only consistent books that I think that we've had so far are the Bobiverse books.

Oh, God. I hope we get another one soon. On its way. On its way. Security? Ha! Joining us today is Mike... No, no. Dave Bittner.

Dave. Yeah. Dave is the host of the Cyberware Podcast. Co-host of the Social Engineering Podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan. And finally, he's the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy. I'm sorry, Dave. I got confused from that other guy that always shows up on our security segment. But it's you again.

What are you talking about? I feel like I've walked into a joke that I'm not in on. Oh, I thought you were going to get that one because I didn't. Hey, I've had a stroke. Fuck off. Okay. Well, you know what? As long as Jason amuses himself, that's all that matters to me.

It's the little things for me. That's it. As long as Jason listens to the podcast and thinks it's funny, that's all that matters. That's right. Right. Right. Right. Little does Jason know, the show hasn't actually been published since he had his stroke. He's just listening.

He's the only person listening to it. And we're just humoring him. Good times. Yep. Well, let's get into the important stuff. Yes. Did you watch the Book of Boba Fett? I did.

Dave? I did. Another Boba less Boba. Yes. Chalk full of Jedi. Yes. Yes. I would like to point out that we are all fired from the job of predicting what is going to happen next. It would have been a good last episode, but they went for it.

They went for it hard. Well, here's the deal. We all said that, no, we're not going to see The Mandalorian again because that's going to be the lead into the next season of The Mandalorian. Nope. Next episode. So we failed on that one. Okay. And yeah, were we going to see more Luke?

That was on the fence. I definitely didn't think we were, but nope. They doubled down on the amount of Luke. So I think from our predictions from the last episode, we kind of missed the mark on what was coming next. We did, but more fantastic fan servicing, I would say. And I think my favorite part was still the ant robots, even with everything else that they threw our way.

Those things looked real. Those things, I'm like, the effects on those were crazy. More real than Luke Skywalker, which is my question to both of you. I think that Star Wars right now has a Mark Hamill problem. They're not going to be able to feature Luke Skywalker for as long as they do and as long as they did.

And if they're going to continue to try to do this, they need to cast a replacement. End of story. Well, here's the thing. I don't think they do, because I think they just cut that storyline off. Yeah, I think that that's going to be that. I think they just completely cut it off. The Mandalorian has said his piece to Grogu, and that is the last we'll probably see of Grogu.

Well, unless he makes the choice. We don't know about that. But I think the Luke Skywalker thing. If Grogu takes the lightsaber, he's off to train. If he takes the chain mail, then he's back with the Mandalorian, and then the season will roll on. But I don't think Luke would be involved at that point.

So Grogu's got to make his choice now. Is it going to be more CG or less? I have no idea what the name of this game was or why it just popped into my head, but Elf Needs Food, badly. Does anybody remember that? No. It was... Okay, never mind.

Forget it. Somebody that listens will remember that from some bizarre coin-operated medieval game from back in the day. I remember Donger Needs Food from 16 Candles, but no more Yankee My Wanky. Yeah. Oh, why? I think... Look, the story demands that Grogu goes with the Mandalorian, right?

He's got his new little armor. We got to see him in his cute little armor. So that's got to happen. They built a little bubble in the back of the Nabu Starfighter to fit Grogu. So he's got to... That's... To me, that's the choice he's going to make. Ultimately, he may go back and decide to be with Luke again after he goes.

He's on a little side journey with Mando. But it seems to me like that's where this has to go. That's what they... That's what all of the commerce parts of making a show like Mandalorian demand more Grogu. And as you point out, I think less Luke.

I think having Luke as a occasionally appearing character the way that they're doing it now, I think it's fine. I thought Luke looked remarkably good throughout this. I think... I did too. It's hit and miss, but when it hit, it really hit.

It did. I feel like they've gotten rid of that kind of waxy look that they have sometimes. There were like two or three scenes where he still had that, but for the most part, I was just like, when the Ant guys built the bench for the Mandalorian, I was like, oh, they're going to make him wait until it's dark so that the CGI stuff won't look as bad because they'll have Luke in the dark.

I thought the same thing. But they didn't. No, they didn't. No, he was full frontal Luke. There's your show title. Yeah, I'm not doing the art for that. But I was watching it and wondering to myself if I was not aware that this is the process they were using.

If I knew nothing about Star Wars and I just sat down and I watched this episode, would I know that there was anything odd about that character? Would I sense that there's anything odd about that character if I wasn't already on the lookout for it?

And I think they're getting really close. They're getting good. They're getting good. But if they were to make him more of a thing, then I think that they're really going to have to cast him. I think you're right about the predictions here. I think Grogu is obviously going to go with the Mandalorian. Why do we have a bubble in the ship? Why not just get rid of it?

That in and of itself means Grogu is going to be sitting in there in his chainmail. End of story. I think Grogu will eventually return to Luke. I think you're right. I think Luke will play a bit of a bit character. I will be bold and make a prediction here. When Grogu leaves to go back with the Mandalorian, we will have a shot of Luke Skywalker going to pick up a young Ben Solo to train him as his first.

Okay. I have a prediction. I have a prediction. In the final battle of the Book of Boba, I think Luke is going to show up with Grogu and Grogu and Luke are going to save the day. I can't see Luke fighting for Boba Fett. I think they're going to be outnumbered.

Well, maybe Grogu will do it. That's true. You never know. You never know. This is a new... It's hard feelings, Boba. Yeah. Bygones. Bygones. And I'm a Jedi. I'm going to help your criminal enterprise. Come on. You never know. Sure.

Next thing you know, Han Solo will be showing up to help out Boba, too. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. He's a changed man, I tell you. You just never know. I was thinking about the fact that these two series are so blended now.

Yeah. And I was trying to think of examples of other blended series. I mean, we've had stunt appearances like the time Charlie's Angels were on the love boat. You have those kinds of things. You have those saved on your hard drive somewhere, don't you, Dave?

Well, I love classic TV. But, I mean, you'd have people appearing on their spinoffs, you know, like Fonzie would be on Laverne and Shirley or something like that. Chachi. But I'm trying to think of a show where people moved back and forth between the shows.

Buffy and Angel. Is that right? Okay. Buffy and Angel did it all the time, yeah. Okay. There you go. That's the only one I got. Okay. That's it. The other thing I wonder is, would Disney, would the Star Wars, the makers of Star Wars, would they have been better off simply leaving Boba Fett out of everything and allowing the Mandalorian to be the replacement for him that we all kind of thought he was when the Mandalorian series started?

That we thought, okay, Mando's a stand-in for Boba Fett. He's the Boba Fett we always wanted. This is really the adventures of Boba Fett. And then Boba Fett shows up and it's like, oh, okay. The real problem is Disney and Disney's characters have to be inherently good.

Disney is not going to do a show about a kick-ass bounty hunter that is evil. So you've always got to look for that twist. They had to, they have, they've got Boba Fett in a redemption arc. Boba Fett is in a redemption arc. And the Mandalorian was never going to be truly bad.

As soon as cute Grogu showed up, you knew Mandalorian's going to have a soul now. He's going to be a good guy. But don't you, I mean, but let's also remember that in the last episode, Mando was carrying around another guy's head in a bag. Yeah, but he was a bad guy, Dave. Okay, sure.

So I understand. All right. I stand corrected. Yes, absolutely. I don't know. There's this whole thing about the Mandalorian's planet and the Darksaber. I mean, they've got an awful lot of stuff to mind that they're obviously going to really get into. So we'll see. But I mean, I tend to agree with you.

I think the mystery of Boba Fett has been ruined. I think we all got what we wanted and be careful what you ask for. Right. Right. But this was a good episode. To me, like this keyed off of the core of Star Wars, which is taking other genres and bringing them into the Star Wars universe.

Oh, yeah. So much of that. The whole standoff at noon with, yeah. Yeah. It's so good. Timothy Oliphant better not be dead is all I got to say. It looked like he winged him. He better not be dead. Oh, he's coming to help Boba Fett. He better be. This is the thing that pushes the town to help, obviously. Of course.

Yeah. I mean, this is a Western after all. Yeah. So, yeah, the deputy is long gone, but Timothy only got winged, so he better be back. Well, we knew the deputy was – the deputy might as well have been wearing a red shirt from Star Trek as soon as he appeared on screen. Yeah. Seriously. Right, right, right.

As soon as he started mouthing off. Yeah, I'm like, he's dead. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Pretty much. I also just want to say, for the record, that Timothy Oliphant has fabulous hair. Oh, my God. He looks so good. He's a very effective Han Solo-esque replacement.

Like, in terms of vibe and look and all of that, he is the Han Solo of the Mandalorian universe right now. And he is turning into Pierce Brosnan. He looked a lot like Pierce Brosnan does. Yeah, I suppose. But cooler. Yeah. I think he's way cooler than Pierce.

Sorry. I'm a Deadwood fan and a Justified fan, so. Yeah. I'm in Camp Timothy for that. Yeah. It was fun seeing the Jawas using the skull of the Krayt Dragon as a hood ornament. Yeah. That was so cool. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I think the overarching thing here is that it's nice to see that Star Wars, this particular little corner of the Star Wars universe is in good hands. So far, yeah. Well, it was good talking to you guys. We'll talk next week. Yep. Yep.

I got to put a spoiler alert in this segment. Oh, God. What are we at? 11 minutes, 42 seconds. All right. Let's move on to some other news. If we must. Yeah, we must. So many people sent me this one, so I think we should cover it real quick. The IRS plans to scan your face, which prompts anger in Congress and confusion among taxpayers.

Prime example of somebody in a bubble going, hey, we should do this, and then all of a sudden going, oh, okay, never mind, never mind. Forget about it. Forget about it. We're not going to. Oh, we forgot about everything else that the government said about facial recognition. Oh, don't. Sorry. Yeah. Let's outsource it. Does it really count if we outsource it?

So, yeah, they're using ID.me to do their verification checks, which, I mean, the government does need identification checks on these tax issues because there's so much tax return fraud that goes on. Yeah. Should they be outsourcing it? I don't know. Can I just send them a scan of Jeff Bezos' face?

Yeah. Here you go. Go get them. Take all my monies. Take all my monies. Yeah. So, I mean, it would behoove everybody if you're an American taxpayer to go ahead and just sign up for ID.me now before it breaks under the strain. Seriously.

Just get it done. You're going to have to do it at some point. Congress obviously isn't going to do anything. I don't care how angered they are. We know that they're never going to do a damn thing. So just go get her did. I've already gone through the ID.me process. It's a little convoluted, but most things of that nature are.

I had to do that for my Nexus cards, which gets me across the borders quickly. So it's fine. It's easy-ish. I would say the other recommendation related to this is that if you have not yet established your online presence, your online account with the IRS, do so as soon as possible because odds are if you don't, a bad guy is going to get there first.

If they haven't already. And try to do it. Yeah. Yeah. So just go and claim that. It doesn't take long. Use 17-factor auth. Right. Exactly. You read my mind. That was my next thing. Just as many protections as you can because that's literally where a lot of your money is.

And if somebody gets to your money first, it is a royal pain to try to claw it back. Yeah. Yeah. That is a cluster that is very hard to un-F. Yep. Yep. A story that caught my eye this week. The folks who enforce GDPR have ruled that IAB Europe's consent pop-ups are unlawful.

Can you, can you, I don't know if you can hear this through the microphone, but my anger and hatred for GDPR right now is beyond, beyond my containment. It's like. Go on. Stop it. Stop it. You wanted these fucking pop-ups to begin with.

It's your fault. Now they're against the law. Die in a fire. Jason has another stroke. End of show. Bye. Wow. I mean, I knew you could get another stroke from cookies, but I didn't think these kind. Well, you know what?

My friend hooked me up with a pot gummy last night, so I think I'm chill enough now where I can scream. Obviously, you didn't take it yet. Oh, I did. Just imagine if I hadn't. Imagine if I hadn't. I mean, okay. First off, the consent pop-ups were stupid.

They did nothing. You know, there's been a whole industry that has just popped up around them. So, you know, here's your plug-in for WordPress so you get your stupid consent pop-up. Here's your plug-in for your browser that just makes them go away right away. Whack-a-mole.

Everybody ignores it. Nobody pays attention. There was no point to having them at all. So, thank God they're finally going away. Yeah. So, I think the big picture here is that when GDPR came along, IAB Europe and IAB is Interactive Advertising Bureau.

So, they're a trade organization for advertisers in the EU. They, as you sort of alluded to, Brian, they tried to come up with a one-stop shop where folks could be GDPR compliant and still do all of the tracking that they wanted to do, right?

And so, I think a lot of people saw it as a workaround and the people who brought these lawsuits to the GDPR enforcers thought that this was against the spirit of the law and the GDPR folks agree. And the result of this is that, say, like a thousand different organizations in Europe, not only are they going to have to do away with these pop-ups, but they're going to have to delete all the data that they collected.

So, I don't know. Look, I do not ever trust the advertising community to not come up with some kind of workaround to do the things they want to do. But, could this move the needle in terms of actually protecting people's privacy to not be tracked in Europe?

Could be. I don't know. I mean, it's such a mess right now because this ties into another GDPR thing that is half of my rage where they're going after people who use Google Fonts right now because Google Fonts then leak your – it quote-unquote leaks your IP address to Google, which then can track where you're going because it's loaded from an external source.

It's because most of these people who are creating these laws and these rules don't know how the fucking internet works. So, it just – it makes me so angry and it drives me mad. I got to stop now. I mean, I don't think that we should at all be surprised that not just – that a government project and not just a singular government – we're talking about the European Union here.

So, multiple, multiple governments have come up with a bad, bloated plan. This is what governments do. You know, we're not surprised by this. We shouldn't be surprised by this. The thing that just kind of gets me – and again, this – like Jason and I having built websites from the very beginning and understanding just kind of the nature of how these things

work, the staggering amount of human capital and financial capital that has been blown – just blown down a sinkhole for GDPR and some of these crazy rabbit holes that they've gone down – is astonishing to me.

I mean, billions of dollars have now been wasted doing things that did nothing. Nothing. It's crazy. Yeah. How many wordles have been denied the universe because of GDPR? I say it's very, very many orders of magnitude of Scaramoochies.

But having said all that, I'm still very much in favor of GDPR, at least in theory. Okay. Brian loves his regulations. I do. He loves regulations. Well, look at the difference between the U.S. and the EU in terms of privacy.

There's – we have none here. None. At all. There's no way to fight back. There's no way to do – to stop anything. People just – you might as well just leave all your doors open and here's my bank account. That's where we're at. You're pretty safe when you get an iPhone.

You can click the button now. That's true. So. Fun times. Fun times. Where's my gummies? God damn it. All right. So Steve wrote in a little bit more on the prepping thing for – everybody's looking out for you, Dave.

Hey, guys. With the conversation on prepping, emergency bags were brought up on a podcast that I listened to. It's not full-on prepper, but I think it has good points. It covers three scenarios. A bag for car and can't get home, a bag for home and need to leave, and bag for house to hunker down. They cover defense and present options other than firearms and why, which seems interesting.

I would like to state for the record that you don't need a bag for your house. You don't need a bag for your house because you have a house. If you're hunkering down in your house, your house isn't your bag. You don't need a bag for your house. Just saying. I would imagine that is more along the lines of a checklist of things that you should have in your house in case you're not going to be leaving it for quite some time.

So I agree with that. Yes, that's a pantry. We call it the pantry. I still have been putting in a lot of thought for this for you, Dave. What I want you to really think about as you go down this prepper rabbit hole is what are you prepping for and why? And after doing this for, you know, I did it for like a decade.

And it was a waste of time because none of the things happen that you think are ever going to happen. And when they do, they never happen the way that they're supposed to happen. Like our end of the world pandemic. As far as, you know, doomsday Armageddon apocalypses go, this one sucks.

I can't use any of my bug out bag stuff. I have to use my home bag to stay home. Nothing plays out the way you do. And what it does, I think, and what I worry about for you is it changes the way you think because you're always looking for threats when there generally isn't a threat.

You don't need to be preparing for something that is amorphous and typically not going to happen, which is why I stopped doing it because it was a monumental waste of time, energy, and money. And that's why I'm like, just keep the basics. Don't go down the rabbit hole.

Have a bunch of food, a bunch of water. Now you got a gun, so you're all set, you know? I think the things that I prepare for, the common things, it's like, okay, if the power goes out, I got a couple UPSs. Now you got a generator. You're done there. Forget about it. Every now and again, go out, check the gas in the generator, get some stable to put in the gas can that you keep around or, you know, run it through.

Just keep everything going. Sort out your food, you know, rotate it through. But the big prep is just buy extra stuff of the stuff you already have. You don't need to go buy MREs. Just have extra and then rotate it through. Boom, you're done, you know? And you're not going to waste a lot of time going down this, you know, just masturbatory rabbit hole of what the hell is going to happen someday.

You know, if I hear shit hit the fan scenario one more time, I'm going to choke a bitch. It just doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. Yeah. The way I approach it, like, I have the generator as well. We've got food. We've got water. The thing that I think about most isn't the catastrophe. It's more like the mundane.

Like, what happens? I'm more concerned about what happens if the internet goes down for four days. Now, because we've all moved our lives online, have some books around so you don't go nuts. Have some stuff for your kids so they don't go nuts.

Because otherwise, right now, we're all living – there's a far better chance that you're going to lose internet for a couple days than Grogu's going to show up and, you know, start meandering down the road, blowing things up. That's not going to happen. And there's very little you can do to prep for that anyways. It's just going to happen.

The mundane disasters are way more likely, and be prepared for those so you don't go crazy. And get a UPS for your router at your house too, you know, to give you time to stay on the internet, to check the weather while you're setting up the generator if you have to.

If it's going to be a long haul, then you set up the generator. But if it's a couple hours, you know, a good UPS will keep your router going for, you know, more than half a day, which is what – you're going to need 99.99999% of the time. So, you know, you're addressing the exact thing I was thinking about coming into today's show, which – and the way I'd framed it in my own mind was of all the preppers out there in the world, what percentage of them have actually ever had to put their plan into place?

Damn near zero. They all pivot to making YouTube videos about prepping. That's how they use their stuff. Or they're into crypto now because they got to, you know, they got to prepare for the end of, you know, finance and the man coming for them. So, preppers are now crypto bros. Let me ask you this though because for your specific situation, haven't you had thoughts about, oh, those fires are getting uncomfortably close?

Yeah. That's why I have a bag with all of my documents and I never let my gas tank get below half. That's my prep right there. I can walk into my house, pick up my bag and get in the car and get the fuck out, you know, and I know every way out of this town. So, just know you're egress and you're fine and avoid crowds.

Always avoid crowds. Yeah, I do. My other thought I had about this is that I do think that there's absolutely a feedback loop that kicks in here where – and I guess that's why they call it a slippery slope because once you start, it's, you know, well, I'm protected against this.

But what about that and this and – and I'm just – you know, Joe Kerrigan and I have talked about on Hacking Humans many times that like I have chosen to live my life in a way where I would rather occasionally get scammed than assume everyone is scamming me all the time.

Yep. Right. I don't want to be – I don't want to have that approach where I don't give people the benefit of the doubt. And that is one of my fears with the prepping is that it puts me in that mindset. It will make you dislike people and you won't trust anyone.

Yeah. A hundred percent. That's no way to live. It just isn't. After taking my urban escape and evasion class, you know, there's a lot of training on situational awareness, watching everybody, looking for the baseline, how people are acting. And it's exhausting. It's just absolutely exhausting.

I'm like, okay, here, take my wallet. I'm just going to move on. There are so many reasons to dislike people already. Why add to it? Yeah. Right. Right. You know, it's just – it's a tough road to hoe and it's like you're not going to need it 99.999% of the time, honestly.

Yeah. So, you know, like I said, stick to the basics. Situational awareness is good if you're in a new place in a new city where you are going to be a target like a traveler. You know, keep your eyes out. But, you know, my dad just spent, you know, 10 days in Paris for the first time and he is the dumb traveler that, you know, he's looking around, doing whatever, probably had his wallet in his back pocket, got his phone out, whatever.

Has Target written backwards on his forehead. Right. Not a damn thing happened to him. He had a great trip and life went on. And I always think about something that my mom told me, like back when I was a kid, you know, we're talking like 1984 when nuclear war was like we all thought it was going to happen.

In fact, there was the movie – or not 1984. What was it? The day after. The day after that came out. You know, all that stuff was going on and, you know, as a young kid, you get freaked out by it. And I still to this day remember what my mom said. And my mom was like, we live right by Los Angeles.

And frankly, we're going to die immediately if it happens. And I'd rather die than live in what it comes after. Boom. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. What are you prepping for is the question. All right. Good times. Well, season finale of Boba Fett next week.

So we got that to look forward to. Hopefully, we'll be around to see it. Yeah. Yeah. I could fire up my generator and watch it. Crack an MRE and sit in the backyard. Perfect. That's right. That's right. Closing shout outs.

Well, first up, I would like to thank everybody that has sent in donations for my hospital fund. I really, really do appreciate that a lot. The problem, though, is that you're sending them to the show and the show is two people.

And it is very confusing with how we do bookkeeping. So if you do want to help out, which I do appreciate, no obligation to whatsoever, I have a direct link in the show notes to do direct donations to Jason's Hospital Fund, which is coming along nicely.

Coming along nicely. We'd appreciate that as opposed to – or in accordance with my previous remarks about taxes, we do pay our taxes on this podcast. So it would be helpful if we could separate these things. Yes, very much so. Very much so.

So, yeah, if you just go to paypalme.jpdef, you can donate there. But, yeah, there's still a small car that's outstanding on my hospital belt. So any help is good. But if you just want to donate to the show, please, as standard fare, go to gog.showslashdonate.

And we've had nobody new at Patreon this week. Sad Christmas. Yeah, sad Christmas. Oh, well. Over at PayPal, we have Matt, Simon, Michael, Nikolai, Jonathan, Matthew, Doug, Shaleen, Judge, Nicola, Thomas, Melissa, Vincent, who sent in a raft of emails this week.

He's back. And he says, happy lunar new year to Brian and Jason, 50-buck donation on PayPal to you, wishing you wealth and good health for 2022. This is the year of the tiger. And I am enjoying all the cat and tiger-related tweets, cosplay and fan art.

Hopefully, we will have Bittner all dressed up as a tiger in security, which has already happened by the time you listen to this. So, I'm guessing he wasn't. Well, we sent him a fox head. So, now we have to send him a tiger head. Apparently so, yes. And we've got our big cats this week.

Patrick with a $100 donation. Leslie with another $100 donation. And Kendall with a $150 donation. Thank you all so much. Thank you so much. And over at Stripe, we've got Adam, Ann, Ashley, Mario, Matthew, Tom, and Richard. And Richard says, Hey, Grumpoids, thanks for the continued techno angst and all the best to Jason for a smooth recovery.

Just tipped you some cash to contribute to visits from a cute night nurse to tuck you in. Oh, God, that would be nice. You've got to find that nurse that I had when my kid was born that looked just like Jessica Jones. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I would pay extra for that. I'd pay extra for that.

One question. What's your recommended brand of pepper spray gun? I don't see it in the show notes. And to your point, nobody did. So, sorry about that. It is at the top of these show notes in follow-up. So, go get your gun on. Go get your gun on. And Anthony asks, Hey, Grumps, what's your biggest one-time donation?

Was it the $500 from the other week or a higher amount? Well, the biggest donation we ever got, I believe, was $1,000. So, the gauntlet has been thrown down. That's right. Thank you to everybody who has donated this week. We really, really appreciate it. Yeah. And happy new year to everybody.

Happy Lunar New Year. We celebrated with a big-ass Chinese dinner, and it was awesome. I love that. It's one of my favorite times of year now, except for here, because it's cold and snowing. But other than that, it was great. So, there you go. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on, and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 539. From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel if you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans.

You can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars. We haven't had one of those in a long time. It's been a while. Anyway, stay grumpy.

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