557: Vanna Screwed Up

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. So we've got some follow-up here. This comes from Michelle who says, Hi, Jason. As a follow-up to the latest podcast and your confusion about Uphold, I believe it was through the Brave browser that they're bat nonsense and they're bat nonsense. I have several emails saved from upload from when I first installed Brave in April of 2020.

I recall being excited about the bat perk and then as soon as Uphold wanted me to verify my ID, I bailed. That was actually the same spot I bailed at, which is why I got the email saying, do your identity. I gotcha. I've continued to use Brave, but have the whole bat thing hidden.

Last week I received another email from Uphold stating that they need me to verify my ID by June 14th or my account will be restricted. If you didn't already solve this mystery, I hope this helps. That exactly solved the mystery. So it's the case of the missing bats. There you go. Yeah. Some more follow-up.

We were just talking about this the other week. Again, we keep hearing about how social media has a liberal bias. There was this whole thing in Texas, the lawsuit that they've got going on, that conservatives are being silenced. And as I pointed out, study after study after study has said that's not actually true at all, or actually, if anything, it's the opposite.

And lo and behold, Jason, this week, yet another study has come out. Facebook's algorithm change in 2018 benefited Republican groups, according to researchers. So the 2018 change in Facebook's algorithm resulted in significant boosts in engagement for local Republican groups, even though their Democratic counterparts posted more often, according to a newly published research.

The findings, as first reported by NBC News, line up with one of the major revelations of the Facebook papers, namely that a change meant to emphasize content from family and friends wound up making news feeds more divisive by incentivizing negative posts. So once again, even though the Republicans and the conservatives are screaming that they're being silenced on social media, another study points out that they're actually being amplified much more.

Yeah. Can we try and amplify them? Because maybe it'll shut them up. Maybe. I do have some follow up on the, you know, the, they send you a shipping notice, you get a tracking code and the thing never leaves the warehouse saga. Oh, I got another one of those too. Yeah. Okay. Mine was with Sonos because I ordered the, the new soundbar they have.

I think it's called the Ray. I think it's been so long since I ordered it. I forgot the name of it. I sent you a screenshot of it. You can see how they handle it. They actually, they're actually pretty good. It says awaiting carrier pickup on the page, tells you when it arrives, you know, all this good stuff, tracking number.

It looks really good. I think they're handling it very well with this graphic, even though it is total and utter bullshit because it was still late. This is, this is equivalent to the Domino's pizza tracker. There is no Jose that just puts your pizza in the oven. It's just a gift. You just, you just killed Christmas for me.

I thought that was real. Yeah. No. It's not well. So you got, you got one of these too. Uh, well, I ordered, uh, some shower, uh, bombs because, uh, I like to have a little eucalyptus and some enjoyable aromatherapy in my shower. And there's a, a local, um, Canadian company that makes these natural ones and they're very nice.

And I, I, guys, I was served an ad for them because my wife obviously had been looking at something along those lines. So I ordered some and, uh, the order has just been sitting there for a week saying it's being shipped shortly. And then I finally like called their customer service.

I'm like, I ordered this a week ago. What's going on? Oh, we're just waiting for somebody to come pick it up. Well, tell us that. Say something. Yeah. Or, you know, drive it over there. This is an Amazon world, people. We expect to know what's going on. Yeah. Seriously. We want to know what happened before it happens.

Come on. Let's go. Yeah. Let's go. That's what technology is for. Damn it. Seriously. Damn Canadians, man. Canadians. I got, uh, I got an email from Twitch this week. Remember Twitch? Oh, oh, wait. Yes. Yes. Yes, I do. We get, we got it. It's the, it's the web three Twitter.

Yeah. They are the, as they say, the pay to earn web three social network. Now, Brian pay to earn. This is a web three social network where you pay to earn. I give you money in the hopes that I'll earn some back.

What do we call that? Bullshit. Gambling. I believe. I think that's, I pay the, the blackjack dealer, say $10. And, uh, I hope to earn say $20, but sometimes you don't, uh, which is how web three works. Uh, they say Twitch is the only social network where users earn money for their content and everything lives on the blockchain data ownership, native NFT marketplace in app payments.

Woo. Yeah. Yeah. So I got an email from them saying, introducing the Twitch market 3.0. I did not know there was a one or 2.0. So thank you for the update. Uh, so with Twitch market 3.0, you have rare candy items, which God knows what that means. You can view your 3d NFTs in AR, Brian.

Did you know that? Exciting. I did not know that. I, uh, I, uh, I should bust out my 3d NFT collection. Yes. And, and your AR glasses that you have lying around a new feature is a beautiful redesign and a new model viewer. Now, hold on a second, just, just in terms of language and how we actually, actually do things in the tech world.

I'm assuming this beautiful redesign is a redesign of version 2.0. So you're actually have not redesigned 3.0. You have moved from 2.0 to 3.0. So that's not a redesign. It's a new 3.0 version.

A redesign would be if you took Twitch market 3.0 and then redesigned 3.0, correct? Yeah, I believe so. Okay. Just checking. I know it's pedantic, but I'm pedantic. They say, make sure you go check out our, go check out your 3d items.

They are looking so much better. Now the three, the, they, they did do the, uh, the lowercase d in the 3d consistently. So it's consistently wrong. Okay. Now at the very end, it comes back with PAMP this post. And three rocket ships. Cause you know, they're going to the moon, I guess.

Um, what's a PAMP? Don't know. I was hoping you were going to tell me. Well, I know PAMPers and PAMPers are full of shit, literally. So maybe you throw poop at somebody to get them to go to Twitch market 3.0. I don't know. I'm guessing this is supposed to be PIMP this post, but I, they bought the wrong vowel.

I don't, Vanna screwed up. Yeah. Vanna, Vanna screwed up. That's all. That's all that I can think of. I found this other article cause I, it was just, it was the toxic internet time. I'm just getting this out of the way here. Praise for Uvalde shooter and call for copycats is growing online.

Homeland security warns. Uh, well, here's the deal. Homeland security. If you know that people are posting this stuff, take it down, shut it off, do whatever you got to do. Do your thing. Yeah. They're just saying that, uh, you know, of course the boards, the message boards are blowing up with, uh, really stupid people. Go figure.

Yeah. And, uh, in my final follow-up news, I'm just going to declare it. NFTs are dead. Let's move on. You sure? Because old friend of the show, Sean Bonner just posted a cryptic message on Twitter about a world famous artist that is looking to get into NFTs and fractional something or others of a fucking whatever bullshit kind of crap that's stupid and nobody cares.

Well, let him be my guest. Go sit over there in the corner and make your NFTs. I don't care. I'm done. I guess you can get fractional shares of NFTs now. I bet you can. I bet you can. Fuck. It's awesome. In the news.

Well, you may have declared NFTs dead. I wish somebody would also declare crypto dead, but not quite yet. That's just in his dying death throes. I don't know if you've looked at your, uh, crypto investment recently. Um, I looked at mine today cause I, I've just left all that money in there as a lark because as I've always said, if you're going to invest in crypto, make sure it's gambling money.

Um, by far the worst investment I've ever made in my entire life. And I've invested in some stinker companies, pets.com. They did well, actually. No. Okay. Anyways, uh, the Winklevi twins. I just like to call them that, uh, their crypto exchange is now facing a lawsuit over the $36 million theft.

Uh, the verge notes that retirement savings firm IRA financial trust has sued them. Gemini is the name of the company over allegations. The business didn't adequately protect customers against a February 8th breach where intruders stole 36 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum assets. They did not have proper safeguards to prevent the theft and didn't freeze accounts quickly enough to block the thieves from transferring money.

You know why? Because these are sham companies that aren't regulated like banks and they don't have to do any of that sort of stuff. So buyer beware. I just got an email from okay coin while you were reading that. I want to read this to you, Brian. It says, get started. There's always more to learn and discover in crypto.

It can be overwhelming, but doing your own research is the best way to build conviction. It's also done well for coronavirus. This doing your own research thing. It's going great. Yeah. I mean, if that is not some culty ass language, I don't know what is. Well, it is a cult. That's all it is.

When I see these things asking me to buy more Bitcoin, all I see is donate to our retirement fund. That's all I see. And the SEC is investigating Binance over its BNB token. They've opened an investigation to find out whether it was an unregistered security during its 2017 initial coin offering reported by Bloomberg.

BNB coins are primarily used to pay transaction fees on Binance, currently the world's largest crypto exchange. They're also facing another separate SEC probe launched in February into ties between its founder and two trading firms. The Department of Justice, the IRS, and the CFTC also opened investigations last year into the company for a number of potential criminal violations, including insider trading, which we know is rampant in crypto, and market manipulation.

Looking at you, Elon. Binance reportedly processed at least $2.35 billion in illegal transactions tied to drugs, hacks, and fraudulent activity, according to a Reuters investigation published the other day. So how many things are going on with Binance right now?

Sounds great. A few. A few. Yeah. Totally legit above the board company that has your financial interests at their heart. And you remember that Starbucks location? It was the first one that voted to unionize. And everybody was like, wow, how cool is that? Wow.

They managed to unionize. Starbucks. Everything. All of that. Cool, huh? You remember that, Jason? I do. Yeah. It wasn't that long ago. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. And Starbucks had decided to shut down that particular location. Well, you poke the bear, you might get bit. Interesting.

We're just going to shut that one down. Okay. I'm sure they have a very good excuse as to why that particular location is not doing well, right? Well, I went into the article a little bit, and the excuse for shutting down that location is the exact reason that they wanted to unionize in the first place.

There was some piece of faulty equipment that they couldn't get replaced, and it was a real big problem. So they decided to unionize to basically fight back against Starbucks to say, hey, you need to fix this thing. And now Starbucks is just saying, we don't want to fix it, so we're just going to shut your location down. Okay. It seems like unionization was kind of a weird route just to get, you know, the coffee made fixed.

Well, they wanted other things as well. They wanted other things as well, obviously. This is just part of it. Yeah. Anyways. In more companies being squirrely, Amazon VP tries to convince sellers to oppose antitrust bill. Hey, guys, do this thing that's bad for you because it's good for us.

Yeah? And? In a post on Amazon's internal forum for third-party merchants, the company's vice president of worldwide selling, and partner services, Dharmesh Mehta urged sellers to oppose the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and ask them to contact their senators. Just under 500 sellers have responded to his post since Thursday, many of them unconvinced by Amazon's claim that the Senate bill will harm their businesses.

This bill jeopardizes the way Amazon wants to operate. It would not jeopardize marketplaces. Amazon, get your house in order before asking us sellers to defend you, wrote one seller. I am personally sick of the condescending posts by Amazon management directed at us. We are not morons and we know how to read and think for ourselves, wrote another seller.

Nice. Nice. Yeah. Yep. Every single one of these just pushes people to Shopify. Yep. Yeah, it does. And in a company actually doing something good, probably because they were forced to, Microsoft has dropped non-compete clauses and NDAs from employee settlements. They've announced a handful of significant changes for employee contracts and agreements that would scrap some of the most controversial workplace policies in tech.

To start with, they will no longer add non-compete clauses and contracts for employees in the U.S. and will not enforce it for most of the current staff. Only employees in senior leadership roles, such as partners and executives, will have to sign and comply with non-compete agreements. They're also ending another controversial practice, having workers sign agreements with non-disclosure clauses when resolving disputes and providing separation benefits.

They are also increasing pay transparency by publicly disclosing salary ranges in all of its job postings across the U.S. starting in January 2023. And finally, it will go through a civil rights audit that would examine its workplace policies and practices as conducted by a third party.

All good. Good job. All right. Microsoft's one of the good guys. I wonder what happened to make them do it. Probably a lot of lawsuits that people under NDAs can't discuss. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that the non-compete thing is an issue because in California here, it's definitely not.

There are no non-competes in California. Yeah. There are no non-competes in California, but they are not based in California. No, they're not. They're not. Unfortunately, I still listen to Scott Galloway here and there, and he's always talking about these pay later schemes, which, you know, I am not a fan of personally.

And I think his warnings about them are good. I mean, didn't you have probably, I don't know, you're responsible, had a nice, you know, home life growing up. So probably not the same experience I had when you got out on your own and you just like destroyed your credit with all of these easy payment schemes.

Did you have that when you were getting out of school? I wouldn't say I destroyed my credit. I did definitely, I overextended myself and I purchased things I should not have purchased. And I was under credit card debt for quite some time, but I quickly realized that this is, I should probably only purchase things I can actually afford.

And I started to do that. Yeah. You're one of the few people that do that. Most of the crowd that I ran with were, you know, kind of hillbilly-esque and not really great with money. So they just saw it as free money. And I'm sure a lot of people are going to be doing that. Yeah. They get you in college.

They get you pretty bad. And I think Galloway reeled against that as well at one point. Because, you know, walking around college as a freshman, there are people from credit card companies signing you up for a credit card and you don't have any money. So, you know, that's what got me in my initial debt. I thought it was a really good idea to buy a very expensive keyboard on the first credit card given to me.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I did something similar, of course. So now we've got that everywhere with companies like Affirm and a couple of the other ones. So, of course, when Apple came out with the news that they're going to add in their own pay later scheme, the news was kind of, it's like, ooh, shocking.

And Affirm's stock drop came back, whatever. I didn't realize, though, that Affirm was Max Levchin. I don't know if you know who Max Levchin is, but he's one of the PayPal mafia. He's one of the original PayPal guys, like super duper OG and good guy.

I met him a bunch when I was in the scene. And everybody's asking if, you know, if Affirm is shaking in their boots now that Apple's coming. And I've met Max and he's probably just like, no, I don't give a fuck. PayPal mafia. I don't need any more money. I'm doing this because I'm rich and I'm having fun.

He's just like a technology guy that likes technology. But he also does like a lot of money. So I don't think he's going to be worried about it. Some of the other companies might be. My guess is Apple's rollout with a pay later thing is going to have pretty strict and low limits as opposed to these other companies, which are basically just going to exploit a lot of people.

Yeah, that's what I'm hoping is Apple's going to have much better guardrails for what people can buy because you're going to have to have that. And, you know, they're taking this all in-house, which is interesting. You know, Apple building out a whole internal financial services division is going to be something interesting to watch.

I mean, because everybody else is doing their stuff right now. I think Goldman does the Apple card. I forget who they do some of their other partnering with. But if they start running their own credit cards and doing everything in-house, it's just going to be keep your Apple stock is all I'm saying. Planning on it.

Hang on to that. By the way, I can tell you've been listening to Scott Galloway because you dropped guardrails. He drops guardrails as often as Kara Swisher drops. Interesting. Really? I didn't even notice that. Oh, God. Okay. I'm stopping to listen to it right now. I'm being manipulated by the dog. I don't know.

What do you think? I think it's interesting. Best interviewer in the world. Media Candy. Brian, we got a lot of messages over the past week that I thought were kind of interesting.

Mostly were congratulations that we outlasted this particular podcast and that, you know, we're a better show. I believe we're a better show, but some of the fans did too. Obviously, not as many as the people that like the other show. Here's the deal. Reply All is fucking dead, dead, dead.

Suck it, motherfuckers. We outlasted you, you little punk bitches. Ha! Sorry about that. Had a little moment. They're the ones that had all kinds of HR issue, right? Yeah. Some shady things were going on there. By the way, outlasting them, 187 episodes, 557 bitches.

I never listen to the show, but if we have listeners that have come over that need this kind of content, you're welcome here. This is a semi-safe space. Semi-safe space. Especially if you're a furry. Yeah. I listened to a couple episodes. That's why I tagged it as shit we already know.

Anyway. Star Trek. Strange new worlds. Yes. Still loving it. Still loving it. I still haven't seen the new one. Oh, no spoilers then. I loved this latest episode. They took a big swing. I wouldn't say they knocked it out of the park with this one, but they took, I mean, God, they took a big swing.

So I think you'll enjoy it. All right. As soon as we're done cracking that open. I'm also going to crack open the next episode of the Orville because the Orville is back. Now, I have thoughts, Brian. Okay. Remember when everybody was saying that the Orville was the best Star Trek, you know, on TV, even though there was other Star Trek?

Yes. Well, that's obviously not the case anymore. No. You know, we've covered that. They're definitely not the best Star Trek. Here's the problem. They are Star Trek still, but they've turned into Discovery, not next gen. They've bypassed everything else.

They have gone straight from the next gen vibe direct to Discovery. Direct to Discovery. I'm sorry to hear that for you, Jason, because you're not a big fan. I was hoping they would pivot to Deep Space Nine, your favorite of the Star Treks. Deep Space Nine would have been grand, would have been grand.

But the entire first episode is all about suicide and how people feel when somebody takes their own life. Oh, boy. Yeah. Serious topic. Well worth discussing. Not what I want in my popcorn sci-fi. All right. I'll keep watching, but the first episode definitely made me very sad.

I have been watching a game show that—it's a food game show. It's a food competition, sort of. It's kind of a cooking competition. It's got—it's so funny. I had everybody, like, written down before, and then I took it away, and I thought my stroke was going to be okay.

Not so much? No, no. So it's Ludo Lefarb, the master of the French omelet, I got to say. And Natasha Leggero is the comedian on there. It is a terrible game show, but it's one of those terrible shows that I just have found myself absolutely loving every week.

You love your coaching game shows. It's one of those shows. Yeah. Yeah. You really do. The first couple times we watched it, and we're just like, this really makes no sense. It's really bad. And then it just got so bad that we love it. I don't know why. I hope they keep it on. It's on TBS.

Okay. I just hope they pick it up for another season. I just enjoy it. I really do. And Brian, the internet gave me fantastic news this week. Okay. The Sandman on Netflix finally has a release date, and it's on my birthday. So I know what I'm doing. Going to have me a big old burrito from my favorite burrito place, sit my ass on the couch, and binge watch The Sandman all day long.

All right. So there was, of course, because you can't have fandom without racists anymore, there was a whole big kerfuffle around when The Sandman dropped because death is played by a black woman. Okay. Fine. They're changing everything up, even though in the comic books, people might notice that death was black in several episodes.

But this week, everybody went cuckoo because they've released some of the character posters, and they released a poster of Joanna Constantine. And everybody lost their shit because they thought they were recasting John Constantine as Joanna. But obviously, people don't do any research.

They didn't know that Joanna Constantine is actually a descendant of John Constantine, or vice versa, the other way around. But the deal is nobody did their research, and it actually hit trending on Twitter, and I just had to shake my head because morons. Toxic fan bases.

Yeah. But they're not even – they're like, you know, not even armchair experts. They're just, you know, backseat fandom people on the side of the road who think they know what the thing's about kind of fans, not real true fans. Because if you didn't know who Joanna Constantine was, you're not a fan of Sandman, so shut up.

So let's talk a little bit about The Great Uncanceling. Okay. Louis C.K. is back again. So let's follow the timeline. All right. Jerked off into a plant or some nonsense like that. Got canceled. Took a year off. Came back with his own special that he funded and sold.

Was a hit. Won a Grammy Award. I would like to just point out that – And now he's finally releasing his movie. He didn't just jerk off. I mean he may have actually jerked off into a plant, but there were women present nonconsensually when he was doing so. Oh, I know.

I did. I know. I'm trying to summarize. I'm just summarizing the whole thing. Yeah, just summarizing – yeah, look. Here's the deal. Bill Cosby got a lady a cocktail. Let's just put those in the same – put those together. There's the explanation. That's the level of detail I'm going for in the explanation.

It's on TMZ. You can look it up. But his movie got canceled back then because he played a character that was remarkably similar, I guess, to him in real life or something like that. I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know.

I'm just going off what I recall. But he has decided to four-wall the movie, and he's going to release it himself and take it on tour. Well, you can't stop people from doing that. That's fine. That's what I'm saying. You can uncancel yourself. Yeah. I have a feeling that he's going to make his money back.

Just gut feeling. Yeah, probably. How do you open a movie called Fourth of July on July 1st, though? You know, I was thinking the same thing, but especially when you're renting the – oh, you know why? Because there's actually a real movie that needs to be in that theater on July 4th.

There you go. Three days. Yeah. Yeah, that's the whole nature of the whole four-walling process is you just rent the theater when nobody else wants it. So I'm guessing he got a deal on July 1st. There you go. It's a Friday, though. I personally will not be watching this. I have – Louis C.K. will remain canceled in my book.

It's fine. I don't – if you choose to go see Louis C.K.'s self-made movie, by all means, help yourself. It's a free country. I will stick with uncanceled comedians at the moment. And as per your recommendation last week, I watched Yvonne Orji's Mama, I Made It special on HBO.

And? Very funny. She is very, very funny. It was very good. And per your comment as well. Wow, what an outfit she wore. Told you. I told you. Like a straight out of my Susie Sue Goff dreams. It was amazing. But yeah, very, very funny.

And I love – I love comedians that give us a different viewpoint. You know, you're non-straight white comedians. So the comedy and the whole thing about her background and where she came from. I mean, I love that sort of stuff because not only do you laugh, you learn more about the world. And that's what we're here for.

Yeah. If you like that kind of thing, then definitely check out the foreign comedians on Netflix as well. There's some amazing international comedians that do specials on there, mostly from Singapore, which is interesting. I think they got a deal with Singapore specials from Indian guys for some strange reason.

But they're awesome. And yeah, what I really like besides the outfit, obviously, I just really like those snippets of going back to Africa because they really added to the jokes. It really – she's like, you know, she tells the joke and then proves it with context with actual video of the people.

It was hilarious. The jokes about her parents and then cutting to her parents, like really doing exactly what she was joking about were the best. I just loved it.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. Brian, the first thing I have this week is the SteelSeries Nimbus Plus Bluetooth mobile gaming controller with iPhone mount, 30-plus-hour battery life, Apple licensed, made for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS with Apple Arcade.

This would be a controller for playing games on your Apple devices. I wanted to try this one out because I was looking for kind of a better controller than the Backbone, which is a longer controller that you clip on that you like your phone clips into.

This is one where it's just Bluetooth. You can have – it has a little holder for your phone so you can stick it in there. Or what I got it for was playing games on an iPad or on my Apple TV. It's okay. The build quality is okay. It's $70. The biggest problem I have is they put the two thumbsticks symmetrically.

The best way to have them is one up on the left with the D-pad underneath. And then on the right, you got the buttons up top and then the stick underneath. They put both sticks underneath. So muscle memory is really kind of hard going back from a Backbone, which has everything in the proper place to this or like a Xbox controller that has – hasn't changed.

I don't know why they decided to do this. Might have been like $0.10 cheaper on the board, I guess, to put them that way. But it's kind of annoying if you – if you're used to the other game pads. The only muscle memory I have for any game pad is the Atari one stick and one button. You're fine.

You can get one. Yeah, if you don't have the muscle memory, you're all good. But if you do, maybe look for a different controller that has the standard layout. Okay, and before we get into this next section real quick, Brian, I do have some news. I signed the lease for my new studio space.

It's happening. Okay. I've been dealing with all sorts of fun business things that I, you know, forgot about, like, you know, insurance and all that good stuff. But it's done. I take – I get the keys soon. They're going to paint it and I get in early, like in a week or so.

So what you're going to hear on Apps and Doodads is the shopping list for a very expensive high-end studio that I am building right now. All right. I could have actually waited to go to the bathroom for this segment. I don't know why we paused between segments.

Okay. Well, because you're a music guy. You know about equipment and things like that. I do. I do. So first up, the Rode Professional Headphones Black NTH100s. They're $150 each. They're new from Rode.

Build quality is astonishing. They're very sturdy. They're heavy, but not too heavy where they feel heavy on your head, but they just feel really good on your ears. They look nice. They have the cable that you can switch from side to side and you can color code them, which is going to be really handy for me because I just bought five of these things for the studio.

So these will be what people wear in my studio. They look good. Like I said, they look good, but man, the sound is incredible. I was going to keep these just for me, even if I went for different ones in the studio, but man, these things are comfortable and they sound incredible and there's no bleed.

So no more Sony MDRs for me, man. These things are, they're way comfy. Well, I might be buying these then because these Sony MDRs, as great as they are for, especially for no bleed, are not comfortable at all. I want to be wearing my Sennheisers, but they bleed too much. So maybe I'll order these.

Okay. Well, when you come to LA in July, you can come over and try them before you buy them if you want. Okay. And maybe just shove one in my backpack without you noticing. Yeah. I will come up and, and, and, uh, since this is, it will be like a public place.

I had to get a headphone condoms, which I didn't know you could get on Amazon. So I got the 100 pieces, headphone, ear covers, disposable earphone overs. Yes. Earphone overs, sanitary, non-woven stretch earpad covers, ear cup covers, fit for most on-ear headphones, paren black 11 CM and a paren for $15.

So 15 cents each for these puppies. So it's 30 cents a show for everybody that I'm going to be losing on your ear condoms. Bring your own headphones, people. Uh, I did also pick up a microphone that I've been wanting for a very long time. I bet a lot of your friends have these, the Sennheiser MKH416.

Yes. Which is the- I'm familiar with this. Yes. Yes. Yes. I've always wanted one, but they were too expensive. Now I have to get one. Yes. They're still very expensive. They're a thousand dollar microphone. Yeah. But there are a couple of use cases for the studio that, um, that I want to set one up for mainly for the, the zoom setup or the, um, the remote guest setup.

So people don't have to have a microphone in front of their face. They're really good for, for that to keep a, like a microphone off camera. So that'll be good. And of course I had to get the road SMR or SM4R suspension microphone shock mount for three eighths inch or five eighths inch thread mounts because they have the, uh, those Rycote thing to keep the microphone in place.

So another $47 just for the damn shock mount for the thing. Um, and I did get my DJI drone. It did show up and I did find a buyer for my air too. That's gone. So I had to, I had to go find a, uh, uh, one of those anti scratch glasses.

And of course you have to, we just love the titles to pack Juden musk, Juden musk. Is that close enough? I think Juden musk mini three pro HD tempered glass screen protector film for DJI mini three pro RC controller, DJI mini three pro RC remote controller accessories, nine H hardness, anti scratch 2.5d arc edge for 1299.

Okay. Fits perfectly. Highly recommended. And I have a little software, uh, I got a couple of software bits, but this one I just love. It's called Yep. Have you heard of Yep? Nope. Exactly. It's a search engine. It is a, let me read this.

We built Yep from the ground up so that we can give 90% of ad revenue to content creators. We've all gotten used to a search model. That's arguably unfair. A model, a model where paywalls and affiliate links have insidiously become part of the search experience. Yep is our answer to this.

I went to Yep and I did a couple searches and the, uh, the results were definitely Nope. Um, as in like for, I searched for my name and for three, three times in a row, it came back with no results. And I thought, okay, maybe the internet's down or something, or they're having growing pains.

Finally got some results back and they were just terrible. God awful. Did a couple more searches. Terrible. God awful. Did not even bother going down this 90, 10 profit, uh, share split thing that they're trying to work on? Because it sounds, uh, like a fairy tale, Brian, it's a fairy tale.

I don't understand the business model at all. I've got to be honest. Like it makes zero sense to me. Okay. But Brian, they say simply put, they say simply put, so you must understand this simply put when you use Yep, you're directly putting money in the pockets of your favorite content creators.

Now I, my content, my favorite content creators, I don't have to go search for, I know where to find them. Um, so, so yeah, if I, if I search for grumpy old geeks on Yep, or somebody searches for grumpy old geeks and it's their favorite podcast, how do we get a check?

Yeah. How does this work? That's stupid. It's a fairy tale. All right. Yeah. Ah, well, I found a couple things. Well, and Jesus Christ, anything gets funded now. It's unbelievable. Yep. Uh, I found a couple things, uh, that I thought were interesting.

I'm, I haven't ordered anything and I probably won't, but I just thought people should be aware of these. This is a, uh, oh, yeah. Ikea teamed up with Swedish house mafia on a line of, uh, uh, a new collection themed around music and creativity.

The Obergrenze, which means unlimited in Swedish. It's, uh, starts with a record player, which is interesting for Ikea. And it's, uh, according to this article, it's surprisingly slick looking. It doesn't offer much in the way of known features beyond Bluetooth speaker support, but the minimalist design could make it a conversation piece as you spin some vinyl.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, where's, where's the tape? Because it looks like a cardboard box that you stuck together and spray painted. Yeah. That that's not so interesting to me, but they do have a line of actually furniture as well, including a desk aimed at music production, complete with two speaker stands and a pullout shelf for MIDI keyboards and other controllers.

That thing is actually great. It's cool looking. It's cheap. I mean, I, I jury rigged stuff like this when I was younger, when I was in like in college and post-college and doing all my music stuff. Like, you know, I, I got an Ikea desk and then I welded speaker stands to it and like, you know, built all these contraptions.

This thing's beautiful. It's really well done. So if you're a desktop musician or even a podcaster, any kind of audio, this desk looks like a great starter desk. I need an engineering station for my studio. And I think one of these is the perfect desk. Right?

Like it's cool. Yeah. This is it. This is, this is absolute. Thank you. You're welcome. I saw the piece on the, on the turntable. The turntable was so uninteresting. I didn't even scroll, but as you scroll, you see the desk and the desk is perfect. Yay. My whole point of this article was actually to get to the desk.

The, the, the, the, the, the, the record player was the Amuse Boosh, Jason. Okay. And something else that I saw that I think is kind of cool. It doesn't quite have the features yet, but this might be interesting for your new, your new venture as well, in terms of eye candy around the office.

Marshall has home speakers now. And if you're an old school music fan, you know, the Marshall stacks that every rock band has ever had. These are great looking Bluetooth speakers. I mean, they're gorgeous. So yeah, we've got to find out how they sound.

Apparently they sound quite good. According to the article, I'm probably not going to order one just because I don't know if it connects to anything I'd want it to connect to. And I know you're a Sonos guy, so I probably can't stream Sonos on these things, but in terms of eye candy and having a speaker, these are just gorgeous.

No, they're very pretty. Very, very pretty. And, uh, you know, some good news about the toxic internet and toxic fandom that we've been talking about. I saw this article and I know this has been bouncing around for a while. But apparently there are a couple of new studies that have come out that have shortened the timeline on our impending doom.

Oh, yay. A solar tsunami could entirely wipe out the internet within a decade, according to a new study. So in a paper published to SIGCOM 21, researchers from the University of California detailed the devastating effects a geomagnetic storm could have on the world's underwater cables, blocking the flow of information and darkening a world that relies so desperately on the internet.

So there, this is basically a, this could happen people. So maybe we should start protecting all of our stuff from this sort of stuff. Article. We won't. We won't. We're humans. We won't. No. Such storms have occurred in the past, but they are rare. The largest storm of the 20th century caused huge damage across the globe, heavily impacting railroad systems in the U S while smaller storms have reportedly taken out power grids in Canada.

And, uh, they say that not only are we kind of overdue for one, there's a very high probability we're going to have a big one in the next 10 to 15 years. Perfect. Just when I'm getting ready to retire, I'm good. Let's, you know what we're going to do, Brian? We're going to stock up on floppy disks and sneakers.

We're going to revive sneaker net when, when the world, uh, when the internet implodes and we're going to be nice to each other again. That's what we're going to do when the internet goes away. Yeah. But you know, what's worse than a solar storm that takes out the entire internet? What's that? The EU making Apple use a USB-C cable.

You would think, you would think that this is the worst thing that ever happened in the world compared to the way everybody's reacting to it. But yeah, no, it's about time. Make it happen. Make it happen. I love how they're saying, uh, making us use a particular power cord that almost everybody else in the world uses will hurt innovation.

What innovation? The innovation of coming up with bizarre fucking power cords that cost a lot of money. Yeah. That, that are slower. And, uh, yeah, uh, yeah, I think it's, uh, it's, it's innovation. Uh, profit is spelled P-R-O-F-I-T, not I-N-N-O-V-A-T-I-O-N is I think what you're trying to say.

One of the few times I think Apple is definitely wrong. Go ahead and switch. Yeah. And look, they, they can do USB-C and small devices. It's in my iPads, all of them. So just do it. It's time. It's time. So we've been doing the show for quite some time and I'm always looking for new and novel things to talk about on the show.

And every now and again, I, I dive back into product hunt.com or I don't even know if it's .com. Let's go to product hunt and I try and find some new and cool things. My God, Brian, are they really scraping the bottom of the barrel over there at product hunt?

Some of the companies that they're covering, let's just talk about two of them first here. We've got Feeting, F-E-E-T-I-N-G. Break free and take your meetings wherever you like. Go for a walk, breathe fresh air and catch some sun. The Feeting Gems technology takes care of automatic note-taking so that everybody has their actions, follow-ups and topics directly after the Feeting.

A Feeding is what we used to call a phone call. Yes, but this one takes notes for you. Probably not very well. Yes, yes. Well, we have another one that does the same thing called Voice, W-O-I-C-E. Forget about keyboards and communicate with your voice.

Start talking with your voice at your own pace without ever missing out on what your colleagues have to say. Voice supports 23 languages, enabling co-workers across the globe to bring warmth to conversation with voice messages and automatic transcriptions.

In this woke world, am I allowed to make a joke about this only being for people that have a lisp? Mawage. For when you need to talk to Drew Barrymore, bust out voice. But there was one gem that I have found, and this is not a Feeting gem. It is an actual gem.

It is a web-based full-screen timer that you can have that is controllable remotely. So you can set up a timer that everybody's looking at, or it could be in a room with a display, all sorts of things. And then you can do it from somewhere else.

So it's basically a shared timer that you can control, which is cool. I think it's pretty cool. That's pretty useful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Their pricing model is weird. You can do, they got some basic stuff for the free model. They've got a package where you can buy 10 hours worth, or you can spend $12 a month.

Now I'm not going to spend $12. I'm not going to buy anything monthly. So I guess it is smart that they have that 10 hour package. Look, it does what it does. If you need something like this, just pay the money. It's a no-brainer. Security?

Ha! We are back again with world traveler Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan. He's the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy.

And Dave, what was that new one that I haven't added to the notes yet? It's called Control Loop. All right. Industrial control systems. Yes. Longest block of text in our notes these days. That's right. That's right.

Well, good to be back. Back from the RSA conference in San Francisco. I'm fresh off of a red eye. So just a couple hours ago, I was on an airplane. So I will admit I'm a little bleary eyed and a little achy. But glad to be able to connect here today and catch up and share what I may have learned while I was on site there at RSA.

In related news, though, I just saw, and this is kind of somewhat security, I suppose, that we're dropping the COVID-19 testing requirements for people coming into the U.S. from overseas, which is good news for me and my upcoming flight. I don't have to go get those tests. Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of my colleagues is about to vacation.

Someone who went with me out to RSA is about to vacation in Italy. And he was concerned that, you know, if he got sick at RSA, went to Italy, the symptoms and the illness showed up while he was there. Would he be allowed back in the U.S. or not?

Well, now he will be. Because nobody wants to check. Right. Right. Right. So, Dave, first up, A, did you step in any man poo? And B, how scared should we be about the internet today? Well, no.

First, to answer your first question, I did not. But I will admit that my blast radius was very small, this RSA. We stayed at the Marriott Marquis, which is right next to the convention center. And our meeting room was in the Marriott Marquis, which, by the way, was fabulous to have your meeting room in the same place as your hotel room.

Highly recommended. So, really, most of what I did was between those two places, so I didn't really wander much farther away where I would have had to have watched my step, as you do in San Francisco. You know, still, the sad reality of that city and the problem with the homelessness there was front and center and obvious and heartbreaking.

But just through my own actions, my view on it was a little limited this time. In terms of being scared, you know what? I have to say that there was a real sense of optimism at the show this year. I think part of that was just everyone was happy to get back together after not being able to do so for a few years.

I think the cybersecurity industry continues its maturation. And along with that comes more professionalization and maybe a little less tolerance for empty buzzwords. People want practical solutions. And, you know, the marketing folks still get their hands on things and run it to the nth degree.

But overall, it feels like folks are getting on top of things. And also, a lot of collaboration between federal agencies and the private sector. You know, folks like CISA and NSA and the FBI. I spoke to a lot of people from those organizations.

And they are just so actively doing outreach to – and that's a new thing for them. The three-letter agencies weren't known for, you know, collaborating even with each other, much less the general public.

And they really seem to move on from that. I think there's a recognition. As one of my guests said, cybersecurity is a team sport. And so, the only way we're going to get on top of this is if everybody's working together. So, that was good. But again, I think really just a message of optimism.

People feel as though we're starting to get the tools that we need to do the things we want to do. In terms of, you know, what led the show of the technology. You know, a few years ago, we were talking about artificial intelligence and machine learning. And there was lots of eye-rolling about that.

Then, oh, it was zero trust. And then there was a lot of eye-rolling about that, you know. We had the human element. And so, this year it was definitely – Yeah, blockchain. Yeah, yeah. This year it was definitely XDR was the big thing, which is extended detection and response.

Basically, as it was explained to me, is kind of a system of systems where people are looking for platforms and let me just add, everything's a platform this year. When I went over to the innovation sandbox and the things that people are developing and pitching, they're all platforms.

Everybody wants a platform. Oh, God. Everybody wants a console. Everyone wants a platform. So, I think that's the current hotness. So, the idea with XDR is that you use the APIs of all the different things, the different security tools that you use. So, your firewall, your cloud security, your endpoint protection, use those APIs to feed into one central place.

So, you have one console that ingests all of that stuff, integrates it, hopefully gets more knowledge out of the combination of all of those things, and then presents you, the security defender, with the information you need to do the things you need to do.

So, that was the new hotness that was being pushed as the must-have thing to buy this year. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Well, let's move on to the more interesting stuff, mainly the Disney Plus platform. Yes.

I'm one episode behind because I was away. I was going to ask. I was going to ask. Yeah. I'll probably be watching that tonight, I'm guessing. We won't say much about it then, other than I think they really should have called the show Leia Skywalker because she is stealing the show. There's no doubt about that.

100%. It doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't surprise me. The casting and the writing for the young, precocious Leia has been spot on. Initially, I was a little like, oh, God, now it's going to be a show about a kid, but it's really working for me. They found the right kid.

Yeah. They found the right kid. Oh, my God. Did they find the right kid? Her facial expressions are just, I mean, especially in this new episode, her facial expressions were just like, how did they do that? I mean, are they deep faking it? You know, it's that good. Yeah. So, very well done. We'll discuss more in depth when you've caught up then.

Yeah. Apologies, but it's been a busy week. Yes. So, I did find this one, so we have a little bit of security news. This is for Brian up there in Canada, Canada, Canada. Your Tim Hortons coffee app knew where you were at all times.

Not good. Yeah. Not good, Canada. This is a big deal up here in Canada where, you know, and, you know, you kind of would expect this in the U.S. and not be terribly surprised, but the Canadians do take this stuff pretty seriously. And Tim Hortons is probably, I'd have guessed the largest coffee chain here in Canada.

I mean, they're not just here. They are in the East Coast of the U.S. as well. But, yeah, there's a lot of, I hesitate to use the word outrage because Canadians are pretty low key. But if they were outraged, there is. It's the Canadian version of outrage.

Mildly peeved. Mildly peeved. Right. Right. Subtle annoyance. There's a light grumble somewhere. Yeah. It's a big deal up here. And it's pretty crazy that they were doing this to begin with and that they were getting away with it for as long as they did.

You know, somebody just kind of stumbled upon it and like, what? What are you people doing? That's crazy. You don't track a man's moose. You don't track another man's moose, much less his beaver. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, this is pretty extensive, the information they were gathering. They're collecting when folks went to their competitors' restaurants, you know, all sorts of things, really in-depth stuff. So is it fair to say Tim Hortons is a bit of an institution up there north of the border?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it may not be the most popular coffee anymore, but it's your go-to for donuts. They used to make delicious breakfast sandwiches. They've ruined it. They're pretty much everywhere. And, you know, everybody knows, you know, you go to Timmy's, you get your Timbits, you get your coffee.

And, yeah. You get your Biebs. Your Biebs. Your Biebs. Justin Bieber crossover is pretty intense. Yeah. It's a very, very, very big thing here. It's an institution. It's a Canadian hallmark. So the fact that- You're the only one I know.

Yeah. It's, yeah, pretty intense. So there's, like I said, mildly peeved people everywhere. There's another story I'll share just real quick here. I'll admit, I have not dug too deeply into it, but it's something I'm planning on talking about with Ben Yellen over on Caveat.

And it is about a Canadian court order to filter the internet. And wait for it. So let me ask you guys, if the Canadians were going to filter the internet because of, what would be the one thing that would prompt them to do so?

What would you suppose? Hmm. Brian, I'm going to throw this one to you. I'm ill qualified. Flannel? Flannel. Good guess. Good guess. Beavers? Yeah. Maple syrup? No.

Let's think athletics. Hockey. Curling. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It is hockey. Canadians are sick of hearing about the U.S. teams that win the cup.

So evidently, the major broadcasters in Canada have convinced the courts to give them the authority to tell the Canadian ISPs what IP addresses they need to block out because of pirated hockey games.

Ah, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, of course, folks are a bit up in arms about this because of the slippery slope argument that if you can convince the court to filter one copyrighted thing you don't like, then they're going to go after everything.

I will say, as your man on the ground in Canada, hockey is as much of an institution as Tim Hortons, if not more so. It is the number one sport up here for sure. The price that you have to pay for your equivalents of ESPN, like your sports nets up here, they are exorbitant.

It is very expensive. Really? And they're very controlled. And there are only certain places that you can go to get your sports coverage and the apps and the different things that are out there. You don't have the breadth of choice that you have in the U.S. There's only a couple.

And they're very expensive. I see. Also, pirating is way more prevalent up here than I've ever seen it in the U.S. You can. Oh, how so? There are little electronic shops up and down most streets. You can pop in there. You can get an Amazon Fire Stick that has been preloaded with an app that just reaches out to the Internet and gives you every channel known to man, including sports.

They're preloaded for you. There's no effort involved. You buy your Amazon hack stick. You plug it into your TV. You pay $10 a month, and you are getting a complete pirate box that rips off absolutely everything. So it's much more prevalent than anywhere else I've seen, actually.

I haven't been to China. I'm sure it's much worse there. All right. So I can actually understand this lawsuit to some degree because it is more accepted here and certainly a lot easier to get a pirate stick, and they can track your IP through that way if you don't use a VPN, I've heard.

Yeah. I mean, it does certainly help explain why they would want to be cracking down on this. Or it also helps explain the motivation for piracy. If the stuff is that expensive and there aren't very many options to do an end around, then I guess people will find a way, right?

The market finds a way. And in this case, it's illegal up here. Yeah, it definitely is. I mean, they are everywhere. There's most people I know have a stick, and they'll use it, you know, even if they are paying for whatever, you know, sports net package. And if you're really into hockey and you want to see all the games, you're not going to get all the games.

And if you want to get all the games, it gets prohibitively expensive because then you're buying into everything. Or, you know, you get your pirate stick that reaches out to the internet and gets all the U.S. channels for you if you want and all the pay channels for you if you want. And sure, there's some delays and the sound doesn't sync up all the time perfectly, but you get to watch all the games.

Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We had a story a long time ago. I think it was the first lawsuit from somebody selling those sticks in London. And he got slammed really hard for that. I think he ended up paying like a million euros or something. It was a lot.

Yeah. And there was a budding thing going on in the U.S. as well. Cody was one of the software packages that you could install on your sticks that got snipped in the bud really quick in the U.S. But they are everywhere up here and not regulated.

Did you guys – back in the day, did you guys have the little box that would allow you to copy VHS tapes? Oh, I didn't. My friend had one. Yeah. Yeah, my friend had one. I never had one. But, yeah. I remember my dad bought the little black box that would get all the cable channels for free if you just paid for basic cable.

Okay. Right. So I do remember that. It reminds me there's a – I don't know, early episode of The Simpsons where Homer gets a pamphlet that says, so you've decided to steal cable. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were all – I think we were all kind of doing that back in the day.

Oh, man. 20 bucks to your cable guy got you everything. I love the old days. That's true. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. Harder to do these days. Most of the cable guys were – yeah, because in our neighborhood, it was the guys we went to high school with. Mm-hmm. That's right. So they'd gotten out of high school and got lineman jobs and were out slinging cable.

And they would basically see if they saw you at the store. They'd be like, hey, man, guess where I'm working now. You know? Right. Their own total side hustle. And all of the decoding was done locally and there wasn't – it was all hardware. There wasn't really a trigger that came from the mothership to activate and deactivate stuff.

Everything was unidirectional, right? Yeah. The systems couldn't really send information back. Yeah. I remember hearing something along the lines of like if you just bent the cable this way, you would actually get all the channels or you just snip out the one wire, which was the blocking wire.

For us, what I remember is if you had one channel, you could get all the channels by like pressing the button for the one channel you had and then slowly pressing the button for another channel and putting a bent-up piece of cardboard underneath the button until it was just right.

And you could get it to work, but you had to want it. I ended up hacking my first cable box the day that MTV launched. Oh, yeah. Because I was working on it for a while, but I ended up cracking it the day that – because I was getting close. I mean, I can't even remember how old I was.

Just a tiny kid. And I had the box apart and it was a really simple box. I mean, it's a big box with a big switch on it, but you open it up and there's this little tiny board and like two wires. So I've sat there with tinfoil. I sat there with aluminum foil and was just bridging things willy-nilly. It's amazing I didn't blow it up, but – Or blow yourself up.

Yeah, or electrocute myself or something, but I got it to work and it – you know, that was – I just really just couldn't remember because that was the day and I got to see Video Killed the Radio Star. They're the first time. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. The good old days. Important day for us. That's right.

That's right. All right. We'll be back next week with more Canadian culture and privacy podcast. There you go. And I am going to – I'm going to go take a nap and then I'm going to go watch the latest Obi-Wan and we can catch up next week.

May the melatonin be with you. There you go. Thank you. Take off, eh? Hoser. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got two new Patreon subscribers, Manuel and Malty Sweetness. Thank you so much. Over at PayPal, we've got David, Mark, Ralph, Deanna who sent us 50 bucks and Stephen Pacifica who wrote, I just got my check from Facebook for their crimes against me in Illinois and I can think of no better way to spend $397 than to give it to you, gents.

Thank you for making my life a little grumpier and may I be the first to congratulate you on outlasting Reply All. Actually, you're probably the 700th. The second-rate millennial tech podcast that has announced its final episode this month. But thank you, Steve, for sending us all $397 from your class action lawsuit.

We appreciate it. I appreciate it. We definitely appreciate it. And actually, Steve was the first one that sent it in that tipped off the run. Yeah, Steve beat everybody else with the cash and the knowledge drop. So thank you very much, Steve. I feel like now that I even have just a little bit of that Facebook money that I can let it go because it was gnawing at me that I did not get that check.

It was gnawing at me. Well, now you got half of the check. Minus processing fees. Speaking of processing fees, over at Stripe, we've got Jeff and Anne. Thank you very much. Thank you. And we have a new five-star rating from Terry Cahill. I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce that.

Cahill, I'm going to go with. Cahill. Oh, there we go. That's easier. I made it difficult. Love the show and appreciate media reviews, which I find really helpful. Wanted to thank those on the show reporting on their hospice experience. I've been a hospice doc for 20 years and work with incredible people. Thanks for the positive comments. Regular Patreon contributor.

Well, thank you, Terry. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. And I actually have a shout out this week to Melon Hats. Have you ever had a melon hat for your melon? I have not. No. It's a nice hat. It's a nice hat. They're very expensive, but the one that I ordered was too big because my head has shrunk, believe it or not.

And so I sent it. I tried to get it back and it was just a hassle trying to get it because I didn't realize I'd paid with PayPal and I'm like looking at all my credit card, whatever. So I wrote them. I'm like, here's my email address. I got this hat. It doesn't fit. What can I do? And within 10 seconds, they wrote me back on a Sunday and said, here's a QR code.

Here's your order number, blah, blah, blah. Here's your money. Just drop it off at FedEx. They gave me the address of the place to drop it off. That was closest to my house and said, have a nice day. And so I went and I dropped it off. And then this person who sent me the email, the original email, wrote me again saying, hey, I saw that you did your thing.

Are you going to get a new hat? And I'm like, yeah. Here, check out these. Like there must be one person that works at Mellon is what I'm saying, because the customer service was just ridiculous. There you go. That's cool. And we have a bit of sad news. Julie Cruz has passed away. Now, Julie Cruz is not exactly a household name unless you happen to be a big fan of Twin Peaks, which I was.

She sang the song Falling, which was her big hit back in 1989 and did a lot of the soundtrack with Angelo Baldamente. She also later showed up as a character in the movies. And she memorably, for some people, replaced Sinead O'Connor when Sinead O'Connor did not want to appear on Saturday Night Live for some reason or other.

I can't quite remember. But I mean, amazing voice. And I still listen to that original Twin Peaks soundtrack all the time. And it's just so good. So, sad to hear she has passed. 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 557. 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.

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