559: Black Box of Fools

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. Breaking news, Brian, across the country. KB Lame is now the most followed TikTok star in the world after surpassing Charlie D'Amelio. I don't know either of these people. KB Lame, he's a Senegalese. He used to work in a factory. He's 22. He's a young guy. Very, very funny TikToker. I've been watching him for a long time.

He basically takes all these life hack videos that are on TikTok and shows people the right way to do them. And he says, here, I fixed it for you. He's really, really funny. I've been following him for a long time. I didn't think he was that popular to knock off Charlie, but Charlie's been the top of TikTok for a very, very, very long time.

She even got her own show on Hulu. I watched a third of an episode before I threw my remote at the TV. I was about to say, how's that going? How's that transition? Yeah, it was terrible. You know, 30-second videos meant to garner clicks and get reactions to actually having to have content.

Yeah, it was tough. It's tough because, I mean, she is a fantastic dancer. She's been dancing her whole life. You know, one of those kids that is perfect for TikTok. But, yeah, when it comes down to actual storyline and being a human being and actually being interesting, hey, no, not even close to the mark.

Right. I got some more breaking news for you, Brian. Oh, yeah? Beep-dee-beep-dee-beep-dee-beep. Yeah, because I do notice I've been doom-scrolling on Twitter. Oh, wait, what's your breaking news? I had COVID. Oh, how's that going? Honestly, I didn't even notice until my roommate got sick. And then she tested and it was like, oh, I guess I should test too. Boom. Yep. Yeah, that was me. Sorry about that.

Turns out that thing I went to, you know, that one time I left the house when I finally thought it was safe out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I can just hear Alanis in the back of my head singing, ironic right now, because that is exactly what happened. Yep. Left the house, got sick and been dealing with it. But yeah, I didn't even notice because I'm so broken from the stroke. It took my roommate getting it to see the contrast. She's like, don't you feel horrible? I'm like, I feel horrible all the fucking time. What's the point?

It's just my regular horrible. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is literally how I am all the time. So it's just been annoying. That's all. Almost done. And I think today's day 11 or day 10. Yeah, today's my day 10. Okay, cool. So you can go back out in the wild soon, know that you have maybe two months, potentially three that you're bulletproof, but nobody's really entirely sure. And it depends on if another variant comes out.

Yeah. And it's, yeah, whatever. At this point, I don't care. I got my four shots. Now I've had it. I've been through the fire. I don't care. Nobody cares around here. Everybody I know has it or has had it. Literally everyone. My neighbors, all seven of them got it the same time.

Then that's why you get vaccinated. So you don't end up in a hospital. Right. Now you want to see now that I'm under the I'm in the club. People like actually talk to me now and tell me things. So here's a really interesting one that I think you will find fascinating. I actually I think I texted this to you this week. So my neighbor got trapped in Mexico when they got it.

The airline actually gave them a negative test so they could get on the plane and get back into the US. Is not is that is that a little, I don't know, shady? Well, it doesn't matter anymore because shortly after that, they got rid of any need to test to fly internationally now.

So it doesn't matter. Yeah. I don't know what the rules are in Mexico, though, if you have to have that test before you get on the plane. So we got two sides of the border you're dealing with. But the the airline was just like, here, get out of here. Go. Lovely. That's good. Yeah, that's great. I mean, everything is going so well, isn't it?

But I think that, you know, not much else has happened this week. So I think we're done with our breaking news, aren't we? Yeah, I think so. I think so. At least for now, we might have some more later as the show progresses. Yeah, it's been a pretty slow week in American news. Yeah. Yeah. There's nothing happening down here. Come on back, Brian. Water's fine.

Yeah. No. Yeah, definitely not. A little bit of follow up to we talked about the they tested the waters and around Glastonbury and found all the drugs and all that sort of stuff in there that was killing eels. Apparently, it's all over the UK. A new study has found notable levels of cocaine, ketamine, valium, Xanax, tramadol and other pharmaceuticals in the bodies of freshwater shrimp and their habitat.

It's the Suffolk UK. Sounds like the combination I will need to get through the rest of the week, given the news we've been hearing. But there you go. Well, you know what you need to do. You need to head up there and go shrimping. Yeah, I love shrimp. So give me some of those and I might feel better about everything I'm reading right now. I was going to say, let's call up Captain Dan and head out on the boat and go get us some shrimp.

That'll get us through the next little bit. I think, I mean, it is really interesting. I mean, we talk about climate change and all that sort of stuff. But I mean, just seeing the impact that we are having on our surroundings and nature is pretty crazy. I mean, we've been hearing about the microplastics and how we've been, that's been found in bloodstreams now in humans.

And just knowing that all these drugs are basically seeping into the environment. It's a little crazy. Maybe we should be a little more careful. It's not going to happen. No, it's we're going to get used to the coke. It's fine. It's fine. Everything is fine. Everything is fine.

I do have a follow up article from Cory Doctorow called Boy, Gig Companies Sure Hire Disastrously Sloppy Lawyers. And it's a it, you know, it goes back to the news from Prop 22 a couple of years ago. And then the flipping of the fact that it was unconstitutional and they wasted two hundred and twenty five million dollars.

It's got a couple other stories in there along the same vein, which I think is just fascinating. And he does a really good write up and encapsulation of what these companies are doing, how they're doing it so poorly. And just a just a nice wrap up. I thought it was a good article for Mr. Doctorow.

I haven't haven't seen one from him that I liked in a long time. And that one tickled me. I liked it. Very good. In the news. Meta has agreed to settle a twenty nineteen charge that enabled housing discrimination through its ad targeting.

We've talked about that a lot in the past, about how granular and insane the ad targeting actually got with Meta and how you could basically be racist with it. And yeah, and they said, yeah, you sure were. So you better settle some of these charges here.

So they paid up some of their coffee budget again to take care of this. The interesting thing about this, of course, is the fact that this is the first time that there's been a case like this has actually gone through with algorithmic biases under the Fair Housing Act. So I suspect there will be more of this sort of thing all over the place because we've all known that Meta's ad targeting fields were extremely problematic and caused a lot of problems.

So one hundred and fifty million dollar fine. That was the Twitter. Oh, that's the Twitter. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, because it wasn't just Meta that got slapped. Twitter got slapped with the the algorithmic advertising as well. Yeah. The problems are the algorithms. We're going to talk about this in a couple other spots. But the problem is the algorithm.

Yes, they are. Well, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Unity and a couple others are trying to get together to form a standards board called the Metaverse Standards Forum. Don't we need a Metaverse first? No, actually, you need this. Well, because you needed the HTTP protocol before you could have the web.

So, and, you know, and you needed HTML. Both of those kind of went hand in hand. So I think this is what they should have been doing before they even started the Metaverse project because interoperability between systems is the only thing that is going to make a Metaverse meta.

That's true. You have to be able to talk to somebody else. Otherwise, you just have the palace or second life or every other standalone. Do you think it's even possible anymore? Like, I don't. Okay. Maybe. Maybe. But don't they all want to be the gatekeeper and they don't want to share?

That's the thing. Yeah. This is the problem. And we're already seeing competing standards that are probably going to emerge because there are other companies that are not in that group. Like, Apple and, you know, Niantic, who's kind of big in the AR Metaverse world, Roblox, and Snapchat taking up the rear.

They're like, me too, me too. We're not going to join. We have glasses. We have glasses. Breaking news, Brian. Grumpy Old Geeks has decided not to join the Metaverse Standards Forum. Yes. We're going to develop our own Betamax version. That's right. It'll be better, but nobody will care. But, hey, but in our Metaverse, people will have pants.

That's all I'm saying. And legs. Yeah. Both. And legs. Which, if you can tell by the other story that I have here with Meta, because they are launching an avatar clothing store with designer brands. Designer brands like Balenciaga, Prada, and Tom Brown.

And, yeah. Yeah. This is bad. I mean, granted, they did put pants in the store, but you know that they don't have them, actually. Once you leave the store, they keep the pants. I don't – this is ridiculous. Well, I mean – It's just NFTs again.

Well, no, it's not – this isn't even – this doesn't even go as far as an NFT. There's no blockchain involved. This is just pure digital goods. Yeah. But there's no – they're selling the digital – they're putting the cart before the horse because where the fuck are you going to wear your Balenciaga t-shirt in what Metaverse? Because there isn't one yet.

I know. I know. It's crazy. They don't even know where the store is at yet. Well, it's everywhere. It's Meta, Jason. It's everywhere and nowhere all at once. It is the Alpha and the Omega. Yeah. Oh, jeez. I don't – I want to know what's going on with Balenciaga because I thought that they used to be high-end, but they're putting their name on anything.

Like, all of these high-end fashion brands are just like – they're just slapping it out there. I think that they realize that there's – with the BitBros and crypto falling, like, you know, their main client base is going away, so they have to start spreading the love. Well, yeah, and Russia, you know.

Russia's economy is tanking, and that's where a lot of this stuff was sold to the super-rich people in Russia. So good luck with that. Oh, well. Big market there. A former Tesla contractor has rejected a $15 million payout in a racial abuse lawsuit.

This is Owen Diaz, a former contracted elevator operator at Tesla's Fremont assembly plant, successfully sued the automaker for creating a hostile, racially abusive work environment, and was awarded $137 million by the jury. This was winnowed down to $15 million by a judge who gave Diaz two weeks to accept or reject the new amount.

He basically said that the – he agrees with the claims, but he found the award amount excessive, which, I mean, I didn't realize judges could do it. I thought once it was handed down, that was that, but it shows what I know about being a judge. Yeah, sentencing guidelines are just guidelines.

So they do have the final say, and I got to say, he was excessive as well. That's not really meeting in the middle, you know? Yeah, no, it's not. It's – you know, if you're going to tilt that one way or the other, you find somewhere in between, right? Not winnowing it down to – well, not that $15 million is next to nothing.

I'll take it. Yeah, seriously. Come on. $137 million is also – come on. Yeah. You know, somewhere in the middle there would probably be better. Not everybody's going to get a second whack at it here too, though. Another lawsuit is being filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing on behalf of the more than 4,000 former and current black Tesla employees.

So kind of like a narrow bandwidth class action lawsuit. Yep. Yep. The thing about it, though, is, you know, I got to look over my shoulder here. Elon Musk is from South Africa. I'm just saying. Might want to look to the source.

It wasn't him. It's his company. It is his company. And, yes, company mores start from the top down. That's right. We got some more TikTok news, though. Yep. TikTok has decided to move all of its user data to Oracle. Isn't this a big brouhaha like three years ago?

Weren't we talking about that then? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And this just came out because BuzzFeed put out an article saying, oh, wait, some of the developers in China are accessing U.S. users' data. I'm like, oh, they're the developers. Yep. It's their company. Kind of can see that, you know, happening.

So they're going to put all of the data into the U.S. and even the backups eventually. Unless they're going to turn off, you know, like Telnet or PortBlock to China, just because the data lives somewhere doesn't mean you can't access it from somewhere else.

It's called the Internet. You know, we built it so somebody in China can see things in the United States and vice versa. Yeah. You can try to lock it down all you want. Put a geoblocker on that and, you know, I think they have VPNs. Pretty sure. Actually, no, it's China.

Remember, they banned them all? Well, not some people. I'm sure they have access to it. It's a stratified society, Jason. It is. It is. And it's their app. I'm sure they can figure it out. We've got some Twitter news. I'm sure you're going to be attending this, Jason, after a seven-year hiatus. Twitter is once again hosting an in-person developer conference called Chirp.

Chirp. Yeah. Okay. They haven't done this since 2015 because of a somewhat rocky relationship with developers, as we've all known, that third-party developers have had a rough time of it with Twitter as they say, go ahead. Nope, never mind.

We're turning that off. Okay, maybe try again. No, we're going to turn that off again and do it ourselves. So, you know, developers and Twitter are not always getting along very well, but maybe this will signal a change in their approach. And obviously, everybody has to include in these stories, what is Elon Musk's involvement mean about this?

Fuck all. Because we don't know what it is yet. They don't know. They don't care. They're going about their business. Yes. Good. And I saw this article and I thought it was funny. Twitter wants writers to publish long-form content with notes, which is, yes, basically a blog post.

I like it. I watched the video on it. I know Kevin Smith is happy. You follow Kevin Smith? Not anymore. I remember I stopped because he would just, like, write 7,000 long tweet storms. And I'm like, I can't deal with this anymore. At least I like how they stack them now.

And if you have Twitter blue, you have the reader view, which is nice. So you can read them in one go. Yeah. I stopped following Kevin Smith a long time ago. Yeah. No, I'm actually kind of excited about this. I like it. You can consolidate over to there. But, you know, I think it will make it easier for people to skip the crap that they don't want.

Like you just said, those Twitter storms that people like to publish. Put it in a big note. Leave it off to the side. You only get it once in your feed, not 7,000 entries, which is nice. It's like opening Instagram and seeing somebody's, their reels feed with all those little dots.

Like, you know, 100 dots. It's just like, pass. Yeah. It's like, do I want to sit here and click through them or do I just want to unfollow? Unfollow is usually the way it goes. Yeah. Now, I saw this headline and it had me scratching my head for a second. Let's read the headline here for a second, Jason.

You can pay for your Lyft ride with cash now. Okay. So, I should theoretically be able to pull up Lyft and order one and then walk out with a $20 bill. Right, Jason? You theoretically think from that headline, yes.

But no! That is not how it works. You can visit one of 35,000 plus stores like a Walmart, an Ace Cash Express, or a Kroger, and then you can use your cash to buy a barcode or ID number to turn into something that you can then use to get a Lyft ride. One has to ask, is this much of a difference than, say, getting a prepaid credit card?

I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking the same thing. I'm like, why don't you get a prepaid visa and load that up? There you go. I don't know either. Yes, and Lyft next will be offering phoneless rides because they are trying to democratize ride sharing from what they said with the cash option now.

Soon, they're going to have the analog option where you can see, if you see a Lyft on the street, you lift up your arm and you go, hey, oh, come on over. And a Lyft driver, if they don't have anybody in the car, will pull over and possibly give you a ride.

I know this harkens back to the old days of, what was this called? Taxe? Taxe? Taxe. Taxu? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It harkens back to the old days of the before times. Were they yellow? Do you remember yellow? I don't know.

It's hard to tell because Lyfts are pink, Ubers are white and black. Yeah, I can't remember. I'm sure it flows, but yeah, that's the next one because they are trying to democratize everything. And it's so funny. My friend's mom had to go do some surgery this week, go do some surgery like she does.

She's 93 and had her eyes done. And since we had the COVID, we couldn't take her to the hospital, which was a big problem. So we, everybody split up and tried to figure out a way to do it. Her mom called 10 cab companies, the 10 cab companies that she had in her book that she used to have before the pandemic where she would go for rides.

Every single one of them was out of business. All 10 cab companies out of business. But that was the business plan. That was why Uber and Lyft had artificially low prices. The entire business plan was drive the competition out of business.

So we're the only game in town and then we can jack our prices, which is exactly what they're doing. Yep. It's the Bezos model. Yep. So, yeah. Well, and guess what? We ended up using Uber. Yeah. Yep. Because you don't have a choice. Yeah. I just have this like image of a girl in a dress hitching up and showing some leg.

Come on. I was thinking Daisy Dukes. Out there was some Daisy Dukes. Yeah. So this should come as no surprise. Cryptocurrency is more centralized than many advocates claim. Yeah. One of the big advantages of cryptocurrency back before it cratered into the ground of the moon and other financial systems, according to its proponents, is that no particular company, central bank or government has control.

DARPA found that that's not true. There can be unintended centralities in these supposed decentralized networks. So in an interview with NPR, Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits, which is a software security research company that worked on the report, said that concentrated power is among people and organizations that have a large chunk of the pie, almost like any other capitalist system, some might argue.

All right. Yeah. So this gets into some of it. The report also notes that three ISPs handle 60% of all Bitcoin traffic. So there's a big problem right there. They can slow down or halt Bitcoin traffic. Anybody with a hack, anybody that hacks them or someone with oversight of any of those ISPs.

They've also, I love this one about Solend, which is based on the Solana blockchain. They try to take over one of its largest, single largest accounts because it said the operator could have significant sway over market movements. So basically, here's our coin.

Don't get too much of it because then you're in control of it. And then we're going to try to liquidate your position. Sounds like a great program to me. Yeah. But the funny part is about that whole thing that because the Solend and the Solana thing, you know, it was all run by a Dow.

Yeah. The Dow voted on this thing. Yeah. But it turns out, you know, because they're trying to end around the whale. Yeah. Well, the whale has all the votes. Ninety nine point eight percent of the votes when it comes to a vote. So I vote. No. The funny part is that at the beginning, the whale voted yes.

Yeah. And then the next day they did another thing because they got such bad press about like saying, well, you discovered communism. I think it was one of my favorite, favorite tweets. Oh, Solana just discovered communism. And it's so they got such bad press about it that they tried to flip it back. And it's like, you know, the emperor has no clothes.

We know now. We know. Yeah. It's not decentralized. It is not. I mean, the DARPA report is really good because it points out the fact that, you know, the ISPs handled 60 percent of it, three of them. And the point that they're trying to make there is that everything on the blockchain happens via consensus, a majority consensus.

So if somebody owns 51 percent of the network, the active network, well, then they can actually do things to the network and the blockchain itself at that time and kind of take it over. So say you say like, you know, you, you, you stage this massive blockchain takeover.

You knock those three ISPs off the internet for a while. Everything happens, you know, everything gets reconciled and settled. Then you slowly bring the other people back on and they get folded back into it. They reconcile with the new stuff and you have just, you know, done some kind of Bitcoin takeover.

It is going to be very difficult, but it is possible. And that's why DARPA did this to show you how possible it actually is. Yes, it's great. I mean, they are literally making this up as they go along there. This, this is Ronald D Moore's, the plan, uh, in real life.

And it sounds like a great place to invest your money. I think the problem, I was thinking about this this morning. The problem with these guys is they've never been punched in the face as, as, as people and humans in the real world, because they don't understand that actions have consequences.

I wonder why they don't see, don't see that. Oh yeah. I wonder why. Sorry, we're not talking about that sort of stuff. Okay. Okay. I found a new site that is my new favorite layoffs.fyi. This is a layoff tracker, kind of like, uh, fucked company was back in the day, but not nearly as funny.

Although PUD was kind of an asshole. Uh, this is showing us in real time. What's, or at least, uh, close to real time. How many people are getting laid off from different companies. The, the crazy part here is I was looking at this, uh, the list and there is, uh, links to Google docs with, uh, the people who have been affected by these layoffs.

And I'm like, wait a minute, you're, you're, you're, you're doxing these people and they just got laid off. That's no, no, no, no. Turns out it's voluntary. People can put their names and their links to their LinkedIn resumes and stuff in this document. So if people who are looking for, for them, it's basically saying, help me, I just got fired.

I need a job. Wow. That's a, that's pretty intense. It is pretty intense, but you should read some of them there. It's pretty incredible. The, the, uh, skill sets that these people have, they just got, especially Netflix that just laid the people off. It's kind of crazy. And finally in the news, Brian, today, I have got a story for you up in Canada, Nadia.

Yeah. Yes. Single beaver caused mass internet cell service outages in Northern BC. So it turns out, uh, officials up there have, have actually tracked down the offending beaver. If they have found the beaver, the quote at the end is, is fantastic.

It's unusual, but it does happen every once in a while. So I wouldn't be a rich man if I had a nickel for every beaver outage, but they do happen. Never a more Canadian sentence has ever been uttered. Oh, you know, I had a couple of beaver outages in my thirties and forties. And it is in fact, it is in fact rough.

My friend, you're in a long-term beaver outage, Jason. Yes, I am. We're going to get in trouble for that one.

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Media candy. Brian, I have some follow-up on the Orville. Okay. I watched the first episode and I reported back on that and I was not impressed. I was actually fairly annoyed with the first episode. Yes, you called it the woke film. I did. I did. The thing about it is I watched episode two and three.

Mm-hmm. Phenomenal. Okay. Absolutely phenomenal. It's up there with some of the best next generation stories that you're going to find. Because it's kind of what it's, you know, that's why he based it on Next Gen when he started. Which is why I'm having a problem with universe creep.

I don't know which universe I'm in at any given time because we're watching so much sci-fi in so many different universes spread across so many different galaxies. I don't know which galaxy I'm in half the time. We need a meta galaxy. Yeah. You know what? They need protocols to go between the galaxy. There needs to be an API, Brian, is what I'm trying to say.

What if we put it all in the blockchain? That would probably solve the problem, right? It would be immutable. It would be immutable. Yes. Unless there is an alternate goatee universe that takes over 51% of the metaverse and we're back to square one. But I cannot say any more about the Orville that is bad because, yes, the first episode was a blip, but the next two, if they keep up with that, I'm very, very happy with that show.

Very happy. Well, since you mentioned Star Trek The Next Generation, we should just mention the – did you watch last night's Star Trek Strange New Worlds episode? I have not. I was busy watching the Orville episode three. Well, I won't give you a spoiler or anything on this, but I was wondering, because it has felt very Star Trek Next Generation, and it is a very good Star Trek show, when they would do their equivalent of the – oh, gosh, what did they call it?

You know, when they went into the – why am I totally – now I'm having universe creep because I'm thinking Star Wars. The holodeck. I was wondering if they were going to do a holodeck episode because we always had those ones where Data or Picard went in there, and basically it had nothing to do with the ship or the galaxy or Klingons or anything, and they wore crazy costumes, and they did period pieces, and they did all of that.

I was wondering when they were going to do an episode like that, and bam, they gave us one. And you know what? I didn't enjoy it as much as I enjoy the regular episodes that we've had so far, but it was delightful. Okay. Okay. It has nothing to do with an overarching story at all.

It's completely self-contained. Well, sort of. Completely self-contained. No spoilers. But, yeah, it was just – they were in silly costumes, and they're doing their thing, and it was just purely delightful. It's funny because the Orville episode three was very much in that same similar vein, but it wasn't self-contained.

It was definitely the beginning of a very larger scene because we have now met the Orville's queue. So there's a little bit of spoiler there for you, but that's why I'm getting all of these things confused. See, now I know I can't start watching the Orville because I'm already having a hard enough time.

Like, I've got to wait to watch the Orville when there's absolutely no other sci-fi on. Probably the best bet, I'm thinking, because I'm happy that we're losing a few shows, but as soon as these are done, then more will come back, and it's like, oh, need a break. Definitely need a break.

So I'm going to give you some podcasts, Brian. Okay. CryptoCritics Corner. This is with Kaz Pianci and Bennett Tomlin. Good guys. They are basically, you know, they're kind of like us, but they just really kind of focus in on the anti-crypto thing.

But they're very smart. They have really good guests. They know finances a lot. They know financials. They're actually pretty smart. They're smarter than we are, dare I say, when it comes to the crypto side of things. Low bar. Low bar. Very low bar. Well worth a listen. I enjoy it because they take the piss out of everything, and they do it with data and science.

I love it. I love it. This next one, I listen to deep questions with Cal Newport off and on because sometimes I just get kind of like, I don't care about productivity right now. Give me a couple months of not having to think about it. And so I take a break. But I came back, and this new one, episode 201, is called Making a Living Online.

And I'm like, okay, what's this all about? Because that's how we started Grumpy Old Geeks, episode one, how to make money on the internet, babies. The interesting thing is this was the reaction to a piece he did in The New Yorker, I believe, called The Rise of the Internet's Creative Middle Class. Now, this goes back to Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans, which we have talked about a lot on this show.

I did not know that another guy we talked about on the show back in the day, Jaron Lanier, wrote a basically anti-Kevin Kelly post about the 1,000 True Fans. This was before we started our show. This was way back in the day, back in 2008 and 2009.

And it turns out that they couldn't find anybody. Like, he challenged Kevin Kelly and said, hey, is there anybody out there? Nobody showed up. There was nobody there. Find me somebody with 1,000 fans. Let's see. Are you making money? Exactly, and they couldn't. Yep. Well, we called bullshit on that pretty quickly.

We're more like 10,000, minimum. Yep. Well, nowadays, Cal has done the numbers. If you want to have a podcast, it makes $100,000 a year with a weekly cadence, and you need 30,000 fans. Right. Well, that's for one person.

Yeah. What if there's two people on the podcast? Brian, we need 60,000 fans. Yeah. Please share the show with the friends and the enemies and anybody else you can, because we are quite a bit away. You need to force five of your friends.

Every one of our listeners needs to force five friends to listen to the show. Like, force them, not share. Force them. Tie them down. Make them listen. Make them download. I don't care how you do it, but five people. Every single one of you is tasked with five people. And I just thought that was fascinating, that I never knew that side of the story, that Jaron had come out against it, because I didn't know that he had been – I know him and Kevin were friends back in the day, but I did not know about this.

And it leads me to one of Jaron's books, that we'll talk about it at the library. But it's a really good read. The actual, The Rise of the Internet's Creative Middle Class article, it's about a 5,000-word article. It takes a little bit to read, like 20 minutes, but it's great. It's a fantastic piece, because what has happened in the interim time is it's actually starting to come true.

It took a lot longer, because the tools actually weren't in place, and it does take a long time to cultivate those fans to actually prove it right. So I think that we are actually seeing kind of the idea, Kevin Kelly's original idea starting to come to fruition, but it's, you know, his numbers are way off.

His numbers are off. Because he's just a little bit – he's way too optimistic. Yeah. Way too optimistic, and it took way longer. And I really enjoyed it, because I am seeing a lot of that, and I'm basing my entire fucking career on the fact that that's going to be true, because I am building a place for people to come get those fans.

So I am – I'm optimistic. All right. I'm optimistic about the 1,000 true fans again. Okay. Well, speaking of your new business, you briefly had a moment in the sun to get some big names there, Jason, because Barack and Michelle Obama have left Spotify. Gasp!

Yeah. Well, they didn't actually leave. They were kind of shown the door. Well, I think both parties are saying, well, we've decided not to continue our arrangement. Unfortunately, they quickly signed with Amazon, so no shot for you. Well, here's the thing.

There is a shot for me, because the entire premise of my business is the fact that I put myself in between where the celebrities live and where the other studios are, so they don't have to drive in LA traffic. Yeah. Well, hopefully they will move to Woodland Hills, and then you can get them. Well, Calabasas or Hidden Hills is where all of the celebs live, or even farther out, in Thousand Oaks and places like that.

Yeah. And I am the oasis in the middle, where they can stop and have a podcast and go back home without having to hit the 101-405 interchange. Yeah. Now, that right there is well worth its price in gold. I'm good for the Obamas, you know?

Yeah. I'm sure they'll get some money. Yeah. I did not like the stuff that they put out with Spotify. Nope. I didn't either. And apparently, they didn't either. Yeah. So. Yeah, I didn't either. But you know what? The kids' show that they've done is very good, so. Good. Good. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that they're going to do just fine.

And it is a first-look deal with Amazon. Yeah. I mean, Audible. So, same thing, I guess. Same thing. Yeah. So, you know, they don't have to produce the shows with them, but they just have to bring them to them first. Yeah. So, I don't know if they're allowed to go outside of the deal after that.

If Amazon says no, if they're allowed to still do it on their own. By definition, that's the first look, so. Exactly. But you never know contracts anymore. And the people who wrote this article are from Engadget. They're not really the Hollywood Reporter. So, I don't expect them to know the nuances of how Hollywood deals work.

But I did start watching The Old Man on Hulu. Okay. Oh, my God. New favorite show. That is not sci-fi. Thank God. It is not sci-fi. It's got Jeff Bridges, John, and John Lithgow right there. There's Amy Brenneman, too, which is kind of annoying, but Jeff Bridges steals the show in this.

He's incredible. And not just because he owns two Rottweilers. I'm not being, you know, speciesist here. It really is a phenomenal show. So, two episodes, or actually three episodes out now as we're recording because the new one just dropped. Highly recommended. Highly, highly recommended if you want something that is not sci-fi.

Excellent. The trailers for it look great, so. Dude, it is slow. I'm going to tell you right now, it's slow, but it's realistic. The fight scenes are incredible. They are so realistic. And sadly, but excitingly, Animal Kingdom is back. One of my other favorite non-sci-fi shows.

It's back for its final season, and it's killing it. I love that show so much. Did you ever check it out? Are you a fan? No, not really my thing. Okay. It's good. It's good. I did try and watch Oblivion on HBO Max. I can't. I don't know.

I'm going to have to cancel HBO Max. No. Nothing. Nothing works. I'm piggybacking on yours. Well, you can send me 15 bucks a month and you can keep it. Nothing works on any of... Like, I can't... The audio was so low on Oblivion that I, like, it was just...

I mean, I had my thing cranked with my soundbar and you could barely hear it. It's weird. So, yeah. And then I went to another movie on HBO just to see if it was just the movie or the service. That one was too loud.

And I still can't get John Oliver to play. So, why am I giving these people money? Mine's working now for John Oliver. Although, I'm not sure that I want it anymore because it's just been sadness pouring all the way down. But, yeah. Yeah. That's why I stopped watching it originally.

I just want to watch it now because I can't. Right. Brian, I am a Cameo fan, I have to say. Are you part of the Fameo, Jason? I am part of the Cameo Fameo. I am. I get these things like other people get flowers for people.

Like, if somebody needs a pick-me-up that day, I'll order them a Cameo. Okay. I got one from my roommate after she started to come down with the Rona and was feeling kind of crappy. We're both fans of Survivor. We've seen every season. And this last season, this girl, Mary Ann, won.

And we were behind her the whole way. She was our favorite. And she won. And she's just – she's an awesome person. She's just a boolean, this little black girl who is just as funny as can be. And I wrote her and said, hey, this is what's going on. Can you make my friend a Cameo?

Here. Here's the extra money. Just do it quick. And she sent it back in like an hour. And it was about five minutes long. So she went like above and beyond. And she even broke down some of the stuff that I said was like our favorite bits of Survivor. She's like, here's why I did this. Here's why I did that. It was so cool when you get these from, you know, people that you watch on TV.

I know it's silly. We're in entertainment. We know that there's no difference between them and us. But it is still cool when you get one. Look, I always thought it was a great idea for a company. I think that they flew too close to the sun. They grew way too big and, you know, got much bigger than they ever needed to be.

But it's a great idea. Yeah. I love it. I love it. So far, I've gotten Penn Jillette, Carson from Queer Eye, and Marianne from Survivor. And all three of them have made the people who I've given them to, it has made their day. And then some.

Like, you still think about it, like, you know, weeks after. So I just recommend it. Can we still say Carson from Queer Eye? Because that's like saying Kristen Dunst from Interview with a Vampire. It was like so long ago. I never watched him on. I did watch him on Queer Eye.

The next time I saw him ever again was when he was on Celebrity Big Brother. And we were watching him there. And when he got kicked off, he went to Cameo. So. But we were rooting for him. And so I had another video made from him. They're just fun, man. There's just so many celebrities on there, too.

Hey, maybe we should get on there. Sure. Make a dollar. Five bucks. And I saw this one because it was just fun. Flying Car Company boss completes first ever commute in $83,000 space age vehicle. And the company is called Jetson. Good name, I think.

That is a good name, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I hope they cleared it with legal. They probably didn't. Nope. Because they're in Sweden. And we know what happens in Sweden. Yes, we do. This thing is terrifying. I'm watching it. And it is flat out terrifying. It is, you've got eight blades spinning at ungodly speeds right next to you.

And you can fly all of 20 minutes. And you can fly for 20 minutes up to 63 miles an hour. You can get about 20 miles away. Great. And I love it. Somebody in one of the Reddit feeds that I was reading about this was like, you know, when you run out of gas in a car, it's not that bad.

But when you run out of gas in your flying car, that could be problematic. It does come with a ballistic parachute if need be. But, yeah, I'm just, I'm worried about, you know, those, over time, the stress on those blades is going to happen.

And what if one of those things shears off and just stabs you in the face at 2,000 miles an hour? Not just you in the vehicle itself. I don't want to be on the ground anywhere near these things when they're flying overhead. Oh, that too. That too. Yeah. No, it is.

It is scary. It's very, it's almost the same thing as that Russian hover bike that we saw a couple of, like, five years ago. I remember that. Same concept. Also just as terrifying. Yes. But $83,000, you know, they're sold out. You can't get any more. So at least.

I was going to put all my Bitcoin towards that. I was going to say they're sold out now, but as Bitcoin keeps falling, they might have some returns on their hands or cancellations. This is really cool. Scientists are getting better and better at levitating objects with sound waves.

It's really cool. These researchers have figured out how to basically, first, they're just going step by step, which is fun to watch. First, they figured out how to have a box with sound generators and speakers to be able to levitate things using sound waves. Problem was the box had to be empty.

Right. Now they have at least figured out how to put an object in the box and still actually levitate things with the computational power enough to know where the reflections are coming from and things like that. Very cool. Right. Very cool. Here's the biggest issue. Here's the next thing that they have to figure out.

If they can figure out how to do this with moving objects inside of the space. Now we're cooking with gas. So next. This is fun to watch, but check out the video if you haven't seen it. It is so cool. Yeah, get back to me when Trent Reznor hits that big chord at the end of Hurt and everybody in the amphitheater lifts up into the air.

Then I'll be impressed. Oh, and he uses his tambourine of doom to levitate everybody. Dolly Minnie has a mysterious obsession with women in saris. Me too. Everybody on the planet has been playing with Dolly Minnie. And now it's like crayon, I believe.

They changed the name of it for, you know, copyright issues. And so if you give this, give the AI no input, it will start generating random images. But most of them have women with brown skin looking like they're wearing a sari.

Right. Nobody can figure out why, which is the great part about this. This is the best part about it is nobody can figure it out. Everybody's got an idea, but nobody can prove the idea because it's a black box. Yes. Yeah. Great.

It is so fun. Nobody's come out and said that it has feelings and it's self-aware? No, it is not self-aware. Okay. Well, it might be. Maybe it's, you know, that's it. We've tapped into its spank bank. Maybe that's its fetish. It's its king. I'd imagine an awful large amount of its data set is coming from people in India feeding things in.

See, that's part of the theory is that it's poorly tagged information or foreign language stuff that's getting mishandled by the pre-processor, which I would 100% believe. And a lot of these images are tagged using things like, oh, Mechanical Turk, which, yeah, not really reliable.

What they really need to do is have, like, you know, an actual team of people that they pay to go through these who are, I don't know, employees, maybe. You don't pay a nickel a shot. Employees. What a novel concept. Yeah. That's never going to happen. I know. I know. We'll stick with the black box for now.

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Amazingly, I finished another book after spending over two months trying to finish one book. To be fair, this one was, like, five pages long. I was going to say, calling this a book is really a stretch. It's actually a chapter, and I remember when this came out, and I railed against buying it because it was so expensive.

It never came down in price. So I spent basically full book price for one chapter, and I read Escape from Yokaialand, Laundry Files Book 12, book in air quotes as far as I'm concerned, by Charlie Strauss. I enjoyed it, and all this made me realize is I will no longer read any Laundry Files books unless it's got Bob back in them, because it was delightful, and I don't like the rest of them anymore.

Yeah. I don't like the way the universe is going. I mean, it's a completely different series, so not sure he should have released this, because that's what it made me feel. Oh, that's too bad. That's too bad. Yeah. Well, I liked it. I got a bunch of Charlie's other books in the queue, so hopefully those will be something different.

But back to Jaron Lanier and that book that I was talking about, it's called You Are Not a Gadget. Right. Have you read this before? Is this a new book, or is this his one book? Because I've read a book. This is a book. Okay, if you've read a book, this is not the book, because the book that, that book was later on.

This was long, long ago, long ago. This is one of his old books where he really kind of came out as a techno-pessimist. Right. It doesn't really hold up that well. I was about to say. Because if you listen to our show, you've read the book.

Yeah. If you've listened to like five episodes of the show, you know the book. Period. It just goes back into the history about when Web 2.0 was basically, you know, fucking us all with algorithms and things like that. The beginning of it, where things were starting to emerge, and how consolidation was happening with the big ones.

He was prescient enough to see in real time how we went from all of us having our personal cool homepages to it being Facebook. Yeah. And he was pissed. So, I don't think you need to read it, but if you want like an old primer, it's a good book. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's actually a really good book, but I don't think in this day and age that it really lends a lot to the conversation.

Right. And what does lend a lot to the conversation nowadays, Brian, and we need this more than ever, David McCraney's back with a new book called How Minds Change, The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion. Right. Oh, you got to read this right away. Well, my question about this book is, do I or do the people that would never read this book need to read this book?

No, I think you need to read this book. I need to read this book. Anybody with a platform needs to read this book, and anybody with an opinion should read this book. I'm halfway through it, and there is a lot of actionable crap in here on what changes people's minds, what doesn't change people's minds, and the science behind it.

And it's phenomenal. So it's, I mean, it's David McCraney. I like his stuff anyway. But this is really, he's really swinging for the fences in this, and I'm really, really enjoying it. Cool. I got the strangest email this week, too, Brian, from Goodreads, of all people. Goodreads. Remember them?

I think I logged into them last time about, oh, eight years ago or so. Yeah. My Kindle is set to auto-set things to start reading when I start reading new books. So when I logged in after I got this email, I noticed that it never does the other half. When you finish a book, it doesn't close them out.

So I'm reading 450 books at the current moment. Ah, there you go. Now, here's what made me laugh when I got this email. I opened it up. Here's the first line. As part of our commitment to improving Goodreads, we are phasing out a number of features in order to focus on the ones our members use most.

Okay, let's start out. Let's break it down. As part of our commitment to improving Goodreads. What? When did this happen? When did they have a commitment to improving it? When did you remember that it existed, is my question. So, and as someone who has used one or more of these features, we are offering you the option to save your content by downloading it before September 1st.

Please note that you will be unable to download your content after this date. So, as a commitment to improving Goodreads, they're turning off the shit that I actively use. And telling you, if you want your data, get it out now, which sounds to me like we're getting ready to shutter this bitch.

No, they're basically taking it from a way that you could favorite authors before to a new follow system. So they're swapping that out because you used to have like your favorite authors list. And now you have to, I had to go back through and follow the individual people. So it's just like a new way that they're tracking stuff like that.

I would really appreciate it if you would just burn it down and start from scratch. Yeah, because I could, I would enjoy a service that is Goodreads, but actually was useful. Yeah, that doesn't look like it's 20 years old. No. Security?

Ha! Welcome back to Security Ha! With Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast, co-host of the social engineering podcast, Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan. Dave is also the co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, where they discuss law and policy and surveillance and privacy, and the new Control Loop, where they discuss ICS and OT.

Welcome back, Dave Bittner. Thank you. Good to be back. Good to be back. Busy week. Yeah. Looking forward to it. Where shall we begin, he asks, as if he doesn't know the answer. In a galaxy far, far away, because nobody wants to be in this one.

Beam me up, Obi-Wan. Oh, wait, that's that universe creep again, isn't it? Yeah. That's right. That's right. Jason posted his opinion, and it did not sound positive. So let's have Jason do his first, since you said yours would be 15 seconds.

Yes, mine is very- So we can dismiss it. Well, I thought this show was fantastic on the edges, and I thought it waned a little bit in the middle. The final episode, so many plot holes, but I would like to say that I found it absolutely satisfying.

I left with a smile on my face, and I'm still thinking about it to this day, so I think that they stuck the landing, a little wobbly in the air there. But yeah, all in all, I thought it was solid. I thought it was solid. Me too. All right, I'm surprised. I concur with everything you just said.

I am sound clipping that forever now.

Yeah, I don't even need to show up anymore. Nope, that's it. Just play that in a loop. It's going to either be that one or your other rant. Those would be the two sides of David. Yes, yes, yes, the infamous rant. So I agree, and one thing I thought as I was watching the credits roll on the final episode was, this is really what I had always wished the prequels had been.

Yeah, right? Particularly that last episode, to see Darth Vader at the peak of his powers, we haven't seen much of this part of Vader's existence.

And so it was fun and exciting to see that, to see him fighting with Obi-Wan. It was just things that I think Star Wars fans had thought about for a long time, and I thought they did a good job with it. I agree. Lots of big old wide plot holes, things that don't make a lot of sense, but at the same time, lots of things that were really gratifying and fun and fanservice-y and filled in some little questions that I think we'd all had.

So I enjoyed it. I'm happy that they made it, and I'm happy that there's more solid quality Star Wars stuff being made out there. I tend to agree with both of you, fellow gentlemen. I will say that, yes, there were definitely some plot holes, but I have to say, I think that they did an absolutely phenomenal job of not destroying the established canon from not

only three movies beforehand and then three movies after, plus the whole raft of different TV series that have been done with Obi-Wan's era. I think that Star Wars fans can be a bit pedantic, the ones that get really into it.

And I think if you were a medium pedant, you actually walked away from this kind of going, oh, okay, they really cleared up some things and they kept it within the canon and what came before and what came after now make a bit more sense to me. If you're a heavy pedant, you've already fired up your Twitter bot and screamed at the universe about how unfair everything is and how Star Wars has been ruined yet again.

And screw you, because we don't like you. So I thought this was phenomenal. I walked away from it with a gigantic smile on my face, much like you, Dave. I felt like this is what the prequels should have been in the first place. As much as I love the show and I really did, I do not want any more.

Please do not do a season two. That is all I ask. Okay. You don't want Leia the series? No. I want no more Star Wars that have to do with the main characters that we know and love. I want other stories. I want a different universes, not universes, but different time periods.

Please don't do any more with these characters. I think we're good. There's nowhere to go but down. Well, there's nowhere to go but fuck up, right? That's good. That's good. Yeah.

And I think kind of like we have talked about with Mandalorian that it feels as though Star Wars content is in the hands of people who love Star Wars for the reasons that we love Star Wars. And so it's important to them to take care of Star Wars for all the reasons that we all love Star Wars.

And I feel as though George Lucas certainly didn't always understand that. I feel like some of the folks who made the most recent batch of movies didn't understand that. And so I don't know if it's because they have more flexibility working within the framework they do on the TV shows.

But it's just really gratifying to feel like these shows are being made by us for us in a way. I agree. So I guess we're done talking about Star Wars until Osaka comes along. I just got to get one last.

I got to get this off my chest. How did they think we were not going to notice how the Inquisitor got from bleeding on the ground after Darth messed her up to being on Tatooine while the other ship was still being fired at by Vader and his crew? How did she get there?

Well, first of all, George Lucas, I believe, is on the record as saying that the ships in the Star Wars universe move at the speed of plot. Ah, there we go. Where did she get the ship? There's no ship. Ship yards everywhere, Jason. Okay.

Okay. I just wanted to – I had to get that off my chest as the one thing that has been bugging the crap out of me that nobody's talked about but everybody's seen. You know, it's like – you saw that, right? Okay. Just checking. Just wanted to clear it up. She went to the spaceport and she walked up to the rental counter.

And she said, Hertz, I need a – Space Hertz. Space Hertz. Right. Yeah. And they said, well, there's supply chain issues. All we've got is this crappy one. I know that you booked a galactic cruiser, but you will be getting this. You get a Mustang because we got too many of them.

That's it. Space Mustangs. Right. Yeah. She said, don't you know who I am? And that's where it went. Yeah. Again, I mean, the fact that we asked those kind of questions, Lucas – that's a bit of Lucas's legacy as well because he went so deep into trying to explain things in the prequels.

Yeah, I know the prequels are getting a bit of a renaissance, but this is escapism. I'm not – we're not supposed to ask how come it takes so short of a time to get across the galaxy. Who gives a fuck? It's story. Okay. Well, I have a story for you that I want to – I want your read on.

So we know – we're seeing that Bitcoin is tanking. All the cryptocurrencies are tanking. And one of the things I was thinking about the other night on why it will never get mainstream, besides all of the normal technological issues with onboarding, wallets, and people stealing all your money all the time.

I think that a lot of the common public, their first interaction with Bitcoin was trying to figure out how to get some so they can get the kids of their – the photos of their grandkids back because of the ransomware problem at the beginning, which people seem to have forgotten about, that that was the best use case for Bitcoin for almost the entirety of its existence.

I don't think that that's something that they're ever going to be able to get over. Do you? So the notion is that because we started off on a shaky foundation that lacks trust, that we'll never be able to get that trust back. People will never be completely comfortable dealing with cryptocurrencies because it started out as sort of the Wild West and was being used in ways that rub people the wrong way.

Yeah, and people have lost their homes at this point. You know, there's nothing good that has come out of Bitcoin's existence that I can tell. And, you know, there's – of course, they're still trying to fix that problem. Oh, it's just a glitch, you know, whatever. Crypto winter, it'll be back, blah, blah, blah.

I think that the public's perception, which is, you know, kind of key to making this thing work long-term, has been so destroyed that I don't think it's salvageable anymore. And I'm just trying to think of this from a rational perspective, not just my gut saying, eh, it's dumb.

I do wonder how many people have actually really invested, put actual money into Bitcoin or crypto other than five bucks or something like that. I just don't think the general public cared as much and got as heavily involved as much as you would think given the amount of press and talking about crypto and commercials and everything else.

I just don't think people were that into it to begin with. I think that's been blown way out of proportion. So I'm not so much concerned about the, you know, grandparents. Are they turned off about investing in Bitcoin and crypto and moving forward? What I'm mostly concerned about is institutional investments.

When we find out that like Schwab's funds and things of that nature that you didn't necessarily know unless you read the small print and followed what this fund that you've bought into for your retirement was investing in. I want institutional investors to basically back out of this area or very plainly, very top of page, if you invest in this fund, X amount, X percentage of this fund is invested in crypto.

That's what I want, because I think that's where a lot of people are getting burned. I do know a fairly significant amount of people who are normies, who are kind of middle class, upper middle class, that did put in more than they should and have lost more than they should, you know, in the ranges of $50,000 to $250,000 that was just wiped out.

Wow. A lot of people don't talk about it. They just did it. Well, nobody talks about when they lose money. No, actually, that's what I'm finding out now that because they did lose the money and they're in such trouble about it, that they're coming clean about it. They actually did it. They didn't talk about it when they invested, but they're talking about it now that they've lost it.

Yeah. So it's kind of counterintuitive, at least with, you know, with my experience with, you know, friends and friends of friends. I'm hearing just lots of stories. But like it's not, it's either super broke folk who did it or people who were in the kind of the upper middle class, like the middle, the squishy middle didn't really get into it.

Like people saw it as a way to get out of where they're at or people just to like say, hey, I want another wing on my house. I want to go to the moon. Yeah. Yeah. I want to go to the moon. Call Elon if you want to go to the moon, not Bitcoin. To that, to your list, I will add the up and coming young men who are contrarian.

I put my oldest son into that category, you know, who just wants to be zigging when everyone else is zagging and that sort of thing. And so this appealed to them, this sort of hustle. Oh, yeah, there's risk, but there's going to be great reward and all that sort of thing.

There's lots of talk as things were cratering about this whole, what do they call it, the greater fool theory that, you know, which I was just, have you guys covered that here? Several hundred times, I believe, but never really in detail. We just kind of glossed over it, but yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's exactly what it sounds like. And people have been saying that the only reason that these things work is that you have to find a greater fool than you to buy it at a higher price than you because there is nothing behind it. And so I think to pile on to what you're saying about will people trust cryptocurrency, I think if it gets the backing of the FDIC, I think then people will start trusting it in the same way that people want to have their things backed up.

They want to see some regulation behind it. They want to know that people are operating in good faith under certain sets of rules. And right now, crypto has none of that. So, yeah. This podcast could have been entirely titled, Brian Screams About the Need for Regulation. And then it'll be the second part will be Jason Screams About the Fact that there's nobody to enforce the regulation because the SEC ain't doing shit.

Yeah. There are no internet police. Well, I mean, so is it fair to say to the crypto folks that, okay, we tried it your way, right? We tried it with no regulation. We tried it with no backstop. Shall we continue and maybe try it the other way for a while and see how that works?

I think it needs a technological overhaul before you can even think about regulating it because it is such a hodgepodge of technologies that obviously is, you know, has more holes in Swiss cheese in it. And, you know, you were talking about consequences a minute ago, and this is what really – I mentioned this to Brian earlier in the show.

I think a lot of the people who are into this and are like, yeah, there's consequences, but, you know, we're risking it and we're going to go for it. They've never actually felt consequences. These people have never been punched in the face because they said something stupid to somebody. They don't know what can happen when things actually happen.

It's all theoretical. Consequences are theoretical because they've got – if they made money on the way up, they didn't have to earn it. They never worked for it, so they don't respect it. And, you know, they treat other people the same way with a very simple lack of respect saying that they're stupid if they don't do it.

Well, you know, those of us who have been around the block say, well, you're stupid if you do do it because we understand the consequences and what can happen because there is no security behind this. It is a – just a black box of fools, you know? It is a black box of fools, and you're just trying to figure out your way through and find your fools on the way through so you can make some money on the way out.

I just – I don't see it happening personally. I want it to kind of because I think that, you know, payments could use a shakeup. The theory behind it of, you know, individual transactions to each other, fantastic. But I don't think it's ever going to come to fruition without a gatekeeper.

Regulation and technology married together to make it work. I also think on the technology side, there has to be a way to throttle in the amount of resources that it uses. Well, that's just changing the way that it's created, the proof of stake versus, you know, proof of work.

Right. Which everybody is saying that they're moving to proof of stake, but where? It's, you know, you're years late now. So that's why I like Gia. There's more sizzle than steak. Well, the other thing that really needs to be removed from this whole equation is the cult of personality bullshit that's really driving it to a large degree.

The Winklevosses, even Elon Musk. I mean, it's a cult more than anything else. And it's not – it's being treated like it's gamified. It's so many things that are so wrong for finances. What's their – it's their Gordon Gekko moment. Yeah, I know.

It needs to be boring. That's the thing. And, you know, a lot of people got really, really rich. For a while. For them. Yeah. Yeah. Where did that money come from? Other people. Right. Yep. But that's the way these sorts of schemes work, right? You nailed it.

Scheme. Yeah. Yeah. It's a scheme. Yeah. Okay. I just want to read the room on that because it just hit me the other night about the whole cryptocurrency. I'm like, oh, yeah. Remember when grandma had to go find a Bitcoin ATM so she could pay the Russians to get the pictures of her grandkids back?

That happened a lot. Right. A lot. Yeah. I wonder what kind of, like, leading or trailing indicator that's going to be if we start seeing Bitcoin ATMs pulled from convenience stores. I think they've been pulled from the entirety of the UK so far.

Good. Is that right? Smart move. That was a couple, like, a month or so ago. I think the UK banned Bitcoin ATMs. Whole hog. Ah. Okay. Good. Interesting. Yeah. All right. Well, in this shitstorm of crappy news, I do have a good story, believe it or not. Microsoft is actually shuttering a project about facial recognition.

They are going to retire facial recognition technology that it said could infer emotions as well as characteristics like age, gender, and hair. These obviously raised serious privacy concerns, and they've decided that they're basically going to take all these features out of their face programming network, which is good.

They're being responsible about this. And they have actually shared a responsible AI standard framework with the public that I do hope is good and people agree with and get on board with. Well, I'm glad they're taking it out of the commercial side of it. But you know that they still have teams working on this internally.

Of course they do. Yeah. I mean, research and development. Yeah. But there's a difference between what you can do. Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing. And I like the fact that they're thinking about that and going, yes, we can do this with our technology now, but we can't do it in a good way.

So let's pull this out of the market. Yeah, and making a business decision, letting the business decision, I think, in large part drive this. Microsoft certainly learned their lesson a few years ago when they released Tay out on the internet.

And she immediately became a racist Nazi, reflecting back at us what the internet is. So, you know, I think they've taken what they've learned there and hopefully have moved it forward. But I agree with you. I think this is a good thing and a nice sign of restraint from Microsoft.

Yeah, agreed. I have this story in here. This caught my eye this week, and I found this fascinating, and I thought you gents would find this fun as well. This is an article that I saw over on TechCrunch, and it's a startup company called Sanus.

And they have developed an AI voice technology that takes spoken language and in real time neutralizes the accent of the language. So I have a link here to the demo.

I don't know if you guys – just take a second. And the demo has a little slider on it where you can have the original voice, which sounds like a gentleman probably of Indian descent. So he has an Indian accent. And while he's talking, you can switch between the processed and unprocessed.

And this system just takes what he's saying and turns it into kind of an American, Midwestern, neutralized, slightly computerized. There's definitely something slightly artificial to it. But it's pretty darn good.

This is going to sell like hotcakes with all the outsourced customer service that get the old people going, you're not Steve from Kansas. I can tell. Exactly. Exactly. So how do we feel about that? Great. Yeah?

Great. Yeah. How come? Because I have found that the tech support that I get overseas is actually quite excellent when we can communicate. Okay. When I've dealt with techs, especially with AT&T techs, American techs, I don't know what it is about them.

They just don't get the job done. When I get in touch with anybody in India, when I'm trying to work through like a router problem or some kind of very technical issue, they get it done in just magic time. And it's usually the women, by the way, who are the best at it.

But it's just hard to communicate because the accents are so thick. You know, I am Cindy. You're not Cindy. Come on. Right. Talk to me. I've had many of these calls. I think there's only been one time that I really had difficulty parsing an accent because they've usually done some vocal training so that they're at least understandable.

But, I mean, yes, this is going to – if I could invest in Sanus right now, I would. This is going to be everywhere shortly. Yep. I would give them all the money I have if I had any. I would take all my Bitcoin out and I would put it right into Sanus. There you go.

All right. It's pretty intense. What I would love to see from this, though, is the ability to put in accents, too. I would like to be – Well, that's where I'm going. That's where I'm going. So I have a couple thoughts on this. So first of all, I think on the good side, this removes an unnecessary stressor from the tech support experience.

Right. I think it's fair to say that we're all more comfortable talking with someone who sounds like us. Whatever we are, it just automatically puts us at ease and there are all kinds of understandable reasons why that's so. And so this helps us along that path and I think that's a good thing.

But to your point, wouldn't it be nice if you could dial in and say, this is who I am. I'm reminded of the scene from the movie Airplane. Oh, pardon me, stewardess. I speak jive. Yeah. Right? Right? Yeah. Like, so suppose you have a thick accent and you understand a certain vernacular.

Wouldn't it be great if you could dial in and say, okay, tech support person, I speak jive and have it come back to you in whatever you're most comfortable with? Oh, two use cases here. First, give this to everybody in Scotland, for starters.

Now, here's another use case for it that I think is pretty cool. If you can take that technology, you can take somebody's voice, you can de-accent it, then you use the de-accented voice as the, like you pre-process it through the accent removal tool.

Then you take that and then you use that voice for whatever you put into your input for the ladies in the tube, for Siri or Alexa, because that's been the biggest problem with those things is they're terrible at accents. You know, look at the Scottish.

They could never use Siri, in the beginning at least. It was always the big running joke. But imagine taking this technology and putting it as like a go-between layer between voice and your digital assistant. Imagine how much that would clear up for the digital assistant what it's actually working from.

Yeah. So let me play devil's advocate for just a moment here, because I think there's also an argument to be made that being exposed to people from different cultures makes us more empathetic and broadens our horizons. And this in some way is taking that away from us.

If we're – this is strengthening our bubble by having – artificially having us communicate with more people who seemingly are just like us. I mean, you know, I think it's use case, right? Like, I wouldn't want this if I'm traveling through Scotland.

I will muddle through. I will drink enough alcohol to make it understandable. That always seemed to work in Scotland for me. The universal translator. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's funny because I was thinking this is a first step to the universal translator. But using it in high-stress situations like the tech calls is actually very helpful, and I don't think it would draw away from that, you know, because it depends on the experience you're wanting to have.

Are you traveling and wanting to experience the world, or are you so fucking fed up with your goddamn router and you're losing your mind? You know what I mean? Right, right. Oh, can it actually take the anger out of my voice when I'm on the phone with them? You need that.

Yes. Your life would go so much smoother, Jason. Far less interesting. The emotion remover. That's it. Right. Right.

I need the disdain remover. I'm sorry, sir. I need the disdain remover. Yeah, the disdain remover. I'm thinking of these two systems battling each other, you know. I'm sorry, sir. I'm going to have to put you on hold for one hour. And then Jason's filtered response says, that sounds fine with me.

I'm a very patient person. Exactly. Amazing. Yeah. It's the what you should say, not what you have said. That's what I need. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. It's very cool, though. Like I said, I mean, if I could invest in this company right now, I 100% would.

Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Check it out. Yeah. All right. That's what I have this week. We'll talk to you guys next time. Later. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got nobody. So, well, we do have a bunch of people knocking their pledges back, but I just want to remind everybody, Patreon is the place where you get early releases of our shows and ad-free versions.

So, you can go over there and sign up for as little as $3 a month. Yeah. Less than $1 a show. Over at PayPal, we've got John, Tom, Andrew, John, Andre, Joseph, Humphrey, Mark, and Jason with a big old $50 donation. Thank you so much. Thank you, me. And over at Stripe, we've got Ross, Karen, Daryl, and Pedro.

Again, thank you all. And we actually got a review this time around. This is from Bonnie. Best tech around. Five-star rating. Opinionated, experienced, witty, smart, with a few habaneros thrown in. Definitely not the usual rewrite of press releases from Fang, Mang. Dave Bittner is a great added voice.

The force is strong within him. Seriously. Good show notes. Mentions of articles, apps, sites, sources, people to check out. Best of the best. Best of the best, Jason. Fuck yeah, Bonnie. Get five of your friends to agree. Yep. We need one friend per star. Even then, I'll still be making less than my day job.

Yep. Me too. Yeah. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. 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. Five of them at least, please.

It's easy and absolutely free. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 559. 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. Stay grumpy. Over at Patreon. Oh, shit. Yeah, nobody.

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