582: Kind Of

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

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Last show of the year. Thank God. Thank God. I'm ready for 2022 to be done. Yeah, well, what fresh hell will 2023 bring? I'm sure it won't be better.

Actually, you know, funny you mentioned that because I did kind of go on a bit of a tear in the show notes this week because of that. You think? Yeah, a little bit. You know, I wanted to be a bit positive. I want 2023 to be better because I feel like we've had three years of fresh baked shit pies and I'd like a blueberry, goddammit.

Is that so much to ask for? You've been in Canada way too long. Yeah. So I just thought since it's the last show of the year, we could change it up a bit. I mean, not for the whole show, obviously, because I've seen the rest of the notes. Yeah, come on. Don't expect me to be positive. Jesus. You know, so it's been a couple shitty years and tech news has somehow improbably only continued to get shittier and shittier.

And I'd prefer our last show of the year to leave us with a bit of hope. I'm not going to lie. It was hard to find some, but I did. You should have put this at the end and not the beginning because we're not going to leave them. We're going to dump on all of it at the end of it. Yeah. I thought the Atlantic had a really great article, the breakthroughs of the year.

And, you know, as much as we crap on technology, here are 10 things that technology has brought us this year that are kind of cool. Now, hear me out on this first one because I'm going to say it and you're going to say no. Number one is the generative AI eruption, stable diffusion, Dolly 2, chat GBT, all things that we have shit on repeatedly on this show.

And they do, but they are saying it's not where they are now. It's where they could go. Okay. Life perfect child porn. That's what, no, I'm. 10 and 10, five fingers and five toes.

You know, come on, can we get the right amount of fingers? We'll get to AI later, but let's just say that they put this in there as is, you know, it's in its infancy and this is very exciting stuff that could go who knows where. Number two, the power to reverse death, kind of.

Kind of. Now, I didn't hear about this story earlier in this year, but then I went and researched this. And by the way, links in the show notes, you can get into all of these. They basically, they had, there was a dead pig and they have pumped an experimental substance into the veins and arteries of animals that have been lying deceased for over an hour and got their hearts to start beating again.

The technology is very far away from use in humans, in quotes. Thank God. Obviously, because we have, we have no idea like brains or anything like that. But I mean, we're starting to figure out some shit is basically the point of that one, which is cool.

Number three, the power. Don't put it on your bacon. For God's sakes. It's a pissed off fucking bacon. Yeah, seriously. Until it takes a bite of itself and goes, God damn, I am delicious. I'm delicious. Number three, the power to synthesize life.

Kind of. Kind of. Again, another story I missed somehow this year. This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, eggs, or a womb. Or people. I guess we're not going to need people very soon, which is great. Pretty cool.

This was with a mouse. But, you know, basically, it's like only using stem cells, they were able to basically grow, grow, butted a tail on day six, grew a beating heart by day eight, and even evinced the beginnings of a brain. This is, again, pretty fucking crazy.

Like, we're starting to figure shit out. Pretty awesome. Yeah. Yay, dystopia. Shut up. I'm staying positive. We're only on four here, Jason. You're already ruining it. Oh, geez, we got ten. Okay. The vaccine cavalry is coming, and they're talking about basically mRNA vaccines, because we were told when they came up with this so quickly for COVID-19 that this was a revolution, and it's starting to come true.

In September, a new malaria vaccine was developed by Oxford University based on mRNA science. In November, an experimental flu vaccine was found to induce a protective immune response against all known types of flu in animals. mRNA, man. And they're starting to figure it out.

Did you see the new one about melanoma today and skin cancer? I did. I just saw that as well. I figured since you had skin cancer, you would be excited about that one. Well, I grew up in Southern California. I have had skin cancer. So that is very exciting. Yeah. Number five, a snapshot of the beginning of the time.

We've talked about this. This is the James Webb telescope, which sent back these amazing images from light across the universe. And the thing that I didn't know, again, having read up on this stuff, we're just getting started here. The quote here is, astronomers haven't even cranked up the Webb telescope as far as it can go. It can go to 11, Jason.

Oh, 11. Yes. Number six, tying in with melanoma, but wasn't even mentioned as part of that. Unheard of advances in fighting cancer. In a trial with 18 rectal cancer patients who were prescribed a novel immunotherapy, researchers found that the cancer vanished in every single patient.

Not receded, vanished. I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer, a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center told the New York Times. Months later, a trial of a new metastatic breast cancer drug delivered similarly miraculous results.

We're figuring shit out, Jason. Doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney. Whatever. Number seven, the obesity therapy. Come on, Star Trek. Undiscovering, come on. It's Star Trek's bones. Number seven, obesity therapy surge. So roughly four in ten Americans are obese, and the American way is expanding waistlines across the whole planet at this point.

People are getting fatter everywhere. We all know why. It's processed food and cheap, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all that sort of stuff. But they have started to find weight loss medication that actually works. This is a diabetes medication that is basically causing people to lose weight in a healthy manner through medication.

Starting to figure it out, Jason. Okay. Number eight, cracking the case of multiple sclerosis. Something we have not understood for years. They have basically finally determined that this is 100% the Epstein-Barr virus, and once you know what's causing it, you can start to figure out cures. Amazing. Awesome. Number nine, legal lab meat.

Some breakthroughs are about... That's my stripper name. Wow. You grew up on lab meat street? That's it. That's me. Some breakthroughs are about new rules, not just new technology. And this is basically the FDA has cleared a company called Upside Foods to produce lab-grown chicken.

They've looked at it enough, said it's safe. Go for it. That's a huge deal. Okay. That would change the world if we can grow meat in the lab instead of having to use all the farmland for it. I have to be me, something that's called Upside. What's the downside? Come on.

You know, there's another shoe. This is the positive story. We're positive. We're positive. Yes, yes, yes. And number 10, new toys for the green energy revolution. So this is all about fighting climate change, which some people that listen to this show don't believe exists. Whatever. But new inventions...

People who listen to this show? Seriously? In fields... Well, we get angry emails all the time still. In fields like nuclear and geothermal technology. So there's been breakthroughs in both cases. In nuclear power, which is actually pretty safe and clean and has basically been tainted by several high-profile disasters.

Admittedly, there were disasters. They basically managed to basically create a much smaller reactor. Like, less than 80 feet tall. It can generate enough clean electricity to power roughly 60,000 homes. There could be a small nuclear reactor at the end of every small town USA soon.

Is this the one that Bill Gates was working on? I believe it is, yes. Okay. It earned a place in Time Magazine's 2022 Inventions of the Year. Nice. And then geothermal energy, which means drilling deep into the ground to use the Earth's heat for power. They basically figured out a way to do this cheaper, faster, and quicker with high-concentrated beams of radio frequency power so you don't have to drill.

How cool is that? How the hell does that work? I don't know. It could be commonplace, and geothermal energy would be accessible in just about every single patch of land. It would be as though humankind conceived of a magic wand that waved across the Earth makes any square mile as energy-rich as an oil-gushing stretch of Texas or Saudi Arabia.

Figuring stuff out, Jason. Okay. I drink your milkshake. So we also had the big fusion ignition story that came out this week, which is a bit – I mean, scientifically, it's really cool. The byline being thrown around everywhere that we're going to have free energy tomorrow, not so true.

Not quite. But it is a major, major step on the way there. So they actually managed to get out more energy than was put in if you don't count all the 192 lasers and the power required for that. Yeah. Yeah. But still, they did it.

Like, they really did it. So now they've got to figure out how to make it better, faster, stronger, all that sort of stuff. Pretty cool. Another cool thing. Audio from a Martian dust devil captured for the first time. We listened to wind on another planet.

Neat. Very. Can we get a microphone to Elon so he can go get it in person? Definitely. Well, why don't we just send him? Let's mic him up. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah. We'll send him with a – yeah.

We'll send him with a Zoom and a little microphone and he can stand out there on the surface of Mars and get some radio for us. And going back to the AI thing, I did read this. I love this guy's site at waitbutwhy.com. Oh, Tim Urban? Tim Urban. Love it. Yeah, yeah.

So he did a super deep dive into the AI revolution, the road to superintelligence. And it's – god, it's probably a good 30-minute read, part one and part two. Yeah, he's not brief. No, he's not brief. But it's such a good overview about why it actually matters. Like we crap on it.

We think it's funny. We talk about how horrible some of the early uses are. And he gets into that as well. He talks – but he talks about how, you know, just the exponential nature of technology and how it grows and it gets into the whole Kurzweil thing, which as somebody who read Kurzweil's Singularity 20-plus years ago, it's crazy to think that he wasn't wrong and we're actually getting to that point.

Maybe. You think? You should – read Tim Urban's thing about it. Okay. Just do it. I'll give it a peek. I'll give it a peek. It really opened my eyes to this and it made me want to crap on things less. Until I read DeepMind created an AI tool that helped generate rough film and stage space.

Okay, the fun's over. Here we go. Let's get to it. This is a program called Dramatron, which is so – it's a so-called co-writing tool, which is basically what these things are great for right now. It's what we talked about with chat GPT the other – last week as well. It's like throw your stuff in, let it see what it comes out with, and use it to modify your own stuff.

And that's kind of what this does for movies. And you can laugh at it all you want, but they tested it. The researchers brought in 15 playwrights and screenwriters to co-write scripts. According to the paper, playwrights said they wouldn't use the tool to craft a complete play and found that the AI's output can be formulaic, to which I say, have you seen any of your own shows recently?

Yeah, it's called Marvel, motherfucker. They're pretty formulaic. Yeah. But it did say that it's actually useful for world building or to help them explore other approaches in terms of changing plot elements or characters. So these things are becoming basically like – you know the whole idea of like you wouldn't write by yourself because you needed a sounding board so you'd have a co-writer?

Right, yes. Your co-writers and your sounding boards are now going to be AI. What's interesting about this is – I'm curious to try it, but I'm actually – I have been going through – since I've stopped with social media, I've been working really hard to expand my attention span back to that of an actual human adult.

And it's working. It's actually working. Yes, I know. It's very difficult to put your – get your head around it. But I have been like really trying to – and last night I watched the entirety of the Duffer Brothers masterclass on screenwriting. And I've got a really – I think I've got a really good idea for a story that I started to map out using what they talk about in the masterclass.

And those guys talk about like an unfair advantage. They literally have themselves as their co-writer because they're identical twins. It's like that is just so unfair. You know what? You're right. No, you're right. No, you're right. Exactly. I'm just like, damn you guys.

But I – the funny thing is the story that I'm writing is about generative AI and it's like a thriller and kind of a sci-fi kind of weird thing that I'm doing. But I'm specifically trying not to use these kind of tools for that.

I want it to be like 100 percent human written because otherwise it would just be kind of like a gimmick that everybody else is doing. But I want to try this now. I really just kind of want to try it and see what it comes up with. Might as well, right? I don't know if I want to. I'm on the fence.

I'm on the fence. When we get off the air, I'll tell you the idea for the story and you can tell me what you think. All right. And Google is jumping on the bandwagon for the chat side of things. But they are being very smart about it because everybody is saying, you know, chat GPT is the big thing.

Everybody is going cuckoo with it. But they're like, you know what? People trust us. We – and they say they have a reputational risk by putting out something that doesn't actually work. And like they see the problems with chat GPT. The fact that Dave Bittner had a tool that he put in that GPT-3 can be – or I think it was actually GPT-2 that could be detected.

So there are flaws in these, you know, in these training sets that Google knows about. And they're like, yeah, you know what? That's cool for them. They've got one million people. We've got billions of people that we have to worry about. So Tempest in a teapot over there.

Don't get your panties in a bunch, guys. We're working on it. They've got their conversation technology. It's called Lambda, Language Model for Dialogue Applications. That really rolls off the tongue. Maybe they can use their AI to get some good branding maybe in the future. But it's good that they're taking their time with it because, you know, OpenAI, that's Elon.

They're going to fly fast and break things obviously. But it's cool that, you know, at least Google is taking a measured approach before doing anything and putting it out publicly, at least for the chat stuff. It's cute that Google is saying that they've got a billion people that they need to take care of and they're worried about.

I know, but remember, they have to profit off those people. They don't worry about them. They worry about profiting off of them. And then I saw another long-form article over on The Atlantic that I actually really liked. And it's something – it's been an ongoing discussion that you and I have had and Dave Bittner as well when we talk about social media.

And I think this really kind of nailed where it is now and why you and I and Dave don't like it much anymore outside of the whole troll aspect and Trump and Elon and everything. It's called Social Media is for Strangers now. And it goes into some of the stats as Instagram and Facebook fade from relevance.

The connections between friends are fading online too, which is something I've complained about. It's why Facebook is less useful for me now. But numbers are up. In October, Instagram reported 2 billion monthly active users. The milestone was surpassed by Facebook, which is sitting close to 3 billion users in the fall.

They're continuing to grow overall, but they're struggling to attract and retain people in general. But they're specifically the younger generation that's crucial for longevity. Why? Because Gen Z prefers video. And here's the thing. I don't like video.

I don't want to watch video. I'm scrolling. I want to see my friends' updates. I want to see some cute pictures. I don't want to watch a fucking video of them. And people don't post videos just for their friends to watch. You can FaceTime people if you want to talk to them. You can send them a voice note. You can text them.

You can do the kind of old school updates that we used to do to update all of our friends about what's going on. If you're posting videos, they're for an audience, not for your friends. And the algorithm enables that by promoting your videos on the For You pages for anyone that identifies as a receptive viewer.

So they aren't places to be engaging in discussion with friends or anything anymore. It's not a place to hang out anymore. It's not a town square anymore. It's all fucking self-promotion. That's it. Pretty much. Pretty much.

So there you go. And then I saw this and I had to laugh. Meta releases an open source tool that can scan for terrorist content. They say they've spent $5 billion on global safety and security and employ hundreds of people dedicated to anti-terror work.

And they realize that not every company has those kind of resources. So they're now providing their open source tool that can help combat child exploitation, terrorist propaganda, and other types of abusive content for free. Also known as the content that you get on Facebook because this obviously doesn't fucking work.

Yeah. Because I was going to say maybe they should have used it on themselves because they have a lawsuit in Ethiopia now because a professor of chemistry at one of the universities in Ethiopia was targeted on Facebook by some of his detractors. And he ended up getting gunned down outside of his house.

Oh, and they couldn't pull down the mass shooting that happened in New Zealand. They couldn't pull those videos down. They just kept popping up everywhere like whack-a-mole. So obviously this hasher, matcher, actioner, HMA program does not work very well. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was released three years ago. Well, since then, how many fucking people have died because of Facebook? A lot. I'm sorry. Meta. Well, yeah. When you have weekly funerals because of your service, your shitty little AI isn't going to come to the rescue.

I'm sorry. You're the problem. Thanks for giving that to people for free. Yeah. Appreciate it. It sucks. It obviously works really well. Fuckers. And speaking of not bothering with any of that, Twitter has disbanded its Trust and Safety Council of External Advisors.

Less than an hour before its members' Zoom meeting with the company executives. And they said, you are no longer needed. Thanks. Bye-bye. Now, this was the third-party body that would look at all the different cases that came in and all that stuff.

And this was the same group that was – before Trump was put back on. They were the group that was supposed to give the decision whether Trump should be allowed to come back on. The same group, right? Right? We're talking about the same group. Same group. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. Yeah, that makes sense. And let's not forget that Musk said in October that he will form a moderation council made up of members with widely diverse viewpoints before he reinstates banned accounts.

Oh, I don't know. Maybe a trust and safety council of external advisors? Something like that. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. No. But he does have a great new Twitter blue logo. Yeah. I saw this. Elon Musk's new Twitter blue logo is perfectly awful.

It's not perfectly awful. It is a throwback to the crypto kids who were all using that same style from the 80s. It's a throwback to your old Kinko's days. Do not put that on me. Do not put that on me. But yes, because there were only so many different presets in the old days of, wow, God, what was this?

It was Studio something. The first 3D program that we could really use on a Mac back then. I can't even remember anymore. Yeah, but it had the same type of presets on that. It was, you know, it was bad. It was before Bryce because Bryce was just basically let's make rave posters with floating chrome spheres.

That's pretty much what Bryce was. But it's the same thing. But it's just horrible. Just like Twitter blue. I'm so glad that I'm not really dealing with that anymore. Fingers crossed it'll stay that way. I've peeked in a couple times. Almost everybody that I used to care about is gone.

So it's like not even a thing. Jack Sweeney, though, is also gone because he was the kid who did the Elon Musk's Jet Twitter account. And Elon Musk said publicly many times, I disagree with what he's doing and he can keep his account.

Well, until Elon. Specifically. My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk, he tweeted. On November 6th. Yes. So that took about a month and he changed his mind.

So, yes, he was banned and all of his accounts were banned. And there was one tweet that I saw, like, come by where Elon is considering legal action. And I'm just like, what? Are you fucking kidding me? Well, I actually – well, it's weird to think that I'm on Twitter more than you at this point, but I am.

And it is just this revolving, endless story of I'm going to make up a rule and then I'm going to break the rule that I made up, but only I'm allowed to break the rule. The rest of you have to follow the rule. That is Twitter right now. Well, he's taking Trump's playbook.

It's 100 percent Trump's playbook. Like, look, Trump said, if I unclassified these documents in my mind, then they're unclassified. You know, this is pretty much what Elon is doing. It's like, OK, well, if I ban it in my mind, then it must be banned. And they're saying that, oh, no, they changed the Twitter rules, but the Twitter rules weren't propagated to the website before it got to the actual – well, it wasn't the trust and safety board that canceled the kid because obviously that was already done.

There's just all this shit that just makes no sense with what's going on with this guy, none whatsoever. So I just – yeah. OK, moving on. What's next? Well, let's move on to one of his other companies. There has been a class action lawsuit that was filed in September against Tesla because basically they're saying that there is fraud here because you have software that says full self-driving capability.

The CEO has said numerous times since 2015 that Tesla cars would be entirely self-driving in two years or less. And so there's a lawsuit saying, well, they're not self-driving. And that is fraud. And the lawyers are basically saying that, well, no, we just – just because we couldn't do it doesn't make it fraud.

Mere failure to realize a long-term aspirational goal is not fraud, Tesla's lawyers wrote in a November 28th court filing asking that the suit be dismissed. Yes, it's not fraud. Your honor, we claim incompetence. And there was one other Tesla news story that was in the news this week.

So I just want to show you – if I could meme us in a podcast, I would make the meme. What was promised – self-driving car – what was actually delivered? Tesla's latest update at Steam Games and Apple Music. Yeah, just what we want. Also, the holiday update, which includes the ability to play games from Steam in your car in support for Apple Music, plus an upgraded light show mode that lets you schedule a show that will appear across multiple vehicles at the same time.

Okay. What was promised? Self-driving car. What was provided? A multi-car light show. And the ability to play video games when you should actually be driving. Yes. Since there is no full self-driving car capability.

Yeah. Well, speaking of incompetence, let's talk about Sam Bankman-Fried for a moment. Jason, I'm feeling like I've lost the hope that I started this episode with. I told you you should have put that shit at the end, man. I told you. It all comes down to order of operations.

Have a holly jolly Christmas. Well, Sam's not having a holly jolly Christmas. I'm telling you that right now. He's stuck in a Bahamian jail and he's fighting extradition, which I think is kind of silly. Well, he could be in a Detroit jail. Well, he could be in Club Fed, which is probably where he's going to end up.

Which is where he's going to end up. Exactly. So I'd be like, OK, let's get it over with and get the hell out of here. I think maybe he's trying to avoid the winter storms maybe because all he has is shorts and flip-flops. So he might be a little cold in the Southern District of New York, which is definitely where he's going to end up very soon.

Yes, he's been charged with multiple counts of fraud, wire fraud, and all sorts of – All the frauds. Everything that he is deserving of getting is basically what he's being charged with. Actually, he deserves a lot more, but this is what he's got right now.

Well, people are kind of doing the numbers. They've been running the numbers on Matt – what was the hell? The guy? Yeah, Madox. Madox. Yeah. You know who I'm talking about. Yeah. I'm confusing his name with my nephew, Madox, right now, so I can't unthink that.

I'm getting him confused with Rachel Maddow and even though I just listened to a show about the guy who wrote the book on him. Anyways, they were running the numbers and basically saying that if he gets – just based on the numbers and it's basically the exact same crime, if he gets anything less than life, it's a travesty of justice.

Not that we haven't seen some travesties of justice recently, but hey, they seem to be throwing the book at some of these people now. So we'll see. Well, it's Madoff. Bernie Madoff. There we go. Got it. Madoff. Got it. Yeah. Madoff's crimes were far inferior to Sam Bankman-Fried's.

So, yes. I mean, you know, you factor in inflation, the cost of living. Yeah. Yeah. And you throw in a little crypto sauce on top. We've got a lot. So, yeah, there's a lot of links in here that you can go check out. But, yeah, he's kind of fucked, which we knew was going to happen.

I know claiming incompetence is fine for Tesla, but not really good for this guy. No. No. No. And celebrity promoters are now being sued for their pimping of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.

Yep. Couldn't happen to a bunch of nice people. Madonna, Kevin Hart, Stephen Curry. Or is it Stephen Curry? Steph Curry? Let's go Steph. Again, we talked about this. I'm not sure I agree with this. This one's different, though. This is different from the commercials.

This, I didn't. Well, these are pump and dumps. These are pump and dumps, and they were orchestrated by Guy O'Ciri. Couldn't find a bigger asshole in the music industry. I was getting ready to say, as soon as I said that. I hate that motherfucker. My roommate was just like, oh, that piece of shit.

I fucking hate him. I don't know anybody that likes Guy O'Ciri who's worked in the music business. That's for sure. I have off-the-air stories about this guy. Yep. We do, too. Yeah. We've got many of those, many, many Guy O'Ciri stories that we will not put here because he's got bigger lawyers.

Because we don't want to get sued. Exactly. He's got better lawyers. But what he is in trouble for is his backdoor moon pay pimping to get these people to talk about their bored apes. And, yeah. You know, look. All I care about, Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton.

If the two of them go down, I'm fine because that was the worst bit of late-night television I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. If anybody believes that that was, like, just random, what they wanted to talk about or they were told by Guy O'Ciri, talk about this. Yeah.

Yeah. No, there was a puppet master behind all of this. It is Guy O'Ciri. So I thought that really kind of opened that up. It wasn't just, like, you know, Matt Damon doing his Crypto.com commercial. That was different. That wasn't Larry David doing a commercial. These people were paid on the back end to go out and talk about it, you know?

So. Yeah. That's a load of shit. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yes. And there's a great article called Crypto is Always Smoking Mirrors Over at the Atlantic. Yes. Mm-hmm. The thing about this is it says, the fall of FTX shocked everyone except this guy by Charlie Wurtzel.

Ahem. Charlie, these two guys over here, yeah, we kind of called it before all y'all motherfuckers. So, yeah, shut the fuck up. And this guy from the OC, Ben McKenzie, got up in front of, you know, Senate or Congress or whatever.

He was in front of the Senate for the Senate Banking Committee and said, oh, yeah, it's all bad. It's all bad. I'm like, you guys should have called us. They should have called us. Thank God some B-level celebrity that was once on the OC is telling him what's up. I know. I mean, I'm like, you're an expert, dude.

He's actually co-writing a book about crypto. So, yeah. He called it the largest Ponzi scheme in history. I think he listens to this show because I'm pretty sure we said those exact words in 2014. I'm pretty sure we did.

Yeah. The DOJ and the SEC are going after influencers, these eight different influencers who have never heard of any of them. They all had over 100,000. Yeah, we're old. 100,000 followers each. They raked in more than $100,000,000.

And they're saying, no, you committed securities fraud. You're fucked. So, great. Glad somebody's finally stepping up. It's about fucking time. This is ridiculous what these people have been getting away with. Every single one of them needs to, not necessarily go to jail, but I mean, they should never.

I'd be okay with that. I wouldn't complain. Yeah. We've got room now that we've let out all the weed guys, you know. So, there's actually extra beds. So, let's fill them up with crypto bros. I'm cool. I'm cool. Cool. Excellent. Yeah. Do it.

See you later, Dan, deity of dips. Whoever the fuck you are.

So, a friend of mine, an old friend of mine who now lives in Denver, sent me a late night Instagram message and said, I think I'm finally going to come to Canada.

Are you in? And he sent me a link to the Lord of the Rings Marathon Feast on Instagram. This is an event held in nowhere near me, but in Canada is very large. So, I'll have to find out where it is on the map and how far away it is.

But every year on the Saturday before Frodo and Bilbo's birthday on September 22nd, they host a Lord of the Rings Marathon Feast. We watch all of the extended editions of the films. You and I have done that. We have done that. Yes. And in theater. And that was a very long day.

While I make and serve the seven Hobbit meals mentioned in the film made as accurately as I can manage to what Hobbits would have really eaten. I love how dedicated this woman is because she is saying, I'm making these meals accurately as to what fictional characters would have really eaten.

I know. Yeah. Can I get a schmog snack? I don't know if you looked at the pictures. It looks delicious. Oh, these potatoes look amazing. Yeah. No. I'm like, I'm in.

I mean, I don't care what you call them. Yeah. I'm not going to Manitoba for anything, but yeah. No. And just to be on a technicality, if we ever get called out on it, we watched the first two extended versions.

That's true. We watched the first two extended for the premiere of the movie. Yeah. Return of the King at midnight the day it came out. So we had to watch all day the two extended versions. There were many Bloody Marys and runs to the bar in between the movies. And then we finally got to midnight and then the guy who played the voice of Sauron came out and we're like, who the fuck's this?

Yahoo. Then we watched the movie and. Couldn't have sent a Hobbit? Seriously. We're at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and you send a voice actor? Come on. Jiminy. A little respect. A little respect for our butts because, man, they were numb.

They were numb. That was a day. That was a day. Anyways, moving on. I finished Wednesday. It was absolutely delightful. I cannot wait for a second season. It was perfect, wasn't it? I loved it. I loved every second of it. I forgive Tim Burton, many of his recent sins for this.

I know. I know. He has definitely cleared the slate for especially Willy Wonka. But, oh. Yeah. Okay. So you finished Wednesday. That was delightful. I assume you finished the peripheral. I did finish the peripheral. That was less than delightful. What the fuck was that?

I don't get it. That was a – that was a – hey, remember Westworld when we did a reboot at the end of the series? We're rebooting the series just like we did last time around and we all remember how well that went. It went so well it's being scrubbed from HBO completely. Yeah, that was – I just didn't – I didn't even understand it.

I did not understand the conceit that they were trying to pull off. I don't understand how killing her in real life but then somehow she's still just alive in the – The Matrix. She's been in a different place. Yeah, it makes no sense. And she crushed a clock which means nobody can find her but she can find the – none of it made any sense but it was obvious that this is – now we've rebooted.

Which seems to be the writer's shtick. Wouldn't it make sense if she was killed while she was – had at least the headset on? So she was at least in the – you know, in the peripheral? I don't know. In the stub?

Don't you remember the book better than me? That makes no sense. This is off book, right? OK. I have no idea. I am so confused by the ending. I'm going to have to go Wikipedia the book and figure out what the hell is going on. But yeah, it didn't – it wasn't clear. It didn't make a lot of sense. I could tell it was supposed to be really meaningful and I was just thinking in my head, I fell for this the first time when it was in cowboy hats.

Yeah, seriously. I'm not falling for this again. No. Even – OK. Even the generic peripherals in the future stub were too Westworldian for my like. They were way too Westworldian. Yeah. It's definitely like – I feel like they're just taking another stab at their thing.

This is what they know how to write. They have a chat GPT thing going on. What was the name of that new one? Script era. I got – scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Oh, my God. What the hell was that thing called?

God, we had too many news stories here. Oh, my God. We totally loaded that. But basically they plugged in instead of Western, make it future. Future Apocalypse. The Dramatron. They got the Dramatron. That's what it was. Yes. They just replaced Western with Future Apocalypse and it spit out the same story.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean I'm – I didn't really care for the book enough to go back and read it again. So – because I didn't – it was confusing the first time through. You know? So, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't get it. It's going to take a hell of a trailer to get me to watch season two.

That's all I'm saying. Ain't that the fucking truth, brother. Ain't that the truth. I did finish season two of The White Lotus. I have not watched season two yet. F. Mary Abraham has turned into Old Salieri, which is kind of fun. It's like – so, you know, I mean I've been watching Amadeus since I was like 10.

Whenever it came out, we had the double VHS and we actually watched it on HBO the first time and there was an intermission in the middle of it for a pee break. It was that long. But I know Amadeus backwards and forwards and fuck the director's cut. Nobody should ever watch the director's cut. Go find the OG.

That's the way it's supposed to be watched. But anyway, I just thought it was funny that F. Mary Abraham is literally turning into Old Salieri. His hair is the same. He looks exactly the same as the old makeup and I'm just like, wow, they did a pretty good job. I liked season two. I enjoyed it.

It was a little slow start. It was not as good as season one but nothing is ever going to be because that was a masterpiece. But this got its stride around episode three I thought and I thought it was good. I really enjoyed it. We both enjoyed it. We had a good time watching it and we're waiting for season three now.

So I give it a thumbs up, total thumbs up. I will get around to it. I'll probably watch it over our little holiday break. Yeah, yeah. Just download it to the iPad and rock and roll. Slow Horses season two. I know this is good because I get a call every week from Dr. David Teeter telling me how much he loves the show because I love it too.

I think that personally for me, this is the best thing on TV right now. I love this show so much. It is not for everyone I'm sure but if you're a fan of British spy stuff like I am, you cannot go wrong with Slow Horses.

It is just awesome. And I really want to read the – I want to go back and read the books. It's funny because LeVar Burton Reads, the podcast, one of my favorite podcasts, he had a story this week from the guy that wrote Slow Horses. So – but I fell asleep five minutes into it so I have to go back and listen to it again, which is a perk.

That's why I love listening to these stories when I fall asleep because I get to listen to them ten times before I get the whole thing. Okay. It's great. It's a feature, not a bug. Uh-huh. It would bug the hell out of me. Ups and doodads.

Barrett writes in – Must we? Must we? We have to, Brian. This is going to be quick. We must. We must. Barrett writes in – I disagree. Oh, come on. Okay. Hey, look. I had to listen to fucking 20 minutes of your uplifting bullshit at the beginning of this show.

So my turn. My turn. The force requires balance, my friend. The force requires balance. Barrett writes in, Now you can even buy a useless NFT from Trump, complete with the worst website I have ever seen.

The website is not as bad as the video. You have to watch the video or don't. Either way, Donald Trump is selling $99 NFTs. Yeah. The best tweet I saw about this at all was Trump NFTs cost $99 and make him lose 99 pounds.

They do. He's thin in every single picture. He's very svelte and he has lost all of the chins, it seems. No, it's bad. It's bad. It's bad. I actually did. I had a tweet about this as well. I think I said something along the lines of, Thank God.

Finally, we have a gift for the racist uncle that comes and ruins every holiday. Perfect. Yes. That is exactly it. Give him a Trump NFT. Yeah. Well, let's hope that they actually minted them on the FTX network because all of the FTX hosted NFTs have broken.

They have broken. It would be so fucking fitting if they were all hosted on 4chan. Oh, God. Yeah. So once FTX went down, all the NFTs went down, and yeah, what's all this about?

Yeah, we talked about this because this was Coachella as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so blockchain, I guess, doesn't really fucking matter, right? Because NFTs, all you're buying is a receipt in a link. It's all there forever, Jason. Remember, it's all there forever.

That's right. The link to the dead website. That's the promise of this great technology. Yes. Yeah, change in the world. Perfect. Change in the world. HODL to the moon. To the moon. Fucking idiot. Barrett writes again, interesting, but let's see if it will actually work.

I'm guessing the first few variations will have issues with waking up, sleeping tabs. This is a link to Chrome gets memory and energy saver modes. I don't care because I don't use Chrome. Do you care? Not really. You know, they're tweaking the system so you can have a bunch of windows open, and theoretically it won't crash because they'll sleep and all that sort of stuff.

I think the only reason this made this in the show notes is because Quibble also wrote in with, I'll just leave this here. I have no idea as to its veracity. And this is somebody who wrote into Microsoft Edge on Reddit and said, I think I found a bug. Edge crashed with 1,600 open tabs.

Clicked and built restore, but crashes after a minute. I had about 1,600 tabs open, then Edge suddenly crashed despite me having plenty of spare RAM. I reopened Edge and clicked on the restore button that's part of Edge, but Edge crashes and closes again after a minute of trying to restore my 1,600 open tabs.

You're doing it wrong, buddy. You're doing it wrong. I don't think you understand internet. No, you don't know how the fuck to use the internet. Have you heard of Bookmark? No. Nope. No. Okay. Nope. 1,600 tabs. It's like when I see somebody's phone and they have like 8,000 unread emails, and I just want to tear my skin off my face.

Oh, I've seen them over 100,000. I've seen them over 100,000 unread messages in an email, and I'm just like, oh my God. There's a decency to turn off the number on your icon, sir. God. I'm just like, how dirty are your private parts? How do you live with yourself?

Because you have to be a filthy human being if you can't get rid of your emails. It's just, God. You must have, oh, yeah. I feel bad. I feel bad for your nether regions. Related. It was Gaio series, and 7,000 of those were invoices I had sent to him that he still hasn't paid 20 years later.

Oh, there you go. There you go. Well, Apple is moving into third-party app stores thanks to the EU. It looks like they're working on it now, so we'll be able to sideload apps onto our iPhones at some point, which I will not be doing because there's a reason that we don't do that.

I like my phone not being bricked. Or hacked or, you know, basically any – all the features that Android has that we don't on an iPhone, those are the ones I like. Yeah, like being able to download fake software that's actually malware. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Good luck with that. Oh, man. But they're also – now, here's a good one, though. They're also considering dropping the requirement for browsers to use WebKit on iOS and iPadOS. That I can get behind right now because, God damn, I hate WebKit.

You know? It's like we got all these great browsers out there that have all these great rendering engines that do all this great stuff, and they are just hamstrung because Apple says, no, you got to use WebKit. Come on. Yeah. Come on. But we do have a new app from Apple called – oh, this new thing.

It's called Freeform. Isn't that a network that does teen shows? I don't know. I'm not big in the teen network show world. I'll leave that up to your expertise. I updated iPadOS 16.2 and iOS 16.2 this morning, and I saw it.

I haven't used it, but it looks like basically just a FaceTime scratch board. Yeah, it's a shareable whiteboard. So, cool. Okay. Yep. Great. Up to 99 friends. Woo! I don't have 99 friends. I don't have nine friends. At least none that I would FaceTime with.

Geez. Yeah, I can't – I just – I don't see the point, but I'm glad that they made it. That's nice. I mean, who knows? Like, notes have become integral with my wife and I for sharing things. I – maybe Freeform will be useful with my kid one day because he seems to be artistic and he can do stuff and – but big deal.

Whatever. Okay. Yeah, whatever. I'm ready for the holiday. Security? Ha! Welcome 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 piracy. Arr! I've been reading too many category pirates. I've been reading category pirates books all day.

Surveillance and piracy. Arr! Arr! And Control Loop where you discuss ICS and OT. Hello, Dave. Thank you for joining me for the final show of the year. Yes. Very exciting. Yes. Brian is off at his company Christmas party so he could not join us today.

Oh, okay. He's drinking eggnog and standing under the mistletoe. Whatever Canadians do now, you know. Oh, right. Kiss a moose or something. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah. Toss a beaver. Something like that. Yeah. Hey now. Hey now.

It's a family show. It's a family show. Oh, yeah. That's what this is. A family show. Sure. Okay. That's right. All right. So, Brian did leave us with a story that he put in from Brady. He says, Brady says, Hi, Grumps. Love the show and I contribute monthly through Patreon.

Thank you, Brady. I recently had an idea that I'd love to hear your and Dave's thoughts on. I use one password and I love the convenience, but I'm still worried they could be breached and give up the ghost to all my accounts. I'm wondering your thoughts on using the password manager to only save most of my password to sites I really care about, like my financial sites.

I let the password manager fill in what they have saved and then I type in a few additional characters to create the actual password. My theory is that if the password manager company was ever breached, the bad guys would likely assume the passwords were just wrong.

And even if they figure out my little trick, it would likely buy me enough time to hear about the breach and rotate my passwords. Curious your thoughts. I will save Brian's thoughts to the end. What are your thoughts on this one, Dave? I have heard about this technique before. Brady is not the first person to have suggested this.

I don't think it's bad. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I do think Brady's thinking is a little bit off in that if I think – I think the way that anyone's passwords are most likely to be breached with a password manager is through credential stuffing, not through a breach of the password management company themselves.

As far as I know, all of the legit password management companies encrypt all of your passwords and they don't have the keys to them. So they would need your credentials to get into your account to get your passwords. So my point here is on your – if you're going to use multi-factor on one account and you're going to use something like a hardware key, make it your password manager.

That's the one that really matters. Yeah. Yeah. It's the one that rules them all. But I have heard this notion of adding a couple of supplementary characters to your passwords. And so, like you said, the password manager auto-fills things in.

You click, click, click, add a couple of characters and off you go. I don't think there's a problem with that. It's an extra step. But I don't see it getting in the way of anything the password manager does. So I don't have a problem with it. I don't see it catching on.

But I think it's logically sound. OK. Here's why I think it is not logically sound. Just for my personal use case. And I've talked about this since the stroke where I optimize for my demise. Where I want to be able to, if I do kick off, have everybody I know that needs to get to the – get the access that they need to have, access to my password manager.

So then they can have all the passwords that they need to do to, like, take care of bank accounts or whatever, you know, any services that I run or things like that. Right. So this kind of scheme negates that whatsoever, like whole cloth. So unless you have it written down with, like, say, your attorney who is also your, you know, the arbitrator of your will, then you've basically just screwed everybody with your password manager and they're just going to be left in the lurch.

That's true. I trust 1Password. I trust 1Password implicitly. You know, I've been using them since they started. As far as I know, that there's never been a breach, unlike LastPass, which is, you know, one every three years at this point. So I decided to put my trust in the password manager because everybody else is like, OK, the financial institutions, all this other stuff, there are ways that you can get your money back, you know, if you were hacked on different aspects of it.

But as far as, you know, somebody getting your password and transferring the money out, I don't know if you can get the money back on that one. So caveat emptor. But I don't know. I just think that that kind of ruins the whole premise of it. And here's what Brian said.

Brian says, thus defeating the purpose of a password manager as you'll not be able to use autofill or anything. So might as well keep an encrypted password protected text file printed out and tucked underneath your tinfoil hat. I think Brian might be going a little hard on that one.

A little harsh. A little harsh. Yeah. Yeah. That's OK. I get what Brian is getting at here. But I think the reality of it is somewhere in the middle that, yes, what Brady is saying does add an extra step. And if you used the same suffix on all of your passwords, so in other words, the password manager is still generating random passwords and then you add your whatever your little extra code is to the end of it.

And if that's the same for everything, you're still getting all the security of the password manager, you know, you're still getting all the security of the additional, you know, a couple characters that aren't stored in your password manager. So I don't think it's a huge burden. I don't think it's a huge burden to adopt this method, but I think your point is correct also that it's an extra layer of complexity.

Yeah, I see the juice isn't worth the squeeze on this. I think it's going to cause more problems than it will actually solve because he says he's using 1Password. And like I said, 1Password has not been breached. It is double encrypted on both sides.

So keep that – keep your password and your key super safe and use whatever, you know, multiple factors that you need to use. And then just put the trust in – I put my trust in 1Password, which means they're probably going to get hacked tomorrow the way things go.

I'll tell you another interesting little tip that I've heard for using password managers to lessen the likelihood of you becoming a victim should there be a breach. And that is that most people, when they configure their password manager and the password manager says, how many characters would you like your random passwords to be?

Oh, yes, yes. Most people choose a number that is a multiple of five, right? This is just how we work with numbers. Most people choose 15 or 20 or 25 or 30, something like that. So the tip is use an odd number that – use 21 or 23 or – So that way if they're banging away – Thirteen.

Yeah. So if they're banging away at your passwords, they're going to start with the number of characters that most people use. Eight. And so if nothing else – Well, right. Exactly. The number of letters in the word password. Yep.

So if nothing else, this will slow them down and maybe make you not so much the low-hanging fruit compared to your neighbors, the old – not having to outrun the bear thing. I'm pretty sure if you use 13 characters plus special characters in multiple case that you are outside of anything that is not quantum computing for our lifetime.

I thought 13 was the number. That's what I've heard too. 13 is the number that the feds use and I'm not sure if that's still the up-to-date number, but I've certainly heard that number in the past few years as being the standard. So – I think I heard it from an XKCD commercial or cartoon, so caveat emptor on that one.

Yeah. Yeah. I've seen it on security posters, like from the NSA and stuff. Okay. Well, if it's from the NSA, we'll take that one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's an interesting point. Thank you, Brady. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Brady.

And Mike writes in, if you want to get your Radio Shack nostalgia fix and are traveling the 101 between L.A. and San Francisco, San Luis Obispo County has three old-school Radio Shacks to choose from thanks to our local Coast Electronics Radio Shack, ham radios, bulk capacitors, and all.

That's not that far from here. Unfortunately, it's outside of my driving range since the stroke, so I'd need to find a ride. But it's not that far. It's like maybe an hour and a half from here. It's kind of – that would be a fun road trip. So if you ever come back to town – Yeah, I was going to say, if I fit back in the neighborhood, we could have a road trip together.

Yeah. That would be fun. You can drive my Jeep and we'll head up there in the little pumpkin and go find some Radio Shack. And we could stop in Santa Barbara for some creme brulee. Mm-hmm. It's just – this is going to sound creepy and weird, but I don't mean it that way.

That part of entering a Radio Shack for me was it was a sensual experience in that my senses – like my sense of smell, all those electronics, there's a certain smell to a Radio Shack that was different from a grocery store or a clothing store or whatever.

The scent, the sound. Oh, I know that smell, yes. Yeah, yeah. And so – Batteries. I am very nostalgic for that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the fries here had that same smell too. You walked in and you're just like, yeah, I'm home. Yeah, right. That's the smell of nerd.

Right, exactly. Right, old solder and grease. Yeah, yeah. So where do you stand in terms of your activity on Twitter these days as we record today? I'm done.

I have given up. I've been off for a week and a half now. And earlier in the show I told Brian that it's like I'm working on rebuilding my attention span and it is going great. I can read long-form articles again. I'm writing a screenplay for a – it's not a screenplay.

It's an audio play for a thriller that I'm working on based on generative AI. It's just – so for me, the fact that I'm off Twitter and off all social media has turned into just the best thing that's ever happened to me. So where are you at?

Similarly, I locked down my Twitter account earlier this week and I am winding down my use of the account by the end of the year and I'm pretty much switched over to Mastodon and it's going very well.

Mastodon reminds me of Twitter when Twitter was new, which is much more signal than noise. It's not algorithm-driven, which is nice and it's just pleasurable. People are so much nicer. So far the trolls haven't shown up or at least I'm not seeing them.

It's more polite. So I'm hoping to – I don't know why I believe this but I'm hoping – I'm being hopelessly optimistic that it may – that it could possibly stay that way. Stay gold, Johnny Boy or Pony Boy.

Pony Boy. Pony Boy, yeah. Yeah, stay gold, Pony Boy. Another movie I never saw. That was The Outsiders, right? The Outsiders, yeah. Or was that Rumblefish? OK. I think that was The Outsiders, yeah. The Outsiders and Rumblefish came out at this – like around the same time, right? They were both black and white. I'm trying to remember.

I never saw either one. I don't remember that. I remember – we read the book I think in middle school. Rumblefish was black and white, right? I – phew. Got me. OK. I don't remember. I don't think – I got these weird things that pop in my head from that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's funny.

I was listening to the radio earlier this week and they were talking to somebody who studies dreams and they were talking about whether or not people dream in color or black and white. And they said that they can track descriptions of dreams being in black and white aligned with black and white movies and television.

So when people were experiencing black and white visual stuff, their dreams were more likely to be reported as being black and white. And now since you can't buy a black and white television and everything is in color, people dream in color again.

But the interesting point that they mentioned that I had never heard before, they said, do you read in color or black and white? In other words, if you – for someone who claims they dream in black and white, when you're reading and you're picturing things in your mind's eye, do you read in color or black and white?

And I've never heard that question asked before and I've been thinking about that all week. That is a really strange question because, you know, I would assume that I dream in – or I read in color. Yeah. But do I? Well, right.

And so they were comparing reading with dreaming in that it's sort of a strange thing because with reading, you've got these words and your mind is assembling the image and dreaming is a similar sort of thing where while you're asleep, your subconscious is assembling this visual image that your eyes really aren't involved with.

So it's this funny in-between thing. And so, yeah, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about that. Do you read in color? I don't know the answer to that. It's funny. The latest series that I read literally on my Kindle was the Murderbot series and I do not believe that any of my visuals for that are in color.

It's all black and white. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, the brain, the brains. Yeah. I do have one security story this week from Brian Krebs over at Krebs on Security. The FBI got hacked.

So the FBI has an information sharing network that they call InfraGuard and this is basically a way to have a public-private partnership between big organizations and the FBI to share information back and forth. And there was some kind of a vetting process to become a member of this forum, online forum, let's call it, information sharing network.

And somebody breached it. Did you have to pay for FBI Blue to get your verified checkmark on InfraGuard? Yeah. $11 a month if you use iOS. Somebody breached it who's going by the name USDOD and, as we joked, is obviously unconnected with the Pentagon.

And they pretended to be – so they applied to InfraGuard using the identity from a major U.S. financial corporation CEO. So they applied using that – all that person's PII, their name, their social security number, date of birth, all that stuff.

So they applied with it and basically without any follow-up, the FBI granted access and this person then ran with it and sucked up all the information off of InfraGuard and is now offering it for sale on the dark web.

Well, yeah, that's the FBI's fault pretty much. There's no – It is. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about that. Yeah. That was some lazy-ass shit. Well, and obviously the FBI is investigating, but it's a black eye for the FBI.

It's an embarrassment for them. They will certainly up their vetting of people when they – in the future. But I think also it shows that this can happen to anybody and the FBI – it sounds to me like they didn't properly consider the threat model here.

In coming up with their vetting process, so. Yeah, yeah. No, that's – that's bad. But it's still funny. I mean, it's funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the last thing I have for us this week, a fun YouTube video I watch.

It's actually a documentary from the BBC and it is the story of the Marshall Amp. About an hour-long documentary and it's the history of Marshall Amps, which of course, rock and roll and heavy metal and all that are – it is a foundational element of all of that.

And it's a really interesting documentary going through the history of Marshall, how they got their start and their ups and downs and where they stand today. It's a fun watch. There's lots of – if you're a fan of rock and roll and metal, they've got some great interviews with some folks.

They've got Pete Townsend from The Who and some other well-known people. Yeah, just talking about how important Marshall Amps were to them and that the Marshall Amp had a sound unlike any other and that it was the sound of rock and roll. Nice.

I will definitely check that out on the break. So what are you going to do for the break, Dave, for this run-up to the new year? Well, I always say I'm enjoying a long winter's nap, which I'm definitely going to do. We take the week off between Christmas and New Year's.

I have some plans. I'm going to go see a show at the Kennedy Center. I'm going to go see Wicked with the family. So that will be fun. You will be defying gravity. I'm going to go up to the Smithsonian Museum, the one that's not down in the mall in D.C., the one that's out in the sticks that has a space shuttle.

I have not been to that one. Yeah, they have a space shuttle. They have an SR-71. They have lots of cool stuff. Road trip. Yeah. Yeah. So it's about an hour away from here and I haven't been there yet. So we're going to go out there one of the days.

But other than that, just kick back, enjoy, have quiet time with the family, hopefully recharge and be ready for the new year. How about you? Awesome. I am going to be reading audiobooks in my studio pretty much nonstop from sunup to sundown just to get caught up on all the category pirate stuff I have to do because we got a lot of books to read.

These guys are prolific. It's fun. I'm actually really enjoying just waking up, coming in, having my tea and reading books. It's like it is the perfect job at this point. So that's all I'm going to do this break. Yeah.

Yeah. That's kind of it. I'm jealous you're going to get to go see a shuttle and an SR-71. That's – I love – I mean that's – for me that is just like – that is nerdvana right there. I mean the Air and Space Museum is my favorite museum at the Smithsonian.

I've gone there multiple, multiple times, spent many days there. Love it there. And – but yeah, getting to go see a shuttle in person or an SR-71 in person would be pretty cool for sure. I'm looking forward to it. It's – the one thing they have at this place is space.

So giant hangers. Yeah. I might actually go – that's the one thing I was talking about during the break is the Ronald Reagan library is down the road from me. And they've got Ronald Air Force One there. So you can actually go into Air Force One and see the chair that Reagan was talking to Gorbachev on when they were doing their deals.

I don't know which chair he was sitting on when he was doing the Ollie North deals or the – any of the Margaret Thatcher crap that – I mean Ronald Reagan to me is a villain. But it would still be cool to go check out the library because it's in a really cool area. But yeah.

Yeah, that was one of the – Gettysburg is near us as well and one of the little side trips that the Park Service offers there is to President Eisenhower's home, which was right there at Gettysburg.

It was – I believe it was the only house he ever owned that was not a government-owned house because he spent his whole career in the military and then the White House. And it's a modest home, very nice for its time but by today's standards, nothing extravagant about it.

But similar to what you're saying about Reagan sitting in the chair, there's a back porch and you just imagine Eisenhower sitting there in his chair with the other world leaders who would come to visit him and talk about all the stuff they talked about throughout and after World War II.

It's just interesting to sit there and contemplate the world-changing decisions that were made in that location, such a modest location. Just wonder about the conversations that happened there. So if you make it up to Gettysburg, I highly recommend taking the little bus over to Eisenhower's home.

I found it to be one of the most interesting things about that national park site. Oh, that's very cool. I knew in grade school I went to Gettysburg to the battlefield and all that stuff. That was our field trips from Virginia Beach. We'd go up there. We'd hit all of the historical stuff and then we'd hit Busch Gardens after that and go ride.

Sure. Oh, yeah. Like this monster and the big bad wolf. Right. Yes. This is much better than looking at a field where a bunch of people that I don't care about died. Great. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. They at least saved the best for last. They didn't butter us up with, you know, Busch Gardens first and then make us go.

Right. Right. If you all can behave through the battlefields, we'll go to Busch Gardens. So they hang that over your heads. That's pretty much it. That's pretty much it. Well, happy holidays and Merry Christmas. Happy holidays to you too. Keep your eye out because your Grumpy Old Geeks Christmas present is on the way.

It has shipped. Oh, that's delightful. That's very nice. We have upped our game slightly this year. Don't get your hopes up too much. We've upped our game slightly. Is it a manual or a stick shift? Damn, you got us.

It's that Pinto that we've been promising you for years since you joined the show. Yeah. We almost upgraded to a Gremlin, but no, you're getting the stick shift Pinto. No, but it is coming from overseas. So keep an eye out for somebody who tries to have you sign for something.

And by the way, I got the weirdest thing yesterday from Azerbaijan. It was this little like three inch by three inch envelope and it came from Azerbaijani post. I opened it up and it is literally a key chain with a mini crescent wrench on it.

And I'm thinking, is this some kind of like notification that I'm going to get whacked? Like, what the hell is this thing? Why would somebody from Azerbaijan send me literally a 15 cent key chain with a mini crescent wrench on it?

I have not figured this out yet. This is going to keep me up at night. And maybe that was the point of it. Maybe it's something – you know what I'll bet? I will bet that at some point in one of the shows that you do, you offhandedly mentioned, my life would be better if only I had this tool.

And some listener somewhere said, well, I'll send you that tool. And so they sent you the tool. From Azerbaijan. Well, people are fans all around the world. I am always – I'm pleasantly surprised by how often a listener just randomly sends me something and it's always delightful.

So far, nothing has been like ticking or anything like that. Yes. I prefer the fans of the show send cash. That's the one thing that's best. But every now and again – The universal gift, sure. Yes. I do have some amazing magnets on a stick from our friend in Wheaton.

I've got all sorts of random stuff. But now I have this weird thing from Azerbaijan. I'll send you a picture of it. See if you can decrypt it because I was just like, is this a warning? Is this like – am I being targeted? What is this thing? So I don't know.

Maybe Elon sent it to me after I criticized him too many times. Right, right. We'll see. All right. Well, I'll talk to you in the new year. Take care. Talk to you in the new year. Bye. Over at Patreon, we've got Andrew.

Welcome, Andrew. Thank you, Andrew. Over at PayPal, we've got Ralph, Phillip, Edward, Linda, Robert, Natalie, Sherry, Dag, Nathaniel, Edward, Miles, and Cecilia – or actually just Celia – with the big 50-buck donation. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. And I did not alphabetize them this week because I know you got butthurt last week.

It was annoying. Over at the tip jar, we've got Alden and Sean, and we've got William Generous for $200. And William writes in, hello! Just donated and thought I would say thank you for the great show and keep up the great work. I'm also that looper that switched to iPhone because Google tried to screw me out of 30 euros in credit.

He actually helped nudge me over that edge, and I haven't regretted it. I miss a few things from Android, but losing an afternoon trying to figure it out and get it working is something I don't miss. Thank you. And fuckhbo.com is still pointing at the right place. Have a great holiday. Yes, William Generous is the one that got us fuckhbo.com.

Talk about nominative determinism. William Generous gave us $200. Very nice. And I cannot think of a better way to end our year than our last review of the year. From Fun1894, one star, bad language, ugh.

You know what that little E for explicit? Yeah. It says it right on the tin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So thanks, Fun1894. And in sad news, rest in peace, Angelo Baldiamente, who did the Twin Peaks soundtrack and many other wonderful bits of music, supremely talented musician.

I can think of no better way to honor his memory than to watch the David Lynch weather report from the day, and he honors him in the way that only David Lynch can. Okay. I started to watch it. I'm just like, this is just a weather report.

You know they air that every single day on NPR, right? They do? He does that every day, and they play it on NPR, which is genius. Oh, that's funny. That's funny. And I've got an RIP to Twitch. He was a fantastic dancer. I loved him on So You Think You Can Dance.

I thought he was great. I never watched Ellen, so I didn't know him from that, but I knew him from So You Think You Can Dance. And, yeah, I'm just watching the news on his suicide because something does not smell right here at all. But, yeah, timelines don't work out. Yeah.

Look, the wife went into a police station to report him missing. In Hollywood, nobody goes to the police. That's rule number one, never go to the police. And she went into a station, which means that she was trying to put some point in time – listen to me.

I can go on for a while on this. I'm just going to say – Oh, my God. You're turning into Eric Hundley. I am. I really am. Eric, let's get on this. I'll do a special episode. But I'm sad that he's gone because I thought he was a fantastic dancer and a really nice guy. And I knew a lot of people that knew him and said the same exact thing. So this is a shocker.

It's a shocker. All right. Well, have a happy holiday, everybody. Have a great new year. We'll see you in 2023, maybe. Although I suppose we've already booked ads, so we have to show up. We're going to be back. And, hey, if you want some more ads, jpd.me will hook you up.

Until next time, I'm Brian Chilmeister. 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. It's easy and absolutely free. Just look for that little share button where you're listening right now and send it far and wide for the holidays.

Give it as Christmas presents. It's free. You'll look cool to your friends. Show notes for this episode. And it's, yeah, cheap, too. Show notes for this episode are at gog.show slash 582. 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, because that is my only social media right now.

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. Instead of the one star, because we say fuck a lot. Fuck you. Stay grumpy, motherfuckers.

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