612: TwiX are for Kids

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Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm the Canadian version of Brian Schulmeister. I'm glad you're back home. I'm so glad you're back home. Nice to be back in my house. Nice to be back up in my attic loft studios. Slash workspace. It's good.

Yeah. Yeah. No, whatever weird sorcery is at your mother's house with the electrics caused no end of consternation for us technically last time. Look, it's been a lifelong struggle. Electronics always blow up there. Nothing ever makes sense.

I blame the wiring. I think there are poltergeists. There are ghosts in the machine, to quote Sting. All right. All right. Yeah. So maybe move your mom to Canada because that place might be haunted for sure or reels.

Anyway, it's got a quick follow up on boot up. Thanks for everybody that popped over and started listening. I appreciate it. There will be some changes next week because the biggest complaint I've got is timing. So what's going to end up happening is I'm going to schlep my ass to the office the night before, record it.

So it goes out for the drive time early for the East Coast folks. The West Coast has many, many pluses. Timing is not one of them. Nope. No, not at all. But it works out with my schedule quite nicely now that I have this nice little studio room where I can walk in, literally press record, speak into the microphone, press stop and go home.

It's fantastic. Right. So, yeah, check it out. Bootup.show if you're interested. Tech news in 10 minutes or less. It's fun. I'm enjoying doing it. So the numbers, it's funny. I do read off how many people listened to the previous episode at the beginning of the show because I find it funny.

But it wasn't funny as the numbers kept going down and down last week. I'm like, wait a minute. This isn't how that's supposed to work. It's supposed to go up. Yeah. Then profit. The line goes up. Damn it. Oh, well. Yeah. Got some more follow up.

We've been talking a lot about threads and social media in general recently. There's an article over at Slate swapping a Twitter habit for a threads one. The TLDR there is basically same shit, different day. But we had one specific question because last week the threads had rolled out the algorithm or not the algorithmic.

The thing that we all want, which is just a straight up time based timeline because the word time is in timeline. Yeah. And so they rolled that out. And my big question was, I wonder if they're going to do the tomfuckery that Twitter did, which is, you know, and Facebook, which is you'd always have to go set it back to that.

It would default back to the algorithmic feed that gets them their ad money. Turns out, yeah, it does. That question was answered in the article. Consider the real nature of the new following only feed reporters at The Verge discovered last week that when users browse the app's newest additions, threads will occasionally re-hide the following feed and bring you back to the for you feed after you open the app.

You have to put in active effort to keep yourself out of the recommendation, happy default settings. You know how much. So, yes, they're fucking with us, too. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, it's like it's hidden. So you have to tap the home icon to even get it to show the two tabs. And it's still being rolled out differently for different people with different devices.

Like it works on my phone now, but it doesn't work on any of my iPads, which is frustrating as hell. Let me tell you how many times I've opened up threads since last week. One. Just a check. How many times I've opened up Blue Sky?

Zero. Yeah. How many times I've checked Twitter? Probably once a day, just simply because I still have it set to like my default tabs that open on my browser when I launch it. So, yeah, there you go. The Yahoo effect. Exactly.

Yeah, it's still just there. So I'll look. But I mean, I'm so done with it. Yeah. I mean, what I'm learning is that, you know, A, I just don't have much to say on social media anymore. So I don't interact with friends anymore.

Right. Because that they've fucked that for us. Yeah. They've gotten rid of the ability to be to see real time updates from our friends and get involved into conversations with them about things and share stuff with friends. I don't need another place to interact with brands.

Yeah. No, what they've done is they have actively removed the social from the social media. Now it's just media. It's just media media. Yeah. Media media. Yep. So thanks, Elon, for at least giving me back that time that I don't need anymore.

I mean, I'm actually pleased that we were around for like the flowering of social media because we did go through a brief period where it was a lot of fun and it was cool. And we reconnected with friends. You know, sometimes that worked out, sometimes not so much. But, you know, at least we had that period where it was kind of cool and fun.

But it's over, man. Bring back LiveJournal. Oh, wait. The Ruskies own it now. Damn it. There's a great article over at The Verge called Elon Musk Wants a Second Chance to Fail at X. The article is a nice little explainer on, you know, the history of everything.

But the last paragraph comes back to exactly what we said last week. And I would like to read it for our listeners. It says, banking is highly regulated and it's highly regulated for a reason, as cryptocurrency enthusiasts have been discovering the hard way. Leave aside the technical questions of building a super app.

The technical part's comparatively easy. The hard part is social. Finance is built on a foundation of trust. That's what those regulations are for. Now take a look at Musk's behavior with respect to regulations in general and at Twitter with respect to the social stuff.

Ask yourself and be honest, is this the kind of man, someone you trust with your money? No. No, not at all. Period. I mean, they use more words. I don't even want to drive his car. Yeah. No shit. No shit.

But there you go. So, and speaking of driving the cars, we've gone back and forth on the Tesla as keeping Elon as CEO thing. But it turns out it hasn't really bitten him in the ass too much yet.

But, here's the but. Bloomberg did a great article called, Tesla owners have soured on Elon Musk but still love their Model 3s. And it's... By all accounts, they're good cars. Like, people I know that have them love them. So, yeah.

Yeah, but when the owner is such a raging twataholic, it's starting to become more difficult. So, people are saying that they're still going to be getting EVs in the future, but they're thinking maybe not a Tesla. But they do still love the Model 3s that they have.

But it's a beautiful piece of web work with all of the graphs and all of the... If you scroll to the bottom, there's a bunch of tweets from people who love and hate Elon. And it's color-coded very well. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I do still like to see good design.

It's so rare these days. It really is. The New York Times was doing it for a while with their infographic posts. Yeah. And I'm starting to see people on the news change their Twitter logo to the X logo when they show their handles. Well, it is the new name. But it looks profoundly fucking stupid, for one.

Because it looks like a letter. It doesn't... It had to squint to find out it was an X. I thought... I'm like, why did... Oh, that's the logo. Duh. But the great part is every anchor is making fun of it. And they're like, are we still on that thing? I actually saw somebody on Twitter...

Oh, X. Sorry. X. When it auto-loaded in my browser window, somebody had posted a screenshot of, I think, a pop-up window DM or something like that. And they're like, the X logo now looks like it's where I'm supposed to click to close the window. But there's another X over on the other side.

This is so horrible. So dumb. So dumb. So here's what I say, Brian. In this interim period of transition where we don't know what to call anything, I think that we refer to the entity formerly known as Twitter, and now the confusing is fuck X.

I think we call it Twix. But I like Twix. Twix are for kids. It's actually not Twix are for kids. It's Trix are for kids. But hey, Elon's a silly wabbit. He can steal the logo and the tagline and just not pay for anything. Like, he doesn't pay for rent or severance.

So... Or cleaners. I say we call it Twix. Okay. Twix it is. In the news.

We've been talking for quite a bit about the whole AI explosion from the beginning till now. And one of the things that I think we both agree upon is that we need some sort of differentiation. We need labeling when things are generated by AI as opposed to actual humans and in all forms.

And Meta seems to understand that. Maybe. Meta's consumer-facing generative AI tools based on its new Llama 2 model may not be far off. And according to screenshots shared by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who shows up often in this... This is a busy guy.

We talk about what he finds all the time. He always finds unreleased features from Meta apps by trolling through code and things like that. He basically says they're working on a generated by Meta AI label. Now, obviously, that's only going to work if you use their tools to generate something within their programs.

But it's something. I mean, that can work for images and music and, you know, things like that. You know, more binary files. You know, you can embed enough data in those things to trigger some kind of content warning. You can't do that with text, though.

That's the thing. That's why all these things fail. Well, the other issue is, okay, great. Meta's going to do that because they're a big company. Adobe's going to build in guardrails because they're a big company. But the cat's out of the fucking bag. Yeah, the shit's open-sourced. The shit's open-sourced everywhere.

And a lot of people are going to put out a lot of versions that have zero guardrails. They already are. So we know that's going to happen. But, Brian, if you update to the latest version with content-aware filtering, then the problem's solved. Oh, wait. It's open-sourced. They don't have to upgrade. Oh, damn.

I didn't think about that. Yeah. There you go. No. And now that I'm back in Canada land, Facebook and Instagram have begun their Canadian news blockout. Have you noticed? Yes. I can say that I definitely have. I have some thoughts about this.

I get, you know, Meta doesn't want to pay because why would they? If they don't have to, they haven't had to pay forever. So why should they start now? Except they should because they're using content and they're using it to promote their own system. And it is news and international outlets.

And so they should get paid. And Australia tried this and now Canada's trying it as well. Yeah. News is completely gone from my feeds here. Unless I've A-B tested, I've put on my VPN and put myself back in Los Angeles. And all of a sudden, there's all my news articles.

I switch it off and I go back and news articles are gone. Now, I, you know, I will let these people fight it out. They can figure it out. They can negotiate. What I am going to tell Meta is the same thing is going to happen with me, with Facebook and Instagram.

Less so with Instagram because I'm still, here we go again. I don't see my friends' updates on Instagram anymore. I see brands. So I'm kind of done with Instagram. I still load it every now and then and I check on it. Facebook, I've been using in large part for this show.

I follow a bunch of news organizations on Facebook. I get updates. I see news articles. I go read those news articles and I put them in the show if they're worth it. Now that I don't see those anymore, why the fuck am I loading Facebook? What you are doing is you are stopping us from caring about using your products anymore.

Now they've taken out social and media. Yeah. So what's left? What am I using you for? I don't know why I'm using Instagram. All I see is brands. I don't see friends. We already just talked about the Twitter and the 20 million Twix clones that are out there.

Now Facebook is useless to me. You guys are killing your own companies. And? That's it. That's end of rant. Okay. I'm just buying a bag of marshmallows and sitting back because, yeah, I, you know, I was using Twix to get most of my news because I had a very highly curated feed.

Now all those people are spread across. They're all gone. Yeah, they're spread across threads, blue sky, mastodon. We've had the diaspora of all the people that I followed and they're not all on all places or they are. They set up a presence. But who wants to go update four different fucking versions of Twix?

So they don't. So they pick one. And now all my feeds are gone. Great. Thanks, everybody. This is awesome. This is just great. I have a cycle or a circuit that I do every morning. I hit Twix, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Threads, and LinkedIn.

And I just post my boot up update and then turn it off for the rest of the day. Somebody told me the other day, they're like, hey, I sent you a message on Instagram. I'm like, and you expected me to see it? Somebody sent me a message on LinkedIn a year ago. It had been a year since I'd logged into LinkedIn.

I sent somebody a birthday wish like about a month and a half ago. And they're like, hey, thanks for reaching out. And I'm like, I did? Like, oh, I guess I did. But it's all so useless now. No. Hey, let's talk about something else that's useless, though. NFTs.

All right. Oh, I love this. The NFT market is still experiencing a decline, according to Crypto Slam. Yeah, NFT sales in July totaled $495.6 million, a drop of 23% from $646.1 million in June.

Still feels like about $495 million too high. Yeah, exactly. And it's all by three people just selling it back and forth to try and keep the price up. Right. What they're saying, though, is that it doesn't necessarily signal the end of NFTs. What it shows is that people are buying cheaper NFTs that used to be really expensive.

They left that part out. Yeah. Nobody cares anymore. Nobody cares about your NFT, which we predicted from the get. Yeah, we did. NFTs are dead. And even the GMs on Twix have slowed down, I see. So, like, people are starting to realize that they're not going to become billionaires off these stupid things anymore.

And that they're kind of silly. It's funny you put an article about NFTs in here because I saw something on Twix on one of my many browser loads that made me chuckle briefly. And then I promptly forgot about it because, like, why the fuck would we talk about NFTs on the show anymore? Because NFTs are dead.

But you did. So I went back and found it. This is by Winchell Chung over on Twix. And it says, When I was very little, someone purchased a star for me, like a real star out somewhere in the galaxy. I had a photo of the star framed on my wall with handwritten coordinates of the star's location and a little blurb about how it belonged to me.

The company that sold this to me no longer exists. In fact, many companies were in this business selling stars, keeping registration of who owned what stars. There was no way of knowing if your star had already been sold to someone previously. No way to prevent it being sold again. And there was no way to physically claim your property.

Virtually all of these companies are now defunct and their ledgers are buried in the sands of time. So anyway, enjoy your NFTs. Perfect. Perfect. And I saw this article. China is considering limiting kids' smartphones time to two hours per day.

We talked about this a year or two ago when they first enacted some rules limiting smartphone time. So the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC. has proposed draft rules that would cap the phone time of children under 18 to a maximum of two hours per day.

That's for 16 to 17-year-olds too. Youth between 8 and 15 would be limited to one hour per day, while those under 8 would have 40 minutes. Phones will need to have an easy-to-access mode that lets parents restrict what kids see and permit internet providers to show age-appropriate content.

Children under 3 will be limited to songs and other forms of audio, while those 12 and up can see educational and news materials. There would be exceptions for regulated educational content, emergency services, and propaganda from China, one would assume. Yes, one would assume. So China, I'm way ahead of you.

I keep my kid under 30 minutes, and that's not every day either. And for this to actually happen, I'm wondering, you know, is Apple, Android, they're all going to have to interact, add stuff to their software. So will most apps? I support this.

I hope you don't just do it in China. Roll it out everywhere if you're going to do this. Parents need these tools. Full stop. Well, welcome to America. We ain't doing shit in America. I know. I know. I'm just saying every now and then, China throws up a good idea. Yeah, maybe. Maybe.

Except the stock for all of the social apps in China dropped like a rock when this came out. It still has a public comment period that still has to get through. I got to tell you, though, if you're not a kids-only company and your stock drops precipitously because of rules of what happens with under 18-year-olds, you're doing it wrong.

Yeah. Well, I think the main one that dropped was the TikTok clone over there, which makes total sense why that would drop. But we'll see how this goes. Let's see if it gets past the quote-unquote public comment phase because I'm pretty sure the public comment phase over there is like, yes, comrade, we'll take it.

We'll take it. Whatever you say, you know best. You know best. Now, I have a pair of articles here that just made me crack the fuck up. WorldCoin says it will allow companies and governments to use its ID system. No thanks. Yeah, WorldCoin, for those who don't remember, is the orb that scans your retina, keeps it on file to make sure that you're human, and gives you some play money in exchange if you live in the proper area.

You can't do that in the U.S. right now because we have regulations that say, hey, this is a scam. Don't do it. But, yeah, they're saying that, hey, we've built this technology now. Would you guys like to use it? So we'll see how that rolls out.

But when we get back to the funny money play side of it, Kenya has said, yeah, we're done with it. We're not going to – we need to look at this a little bit more before we allow our people to access this stuff. And WorldCoin has gone on the other side and said, you know, we think that we're going to pull out right now.

So right now they're in this little battle of, no, no, we're going to leave. No, we're going to leave. It's like – Also, can we have the eyeballs back? Yeah, yeah. Can we have our – can we have our scans back, please? You don't get to hold on to that. Yeah. Yeah. So they have 350,000 people in Kenya already signed up for that.

So silly. All right. Silly rabbits. Well, we have some interesting news in self-driving cars. The Uber safety driver at the wheel during the first known fatal self-driving car crash involving a pedestrian has pleaded guilty to and been sentenced for an endangerment charge.

So that's pretty interesting. We're going to start to see where the laws fall on this stuff. So good for Uber. I would like to see her bank account because I bet that there's a nice juicy deposit from Uber because her pleading guilty kills all of the other lawsuits that are going to happen.

That's true. All of the investigations that we're going to keep going on and going on and all of the precedents that were going to be set, all of that is taken away when she pleads guilty. And she just got a suspended sentence. So I'm guessing somebody talked to somebody and made that happen.

Probably. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they've got some money to do it now. I would like this is breaking major news for this show, Jason, as far as I'm concerned. Because in general, anytime we call something, nothing ever fucking changes. And we've been saying Uber has never made a profit for the entirety of Uber's existence and our show.

Guess what? They've made a profit for the first time in Uber's history. Probably because their costs have gone up so much. And, of course, their food delivery service, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But, yes, they have finally made a profit. Pre-tax earnings, and God knows they won't pay any taxes because they're going to figure out a way to get around that, stood at $326 million.

A huge change compared to the $713 million operating loss it reported the same time last year. That is almost a billion dollars in swap there. Yeah. And swing. So that is impressive. That is impressive. Let's see if they can keep it up. That's still fuck Uber.

Well, yeah, exactly. Still fuck Uber. And let's see if this is just creative accounting or if it is an actual trend. Because as we know, you fire a bunch of people, you cook the books, you can make it look like you're actually profitable for a short amount of time. Yep.

Short amount of time. Juice that stock. Mm-hmm. Well, we have a new investigation coming from a new agency, the California Privacy Protection Agency. They are going to be investigating the data collected by your automobile here in California.

All right. Because these things are just rolling data machines now. They know where you're going. They know when you're going. They know what you listen to on the radio. They know where you parked, how long you were there, what building you probably went into. Yeah.

So they're just going to be checking it out. Because in California, we have all sorts of laws under the California Consumer Privacy Act. And geolocation is considered personal information, which we have the right to opt out of.

Now, geolocation is kind of a core tenant of navigation systems. Yes, it is. But they should only be used for navigation, not for other things. Yes. So are they keeping all that data? Of course they are. Oh, come on.

They're keeping it all. Oh, I was trying. Come on. I'm sure they're good companies, Jason. No. Really? You think? No, I don't. I was kidding. But there's a checkbox, Brian. There's a Do Not Track checkbox. You know what they should do?

If you press Do Not Track, they should just always send you to Albuquerque. They should just send you the poop emoji. Oh, that would work too. That would work too. Now, I looked up the CPPA just to find out a little bit more about them. And on the about page is a bunch of people that look like they would rather be anywhere else than if their job at the CPPA.

My favorite, my favorite has to be, if you go to the very, very bottom almost, Maureen Mahoney, the Deputy Director of Policy and Legislation. She looks like, why are you taking my picture? Well, these are the kind of people I want running this.

Not going to lie. I'm good with this. Yeah. A bunch of boring, boring people. But that's what we need for a government agency that is going after if your car knows where you're at. Yes. Yeah. Unboring people, though.

Elon and X Corp, the parent company of Twix, is suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Now, when I first covered this on Boot Up, it was funny because they were just threatening to. And then the next day, they're like, yeah, you know what? We got so much news around it.

I'm sure Elon's like, sue them. I got to save face. So they're suing them, saying that the company scraped all of this Twitter data. And if Twitter doesn't exist anymore, is there really a crime? Just asking. Just asking.

But they're saying that they created flawed research, which is affecting their ad sales. So they're saying, hey, you guys are telling us the truth about what we're doing about not protecting anybody. And we don't like it. So we're going to sue you. Right. Awesome.

Well, funnier news coming out of Twix. X Blue subscribers can now hide their check marks. Yes, the much vaunted thing that you were supposed to purchase to show off how cool you were, that then became associated mostly with neo-Nazis, can now be hidden if you're shamed by it, which most people are.

Well, I spent 10 minutes this morning looking for that check box, and it doesn't exist. So, yeah, right up there with deleting your message history and Facebook. Everything over there is working just perfectly. Yeah, it's just fine.

And if your trust in Elon wasn't rattled enough, well, then, you know, head on over to Las Vegas because the boring company is about to dig a 68-mile tunnel network under Las Vegas, which I think is going to be one of the greatest artifacts of our dystopian future when the mole people are living down.

The Morlocks, the Morlocks will be living in those tunnels, is what he's doing. He's building housing for Morlocks right now. I saw something again on Twix about this, and it was like, oh, look, the tech pros rediscovered trains. Yeah, that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. Except these can only carry three passengers at a time.

Yeah. Thanks. Wow, that's awesome. You could have just put a fucking subway in. And trains have, you know, emergency exits and ventilation and things like that. I don't know if you've looked at that tunnel. There's not enough money you could pay me to get in that thing.

No way. That is just a fiery death trap waiting to happen. What happens in Vegas? I wonder how many bodies they'll discover as they're digging those tunnels. You're supposed to go out of town, people. Out of town. Yeah, seriously.

I got a Jimmy Hoffa. I got a Jimmy Hoffa over here. And I love this one. NASA accidentally cuts contact with Voyager 2. So someone sent an update, a software update. Must have been a self-driving beta update to Voyager 2, which turned it 0.2 degrees away from Earth.

And when you're talking about a spacecraft that is 12.3 billion miles away, that's a big overcorrection. Fortunately, the old people back in the day thought about this and said, you know what, kids in the future, they're probably not very good programmers.

Let's just put in a failsafe here. So a couple times a year, Voyager actually tries and reconnects to Earth, no matter what, to reorient its signals. Smart. Yeah. Yeah. In October, it will try again, and we should hopefully get connection back to Voyager.

That's what happens when you use AI to write your code, kids. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's it. By the way, I did a – I slammed that Boring Company article through ChatGPT this morning to just do a quick summary on it.

And I used the new feature where you just put in a URL, and it will go grab it and give it back to you. So according to ChatGPT, the Boring Company is going to dig a 6.8-mile tunnel under Vegas. Oh, okay. Seems more realistic.

Yeah, so fact-check your shit, kids, because ChatGPT is – we talked about it getting worse. It is definitely getting worse. Yeah, it is. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out.

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Media Candy. I think the writers over at Star Trek Strange New Worlds are listening to our podcast, because a couple weeks ago we said, man, this show can literally do anything. And they said, hold my beer. It's time for the musical.

Holy shit. Look, man, I am not a musical fan. I leave that to you and Dave and my wife. That's not my thing. It was delightful. Oh, my God. I was not expecting that reaction.

I thought I was going to hate watch it, and I enjoyed it. It was nice. And, man, some of those actors fucking sing. Some, you could tell, were, like, auto-tuned to all hell and, like, 7,000 takes. But Christine Chong?

Holy crap. Dude. Jesse Butch? Man. I had to go look it up right after the episode. I'm like, okay, how many ringers did they bring in to do this? And zero. That was them. Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah. It was good. And the songs were pretty fucking good.

It was a really goofy episode. But, again, that's the point. That's what makes it fun. Musical episodes are supposed to be goofy. They actually went out of their way to make this one not as goofy and actually be serious in parts.

Mm-hmm. And the Klingons. The fucking Klingons. I almost lost my shit at that point. I did. I did lose my shit. I was just, like, I mean, my hand was over my head. I was like, holy shit. Yeah.

This show can literally do anything. Anything. I don't care what they do anymore. I'm a lifelong fan. I can't believe it. Like, it's just so good. I know. It's so what Star Trek is supposed to be. This show needs to be on for 100 more seasons. I don't care. Break the cannon.

Fuck it. It's so good. Yeah. It was great. It was actually great. And I can't believe I'm saying that. I know. I was so expecting the hate bombs to come flying. And he's like, I used to love Star Trek Strange New Worlds. And then they sang. I mean, don't ever do it again.

No. One and done. One and done. One and done. But thank you. Go out on a high note. Definitely go out on a high note. Loki is coming back for season two on October 6th. You said you weren't going to watch it because you were very upset at the ending for season one.

What do you think? Are you going to give it a shot? I might give it a shot, but purely because we're still in a writer's strike and nothing's coming anytime soon. Like, it's going to be desperation watch. I will give it a go. I thoroughly did enjoy the first season. As soon as soon as they tied it into the greater arc of everything and the bullshit, whole MCU, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it kind of turned me off.

But I'll give it a go because there's not a lot of options out there. Books. Books. Yeah, there's books. I'm back to reading. Yeah, good. Good. Let me talk about hate watching, though. Foundation season two. Okay. How far did you get? I had so many people telling me about it and saying you're going to hate every second of it.

So, at that point, I was like, I have to watch it now. I have to see how bad it's gotten. I watched the first three episodes. Oh, my God. Yeah. What the hell's wrong with you? Well, somebody told me something that happens in episode three and I had to see it. Okay.

Spoiler alert, people. They fucking brought him back to life? Are you fucking kidding me? He's actually alive in the universe again now? Oh, God. This show is so fucking horrible. I couldn't make it through the first, like, minute of the actual show when it started with him, like, you know, just going crazy and talking to himself.

I'm like, not only is this just incomprehensible, the writing is terrible, the acting is terrible. I'm like, I can't. I just can't. I'm going to go do something else. It's horrible. Put bamboo under my fingernails. There were brief flashes of what I thought could have been a decent sci-fi show that has no connection whatsoever to Foundation.

I think I said something along the lines of it's like the writers got fucking drunk, read the Wikipedia encapsulation of the story, and then just printed off a list of character names and decided to use those to make up some fantastical voyage of their own. That's what they're doing. That's what it sounds like, yeah.

It doesn't have anything to do with the books at all, and they're changing core tenets, important core tenets of the book. Oh, it's not Foundation. Anyways, so I'm done with that. I watched three. I hated it. Got it out of my system.

No more. Okay, good. Good. I have been watching Good Omen Season 2. I'm savoring it. I think I've watched three episodes of that as well. I'm going to take it nice and slow. It's delightful. Good. I'm taking it so slow I forgot it was on and did not even go back to watch it.

You know, that's the funny thing about Amazon shows, right? I never think to launch Amazon Prime on my TV, ever. Yeah, because I don't think you can add any Amazon Prime to your Apple TV Watch Next mode. I don't know if it pops in or not. I don't think so, because the only way I find things on Paramount Plus anymore, because I'm watching like two shows on Paramount Plus, and I get the Watch Next notification on my watch, which is fantastic because I'm like, I can never remember what fucking network anything's on anymore.

So I'm going through ten apps trying to find out where the goddamn show I was watching was. By the way, speaking of those functions and features, with all the technology and all the tracking and all the understanding of human nature and even the AI that you're plugging into everything, can you please, please, for the love of God, realize that once the credits have hit and I click away from it, I've watched the whole show.

You've watched it. I've watched the whole show. Yeah. Take it out of my continue playing list. Yeah. Yeah, they need a credit marker. It's not that hard. It's, yeah, it's really, it's annoying as shit. It really is. I've got, my feeds are littered with shows with that blue line all the way across.

Yeah. But it still says there's more for me to watch. I'm like, no, there's not. Yeah, and the worst is, the worst is when they, when it forgets your resume point and you have to start at the beginning and you are almost at the end. That's horrible. All right, so I've got some drunk on a plane movie reviews, Jason.

Hit me, hit me. It was desperation time because I had watched anything good and didn't feel like re-watching an old movie. So I'm looking at this list and I can tell, I can smell the bottom of the barrel. I took two for the team, Jason. Okay, let's hear it. For, in the interest of having fresh content.

Okay. I watched 65. Oh, I'm sorry. The Adam driver gets into a spaceship, somehow ends up in the past and kills a bunch of dinosaurs movie. Okay. Fucking stupid. Okay, okay. Ending horrible. I don't, what, unclear if they got back or anything.

I don't understand. It was dumb. Go watch Jurassic Park again. Okay. Because that's a much better dinosaur movie, even with worse special effects. And then I actually enjoyed the first Shazam movie, believe it or not. So I watched Shazam Fury of the Gods. I did not enjoy the second Shazam movie very much.

Okay. All righty. Even drunk, it was a steaming pile of crap. Okay. I never even saw the first Shazam movie. The first one was actually kind of clever. That's what I heard. That's what I heard. It had some chuckles. See, a couple of chuckles. Farther down the writer's strike, I'll probably get to a couple of chuckles will be my barrier for entry, you know, or the low bar to raise to get in there.

But for now, I'll wait. I'll wait until the desperation fits in. When you hit real desperation, Shazam Fury of the Gods had a chuckle or two as well, but not as many as the first one, so not worth it. Okay. I still don't think it's going to be bad enough to make me watch the Ant-Man sequel.

I told you I watched that, right? I think so. I didn't understand a single thing that was going on. Okay, yeah, because I was going to say, everybody said it was incomprehensible. It was incomprehensible, and you don't care enough to try to figure it out. Okay, perfect. Perfect. Well, I had a very sick dog all week, and there were a couple days where I literally stayed up all night long.

And so it was a very sleep-deprived week. But one night, I had to sit out, and I grabbed my iPad, my beautiful iPad Pro with the most beautiful display ever, and popped in the AirPods. The man that has a 70-inch TV. See, I had a sick dog, couldn't do anything about that.

I had to sit with her where she wanted to be. So I watched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. The exact movie one should watch on a 70-inch TV. Exactly. Says the guy who watches things on a 5-inch screen on planes.

Yeah. The thing is, that iPad is so beautiful. If you get it close enough, it looks better than the 75-inch TV. Thoroughly fucking enjoyed the movie. I loved it. I loved every minute of it. It got the sour out of Volume 2 out of my palate.

Because I didn't think Volume 2 was that great. I loved the Christmas special, though. The Christmas special was the perfect lead-in. If you haven't seen the Christmas special, starting Volume 3 makes no sense. Okay. Is Kevin Bacon in it? No. Kevin Bacon is not in it. Oh, damn.

Damn. No. A lot of Nathan Fillion, but Sylvester Stallone's in it, too. You're not selling me. It was great. It was fucking great. Okay. Nathan Fillion's awesome. Come on. No, he's great. I was talking to Sylvester Stallone. Sylvester Stallone. He's mildly in it. He's only in a couple scenes, so you can pass on him.

I really, really loved it. I thought it was a perfect way to wrap out the franchise. Awesome. I'm going to watch it because I know it's the end. Yeah, exactly. I don't think I could do it if there were going to be more. Yeah. Now that I know they're wrapping it up, I can do it.

Yeah. Perfect ending. Perfect ending. Okay. Apps and doodads. Apple's big in the news right now with their quarterly results, and turns out iPhones are not selling like they used to. Go figure.

Because the old ones work pretty well still. Yeah. I got a 13 Pro, and I've got no complaints. It does everything I need it to do. I got a terabyte of storage in it because I knew I was going to keep it for the long haul. You're going to have to bring back that old device throttling again.

Yeah. God, it was such a pain. The funny thing, I went and I got the terabyte in it. I have not gotten past 25% full, no matter what I do. No matter what I do. Anyway, so iPhone sales are going down, but paid subscriptions are going up big time.

They have surpassed 1 billion paid subscribers, which is ridiculous. And you know what they do that's really nice, and I hope you're paying attention, Netflix? The sharing with friends and family, up to a certain number of devices for subscriptions. It's genius.

It works really well. It's wonderful. It makes people happy. It keeps them in your ecosystem. Yep. It's really good. It's really, really good. I love, yeah, and my friends, or my family plan quota. They don't say friends and family. It's just family. I have a very, very extended family, which makes some people, like you just heard, very happy.

I'm an honorary to Sillipa. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. So good for them. I wish they, the only thing that I wish is that they would up the iCloud Drive storage limit. It maxes out at 2 terabytes, and I have more than that of files that I don't want on my phone that I want on my computer.

So I like this. Rumor, Apple Watch 9 Series to be available in new color alongside Black Titanium Ultra. I said I was going to get the Ultra. Now, if it's in Black Titanium, whoo, because I went back and I checked. I've got a Series 5. The funny thing is about my Series 5 is my Series 5 works really fucking good, so I don't know if I'm even going to bother.

I got to say, I had upgraded, and I don't really notice the difference. That's the problem. Slightly bigger screen, but that's about it. Yeah, I got a 44 millimeter, you know, Series 5. The only problem with this is I am down, the battery is dying, so I get down to 5% when I'm putting it on the stand at night.

If I go for a workout, like a walk during the day, and I turn on the workout tracking, I do have to charge it for like five minutes in the middle of the day, which, sorry, you know, compared to spending $900 for a new watch, which I think that I'm sure that the Ultra is going to be with the titanium finish.

I'll put it on the stand for now. I think that's a good idea, yes. The last thing I have in here, in the old apps and doodads, is I found the Sprite Mixtape Art Generator that's celebrating 50 years of hip-hop with an AI-powered digital art experience.

Did you get a chance to try this, Brian, or take a look at it? I looked at it. I didn't get a chance to dig into it. It's pretty cool looking. It does look pretty cool if you can actually get it to do anything. I could not because everything that I put in was flagged and said, now, now, now, children, let's not talk like that.

We're celebrating 50 years of hip-hop. I don't know if they've listened to any hip-hop. They have not. Brian, they have not listened to any hip-hop. I'm not a huge fan of the genre, but I've listened to it. I know what happens. Put in any hip-hop lyric and it will tell you, no, we cannot do that.

So, kind of a big, big fail on that one for me. But that's what happens when it's, you know, sponsored by a global megacorporation, I guess. They won't let you have any fun. Guardrails. Security?

Ha! Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave with podcast superhost Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the CyberWire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen because people are nosy.

And the host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings, too. How was your birthday, Dave? I had a lovely birthday. Thank you very much. Let's see. What did we do? We went out to dinner with my family, had a lovely meal. And then a couple days later, got together with the larger family at my father's house with my brother and sister and all their kids and everything like that.

So, when was the fun part? Right. Just kidding. Right. The fun part was the nap I took Sunday afternoon after. Yeah. Yeah. But it was very nice and low-key.

So, you know. As our birthdays start to become. Well, it's everything you could ask for of an off-year birthday. You know, I think I'm probably not in for a big hootenanny until I turn 60 and that's a ways off. So, although I'm sure it'll be here before any of us know it.

Exactly. Exactly. It'll be here before self-driving cars, I'll tell you that much. Yeah. You know, I was thinking about that the other day, how my youngest son, Jack, is 16. And so, he's taking driver's ed and all that kind of stuff. And so, on the weekends, he and I go out driving together and it's fun and he's doing well and all that.

But I remember when he was just coming into his teen years seriously thinking that he may never learn to drive a car because self-driving cars, certainly in five or six years, we may be there. And we're not.

Nope. And we're not even close. Nope. Yeah. Nope. Speaking of the off-year birthday and nothing to do, mine is tomorrow and I plan on doing absolutely nothing. Good for you. We're going to watch TV. How decadent. Yes. We're going to barbecue in the morning before the sun becomes unbearable and then watch TV all day.

Maybe rub the dog's tummy, but that's about it. I thought you were going somewhere else when you said rub, but okay. No, no, no, no, no. Birthday treat. Sometimes solitude is the best you can ask for. It really is. Oh, no.

But it'll be interesting. The other birthday I have is I'm seven months sober today, believe it or not. Congratulations. That is – that's big. That's awesome, man. That's better than the 52-year-old birthday, honestly, because nobody cares about 52. No.

No, they do not. Yeah. Well, good. Good for you. Congratulations. That's a big deal. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah. So I – speaking of young Jack, my son, he and I went to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I thought you were still talking about my birthday.

No. It ain't a young Jack, Jason. I know. Depends on what time of day, I guess. That's right. He's on – that knocking on your door is my young – he's got a present for you. He'll be singing happy birthday.

So at his request, we went to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which opened this week. And I have to say I enjoyed it very much. And I'm not a turtles guy. Like I – you know. It missed me. Exactly. I never got into it. Yeah. Exactly. I think they came after us.

My younger brother was into the turtles. So I knew of them, but I didn't really know a lot about them. So I had my son bring me up to speed on them. But overall, I thought the movie was very well done. And this was the first time that the turtles have been played by actual teenagers.

And that made a difference, I think. They said part of the process was they got this group of four teens together and they would just let them go and talk and joke. And a lot of that made it into the movie. So it has that dynamic of young kids just being stupid young kids.

Yeah. Yeah. And so that was fun. Another thing I thought I'd point out as a moviegoer. So we have a fairly decked out AMC movie theater near my house. I think they have a good dozen screens, but they also have an IMAX screen there.

You know, the fake IMAX, the LIMAX screens. Yeah. But not the Science Center IMAX, but the movie theater IMAX. Yeah, not the good one. Not the dome, but the – Right. But they also have a Dolby Cinema. And I don't know if you've ever been in one of the Dolby screens, but you go in and it has all the speakers.

Like the walls are lined with speakers. There are subwoofers hanging from the ceiling. So – and all the seats have butt shakers in them so they can vibrate, you know, not when there's low frequency stuff.

Not only do the subwoofers rattle your teeth, but the seats shake your booty. But one thing I noticed that I hadn't noticed before architecturally that is special about the Dolby Cinema that I love is they have the reclining seats, which is pretty standard in most theaters these days.

But in front of you there's a wall, like a waist-high wall in front of every row. And what that does is it blocks your view of everyone else in the theater above you – or below you rather.

So that wall is designed to just about come up to the bottom of the screen. This is brilliant because you can't see any of the other idiots checking their phones during the movie. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, the wall blocks you from seeing any other people.

I wish every theater had this and now I'm going to start seeking out – I wish my house had it. Yeah, really. That's true. Yeah. I'm going to start seeking out movies that are playing in this Dolby screen because it's great. It's great.

That's awesome. No, I don't know. What you can also do, I'm thinking here, is maybe just put some black electrical tape along the bottom of your glasses to kind of align where that would be. That would be good. If you're going to a theater that doesn't have the wall, it's just like, hmm, that actually sounds like a pretty good idea. Just block everything below your nose.

Right. Well, the same way that movie theaters have – the curtains are motorized for different aspect ratios. You could just have a pair of glasses that have little barn doors on them. Yeah. You know, right? So you can just dial in, limit your – like blinders for a horse.

Just dial in what you can see. Here's our next million-dollar idea, guys. Get on it. Somebody break out the 3D printer and make some glasses. Except that you keep knocking over your drink when you go to find your Coke and you can't see it because the blinders are on.

Right. Right. True. So we'll get sponges too. We'll do – actually, we'll just do super long straws. We'll do blinders and super long straws. Yeah. There you go. No, you just need one of those hats where you put the drinks on the sides with a straw. Yeah, a beer hat. That's what you need.

Perfect. It's all good. I can't believe you guys weren't into the Ninja Turtles. I don't know how I got – well, I guess I'm 12 at heart. But I was big into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I actually went as one for Halloween one year, whichever the green one was. I guess they're all green.

But the accent color green. They're all green. Yeah. I had a green cast that year. So from breaking my ankle. And I was stuck in bed playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Nintendo game. And so my dad and I dressed up as Ninja Turtles for Christmas.

I think that's the strongest memory I have of the Turtles is the arcade game, the four-player arcade game because that was very popular for a while. That was a hot game. Yeah. I never got into that one. I just had the Nintendo version because I was stuck in bed with the broken leg. Right.

And I do remember distinctly though, those old Nintendo controllers, the hard edge rectangles. Oh, yeah. I would play so long during the day that I would lose feeling in my bottom three fingers because it would just like – it would compress the nerves in your hand.

Yes. And like after a 10-hour session of trying to get past that damn level I never got past. I remember that feeling as well. For me, it was playing Mega Man 2 on the NES. Right. Yeah.

Anyway. That's good. I actually am looking forward to seeing the movie. How was the animation? Because the animation looks weird in the – It is weird. I mean it's 3D animated but it's done in a claymation style. Yeah. So all the characters are kind of lumpy but it's not distracting.

I thought – my sense is that with the success of the Spider-Man animated movie that it's freed up a lot of people to be creative with the animation style. Like everything doesn't have to look like a Pixar movie which is what we had for a while. So I think it's interesting that people are sort of nipping around the edges when it comes to these stylistic choices and it's cool.

I mean it's a short, fun movie with a little bit of their origin story and there's nothing – it's not a movie that you'd be going back over and over again to see I think. But I enjoyed it. It's no Rashomon.

No. It was fun. We had a good time. My son and I had a good time together watching the movie and what more can you ask for than that? I felt exactly that way with the Mario Brothers movie with my kid. Yes. It was a blast. Yes. And he really enjoyed it.

Yes. I would put it in the same category as the Mario movie. Yep. Yep. Cool. All right. So last time we were together, we did not get to a topic that we had on the list and we thought we'd make it its own topic. So today we're talking about billionaires and how we all aspire to be one.

I don't. Not really. I don't. No. No. I don't. I'll settle for a few mil, but I don't need the bill. Shit. I'm just looking for cash flow positive. I'm in Uber territory right now. That's right. Uber free this week. I just want to – yeah. When you go to the ATM, you just want to know that money is going to come out.

That's – Yeah. That would be nice. That's what I'm striving for right now. Right. Right. It's good to have goals. So I think a lot of this conversation about whether or not billionaires should even be a thing from a policy point of view, I think a lot of the conversation has been sparked recently or reinvigorated lately with everything that's going on with Twitter and everything that's going on with Elon Musk.

Yeah. Sorry. We're calling it Twix now. It's Twix. Oh, that's good. I like that. That's good. All right. I'll run with that. And just the utter fool that he's making of himself and I think reminding folks that just because someone has a lot of money or just because someone has success in one area doesn't mean they have any expertise in any area or indeed any area at all.

Yes. Especially if they started with quite a help up. Right. Yes. Right. So I thought it might be interesting to talk about this notion of billionaires at all, whether or not from a public policy point of view, should billionaires even be a thing?

Should we have policies in place to keep people – I'm going to use a loaded word here – from hoarding wealth? And I know people are already – listeners are pounding their heads against the desk and saying they're not hoarding wealth. They're earning wealth. And we'll get to that. So I've put a couple of links in the show notes here.

One is titled Billionaires Should Not Exist. Here's why. And the other one is Wealth Without Limits in Defense of Billionaires. And I think both of these articles make good points, pro and con, for why we should or should not have billionaires. I would like to start off with a thought experiment here that I have found to be quite useful.

So imagine that you make $100 a day, right? That's what you earn. So let's do the math here. You make $100 a day and we're just going to make it easy and say you make it 365 days a year. So you're making $36,500 a year.

How many of us think we could live comfortably on $36,500 a year? Not where I live. No. No. And the median income in the United States is around $36,000 a year.

Yes, it is. Which means there are lots of people who are doing the best they can to get by on what we all agree is not an easy amount of money to sustain yourself, not to mention a family or loved ones or whatever. Not a living wage or whatever. Not a living wage.

Right. All right. So let's go up in order of magnitude. Let's say you make $1,000 a day, 365 days a year. So you're making $365,000 a year. How are we doing now? Pretty damn good. Pretty good. Right?

Count me in. You're living comfortably. Yes. I mean I think that – we'd all agree that is a comfortable living and most of the things that you want in life you would be able to provide yourself with. You could drive the car you wanted to drive. You could most likely live where you wanted to live.

With some notable exceptions. With some notable exceptions, you'd be in a position to tuck away money for yourself for retirement. Chances are you could pay for your kids' education, certainly their health care. Well, right. Not anymore.

Health care or education. Yeah. Yeah. If you're Canadian, you could. Okay, so $365,000 a year. Let's go up the next step and let's say you make $10,000 a day, 365 days a year.

How are we doing now? You're fucking rich. So is this the point where we say you're rich? This is the point, yes, 100%. So $365,000, we don't consider that rich? Well, it depends on where you are.

Yeah. In Los Angeles, in major cities across the world, that is, you're doing okay. You're middle class. Right. Shit, I would say 100% is rich. That's a lot of money. You ain't going to be able to buy a house in London. You're not able to buy a house, yeah, in Los Angeles.

Actually, you can. You can get a house in LA. You can get a house in LA, yeah. But that, I mean, I think it's a reasonable dual income total. Yes. If you have a couple of good earners, right? Yes. Mm-hmm. Okay. But at $10,000 a day, so now we're at $3.65 million a year.

Yes. Now we're rich. You're rich. Okay. And I think it's fair to say you can have just about anything you want from this world. Maybe not a super yacht. Maybe not a super yacht, right. But now we're talking multiple homes. You can't go to space. We're talking multiple cars.

You can get a Bentley. Yeah, whatever you got. Yep. Yeah. So you're doing good. If you can get a Bentley, you're rich. That's awesome. This is the level at which celebrities used to be at. Yes. Like the high-end ones. And I would also say CEOs. Yes.

Okay. Yes. So our last jump here, we're going to go to $100,000 a day, 365 days a year. Now you're talking Kardashian money. Now we're talking big money. Okay. But if you do the math, that's only, and I say only in air quotes, $36.5 million a year.

Right. There are a lot of people out there who are making, athletes, who are making more than $36.5 million a year. Yep. Movie stars. People on Wall Street. Wall Street. Hollywood. CEOs. Plenty of CEOs.

NFT merchants. Oh, wait, wait, wait. That was only for a week. Briefly. Yes. Briefly. Briefly. So the thought experiment that, the reason I run this thought experiment is to try to calibrate ourselves to what we actually consider to be rich or not, because the argument that I would like to make is that I don't have anything against rich people.

I think there should be rich people in our society. I don't begrudge anyone for making a living, but I do think that there should be mechanisms for limiting the top end. And increasing the bottom end.

The thing for me isn't so much the actual dollar amounts. It's the disparity between the low end and the top end. Particularly if we start talking about CEO pay. Right. So to that point, what I would love to see is let's just make up a number here and say that we go with $100,000 per day, 365 days a year.

Let's just mark that as our top end. And at that point, we kick in very high taxes. So we're going to let you be rich up to that point. And now we're going to start taking from you in a big way.

But what I think we could do at that point is say for your CEO, we could incentivize you and say, OK, if you start spreading this around to your employees, for every bit you share with the little people, you get to keep some more.

Yeah. So you want to be even richer than the rich you are? Spread it around. Spread it around your company or do a Bill Gates style philanthropy and all that sort of stuff? Then yes. OK. Well, and that's one of the points that the article that I posted here that's in defense of billionaires, which says that billionaires do a lot of philanthropy.

Some of them do. Some do. Some do not. I think there are about 500 billionaires in the US. We have – I think we have the most of them. I think there's something like 700 in the world and I think we have 500 of them, something like that. But I'm not even talking about hitting the billionaire level.

I'm talking about limiting people from getting to the billionaire level because there comes a point where it's just kind of silly. If you have everything that you need and then some and you can live a lifestyle of great wealth, of great means and far beyond what the average person can do, then does there come a point when from a policy point of view we say, OK, as long as there are still kids who are hungry,

as long as there are schools that cannot buy books, we're going to come after some of your top-end wealth. And if we take care of all those issues, well, then we'll have another conversation. But until then, we're going to be limiting the top-end.

We're going to have a maximum wage. What about savings? So let's say I earn $36.5 million a year, but I only spend $2 million a year. So then you get into the generational wealth of like you've just built this money pile that just keeps making more money.

Yes. And over half of the billionaires are billionaires as the result of inherited wealth. Yes. So I think you come after that as well. I think Elizabeth Warren's – The death tax. Well, you have the death tax. You have Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax.

One of the things that the article that's against billionaires says is that when you're a billionaire, you have all sorts of tools to shield your wealth from taxes. Yes. You can take it offshore. You can put it – even much of the charitable giving that billionaires do is performative in order to lower their tax exposure.

Now, it's great for the people who benefit from that. But, you know, it's – Much more could be done if that money was distributed more evenly. Right. And everybody could afford their own malaria nets. Right. But I think, Brian, you nailed it, is that in my mind, the disparity is just out of whack.

Right. We have more billionaires than we've ever had and they have more billions than they've ever had in the entirety of the world. Yet we also have the poorest populations. Right. Yeah. Right. And they're often working for the billionaires. It's not a zero-sum game. The billionaires are siphoning the money from the poor people.

Well, and there is an argument to be made that it's not like the billionaires are just stuffing this money in their mattress. I mean, that money is being put to work. It is invested. It is an engine for many things. But – It's too much. It doesn't make up for – Yeah.

Yeah. Who's – Mark Cuban, I think, made the point that he said, I can only drive one car at a time. I can only eat one meal at a time, whereas if you distribute this money and now you have people buying 100 cars, that's better for all of us.

It's better for the economy. It's better for everyone. Not the environment. I was going to say, not the environment, but – Right. Yeah. No, I agree. And then Scott Galloway has been pounding on this a lot recently, and a lot of economists are. It's all gone out of whack. It is tilted too far, and we need to scale things back.

But how do you do it? But that's, you know, especially since the billionaires are the ones that can pay off the lawmakers and often get the lawmakers into office. This is where it starts to go. The influence that they have makes it almost impossible to change. And again, that's a problem.

That's too much influence. Elon Musk has way too much influence. He has zero guardrails, and nobody can put up a guardrail because he has more money than he could ever possibly spend in his entire life, even if he keeps doing stupid things like buying Twitters. Right.

Right. And he can go out on the sidewalk and scream something into the ether, and it'll be on the front page of the New York Times. Like you're a pedophile. Right. Right. Yeah, it's a problem. Like, I don't think they should exist. I think it needs all kinds of caps.

And I really do like that idea that you can make up to a certain amount, and then after that, we tax the hell out of you, or we take it all. Or you distribute your wealth better, and you can keep more. I like that idea a lot, that sliding scale. It does incentivize people to continue to do the things that they want to do if their driving force is just making more money, which it seems to be it is for a lot of these people.

Yeah. Yeah. And I just, on a personal note, I have known people that are very, very rich. I've been friends with some. I've worked in the music industry. I've worked with people that have made in the excess of, you know, $20, $30, $40 million a year.

It changes them. They go a little cuckoo. They lose touch with reality. It really does happen. I can back it up with the Silicon Valley people I know that are worth, you know, in the $100 million range. But I think it really starts to kick in around $10 million when people are just like, I'm not amongst you anymore.

I like the phrase that fame and fortune doesn't change people. It unmasks them. I think it really changes them. Well, I guess, you know, for the defense of that would be Tom Hanks is still a nice guy, right?

True. So you got one. Yeah. But I think. Well, Bill Gates, I mean, you see what he's doing with his money. I think that's admirable. And there are a handful of billionaires who have vowed to basically do their best to give their money away by the time.

Warren Buffett. They die. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, they why I would love to see a billionaire come at the issue of the the collapse of the news industry. Right. The print news industry. Well, the same way that Bezos is doing God's work with The Wall Street Journal.

But the way that they used to build. Sorry, Washington Post here. The way they used to build libraries and theaters and would slap their names on them. Let's build local news organizations, nonprofit news organizations the same way. That would be a great thing for a billionaire to throw their money at.

I agree. But alas. I'm just over here calculating how much money we've lost doing this segment because I can hear I can hear in my little booth the unsubscribes coming in. Why? You think we have a lot of billionaires listening to us and now we're going to come at them with pitchforks?

No, I just know what happens when we when we go down these roads. I know. Anything political. We didn't talk about the indictment at all. Re-indicted and it feels so good. That's one of the challenges I think that you hear policymakers say is that everyone can imagine themselves being wealthy.

So and they aspire to it. So they don't want to put limits on it because maybe someday I'll be there and I don't want the you know that when when I'm rich, I don't want to have to pay taxes. Nobody wants to pay taxes. But OK, here we go. Here come the unsubscribes.

That is entirely Trump's playbook is, yes, you too can have this, but he's playing. It's not true. Right. Like, it's not true. It's just not true. It's it's it's malarkey to quote Biden. Yeah.

So I get it. I mean, I get everybody thinks they're going to be a winner. I thought I was going to be first baseman for the Dodgers. There's there's only so many people that can do these things. There's still time, Brian. There's still time. Come on. They're having a down season. I've actually need pitching.

So I better get to work on that. So, yeah. Yeah. It's just it's it's a fallacy. It's it's just not. We'd all be better off if we distributed it more. And how I get again, how much money do you actually need to mark what Mark Cuban says?

You don't need that much. Why are we why are we letting people accumulate as much as we're letting them accumulate? Right. When there are clear harms. When there's so many things wrong with this world, what are they doing with the money? Nothing. I would like to state for the record, though, that Mark Cuban is worth five point one billion dollars.

So I don't know if he's really well. He started, but he is to some degree. He started up that whole health care drug company. Right. It's going to start. It's starting to have real effects with the health care industry in the U.S. and is chipping away at those companies with those CEOs that are making gazillions of dollars per year.

Yeah. Yeah. So he's doing something. More than most. So, again, I just want to emphasize here, I have nothing against rich people. I'm not promoting – I'm not suggesting that we go full in socialist or dare I say communist and have everybody make the same and there be no rich people, there be no poor people.

I am totally for a spread of earnings and wealth and all that kind of stuff. I'm not against any of that, but I just think we're – it's out of balance right now. And so we need to put guardrails on it to try to get it back to a reasonable level where, yeah, we can still have rich people, but it's too much right now.

I agree. That's just my opinion. I'm on board. I'm on board your super yacht, Dave. Right here. The SS comrade. Look, again, when you have so much money that you have a super yacht built that's too big to get down the lake or the river you wanted to take it down, that you pay the city to take down the bridge, you've got too much money.

Right. Right. That's all I'm saying. Right. Okay. Well, I'm not one of those people and I have to get back to work so I can pay for this damn place. All right. Fair enough. I'll wrap this up, guys. If you want more deep segments like this that'll alienate people, write us.

Oh, Jesus. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got a couple new subscribers, Sam and Yan. Welcome, folks. Thank you. And apparently something is up with Patreon and payments because they're trying to do some tomfoolery about running everything through the Bank of Ireland for tax purposes or something like that.

So it didn't seem to affect any of our listeners, maybe a handful. So if you've seen a chargeback or you didn't get charged or whatever and you want to, apparently you can log in and have it redo it or something to that effect. There's something on Patreon's pages.

So, yeah, we could use that, please. We definitely could, please. Over at PayPal, we've got Judge, Matt, Simon, Nicola, Matthew, Jonathan, Nikolai, Thomas, and Sean with a big $100. Yeah, Sean is OBK on our Clash Royale clan, GOG.show.

And I believe live nation. That thing will keep running even after we're done doing the podcast. It will. It will. Okay. Probably. We've been kicking a lot of people out for slacking, but, you know, OBK is one of the good guys. And there were libations involved. He did say he had to, like, grab his phone and log in real quick in the morning to see where the decimal point was when he gave us that $100.

I thought it was great. Over at the tip jar, we've got Mario, Matthew, Christopher, and Stuart with a $20 tip. Woo-hoo. Thank you, Stuart. Thank you. Thank you so much. And sad news, Paul Rubens has died this week. He was apparently hiding the fact that he had cancer for a long time.

Six years, apparently. Yeah. Yeah. Great, great actor. Great personality. He will be missed. Definitely a Gen X icon. Yeah. And the one thing that I was happy to see was people were resurrecting his death scene from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, which was one of the classic death scenes of all time.

And happy 83rd birthday to Martin Sheen. Woo-hoo. My president. Yeah. Let's go back and watch the West Wing, everybody. And a happy 32nd birthday to my brother, Greg. Woo-hoo. Also my brother, according to Apple. Yeah.

According to Apple, your birthday is today. Is it? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I got a notification. It's Brian Schulmeister's birthday today. And I'm like, what? No, it is not. No. Weird. Yeah. All right. Well, that's my unbirthday.

So very happy unbirthday to me. Happy unbirthday. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason Filippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 612. GOG.show slash donate is a place to drop us a few bills, even if you're going to Ireland.

Please give them. Please. Pretty please. At GOG.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. And you can head over to GOG.show slash contact to send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about. GOG.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air, but we didn't get any this week.

So head on over there. Give us a review. Pretty please. With sugar on top. And oh yeah, by the way, stay grumpy.

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