614: Put Me In Coach

At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. 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. Brian, I got a little housekeeping this morning. Okay. I was listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast last night, and I was shocked. I was shook. I was floored, I just got to say, to my core.

I was shook to my core. Fell to the floor. Shook to the core. The show, the tech show, which I always like to think of as our nemesis, and they don't even think of us at all because they're ten times of our size, and they had zero ads this week.

And they're like, yeah, the market has dried up completely. Since January, it's gone through the floor. It has just been going and going and going, which to me is just mind-boggling because podcast ads still pack a punch better than most ads.

Anyway, they talked about how they were shifting over mostly to a member-supported model, which we have been for seven, eight years now. Yeah. Again. Well, we're kind of member, not so much supported, just kind of keeping us falling through the roof.

Yes, yes. I was doing the numbers this morning, and I'm like, I used to make $15 an hour doing the show and adjusted for inflation and costs. It actually costs me about $3 an hour to do the show now. So you've got to stop getting those Whole Foods burritos.

I did. Oh, I stopped that a long time ago. Trust me. No, no, no. I was literally this morning, I was like, man, I want to go get some chips. But I'm like, ah, no. And then I opened up my little bag of celery, and I crunched on my celery. Yes, I snack on celery. So we talked about taking ads from the audience before and the big sale we were having.

The problem with that was I couldn't find a way to make it work that were the time. We did the one with the fan who bought the ad, which was fantastic. It was super funny. And I got about five or six different inquiries to do it again. Problem was it was taking me more time just to get that done than the cost of the ad.

So here's what we're going to do. I have figured out a way to make it self-service. So for the rest of the year, there will be a page coming up this week. You can drop me an email at jpd.me or wait for the show next week, and we'll talk about the link to it.

It's just going to be self-service. You put in your ad copy, credit card info, cheap ads for the fans, for the listeners. We're going to help you guys out. You help us out. Everybody's happy. So that's going to mitigate that problem, hopefully, because I looked at our ad calendar, and there literally is four ads for the rest of the year.

And they were paid for last January, and we have long spent that money. Yeah, I have a good buddy of mine who works in a company that does ad placement, and he said, like, nobody wants digital ads anymore. It's not just podcasts. It's the entire – everybody's realized that online ads are not really great.

Yeah, and it sucks that we're getting looped into that because that was the beauty of podcasting is that we outperform everybody else. Yeah, that's true. By orders of magnitude. Yeah, it's much better than streaming or anything, streaming radio services or all that sort of stuff, which is just useless. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, host-read advertisements on podcasts convert because we only talk about things that we care about, you know? So anyway, they're missing the boat on that. But the other big news this week was that Spotify and Patreon now have an integration, which we will be turning on very soon, in the next day or so.

I think I might have to, like, spin up a new Spotify account just for the show. That was the only – that's the only hurdle right now, but it's basically just a checkbox. So anybody that signs up for a Patreon subscription will be able to listen to the show ad-free on Spotify and in high res unless Spotify knocks it down, which they might.

Who the fuck knows? It's Spotify. They do what they want. And if there's an ad on that, then somebody tell me so I can get my pitchfork and my torches and we can head over to Spotify HQ. Speaking of Spotify and podcasts and money, I didn't include this article in the show notes, but I did read it.

Did you see the Spotify considering removing white noise podcasts to save money? Yeah, it's a $38 million issue that they have there. Some of these were making $18,000 a month for just putting out white noise. We're in the – we're doing this wrong. I know.

I know. Why are we talking? We could be making money. Talking is losing us money. I'm just going to turn on my fan for the next hour. That's all we got to do. All the stuff that I filter out turns out to be the thing that people want to hear. Turns out that's the juice. That's the juice. Anyway, so that's it for my financials roundup for the show.

But we had to address it up front because, yeah, without that, we don't do a show. Wait, weren't you going to rant about a chargeback? The chargeback? Oh, thank you very much. So – I read the notes. Yes, you do. You do. I get a little – I'm a little over-caffeinated this morning, so sometimes I get a little overzealous.

A fine show fan who has been a loyal subscriber for well over a year decided to, instead of canceling their subscription, went to their bank and filed a chargeback without contacting us at all. Guys, if you have a subscription that you need canceled, please get in touch with me or click the unsubscribe link wherever it may be in one of the three different ways you can subscribe to the show.

And we'll take care of it immediately. If you initiate a chargeback, it takes months for you to get your money back. If you do because, you know, that's a long process. It screws us up because now I got to spend a couple hours dealing with this shit and, you know, I could just let it go through because our chargebacks are so low.

It's, you know, it's not going to hurt us, but it's just annoying. It's one of those things that my OCD kicks in. I'm like, I can't have a chargeback. I was in the right – what the hell? Just email us. Just email us and let us know. If you want to cancel, cancel. We can walk you through it. Yeah. We'll take care of it.

Yeah. We can do it from our side. It's easy. And we understand people come and go. You know, sometimes you get a few bucks. Sometimes you don't. You know, sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you are. So, please, don't do a chargeback. Just get in touch with us. It's easy. It's easier than going through your bank for fuck's sake.

That's true. But I guess they were just so sick of our shit they didn't even want to talk to us. We had to say something to piss them off. We really did. And I think I know exactly what it is. I'm sure it was my fault. It kind of – I think we both had a hand in that one.

In the news. This week, it's a robo-taxi trifecta. Hold on. Let me take a guess here. They don't work. Kind of. Kind of. Here's the first one.

They definitely work because people are having sex in robo-taxis, which we called – I can't remember how long ago. We're like, these cars are going to get gross, man. They're going to get gross. So, hat tip to Joseph for the first – being the first one to send that one to it. We called this – yes, people are getting busy in the back of the – the funny thing is they're getting busy in the back of the – the cruise taxis, but nobody's fucking in a Waymo, which I love.

Nice. Yeah. It's just – Oh, to be young again. To be young again and young, dumb, and full of cum. That's what they called it. That's the name of the new service. Uh-huh. That is it because I don't know – I mean, yeah, they think they're – oh, we're going to be fun and everything like that.

There's a bunch of IT guys spanking it watching you guys get busy because those cars have so many cameras in them. It's ridiculous. But I guess that's the point is they want people to see them. You know, and it is San Francisco, which you kind of can walk down the street and see that almost anywhere anyway, you know?

So, it's not really something new in San Francisco because it's San Francisco. But it's just funny that that's the new quote-unquote thing. And by the way, it is still illegal. And when you do get caught with your pants down and the cops show up, you still probably will get a ticket. But think about the children.

Think about the children who have to watch. Anyway, right after the expansion approval to 24-7 that we talked about in the last show. Yep. Yeah, like 15 taxis died all in one go. It was like a gaggle of dead taxis because they all lost connectivity because a music festival was going on.

Ah. And apparently the music festival sucked up all the juice in the neighborhood. Now, this is San Francisco. Connectivity issues in San Francisco are well-known, extremely well-known. It is one of the most tech-savvy places in the country with the worst connectivity ever.

It's terrible. So the fact that they didn't plan for this, you know, kind of says what the readiness level is for just about anything they're doing. Thoughts, Brian? Not really. I'm not surprised. Nope. And, yeah, San Francisco, ironically, has notoriously had horrible connectivity for decades now.

I mean, I haven't even been to San Francisco in over, I want to say, 12 years. And, yeah, for sure, last time I was there, it was like I couldn't keep a cell signal going. Nope. And it's even worse inside because I was talking to a contractor when I was in one of my houses.

And his contractor friend was like, yeah, when they were building these places, they couldn't really afford, you know, real rebar for the concrete. So what they ended up doing was using chicken wire. Faraday cages. Which is exactly right. All those old beautiful houses are just is row upon row of Faraday cages, which is why I used to have a femto cell in my house, which still didn't work because those things were fucking garbage.

They were garbage. I had to have one at one of the places I lived a long time ago, too, and it never, ever worked. Never worked. Those were that was just such a scam. Such a scam. Well, here's my last bit of RoboTaxi news, although the show is young, so we might get some more in by the end here.

Hat tip to Dan for being the first one to send this one in. On Tuesday, one of the cruise cars ran through basically a construction zone and ended up nose down in a bunch of wet cement. Well, better than poop. Yeah, better than poop.

It was the area had been marked and there were guys with flags waving the cars saying, no, no, no. What they needed was some more orange cones, apparently. So the cones were all stolen by the activists who were putting them on the hoods of the cars from people fucking in the backseat.

The circle of life. Somebody wearing a red shirt and then that would have been fine. So this next one we're going to call Set Visibility to Screwed. Yes, Donald Trump's old Twitter account back when it was Twitter has been subpoenaed by Jack Smith. We got him this time.

Yeah, sure. Well, this is this is what took down McAfee. If you remember, John McAfee got screwed by his DMs on Twitter, colluding for all of his pump and dump cryptocurrency scams. Yeah. So, you know, Trump was trying to pump and dump the government here.

So we're going to see how this goes. But, yeah, the interesting thing is here Twitter, you know, took their sweet old time getting them the the tweets to him. And they got a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar contempt fine, which is great. Love it. Yeah, because, you know, by that point, Elon had taken over the company and there were no engineers left to find anything.

But the fact that Elon comes in, fires everybody, but they can still go back and find shit that you deleted that long ago from 2006 tells you nothing is ever deleted. So we talk about it all the time. Nothing positive.

Nothing on these services is ever deleted. Ever. Nope. Yeah. Oh, the last one I got right now is I love this. The New York Times has put a in an item in their terms of use talking about AI and saying, hey, you can't take our stuff.

Right. Yeah. We figured that was coming because they were they were like, we want to get paid. Woo. Oh, we do work. And then you take it and make new shit out of it. Why should you get paid? Common sense stuff. Right. OK. Well, rumors are going around now that The New York Times might actually just say screw it and sue OpenAPI.

They should. Which they absolutely should. The thing about that is they might have to rebuild chat GPT from scratch then because the large language models are so intertwined and become such black boxes because they're just little signals that go in for different things that you can't just pull out one bit of data.

Yeah. You can't say forget Sarah Silverman's book. Exactly. Yeah. So they have to rebuild. But they're rebuilding all the time. You know, was it GPT-5 is going to be coming at some point. So all they have to do is like, you know, re-swizzle for that.

We'll see how this plays out. But I hope The New York Times does sue them because these people have – look at how much funding OpenAI has gotten. They've got all the monies. Yeah. I mean, they could buy at least four Twitters at this point. Come on.

The only downside is every time they rebuild this model, we lose like a third of the planet, you know, since Bitcoin has, you know, dropped the ball lately on killing rainforests. OpenAI and all this other crap has taken over. Yeah. They have.

Yeah. Well, I hope they have to rebuild. I think that's great. You should do it right. I don't know why everybody thought this was totally okay. But you're right. Move fast and break things. You've got a multi-billion dollar bank account. You're being – you've got the money to do all this and you're using copyrighted material.

You're using – they use that – what was they call it? Bible 3 or whatever, which is all that ripped off stuff and everybody's trained all their models on these libraries that are completely illegal. It's unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah, there's a reckoning coming for that shit real soon. Yep. There better be. Snapchat's having an issue with their AI chatbot.

It glitched so hard it started posting stories, which it's not supposed to be able to do. Yeah. That's – it's like – the fact that it can – Yes. It means something is fundamentally wrong. It's got a bunch of people on Twitter or X now wondering if we're at the dawning of the singularity because this has happened.

No. Now, they said no, it was just a technical issue, but they didn't exactly explain how it did it still. Everything is a technical issue when you're talking about software. Yes. Of course it's a fucking technical issue, but how did it post to stories when it wasn't supposed to be able to?

It doesn't – my AI does not have stories feature, but it was a tech issue. Somebody wrote that code that let it do it. It did not write itself. Well, maybe it did. No, maybe. Maybe. That's the thing. We don't know.

But good thing we're entrusting our children's education to these black boxes, and Iowa School District is now using AI to ban books. Yeah. I lost half my listeners on boot up for this story, I think. Yeah, because nobody reads. The TLDR on this is there's too many books for us to try to read to figure out if there's descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act, which the new – there's some new – new Iowa legislator passed a law saying that you couldn't have that in any school books.

So they're running all the books through AI to parse for bad words or people fucking in robo-taxis. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of classics are being taken out, which is insane. The Handmaid's Tale. I guess you don't want anybody knowing about that, do you, Iowa? No.

Better ban Hulu, too. So, anyways, whatever. Stop it. Knock it off, people. Don't ban books. Yeah, seriously. Just stop banning books and then we – you know. But these are people who don't want to think anyway. Seriously, I bet your kid doesn't fucking read just like you, so don't bother. Let the people who read, read.

Anyway, I love this one, too. Scientists have decided to – they didn't decide to. Well, I guess they kind of decided to. Some scientists at the University of Chicago have made a new tool that will take an image and basically futz with it enough that when it gets sucked in by an AI to be classified, it gets classified as something different.

It's kind of like steganography but not really. It modifies the images to a point where it is not your image when the AI sees it. Gotcha. Which is great. Yeah. So, it's – I'm sure the AIs will figure out how to fix this in the future at some point, maybe.

But I think – The whack-a-mole continues. The whack-a-mole continues, but you need these people to actually at least start doing things like this to actually make a dent in the problem, you know. So, it's cool. It's cool. Yeah, it's called Glaze. The link in the show notes in there. They're making it free because they think that art needs to stay, you know, art, I guess.

They like humans. They like humans. I'm not so sure I'm on board with that, but okay. You're not on board with humans? Yeah, not really. Seriously, not nowadays. Well, this next story is fantastic.

Bots are better at beating, are you a robot tests than humans? Well, we know that. But we finally have some action. Trust me. My email account knows that. Yeah. The fact that it took me five minutes to get into this show because I couldn't get our show notes up was part of that.

Oh, God. They're saying that when humans solved distorted text capture texts, it took between 9 and 15 seconds and achieved an accuracy of only 50 to 84%. Bots taking the same test completed it in less than a second with 99.8% accuracy. My thing is just flip it on its head.

If you can't pass a capture, you're human. Let them through. That's right. I agree. Have you seen the one? This is the one that drove me crazy I got. I think I actually got this on ChatGPT, which was they showed me a picture of a guy in an airplane seat, and they gave you a different seat, and you had to move the guy to the seat with the seat number in it.

I shit you not. That was the captcha. Oh, my God. We're all playing stupid games. You have to use your arrow keys to get through the different seat numbers. At that point, I'd just be like, I don't even care about getting into this this much. I was like, I'm a fucking paid member, and it was asking me every single time.

I'm just like, oh. I don't care if I'm a robot. I fucking paid you. Let me in. Right. Well, the latest thing that OpenAI thinks that they can solve with their ChatGPT and AI is content moderation, because it's been doing so well so far.

The company wrote in a blog post that GPT-4 can not only help make content moderation decisions, but aid in developing policies and swiftly iterating on policy changes, reducing the cycle from months to hours. What could possibly go wrong here? Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, this is not going to work.

Lazy human's going to laze. Yeah. That's it. It's like, okay, let's go back to the sweat farms or the sweatshops in Nigeria and let people do them there. Oh, wait, that's not working either. No. Because everybody's got PTSD and, yeah. Because humans are fucking horrible.

I think that's really what everything comes down to. Yes, they just are. That's a sad but true. Yeah. Well, here's a couple extra ones here. NYC bans TikTok on city-owned devices. That's going to be everywhere soon. That's just going to be a thing. It's a thing.

Which is really interesting. Well, I mean, the two interesting things here are that New York State has already banned it. So apparently, you know, you have to be – the shit doesn't trickle down for a while apparently. So state-issued devices have been banned since 2020.

So now the cities have finally come on three years later, which is fine. The biggest issue I don't think is the spying. I think it's the time suck that people shouldn't be using TikTok on their fucking work phone. Exactly. You know, get rid of that. Get rid of that. Yeah.

I'm not too concerned about like some budgetary or sanitary maintenance like a guy with TikTok on his phone for the Chinese. But I'm worried about him not doing his damn job. I'm worried about him driving the garbage truck and running over my kids, you know? Yeah. That's what I'm worried about.

But here's the thing. Somebody on the street will be there to TikTok it for you. So you can get it all captured. And then the AI content moderation people will come in and take the video down because it's disgusting. Yeah. There you go. Do we even need people anymore? I don't think so. Okay. I don't think so.

Just checking. We've talked about the internet becoming an Ouroboros for years and now it has finally, finally happened. Now, a little NFT news to put a smile on your face. This did cheer me up. Oh, God. Buyers of bored ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be a bad investment.

Oh, my God. Yeah. You don't get to do that. You're the idiot. You're the idiot. Yes, I know. So these people are suing Sotheby's. Good luck. Because, yes, Sotheby's. Because they're morons. I don't get to sue Walmart if I buy a piece of shit chair that I knew was a piece of shit chair because I bought it at fucking Walmart.

I know. Okay. I'm just saying. I'm just saying that these people are. This is a thing. This is what people are actually doing. Morons. I have to read this. I have to read this bit. Okay. The lawsuit claims that Sotheby's representations that the undisclosed buyer was a traditional collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for bored ape yacht club NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience.

Lawsuit plaintiffs say that harmed investors bought the NFTs, quote, with a reasonable expectation of profit from owning them. Okay. Now, this comes down to the fact that Sotheby's sold a bunch of NFTs to FTX.

And they're saying that FTX was in bed with Yuga Labs. Might be true. But if you're buying a piece of art, you do not in any universe have a reasonable expectation of profit from anything.

Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Not even just art. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tough shit is what the lawyers should say and just throw them out. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Tough shit. Let me mint that for you and put it on your blockchain. Tough shit. Well, speaking of that, I guess we should start a class action lawsuit about Bitcoin.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why not, right? Same shit. Yeah. Who the fuck are we going to sue, though? It's distributed, Brian. Mr. Coin. Yeah. Let's go find Satoshi Nakamoto. Oh, wait. He's probably dead. Yeah. Oh, man. And here let's let's move on for the last final nail in the NFT coffin.

Now, have you not heard ad fucking nauseam from these bit bros and NFT knobs that, oh, you know, one of the great things about NFT is artists. Artists can get paid, you know, forever for the resale of their artwork as it as it goes up in value, which we have.

Which it has not, obviously. But, Jason, they have smart contracts. Exactly. They're better than normal contracts because they're smart contracts, Jason. They're smart. Surely they work. Well, here's here's the rub. Jesus.

This comes back to the entirety of everything saying that, oh, but it's on the blockchain. It's on the blockchain. Well, somebody has to enforce the smart contract. OpenSea, which was, you know, one of the. The big one. Biggest. The biggest scam artist in the entire NFT trade world has decided that.

They're not going to do that. We don't actually have to do that if we don't want to. There's really nothing we can do about it anyway. No, there's nothing you can do about it. Period. They're just going to say we are not going to do this in the future because we don't want to.

So so the smart contracts with those residual payouts in the future are going away. So they're they're not going to be enforcing these royalty fees any longer. What do we say day one? We first got a whiff of NFT and smart contracts.

I was like, there's no fucking way. It's all bullshit. And this is the you know, the apes are coming home to roost. Yes, they are. So they are. Yeah, I don't want to hear anybody ever say that we were wrong. You want to know how fast all of this went?

I somebody posted this on on X. It was it was only a year ago that Snoop Dogg performed as a board ape on on some award show. It was only a year ago. Oh, my God. That's how fast this shit burned the ground. That is so awesome.

That is so awesome. It just makes me feel good inside. I don't know why I'm a am I a horrible person? No, we like being right. Yeah, we do. We do. Happens more often than you think. It happens an awful lot. Speaking of X and pathetic little people, X is slowing down links to websites.

Elon Musk doesn't like. Yeah, he has put in some code to add a five second delay to things. like The New York Times, Mastodon, Blue Sky Threads, and Substack. Makes them load slow because he's a dick. Yeah, that kind of sums it up. He's a dick.

That's the entire story. Speaking of being a dick, he's also being a dick to Scott Galloway, who can be a dick himself sometimes. I was going to say, there's a mutual dick society there. Well, apparently he's been locked out of Twitter for, I think, almost two weeks now after allegedly declining an invitation to meet with the chief twit himself.

He posted on threads that as of Tuesday, he had been locked out of his account for 17 days, following it up with a post saying a mutual friend reached out and said, Elon feels unfairly attacked by me and wants to meet. I declined. Two days later, I was locked out. Yeah, well, the thing is, like, the timeline doesn't quite line up because he hadn't been posting anything for a while.

I mean, I guess he was on vacation. Yeah. Yeah, his must be nice. Yeah. He takes all of August off every year. Must be nice. Well, then how did he go and find it? Because he should still be on vacation. I'm sure he logged in to look at something. Something.

I'll tell you what he didn't look at, any science on Twitter. Yeah. Because these are the other people leaving, and this sucks for me because it was the real reason I was on Twitter anyways. News and scientists. Earlier this year, Pew Pew Pew Research reported that a majority of U.S. Twitter users reported spending less time on the platform since Elon Musk take over last year.

Now, new data suggests another important group of users are also pulling back from the service. More than half of scientific researchers who use Twitter report they've reduced the amount of time they spend there or have left altogether, according to a survey of thousands of scientists conducted by Nature. So, yeah, they're out of there.

They're moving to threads. They're moving to Mastodon. They're moving to smaller areas without the Gen Pop because the Gen Pop is dumb. Yeah. The Gen Pop shits all over them and doxes them and does other crazy-ass shit. This kind of explains the whole kerfuffle around the superconductor shit that was going on because all the real scientists were gone, so all the fake scientists were left to go run that experiment.

They do their own research, scientists are left on Twitter now. Yes. I've Googled it. I know. I've done my own research. Fuck. We're so fucked.

At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Media Candy.

So I was popping into Apple TV Plus this week because I have to go through Apple TV Plus to get to Paramount Plus so I can go watch Strange New Worlds. Well, the thing about Apple TV Plus now is it is all sports on the marquee homepage.

Well, they've spent so much money on MLS and on MLB. It's not surprising at all. They want to recoup on their investment. Yeah, that's fine. Can I get a checkbox, Tim, that just says no sports, please? Because there is no universe where I'm ever going to watch any of it, period.

It's just in the fucking way. I wish you could at least do favorites. Like, I don't really give a crap about anything except for the Dodgers with baseball. So popping up Red Sox games, I could care less. But if I got funneled into the things I do like, I would not mind that. Yeah, that's fine.

I still don't need foundation ads. I don't need silo ads because I watched it. And I don't need foundation ads because I'm never going to watch it. It would just be nice to be able to customize that just a touch. Why don't you just download the Paramount Plus app and do that instead?

Because I pay for it through Apple TV Plus. Oh, well, that was dumb. No, it's not because I can cancel any time without having to jump through any hoops. Right. But, you know, well, I'll talk about why I'm not canceling it. Well, look, they're dripping Star Trek out. There's going to always be new Star Trek except for like right now, like another month.

Well, that's the thing. I have the Showtime package, so I have Paramount Plus Plus Showtime. So that is taken over for me. I'll talk about that in a second. But here's the fun part. It's official. People aren't watching TV as much as they used to. Yeah, no shit. That's called the TikTok effect. Nielsen reports that linear TV now makes up less than 50% of all TV usage.

Finally. Yeah, we knew it was coming. Over the last year, cable viewership has dropped 12.5% in broadcast TV. Now accounts for just one-fifth of total watch time in American homes. It's because it's all fucking stupid reality shows. Mm-hmm. You stop making good product.

Yeah. And you charge too much for it. The thing now is it's like reality is all we got thanks to the strikes. It's things are going to start running out very soon. Give it another two months. By the end of October, it's over. They're done. They're done. And here's the fun part that we've always predicted too.

Streaming TV costs now higher than cable. Yep. Yeah. I mean this particular study does make an assumption that you have basically subscribed to everything, but you kind of have to these days because everything is so fragmented. Yeah, they use a standard package of Apple TV+, HBO Max, Disney, and Hulu.

Right. But, you know, they're just using that block and say it used to cost $73 a month. Now it's $87 a month. And these companies are saying, oh, we're losing money on this. We're losing money on this. Even though they have record subscribers, they're just – they're spending money in the wrong places.

They're pissing it away. It's so annoying. And the biggest issue though is their stock is crashing because they're mismanaging everything else. It's just a mess. This whole fucking Discovery Warner Brothers thing, oh, Jesus. What?

Max isn't successful? Well, let's buy all of this crap and then cancel everything and throw it all away. Well, that's the thing that I don't understand about any of these streamers. Netflix does as much of it as anybody else. You have a show.

It's doing well. And then you cancel it and then you take it off your streaming package for tax reasons. You spent the money on development of the show already. It's got people watching it. What are you doing? Yep. So, I mean, at least the thing is it's better for other streaming platforms.

Like Roku TV is buying up this stuff left, right and center. They've got so much they don't even have a lot of it scheduled to air yet because they've got too much stuff. Right. You know, my friend's show, Legendary, that was on HBO Max before it was Max, they funded that show for three seasons.

It did fairly well. But then they canceled it because this new guy hates gays, canceled anything gay. And then Roku started buying it up. So, and we talked to the Roku channel. Like, hey, when are you going to run it? They're like, we don't know yet. We've got so much stuff. We don't know what to do. I mean, we literally talked to them about that.

That's what they told us. Like, we just have so much stuff now. So, the Roku channel is going to be bumping up pretty soon. So, make sure you get that. At least, oh, wait, that's free. Never mind if you have a Roku device. Well, we had Star Trek Strange New Worlds and Good Omens season finales that I finally watched.

The Good Omens one anyways, because that was, oh, six episodes came out at once quite a while back. I'm not going to talk about that one because you haven't seen it yet. But Star Trek Strange New Worlds had their season finale with a bit of a cliffhanger there. It was good. I found it jarring going back to a regular episode after all the experimentation that they've done recently, though.

And I was like, the musical episode was better. Yeah, it was. It was. I'm like, this crazy action thing with the Gorn, I'm just like, I kind of like the other shit. It was more fun. It was more lighthearted. I know what they were trying to do, but they should have sprinkled some more Gorn throughout the season, I think, to keep us hooked.

I think they needed a bit more space between that and the musical and then the crossover with Lower Decks. Like, you do those two episodes and then you hit us with something super serious. Yeah. A little more space. Yeah. A little more Final Frontier in there, please.

Yeah. Please. But at least they did make a callback in the episode to the musical episode. Yeah. That was funny. He's like, at least we're not singing anymore. Oh, and we got Scotty. Yes, that's right. We got Scotty. I almost spaced on that. We got Scotty. And he's great. He's actually Scottish.

Yeah. Not Canadian or whatever the other guy was. Oh, English. Yeah. Yeah. No, I forgot about that, too. Yeah, we did get Scotty. So that was fun. That was fun. I got a nice little video here. Anson Mount recalls recording Space, the Final Frontier. That whole bit.

It's a cute little video. Highly recommend watching it if you're a fan of the show. It's only a few minutes, but it's a good story. It's a really good story. I won't spoil it for you. And I'm not going to talk about this. I just got the link in the show notes if you're a parent and you have not watched Bluey yet. I've been talking about this show a bit.

It's in praise of Bluey, the most grown-up television show for children. Bluey is awesome. I love when my kid wants to watch it. I have barrel rolled on the floor laughing from some of this stuff. I have had to turn away and wipe tears from my eyes from other episodes. It is so well-written.

And so it's as much, if not more so, for the parents than the kids. It's a phenomenal show. Billions is back on Showtime, which is why I have to keep my Paramount Plus subscription. But the thing about Billions being back, I was not going to watch this show.

And I think that the producers knew that nobody was going to watch this show because they've been shit in the bed for two seasons. Damien Lewis is back as Axe. All right. Fuck yeah. That's all that matters. That's all that matters in this show right now. Axe is back. I haven't seen him since somebody killed him on Homeland.

Oh, that's right. I forgot he was in Homeland. I just remember him as Dick Winters from Band of Brothers. Go back and watch that now. He's so young. All these people are so young. A long time ago, man, that show. It was. It was. Highly recommend binging that if you have something, if you have some spare time, if you've never seen Band of Brothers.

Oh, it's absolutely phenomenal. And I don't like war movies at all. Yeah. Yeah. And here's the. It has legs. It totally has legs. It is. It is. It still holds up just as good as it did when it first aired. It really does. So, yeah, I'm happy about Billions being back.

So that's going to fit the bill for six episodes because they got shut down by the writer's strike as well. Oh, the writer's strike and the actor's strike too. So, yeah, the Los Angeles strike, as we'll just call it. All of L.A. is basically on strike now.

Yeah. I watched Painkiller on Netflix. I have heard not good things about it. It sucks. OK. It absolutely sucks. All right. I, you know, I love me some Ferris Bueller, but him as Richard Sackler was awful.

Awful. Yeah, it's terrible. It is a low-rent version of Dope Sick, which had Michael Keaton in it. He played one of the doctors in it. I highly recommend skipping Painkiller and watching Dope Sick if you want to have your depressing opioid docudrama.

At least Dope Sick actually taught you some stuff. It gave you a much better insight into the Sacklers and the shit that they've done to wheedle their way into our lives. Like that whole – like they just barely brushed over the pain scale, that zero to ten pain scale that you get – you still get at the hospital.

That was the Sacklers. They invented that. And people are taught that in medical school and they just invented that shit to sell OxyContin. You find out about that in Dope Sick. You do not find about that in Painkiller. Plus, Dope Sick was more – it's better acted, well-written, better written, and all that shit.

There you go. I highly recommend Dope Sick. But yeah, skip Painkiller. It was fucking garbage. All right. I've started watching The Witcher Season 3. I was not going to watch it because I remember not particularly enjoying Season 2, although I did like Season 1. But then I heard about the whole thing with Henry Cavill, who I genuinely like.

He got famously booted as Superman and then he also got booted from this role and he's being replaced at the end of this season. So I decided, well, that's interesting. Maybe I should go back and watch it. Plus, writer's strike. What else am I going to do? I'm really enjoying Season 3.

Oh, cool. It's good. It's got a good story. The acting is great. I'm really liking where they're going with it. My wife walked by a couple of times and she's like, this looks like Game of Thrones except with no budget. That's about right. That's about right.

There you go. Instead of smearing blood and having great makeup people, Henry Cavill reportedly just like rolls himself around in dirt before every day. But it gives it some sense of realism, too, which is kind of nice. It's not over CGI or fantastical. You know what I mean? So it's like I'm I'm really enjoying it.

I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. Awesome. Season 2 was rough, though. Cups and doodads. YouTube is cracking down on videos promoting ineffective cancer treatments. OK, more people, right, more people suck.

That's right. They're going to start to promote authoritative sources like the Mayo Clinic for cancer related information instead of Joe Schmuck trying to sell you mushroom coffee. Let me tell you, as somebody who has had cancer, garlic does not cure it. Vitamin C does not help. Vitamin C. No, you know what helps?

Fucking medicine. Ah, modern medicine. Yeah, that's why I'm still here. Not garlic. I ate a lot of garlic. Yeah, you had garlic before and you still got cancer. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. If garlic if garlic cured anything, I think we would live to a thousand right now.

So, yeah, I have garlic every day. Me, too. All the time. Love it. Can't get enough of it. So, fuck you. Yeah. Oh, dude, do you have black garlic in your house? Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. I love black garlic. I put that shit on everything. Seriously. Oh, my God.

It is the best spread on crackers. I love that stuff. It's very good. Yeah, it's not what you think, people. It's sweet and tasty and delicious and good for you, but it does not cure cancer. Yeah, I covered this story on Boot Up and I'm like, the only cancer that YouTube really needs to crack down on is political cancer.

Can we get rid of those guys next, please? That would be awesome. That would be so much better. So, I've got a little class action lawsuit news. Apple is going to start sending payouts for the $500 million battery gate lawsuit soon. So, you should start to see your pennies from heaven trickling in. Well, 65 bucks.

That's not change. 65 bucks is nothing to sneeze at. This is five years in the waiting. Yeah. Adjusted for inflation, it's $1.22. Yeah. So, it's too late to get in on that one, but you'll get your money if you did before. But you have a couple days left to file claims for Facebook's $725 million data privacy settlement.

Anyone in the United States who had a Facebook account in the last 16 years has one week left to file for a payment. So, get in there. Which is everybody in the United States that was born. So, everybody's going to get a buck. That's about it. That's about it. Because the lawyers are getting half, for sure.

Get on that, people. Link in the show notes. Remember, it's your civic duty. It's the only way these companies get punished anymore. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave.

With podcast super host Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire 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.

Welcome back, Dave. How you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you. Excellent. Good to be back. Excellent. We have a bit of feedback for you. Clint writes in on the last episode. Dave was lamenting the fact that Don Henley's Dirty Laundry is not available on iTunes. Was he possibly referring to Apple Music streaming because it is available for purchase on iTunes for $1.29?

Yes, indeed I was. I was referring to Apple Music streaming. And shame on me for not differentiating between the two. The fuzzy line. Pete wrote in, weirdly, Dirty Laundry is on Apple Music in Australia. I've got a screenshot if you want to see it.

Great podcast, by the way. I found it recently. Two thoughts here. First, Dirty Laundry probably got more plays in the last week than it has in the past five years. Right. My guess from just from people going and looking to see if they had it or not. Yeah. And the other one was I just realized how funny it is how you – when you've been in an industry for so long and you have such knowledge of the industry, you forget that everybody else doesn't.

And that is how I feel when people started to write in about this because I was like, yeah, but don't you understand? Bands have different regions, have different record contracts, maybe even with different labels. And they do different deals and they make different deals with the streamers and it depends on what label you are on and who distributes it within that country.

And, oh, yeah, people don't understand that. So, yeah, that's the way it works. It's very complicated and sometimes things just aren't going to be in a region. End of story. Yeah. Well, that was one of the odd things about it was that like the whole rest of that album, I think – what is it? Is it Building the Perfect Beast?

I can't remember which album Dirty Laundry is on but the whole rest of that album was available on Apple Music streaming but just that song was not. Yet it's still available on Apple Music's infrastructure for purchase, just not for streaming. Correct.

Now, I don't know the specifics of this song. I suppose I could have looked into it but who really cares that much. But there could have been a co-writer or a producer on that one or they licensed it to a soundtrack and they had first dibs or – I mean, there are a gazillion different reasons it could not be.

Somebody just along the way said, I don't want it on streaming and it's not in the U.S. But elsewhere probably. Somebody threw a tizzy fit at some point and now I have to go get it by other means. Yeah, I have to get it by other means.

Lesson here, kids, is the music industry sucks. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about it, it's the same – the only reason I have a VPN is because of TV and movie deals. Same thing, right? Like Netflix U.S. versus Netflix U.K. They have different shows because of different deals.

How long do you think this is going to last? How long until the – what I consider in my mind to be the average person's devaluation of music being out of alignment with what the music industry values their music as?

Well, I think it's already – I mean, it's crashed and burned. It can't get any worse. Musicians are already not making any money. Although, weirdly, the big labels are making tons. Interesting. Surprising. Surprising, isn't that? Yes. Yes. So music has already been completely devalued. Nobody wants to pay for it.

They're – you know, they'll do Spotify for free just to get the vast majority of musical content out there. And again, like earlier in the show, we were talking about books and reading and how very few people actually read. Very few people care about music that's more than five years old.

So like when you go back and you have like these hits from the 80s and things like that, that's a very limited number of people that are looking for these things. So it's not really that important. Yeah. I also think the ritual that we used to have of putting an album on the record player, since that's been lost.

And music is disposable now, right? It's not something – like I don't know if teenagers are sitting in their bedrooms with headphones on anymore. I suspect not, you know, poring over the same album time and time again. I'm not saying I listened to The Cure's Disintegration about 9,000 times when I was 16, but I fucking did.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean my teenage son, he listens to music when he's in the shower and he'll be listening to it while he's doing other things. But really the background – It's not the main activity.

Yeah. No, no. Well, and also the background soundtrack of his life has become podcasts. Right. That's my boy. Good man. Good man. Not that he has any choice. You hear that, advertisers? Yeah. Seriously. All right. Right. Yeah.

But he'll be – yeah, that's what he has. Whereas we would have put an album on and just have it playing in the background, he'll put a podcast on, which I'd say – I'm the same way. These days, really. Yeah. Well, me too. I used to – I would make custom mixtapes if I knew I had a long drive when I was a teenager.

Now it's podcasts. Right. Or a breakup. Yeah. Yes. Well, start and end of relationship involve custom mixtapes. Yes, they did. Yes, they totally did. Yes, they did. That's true. And the middle did too. That was the banging tape. That one can be reused.

Yes. Once you get a good one, you want to keep going. Well, you really only need three minutes at a time. That's true. That's true. Yeah. You just have to be careful if you choose any songs that have specific girls' names in them. Ah, yes. Oh, I'm not dating Gloria anymore. Ooh. You've got to cut that one out.

Actually, no. That was a good tactic. You can get away with it. Oh, I heard the song. Oh, yeah. My ex also happened to be named Gloria. Right. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. So, Brian, you did mention TV and I did want to bring this up.

I heard Lena Kahn on the Ankler podcast. It's basically about the Hollywood writer's strike. And she's from the Federal Trade Commission. Yep. And she was talking about how they may be looking into studios and all their practices because, you know, they're – and first off, she's extraordinarily well-spoken and extremely smart.

I was so impressed by her on this podcast. It was incredible. That's why everybody was super excited when she first took the position. It hasn't – I mean, people are saying it hasn't gone very well. Other people are saying she's doing everything she needs to be doing to – it's a slow burn. But she's very smart.

Yeah, extremely smart. And she's saying that, yeah, the major studios, they are basically screwing the pooch on everything and they're – the FTC is like thinking about looking into their business practices. And I'm like, please, go faster, faster, which is why she was on the show talking about the strike.

And, you know, it's a complicated topic that I don't want to get into. But I highly recommend checking out the podcast. It's like 40 minutes or something. It's well worth the listen. I got to say they don't really need to look into it very well. They just need to watch The Sopranos. That's exactly how it works.

So, Jason, is she talking about like Hollywood's famous creative accounting practices? That sort of stuff? Yeah, talking about why the creators are getting stiffed, why the public is getting stiffed, why the product is getting worse, but the companies are getting richer and the people who actually make it are getting poorer.

It's just how everything is being flipped on its head as far as how the studio system used to work and everybody got paid and now it's not that way anymore. Absolutely. Everything that we're seeing with the major studios is exactly what we already went through in the music industry. And we were all screaming at the top of our lungs, be careful because look what happened to us.

Yeah, I was thinking about that today about the – how – and I don't want to sound stereotypically, you know, end-stage capitalism, but it's going to sound like that because I was thinking about how – let me highly simplify and say venture capital, like they go through vertical by vertical and just extract all the value.

Like we just saw with podcasting. Right, right. Yeah. And where does it end? Well, it all ends up on a super yacht with the billionaires that we talked about two episodes ago. That's where it ends.

I mean we're just seeing such accumulation of massive wealth in the hands of very few people. It's all just being funneled straight away from everybody else. Mm-hmm. On that fun note – You want to read this one, Jason, or should I?

Yeah, I'll go with this one. Because I put this one in. Roz wrote this in. This came across my Steam recommendations page, and I thought of Dave and Jason's love of musicals. This may be right up your alley. I doubt it runs on Macs, but you never know. No, I know I looked at the PC. Here's a link to the site in the launch trailer.

I did play the demo during the Indie Game Festival on Steam, and it was the strangest demo I've played yet. He's talking about Stray Gods, the role-playing musical. Mm-hmm. I wish I had a PC to go play this because it's kind of interesting. It is.

Yeah. I went and looked at the demo and everything and the website here, and my first thought was, how has no one done this before? Yeah. How did it take this long for someone to come up with a role-playing interactive musical?

I think the Venn diagram of gamers and musical fans was not very big so long ago until recently. I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. You guys are on words. I don't know. I mean, I think certain kinds of musicals, like the people who, to me, the people who played D&D were also really into chess, the musical, you know, that sort of thing.

On the other hand, I wonder, if you're playing a game, do you really want to pause for five minutes to listen to someone sing, right? Because that's what it takes. I feel that way in general, which is why I'm not a musical fan.

Hmm. Okay. That's fair. Except for Star Trek. That was a good one. That was a good one. No, this is cool. If they ever port it or if I ever get PC up and run it, I'm going to give it a shot because it looks fun. It really looks fun.

Roz finishes up, thanks for keeping the show alive. I've lost track of how long I've been listening and supporting the show, but I remember Beach Mama sometime after I started listening. Okay, Roz, you've been around for a long time because of Beach Mama, our first fan. This is my go-to podcast and I look forward to every episode and thanks for the many book reviews.

Well, you're welcome, Roz, and thanks for sticking around. Beach Mama. Yeah. Wow. I don't even know what Beach Mama is. She was one of the first people that wrote in to us. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. It was really nice. She stuck with us for a few years and then she kind of disappeared into the waves. Yeah.

Maybe she's Beach Grandmama now. Maybe. I never know. So I went to a baseball game yesterday. Uh-huh. I went to see the Red Sox play at the Nationals Stadium. Now, let me stop you right there. Yes. Baltimore Orioles.

Yes. Historically bad team. Yes. Having the season of their lives and you didn't go see an Orioles. Yes. Having their best season since I've been alive and you didn't go to their games. Yes.

You're correct in everything that you said. And the group of friends that I went to see this Nats game with, we are plotting to go see an Orioles game sometime in September. So we will get there. But you're absolutely correct.

Which ties into one of the comments that I want to make about going to this game, which is that I feel so spoiled as an Orioles fan having Camden Yards as my home baseball park.

Because I went to this Nats game yesterday and it's fine. The stadium's fine. It's beige. It has everything you could want. Like it has plenty of food. There's plenty of restrooms.

There's like everything you would need. It's, you know, sound system's good. The video's good. The sight lines are good. But the stadium itself has no personality of its own. It's just a place to watch baseball.

Whereas a place like Camden Yards, it just has a feeling to it. It feels like baseball. I'm 100% with you. Dodger Stadium, as much of a pain in the ass as it is to get there, is a magical place. While I also go see occasionally Anaheim Angels games because they're right by too.

It's just a stadium. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I can jump in on this one. Really? Go on. I used to go see the Giants play all the time when I lived in San Francisco. Fucking hate the Giants. I hate the Giants too. But the stadium was awesome.

It is a good stadium. It was a fantastic stadium. Great food. Great views. It was two blocks from my office and four blocks from my house. You can't be in a stadium where if they hit it out of the park, it goes in the fucking ocean. Right. It's pretty cool. Where there's people in canoes out there getting the balls.

Yeah. Right. Hoping to not get beaned. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was a great place to go see games. I mean, I don't remember any of the teams I saw play there except that I know the Giants were there. That was about it. Be weird if they weren't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But man, the food was fantastic. It was just a vibe.

It was fun. Now, I will say that in reflecting on this, I had a realization, which is that I'm pretty sure in my entire life, I have only been to three major league baseball stadiums. Okay. The original Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Camden Yards, and National Stadium.

I don't think I've been anywhere else. I've been to a couple of minor league baseball stadiums. Cal Ripken has a stadium near us where the Ironbirds play. And I've been to where the Frederick Keys play. And those are both feeder teams to the Orioles. But I don't know how I've managed to go this far.

And I guess it's just because I'm not an avid baseball fan. So when I travel, it's not like I go, ooh. It might have something to do with it. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Just because I've never cared and bothered, this is why. Right. It's like me saying to people, what do you mean you've never been to a Broadway musical?

You know, like. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Should perspective. I think I've been to three as well. I think I've been to three. I've been to Three Rivers Stadium. I saw the Pirates play there when Willie Stargell was with them. We should date that for you. I've been to the Giants Stadium.

And I've been to Wrigley Field. Although Wrigley Field, the only time I was there was I was on the grounds watching Billy Joel play. I never saw a baseball game there. Does not count. But I was in the stadium. I stood at the pitcher's mound. That's cool. I know it's a thing for some people to go around and do all the stadiums.

I've been to quite a few, but nowhere near all of them. Like maybe 10. Okay. But I know somebody personally that has been to every single stadium, including the Expos, Montreal, when they still had a team there. Wow. That's actually Mike Malinnon, the drummer from the Goo Goo Dolls.

Oh. He's done a show. Yeah. Yep. Yep. He's done them all. He's done them all. Now, to be fair, he was a touring musician. He went to all these cities. Right. And he had days off because he didn't play until night. So. Yeah.

So it kind of helped. Yeah. Yeah. I'm also curious, Brian, how do you feel about baseball basically having a shot clock now? I love it. I think the game is sped up. It's a lot more fun. It's a lot quicker. I mean, I'm torn a little bit because sometimes like being here in Toronto now and watching the Dodgers, sometimes the Dodgers games will be on at weird times that aren't convenient for me.

And now that the games are like two hours, I'll miss it. Before, when they were almost four hours long, I knew I would catch some of it. So that's the only downside. But actually watching the games, I think the game is much more vital now. It's quicker. It's more interesting. I find my son is more into it now because there's less like they're just standing around and doing nothing for five minutes at a time.

No, it's go, go, go, go, go. Something's always happening. So I think it's a shot in the arm that the sport actually needed. I agree. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. As a casual fan, I certainly appreciate it. It is a lot more action. Also, it's made the length of the games more predictable.

Yeah. For advertisers. Well, yeah. For advertisers. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, also for fans. TV slots. I mean, I've certainly decreased my beer consumption if I'm at a game because there's less time. But, you know, that's actually probably a good thing as I'm getting older. Right. Yeah.

I think beers were $16. Yeah, because in the old days, you would have just upped the frequency. Yeah, that's true. I would have been like quadruple fisting every inning. Seriously. No, I think it's done wonders for the game. I haven't seen numbers specifically, but I've watched enough baseball and read enough online like Bleacher Report and things like that to know that the sport's doing well, better than it was previously.

So, good for them. Yeah. I would be sad to see baseball just become a sideshow rather than a big deal. I just want it off my Apple TV. Yes. Damn it. Unless Willie Stargell's playing, I don't give a shit. Seriously.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Are kids playing baseball anymore? Yes. Are they? As a father of a seven-year-old, yes. Okay. In Canada, no less, where, you know, we only have – Canada has one team, the Toronto Blue Jays. That's it. But people are – the summer leagues are here.

They go pretty old, like all the way through. So, starting at four years old on – and they're full. Yeah. It's not like there's only a few teams out there. There's a bunch of teams. So, yeah, the kids are still playing. It's a fun game to play as a kid. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I was a terrible baseball player. Oh, my gosh. Oh, same here. Oh, it's just awful. My father thought it was good for me to play sports, to just know – and on the one hand, I think he was right. He claims, in retrospect, he claims, in retrospect, that what he wanted for me was to be able to watch the games and understand what was going on.

And so I think that's good. So I played a couple seasons of baseball and I played a couple seasons of baseball and I played a couple seasons of basketball, both, like, instructional leagues. And I was just awful. Awful. It's become clear to me that my kid, Lucas, team sports are not really his thing.

He doesn't really enjoy them. But I have him in baseball and I have him in soccer anyways just because I think it's so important for – I think all kids, certainly boys and girls at that age, to have that, like, sense of discipline that comes from a team sport and the togetherness and actually having to – team bonding and all that sort of thing.

I think it's super important. You can tell Donald Trump never fucking played sports. He played golf. That's all he's ever fucking played because he's a dick. Like, you need that at a young age, that sense of camaraderie and the whole thing. So I think it's super important, whether you're good or not. I don't think it's going to put you in your place.

I was bullied and ridiculed for my lack of ability to play when I was a baseball player and a football player. So I wholeheartedly disagree with your assessment of the teamwork. My soccer career as a kid was much better. I had fun playing soccer.

Everything else I hated. Soccer is a lot more fun of a sport until it gets super serious and it isn't. But I feel like baseball, to some degree, can go either way. It depends on your coaches and what league you sign up for. There's a super competitive one here that we had Lucas in right away, and that was horrible for him.

But then we found a much more laid-back one, and he's enjoying it a lot more. Football, I can't imagine. Like, that's just – people are nuts about football. See, that's why skateboarding was so perfect. It's an individual sport, but you do it with a group of your friends.

So it's individualistic and team-based because you're all learning from each other and building each other up. That's actually a really good point because I was kind of – Lucas really likes swim, and he's going to keep doing that, I think, for the rest of his life. Maybe competitively, we'll see, but I always thought it was very individual.

But you're right. It's kind of a team thing as well, so. My oldest son, Scott, had signed up for flag football when he was probably early middle school age. And so notice goes out that with this league, that they're in desperate need of a coach for his team.

And so my wife volunteers. My eight-months-pregnant wife volunteers. Imagine, if you will, that you are the other parent who you've signed your strapping young lad up for flag football.

And you're getting – because this is the pathway to good, great things in sports, right? You've got to start somewhere. And you get there, and who's the coach? Pregnant lady. Pregnant lady. Now, let me just say, my wife really knows football, and she had coached football in summer camps and things like that.

So she was a good coach. The saving grace for just the people who are skeptical was that one of the other kids on the team's father was a former professional football player. And so he – He helped out.

He was assistant coach, and that magically made everything okay. But it was just hilarious. People – because the people – like, Jaws did hit the ground when – because they're looking around. Where's the coach? Where's the coach? And my wife said – you know, my wife waddles in to the middle and says, I'm the coach.

And they're like, no, seriously, where's the coach? Why are you wearing shoes? You should be barefoot in the kitchen. What's happening here? Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's definitely a mindset with football more so than I think most other big American sports. That's for sure. Yeah, yeah.

She had a good time, and the team did well, and all's well that ends well. But it was a funny – it's just a funny visual, you know. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, security. Ha! Ha ha! I think we've covered it.

Yeah, I think so. Thecyberwire.com. Over at Patreon, we've got Apple to games. Woo-hoo! And we've got Dan. Dan says, hi, guys. Brian mentioned a First Contact series of books by Peter Cowderon.

I love First Contact books, so I ordered the first one straight away. I was so happy because good ones are hard to find. And then I went right to Patreon and signed up again. Thanks so much for good information. Also, FYI, Dirty Laundry is on Amazon Music. We've got a lot of that. Yeah.

Peter Cowderon actually listened to our show. What? And he tweeted us on – he X'd us on X or whatever the fuck we're supposed to say these days. And I was just saying thank you. And I wrote it back and said thank you for the book. All right. Now, how do you feel about shitting on the second one? Well, he heard that too and he still wrote us.

All right. I didn't shit on it. I just didn't think it needed to exist, which I guess is shitting on it. Yeah, kind of. Okay. All right. That's why Daniel Suarez never talks about our show. I loved his first two books, but, man, the rest were just stinkers.

Although the new series is good. I got to say that. Okay. Well, there you go. Over at PayPal, we've got Sherry, Natalie, Andrew, Dagg, Blake Bowling, Linda, Nathaniel, Edward, Brian, Joseph, and Ramsey with a big old 40 bucks. Thank you so much. Over at the tip jar, we've got Theodore Sean and the good fucking Israeli who gave us a tip for 100 bucks but did not want to be mentioned.

So he just said just call me the good fucking Israeli. I'm like, okay, you're the good fucking Israeli. No chargebacks, people. Stop the fucking chargebacks. All right. Anybody die this week? Guess not. It's not in the show notes. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

Show notes and links for everything we talked about today are GOG.show slash 614. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep doing this. Seriously, please, or sign up for Patreon or PayPal. It's everywhere. Come join us. Or self-serve an ad. Give us a few bucks because if you don't, we're not going to be doing this a lot longer.

Please. Come on. Come on. Come on. Sharing the show with your friends and enemies or anyone in between is free. It is not as good as cash, though. Not as good. No. We like cash, but sharing the show does help. GOG.show, you can find links to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. Or you can head over to GOG.show slash contact to send us your feedback, tell us to fuck off, or send us links that we can talk about in the show.

GOG.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air, which we didn't get any this week. Boo. Stay grumpy.

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

From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.