617: It’s Just Business

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From beauty and fashion to home, culinary and outdoor living. 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. We got a little note from Kenny on the X. Brian says, Jason, if the next episode of GOG is a Burning Man special, and it turns out it's just you leaving the tape running whilst Brian laughs for 45 straight minutes, I'm good with it. Take my Patreon money. Gladly.

Well, you can log off then, Jason. I've got my mints here to keep me going, so I'll start laughing now. Okay. I mean, come on. It's hilarious. Now, I do feel... I have friends that have been going to Burning Man since before it became, you know, tech douche boy bro money thing.

Yeah, douche boy. And they were there and they were fine and, you know... But it's funny. It's very funny. And, you know, Chris Rock and Diplo. When's the last time you heard Diplo's name? Walking out and whatever. Heroes. Let me tell you. Heroes.

Heroes. Whatever. Stupid thing. I'm too damn old to care. Yeah, that's exactly it. I'm just like... I'm just like, yeah. Ten years ago, I'd have been laughing. Now, I'm just like, who cares? It's like, all I know is San Francisco gets a couple extra days of good parking, you know? That's about it.

Yeah. So, I saw a little bit of this follow-up here. The UK has finally come to its senses and decided to back down. They got rid of Brexit? Yes, the government of Brexit. I guess they're coming, too. Maybe. Sort of. But they've decided to pull that stupid encryption bill that they were trying to pass.

And Apple was going to pull out and say, well, if you pass this, then there's no iMessage or FaceTime for you. And they said, well, we like our iMessage. We like our blue bubbles. We don't want to be green. Nobody wants a green bubble. Nobody wants a green bubble. So, that crisis averted in the UK for today.

For today. We'll see what tomorrow brings. Yes. It's a new day. Now, speaking of the UK, as I live in a protectorate or whatever the hell Canada is these days. So, yeah, I moved to Canada. In case you didn't know, I live in Toronto now from my home of Los Angeles, California, because of my wife.

But nobody really, if you're American, you do not think about Canada ever, really. Unless you live on a border city, you just don't think about Canada. So, there's not a lot of articles like this that come out. So, when one does, I always read it out of interest.

This is over from Slate. Americans should feel humiliated by Canadian McDonald's. Should we? Now, I've been to Canadian McDonald's. I have a seven-year-old. Even he's got better taste than that, and he'd much rather have In-N-Out. But he'll take McDonald's if it's available.

So, they talk about some of the things that McDonald's has here in Canada, which more shitty food options is a win. It's fucking McDonald's. McDonald's poutine is still crappy fast food poutine. Not good poutine. It's McDonald's poutine.

And a bigger, more calorie Big Macs is not good either. This is a very strange article. But, I mean, I suppose if you really like McDonald's and wish you had more selection, then Canada's the place to be. All right. Yeah. Now, I mean, what was it?

Tony Horton's? What's the Horton? Tim Horton's. Tim Horton's. Tony Horton was P90X. Very opposite of Tim Horton's. All right. I did like their breakfast sandwich better. They did have a better breakfast sandwich. Yes, it is amazing. Except, didn't Bieber take that over?

Isn't it the Biebs Horton now? He had some promo where it was the donut holes. They call them Timbits here. They were Biebbits for a while. Bieber's balls. Yeah, pretty much. Okay. That was a nice dusting. Nice glaze on Bieber's balls.

Nice glaze. Ew. Remember Ello? Oh, do I? We used to make him put up for like a decade. Yes. Didn't they just do t-shirts at the end? Yeah, yeah. I just didn't realize that they were gone now. They are actually gone. Oh, they're full-on gone now.

I guess, you know, once the one person that wanted an Ello t-shirt bought it, that was it. It was over. Game over. Game over, man. Yeah, it's just a bunch of certificate errors now if you go there, which I didn't know this because I was just flipping through TechCrunch this morning. It said, AI reading coach startup Ello raises $15 million to bolster child literacy.

And I'm like, that ain't the Ello I know. Now, imagine if we just took that $15 million and put it into, I don't know, the school system. Yeah, well, that's not their job. Come on, right. No. Why would you do that? That's what taxes are for. No. I just think we're out of letters.

We need more letters. We need Alphabet 2.0. And we can put it on the blockchain. Just give us more letters. Well, aren't they going to – weren't they talking about opening up emoji domains? Oh, okay. That will get us going. All right. We can do that. We can do that.

Ello could actually use a tumbleweed as their website. They could. No, I think Elon has already bought that for the next iteration of whatever the fuck he's doing. Well, it looks like what we've always wanted to have happen might actually be happening, but only if you're in the EU, Jason.

There's many things that I want to have happen, so you have to be a little more specific. Imagine, if you would, if we paid for our subscription to a social media account and they didn't mine all of our data and nail us with ads all the time. Oh, you mean the way the internet used to be? Yeah.

Oh, oh, okay. Well, it may be coming back. Meta may add a paid subscription option to Instagram and Facebook in Europe, according to the New York Times. This is to address the EU regulations that have diminished most of Meta's most lucrative data collection methods. So, since they were losing it anyways, they're now going, well, I guess if we can't get our money that way, we'll charge.

Yeah, well, here's the problem. It's Instagram and Facebook. What I think is they'll still collect all the data and they'll sell it in different ways. They're just not going to be able to use it for ads anymore. Yeah, this is a smokescreen. You're paying us so we don't have to collect it anymore. You still got the hard drives running?

Yeah, yeah, okay, keep them going. That's what I think, too. Yeah, we're going to change these laws eventually. These people aren't going to live forever, you know? Oh, Jesus. Well, we'll see how that goes. I don't think – I don't – is Facebook and Instagram that relevant over there anymore?

What are the kids in the EU doing? I don't know. Besides going outside and living life? I'll be visiting London soon. I'll tell you what the kids are doing. Okay. Well, that's technically not the EU, right? Oh, that's right. Forgot about that. Silly Brits. Yeah, yeah. Silly Wabbits. Well, speaking of meta, though, they are back in the office three days a week.

Yeah. They have laid the hammer down. We've talked about this ad nauseum. I fully support the idea of a hybrid thing. Three days a week seems reasonable to me. If you're one of those people that picked up and moved so the power of your dollar went further somewhere else or whatever and you did not get approval from your company to do so, if you did, then that's a different story.

Right. That's on you. Yeah. If they approved it and then they say come back, well, that's a different conversation. Yes. That is a different HR conversation. The thing is this whole thing is very complicated right now because we're in the middle of trying to figure shit out and some people are doing it right.

Some people are doing it wrong and every situation is different. And I think it's fair to have both sides give. I mean, three days a week is a sacrifice for people, for businesses, because they still – you can't rent an office space for three days a week.

You rent it for every day. Well, I mean, you can call Adam Neumann up and see if he's got anything laying around. Well, that's true. You can get the temporary spaces. You can rework it. Yeah. For now. Yeah. Paul wrote in. He's angry about our position on this. The sentiment of forced RTO coming from guys that work from home themselves is a bit disappointing.

Forced office attendance should be tied to bad productivity, not salary. If you get work done, it shouldn't matter where you are. And that work has a price tag that should be commensurate with the work, not your proximity to some least office space. Paul? There's a flaw in your argument, Paul. I do hybrid, by the way. Yeah.

Jason works from home because he works for himself completely. I don't work from home. I actually don't work from home. I work in an office that I pay for. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. Yes. I wasn't sure where you were at at that because you've gone back and forth a few times. I am in the office that actually costs me way too much money a month right now.

Yes. I pay for it. And even I work from home and I get pissed off when I work from home. Get your ass to the office, Jason. You're paying for it. There you go. I yell at myself. I'm going to fire myself because I can't get in the office enough. Look, Paul. There are plenty of companies that are full-on work from home.

Go work for one of those companies. Right. Problem solved. I think the issue here, though, is he's talking about – I could be wrong here. But he's talking about the salary differential. Like say I made $150,000 a year and I lived in San Francisco. Then I moved to Poughkeepsie and I'm still making $150,000 a year.

Well, the reason that you were making $150,000 a year living in San Francisco is because they bumped you up because the cost of living in San Francisco is so high. Exactly. And they're paying for the office space for you to attend. Therefore, that whole thing is just a big deal. So if you move and they're not – they don't have to pay for the office anymore, I can see where you're thinking that, oh, they should take that money and give that to you.

That's not how business works. No, it is not. That unfortunately what they want is they want to pay you as little as possible to do your job and that is a reason for them to say, hey, we're still paying for all this shit over here. You're over there. Why are we giving you as much money as if you would live here?

You know, it's complicated. It's complicated. My wife just had to have this discussion with her company because technically she's based out of Los Angeles. She's now living in Toronto. They want to review the salary based on cost of living on where you live. Well, that and she works for the devil, but – Well, that too.

Yeah. But devil pays well. Yeah, well, here's the other option. Grindr just lost almost half its staff. Now, the headlines say because of its strict return to work policy.

There's another shoe with the Grindr story. Okay. That needs to be addressed. The Grindr employees decided to unionize. Oh, I'm sure that didn't have any effect. Yeah. Well, they announced their intention to unionize on July 20th, and the company's return to office mandate was announced shortly after on August 4th.

How are we going to deal with this? How are we going to cut these people? Yeah. So this is a complicated one. It's not what it seems on the surface. We'll be keeping an eye on this. But yeah, almost half of their 180-person workforce walked out. And, you know, that's their prerogative.

That's the great part of living in the United States. You can do whatever the fuck you want. You certainly can. You can start a company, and then when people say, I want to unionize, you can say, I don't think so. You can. You certainly can. Like Amazon and Facebook are trying to do it.

Everybody else on the planet who hears unions are coming. They're saying, what the hell can we do? Fire them. As they twirl their mustache and say, it's all complicated. But remember, this is all business. So nothing is fair. Nothing is fair.

At the end of the day, it's always follow the money. Yeah, but don't expect life to be fair. Especially nowadays. Yeah, I agree. Well, Airbnb certainly doesn't think life is fair right now. No shit. I mean, I can't believe it took as long as it did, but it finally happened.

New York City has basically de facto banned Airbnb. Because they want them to follow the regulations that exist. There are regulations on the books, yes. Yes. That is basically all they want to do. Now, they did start enforcing some new regulations, because basically Airbnb was saying, fuck it, we're not following those old ones.

They were trying to Uber their way out of it. Yes. They were trying to Uber their way out of it. So hosts will have to file a registration application and meet a set of requirements to be able to rent homes to guests for less than 30 days. They can only rent out homes for short-term stays if they're also staying there. I don't get that.

I would never do that. And only two guests are allowed at a time. These requirements are part of old and existing rules on rentals, however, and only the short-term rental registration law itself is new. So they basically had to say, you're not paying attention to this. This applies to you. So I guess we'll make a new one that specifically states, this is for you, Airbnb.

Yeah. Airbnb is saying that the city is in the pocket of big hotel. But here's the thing. Airbnb is a hotel. Don't they understand that they are basically running hotels? That is what they're talking about. They're a platform.

They're a platform. They're just a platform. But here's the thing. I think – and I am fine with this because the problem is Airbnb created low-rent slumlords everywhere in the world. Yep. And that's why it's so impossible to buy anything anymore because everybody has investment properties.

I've got three investment properties. Yeah, well, I'm living in a fucking apartment because I can't afford to get a goddamn place to live. You asshole. So let's free up some real estate and let people get to the fucking job of living. Yeah. That's the problem, that we have a housing crisis right now.

And the rents are too damn high. The house prices are too damn high. And Airbnb certainly did not help because people that had a lot of money, to your point, Jason, they bought properties in places that people want to live because they have to go to the offices to make their money. Right? Right. Yep. So, yes.

Yeah, I'm fine with it. Me too. I think Airbnb needs to be regulated like this. Like, you still have some. It's not like it's not allowed. It's just you can't have a ton. You can only have – they should do it the same way that they're doing things with, like, weed shops right now. You can only have so many in an area.

That's it. Because people need to be able to buy apartments and houses and live there. Not two days out of the day, out of the week. I don't know. I still think people need weed wherever they go. So, I'm not saying no weed. I'm just saying you don't need seven on a corner.

If they're going to do that, then they – well, here's the thing. Maybe they just should let Starbucks sell weed and then we can just get rid of the entire thing. Let's just – let's monopolize the whole damn thing. You can get your caffeine and your butt at the same place. Starbucks weed will probably make me need to crap just like their coffee does. I can't stand their coffee. I can't stand their coffee.

It's burnt tasting and it just never sits right in my stomach. Well, that – see, this is why I want Starbucks banned because these stupid drive-thrus in L.A. just screw up traffic everywhere. They put a little tiny kiosk in a place with no ins and outs and so all of the traffic has to line up on the street.

Yep. And that's just everywhere and it drives me mad. That should only be In-N-Out like it's always been, not Starbucks 2. See, the problem is – and this happens in – this is – on my way to my Tuesday meeting, I run into this problem. On the right side of the street is In-N-Out and traffic is backed up for four blocks on Ventura Boulevard.

Across the street is Starbucks where traffic is backed up the other way. Exactly. So you take a four-and-a-half lane, you know, major thoroughfare and you buckle it down to two and people are just trying to go home and it's just a mess. It's a mess. Anyway, I digress. I digress.

This just came in pretty funny this week. Walt Mossberg, remember him? Sure do. Someone used to be – he's responsible for Kara Swisher. Yeah, yeah. Asshole. Yeah, he started the Recode conference with her. Well, they exhumed the corpse of Walt Mossberg.

He has said, I'm leaving X because it's a cesspool because Elon is threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League. That whole thing is just – oh, my god. It's insane. It's insane. Yeah.

Yeah, it is a cesspool over there. It's bad. Oh, it totally is. Absolutely. It's not getting any better. I just go and I post my little boot up thing and go about my business. That seriously has all I've come down to on social media now. I have a run in the morning where I wake up, I post my links to boot up and hopefully somebody will click on it, which nobody is doing because nobody goes to social media anymore.

I've tried it days where I get up and I don't post it and then the next day I post it and there is zero difference. Zero. Nobody is still listening to the damn show no matter where I post it. So go listen to Boot Up with Jason. Please, bootup.show. Anyway, I just thought it was funny that Walt Mossberg, who is completely irrelevant in the tech news world right now, came out and said, I quit.

It made the news. It did. Gave me about 45 seconds of material. So thanks, Walt. There you go. So the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team introduced a new ticketing system. It's called Go Ahead Entry and it uses facial recognition. It was intended to decrease wait times and increase efficiency, but it did the opposite because guess what?

It doesn't work well. It doesn't fucking work. Glitches in the system accidentally picked up the faces of other people waiting in lines. I don't know if you've been to a baseball game, but one does not stroll in with nobody else. There are lots of people in lines and beer and everything. So, yeah, that didn't work.

So security had to create an impromptu buffer zone for the cameras. Line up. Faces, please. Show me your faces. So they are not alone. Other sports stadiums in the U.S. are already implementing or testing some form of facial recognition authentication for basically replacing tickets, which I am not down with.

We do not know what their privacy policies are on this. We don't know what they're going to do with any of this. We don't know how any of this is going to work. And please stop it, people. There's nothing wrong with an old school ticket or even just the scan on the phone. Just keep doing what we've been doing.

You don't need to scan my face just because I want to go see the Dodgers. You know what they need to do? They need to put up a full-size cutout of Bruce Willis from Unbreakable at every entrance. Right. That would be really funny to like the seven people who saw Unbreakable.

But I wouldn't think of it. Or remember it. Yeah, or even remember it. Still M. Night Shyamalan, M. Ding Dong's best movie, I still think. Although it doesn't have legs. I tried to watch it again. It doesn't really – it doesn't hold up, especially the stupid sequels. Talk about a wasted – wasted franchise.

20 years too late and two scripts too slow. Okay, moving on. This just tickles my dark little heart. YouTube vlogger Ruby Frank charged with six counts of felony child abuse. Why does that matter? Because she ran a very popular parenting YouTube channel.

Imagine that. Yes, here's how you raise your kids. First, get some duct tape. Beat them. Oh, God, yes. Six counts of felony child abuse. The charges come after her 12-year-old son allegedly escaped with duct tape on his wrists and ankles, appearing malnourished with visible lacerations.

Also, there was a daughter, a 10-year-old daughter found in similar conditions. I know I'm laughing about this, but it's very, very serious. But come on. She ran a parenting YouTube channel that was popular. Unbelievable. All right. Well, bye-bye, Ruby. Yeah. And the kids are now under Utah's Child and Family Services Care.

So, only in Utah. I guess so. God. We've touched upon this a couple times on the show over the past few years, but it's nice to see it in basically black and white. If you've got a new car, it's a data privacy nightmare. Duh. As we know. They are data harvesting machines that you go around in.

Volkswagen cars reportedly know if you're fastening your seatbelt, how hard you hit the brakes. And, of course, they're sucking up all this data. This is all according to Mozilla's Privacy Not Included project. They found that every major car brand fails to adhere to the most basic privacy and security standards and new internet-connected models.

And all 25 of the brands they tested flunked the test. Yeah. Some of the cars tested collected data you wouldn't expect your car to know about, including details about sexual activity, race, and immigration status, according to Mozilla. They don't tell us how.

I would like to know how my Nissan knows if I got laid or not. Inquiring minds want to know. I mean, I suppose it would know if I did it in the car. Yes. Yes. But that's about it. So, yeah. It's an interesting thing. It's an interesting read. It's not good.

BMW seems to come out somewhat okay. Well. Comparatively, but still not great. Yeah. And the real thing is car brands are engaging in privacy washing or presenting consumers with information that suggests they don't have to worry about privacy issues when they very much fucking do.

Do. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This car powered by Cambridge Analytica. Yes. No, it's kind of a mess. It's kind of a mess. The really fucked up one is when you pair your phone to the car and then they're sucking your phone dry, getting the data off your phone and then using that to sell as well.

Yep. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. You can do all that shit then. Make the car a lot cheaper. Well, BMW, as you just mentioned, has decided to kind of do just that. Well, they're going back to the norm. Good. Regression to the mean, as it were.

BMW has abandoned its plan to charge customers $18 a month for heated seats. Now, I love this. Heated seats payment plan was one of BMW's experiments with in-car microtransactions. And I would say $18 a month is not a fucking microtransaction.

That's a fucking transaction. That's true. Microtransactions are like a buck, 25 cents. Yeah. Under a dollar would be a microtransaction. I'll pay a dime every time I want my fanny heated. Exactly. I'll even pay per cheek since I'm... Just the right, please.

Well, the left, I've had a stroke. I can't feel my right cheek, so I would just like my left warmed. That's all I need. Yeah, if they can nickel and dime us, you can one-cheek them. Exactly. I will single-cheek my way to where I'm going. Well, I mean, this is good news.

I'm glad to hear this. I hate this concept. If you buy something, you own it. God damn it. And that's that. You get everything that you paid for when you got it. And heated seats should be included. Again, it's Elon's fault. Of course. They all looked at fucking Tesla and went, huh, I bet we could do that too.

And everybody else goes, no, you can't. No, you can't. I bought the fucking car. There's a button there that says heat my seat. You know, heat my seat. Well, Hyundai is still trying to do something similar, but it's a little bit different. Hyundai Pay is the latest effort by Hyundai to make in-car payments a thing.

So what they're trying to do is say, you know, in the new 2024 Hyundai Konas, you will be able to pay for parking directly from the car, directly from your infotainment screen, which is fine. I actually don't mind that at all. That's fine. Yeah. You know, here's the deal.

Let my car just basically be my phone and my wallet. If I want to pay for something at a drive-thru, say, and when I'm stuck at the stupid Starbucks drive-thru to let me get through faster. My car is my wallet. Great. Fine. You know? Yeah. Cool with that. Well, let me remind these businesses what businesses are supposed to do.

You're supposed to improve your product and make it better for us. That is what they're doing with this parking thing. You're not supposed to degrade your product by taking things away and then making us pay more for them. Brian, Brian, we covered this at the top of the show. This is business.

They are there to extract everything that they can out of you. The old way of doing that used to be making better products. But I guess I'm old. Yes. You are old, Brian. You are old. Right. Our pal Spotify has a couple news stories here.

This will be fun. There was a great article where they talk about their $1 billion podcast bet that has basically turned into a billion-dollar pile of shit. Who saw that coming? Everybody in the podcast industry that wasn't part of the establishment.

That wasn't Joe Rogan. That didn't get $20 million for their stupid show that was just terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These are mainly people cashing in on their celebrity and then not fulfilling their requirements, basically what it is.

So Spotify got screwed, which means everybody else gets screwed. And, yeah, thanks for ruining our business, assholes. Yep. Thanks a lot. Well, other things going on over at Spotify, too. The people that make white noise podcasts. Yeah.

Again, unbelievable. Hey, man, more power to them. Get whatever you can out of these fuckers. I agree. I agree. We talked about them a couple weeks ago because Spotify was getting pissed off at how much money was being raked in by these guys when they said, well, we're going to cut off your stream or the sound of the stream, depending on which white noise podcast you're listening to.

It will no longer be eligible for Spotify's ambassador ads program as of October 1st. That's it. All right. Bye. We're pulling the ads from you. But you can still make money. You can still make money. There are other ads. You just can't have the red ads, which would probably break up the white noise experience anyways.

Yeah. But all ads would. So, yeah, they can still do other ads or whatever they want, but they're taking away the biggie. Yeah. Well, there's got to be a loophole. Let's try and find it. Okay. Why not? I think next week we just release a white noise version of Grumpy Old Geeks and see how well it does comparatively.

See, when I think of white noise, I think we need to do one of our favorites is the Starship Rumble. Oh, that's my favorite. Yes. You know, just a nice pulsing warp core. Unfortunately, we don't own that IP, but that doesn't stop anyone. That does not stop anyone at all.

Hello, Pinterest. Okay. Well, since Spotify is now broke because they spent all their money on podcasts and white noise, they are going to start to try and give away free audiobooks to, you know, get some ear share from Audible, which, you know, Audible makes money by selling audiobooks.

So Spotify is just going to give them away. Why not? 20 hours of audiobooks for people who have premium memberships. This is a test right now, so we'll see how that goes. Okay. In another test, Spotify is testing pulling the in-app lyrics from the songs that you're listening to because, you know, why not?

You're too lazy to Google? Yeah, obviously. So they're saying that, yeah, you know, that'll just be a premium feature from now on. It's like, oh, here's the deal. It's bullshit. Everybody is trying to take back every little thing they can from heated seats to lyrics. To work from home.

Exactly. Everybody wants something for nothing. Damn it. Damn it. Yeah. I only put this article in here because I like this first line. This is Elon Musk's, X will use public data to train AI models because, of course, you can't be left out of this.

But here's the line. The artist formerly known as Twitter has been in some hot water this week after Bloomberg found that the social media site would start collecting biometric details along with job and education data from user users. Or will they? Is that something that Elon just farted out like he does?

I think this isn't some more lawyer bullshit. I think this is the same reason that we think that Nissan is collecting our sexual activity data. Yes. I think a lawyer somewhere threw it in a TOS and it just got stuck there. Somebody now found it. And that's exactly what's going on with this because the newly released privacy policy indicates that they will use that data along with other collected personal information to train AI models.

Maybe. Great. Maybe. They're certainly planning for it or at least covering their ass for it. Okay. Yeah. This is just all cover your ass shit. Speaking of covering your ass, there's a great article over at Esquire about, are your pants lying to you?

Yes. Yes, they are. Yes, they are. You know, I'm thinking there is just, I, you know, I, I weigh 210 pounds, right? There's no way in hell I should wear a 34. No. But I do. Yes, I do.

I've worn 34s and I've gone down to 32s, but those might not be 34s and 32s based on this investigation. Old, here's my favorite one. Old Navy size 34 dress pants are actually 39 inches. Wow.

That's, yeah. You know what? Every single female listener to this podcast is saying right now to themselves, welcome to the club, guys. Yeah. Because women's clothing has always been, I, my entire life I've heard women bitching about this. It's, they're never the same. They're all over the map.

Interestingly enough, my, my experience has been the opposite of this, which is like, I get like size 36 and sometimes they're way too small. They're not like normal 36s. So I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Well, that's. That I see the boxes of pizza piled up in the corner.

That's going to say. Um, yeah. No, I, like I have two pairs of shorts, like the combat shorts that I get. They're the exact same brand. They're the exact same, you know, the only difference is I ordered them at different times and there is an inch difference between the two.

It's crazy. Would those be 5.11 tactical shorts, tactical internet shorts? No, I spend way too much money on mine. I'm not going to give them a free ad. Okay. They're, they're fancy ones. So are mine. These 5.11s are like 80 bucks a pair, but they last for 20 years.

So I will, on a, on a per annual basis, these shorts have, have lasted quite a, quite a long time. But, uh, they, uh, they also do have, uh, have that feature where they do change sizes from pair to pair every now and again. So, so I do have, I do have them stacked in my drawer accordingly on the, so I know I'm like, oh man, I had Mexican last night.

I better go to the bottom. You know, it's funny. I, I, I do my black shirts, right? Like I love my, my black shirts and they're all from Banana Republic. And every year, every year they switch the manufacturer, which they stitch in there, like what country made it like, so I can tell like my, my Jakarta shirts are much tighter than my Indonesia shirts, but they're the exact same size shirts.

See, mine, I, I, I also have, I just wear black V-neck t-shirts. I do not go to Banana Republic. I go to Amazon and get the cheapest ones they have, which are made by a company called Gildan. If you used to listen to audio books, uh, you, you would know the name Gildan because they used to do a self-help-y like business-y books.

And every time I put my t-shirt on, I always hear the jingle in my, in my head. Gildan Audio presents, Gildan t-shirts presents. The cheapest t-shirt you can wear. These things are $6 a piece and they are disposable, which makes them fantastic because I, I am now an old man and I dribble a lot.

So I would, Brian, check, check out the Gildan t-shirts because they, uh, they are the same size every time and, uh, they, they are disposable. I don't really have the dribbling issue yet, but, uh, I guess that's something to look forward to. It's coming. It's coming.

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Media Candy. Brian, I sent you a screenshot from a spam email I got this week because I thought this company was dead and gone, but MoviePass is back, baby!

You can't keep a non-existent business plan down. Yeah, apparently they've been back for a couple months. I think we talked about the resurrection, but just assumed that it would be dead again almost instantly. But they're still there. They're still there and spamming again. I don't get it.

Like, how many times does a business have to fail? And you just keep doing it. I mean, okay. Just keep a tally because this is our test case. This is our canary in the coal mine. Unbelievable. Yes. Is MoviePass the thing? They're going to hang on just like Elo did.

You know, we're going to be getting MoviePass t-shirts any day now. It'll be perfect. I wait for the inevitable transition to an AI company. All right. Okay. I watched Inside Man, the 2023 version. Because there's an Inside Man TV series.

There's a movie I think Spike Lee did with, what's his name, a long time ago. The original movie that was good. It was good. Denzel Washington, that's who I'm thinking of. Great movie. This movie sucked. Skip it. It's missing half a plot.

It was lame. Okay. Absolutely lame. And we started watching Lincoln Lawyer, the series on Netflix. Because it got a season two and I saw the reviews were good. So I did the Schulmeister test. You know, I'm like, okay, if it got a second season, has good reviews, got picked up for a third season, I'll watch season one.

All right. We binged it in like three days. It was great. It was absolutely great. No McConaughey. No, all right, all right, all right. But I got to say, I did like the original Lincoln Lawyer movie. So I am. Okay. I'm a McConaughey fan on that one. I thought he did a good job with it.

I thought it was a good movie. I like the series almost better. I thought it was a very good, well done series. Okay. Digging it. Digging it. Well, I watched something that I enjoyed that I not in a million years would have chose to watch myself, but my wife was watching it and I would like abscond to the couch with my book, but I kept looking over at the screen and just getting sucked into it.

Winning time, the rise of the Lakers dynasty. I hate basketball. I fucking can't stand it. It's my least favorite sport in the world. I'm from Los Angeles. I was a kid when the Lakers hit this dynasty and it was the biggest thing in LA and I could have given two shits. But the show is fucking awesome.

It's hilarious. It's so well done. It's so funny and it's so insane what they were up to. And it's so, they do like the eighties and the late seventies so well too. Like it's just unbelievable. So I actually have to say I highly recommend it. So is it a documentary or what is it?

It's based on a book that was written as, as like a, you know, you know, a biography of the time and of the, of the team, but it's not, it's, it's acted. It's scripted. Oh, okay. Got it. Yeah. It's, it's not a documentary at all. It's, it's a full on series.

Yeah. Got it. Okay. That makes more sense. Cause I'm like funny. Yeah. No, it's hilarious. I mean, unbelievable. Yeah. Cause I had a parallel path to you, but I was in Chicago during the, the bulls, you know, and, and that was not funny. You know, you can watch that 800 part Michael Jordan series.

And the one thing that nobody has ever said about that was, yeah, that was pretty funny. Nope. Well, definitely different personalities. You know, you had magic Johnson, who's a pretty funny guy. Anyways. Uh, I finished season three of the witcher. Um, I've been back and forth with that show.

I have to say, I really did enjoy it. Um, ends on a cliffhanger. And the major problem is Henry Cavill is not coming back as the main character and he's the best part of the show. Well, so poor Henry Cavill fired as Superman and then fired as the witcher, uh, they're replacing him.

I can't even remember who with, and I don't think I'll give a shit or care because writer's strike. And by the time this show comes back, I won't even remember that I watched it or you'll be dead or I'll be, you know, the way this thing is, is dragging out. I don't think we're getting anything new.

It's time to go back to Dostoevsky. Yes. Uh, and I watched the first two episodes of the wheel of time. Season two, uh, which I enjoyed. My wife was walking past and she pointed out to me, you watch an awful lot of these types of shows.

Cause she had seen me watching the witcher, you know, a couple of nights before that. And then a few months ago, it was Lord of the Rings. And I was like, yeah, I'm almost having a hard, okay. Which one is which? Okay. They all, okay. So who's got orcs and who's got trolls, but then they've got elves, but then those two have elves and then there's magic in these two and Jesus fucking Christ.

They're all the same. Yeah. Yeah. So it kind of are, um, that's what I came to. And the one thing I have to say is, um, both the wheel of time and, and the Lord of the Rings one, whatever the hell they called it. It's like the Lord of the Rings of the Lord of the ring of the one ring with Lord of the ring.

I think that was the title. Something like that. There was a lot of rings in it. Um, they're beautifully shot. They spent so much money on sets and design and everything while the witcher, not so much, uh, but. Didn't you call the witcher the, like the low rent Lord of the Rings?

Oh yeah, definitely. But I tell you, the difference is I think out of the three, the witcher is the most well-written and interesting and engaging one in terms of characters. I find the wheel of time and Lord of the Rings shows pretty bland. They're good to look at. They're like a dumb supermodel.

Well, didn't the witcher come from a video game? Yes. So they have, they have a lot of backstory there. The Lord of the Rings comes from the Lord of the fucking rings. Well, no, it doesn't. This is a, this is kind of a new thing. Well, yeah, they're making it up, but they're working off pretty intense source material. Yeah.

And the wheel of time also a series. Yeah. But game of Thrones, come on. Once they went off book, it went to shit and Lord of the Rings are kind of going off book. That's true. I did attempt this week to start watching Game of Thrones from the beginning again. I lasted 15 minutes.

Really? Yeah. It doesn't have legs, huh? It did not bring me back in. Or is it just because you know what's going to happen that you don't give a shit? I'm just, well, I know, like I'm looking at these, these characters and I'm like, I got five seasons before these fuckers get interesting, you know?

Really? And it's like, oh no, I just couldn't, I couldn't put myself through it. I got to say it, it did look really nice on the 75 inch TV, four feet from my eyeballs. That was good. Lord of the Rings does look better, but it's still, it's like, I can't handle this, you know, that genre of shit anymore.

I just can't. And especially when you have British people doing fake British accents so they can sound like Americans doing fake British accents. Drives me crazy. And it's pretty funny. Lower Decks started this week, which I have not seen yet. Have you? I watched both. They were good.

Okay. Nothing amazing in these two episodes, but they were both, but I'm, I chuckled, you know, it was good. All right. All right. Roku is laying off 10% of their employees. Why did they unionize? Must have, must have another 200 people out the door over at Roku.

Um, I, we were dealing with a show on Roku right now. And I actually went and spent some time digging around the Roku channel yesterday. And it's not really just the Roku channel. I use channel in air quotes. There's like a gazillion channels on there. You can find just about anything to watch.

It's crazy how much content is on there for free. If you have a Roku TV or Roku device, I was like, wow, let's go see what the weather's like in Tampa. Cause you can watch the evening news live in Tampa. I'm like, okay, it's got news from all over the country, which is kind of interesting, but then it's got thousands of garbage channels.

Like there's a family feud channel. Oh, okay. There's a project runway channel. I mean, I guess if it costs nothing, it might as well, right? Yep. And it's, it's all, it's all ad driven linear programming. So it's not like you, there's no pausing, no nothing, you know, DVR and you put it on.

It's great for background. Like if you just want to show in the background, perfect. It's perfect for that. But yeah, man, it's just ridiculous how much content is on there. So it's surprising that they're just laying off that many people. I guess it's just not a landing. But what is landing is Lionel Messi.

Woo doggy. That guy has just, you know, made Apple all the monies. Well, he took a good chunk of that. Yeah, that's true. He got a good chunk of that. And MLS got a good chunk of that too. So, but Apple is definitely very pleased with this master plan of theirs.

Yeah. It was the MLS season pass witnessed 110,000 new U.S. signups on July 21st, the day before his first game. I didn't know there were 110,000 U.S. soccer fans. Man, it's picking up finally. They've been saying that my whole life.

Yeah. But yeah, it seems to be going pretty well. And yeah, this is exactly what everybody thought would happen. And of course it happened. So good on him. There you go. Better than football. Better than basketball. Fuck yeah. After finishing Richard Blade's book, I wanted to go back to sci-fi, but I was too lazy to try to find anything new or a new author.

So I went back to the First Contact series by Peter Cowdron and picked up one called Ezekiel, spelled all funky with a three instead of the beginning. Great. I like this guy. He writes really just kind of brisk, good first contact stories. And this is the first one that kind of ended up with a semi, well, no, it didn't end up positive.

Nevermind. It ended up pretty bad. Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Yeah, I really, I'm pretty impressed by him and his writing so far. So I'm going to, you know, keep on going with the series. Luckily, I know there's like 25 of them or something like that. So I'm sure there'll be a couple of stinkers in there.

Yeah. Take a break. I know, but that means I have to find something else. Okay. Well, don't read Notes from a Fellow Traveler by Darren Brown. Wasn't planning on it. You weren't, you're not going to like it. I mentioned on the last episode that I missed the disclaimer that it was for, you know, stage magicians and mentalists only, but it's not.

It's actually a phenomenal book talking about just the kind of the science of performance and all the tips and tricks that go into making a magic stage show. And it is insane how every little thing is practiced and perfected.

Every movement, every word is just so, you know, purposeful, just planned out. Yeah. It's all purposeful. That's the word I was looking for. And it's, it's a fascinating book. I'm only like a hundred pages into it, but, uh, it's really well, really well done.

I'm, I'm enjoying it thoroughly and I'm taking my time with it. So it's really good. I'm really enjoying it. Um, but, uh, I did see this come through my, my feed. John Scalzi has a new book called Starter Villain coming out September 19th, which I, he must've written before Blue Sky came out because God damn, he ain't got no time to write a novel anymore.

No, he's fucking busy. Jesus. Okay. That's cool. I'm excited about that. I also know that, uh, I don't have a date on it. I just saw that the new Babaverse is coming. Ooh, uh, cool. Okay. We're getting one of those soon. I think he just finished writing it. Love it. Yep. Love it.

The dark side with Dave with podcast, super host, Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the cyberware 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 are going to take over the world. Hi, Dave. Hello. Good to be back. How's everybody doing today? Doing well. Oh, good. Good, good, good. So I want to jump right in here.

Uh, have we kept up with Ahsoka? We sure have. We're waiting for you, Dave. Okay. We didn't discuss it last week at all. And are we still pleased with where this series is taking us? Brian? It's a bit slow, but yes. Oh.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. So there's an asterisk there? I just feel it's moving really slowly. Like, we don't need to see a lot of the stuff. I want him to move it along a bit, get to the meat. But I suppose the meat will be the season finale, so we get a second season.

Yeah. I mean, I like it. I like the characters. I've enjoyed it. I just do find it like, let me, let me ask you a question, Dave. Yeah. Have, going back to the Holy Trilogy and probably the most boring lightsaber fight in all of Star Wars, yet somehow the most exciting lightsaber fight in all of Star Wars.

I'm just finding these lightsaber duels as wonderful technically as they are boring. Like, Darth Vader versus Obi-Wan had more gravitas to me. Yeah. They're almost, they're so often now and they're so quick and they're so fast and it's just kind of like, I didn't even need to see that.

Right. I think there's something to that. I think a big part of it is the modern style of action sequences is so fast and there's so many close-ups and cutaways and that I tend to lose track of the geography of the scene.

Where is everybody? What are they doing? And, for example, one of my coworkers is a very high-level kendo person, like, traveled internationally and competed in kendo. So, knows his stuff when it comes to this particular martial art.

And, of course, kendo is not completely unlike lightsaber battles. Right. Yes. So, I ask him about the lightsaber battles and he says they're really more choreography than anything else.

They're like a dance rather than an actual combat like you would see in something like kendo. And I think that's part of it too. You know, was there something to the fact that Alec Guinness had the age that he was, he was not going to be doing cartwheels and flips and – right?

Right. And so, there was a certain stoicness about those fights. Now, I do think the fight between Ahsoka and – what was the – I don't remember the name of the male character who's the – The Ray Stevenson. Yes. Yes.

I liked that one. Right. There was something kind of elegant and respectful about the two of them sizing each other up. Well, and the other thing which you never really see in, as far as I can recall, in any other lightsaber battle is you saw pure strength almost win.

Mm-hmm. Like, because we've had people against each other that are obviously different builds and different – all of that. But in that battle in particular, he won just because he was so goddamn strong. He beat her down. Right. Right. Which was kind of cool because you don't ever – that's never really part of the equation in any other battle that I've seen.

Yeah. And I guess you can hand wave it away by saying if you have force powers, that that compensates for a lack of size. You look at like Yoda's fighting style. And also, you know, you just – you don't know how strong different creatures are.

Look how much stronger a chimpanzee is than a human being. Right. And they're smaller than us. So you're saying don't give a chimpanzee a lightsaber. No. No. Yeah. That's – you know, I'll just tread into dangerous territory here. But whenever – when people say people don't – guns don't kill people, people kill people, I say, so let me lock you in a room with a chimpanzee with a gun.

See how you feel. Right. Yeah. That's – So let me – so getting back to Ahsoka, I've seen a couple of people complain that they feel as though the show feels cheap, like the sets look cheap and it – and I don't sense that at all.

I just felt fine to me. No, I don't either. I think, you know, the ships are well done. Certainly the effects are fantastic. Yeah. No, I don't – not once did that enter into my mind. I suppose if you, like, look at, like, the Rebel base, but that's supposed to be kind of scrappy and, you know, just kind of, you know, beaten up.

And that's what it looked like. That's done on purpose. Yeah, I mean, look at that scrapyard scene. That was, you know, really cool. Yeah. Right. I mean, they're, you know, stripping the ships and building the engines. I thought that was a beautiful scene. Yeah. No, it did not feel cheap at all.

I do have to go back to the theme song though. And now that I have gone back and listened to it, yeah, it sucks. It doesn't suck. It just doesn't fit. It's the wrong show. It's the wrong show. Yeah. Yeah. The only reason I'm hesitant to jump on that bandwagon with you is that I initially did not like the music in Mandalorian at all.

Right. And over time, it grew on me and came to be part of that show. So I'm a little hesitant to agree with you, even though I agree with you. Yeah. I mean, it's still, it feels like it should be for the Mandalorian again. It feels more of that ilk.

But it's funny. I had closed captioning on because when I was watching it one time because my kid wasn't completely asleep yet and I was running out of steam. I just had to get this done and get to bed too. So I didn't want to crank, wait to be able to crank the volume. And it's called a mystical score.

Oh, a mystical score. Which it doesn't feel that mystical to me. It feels more Western. Western. Yeah. I could have gone with a mystical score. There you go. The other thing that has struck me about this show, and I think it ties back to the series that we've seen, what I wondered about is the amount that I'm enjoying these Star Wars series, and I'm enjoying them very much overall.

How much of that is tied to lower expectations and anticipation compared to waiting several years for a movie to come out? Right? There's definitely some of that. I also think maybe it was part of the master plan of the last three movies sucking.

They're going to pivot to doing series. Because now these series are really good in comparison. And I know this because I just watched the three of them with my kid. I'm enjoying it thoroughly so far. The only thing that bugs me about it is it's too damn short. That's my only complaint. You mean only eight episodes? No.

I mean the episodes are too short. They're only like 30 minutes. No. They're all over the map, which is what you can do now. Because the first one was 40-some-odd. And then there was that surprise one that was only 30 minutes. And that was way too short. Like I was left going, what? What? Right. Now I've got to wait a week? Right, right, right.

Yeah. But no, overall, I am enjoying this kind of Star Wars. Me too. And so keep it coming. Speaking of other shows that I am watching, I'm curious. Have you guys checked in or kept up on Only Murders in the Building?

I'm surprised that somebody who does 7,000 podcasts wants to watch a show about podcasters. Well, that's true. Although – I've never watched it. I hear it's great. I kind of have it in my back pocket as, you know, when the writers strike, when all the shows dry up.

Maybe I'll go in, dip into this. I do have my Martin Short version. I only like him in Three Amigos, but we'll see. Jason? I got halfway through season one and as a podcast pedant, I could not take them changing microphones every time and basically just talking down and talking about podcasting.

Oh, my God. It's a Blue Yeti. Fuck the show. Yep. Yep. They did that. They did that. I was just like, oh, and they're talking into the wrong end. God damn it. You're only so capable of suspending your disbelief. I am. I am. It's not the murders. It's the mics.

It is not a top address microphone, people. Sorry. You look like an idiot. That's fair. But no, I just – I didn't – I'm kind of with Brian, but Martin Short, I did not like him. I liked him for a little bit in it. And then just the whole premise really just kind of – I don't know.

I'm even thinking about it. It's kind of given me the hives, the heebie-jeebies. I don't know. I just don't – I don't like that show. Okay. That's fair. What does intrigue me, though, is – and you put this in your show notes here, Dave, is Paul Rudd and Meryl Streep together on screen.

I kind of feel the need to see that. So this is what I want to get to, that I feel as though like a lot of shows like this, right, the first season was an unexpected sensation.

I think they expected it to be kind of a cute, quiet little thing, you know, let's keep busy during COVID and we'll make this fun show together. And it generated a lot of buzz. And so they did a second season. The second season was okay. I feel like in the – Living some fresh blood.

Yeah. I feel like in the third season, the move that they've made, and I think it's the right one, is that they have embraced the silliness. Right. It is a fundamentally silly show. These are silly actors playing silly characters and they're having a ball.

And the plot of it is almost secondary to watching these actors have fun with each other. And the fact that they got Meryl Streep, arguably the greatest actress of our generation, right, to be in this cute little show and play the part that she's playing, is brilliant.

It's just brilliant. And Paul Rudd just chews on the scenery and is wonderful in it as well. So I'm about three episodes in and I'm enjoying it for all of those reasons. Not really caring that much about the whole murder plot thing.

That is what it is. But really that's just sort of a framework to hang it on. So let me ask you. Could I just jump in and watch season three without watching the first two? Yes, I think so. Okay. Maybe I'll just do that then. And if I do like it, then I'll go back.

Yeah, yeah, I think you could. You could certainly, yeah, yeah. You could probably read the Wikipedia page, jump in on season three and be up on what you needed to do. Okay. Yeah. And Martin Short, he's playing a character that is perfect for him to play.

So perhaps you'll be able to get past your – he's never not Martin Short. You know, like he's not a person who disappears into the role. Well, you know, and he's covered with the Steve Martin balm from Three Amigos. So maybe that will make it bearable. Right, right.

And you can tell the great affection that the two of them have for each other. Right. And again, that's part of why I enjoy this show. It's a very comfortable show to watch and I feel good watching these people having fun together.

So check it out. I'm curious to know what you think. I will. Before we jump into some news things here, I was curious where you guys stand when it comes to the Apple Watch Ultra. Are we all – we're all Apple Watch users, yes?

Yes. Yes. Okay. So I have one that is a couple old. I think I have the first one that was on all the time. I think that was three, right? No, I think that was a five because I've got that one. Okay. That's the same one I've got.

Series five. Whatever that one is, that's what I have. And I have the smallest of them. And I'm content with it. It's fine. It does everything I wanted it to do. One of the reasons I got it was, as we've talked about here, being a white man in the heart attack zone of my life, I like the idea that this is keeping an eye on things and protecting me from falls and keeping an eye on my heart rate and all that kind of stuff.

What I'm curious about is if the Apple Watch Ultra, which we're expecting a new one sometime soon, maybe next week. Maybe – yeah, maybe next week. Mm-hmm. If they're able to measure blood pressure, which is something that I have to keep an eye on, I'm thinking of jumping to that because I think that that will have great utility to me.

But I'm also wondering – Is it worth the cost-price difference? Right. And the size. And the size. And are you, I don't know, participating in the X Games this year? Or will you be climbing Everest? Or will you be doing any deep-sea diving?

No. Then I don't think you need the fucking Ultra. Well, yes. But, I mean, it's kind of like buying the rhinoceros guards on your SUV. You know, you're probably never going to use those either. Also a thing I would not do. Right. Right. It's the same sort of thing.

But the utility of blood pressure monitoring is valuable. But my guess is that will be in the regular watch within another iteration or two. Okay. That would be my guess. Right.

Until then, get a cheap blood pressure monitor. Well, I have that. Leave it at your desk. Yes, I do. I do have that. Jason, what are your thoughts? I was planning on getting the Ultra when it came out. And I asked Jason the same questions. Are you going to be in the X Games? Are you going to be climbing Everest or deep-sea diving?

No, I just want it. There's my answer. I just fucking want it. Well, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah. No, I like it. I think it looks cool. I just don't like the orange. But we'll see how it changes with the next iteration because they're talking about a black version, which I would like.

Yeah, I've got the 44-millimeter Series 5. I have been waiting for them to update the internals for four iterations. And I hear they're finally going to do it with number 10. So it's basically I'm going to play it by ear to see what it's like. I mean, if the cost is way too much, I'll probably just get the regular 10 just because my battery isn't making the whole day anymore.

I have to take it off and charge it. It won't get me through the day with one two-and-a-half-mile walk every day. The workout basically sucks too much juice out of it, so I've got to upgrade anyway. So I'll see what it's like. But, yeah, I don't see the need to get the Ultra, but I just kind of want it because it – Yeah, that's kind of where I am too.

You know? Yeah. That's kind of where I am too. Okay. I'll stay the loser. Well, yeah. And I will admit that the blood pressure thing is very much me justifying also. I did go to my local Apple store and I tried on the Ultra because I was afraid that it would feel too big and too heavy, especially since I have the smaller of the watches right now.

But it felt neither too big nor too heavy. I was surprised how light it feels actually, as big as it is. Yeah. I've kept a couple of devices, Apple devices, around to do the trade-in. Yeah. Because I can't buy one outright.

So I'm just going to trade in a bunch of stuff and get some money off and trade in my 5 because my 5 is still in pristine condition. I mean the Ultra is like – it's as much as an iPhone, isn't it? It's like over a grand, right? It's a – they're not cheap. They're not cheap at all. I want to say it's around 800 bucks, something like that.

For a watch, it's kind of ridiculous. It's a premium watch. Yeah. Not on the grand scale of watches. Trust me. No, no, no, no. It's not a – whatever. It's the one, the Submariner. That's – Yeah. No, it's – no. But – Yeah. Yeah.

I've never thought of myself as a premium watch guy, but here we are. I like the Casios. Give me a $25 Casio. That's right. That's right. Mike, since my Casio calculator watch was about as high end as I got when I was in high school. God, I love that thing. I love that thing.

They were great. They were. I know we don't really ever do security stories anymore, but I just – I liked this one a lot, so we'll toss it in really quickly. And it's already passed. I should have followed up on this. I didn't. The New York Police Department has been using drones in a limited capacity for years, but these have been controlled.

You had to have a warrant, et cetera, and all of that stuff. Not so much anymore, I guess. They announced that they – plans to use drones to follow up on noise complaints during the Labor Day weekend. So if you had allowed – you had allowed barbecue, they're going to fly a drone over your backyard with no warrant required apparently.

So that's going away I guess. It seems fine to me. I mean if it's a complaint and they don't want to send somebody back there to get – okay, we got Joe out front with the drone. Let's take a peek. It doesn't look like much. Let's move on. You know.

It's just checking it out. But I don't understand why they can't just have the guys go in the backyard and take a peek. Yeah. That seems to have been working for hundreds of years. You know. I don't know about hundreds of years. When Gog was out there. When Brog and Gog were out there eating a brontosaurus and it got a little crazy.

Just sent the guy over. Hey, keep it down, guys. Right. Right. He didn't need a fucking drone. Yeah, I mean I guess there's cost savings potential here and it also probably helps the NYPD justify their purchase of drone technology.

Bingo. Ding, ding, ding. Wiping out said cost savings. Exactly. Because there's still going to have to be an officer on site to fly the thing. So it's not like there's not going to be a cop nearby. So come on. Yeah. I guess where this could be trouble is let's say I was having a party in my backyard.

And my backyard is surrounded by an eight-foot fence. And it's a nudist party. Well, sure. Why not? Because there have been – It's a furry party. Come on. I know. I know. I know. Right. Is there any other kind? No.

There have been stories that Ben and I have talked about over on the Caveat podcast where the police have put a camera up on a pole to be able to look over a fence. And whether or not that qualifies as warrantless surveillance because it's not out in plain sight.

It's not something you could see from the street that people were clearly trying to maintain their privacy. And you circumvent that. Then do you require a warrant? And I think there's a case for that to be made. So at the same time, nobody has the right to restrict the airspace over their property other than the FAA.

So I guess it's within their legal rights to fly something over if they want. I will say my house is right near a park next to a lake. And so every now and then I'll be sitting out on my deck and I'll hear that buzzing sound as a drone flies in front.

And it's just somebody taking pretty pictures at sunset or something like that. You think. Turtle hunters. The turtle hunters. Yeah, that's right. Turtle poachers. They're coming by and, you know, sometimes they'll fly up and I'll wave to them and off they go.

But. Yeah. It's a weird thing. It's a weird new reality. Well, I was actually just thinking that because having grown up in Los Angeles, I mean, there's a helicopter overhead all the time. It's usually it's often police, if not the news or something like that.

So having things flying over my house is something I grew up with, especially being as close to Disneyland as I was. So. Ghetto birds. Yep. Ghetto birds. Right. Right. I put a link in here to a presentation that Corey Doctro made at DEF CON this year, and it's his presentation about D and shitifying the Internet.

Good luck with that. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting presentation. I don't know if you guys I don't know what you guys thoughts or feelings are about Corey Doctro, but I think he makes some interesting points. I don't know that we'll ever see the things he suggests come to pass, but I do think the presentation is worth a look.

I watched it this morning and, you know, I've known Corey for 20 some years now, and he's gotten really good at this stuff. I was telling Brian before the show, and I thought this was a really good talk. The nice thing about this talk is you can bump it up to one and a half speed and not even have to watch it because it's just him at a podium.

So there's not even slides. So you can put it on the background for audio. But I thought it was a very good presentation, and I think he – at the very end, he makes some very good points that we are actually on track, especially in the EU. And with some of the new anti-monopoly legislation that we're trying to get past here in the US, I think things are actually on the upswing.

But what I really liked was his entire life cycle of, you know, how these platforms come to power and die because it is literally exactly what we've talked about on this program in real time as we've, you know, watched Facebook over the years.

He just compresses it down into about five minutes and doesn't take 617 episodes to get there like we have. But I think it's like a 45-minute or 48-minute talk or something like that. And, yeah, one and a half speed, it's a good way to knock out your morning coffee.

I highly recommend it. I will probably play this in the background. My feeling on Cory Doctorow has always been I like the message, not so much the messenger. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was not aware, Jason, that you had a relationship with him. So that's interesting. I've known him since the second Supernova Convention in Washington, D.C.

I watched him take down a lot of really top-level American politicians and bureaucrats. And he was Canadian at the time. And I'm just like, this guy knows more about how our government works than we do. I'm impressed. To be fair, that's all Canadians.

Right. Yeah. No, this was – I think Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom had been out for like a month. You know, his first breakout book. He was just becoming a science fiction writer back then. That's how – that's when I first actually met him in person. So, I've watched his career quite a bit over the years.

So, yeah. Well, I agree. It's worth watching. It's an interesting presentation. So, we'll have a link to that in the show notes. The last thing I put in here was a fun little thing I saw. It was – somebody set AI at generating images of a typical home in all 50 states and the 30 largest cities in the U.S.

And I have to say they're pretty on the mark overall. Who gets a double wide? I was about to say like how many tropes. Yeah. Are there guns hanging off the Texas one? Are there – Can you see beaters on blocks in the front yard in any of them or a boat in the back?

I would say this shows every state in its best light. Okay. But the architectural styles are for the most part correct. Yeah. I had a couple people say – some of my coworkers said, it's not quite right. But there weren't any that I thought were really off the mark.

So, I thought it was a fun thing to peruse through and I wanted to know what you guys thought. I mean, Arizona and California are spot on. Yeah. So is Hawaii. I'm just scanning through really quickly and from places I've spent a lot of time. Right. Seeing how close that they are. But yeah, I mean, Nevada, that's pretty close.

Yeah. Yeah. They had Maryland down pretty well. New Mexico for sure. Yeah. This is good. It's pretty good. Illinois is a dead ringer. Yep. Yep. Yeah. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. So, again, we'll have a link in the show notes. A fun one to kind of breeze through and see if you agree.

Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Matt. Welcome, Matt. Thanks, Matt. Over at PayPal, we've got Nicola, Thomas, Kenneth, and Nikolai. All right. Over at the tip jar, we've got Christopher, Matthew, and Jeff and a new sub from Sarah.

Welcome, Sarah. And everybody, just remember, over at Patreon, you get the shows a little bit early, no ads, and in high definition. Boo! Oh, no reviews this week. Boo! No reviews this week. Bummer. And some sad news.

I was never a massive fan, but how could you not like Margaritaville? Jimmy Buffett passed away at age 76. I could easily tell you how you could not like Margaritaville. I don't like Margaritaville. I love the song. It's nice. It's fine. Oh, okay. I mean, you know, I don't think I've played it in 10 years, but it's a good song.

Okay. You say so. I'd say so. All right. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Chilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at GOG.show slash 617. GOG.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment.

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