86: Recycle Bin Zero

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started. Happy Black Friday, Brian.

Happy Black Friday, Jason. My spam box overfloweth. Yes, indeed it doeth. The only thing that I can think of today, though, is, well, most people are out trying to get deals on plasma TVs and tchotchkes for their loved ones. Most nerds are sitting at home today watching the new Star Wars trailer.

That's the first thing I did this morning. What did you think? I liked it. I liked it. Yeah, you know, I almost didn't want to hit play. I almost wanted to just kind of go into this, but then I realized that since they're starting the whole promotional campaign over a year early, there's going to be no avoiding things, especially since I'm a geek. So I hit play, I watched it, and I really enjoyed it.

Yeah, me too. At first I was kind of groaning at that really weird robo ball thing, and I'm like, oh no, oh no, here we go again. It's just another stupid droid. And then, you know, it kind of picked up a little bit. And as soon as you get to the X-Wings cutting across the water, I'm like, okay, okay, we're making progress here. And then, of course, at the end when the Millennium Falcon comes out, it just goosebumps all over. I'm like, yes!

Oh, I know. The Millennium Falcon was awesome, and so was the badass. You know, the bad guys always get the badass lightsabers. I loved that red lightsaber. That was kick-ass. I know. They have to do something with the lightsabers with these guys. So this time it's like, oh, well, let's put handguards on it, because you would have ever thought of that up until now. It's like, uh, it looked cool. It looked cool.

Yeah, I'm in. I'm in. So far, I'm all in. I mean, we're going to start hearing all sorts of story leaks and all of that sort of stuff, which I'm going to attempt to avoid as much as possible. I'm just going to try to stick with whatever gets officially released. But, uh, I'm in. And we have a year of...

Yeah, we're going to have a year of just dribbled out bullshit and crazy nerd speculation online, which will be interesting. Yeah, I think a tweet bot filter will be in order for this one. Definitely. So, uh, we've got a maybe return to grace for Star Wars after the crappy last three.

Um, you've been a big fan of Serial, and I see that the New Media 101 Managing Expectations campaign has begun for the end of Serial. Yes, because they don't know how it's going to end, which is what I've been saying on Vapid. I'm like, I see a finale of lost-ian disappointment proportions coming with this thing.

Yeah, there's a big New York Times interview where she's basically really doing the best job of trying to manage expectations and telling everybody, you know, this may not be that great. We don't know what's going to happen. It's not going to be perfect. Everybody calm down. And, uh, you know, what are your predictions for, not the end, let's not talk about that.

But they've already announced that they're going to do a second one. Do you think that they're going to have a massive drop-off in listenership? Uh, honestly, it depends on this ending. It all hinges on this ending. I still think it's going to be, I think the next season's going to be massive, no matter what. Right. I'm disappointed that they didn't publish their numbers on how much they got in donations to make Season 2, and plus all the other money that they're getting from sponsors.

It would have been nice to see, like, how much money was on the table with this. Yeah. But, you know, they don't have to, I guess. But it would have been cool if they did. Well, I'll explain probably why they didn't a little bit later in this show. Okay. I think Season 2 will probably still be, you know, a very good listen.

We're going to see how it ends up, how it wraps. I still have not listened to it, so I should probably get on that. Well, hell, if it sucks, then I'll tell you. Again, we're going back to my theory on viewing TV shows, which is I want to get at least two seasons in before I get into it, because I don't want to get disappointed.

So, yeah, I think at this point I should just hold off. Well, it goes against my cardinal rule of if you like something, you've got to listen to it or watch it. So they make more of them, which we'll also get into later in the show. Yeah. So Tidal, which I talked about a little bit last week, which is the Hi-Fi Streaming Audio, I think made a massive mistake this particular week.

They put out a page that is supposed to basically convince you that the Hi-Fi Streaming at two times the price is worth it. So they created this great page. They say, you know, connect this to your studio monitors, as I did, or, you know, whatever high-quality output it is that you have, be it expensive headphones, studio monitors, whatever it is.

And we're going to load up five tracks, and we're going to have our high-quality stream, and we're going to have a Spotify-esque low-quality stream, both loaded in at the same time, and A-B buttons so you can literally A-B test the two different sounds. Or figuratively test the A-B sounds, and I tried it.

I hooked it up to, like, the massive stereo we have here at the house, which is top-notch, super high-quality, and I got two out of five. Yeah, I got three out of five, and then two out of five going through crap headphones, which is basically a zero test.

It means nothing. Then I went back, and I tried it again, and I basically did five runs on my super high-quality stereo system, and statistically insignificant. The only time I always was able to tell if it was a high-quality was any time that they popped in an Electronica track because you had got the super, super low bass and the super, super high frequencies that are generated by synthesizers and things like that.

So for Electronica, I could consistently pick out which one was high-quality and low-quality. For everything else, I could not make heads or tails. I mean, I thought I knew what it was, but I never got it right. So I think that was a big misstep for them. I mean, maybe a bunch of audio engineers that do this professionally for a living and haven't had any hearing damage whatsoever from going to shows can maybe tell the difference, but otherwise I think that they just totally screwed up by doing this.

Yeah, it was a tough sell, and I think the tide is going out on Tidal because it was, for me, made absolutely no difference. I mean, on the two that I got, those also were both electronic tracks, you know, and you could totally tell there just because of the range of frequencies, but for regular music, I couldn't tell.

It was just a monkey pressing a button. Yeah, yeah. So at the end of the day, it did not convince me to spend double the amount of money for a different streaming service. The other issue with it, I mean, I know they're positioning themselves for audiophiles, so that might make sense. I don't know if there's a big enough market out there for them to do it.

They're obviously not going to ever compete with your Spotify's or your RDO's or anything like that, but so much of the music that's being recorded now isn't even being recorded at that high level of quality. So, again, I guess it's for audiophiles that want to kick back and listen to their Eagles albums.

Yeah, but you think that they're going to already own the high-quality version of those tracks. Yeah, I mean, that was the kind of the argument, I guess, would be that, well, we're getting, you know, the record industry is getting away from trying to release anything physical because my initial argument was anybody that cares about hi-fi at this level has, like, a $7,000 record player and is buying pristine, super-heavy, you know, vinyl and listening to it that way, which is always going to be a niche market, which I think makes sense for record labels

to continue to put out things on that format for these sorts of people. This is the attempt at saying, well, the whole world is going to streaming, so let's do something for the hi-fi people so new stuff can be sent out this way. But new stuff isn't recorded at this high level anymore. New stuff is recorded on the laptop. Exactly, and GarageBand or Logic or something like that.

Exactly. Okay, anyway, title's done. Okay. Moving on. I had a bit of a pet peeve this week. I know we talked about this briefly when the iOS 8 update came out. I'm getting so sick of the – it's so hard to delete things now. It's impossible.

I was even upset when I finally went over and switched to Mac, and I was like, what do you mean I have to hit command and delete to delete? Why can't I just hit the delete button? Now everything is like, okay, we're going to temporarily move this somewhere. You can empty your recycle bin, but then you have to go back and do another recycle bin that actually really deletes the stuff.

On my phone, it takes five steps to delete any sort of picture. So if I screw up and I take a bad one, I don't want it hogging up space. I have to delete, delete, delete, delete. Go back and check and make sure it's not in the cloud. Get rid of it there as well. What the fuck? I know. It's tough. It is tough. It's ridiculous.

I saved articles on Facebook, which is a brilliant feature that they added because like when I'm out and about and I just check out Facebook on my phone, I see an article that might relate to say this podcast. I can just hit the little save button and boom, it goes into it and then I can come back to my browser later and I can go back and I can find it and I can read it. And then if I delete it, it then goes into an archive that I then have to go in and delete again.

Everything is doing this now. I know. I know. And quick tip on the Facebook side, get Pinner and Pinboard for your, you know, just get a Pinboard account, get the Pinner app, and then you can add a quick pin in the share screen in the, you know, the share pane. So it's a two-step process.

You have to open the link in Safari and then do a quick pin and then close the window, but it's better than putting it in Facebook's saved articles and having to go find them later and deal with deleting and stuff. That's the way I do it. And I wish, wish Facebook's piece of shit app actually used the, you know, the share screens like they're supposed to be so you can customize them.

But no, they don't because they want you to use their system. The only option you get is open in Safari or copy link. Yeah, that's, which is precisely why I just used the stupid save this link on Facebook when I'm out and about because I don't have a lot of time. It's a one-second thing and it's done. It's just a pain in the ass later.

Well, that's the thing. Take two and a half seconds and do it the right way and then you don't have to worry about it. I don't want to. Two minutes later. I'm just trying to save you some time. Time is precious. We don't have much left, Brian. That's true. So, yes, I think the only way that this is ever going to be fixed is if the government steps in and starts regulating data collection like they do in the EU and says, you know, hey, stop this shit.

Yeah. That's going to be 10 years for the U.S. to get on board with that, if ever. If ever, because it doesn't really make sense for the companies to do that and they have big lobbies and let's not get into government too much here. Okay. My other frustration since we're going on a rant roll right now, and this has just been ongoing.

I mean this has been ongoing since the internet started and everybody was sending out their mails with their funny links of the day that they found. I'm starting to just get inundated with people, especially since people know I do this podcast now. So, everybody, I appreciate the thought. I appreciate the effort. I get so many messages or emails every day of whatever it is that's trending out there in the universe.

And just stop. I've seen it. We've all seen it. If you sit at your computer all day like we do because we work on our computers and we're online all day like we are, we have seen all this stuff. I know I'm going to get at least five emails of the Star Wars trailer today. Seen it. Everybody's seen it.

We've all got it. We don't need to be told. We're all posting it on our Facebook feed too. You don't need to send me a private message about it. Got it? Cool. Awesome. You got something to say about it. That's a different story. You don't want to post it publicly. You have some commentary. You want to let me know your thoughts or opinions on it.

Attach a little note to the link telling me your feelings about it. Now, that's actual communication. Just sending me a link? No, thank you. Got it. Okay. So I have a counterpoint. I have a counterpoint to that. And it's now that the Facebook feeds are customized per user, you basically have just this customized ambiguity that other people might not be seeing the same thing that you're seeing.

So, you know, it might be a good thing to give a hat tip to a link that you think somebody else might like because you don't know if they're going to see it because that's the way things work since we don't have these homogenized feeds that we all used to have where we would see the same shit over and over again. Okay, fine.

I mean, that's all my thought on it was just, you know, I still like when people send me stuff that I haven't seen. It's rare, yes. It's very rare. It's actually rare that anybody sends me anything anymore because they know after 20 years of me saying, I've already seen it, stop sending it to me. That, you know, yes.

So I may be an outlier in that space. You might be. I'm just saying, please do not send me a link to the Star Wars trailer. Why not? It's so pretty. Okay, so you had your rant. My turn. All right. So there's an article that came out in Inc.

magazine today, which is the Sweet Peach founder speaks, those startup dudes were wrong about my company. Now, a little follow-up here. Sweet Peach is the probiotic that hit the news last week about making women's vaginas smell peachy.

Right. You saw these articles. I did, and I just glossed over it. I was like, you got to be kidding, right? Yeah, this was one of those things. I left it purposefully out of the show notes because I didn't believe it. It's just it had – it did not have the ring of truth, as Judge Judy would say. Right.

So I wrote out a 1,400-page rant here that I'm just going to summarize by saying the news has gotten so untrustworthy now that I am uncomfortable talking about anything almost until two or three weeks later when people have had the time to go out and do the due diligence on it because people aren't doing that anymore.

No, they're not. I pulled the story about the ex-Amazon employees starting a hunger strike last week because it sounded like basically a thin layer of truth on a lake of steaming bullshit, and I was right. You know? Yeah. At this point, it's like it's – you have to do so much work to find the truth out of both sides of the argument that it's like almost not even worth bothering.

But we rely on good journalism to do our jobs on this show because we have commentary about it. And it's getting to the point now where it's like I'm going to spend most of my time just following up to see if these people are telling the truth or not. Yeah. Well, I mean, we've been talking about that since day one on this podcast.

The state of journalism is wretched out there. The clickbaiting of everything, and it doesn't – nobody wants to take the time to do research. There's pressure on every single site and every single journalist – journalist in air quotes, every writer out there to have page views, get it up early, get it up fast, get it up quickly, be the first people, make sure you're the ones getting the links to it.

It doesn't matter if the story is right or wrong. Come on. Okay. And where are the fucking editors in all this? Almost everything I read has either blatant grammatical or spelling errors to the point of absurdity. It sounds off-topic, but all these people are writing in a vacuum without any oversight anymore because the shitty budgets and the race to get stories online faster, to get the clicks, to get the page views, and it's killing the – it's just killing the industry at an exponential rate.

I agree. They're losing the trust of the audience, and it could just be like a confirmation bias, but more and more there's a backlash against this, and people are getting tired of it. So I – it's just becoming so untrustworthy, it's almost absurd.

But the question is, are people getting tired of it enough to actually pay for news again? No. Okay. Well, then fuck it. This is what we got. This is the problem. We broke the bank on it, and it's not going back in the – the genie is not going back in the bottle on that one. Nope. The thing is, it's like we need – I don't know how to – I honestly don't know how to fix it.

I just can tell you that it's fundamentally broken right now. Well, I have a thought on this, and it's a thought that I'm going to bring up a couple other times in this podcast when we talk about very similar things. We are basically going back to the Middle Ages right now. We need patrons. We need incredibly rich people like Jeff Bezos who supposedly was going to come in and fix some journalism to come in and just pay for it at a loss because the world needs it.

How's that working out? It's not. That's the unfortunate thing. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to put a couple of links in the show notes that – where people are talking about this specific problem who are journalists and are saying this is bullshit. Let's kind of put the brakes on it here and decouple the race for technology from journalism because that's where a lot of this comes into.

It's like you have these engineers who say, oh, well, I can make it better. Citizen journalism is going to be the be-all, end-all. And as somebody who ran a citizen journalism site for eight years, I can tell you that that didn't work. It was good for entertainment, but it was not good for hard news.

It was good for people on the streets reporting like we had people in Katrina that would go out and say, CNN is calling this wrong. I'm standing on the corner. They said it had eight feet of water in it right now. That kind of thing it's good for. But when you're trying to do investigative journalism, it's not a big thing.

No, not good at all. And we had a little follow-up on Garth Brooks, how he took on the internet and didn't really do so well because he's kind of obscure now. Well, there's a few issues on this, and again, I think this is kind of bad journalism.

And this is The Guardian, which is not good for them to have bad journalism. No, I've got another one The Guardian stepped on their own dick for this week too. Okay, well, maybe they need to take that winner of the Pulitzer Prize off their banner there. I mean, the main issue, they want to play this as he took on the internet and lost, and he certainly did.

Like, you know, he's about 10 years too late in terms of creating your own online store to sell digital downloads because that's all over. Just go to iTunes because that's where people find you. End of story. So his management is living in a bubble. I'm not entirely – they could have done themselves a favor.

And, like, hired us as consultants to just say, no, this is the dumbest idea ever. But that's not really the issue. The issue is he's been gone for almost a decade. He's a woman. Yeah, you can't do that anymore. And his sales actually technically really aren't that bad compared to what everybody else is selling right now.

They're just comparing his sales to what he used to sell. Well, in the 10 years since he last had an album, things have changed drastically. Nobody sells like that anymore. So pitting Garth Brooks against Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks 10 years ago is not a fair comparison at all.

Now throw up his sales compared to other country artists of the same age-ish and who haven't gone away for 10 years. And he's still doing quite well. Okay. There it is then. I threw it in here because we wanted to talk about it a bit. Yeah, but it was beyond dumb for him to think that he could create his own digital distribution network at this point in time because nobody's going to go there.

It's just that that was stupid. Yeah. If you're not part of the conversation, then trying to jump back in and own the conversation after a hiatus of that length of time, it's just never going to work. Yeah, exactly. So there you go. I mean, they just – they got a little reality slap and it doesn't really matter because he's also one of those artists that's been around for so long that, frankly, nobody really gives a shit about his new material anyways.

It's an excuse to go tour where he will totally clean up. Okay, so keeping on with the music follow-up, you posted a pretty good article from East Bay Ray from the Dead Kennedys explaining how YouTube is stealing from musicians. Now, I read this last night and somewhat this morning because I fell asleep because of turkey.

It's an interesting breakdown on the numbers that people get from YouTube. YouTube is taking out their CapEx before they get paid or they pull their costs out before they pay the artists. So it works out to be a terrible deal for the artists.

They're getting 35 percent of the money. Yeah. I mean this is what I've been talking about wanting to see more of and I'm really happy. We actually have a couple articles on this show that we're going to talk about where people in the music industry are actually kind of – they're whipping it out and putting it on the table for us to see because we get – basically all we get is press releases from these distribution channels, your YouTubes, your Spotifys, whatever, saying we're paying out tons and tons of money.

Now we're starting to see a lot more of the artists saying, well, no, actually, here's what we really are making. Here's the cut that you're taking and this is kind of bullshit. This is a really interesting article in that YouTube has kind of been where people go to listen to music and everybody kind of justifies it because they know it's monetized.

The breakdown surprised even me. I was not aware that they took – they basically – YouTube is taking more than the old school record labels did, which was already considered robbing and thieving. They're taking a shit ton. They take more than iTunes does. They take more than anybody else out there.

YouTube is taking such a huge commission that it's basically criminal. It is and the fact that they're using their expenses to steal from them is ridiculous because their expenses for what they're – the amount of music that is being played is probably a minuscule percentage based on the rest of the videos that they're putting out there.

As far as just bandwidth and time on site go, I guarantee you the cat videos outweigh the music. You know? Yeah. So lumping all that into one expense bucket is – it's thievery. It's total thievery. Yeah. There's just so many numbers to work through here.

And, you know, it's all offset by the glowing stories that YouTube and Google themselves will put out about, well, look at all these YouTube celebrities that we have. We have people making, you know, half a million dollars, a million dollars, $5 million a year just producing videos. Well, look at these numbers.

Look at the percentages in this article. I mean, YouTube is cleaning up these – and again, it's always, you know, needle in a haystack to find somebody that can actually make money. If you're just kind of middle class, look at the cut they're taking. The cut is almost kind of irrelevant if you're making $500 million a year.

Okay, they're taking a big cut, but I'm still making a ton of money. If you're sitting in what is considered the cultural middle class, that cuts into your profits in a way that really hurts and makes it almost impossible. Here's the upside. Next week, we're going to have a rebuttal article where the numbers are flipped because somebody actually did a little more research on it.

Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the issue. You know, we were just talking about – you were talking about why you would hope that Serial had put out some of the numbers about the money that they had actually made and things like that. This is why people don't do it. Now, not this Dead Kennedys article specifically.

I'm sure we'll have something about that next week. But let's talk about – I can't even pronounce the name of this band. Pomplamoose? Pomplamoose, who Jack Conte, who's one of the members, one of the two members, put out a pretty detailed article on – go ahead, Jason, say it.

Medium. On Medium. On Medium, about his little tour that the band took out and he detailed exactly their expenses and exactly their income and they lost money on the tour. Now, I don't doubt any of these numbers.

He has no reason to lie about it. And we do also need a whole other disclaimer because at the very end of the article, he talks about how his band is making money through digital sales of his music and also Patreon, which is a site that – where people can do the Amanda Palmer method of ask people for money and they'll give it to you.

And he says they make quite a lot of money in that. The disclaimer being he also founded that company. That's the interesting part that I didn't know until you put it in the show notes, that he is a founder of Patreon. Yes, he is a founder of Patreon. Now, to be fair to him because it is a very small mention in a very large article that does not push or promote it that much at all.

It is a single mention. However, this being the internet, and this is also why people don't tend to post their profits and their expenses and things like that, these guys have been getting ripped a new a-hole by everyone. First off, it's the fact that he's a co-founder of Patreon and we should have labeled this as sponsored content and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, even though it's just a tiny little mention.

That's a bit weird. You have musicians from all over the world just ripping apart every single choice that they made on their expenses even though, you know, I've been in the industry for 15 years and, yeah, okay, some of the expenses were maybe a little bit high and they probably could have found better deals and they could have done better tour routing.

And, you know, maybe in certain markets they could have stayed in the city for two or three days and played a few extra shows to kind of bring up their income a little bit. You can nitpick this to death, which is what, you know, the internet was tailor-made for and exactly what everyone is doing, but I'd say overall this is a really pretty close to real-life breakdown of what a tour of that size would be like, and he lost money on it.

Yeah, I mean, specifically, where was that number? I'm pulling it up right now so we have it, but it was, you know, around $10,000 that they lost, I believe. Oh, yeah, okay, so they lost $11,819 on the tour. So, it's, but, I mean, it's also more promotion for them.

I don't know. At this point, yes, it's an interesting article. They put the numbers out. Wait, hold on a second, though. You just said it's more promotion for them. In the old school way, yes, the tour was promotion to sell the album, but nobody buys the album anymore. That's why I stopped. Okay, yeah.

As soon as I said that, I was wrong. The theory of the industry now is flipped in that you release something to get people out to your shows because that's where you make your money. Yes. Yeah, I don't know. I just, I am happy that we're bringing back a little bit of the radical transparency theory that was around 10 years ago that everybody seemed to forget about and stop doing.

Yeah. And we'd need more of this because this way at least we shine a light on where the cost structure is, where the payment structure is, and then we can route around the bottlenecks. Yeah. You know, I think the more people do this, the more people post their incomes, their numbers, then, you know, patterns will emerge and we'll be able to find ways to route around where the sinkholes are.

Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And like I said, it's just unfortunate that this is the internet and we have to have comment sections because I want to see more articles like this, but I see why people don't post it. Because if you start going through any of the comments at all, there's a few people that are supportive, but mostly it's like, hey, fuck you guys.

I mean, there are even people saying, wait, hold on a second. You managed to make about 30 grand a year? What are you complaining about? I'm like, wow, I don't know where you're living, but 30 grand a year is not good. Not a whole lot of money. No. No. So, yeah.

Yeah, I want to do a little follow-up on the drinking jacket that I mentioned last time. With 29 days to go, it got funded. Now it's got 24 days to go and they have more than doubled their goal. So this is not good news. Why is it not good news? It's because you're a fan of this jacket.

I am. I prefer on Kickstarter when things are funded to what they should be funded to. And it's like you look at anybody who gets too much money and it screws up the project. Yeah, but... Too much money, but hopefully on this one it'll work out. I'm still hopeful that I'll get a nice jacket out of it, you know. You are aware that Kickstarter has started to pivot, correct?

Pivot how? It is not really being... Well, it is still being used, obviously, for its original intended purpose, which is, you know, to fund something, some creative project or some engineering project or whatever. So people can get the money up front so they can go out and build the cool things and then send it to you.

But I've started to notice the Kickstarter more and more is actually just being used as a store for people who have done this before. Because it gets more traffic and it gets more press and it gets more interest than if they just opened up a store on his website. I guarantee you if Zane Lamprey just put up a drinking jacket at ZaneLamprey.com, he would have far less purchasers than he did doing this Kickstarter.

Well, yeah. I mean, it's kind of functioning now as both focus group and store. Yeah. So if you do put up a product that nobody wants, it won't get funded and it won't sell. But if it does get funded and you get more press off of it, then you will sell more. But I just hate when it gets too much press and gets too overfunded and then somebody skips off to Belize with all the money and then you never...

Yeah. But, I mean, you have to look at it as it's a store now. It's not overfunded. It's just a lot more people bought it than they thought they were going to. Yes. Hopefully, they'll still be able to get the good fabric unlike the damn T-shirts. Yes. Well, this is the problem because once you start to get this much money, you start to get really greedy and you start to look around and go, well, how can we shave another $3 off the cost of the actual jacket?

Yeah. So speaking of T-shirts, though, what the fuck, Elo? I mean, sorry, who? Yes, exactly. Sorry, what? Elo, the recently demised social network, has put up their Black Friday T-shirt.

On Black Friday, they put up a T-shirt that has a loaf of white bread on it. All I can say is go die in a hipster fire. I designed my own shirt that was unfortunately rejected. It was just a tumbleweed. Or it could just be a black T-shirt with nothing on it because that's pretty much what Elo's come to.

I checked in. You checked in. And the only person that's posting on my feed now is Bruce Sterling, which annoys me because now I have to go back and read it because I love Bruce. Doesn't he post anywhere else? He does, but not the stuff that he's posting on Elo. Well, that's an interest. And he must be getting paid.

No. Comment of the week. Our first comment of the week comes from Rohan Gunatilaki, our friend at Bootify. Bootify. Rohan writes, Hey, Jason and Brian, this is just to say thanks for all the support for Bootify over the months and also just for making a great new show, which I enjoy every week.

We're doubling the content on Bootify this week and launching the Android version. And your advice regarding pricing really helped confirm that the best thing to do was not to try and wheedle more money out of our users, but to give them as good an experience as possible so that in the future, when we release new products, they'll come with us.

Happy Thanksgiving, Rohan. P.S. You might like this thing I wrote recently. And he links us to an article called Five Challenges of Being a Mindfulness Entrepreneur. Ah, well, thank you very much, Rohan. And, you know, thank you for Bootify because you've actually saved my ass many, many times since you released your product.

It has always calmed me down when I'm dealing with intensely stupid clients. Yes, and the new content is actually really excellent. I've been going through it. And the same thing. I don't have stupid clients anymore, but I do have stress. And I need to de-stress and I need to become more mindful.

Yeah, it's a great app and I really appreciate the comments. I'm glad that we have the little Grumpy Old Geeks Bootify love, even though we're really at different opposite ends of the spectrum. And I would like to point out that Rohan has donated to Grumpy Old Geeks and is keeping us on the air for another at least two months.

Yes. So very, very much appreciated, Rohan. Yes, thank you very much for that. We also got a $10 donation from Jeff and a second comment of the week from Jeff Clark. In case you guys were worried about putting out a show that doesn't talk about the music industry, don't worry. That'll keep happening for a while.

Here is your link for this week. God, I hope you haven't linked to this in the past since I'm fairly new to the show. It's a newyorker.com talk about revenue streams, specifically Spotify. And I read through the entire article and I think we're suffering from what we just talked a lot about in our intro, which is people on this side say X and people on that side say Y.

Some of the smaller management teams are saying Spotify is actually paying out and paying out pretty well, but then you have other people saying no, they're not. The transparency and the clarity is just not there yet, but I like to see these articles keep coming out. I want to keep pushing towards it, and I want artists to keep talking about what they're actually seeing.

So I like this. Yeah, there's just a lot of discrepancies going on. There's a ton that don't make any sense. It just can't be that all over the map when you have a Taylor Swift's management saying, you know, we're making almost half a million dollars a month, but then you have Roseanne Cash saying I made $1.35.

I mean, it doesn't make sense. No, it doesn't. And you've got another article on digital music news about Spotify's losses last year, which are getting less than the previous year. Yeah, so they're starting to actually climb up and make a little money, but they're still losing hand over fist every year.

And it's just going to be interesting to see because they're dropping their prices, but they're increasing their expenses in terms of bandwidth and payouts. I don't know how you're going to keep this running. Well, they're trying to get to that magical 40 million user mark, which they keep talking about, and so they're spending money hand over fist to get to that point.

Yeah, yeah. We'll see. I mean, we need more clarity. We don't really know what's going on. But Daniel Ek is very much convinced that he is the savior of music, and this is going to turn everything around. We shall see. So far, from my experiences and from the artists that I know and the actual money that's coming in for all of these guys, they're losing big time.

It's not helping. Yeah, time will tell on this one. So thanks, guys, for your donations and comments. We really appreciate it. And feel free, if you don't have any cash to spare, hop on over to iTunes and drop us a nice five-star review. We really appreciate it. Yes, we do.

And Jeff actually sent the $10 because he wanted the Among Us tracks, which I then put together a 12-track sampler of things that had never been released. So hopefully he'll enjoy it. Yes, and if you would like to get the sampler, just drop us a tenner. Yep.

Facebook, our dear friends, are coming out with a new privacy policy starting January 1st. Yes, I got the notification yesterday on my little Facebook pop-up saying, hey, we're going to completely fuck with you again.

Let us shit all over your new year. So they've got a blog post about the new updates, and they've got a new page about privacy basics where it says, you're in charge. Well, shit, you're going to do what you want no matter what. So they say they're simplifying the process, making it easier to see how others interact with you, what you see, and all the good stuff.

Uh-huh. We'll see how that pans out. Because in the past, it generally has some kind of miserable side effect that causes some kind of class action lawsuit. So we'll see how that plays out. Yeah, it'll be interesting. You know, it won't make a difference. There'll be some uproar for a little while.

People will say things like they did last time or like when they split off Messenger and, oh, my God, it's tracking us everywhere. I'm never going to install Messenger. And then two weeks later, everybody has Messenger installed anyways because you didn't have a choice. So that is about exactly what's going to happen. Okay.

Good times. Moving on. The more I hear about Mike Rowe, the more I like this dude. As I was just talking about, like one of the reasons that people don't like to post much about transparency is that they get crapped on right away. Mike Rowe posts an awful lot and he gets a lot of shit on his Facebook page.

And he did this great response to somebody that was just basically trolling him and spamming him with an attempt to buy some crappy self-published book that he was writing. And it's genius. This guy is awesome. He basically just, you know, gave him marketing strategy. He made it a teachable moment.

Yeah, it was a very teachable moment. The only thing I – the only problem I have with this is if this wasn't Mike Rowe, it wouldn't have been news. Yeah. It was just – it was a cute reply to a troll. Yeah. What it was. But yeah, I like Mike Rowe. Me too. I got no problem with the dude. I especially remember the speech that he gave in front of Congress about the working man.

It was a really – I think we covered that on the show when it came out. It was a good speech. Yeah, we did. We did cover it on the show. That was actually my first real exposure to Mike Rowe. I mean, I'd heard that he had these TV shows and things like that, but I knew next to nothing about him back then. And since then, I've become quite the fan. So keep at it, man.

In connectivity news, I don't know if you've noticed, but certainly here in California, they've been pushing recently the Time Warner cable and everyone else that basically all the old frequencies for TVs are going away. Where you have no more analog transmissions, everything is digital now.

The side effect of that is there is this huge band of analog transmission frequencies that is now open and not being used. Of course, our governments have decided to basically auction them off to the highest bidder, but scientists are instead urging that we use this empty bandwidth now to basically create free super frequency Wi-Fi.

Not going to happen. Of course it's not going to happen, but isn't it a genius idea? Oh, it's a great idea. It's a bunch of German scientists that came up with this. And I bet you the Germans will do it. Yeah, I mean, it's Spectrum. It should be usable by everybody. Well, it is also technically owned by the public. It is for the public airwaves.

So why the hell are they auctioning it off? Give me my damn Spectrum. Exactly. I mean, this needs to be an outrage. Somebody needs to get on this and make this happen. Outrageous! Yes. We'll see how that plays out, but it's a great idea. Yeah, we'll never hear about it again. Yeah, like super long-range hotspots. That would be very nice.

Well, I mean, it would ruin the kind of monopolies that we're getting from the Time Warner hotspots and the blah, blah, blah, and the paying whatever for every time you go anywhere to get online. And it'll also take a huge chunk out of the telecoms, your Verizons and AT&Ts, who are just charging outrageous fees for high-speed 4G networks and all that sort of stuff.

Just gone. Gone in an instant. Which is why exactly that it will never work. I know. It will never pass. Yep. And another thing that will never pass is the European Parliament is trying to call for the breakup of Google. Mm-hmm. No. Yeah, good luck with that. Yeah, that's one hell of a windmill to go tilting at. It's not going to work.

Google's just going to buy the European Union at this point. That's what I said. They got enough cash. They just buy Europe. Yeah. You know? They want their own little country, and they can just buy Europe. Why not? You're oogle. Phew. So let's have a little chat about Uber.

Oh, you know, at this point, I just don't even know what to do anymore. Again, I feel like I'm just farting into the wind talking about these stories because people just don't seem to care. But this time around, this one was very bad timing for the Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, who was giving a speech last week in Vegas at a ritzy gathering of bankers and tech tycoons hosted by Goldman Sachs.

And he was giving the speech as basically Ferguson was starting to burn to the ground, and then he likened his company, Uber's PR crisis, to Ferguson. Two issues with this piece. One, it's coming from Pando, which is Sarah Lacey's, you know, her microphone.

Right. And her people's microphone. It's where this whole thing started. I didn't – before this whole thing happened, I didn't do a whole lot of research into Pando. Pando Daily, sorry. And it's not journalism. It is not journalism at all. It is opinion – it's all opinions.

You know, it's editorial. OK. And so without a direct quote, this – you know, this is all hearsay in this article. He's got one person that tweeted it and one person that was – that kind of told the journalist on a back channel.

But there's no direct quote. Right. And there is no recording of it. OK. So between those two pieces, it just feels like just a smear piece. I don't know. There's a direct quote in the middle of the piece there. From – well, let me pull it. From Kalanick. Do we have the actual – because it was from a tweet.

We don't have – Oh, OK. Got you. We don't have audio. Well, that's not surprising. Yeah. Anyway. So I just – Pando for me is very suspect at this point. And the whole blow up about it because when you go to the next couple articles we have, there was one where they actually had somebody who was sitting next to the conversation that was going on and the BuzzFeed guy was – you know, he was pushing his agenda and the comments were taken fairly well out of context and basically blown up to push an agenda, Sarah Lacey's

agenda for the most part, saying, oh, you know, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I've got secret service on me. Now, you know, the whole nine yards, having to hire bodyguards, armed people, following me everywhere. Life is ending. And it's – you know, the whole thing is just kind of twisted up. And this is what got me on the whole rant at the beginning of the show.

And there's a really interesting article from – what's his dude's name? Mark Suster, where he basically talks about, you know, in defense of Uber. And it's a well-written piece. And, you know, just – that's the whole thing. You've got to find the squishy middle now.

That's where the truth is. No, I agree. The huge part of this is the problems with journalism for sure, without a doubt. Because, I mean, like I said, Uber was a hot topic for two weeks. So all of a sudden there were 7,000 articles that were sold as news that weren't really news all about Uber.

Yeah. And I think the most important thing to come out of this is the ACLU's article on the lessons of Uber privacy scandal. Basically saying that, OK, these people are – they're kids in a candy store with too much data. They're not protecting it well enough.

And there needs to be mechanisms put in place to let the users remove their data, much like Google does with their takeout and all the other services that they have that let you not – you know, Google has not followed any of my search results since 2007 because I told them not to.

And unlike Facebook, they actually respect my privacy setting and have not changed it on the thousands of times they've updated their privacy policy. That's requiring you to reset all your settings again. Yes. So the ACLU is calling for that kind of data protection across all of these ride services.

And it should be just any basic website that keeps your personal information. I think that's the – this is the best article that came out of the entire kerfuffle because the rest of it, I don't give a fuck. I really don't. I know. I know you don't. But I agree with that 100%. I mean, the ACLU, this was a great article.

I really enjoyed it. It has nothing to do with Uber. It has to do with your privacy and with the internet and with all these data mining services that are taking place and every web service which wants to get your information because that's what it's all about. Everybody wants your info. End of story. Yeah. That's what I'm saying.

That's the best thing to come out of it because Uber brought their whole Godview thing to light. So there is an upside to having to read all of these mind-melting articles over the past two weeks. Yeah. Last thing I just want to talk about. This isn't really news but it's a great article in the Washington Post talking about text neck.

They're calling it an epidemic. I don't know about that. But it did get me to reevaluate my ergonomics for my desk because it shows that when your head is at different angles, how much pressure is being put on your shoulder and spine. And it's something like you and I being in the business this long, we know about ergonomics and we know how to set up our desk properly so you don't get repetitive stress injuries and you don't break your back.

I mean, this is why my mom can't work anymore because she sat hunched over a computer for 20 years and it broke her. And so I recommend checking out the article and I also recommend going and find – there's a lot of diagrams on how to place your monitor, the height of your desk, the height of where your keyboard is, and just get it set up.

So I fixed my desk because my monitor has been too low and I've noticed it's hard to sleep at night sometimes because my neck hurts. And I moved my monitor up. I've actually got more energy at the end of the day and my back doesn't hurt anymore just by that one little change. Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, you're talking about setting up your desk, which has basically nothing to do with this article.

But yes, the ergonomics are extremely important. But this entire article is about text neck, which is people walking around or sitting down and basically looking down at their hands held about gut level where you have your phone and you're doing your texting and reading. And it's funny.

After you posted this, I kind of agree that it's an epidemic because I spent the next couple days noticing, being in the moment and consciously aware of the people around me and the people doing this. Like I walked around Third Street Promenade, which is a shopping mall here in Santa Monica, and everybody was bent over and hunched over looking at their phones.

I was sitting in a restaurant. I looked around. Everybody was hunched over. This is something to be pretty aware of because our body is not meant to be bent like that all the time. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yes, I did co-opt the article for my own purposes. I will admit to that one. But it's an important thing that I really believe people should pay attention to.

And yeah, well, here's the deal. Stop texting so damn much. Yeah, I agree. Security. Ha! Our hack of the week. Hackers shut down Sony Pictures computers and are blackmailing the studio.

This is something you probably have some really good insight into, Jason, having worked for the big studios at one point in time in your life. No, not really. I never worked for Sony. Well, not Sony, but you were at different ones, so. Yes, I worked at Paramount for quite some time. It's interesting on this hack because I haven't seen any resolution yet.

As far as I know, Sony computers are still owned. Right. And there are signs that point to an inside job, which is interesting. And it's, yeah, they're screwed. They are hosed. Yeah, they're in some trouble. It's going to cost them a lot of money to get out of this one.

Not to the hackers, but I mean, they got to replace basically everything. No, it is a fuster cluck of just unbelievable proportions for them. Yeah. Yeah, we don't have a whole lot of news on it at this point because Sony's trying to keep it as hush, hush, hush, hush, hush as possible.

And yeah, maybe next week we'll have a little more insight into it. But it is a major hack, big time. It's a big time one. And it's funny because you see, I mean, all these studios do tend to have an awful lot of security. But so do music studios. I mean, music labels and things like that, which is what I work with a lot.

And they do have a lot of security. But then they also do silly things like put stuff out on a Dropbox without a password to be passed around. So there's a definite lack of education in terms of the people that actually work at these places and their IT department is not talking to them.

Yeah, well, I mean, the people are the problem, especially my time at the record label, the security was a joke. The time I was at Paramount, the security was excellent. Those guys were good. No, those guys are really good. And it made it hard for us to do our job a lot of the time.

But, you know, we worked with them and we got around it. But yeah. And Sony is, I don't know, after all the, you know, the PS network hacks and all that stuff, I have no insight into the inner workings of Sony whatsoever. And I never want to work with them. Another hack of the week.

We actually have a couple here. Craigslist. Their DNS was hijacked. Yeah, DNS hijacking, I think, is going to be something that we're going to see a lot more of recently because I just finished that little bit in Doctora's book about it. It's very unsecure.

Well, the issue here is and this, the Craigslist was hacked and then redirected and the Syrian electronic army is back and they did another hack against a site called GIGIA, which a lot of news organizations use. And they did the same thing. And both of these, they use, they basically hacked their account at their registrar.

Yeah. So that's the, that was the SPOF on this. So, and it's interesting because I was looking to see if any of the registrars that I use have like something like two-factor authentication and none of them do. Nope. And it, that is a, that is an issue. I think if, as, as hackers are starting to go after the DNS credentials for these sites and most people don't have complex passwords on their registrar login thing, oh, it's just, you know, whatever.

But that is, that is like the key to your site being online because that's where you, that's where the keys to the castle are. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever had problems with this, any people out there, especially if you're, if God forbid, you're actually using network solutions. If something goes wrong and you can't get into your account, it's almost impossible to get ahold of anyone and to get any help to actually get into your account.

I've never dealt with that particularly. I've never had anybody being hacked, but doing what I do for a living, I often have to, you know, take over a site or whatever. And I'm like, well, what's your registrar? What's the information? And, you know, people, because they're stupid, lose things like their passwords and they don't have the email address that was originally, all this stuff was put on.

So I'm like, well, I cannot get into, I can't get into your registrar. You don't have a password. The email address doesn't exist anymore. You, I, I've called network solutions. They're basically like too fucking bad. Well, first off, network solutions is the fucking devil.

Yes, I know. Never, never do your diet or do your domain registrations through GoDaddy or network solutions. Those are my two absolute grumpy old rules. Never ever use them. And if you have them get away fast. But yeah, everybody needs to have the most complex password that is in your arsenal should be for your registrar.

Yeah. And use an unpublished email address. There you go. Absolutely. Tips from the geeks. Coming back to the Stuxnet talk last week, we have a new contender out there. It's called Region. Mm-hmm. And the same team that discovered Stuxnet is the same ones that, same one that found this one from Symantec.

And these guys are good. And they, this thing has been around since at least 2008, but possibly 2006. It is a, from what I can see from all the documents, this is a masterpiece of malware. Yep. So it's, the news is still coming out about it, but it's a, it's a biggie.

It's a doozy. Yes, it is a doozy. Oh boy. Yeah. Speaking of doozies, Home Depot is finally starting to feel the sting if they weren't already from their huge data breach. And there are at least 44 civil lawsuits, probably more to come.

Oh, I'm sure. I mean, there's some crafty lawyers out there right now that are trying to track down some people, I'm sure. Let's keep those coming. Yeah. No, that's a, that's a mess. It really is a mess, especially with all the, the talk from the people who used to work there coming out saying, no, no, it was, we were nowhere near PCI compliant.

Right. Not by a long shot. And in other interesting news, this is a little bit scary. Admiral, Admiral Michael Rogers, the director of the NSA and head of U.S. Cyber Command has come out to Congress saying, yeah, China and a couple other unnamed superpowers can basically take over our electrical grid.

And a lot of the industrial infrastructure of our country. Well, yeah, that's, I mean, our infrastructure is fucked. It has been for years. And that's, that's even before you bring in anything like, like network security and things like that. We need a whole, we need a new, new deal to, to fix all this stuff.

Cause our, our country is crumbling in many, many ways and we're vulnerable. There's no doubt about that. New deal 2.0. Exactly. There you go. Actually it'd be, it'd be new deal spelled like missing, you know, the E, new deal. How could it not?

You know, you get a W and no, no, there is a new, no, what am I thinking? N-E-U-D-L-L, noodle, noodle, noodle, there we go. We've got to register that domain through network solutions right away. Indeed. So on, in stupid shit of the week in security, there are so many articles going around about e-cigarettes putting malware on your computer.

All right. Should we just go ahead and say that this is because vape was considered the term of the year and this is shoddy journalism meant for click views. Oh, it was terrible. But the guardian is the one that put out this article, which is what, where I come in from saying before that the guardian is not having the best track record this week.

No, they are not. This is a bit stupid because, yes, e-cigs, they are USB chargeable, so you can plug them into your computer. There are chips in them, so they can be hacked. Yeah, and that's why you don't buy cheap USB chargers from the grocery store or anywhere else.

But the thing about this is it was made up. The whole thing was made up. The guy on Reddit who wrote the thing said it was made up, and the article's still there. People are writing follow-ups on it. Most of the follow-ups are saying, you know, well, here, Naked Security has another click-baity headline. Should vapors fear malware-laced e-cigarettes?

Of course, the answer is no. No, no. There's not a single case of this actually happening. Is it theoretically possible? Yes. But has it happened? No. Should you treat your e-cigarette that has a USB plug-in like anything else? It's like if a stranger knocks on your door and walks in and wants to plug in their vape to charge on your computer, should you let him?

No. Well, also because it can damage the USB port on your computer. So there's the main reason not to do it. Not this fictitious tinfoil hattie, my cigarette can take over, you know, and launch nuclear weapons. So on that note, there is a new product that's coming onto market, unfortunately, through Kickstarter, and it hasn't been funded yet.

But it looks like a cool thing called SyncStop. Which is a little bridge that you plug in between a device and your USB port, and all it does is it disables the data pathways. So it's just power. It, you know, sterilizes the connection so you can use your computer to charge something.

I say just keep a USB brick with you and plug it into the wall. It's going to charge faster anyway. Yeah, we don't have that problem, really. I mean, this is something that is not an issue. Just plug it into the wall, not into your computer, you're done. I mean, yes, you can be at a conference and not have, you know, access to a plug because everybody's charging.

ABC, always be charging. So we'll see. I mean, it's a cute little thing. I just wish I could pick one up now and throw it in my bag, but I can't. Yeah, I would definitely have one of these. This would make sense just to have in your bag. As a geek, you know, we carry our backpacks that are full of tiny little crazy-ass things.

This is something I would definitely buy. Although I do enjoy the fact that they're still trying to push the secondary name. It's not just SyncStop. It is SyncStop slash USB condom. Yeah, the USB condom. Which I would just go with SyncStop, guys. Yeah, definitely. Listen to the marketing experts.

Look, we're good at this. People should actually pay us for this shit.

This week in Media Candy, Hollywood comes back to Silicon Valley with a new Siffy reality TV show. If it's on Siffy, it can't be any good. I'm sorry, guys. You guys have, since Battlestar Galactica went off the air, you're useless. Oh, no, man.

The Jim Henson Creature Shop Challenge was really good. Okay. I actually enjoyed that show. Now, this show is going to be called The Bazillion Dollar Club. Oh, boy. Yeah, six-episode series following some startups from 500 startups from Dave McClure's outfit.

All I can say is I hope he wears shoes in this one because he's got some nasty toenails from wearing those slippers all the time. Yeah, no thanks. So I was going to go off on a little rant here, but I'll keep it short here.

So Radiotopia is the big player on the block along with Gimlet Media for, you know, Gimlet runs the startup show and then this new show. I don't even want to talk about it. But I went and went to the Radiotopia site, saw how much gazillions of dollars they crowdfunded, and I checked out all their shows.

And by the end of the fourth episode of all the shows, I was about ready to slit my wrists. I actually did a really longer rant on Vapid about this, but all of these things sound exactly the same. It's formulaic.

It's driving me crazy. I want these things to be more punk rock. That's all I can say. I'm skipping the Radiotopia series altogether. I can't take it. Well, I mean, it's all NPR-esque, right? I mean, that's… Oh, exactly. It's the same formula. Yeah. Exactly the same.

It's the public radio formula. Well, radio is dying, and, you know, they're moving over to the podcasting format, which is, you know, basically just on demand. So it makes sense that they're doing that, and that stuff is popular. A lot of people like their formulas, like that sort of stuff. There's no lack of punk rock on podcasting.

I guess that's the nice part of it, is that it's kind of open to everyone. It's the same problem the entire internet's having in general, man. I just feel like I need to be driving a minivan while I listen to that shit. I just… That's it. I want a beige minivan, because that's what those programs feel like to me.

Yeah, I got you. I got you. I mean, it's why I haven't really been able to get into serial either. I just can't do it right now. I'm not interested. Yeah, I hear you, brother. I hear you, I guess. I think what is good, though, Homeland's pretty good this season. Homeland has been awesome.

It's been riveting. The last couple episodes have been absolutely fantastic. I was a big fan of the show when it started. By the second season, they were starting to lose me. It was obvious they would have to do a complete and utter reboot, and I'm not going to do a spoiler alert or anything, because if you're not keeping up at this point, too fucking bad.

They did a complete reboot for season three. It got off to a bit of a rocky start, but now I am just like, you know, it shows up on the Showtime app at like 6 p.m. Pacific time, and I'm not waiting until later at night to watch it.

It is on at 6. I love this show right now. It is kicking ass. They basically transitioned to becoming almost an action show, and it's fantastic. Yeah, just a little clarification. They rebooted with season four. Season three was the wrap-up of the first storyline. Oh, okay. So season three was the really bad one.

Okay. Yeah. So we're on season four now, and I thought they had a bit of a mid-season slump, but they have picked it up like tenfold near the end there. It's really good right now. I think there's only two episodes left, I believe, in the series, and it is kicking ass. It is probably my favorite show on TV right now.

My second favorite show is also doing a really good job of reinventing themselves. Unfortunately, they decided to do it once they decided to cancel the show. So this show, The Newsroom, is done. This is their final season. It always had potential. I was really disappointed by the first two seasons, but right now they're swinging for the fences.

Everything's coming together, and this is also must-watch TV for me right now, and I'm so fucking pissed they're canceling the show. Yeah, I went back, and I fell off on season two. I was moving or something like that, so I never went back and picked it up, but I binged-watched the entirety of season two.

In about 12 hours. See, I loved season one, and I thought season two was really good. I had a really good time, and then when I got to season three, it got even better. Oh, I'm sad now. I think they're trying to pack too much into this season, though, in some parts. There's too many storylines going on, but all in all, it's pretty good.

Yeah, I mean, they're doing a Snowden-esque storyline. They're talking about the state of online journalism and pay for clicks and all that to journalists. It's a lot of the stuff that we're bitching about, so it's pretty good. Right now, I'm enjoying it a lot. And I think my favorite bit in this entire season so far was Jane Fonda ragging on the loss of the word literally.

I'm like, he listens to our show. Yes. Yes, there are a few things that could have been directly ripped from the grumpy old geeks, but it's been very good. You dropped a link in here called Social Anxiety, How Red Bull is Changing What It Means to Be an Independent Musician. We'll have the link in our show notes.

It's from thefader.com. I don't want to talk about it too much. It's an incredibly long article, but this is interesting because we talked a little bit earlier about how things are getting funded, and I said that things kind of almost have to go back to having patrons, having a Jeff Bezos come in and save journalism, and having basically Red Bull come back in and save the music industry.

This entire article is about how Red Bull, which has a shit ton of money and wants publicity, is funding artists, and again, like I said, we're kind of going back to the Middle Ages here where Leonardo da Vinci would have been just sitting on a corner doodling away if it wasn't for really, really rich patrons paying basically for his art, and that's what we're back to right now.

So I just wanted to mention that. Okay, yeah. It's moving towards corporate sponsorship. Yeah, everything is going to be corporate sponsored now. That's just – that's the only way to actually really make it anymore. And I wanted – I was going to say the Mona Lisa sponsored by Coca-Cola. Well, sponsored by the Vatican. Yeah.

Yeah, it was, yeah. The Coca-Cola of its day. Everybody had to have it. I wanted to put a new section in here called Old School Classic of the Week. This came as a friend of the show suggestion. It's a new segment because honestly new music is shit. So I'm going to dig back into the archives and pick out an album that I listened to intensely when it came out, but – and in the best cross-promotional way, see if it has legs.

So I'm stealing your idea for movies, and I'm just going to do a quick little bit in here about music. I'm listening to the album on repeat for a week before our show, making sure that it's not just nostalgia that makes me like it. It's also got to be a full album, a full fucking album, not a goddamn couple singles with some shit around it.

And every single one of these albums I'll put in this segment are ones I just assume people already have. Apparently, you and Cultured Masses do not and have never heard of it, so we will provide links for purchase. The first one up is Death in Vegas, the Contino Sessions, which came out in the grand old age of 1999. It's been around for a while.

This album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. It features Richard Fearless and Tim Holmes with vocals by Iggy Pop, Bobby Gilepsy from Primal Scream, Jim Reed from the Jesus of Mary Chain, Dot Allison from One Dove. It is basically everything I like about music. It's electro-goth-grunge-pop-crossover-perfection.

They put out a few other albums, all of which were good, but this is the gem. This is the one to get. It is still good. It is still edgy. It is still vital, and there isn't a bad track on it. Well, there you have it, then. By all means, go pick up Death in Vegas, the Contino Sessions. If you don't like it, you suck.

And you're allowed to steal does it have legs because I stole it from Andy Preboy. Well, there you go. Now, to round out the media this week, I've been watching Arrow. I like Arrow. Okay. It's an okay show, but whoever is their technology advisor on there needs to be taken out back and have an arrow shoved through his eyeball because this week, or maybe it was last week, somebody had a photograph, a physical photograph, and they scanned it to pull out the steganographic data.

It doesn't work like that. No, it does not work like that. That is not how it works. I mean, steganography is a blanket term, but when it comes to the embedding of data and images, it's usually done inside of the JPEG, the extra information in a JPEG or a GIF to, like, slightly change colors to hide codes inside of it.

Maybe somebody wrote a lot of really, really, really, really, really, really, really small ones and zeros on the photo itself. So when it got scanned in, that data was then brought in. Well, he used one of these old handheld scanners like you used to get to, like, just drag across the page, which was very funny. So all in all, Arrow's use of shitty technology fail of the week was just really crazy.

I'm like, you idiots. Maybe we need to make this a segment as well. Is this actually worse than – do you remember the Sandra Bullock-Dennis Miller movie, The Net, and their portrayals of technology in that movie? The guy who got killed flying the plane into the wires was my neighbor. So, yes, I very much remember that movie.

I gave him much shit over his crappy movie. Although he went on to win an Oscar for Best Short Movie, so he wins, not me. True. And he was in Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy, so all in all. But, yes, The Net was terrible.

The Web's not dead. Jason, just because you decided to take off your tinfoil hat last week and you're all optimistic and everything, I decided to throw a link in the show notes just to see if I can get you back to your dark side.

This is from YourNewsWire.com. It's called, Wow, 10 Popular Mind Control Techniques Used Today. It's actually just kind of silly, but, you know, there you go. It basically tells you that you can't trust anyone. Everybody's trying to get to you with flicker rates on your television and your computer and the electromagnetic spectrum and nanobots and drugs and military testing and sports politics and religion.

Oh, my. Yes. And to be fair, this comes originally from worldtruth.tv, which right there speaks of crazy motherfuckers. Yeah. It was funny. I had a good laugh at it. It was very cute. It was very cute.

So a thing I found this morning is called the Drone Survival Guide, a 21st century birdwatching guide. It has, in scale, all of the drones of the world that are in use right now by governments and private industry. And you can buy it on aluminum paper so you can blind the drones as they fly over top.

That was a nice touch. Yes. You can get the free download of all of the PDFs. Lots of – it would be interesting to see what kind of feedback we get on this because it's half in English, half in Arabic or Pashto, I believe. So, yeah. Yeah.

I think it's from a South African dude though. But it's funny. It's a cute little thing. But speaking of cute little things, I found this article from Bruce Sterling and he did not post it on LO. He posted it on Twitter. The Zip Tie Chair Lounge from Makezine. This looks incredibly uncomfortable.

Well, I'd hope that you'd put a pillow on it. But it's – yeah. It's a half a sheet of plywood and a bunch of zip ties to make a chair. Yes. But they call it the perfect nomadic maker, which means that you probably don't have easy access to a bunch of pillows. So I think you're just supposed to go for it as is. Yeah.

Yeah. It might be a little uncomfy. But it folds up. It folds up and I guess they priced it out and it still costs less than $50. But I can get a much more comfortable chair for less than $50. Just saying. Yeah. What's wrong with the whole – like the ones that you used to take to the beach? Little fold-out beach chairs.

Yeah. Those are like $9. Yeah. Those are $9 and much less – easier to carry than this piece of wood and zip ties. Oh, you could probably get a Fugger Fugger from Ikea for cheaper too. There you go. And go get your standing desk. I still think it's neat. Okay. It's neat. I'm just saying it's not practical for any kind of nomad unless he's really strong.

Agreed. Are you kidding me? I finally found a really good Are You Kidding Me that actually kind of stunned me. I haven't been going crazy on this segment recently because I've just been running across a lot of – yeah, I knew that. Yeah, I knew that.

Yeah, I knew that. This one's good. Did you know that we went to the moon before we thought to put wheels on suitcases? We really aren't that bright, are we? We really aren't. It wasn't until 1970 that the first suitcase came out that actually had wheels on it. We were already on the moon.

We were probably – we were done going to the moon by then. Yeah, we were already done. God damn. And NASA didn't even come up with this. Why are we spending our money on NASA? They can't even give us wheeled luggage. No shit. Closing shout-outs. I want to give a shout-out to a friend of the show, Andy Stochansky, who finally got back in front of the mic.

He's been a good friend of mine for years. He was originally the drummer for Annie DeFranco. Then he had a solo career that was quite big in Canada. Started to make it a little bit over here. Kind of got disillusioned by the industry like most people do. And he kind of stepped back.

He's been a great singer-songwriter for a while. And basically he's just been doing songwriting for ages. He's been writing for tons of people and quite successful at it. But he was coaxed out in front of the mic again by George Strombo. Strombo-lop-lop-lop-lop-lop-lop who does a big show in Canada called The Strombo Show.

Great listen. It was awesome to hear Andy talk about some of his influences, some of the various things he does, and actually sing again. So awesome job, Andy. We hope to have you on as a guest to the Grumpy Old Geeks soon as well. He's definitely game to do it, but it's just all scheduling. What was the second song that he played, the last one?

House of Gold, I believe? No, that was the first song. I'm not sure what the second one was. It's been a week since I actually listened to this, so I don't really remember. But House of Gold, which is the first one, is one of my favorite songs that he's ever written. Because the second one is one of mine. I knew that song. I just can't remember what it was. It was a good watch.

Yeah. Yeah. Go, Andy. All right, man. I got no shout-outs this week. Oh, I do want to say one final thank you to Rowan from Budaphy. Go get Budaphy right now. It will keep you calm, and then you can carry on. Exactly. Carry on, Jason.

I will. I'll see you next week, Brian. See you next week. Music for Grumpy Old Geeks is provided by Among Us. Check them out at iTunes and other music venues. We are, or give us ten bucks and you can get a lot of them. We are hosted by Libsyn.

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Carry on, Bob's your uncle. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

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