96: The BS Engineers

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. So I hear you're having some really nice weather out there, aren't you?

I'm not going to be that douchebag that posts on Facebook how amazing it is here right now to all my East Coast friends. Okay, Brian. Now, when in the history have you ever not done that? Come on. I never post about the weather, to be fair. I'm the one that actually gets very annoyed with people that post nothing but sunset pictures for sunrise pictures.

What about sunsetting kittens? Everything that's wrong with the internet, besides Kanye. Yes. So I was just outside for quite some time, and I'm frozen, but this will warm me up. Well, you have a little booze in your tea today?

No, no, no, no, no. It's a little early for that. I got my workout after this. Need to be an upstanding young gentleman. Excellent. So I've been doing an experiment for the past 30 days that I didn't really tell anybody about. I just did it. Okay. I turned off Adblock for 30 days. Yeah. Wow, does it suck without Adblock out there.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, every time I have to go down and fix my parents' computer, which is basically every time I go down to my parents, I get a quick look at what the internet looks like without Adblock. It's horrific. It's really bad. And that's why I found last week when we talked about Adblock was basically doing pay-to-play to some big advertising companies.

I got so distressed about the future of the internet. So do you pay for Adblock Plus? No, I just use the basic, which blocks more than enough for me. I see some ads, but they're very unobtrusive. The main thing for me is the pop-ups. They're all gone, so that's good enough for me.

Yeah, because the news last week was mainly about Adblock Plus, not about regular Adblock. Right. So you should still be okay. And since I've turned it back on, it's good. I mean, they do have that stuff with Outbrain and some other of those, was it Zerg.net and shit like that that sneak through? Yeah. The issue for me is the precedent.

Once you open those floodgates, it's a slippery slope, and it's hard to say no to money because they're getting more money, I'm sure, from those advertisers than they are from anybody that actually buys the product. Yeah, we'll get into the money thing in a little bit. The craziest thing that I noticed was how pervasive retargeting is.

And just for people that don't know, retargeting is when you go to, say, Amazon, you search for something, and then for the next three weeks, you're stalked by that product. Yeah. I mean, that's everywhere. That's all over Facebook, too. I mean, it's kind of – it's creepy. Like, I'm still getting ads for the monitor that I bought two weeks ago.

Oh, and the worst one was Jordan Cooper for his new show, The Morning Dump. He had people looking for poo-related items under $5 for their new giveaway thing. So now, everywhere I go, I am literally up to my eyeballs in turds going around the net if I don't have Adblock on.

Lovely. But here's the thing. Adblock is free. If you're not running it, go get it because you're not going to click on the ads anyway, and it's just going to make for a better experience for you. Yeah, it's a staple. It's one of the first things. It's the first plug-in I install anytime I have to do anything fresh. Now, the next thing that I did was I just broke down, and with all the stuff with Flash going on, I'm like, why is Flash still loading, like auto-loading everywhere?

There used to be a plug-in for Safari you could get called Click to Play. And now, with Chrome, it's built in. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes on how to enable it in Chrome. And if you're not using Chrome, then you really should be. It's still – it's a bit of a memory hog, but it's the safest one out there.

It is definitely a memory hog, but it is by far also my go-to browser. It's just – it's better than anything else. We'll see what Spartan is, but more about that later. Yeah, well, I'm not going to be able to run it because I'm all Mac. Yes. And I'm not going to go to Opera. That's for damn sure. Is that still around?

Oh, yeah. I don't know how. They've got their mobile business. They've got a mobile browser that you can run on Android, I guess. Well, I actually ran that on my iPad before Chrome came to the iPad. So I do have it installed on something, but ever since Chrome came out, that was that.

Now, do you run Chrome on your iPhone? I do. Okay, I don't. I just still run Safari on there. I do because I just – you know, you get hooked just like Apple does with everyone. You get hooked in the infrastructure, and I love being able to access the exact bookmarks that I've left open on my desktop on my mobile when I'm out and about.

It's awesome. Yeah, you can do that with Safari too. That feature is ubiquitous across the two now. But I just – I don't know. It just – I didn't like Chrome on the phone. For some reason, it never really worked right. I'll have to try it again and see if it's any better. Yeah, it works fine. It does what it needs to do. I'm not a huge fan of browsing on my phone.

I know, you know, everybody does it now, and it's the big thing. But, yeah, it's too small. Yeah, I only do it when I have to. If I'm looking to get a link to post into pinboard for the show notes, I do that. But now with the sharing screen, where you can actually just do it from the sharing screen and post a pinboard, it's like, oh, no need almost to open it in a browser.

Right. So an article was making the rounds this week, and I think somebody basically posted it purely for you because you are back on your Fitbit. It's a Mother Jones article. It's kind of a cheesy one, let's be honest. But science to yuppies, your Fitbit is lying to you.

I just like the title. Yeah, and the title actually has nothing to do with what's in the article. It has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's more about should you use your cell phone over your, you know, your whatever band that you have, the band du jour, as it were.

Which has been the argument that I've been making since day one. The app on the phone is more than enough for me. Yeah, and my thing, though, is I always wanted to track all the steps instead of just when I have my cell phone on, because most of the time, I don't have my phone in my pocket. It's on my desk, charging. Yeah. And when I'm doing like a real workout, like when my trainer's over, I definitely don't have it in my pocket, because I don't want to break it.

Right. I've never had an issue of worrying about breaking it when I've been working out, but it does take its toll on my phone's battery life. I'm the one that's always ending up going, ah, shit, I've ran out of batteries, because I have a vested interest in keeping the phone on me every time I take a step, because I'm trying to hit my 10,000 every day.

So, yeah, that is the one drawback to using the phone instead of another device, at least for me. But yeah, at the end of the day, the phone works fine. The article basically just says that the phone is as good as almost all of the fitness trackers on the market, so why bother? Yeah.

Why bother for the reasons that we just stated? But the clickbaity headline pissed me off a bit. Well, that's the entire internet now. True. So, I'll have a little follow-up article. This is from Tim Urban. It's been out for a couple weeks now, and we've had it in the hopper, and I just want to throw it out there this time.

It's called The AI Revolution, The Road to Superintelligence. It's a two-part article that kind of is a sum-up of all of the AI talk that's going on out there. So, if you want to get up to speed on why everybody's kind of flipping out and going crazy, thinking we're going to die soon, they're going to launch the nukes, and then we'll just be battery farms, then this is a good article to read up on.

It is a very good article. If you're interested in this sort of thing, the Bible is basically Kurzweil's The Singularity is Coming, or The Singularity is Near. I can't remember exactly what the title is. I've probably read that like four times. And the plus side for Kurzweil's thing is he's not scared by this.

He thinks it's going to be absolutely fantastic for humanity. And I tend to agree. I mean, all the doom and gloom that we talk about on the show a lot, the things that I worry about, which is, you know, financial disparity and the job market's tanking and we're basically phasing people out and how's anybody going to make a living?

When we hit a singularity, that's a game changer. That's when life will either completely fall apart or it won't matter anymore and we're going to be fine and it's going to be an interesting life that we can't even possibly imagine right now. Yeah, that's the cool part. So yeah, check out the article. It is very long and there's two parts to it, but it's, you know, it's shorter than reading Kurzweil's like 600 page book.

Yes, but Kurzweil's 600 page book is awesome. And by the way, everyone, this is, this is coming. We're not going to avoid this. It really is going to happen. And even most, most of the skeptical people that are way into this stuff think that it's going to happen even sooner than we'd originally anticipated.

That was, that's the neat thing about the article is it talks about, you know, just the rate of growth and why the rate of growth is changing and compressing so rapidly. And it's, and it's, and it's spot on. It's totally spot on. It's getting exponential upon exponential, which is ridiculous. So, so I've got another article.

This is from boston.com. I forget where I found this one, but it's called boxed in wanting out. It's a new study that talks about how basically we have too much stuff and it's making everybody miserable, which is if you've listened to any of my rants on this show, you'll know that I've been saying that forever, but it's a, it's a, you know, it's a good little wrap up on, you know, the studies that people are doing to say, yeah, we, we do over consume somewhat and we'd still have too much crap and you don't need it all to be happy.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I, you know, I look around my place and it's always like, I can get rid of this. Why do I have this? Why do I have this? And, uh, it becomes trap. It becomes a trap because it's hard to get rid of stuff or, I mean, I'm not somebody that lives on Craigslist or eBay trying to sell things.

It's, I almost feel like I should just have a yard sale or something because there's so much stuff I don't need. And I'm kind of like you. I'm not, I'm not somebody that just runs around and impulse buys things. I generally only go get things when I need them, but somehow you just end up with crap.

Yes, you do. I don't, I'm not, I'm not going to do the Tyler Durden quote, but you know, it's true. It's true. Yeah. Moving on. Moving on. So let's talk about some, uh, some virtual stuff that won't take up any space, but it's some good listening. Uh, we talked about the SoundCloud dump that people thought was maybe the Apex twin, which is, uh, over 150 plus songs that he's just had sitting around and he, he posted them to

SoundCloud as a user 48736353001, which is a very Apex twin thing to do. Uh, we've all pretty much determined that yes, this is the Apex twin and it's his stuff. Uh, it's a bit daunting to get into because he doesn't exactly name songs or anything, but conveniently, thanks to the power of the internet and some people who do not have lives whatsoever, there is a link in our show notes that basically leads you to a completely annotated version

of the dump, which not only includes, uh, rough estimates of what year he might've possibly done that in, but also a breakdown of the instruments used in each and every one of those songs. You were correct when you said that they don't have a life. Good Lord. But I'm happy someone did it because it was interesting.

That's a lot of annotating. And I don't have time to listen to basically 150 tracks and find ones that I like. So it was kind of nice to be able to go through that and go, oh, well, I really liked this period of Apex twin, particularly the more ambient stuff. And I was able to pull out about 20 from those things, from the, uh, SoundCloud dump that I really enjoy.

Oh, excellent. So more music news. Let's talk, since the Apex twin has basically said, fuck it and put his stuff out for free. A new report from tech dirt is talking about how, while yes, there is a lot of money starting to come from places like Spotify.

Guess who's keeping it all? Let me guess the labels. Yes. Of course. Yeah. So this is not surprising. This is a big, this is why the numbers don't tend to make sense a lot. And, uh, unfortunately most of the artists have been going after Spotify, which I think is, is too short-sighted at this point because games over Spotify one streaming one, we're never going back to purchasing.

So how about you start yelling at your label? Because there are some interesting breakdowns where you see the labels basically keeping 45% of the shares of streaming revenue with only 6.8% going to the artists. And, uh, that's not good. Well, that's par for the course, you know, that's, well, it was par for the course.

It was par for the course when the labels actually had distribution costs and things to do. And they actually did promotion and physical product and all of the sorts of things that the label used to do, but no longer does, but is still taking the lion's share of the payouts for what's going to fix it.

What's going to fix it? Uh, I don't know. The labels are entrenched and they're in contracts and there are lawyers. Who knows? That's the very next article that I'd like to mention really quickly because it was pretty interesting. Politico has a, uh, had a post around the time of the Grammys called the secret policy war at the Grammys, which is basically a very long article discussing how the copyright royalty wards and things like that are being taken to task.

And there are a number of lawsuits and a number of basically all the lawyers are going to make a shit ton of money trying to sort out this mess, figure out streaming rates, figure out royalty payments, figure out what things like how Pandora is different from Spotify, which is how does that relate to sound exchange and how all these payouts should go and who, you know, who should be getting the lion's share.

So we'll see what happens. I mean, you've got ASCAP and BMI are basically going to bat for the artists because that means they get a bigger cut and, uh, we'll see what happens. So it sounds to me like since the labels don't have, you know, physical distribution costs anymore, they barely do. Ah, but they will argue that they do because they still put CDs into places like Target.

Yeah. Well, let me finish. That's, that's barely on the, on the radar with, with what anybody's paying for, but it seems like the true cost of a label nowadays is an army of lawyers. That's like their biggest cost. Yeah, that, that is a huge cost. And you do need that army of lawyers to go and to go after people like Spotify and Pandora and, and those sorts of things and try to, try to keep them in line.

Unfortunately for you as an artist, those lawyers also do their best to keep the money out of your pocket. And they also, you know, for a very long time, we're spending their time going after 14 year olds who downloaded a few songs from Napster and, you know, suing their fans.

That was, that was a big lawyer cost right there. I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, it's all a mess. The, the reality is that, you know, the label system has not kept up with, with how things work in the modern age. A lot of the services that they are charging the artists for are totally unnecessary or they don't even do, or they certainly don't do as well as the artists themselves can do.

IE marketing, um, it's, it's all got to change. Yeah. 20 years, there will be no labels. I disagree. You think, you think they'll still be around? I, I, yes, I think they will still be around because at the end of the day, the label is still, it's still the filter. It's still the, uh, it's still a way to basically, it's a, it's a verification.

It's like your Twitter account has been verified. That's what a label does a label. When a label is signed you, it's basically, you've been vetted and you are better than the 35 other bar bands that played that night. I, that, that's what I, that's the value that I see from a label moving forward.

And I think that somebody, okay, as some point as the old guard dies off and you don't need somebody that's making $500 million a year at the head of a label, there's some intern that's working over universal music right now that's working his way up and taking some business management courses on the side and whatever that's going to go.

Hey, this whole thing is ass backwards. I'm going to go start a new, I'm going to start a label 2.0 that does things right. That makes enough money for us to make a living that pays the artists well, and we'll have the connections to get them, you know, to do all the things that one needs to do. And, uh, we're going to see labels kind of spared down and back the way they were before all the cocaine.

Okay. So just a quick rebuttal, the, in the old days when distribution was limited, you did need those gatekeepers. You needed somebody to go through and find it because there was a limited amount of supply that you could put out there because there was a lot of vinyl, a lot of plastic. And nowadays with the internet, you don't have that, you know, that need for somebody to be the gatekeeper.

The fans are the gatekeeper because they're the ones that are going to find the music that they like and follow it. And that's why I think that there is going to be no labels in the future because it's going, all the artists are just going to say, why am I paying you to do this? What is, what is the value add for me to give you most of my money to get me out there?

There's so many other things involved, including recording studios, including songwriting, including getting hooked up with people, uh, touring, booking. There are a million things that the labels still do. And there, I still see a place for the labels. I know you can say it's just a democracy out there and whoever gets the most YouTube views wins, but I, there's too many other things going on.

There are too many manufactured things, even at that level. That's why we're starting to see basically labels for YouTube stars because it can get pushed further and it, we can manufacture stars still, and that's going to keep happening. And that's not by the way, necessarily a bad thing without a major label.

There would have been no Nirvana that they were just as manufactured. The music was real, but they were manufactured and they were built up and it was a team of people working to make sure that they got the massive exposure and that's going to still happen. It may be a democracy out there, but that just means again, like I said, there are 10 gazillion shitty bands and five good ones.

Yeah, we can help push the five good ones up. Yeah. We can go on for this about, about this for hours. So let's just, let's move on from, from the music. I agree. Uh, one of the things that I was really interested in, I find, I found something online. It's the net worth percentile rank calculator. This came out of many sitting around at the bar with, with friends and we all know nobody really likes to talk about money, but I started to get in my head, how do I have any idea how well I'm actually doing financially against everyone?

Like where am I at? I mean, obviously I'm not in the 1%. If I was, I wouldn't be doing this fucking podcast. I'm sitting on an Island. Um, but I wanted to know, and I Googled a bit and found this great calculator, which is really interesting. You can put in basically your income and, and your age or an age range and compare where you're at in terms of percentile ranks with basically all Americans.

Okay. Well, since my net worth is negative, uh, I don't even really need to plug anything in here. Yeah. Well, for those of you who had those concerns, such as I did, it's, it's interesting and it seems to be relatively accurate. So, uh, yeah. And then the immediate discussion I had with buddies at the bar again is if we're so fucking high up in this percentile rank, how come we feel like we're still broke?

And then we went, oh yes, we live in Los Angeles. That's right. That is right. You can make a gazillion dollars there and still not have a pot to piss in. Yeah. All righty LA. But on the plus side, it is 85 degrees today. Yeah. Um, so you wanted me to start going after other people who stole my photos.

Well, your wish is granted. I found some of my wrestling photos on a Wikia site, which is, you know, you can go and start up your own Wikia sites run by the Wikipedia foundation or Wikimedia. I am trying to get them to take down a few photos and I went through trying to find the people.

They have no formal process. So what I actually have to do is send them a DMCA takedown notice for each image. Hold on a second. You, you, you mean an online company has no process or way to actually contact them when there's an issue? Oh, I contacted them, but they said, yeah, we don't have, we don't have a formal process for copyright infringement claims.

Really? Yeah. None whatsoever. And especially on a site as big as Wikia, where it is their community sites where people post stuff all the time. So yeah, uh, they, the terms and conditions for the user say, yep, you're responsible for it. But now I have to send a DMCA takedown notice to Wikia for the images, which is a giant pain in the ass.

I mean, as, as much as Facebook is, you know, this colossal monolith, which you can barely get through. When I sent them my photos that were stolen, they handled it within 48 hours and they were gone. They were completely scrubbed from Facebook. Right. And now these guys who have been around longer want me to sit there and like, you know, fax them something.

What the hell? Yeah. I'm looking through the terms of use and everything right now. And it is, it basically says, don't put up anything that's third party and submitting content to the site and copyrights, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. What a pain in the ass. And you go to that. Yeah. You go to any Wikia community site and it's all stuff they don't own.

Of course. Yeah. Again, I'm still, I can't figure out for the life of me how Pinterest remains in business. Yeah. We'll talk about them in a little bit. We got a news story about them. All right. Moving on. Moving on.

Comment of the week. We have got a crap ton of comments this week, Jason. A metric poop ton. Our first is from our Budaphy buddy, Rohan. Thanks, Jason and Brian, for all your support for Budaphy right from the beginning. We hit a major milestone this week in that our users all together have meditated for 10 million minutes in just over a year, which is all a bit overwhelming for an app that just started as a weekend project made from spare change.

Special thanks to Jason, who gave some great advice on pricing and treating our users right with the upshot that we've had a great start to the year, even when raising the price to $4.99. We're not quite at the level where I can retire and move into a gold house or apparently hire us on as consultants, right? Indeed.

But it does mean we have the resources to make some new next-gen mindfulness products for this year. I'm also writing a book, but that is only so I can make it into your At the Library segment, which is my favorite bit of the show. Oh, well, thank you very much, man. And yeah, Jason and I both use it. I still do.

Great product. Yeah, definitely. I am sad to say that this week there is no At the Library segment, so please finish writing your book and we'll put it in. That's true. I did finish a book, but I just finished it last night and didn't have enough time to get it in there, so next week. Okay, and there will be a link to Bootify in the show notes.

So our next comment of the week, well, we should call this comments of the week, or maybe feedback. Well, for a while we were only getting one. Now they're coming in fast and furious. Yeah, we've got a ton. So this comes from Jesmyn. I believe that's how you pronounce it. This comes from iTunes. It says, good stuff here.

Five stars. What went wrong on the internet and who's to blame? Fabulous summary. This is a great podcast for keeping up with the tech world. These guys are funny and honest and listening to what they share will help you hone in on what's important and with different parts of the tech sector. These guys follow lots of news sources and share what's hot and what's relevant.

I highly recommend this podcast. It's one of my favorites and it really does help me keep up with what's going on in the world. Thank you, Jesmyn. Very, very much. Thank you very much and, as always, the five-star ratings on iTunes are very much appreciated because supposedly that matters. It does matter, but you know what matters more?

Telling a friend. Exactly. Our next comment is from Dan Schultz and came in via Facebook. Hi there. Love your podcast. Have started from the beginning and am now on episode 21. Oh boy, you're in the drunk podcasts. Oh yeah. I'm a 60-year-old web designer, retired, I'm jealous, who enjoys listening to you kids dish the dirt.

Your guests are a real nice touch too. Keep it up. Thanks. Well, thank you very much, Dan. Thank you very, very much. And now we move on from the comments to the questions because we do have a question form that you can fill out on Grumpy Old Geeks where we will answer your questions. This first question comes from, well, this is kind of a question slash comment.

Yeah. So I'm not going to use the quiment thing that Nerdist does because I really hate when they do that. So yeah, this comes from friend of the show, Mike Tamal. Gents, unfortunately, on one of my assignments for the class I'm taking on digital media and society is to, quote, demonstrate how digital media has been used to influence or has changed core business processes within organizations or for individuals, end quote.

For this assignment, I would like to provide a rather negative story about how use of digital media has absolutely wrecked a company. Obviously, the Sony hack is the first thing that comes to mind, but it's a can of worms that everyone else will have their dick in. Ew. Ew. I am hoping that you gents can toss a story or incident my way that is epic.

Never mind. I just remembered episodes one through 95 and I will be doing my report on the music industry. Thanks, Brian. By the way, keep up the good work. I've listened to a few other podcasts and you guys have an awesome setup going. There were hardly any audio issues in the past 95 episodes. I don't know about that.

And it continues to sound top notch. You can really hear all the hard work that Jason has put into tightening down your mixing setup. I also like having Bob's voice back, Mike. Well, thanks, Mike. Yeah, of course you could use the music industry. I mean, really any creative industry where digital distribution has loosened up the chains and piracy has stuck itself in there and, you know, pick the book industry, the movie industry, journalism, network broadcasting, any industry that relies on advertising, the advertising industry itself.

They're all fucked. Take your pick. Okay, Brian's totally right on all counts there. I'd just be careful about going too broad since the assignment was for an organization or individual and not an entire industry. That said, Zoe Keating has nailed it down for an individual in the music biz, but you could also do Jonathan Colton if you don't want to go negative and still stay in the space.

Or, I mean, it just comes to mind right now. Look at what just happened to Brian Williams. Well, he probably never would have been caught out before the internet. I mean, that's what enabled it to happen. Yeah. Yeah. So there's one too. What about Dan Rather? Yeah. All these people. Look, you got no lack of stuff to pick from.

And my only thought, as I didn't actually think about this last night when I first read your comment, but when Jason was reading it, is why choose to go negative? There's enough negative stuff out there, man. Pick something good. Yeah. Get off our lawn, man. We're the negative ones. Yeah. We do that. Do something uplifting.

Find some YouTube kid that turned into a, or find that who that chick is that just opens up Disney boxes and makes $5 million a year. Yeah. Or that kid from Target who's now a superstar. Is it really? I don't know. He's trying to be. Anyway, Mike also includes some links to a bunch of starter drones and quadcopters and stuff.

We'll put those in the show notes. And thanks for those. Yeah. Thank you very much. And we still had yet another one. This came in through grumpyoldgeeks.com from Grim Harrison. Sounds like he should be on our podcast. Grim. The grumpy old Grims. Good sir, Grumps. The last few episodes have broadcast an unusually high level of Prius hate.

Just the last few? Yeah. That can't possibly be right. I think we've been doing it since day one. I suppose normally this would pass unnoticed by your humble fan, but coincidentally, I've taken it upon myself to acquire a Prius. I wasn't really socially conscious of the general disdain people have for a Prius.

As an engineer, I rarely interact with human beings. Okay. There we go. My time being primarily spent debating and fraternizing with electricity and computers of various types. None of whom ever offered an opinion about the Prius or those who drive a Prius. I conducted a rudimentary cost analysis and present value of many different new vehicles of like fuel economy.

I'm going to skip all this, but basically it comes down to the point that the Prius totally makes sense financially and many other reasons against all different types of cars, consumer reports. You really got into this, my friend. So you definitely should be on this podcast. So the Prius slightly edged out the Camry Hybrid, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So why all the Prius hate? I think it's more than just you. On the road, I have noticed a very significant increase in hostility from other cars and drivers. I am generally a fast driver who goes over the speed limit by a lot, and typically I am never tailgated or passed. I go the same speeds now as then and have not changed my driving habits in any way, but I've noticed in city driving, I am cut off, tailgated, honked, and yelled at for being slow, even though I'm not being slow, and passed.

What's going on here? I made a choice in economics. Why am I being targeted by so much hate? Keep up the great show. I'm very glad I found you guys. Best regards, Grimm. Well, you didn't say what city you live in, but I have to agree with you. There is a lot of Prius hate out there. It makes a lot of sense in the city that I live in, and judging from my Facebook friends who live in other cities, yeah, same thing everywhere.

The reason there's so much Prius hate, because nine times out of ten when I see someone doing a jackass move driving, it's a fucking Prius. Because nine times out of ten when I'm legally crossing a street and nearly get run over, it's a fucking Prius. Because the Venice Whole Foods parking lot is the most dangerous place in the entire world, and it's 90% full of fucking Priuses, or whatever the plural is for those wonderful machines, granted, driven by raging egomaniacs.

It's a certain type of person that gets a Prius. I'm not saying all. There are always people, you know, there's always outliers, and you seem to be one of them. But in general, especially here in Santa Monica, the Prius attracts a certain type of owner, and they are assholes. Okay. End of rant. End of rant.

Now, I'm going to put a little counterpoint on that. For years, I've had a hate-hate relationship with pickup trucks. Not the drivers, per se, but the machine itself. I spent summers in Texas and saw that whenever anyone, I mean anyone, from grandma to the big, tough cowboy dude, when they got behind the wheel, they immediately turned into a road-hogging douchebag, and they didn't give a damn about anybody else, period.

It wasn't the driver, but it was the truck. It kind of had this Jekyll and Hyde moment. I've driven a Prius before and found it to be one of the worst cars I've ever had the misfortune of getting behind the wheel on. So my theory is this. Prius drivers are so pissed off about being duped into buying that ugly-ass, overpriced piece of hippie shit that they just want to take it out on everyone else by being the biggest assholes that they can possibly be.

All right. Well, you have two interesting perspectives on why the Prius sucks. I hope that helps. I'm sure that's not the answer you were looking for, but that's what it's, that's what it boils down to. Yeah, yeah, I totally, I agree. And like I said, I don't know where you live, but definitely if you, if you come, just bring your Prius down here to Santa Monica, drive it around for a while, and I'd be certainly be one of the people chasing you out of town with the pitchforks.

In the news. Brian, before you, uh, mentioned on a previous show about how much you, uh, love when the president, you know, gets down and does some silly videos. I wouldn't say I love it, but, uh, I'm okay with it.

I thought you hated it. What's it, what's going on? Have you changed your mind again? It's not presidential. I, but all I do is whine about things that I can't change and I have to just accept and move on with. So I'm trying to have a Buddha-fi moment here. Okay. So look, ever since Clinton went on Arsenio and blew the sacks and asked, answered a question about what underwear he was wearing, all this shit went out the window.

That's true. That's true. God damn it, Clinton. So yeah, Buzzfeed had a, had a video with the president this week. Wasn't very funny. Wasn't very good. Um, and it was on Buzzfeed. Now the, the reason I bring this up, I thought you were going to have a pretty good rant about it, but I guess not. So I'm going to, I'll take the, I'll take the reins here.

Look, I would have a rant about it, but I'm, I'm quite enjoying the animated gifs on, on the Buzzfeed page. Okay. Uh, and, uh, we've talked about save you a click the, the, the Twitter account. Yeah. They had a great followup today because Buzzfeed posted a link to one of their articles to, uh, say, uh, how to actually clean your penis.

That was a Buzzfeed link. And so saved you a click just says, yeah, these guys interviewed Obama with a link to it. That, that pretty much sums up the state of the, of the whole thing. Uh, yeah. Uh, Michael, uh, journalism, you might want to go with journalism. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mike, that's definitely pick that one for your, for your report. I'm just saying. Yeah. No, I mean, I could rant about it, but who cares? The battle is lost, man. The battle is lost. So yeah, Obama is pulling funny faces and drawing sketches of Michelle Obama on Buzzfeed, which then is followed up immediately with an article about how to clean your penis.

At least Obamacare is getting involved somehow. You know, if they'd have gone with how to clean your selfie stick, that would, well, that's what I'm saying. They could have at least, you know, tied the two together somehow since Obama did play with his selfie stick. Yes. Oh, wow. And other news.

Facebook is rolling out yet another feature. This one's a little bit creepy. Uh, dying on Facebook just got a little less awkward. Apparently they, and I've dealt with this. I have a few friends that have passed away that still have their Facebook accounts are open and it kind of, it's kind of nice almost in a way because every year when there would have been birthday rolls around, a bunch of people will post on the wall and it's a nice way to remember someone.

But now Facebook is trying to basically make sure that you stay on Facebook literally forever by transforming your account when you pass away to a legacy account. And they're even letting you set up someone as a legacy contact who can then be basically the manager of your personal page in perpetuity.

Yeah. I mean, there's two sides to it. You can have them delete your account completely, which is what I've done. I am not an, I am not a data donor to Facebook. They don't get to keep my data after I'm dead. You know, I'm an organ donor, but not a data donor. Right. Now the person that can take over your account can only do a few things.

They can like pin a notice and approve new friend requests, which is like, what? Yeah. How are you making new friends? I don't get that one. Yeah. The fact that if people like you more when you're dead than they do when you're alive, you're in a pickle, you're in definitely a pickle there and probably don't even want to know about it.

But this is the interesting thing about this is yesterday I was going through this, trying to figure out a way to notify Facebook when somebody dies. Cause I wanted to see, I wanted to see what the notification systems were, if it's something that could be social engineered. So you can come in one day and you're dead.

And I, there's really nothing in the system where it says how to actually notify them. It says, once someone lets us know you've passed away, no one will be able to see your profile again. If you permanently remove it from Facebook. Yeah. There's an interesting aspect to this is how does Facebook know when you've died that you can obviously can't notify them personally.

One of the last things I'm going to do on my deathbed is, is make sure that I write, you know, contact Facebook support to let them know, you know, in about 20 minutes, I'm going to be dead. Okay. Yeah. Well, it reminds me of those, uh, mesothelioma commercials. There's like, have you or someone, you know, died from mesothelioma? It's like, no, no.

Well, I have, I have not died from it, but, uh, if I do, I'll be sure to call you when I'm done. Hey, that's what happens when you crowdsource your copy. Uh, speaking of death though, uh, Ibo remember Ibo. The, the Sony robot dog. I do. I totally wanted one when they first came out. I really wanted one.

I knew somebody, I thought it was Phil Taron, uh, had like a, an army of Ibo's, but I could be misremembering that. Um, yeah, I always wanted one. Then they stopped selling them, but now Sony is, uh, stopping the support. Oh yeah. Poor Ibo is, uh, going out to that great robot pasture in the sky.

I wonder if they have a Facebook page. Can it be set the legacy status? This was making the rounds. Apparently the kill switch initiative for cell phones has actually worked and, um, cell phone thefts are down like greatly. Which that's awesome.

That's great. Yeah. Something actually worked, you know, it's like, oh, let's regulate this and, uh, hopefully it will stop the, the rash of cell phone thefts. And it seems to be working. That's great. And guess who, uh, guess who forced that legislation? California. The mighty state of California.

So thank you rest of the world. Yeah. Well, yeah. Where I have to go and buy a grocery bag every time I want a can of beans. Yeah. Screw you. No, this is a great thing. I mean, I remember when it was like, there was news reports about how you shouldn't wear Apple's white headphones and you should get a different pair because then people will know you have an iPhone and they're going to phone jack you.

But, uh, yeah, that's all gone now. So yeah, now my phone will not be stolen. So I can tweet when I have to pay for a bag at Trader Joe's. That's, that's the, that's the trade-off that I've got now. Yeah. That's good stuff. Uh, I see you posted an article. That's a follow-up on the whole Waze controversy with the pop, with the cops getting all pissed off because people were able to report where they were.

Yeah. Apparently the Miami cops are just in mass reporting where cops are not and trying to outsmart the system. Sweet. Why not? Hey, if one side is going to game the system, the other side, fair play. It is fair play, but hopefully let's find out if these Waze algorithms actually are worth their salt and can start finding, you know, false reports and then flagging those users as untrustworthy users because, you know, they are untrustworthy and what they post doesn't actually exist.

So if enough people go by these cop spots, there are no cops there. They're going to develop a pattern and then the cops will probably get booted off Waze or, you know, I think they just need to put a little, you know, police icon with a question mark on all of them. Maybe, maybe not. And check the general, uh, relative, relative position to a donut shop.

And, you know, you can get a pretty good idea if there is actually a cop there based on location and situational awareness there. Very funny. Yeah. We'll have to develop a donut based algorithm. Mmm, donuts. Donuts. Now, remember Justine Sacco? I did not until, uh, until the news broke again.

Yeah. She was the, the idiot PR girl who went to Africa and wasn't going to get AIDS because she was white. And then her life was turned upside down and basically ruined. Yeah. So there's a New York times article written by John Ronson, who is, uh, written a couple of books that I've read.

The psychopath test was pretty good. Uh, the men who stare at goats, which was turned into, I thought a pretty good movie. And he's got a new book called, so you've been publicly shamed coming out. So this is basically an advertorial type of thing. Yeah. And it's called a how one stupid tweet blew up Justine Sacco's life.

And it goes through her story, but also a couple other people's stories on how their lives were ruined because they did something stupid once on the internet. Uh, yeah, I mean, there's no doubt. I mean, we talked about, about her at the time that it was, it was, you know, some of this stuff was definite inside voice stuff.

And if you're, if you're even slightly connecting your Twitter account to your work, or if you're, you know, doing PR, or if you're in any kind of social media industry, you can't do that sort of thing. On the other hand, you know, if somebody got access to my Facebook feed, I'd be dead.

No, you'd be screwed. But people who know me know that this is all jokes. It's all tongue in cheek. It's all just funny. Um, and that's what she was trying to do. She just doesn't have a very good sense of humor and yeah, it totally destroyed her life as far as I can tell. So.

Absolutely. Um, but you know, Valleywag played a pretty, you know, major role in, in actually exposing it. And I fuck Valleywag. I hate those guys more than anything. They are, they are a bunch of soulless douchebags. They, I've been running to my boss's office because of they, they wrote articles on me.

You know, I don't, I don't like those guys at all. And, uh, yeah, when I hear Valleywag, I think die in a fire. So, well, there you go. Anyway, really good, really good article though. I recommend reading the article. Yeah. And I actually, I do want to check out the book when he writes about it, because this is so our culture right now.

It is, it is, people just leap on anything that you do that there's no context given. There's no, there's no even attempted at trying to understand or have any empathy with somebody who does something like this is she didn't do anything terribly horrible and she paid the highest price for it.

Yeah. Bring out your digital pitchforks. And, you know, listen, this is one of the reasons I stopped listening to Adam Carolla because he was, he was so on the, the let's get back to public shaming thing. Well, when taken to its logical context with the, you know, the rise of the internet, that, this is what happens.

Everybody gets their digital pitchforks out and you're screwed. Yeah. I mean, I don't think he, there is a middle ground there, but I can see how that would be upsetting. Yeah. Now we were talking about Pinterest before. Well, apparently they've joined forces with Apple and now you can pin apps and you can buy them from Pinterest.

Who cares? Who cares? So that's, that's what, who cares? App pins, whatever. Yeah. Cause you know, it's mostly, mostly women who are using Pinterest. Let's be honest about that. And they're looking at wedding dresses and, uh, wreaths and crafts and clothes and shoes and all that stuff.

Not apps. Completely missing the mark with their audience here. Well, it makes sense for Apple. It's just another way to have their apps easily promoted out there. And app developers, I'm sure are happy about this as well. But making the news, is this actually a story? Who cares? Yeah. Well, you know what?

Their stock has gone up quite a bit in the past couple of days. So if this is what's doing it, all right, I'm on board. Come on, Pinterest and Apple, go make babies. I'm very happy with my Apple stock. Security? Ha!

Happy Safer Internet Day, Brian. Oh God. It's another one of those things. I'm sick of Internet Days, whatever kind of day they are. On February 10th, more than 100 countries around the globe are celebrating Safer Internet Day, a day-long effort to raise awareness for smarter and safer Internet use.

Uh, why do they still do this stuff? I don't know. Listen, listen, Internet. I'm sick of it. I'm done with it. And by the way, we don't need to raise awareness about anything anymore. We actually need to fix problems, not raise awareness about problems. We're all aware. We're aware of breast cancer.

We're aware the Internet isn't a safe place. We're aware of a lot of things. How about we fix them instead of just raise awareness? Okay. Now, since awareness has been raised, I honestly, they should have just played this video that I found from Hope X called You've Lost Privacy, Now They're Taking Anonymity by Stephen Rombaum, one of my favorite people in the world.

Have you heard of Steve before? I have not, but I did love the video. He has an awesome show on the ID network called Nowhere to Hide, where they take a couple of his cases and make a TV show out of them. They're fantastic. They're hard to find. I just actually bought them on Amazon Prime for 10 bucks.

You can get the whole season because I just wanted to have them. And I'm also theoretically interviewing him tomorrow, so I needed to get my ducks in a row. But this is one of the best videos on how everything that we've talked about on this show, he does it in a much scarier version with backup and has an interesting take.

He's like, you know, I wouldn't be upset that the NSA is taking your stuff because they kind of have a purpose to do it, I'd be pissed off at Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, everybody else more than the NSA. It's the non-government organizations that are collecting our data that I worry about.

The government can do whatever they want. They're going to anyways. Well, here's the thing. Since most of their data collection has been outsourced now, that's how they get around it. They buy data from Google, Yahoo, Apple, because then it's just, it's business records and they can just go in and buy the business records instead of having to go get taps on your phone or tap your internet traffic, even though they're doing that anyway.

But still, it's a, it's, it is, you know, one of the best, I think it's two hours and 40 minutes. It'll, it'll scare the crap out of you. But even at the end in the question and answer, he's like, is it really worth going to all these, you know, lengths to stop people like with facial recognition and gait recognition and all this stuff?

He's like, there comes a point where you just kind of got to live with it. And if it really bothers you work on changing the law. Yeah. You got to, yeah. Play through the channels. That's why they're there. Yeah. There are privacy laws and they should be, there should be stricter privacy laws. And many, many people are pushing for it.

I guess we'll have to raise awareness about that. See, yeah, that, that, you know, safer internet day. That's what it's all about. Even though we've talking, been talking about this stuff for almost two years now, and nobody's taken any of our advice on, I think maybe three people have gotten one password since we started this, even though we've been saying it for how many weeks, but.

Oh, I know. And I still get asked, like, what's the name of that thing that you use for your passwords? I know. Jesus, how do you not have this? So speaking of the government, they're doing a new thing. They've got a new agency to sniff out threats in cyberspace. Another one. What's it called?

Oh God, I forget. Damn. It doesn't have like a nifty little acronym like SNF. The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. Oh, that's not snappy at all. C-T-I-I-C-T. Ugh. Z-ticket. Z-ticket? You're going to get z-ticket.

What? Yeah. Why do we need another one? Isn't that what prison is doing and the Homeland Security and the FBI and the – they're all doing it. Well, that's the whole point of this one is what they're saying is that it's supposed to be a coordinational type of outfit where they take all the info from all of the different people who are taking all the data from us and then putting it all together and coming up with better threat analysis.

Okay. Well, I'm down with that. I'm fine with it. Well, it's going to cost you more tax money even though – Well, I know. The theory behind this I think should be then now that we have this organization, we can eliminate that department in the other five different organizations that we have doing it and just have the one organization and therefore save money.

But of course, the world never works that way. Right. And the whole point of the Department of Homeland Security was to be that clearinghouse 10 years ago and it never happened. So now we have another one. Now, this is an interesting – Melissa Hathaway, a former White House cybersecurity coordinator, said this.

He's like, we should not be creating more organizations in bureaucracy. We need to be forcing the existing organizations to become more effective. Hold them accountable. Yep. Yes. I agree with that. Me too. There's an interesting Senate report that came out. This is from Wired.

It says, Senate report slams automakers for leaving cars vulnerable to hackers. And BMW has been releasing over-the-air patches. Everybody's releasing patches now because cars are so unbelievably insecure. Nobody ever thought about this when they were putting all this crap in the cars. It's like, oh, let's put a bunch of computers in the car, make them wirelessly accessible or just key plug accessible, however many different ways you can get to it, and kind of do security as an afterthought in considering this is a, you know, two-ton piece of moving steel.

Yeah, let's, you know, let's have less security than the little Wi-Fi router in your house. Makes no sense. No, and it's pretty bad because a smart hacker, I guess, apparently can basically slam on your brakes, play around with the steering. That's some scary shit.

Well, yeah. Now that these cars are so technologically advanced, you know, they can steer for you. They'll park for you. They'll pull you out of the lane if you're trying to change lanes, and they sense that there's somebody in your blind spot, these things, and plus, especially when they become self-driving, you know, then you can just take over a whole fleet of them, and then we're back to that Daniel Suarez books with the crazy drones and the self-driving cars, and, you know, so we'll see how that all plays out and see if these guys can get their security together.

So, yeah, if you want to go into the security business, go into the automotive security business right now. I think there's going to be a lot of job openings in that coming up. Fun. And DARPA is now developing a search engine for the dark web. Ooh. Yep, just what we need. What are they going to call it?

Oogle for child porn? Memex. Droogle for drugs? No, just Memex. Memex? That's a horrible name. Nah, it's kind of sci-fi-y. I like it. I guess. I don't know. It makes me feel like Memorex, and I'm back in the late 80s watching some guy put a tape in his thing and having his hair blown back. Which, by the way, in the UK, that was Peter Murphy from Bauhaus who was in those ads.

Really? A little real fact. Mm-hmm. I did not know that. How about that? Learn something useless every day. Yeah, so these guys were in 60 Minutes. They did a demo. There's a Wired article that we'll link to in the show notes. Check it out. But it's interesting that they're, you know, trying to—this goes back to the Rombaum thing.

Anonymity is dead. You cannot be anonymous at all anymore. And I know. I know. You and I started with that argument with this very podcast, like, way back in episode one. You were the one that was pissed off about it, and I was the one that said, fuck it. You're not going to be able to stop it. And if you're not doing anything bad, don't worry about it.

Well, you should still worry about it because, you know, they can come back and get you for things that you've done that weren't, you know, weren't specifically illegal at the time. But then they can retrace the bullets, backtrace everything, the bullet points, and then come up with a crime that if they don't like you, they can come get you.

Yes. Big data does cause that problem. If anybody has it out for you and has enough power, you are dead. Yeah. We're going to run through the rest of these real quick because we got—the White House is building brain-based lie detectors. This is very, very, very, very bad. I don't understand why people chase after this because doesn't anybody understand that white lies are the grease that makes society bearable?

Uh-huh. So, yeah, let's just—guys, just—no, no, we're going to figure it out. I do not want my friends to know that the reason I didn't go out last night was because I didn't want to, not because I was working late like I said. Yeah. No. This is going to bring a whole new field of radical honesty that nobody is going to be happy about.

No, it'll destroy society. Moving on. Anonymous actually found some teeth and balls after all and have been taking down dozens of terrorists, social media accounts, and websites and stuff. Go Anonymous. Now, this one is just stupid. A security researcher published 10 million passwords and usernames because he thought he was going to get raided by the FBI for having all this stuff.

So he made it public, even though the data was already public if you knew where to get it. So he's in a really, really gray area here. I can't find any follow-up about what happened to this guy since he's published it. I'm still looking. But, you know, either he's hiding out in the hills of West Virginia or in an orange suit headed to Gitmo right now.

Hmm. Yep. And two sites that I found because of this, it's not a breach, it's, you know, an announcement or whatever. A release. I'm sorry. A release. A site called Have I Been Pwned and Pwned List. And you put in your accounts and see if they have any of your information on any of these lists that they've been collecting from all these breaches.

And sadly, I didn't have anything on Have I Been Pwned, but on Pwned List, I got hit. I got a couple things that showed up and I have been hacked from somebody's account. I don't know if it was the WordPress hack or the Blizzard hack.

One of them, but they were, I know they were hashed passwords, so. I've been pwned by, it was through Adobe. So I guess I need to go in and change that password. Well, hopefully you've had them all changed anyway. For most of those, those big breaches, they changed them automatically for us.

Ah, there you go. So I'm okay. I'm okay, you're okay. One way in which I am not okay is I recently bought a big Samsung Smart TV. And of course, this made the rounds absolutely everywhere because of a little tiny, itty-bitty little thing in their terms of service that said basically they have to record, obviously, just like Siri, if you're using voice commands, they have to record them and send them somewhere and blah, blah, blah, and speaking.

But there was a little bit in their terms of service that said they share that data with third parties and they don't specify what third parties. So that is a little bit fucked up. And, you know, from not being the reactionary guy for once here, they have to put that in there because I bet they outsource the voice transcription to a third-party service like the company that runs Siri.

Yes, I'm sure they do as well. So this became just a big story because we needed a big story. I have a simple solution to this, which I have implemented myself. I think voice recognition and talking to my TV is stupid anyways because I have this thing called a remote that I've been using for 20 years that works just fine.

I disabled it on my install. I don't use it. Done. Yeah, I'm terrified of the day where I cannot go to the store and buy a TV that doesn't have a camera in it. Mine does not have a candy either, rather convenient, or a camera. I don't know why I just said candy. I think I saw a candy crush thing scroll by.

No camera on mine and I disabled the voice recognition. Now, I know we've raised a whole generation of people that are used to talking to their stuff, but I just feel silly when I do that. I don't want to. Remotes work just fine for me. Yeah, if you want voice recognition to change the channel on your TV, have children. Yeah. That's it. Kid, change channel.

Volume up, volume down. Like you and I were when we were kids and we didn't have actual remotes. I know, I was the damn remote. Exactly. My grandfather was like, hey, John Wayne, channel seven, go. And I have to get up and walk up. And he's like, louder. I'd have to get up and go. Last story of the day in security.

This one, hat tip to MXV for this one. Some guy figured out how to delete every photo on Facebook. This comes from Gizmodo and a guy with four lines of code pretty much figured out how to delete every photo album on Facebook. I should have done it, man. See, that was the funny part in the comments on this.

Everybody's like, man, why did you why'd you turn this one in? I would have paid you for this service. That would have been great. I mean, talk about an uproar. People called 911 when Facebook went down. Can you imagine? Oh, I'm sure it would have been a hassle for Facebook because they do have backups and things like that.

But still, yeah, because once you put it on Facebook, it never goes away. But my problem with the story is the title is some guy figured out how to delete every photo when they could have said security researcher figured it out or white hat hacker or maybe even just use his name.

Why did they say some guy figured out how to delete every photo on Facebook? Journalism.

Media candy. I'm very happy to state that John Oliver is back. He is absolutely my favorite fake news guy out there these days. It's sad to say goodbye to John Stewart, but I literally haven't watched The Daily Show in probably two or three years. I'm all about John Oliver.

He came back and he came back with a vengeance. And there's a link in the show notes to his 16 or 19, I can't remember exactly how long, minute rant about our pharmaceutical industry and doctors. And it is genius. And welcome back, sir. It is great to have him back.

That was a great episode. It's, yeah, he was missed. Yes, definitely. So I saw Citizen Four. How was it? It was amazing. Okay. It was absolutely amazing. It has footage from the beginning of the whole Snowden thing up until when he's in Russia.

But just seeing the story unfold with all the video from all the stories that you've ever seen and, you know, seen clips of and all that, it was awesome. Absolutely awesome. They won the BAFTA for the best documentary and they're nominated for an Oscar, which I think they're most likely going to win. I hope so.

I mean, I haven't seen it. I definitely have to watch it, but it's been on my list. Yeah, as soon as you can find somebody with a screener, or I think it's coming out on Showtime very soon. Rather conveniently, I live in Los Angeles and screeners float around like creuses. Exactly. That's how I got to see the movie.

And I wish it was in the regular Cineplex so I could just go down and pay for it. But I'm sure it's in the Swedish cinema. I think you might be able to find it in the Swedish cinema. I looked before and I couldn't find it, but, you know, who knows? Yeah, who knows? And I saw a Radiolab story called The Trust Engineers.

This was about the Facebook experimentation scandals. It's a, you know, a fairly short podcast, maybe an hour with whatever the Radiolab shows normally are. I thought it was a really good look at the behind the scenes of what those guys do. And the interview starts before the, you know, the big debacle happened with that coming out that they were, you know, using us like rats in the lab.

Yeah. And it's got before and after. And the thing that just came out of it that, you know, we've talked about and always said it was happening. They confirmed it. At least 10 to 15 experiments are being run on any person at any given time on Facebook. Yeah, it's a little freaky to hear about.

I listened. It took me two lessons to get through the podcast because I kind of fell asleep the first time. But once I got past that hump, the last half of it, I really enjoyed. Some of it is creepy and bad. The rest of it is what I would say a smart company would be doing.

I loved the story about the whole system for reporting photos. That made so much sense to me about how they basically, you know, they had the thing and they were getting so many false reports and incorrect reports. So they started monkeying around with the reporting system using basically, you know, societal engineering to find on something that actually worked and decreased their workload and got more accurate information.

I have no problem with them doing that. That makes sense and a smart company should be doing it. Yeah, that makes sense. It gets creepy when they're trying to actually make you do things like go vote and making you feel sad or happy. I think that podcast, coupled with the Rambam talk, are must listens for our Grumpy Old Geeks audience this week.

I agree. I agree completely. It was really interesting. And, you know, yeah, there's some creepy things that they're doing, but there's some good things that they're doing. And I wouldn't mind if Facebook figured out some little algorithm and tweet a little bit so that I was happier looking at it all day, to be honest. Yeah, that's true.

As soon as they get you with that in the Oculus Rift and they'll plug you in and then it'll be just like WALL-E. Woo-hoo. There was another great podcast, one of my favorites, You Are Not So Smart podcast. They dig into the science of misremembering. Yeah, perfect timing. And I liked how he came back and basically, you know, put a segment at the very beginning about Brian Williams because that's all in the news right now.

Good neuroscience in there. Good stuff. I mean, I've always known that memory is at best a very flawed and personal recreation of what happened. And the worst part is every time you remember something, you're rewriting it. And, you know, if you take it to its logical extreme, it's just, it's kind of depressing the fact that most of the things we remember and that make us up probably never happened or happened in a way that we are completely, you know, tailoring to our own crazy view of the world.

It's, man, I had some issues after I, like just personal issues after I finished reading that because it's, it really is kind of scary. Oh, I mean, it's life, man. You can't, it's the system. It is the way we are. What are you going to do about it?

It is what makes us who we are. And it does make us think that maybe we need to be more empathetic to people that get caught out on things because we do the same shit. In fact, I plan on having some personal follow-up on this particular podcast in a few weeks because I just, a couple of my old friends reached out to me.

We're going to have a bit of a reunion. We're getting the band back together, as it were. And these are, these are guys that I haven't seen in 15 years or so. That's my old crew that I hung around, you know, Disneyland with, and we all looked like we were either in Love and Rockets or The Cure and ran around together. And I guarantee you that the four of us, our memories of shared experiences from back then are going to be vastly different.

And that's one of the reasons I originally got some of my remote podcasting gear is because I'd be hanging out with people and they'd be telling me stories of the crazy fun stuff that we used to do that I almost completely do not remember. I don't remember that. Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is when I was a teenager. I'd never had a sip of booze at that point.

So couldn't really kind of blame it on, on the crazy nights out, but all the skateboarding stuff that we used to do, I barely remember any of it, but I got friends that remember all of it and I wanted to get that stuff on tape. So in the future, I can go back and listen to it and, you know, make, formulate some new memories out of nothing that apparently I was part of.

Ross, Robert, and Mike, don't worry. I will not be taping it because we don't want any of these shenanigans that we'll be recalling recorded. So, but I will get back to you about how different our memories are of these very, you know, formed and very, very beautiful and fun experiences that we had back in the day.

It'll be interesting. Yeah. I was going to, I was thinking about that with mine and I'm like, I could just call, I could put them all into a new podcast and call it statute of limitations because it has run out for pretty much everything we've done. I'm hoping everything we've done. Yeah. But don't forget the internet shaming going on these days. It doesn't matter. Yeah. You could destroy some lives.

Yeah. Fuck the internet. Uh, I actually listened to, I listened to a Freakonomics radio, did a, did a very recent podcast about how safe is your job. And it basically runs through a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about, um, how the job market is completely screwed, how we're all messed up and, and we don't have much of a chance of keeping a career going for very much longer as everything gets outsourced or automized.

It's a really depressing, but very well done and interesting overview of that entire topic. Yeah. What I really liked about this show is it does talk about the rate of disruption in a given industry and how, when the, when the rate of disruption hits a certain tipping point, it gets, it can be really bad.

You know, if there isn't another side, side spinoff from that industry to take up the jobs, like we talked about with cars and hotels and things like that, it was, it's a good listen. Yeah. In the past, when an industry was disrupted, there was a subsidiary industry that would basically take off.

But the problem is now we're not seeing that happen. Industries are being disrupted, but there's no replacement. Yeah. So it's, it's a, another sad read or listen, it's a listen. It's from a couple of weeks ago. It's not one of the newer Freakonomics. I had to go back and find it. End of month or end of last month, I believe.

Yes. And the whoopsie of the week comes from Netflix. Uh, I, I, this somehow, uh, passed me by. They launched house of cards a little bit early, like 10 episodes and whoops, somebody pressed the big red button a little too soon.

Uh, they handled it very well on Twitter. Yes. The, the, the Twitter reply was, this is Washington. There's always a leak. All 13 episodes will launch February 27th. And then I will rebut that with, this is Washington. This is pretty good promotion. Did this really happen? Did anybody we know actually see an episode?

Are there screenshots? I can't find any of that. I found screenshots. Yeah. Okay, good. There we go. Nevermind. They were out there. And apparently if you had started streaming it, they didn't turn it off. So some people have seen the episodes and have, you know, spoilers. So be careful what you look for. You might get it. Okay.

And in, in the final news, uh, ABC is bringing back battle bots. Okay. Did you didn't like battle bots? I thought it was all right. I thought it was fun. But I mean, now this is like 10 years later. Imagine how much like cooler the, the battle bot tech's going to be. Oh yeah. I mean, people are going to be outfitting drones and all that sort of stuff.

It's going to be awesome. Yeah. I'm pretty sure they have to be on the ground, but it'd be cool if they could have, you know, like a, uh, like a little remora drone that will pop off and like peek around and find out whatever you can have some fun stuff with it, but it looks like it'll be cool. They're, they're casting it now. So we'll see if, uh, what's his name from the myth busters, uh, grant, because he used to, he was on the old battle bots.

We'll see if he gets brought back since he's probably unemployed right now. Well, he's doing all those commercials for McDonald's. He runs you through the science and reality, reality of how the chicken nuggets are made and why you should eat them. Even though we all know you shouldn't. How the mighty have fallen. Moron of the week.

Our moron of the week is Kanye West. He's pretty much just a moron in general, but he did, he basically did a followup at the Grammys, uh, akin to when he grabbed the mic from Taylor Swift. He was basically trying to run up and grab the mic from Beck when Beck won album of the year.

Uh, he said at the time, uh, or at the time it was played off as if he was just doing the best joke ever on his own thing because he did stop himself and he went back and sat the held down like he should have. Uh, but then he followed it up with a spectacular rant to E or something like that after about how Beck didn't deserve the Grammy and it's destroying artistry and blah, blah, blah.

Beyonce should get everything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, Shirley Manson nailed it with an open letter. I hate open letters, but this was a good one on Facebook. So Shirley for the win, Shirley Manson, I've had the pleasure of meeting a few times and she is kick-ass and awesome and you should definitely read it. The link is in the show notes.

She puts him in his place spectacularly. Uh, since then Beck and Beyonce mashup has come out. Single loser put a Beck on it. Uh, it's actually, it's funny. It's a good idea and it's timely, but the production values on it are horrible. Uh, link in the show notes as well. And the best meme that has gone around about this is of course the response to hashtag who is Beck.

Um, it's two images. There's one of Beck and then one of Beyonce talking about the two albums that were, uh, nominated. Uh, Beck wrote, produced, and arranged all 13 songs on his last album. Plays 16 instruments is asked by Kanye to give his award to Beyonce. Beyonce plays zero instruments.

Needed 16 songwriters, producers, and composers on her last album. Yeah, Kanye, I see your point about art. Yeah, I love that follow-up. That was great. Yeah, so good stuff. And then, uh, in douchebag of the week, I have part two. I would go with clashdaily.com who have tried, who are trying to use this to get a photo of theirs to go viral.

Kanye West wants this photo removed from the internet. So share it around. And it's a Photoshop photo of Kanye kissing Kanye. Uh, very funny, but I see absolutely nothing online about Kanye West even being aware of this photograph or being upset about it. So don't lie to make something viral.

It's good enough. It stands on its own. Yeah, it was a good Photoshop job, though. I'll give him that. Yeah, it is. Are you kidding me? Love it! Now, we've talked about the TV show bullshit before on this show.

We're both huge fans. Love it. Sad it's gone. Wish it would come back. Now, we also almost had a segment on this show called, uh, is it real or is it the onion? And we ended up cutting it because we couldn't find enough good stories. And sadly, I found the perfect story this week because it's from LAist and it says, we went to a water tasting, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Yeah. And if you remember from the first season of bullshit, they did this exact same thing. I mean, it's almost mind boggling how similar they are, except one's not a joke. There are water sommeliers in LA and we used to just call those guys busboys.

We're like, can we have some more water? Now they're higher paid and I bet they all have Priuses. I wonder if this is just a gag. If honestly, these guys are huge, like Penn and Teller fans and they're like, let's just see if it works. Let's make it real. That's definitely a possibility, but I don't think so because I think this is, uh, this is, this is exactly what happens when people start to have too damn much money.

Or people from UCB are trying to do their, like, you know, their, uh, their master's thesis. Ridiculous. So I've got a self-serving shout out this week. Does It Have Legs? Episode 33.

After almost a year to the day, we went back and we did the sequel to Highlander. Highlander 2, The Quickening. Okay. So if you're a Highlander fan and haven't seen Highlander 2, check it out. Or if you have seen Highlander 2, check it out. Basically, basically, check it out is what I'm saying.

I don't think I ever saw two. I saw one. I don't think I ever saw two. Well, you can get our expert and in-depth analysis on our free podcast episode of Does It Have Legs? Okay. Link will be in the show notes. I will do so. I have no self-serving shout outs whatsoever this week.

In fact, I have no shout outs. There you go. It's been fun. Nah. Good talking to you, Jason, as always. Good talking to you, too. And I will talk to you next week. Next week. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show.

If you'd like to help keep the lights on, you can donate at grumpyoldgeeks.com. $10 or more, we'll get you a copy of our official soundtrack provided by the band Among Us, who you can find on iTunes and Spotify. On social media, you can find us at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks or twitter.com slash gogpodcast.

We really appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews. Just go to grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iTunes and leave us a few words and five stars. We are hosted by Libsyn. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two months free. Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 96.

Ah, poor Ibo. That's where we roll, bitches!

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

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at qvc.com. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel.

Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at bkfsea.com.