98: Live Long & Prosper

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.

Hey Brian, it is a great day for the internet. Isn't it though? The FCC has passed their net neutrality ruling and everything is great. We're going to have competition. It's going to be amazing. The future is so bright. And then Comcast says they're just going to go ahead and sue the shit out of everybody to slow it back down.

Yeah, I saw that one coming. Yeah, that was pretty quick. I mean, it's good. The FCC finally did something smart and it's awesome, but this is going to be years and years of battles and we're still probably going to lose anyways. Corporations are going to do what they're going to do. We're going to fight it. It goes back and forth, but we need the corporations because they're the ones that give us the internet.

But that's what the, you know, the whole opening of the competition space is, but we'll see how it, we'll see how it plays out. Right now, my internet works. I'm okay. Everything's fine. I can go watch House of Cards tonight. Or llamas. Llamas. Fucking llamas.

I see, I'm, this is the one thing that I was so happy with yesterday was I was pretty much offline most of the day because I was, you know, working like some people do. Yeah, but you and I both know what that means for us. We, when we're working, we are actually still online and we see all these things play out.

Well, you do. I don't. I work offline because I need to, I need peace and quiet because I'm writing code and I'm just like, leave me the hell alone. Then I come back and there's llamas and dresses. Yeah. Well, I mean, the one thing that made me happy about the dresses was that the llama story got kicked off. But let's hear your take on all of this. I actually enjoyed it. At first, I was annoyed and I was like, I had the same opinion that everybody else did, which is really, we have, you know, we built the greatest communication system the universe has ever seen and we're using it to talk about a dress.

Yeah, I, that's, that was pretty much it. I'm like, we, we win the internet for the day. And then you basically say, show us why we can't have nice things. Yeah. So that was my first thought. And then I realized, well, hold on a second. All the people that are talking about the dress online, they weren't exactly, you know, solving, finding the cure for cancer on Twitter before they stopped.

And secondly, I actually really ended up enjoying this whole thing playing out. I thought it was interesting. I thought there was real science behind it, which makes it great. You know, I liked this thing. I'm glad it happened. Now today, you know, the day after when all the corporations are trying to, you know, get on this and people are figuring out ways to put in, you know, hashtags for their, for their corporate tweets, that's when it starts to suck.

But yesterday was a spontaneous kind of cool thing that happened and I liked it. It was interesting. It was the, the birth, life and death of a meme inside of 24 hours. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's one of those things where, you know, we don't have these mass movement things that occur anymore.

Even the Oscars, you know, it was way down in terms of viewership and things like that. This was something that spontaneously came up. We're going to start to see, I think a lot of these things, which is, you know, all of a sudden some random weird ass thing is just going to capture everyone's fancy and it will be a group experience, which I think we lack a lot in this culture now.

The group experience engineered by BuzzFeed. Yes, but I'll take it anyways. Was it, was it blue for you or was it white? Here's the funny thing. Well, first I thought, okay, this is an elaborate joke. They're doing, just doing a, they're using their AB testing software. So every time somebody comes to the page, they get one of two pictures.

I'm thinking, okay, this is the, this is a great prank. I love it. And then I saved the picture onto my phone because I looked at it and the first, for me, it was, it was a white and gold. Right. And I was in a brightly lit room looking on my phone and I'll be honest, I was on the crapper.

And that's, I mean, that's where I look at my tweets. So, and later on, I went out with some friends to a bar because my buddy was playing and I'm sitting in the bar and I open it back up because I just wanted to ask, you know, the people around me, not knowing that they had already seen it and had been dealing with it all day.

So I opened it up and I showed the picture to a table of groans. They're like, oh, not you too. And I'll be damned if it wasn't blue and black. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what I really enjoyed about this was people actually going through the process. It was an internet debate that actually never really got nasty, actually got somewhat scientific.

People were actually exploring it and doing hypotheses and testing things. It was like all of a sudden an entire generation had been opened up to the scientific method. I like that. Well, I, I don't know. As far as that, how far that goes in my stream, at least the people in my stream were like, they, they fought for a while and then somebody just put it in Photoshop and change the levels.

And they're like, oh yeah, it's black and blue, you know, it's got shitty lighting and it's right on that cusp of perception. Yeah. Which was the neat part. I mean, that was the cool, like visual effect. And then I'm just thinking, okay, maybe it just has to do with background. But then like today I did it again in a neutral room and I, and I just stared at it.

And sure enough, it went from white and gold to blue and black just after like a minute. It's like one of those, you know, pointless ship things in the, like from, from all rats. Unfocus your eyes and you can see a ship. Yeah. It's a schooner. It's a schooner. On a, on a much higher, like meta scale for me, this became down, it came down to, I like this because it almost, it forced people to realize that perception is not reality.

That's what this did. And that's why I like it because it was a science thing. It wasn't just, oh, look, cute llamas running around. This became science and even deeper level. It's kind of taught people that you can be both right and wrong simultaneously. It's not white or gold.

It's not black or blue. It's both depending on a number of factors that you had to go figure out. I would argue that this dress is 50 shades of gray. Oh, Jesus. You waited all day to use that one, didn't you? Yeah, pretty much. I thought so. Okay.

You mentioned the Oscars and how they were down. Now, what did you think of Neil Patrick Harris's little traitor quip? Honestly, it was probably one of the funniest things that he said in a very unfunny broadcast. It was quick, it was fast, it was off the cuff, and it was pretty funny.

Yeah, they really had set the bar low by that point, though, you have to admit. Oh, it was a horrible telecast. Like, I don't like to watch the Oscars anyways. I'm not a big fan of it. It was unbelievable how tone-deaf they are to the current economic and political climate. The writers just really fell down this time around.

There was nothing good about it. It was almost excruciating, particularly the worst bit, I thought, was when some woman had just won and was talking about suicide and immediately followed up with a joke about how she had balls on her dress. I was like, are you kidding me? Wow.

It was just bad. But, you know, the treason joke was funny. I mean, I disagree, but it was funny. Yeah, it was in poor taste. But, you know, at least when they asked Snowden about it next day on that Reddit AMA, he had a sense of humor about it.

You know, he's like, to be honest, I laughed at NPH. I don't think it was meant as a political statement, but even if it was, that's not so bad. My perspective is, if you're not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don't care enough. Which is a fairly good response, I think. Yeah, I mean, I agree. It's that old adage that, you know, if nobody's telling you you're wrong, you're not doing anything right.

Yeah, definitely. But yeah, just being forced to watch the Oscars was, we got through like the three and a half hours or four hours or however the hell that long it was in about 27 minutes. I unfortunately did not. I was on the couch watching the whole damn thing and it just, it did start to really bother me.

I mean, this is one of those, I just can't do them anymore. I can't watch them. They put me in such a bad mood. I can't take it. They put you in a bad mood? I thought you were perennially in a bad mood. Well, even in an even worse mood. How's that? Okay. You had to be super grump.

Super grump. Speaking of that, I ran into an article on Salon, of course, because it's one of the few bastions of decent journalism about HR departments and how they have basically taken over the entire corporate culture and made everything shit.

HR people are the worst. I'm sorry if you're an HR person and you're listening to this. Your industry is filled with horrible, horrible, horrible people. Yeah. And it's, it's now that I'm kind of dipping my toe into the corporate world a little bit, it's, it's painful. It's, um, this is a really interesting article about how these things have kind of spun out of control since the eighties and how they're basically just firing people left, right, and center, destroying innovation and creativity.

And, uh, it bummed me out. So if you want to be bummed out, go read the article. It's in the show notes. Yeah. I mean, I, I lump HR people into the no talent ass clown genre because they don't really have a skillset. They read a couple of manuals.

They try and teach you not to be, you know, uh, really horrible to your coworkers and make you fill out forms. And the worst ones are, I'm not going to name the agency that I was at, but I ended up leaving because, uh, she took it upon herself to take the offer that my bosses had, had given me to work there.

They're like, okay, this is how much we want to offer him. And she's like, oh, I'll get him down. And they're like, no, we gave you the offer. Yeah. And they're like, give him the offer. And she calls me and she low balls me. And I was just broke at the time. And I ended up taking the offer and I ended up leaving because I didn't make enough money.

So they could have kept me. I would have probably still been there if, if she wouldn't have stuck her nose into it. So I have a, I just hate HR people. That is their perceived job. Yeah. So good times. Yeah. No, I just got angry when I read this article. Yeah. I got depressed more than angry.

It's what do you do? Well, I mean, it's just, everybody's treating everybody else is a commodity and it's like, no, we're still people. Nobody's realizing that on the other end of that, that they is you as well at some point. And, you know, yes, it is, you know, we, we need the bill and Ted, you know, be excellent to each other.

Motto just plastered on everybody's ass backwards so they can see it in the mirror. I don't think that'll work either, but it's a nice thought. Okay. I also ran across another article in the guardian, which I also find to be a really good journalistic output.

This is called the iPod effect. How near limitless storage makes content worthless. Did you read this Jason? I read it. Yeah. Yes, I did. Very, very interesting point of view. And I, I tend to agree with it about a 250,000% because what they're saying is as soon as, you know, the price of storage drops to zero, then there's no, there's no, um, value in the individual item because you can just have everything instead of, you know, having to curate things like music is what they're talking about here.

It's like, instead of having to curate your collection, you only have a limited amount of space, limited amount of money to go buy. Then the value of that, that thing becomes, it approaches zero. Yeah. I totally agreed with a lot of this article as well. I mean, I've definitely found that I listened to less music now because of the way that things are set up than I used to in the day when I had to pick five or six CDs and throw them in the car, walk around with them.

Um, I got really, really into them and I had to pick them and find the things I really wanted. Now that I have everything available to me, I actually listened to less. I find less, uh, there's no doubt that it's been decommoditized to a great degree. Um, you know, if you have to go and find say 16 songs by Bob Dylan, that's a big deal.

And you're going to find something good and you're going to listen to it a lot. If you just go and rip an entire torrent of his entire output ever, uh, which is like a couple of gigs worth, you're probably not going to listen to it very much. And you're not going to go through it and explore it. And you may even forget you have it. I find myself forgetting I have things all the time.

Well, I think this comes back to, uh, we've talked about it on the show a couple, a couple thousand times probably at this point, but it's the paradox of choice. When you have so many things to choose from, your brain just can't handle it. And you end up choosing nothing and you get stressed out. And then it's just like, screw it. I'm going to watch TV. I'm not going to listen to music because I've got so much music to listen to.

Yeah. And that's, that's what happens. And then it's like, okay, well, I'm not going to pay for music because I don't want to listen to music because there's too much of it. It's this whole list, you know, cyclical argument, but it, uh, it was a great article. And I, I really, I felt for it because I do remember that tipping point when I got my first iPod and just over time really just was like, okay, now it's just a race to collect more crap.

I don't even care about listening to it. I just want to rip all my CDs. I want to have the biggest library ever. Yeah. And, and for no reason I want it tagged perfectly. It's, it's, you know, if you have OCD, that was the greatest time in history. Cause it was the first time you could sit there and go through every song, make it perfect.

And then never listen to it. And then, uh, you know, eventually the iTunes library would crash and you'd lose all your work and you'd have to do it all over again. Yeah. Which I eventually stopped doing and I don't have a very well curated library anymore because of that, which will get me to my next point in just a second. But I did want to finish up with this article.

Uh, the one thing that the author Max Tatton Brown, uh, posited that I don't agree with is he thinks that we're swinging back because iPhones are starting to have less, you know, you don't have, you can't get your whole library anymore. They stopped doing the iPods that had, you know, 16 gazillion gigs on them.

So you have to start picking music to keep on your phone because you have less storage. He completely, he conveniently leaves out the entire fact that everybody just streams now. And I don't know about you, but I, when I'm, I launched Spotify, it's that same thing. It's too much choice.

What am I going to go listen to? I don't know. I've kind of end around to that problem because I don't want to use Spotify when I'm out on the road. I mean, yes, I will go through Spotify and I will curate what gets loaded onto my device. Yeah. But the fact is in a pinch, you know, Spotify still has everything, but I just use, and I've got iTunes match, which is the same thing.

I've got 24 and a half thousand songs that I can pick any one of at any time and end up just listening to a podcast instead, which yay podcast. But you know, at some point it just, it gets to be too much. And I've, I've actually started to pare back my library from the stuff that I have, have started collecting over the years for the sake of collecting it.

And I'm like, okay, someday I am going to listen to the entire Beatles collection. Even though I hate the Beatles, I have the entire Beatles collection and I hate the fucking Beatles. So I don't know. It's just one of those things, man. And I think there's a little bit of that snapping back, but it's not going to be a movement.

Nobody's going to care enough. You know, we're not going back to the old, the oldie days of small artisan libraries. Yeah. Well, and again, I think the author is obviously of our generation. And I, you talk to the, the younger generations now, they don't even understand this at all.

There's, there's no going back because we've raised an entire generation that doesn't get that in any way, shape or form. Yeah. It's what they grew up with. So someday they'll be like, man, remember when we had everything and now we just have this little bucket of music. Oh, I want, I want to go back to the old days when we had access to everything.

Yeah. And this, uh, this article actually made me, it made me think about a different concept, which I'm going to talk about a little bit. I didn't get the chance to fully flesh it out because first off, I'm not a Buzzfeed paid writer. Uh, secondly, there was llamas and dresses to deal with. Uh, but it made me realize that we were kind of the last consumer generation and actually also the screwed generation, you and I, Jason, because we are the only generation in the history of the universe that got totally fucked by the entertainment media.

And I, I would posit that, that all the entertainment big, the record labels, the movie companies, they all owe us money because we are the people that bought things multiple times because they shifted, they shifted formats on us so many times. I mean, I know particularly for me, there are some things that I bought on vinyl when I was a kid.

Then I got on cassette, then I got it on CD, then I ripped my CDs into iTunes. Then we inevitably had those crashes with our iTunes library. And at that point I'd already gotten rid of the CD. So if I wanted to hear that album again, I had to buy it again on iTunes. And now I'm paying Spotify to listen to that same album yet again.

There are albums by bands that I have probably purchased seven or eight times. And certainly people have done the same with movies, VHS to DVD, to Blu-ray, to whatever. We got screwed, man. Oh, dude, don't even get into the DVD special editions. I have probably seven different DVDs or had, they're all gone now, but that's the point.

But of Army of Darkness, man, they made like 17 of those damn things and I bought them all. And yeah, we bought a lot of stuff. And that was, you know, the progression of the formats because yeah, that's the one thing that they don't really think about with these new services with Spotify and iTunes Match and whatever the hell everybody else is doing, is that there is no planned obsolescence.

They were trying to build that with the ponos, you know, it's like, oh no, it's like going from, you know, CD or VHS to DVD. No, not really. You hit a quality endpoint and then there is no more runway for the quality upgrades like we had with going from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that's a, I don't think I've ever read any article or economics report on how that is actually factored into the media companies and why they were so massive throughout say the seventies and eighties and early nineties because a big part of it was you and I kept buying the shit over and over and over again.

Yeah. They just kept, I mean, literally kept selling us the same crap over and over and over. Again, I was starting to really think about that. And you know, there are some bands out there that owe me some serious cash. Well, you know, Hey, here's the deal. You could have listened to your cassette.

That's true. You didn't have to go buy it. We were, I don't know if we were, you know, but that's how we were raised as again, like I said, the last consumer generation, that is what we did. It, we didn't think twice about it. It was just like, okay, well now I have a CD player in my car, so I better go get that album on CD.

I got rid of all my cassettes. It's just what we did. And the current generation is they don't, we've, we've seen so many studies about this. They have almost no interest in material goods. It's all about experiences for them. Everything streams, everything is transitory. Everything is rented and not owned.

They don't even give a crap about cars. They've got Uber. And I, speaking of Uber, I just taught my neighbor how to use it for the first time. So all the crapping on Uber that I've done, I just made you guys some money. Um, you know, even the main purchases that, that the younger generation considers to be really important things like iPhones, those are basically rentals that get swapped out every other year or so.

We really were the last consumer material generation. And I think that's going to have massive, well, we're already seeing all the implications that it has. The entertainment industry is running scared. The money is gone. They can't upsell us anymore and people don't care about owning. Yeah.

So they moved from owning to renting. So instead of paying them, you know, per item, you just pay them per month now. And I still don't think that that's ever going to work out the same as what we paid. I mean, my, my DVD collection, after I lost my VHS collection, my DVD collection cost me $25,000. There's no streaming service in the world and I'm not going to live long enough for them to get that same amount of money out of me again.

No, no, it can't possibly happen. So the income is going to go down for, for all these organizations, no matter what. Plus there's, uh, I mean the record labels particularly, and I'm sure the same thing happened in the, in the movie industry, um, as bad as they were with their finances in terms of screwing artists, which they have done since the beginning of time, when there was a direct sales chart to an actual physical product, it was much harder for them to screw an artist because,

you know, we knew exactly how many CDs this particular artist sold with streaming and the inability to do. Yeah. Even though they could do the reporting, there could be exact statistics about everything that everything gets fudged, everything gets pushed away. It's even harder.

We all know that the money isn't getting to the artists that we're specifically listening to as much anymore. And here's the difference though. Also, uh, in the old days, people would buy an item, a CD, right? Nowadays, I can go in and listen to 30 seconds of a song on that CD once, you know?

So you can't buy like a quarter of a bit of a CD back in the day. So now you've only got pieces and parts and songs and it's, it's, it's a mess. But I recommend that you go listen to the latest planet money on spreadsheets because it talks about how they, how they had it actually, it is because when spreadsheets came out, uh, computerized spreadsheets, lots of accountants lost their jobs.

Yeah. But what the, what it did at the end of the day was actually made more accountants because the paperized, the paper accountants paperized, like paper, paper craft, crap that these hipsters do, um, those guys kind of faded away, but a new generation came in because once the price of, uh, accounting went down, actually after a while they needed more accountants because people would do more accounting.

And it's, I think we're just in that middle of the road point in, in history, which is, you know, kind of a common theme that we have to deal with all the time. And it's not the end of the road. Obviously we're not just all going to die eating our shoes and boiling our hats. It's, it's a transitory time, I think.

And yeah, I agree. I mean, we've talked about that. We've touched on that a few times. I think you have a bit of a more rosy view of it than I do, because I think last time we talked about this, I was saying that, yeah, we've had this same sort of thing happen multiple times in history, but what hasn't happened yet, and this has been a very long transitory period is we haven't seen the replacement industries come up, at least not.

We see plenty of people trying to do things, but we don't see the money coming in and the support for it. That's not happening. It'll get there. We'll get, we'll get there at some point. It has to, you know, that's the thing. Either this will collapse and we'll move to a different type of economy, not a sharing economy.

I don't even, I don't even want to speculate, but something is going to have to happen because we're just going to have lots of people out of work trying to scramble to do something else. And we always come up with something at this point in, in all of the past evolutions going from, you know, live performances to paper music, to recorded music, to, you know, everything from stage plays, to television, to movies, all that stuff has this transitory period and everybody thinks the world is ending and it never does.

So yeah. And that's why I'm saying it's like you can chicken little to the, to your blue in the face, but something's going to have to come along because people like to survive and we'll come up with something. I'm sure we will. Unfortunately, I'm probably not going to be too happy to welcome my corporate overlord sponsored life.

Or you, hell at this point, we'll both probably be dead by the time it gets figured out. That's true. That was a cheery thought. So after having such a nice social discourse online about the dress, I do want to bring mention to another article that I saw this week by Iggy Azalea, who I freely admit as an old man, I know next to nothing about.

She's, she's young. She does some sort of music and it's probably rapper hip hop related and she's white and she comes from Australia. And there's been a lot about her online and she's gotten into all kinds of Twitter wars and it's been, uh, you know, the standard, you know, not really anything going on, but a lot of, uh, chatter.

Oh, I'm glad I'm not the only one that has no idea who she is. I'm like Iggy who Iggy pops daughter. I do. Who is this? Get off my lawn. Get off my lawn. Not Iggy pops daughter, but, uh, she did an article or actually she did a big long interview where she talked about how Twitter and it makes her hate people.

And she doesn't want to hate people. So she's putting herself on a social media diet. I like that thought. I agree with that thought. I find that the more time I spend on social media, the more depressed or upset I can be. And I'm not even somebody who gets trolled all the time. And God knows she does.

Um, I just think it's interesting to see somebody that is of this younger generation who was raised with this stuff. She never didn't have any of this stuff, uh, coming to the same conclusions that you and I get. So that gives me a little bit of hope. You know where she needs to go. Where? Hello. Oh yeah. She can go to Ella.

Nobody will bother her there. Exactly. Oh shit. We breaking news. What? Leonard Nimoy just died. Oh no. Live long and prosper. Oh, that is fucking sad. Sorry, man. It just exploded everywhere on social media. Now I know what you're doing when we're trying to record a show.

Okay. Oh man, that sucks. Okay. Well, yes, live, live long and prosper. Indeed. Yeah. That's, that is a serious bummer. All right. Moving on. Uh, I did have a brief article about, uh, Kickstarter that was written in, and gadget. Uh, that's Kickstarter.

Zach Braff problem gets worse with the pebble time. I know you have no more outrage over Kickstarter. Neither do I. It's just an interesting wrap up that has said what we were saying about a year ago, which is that Kickstarter is no longer anything other than a store that generates a lot of eyeballs. Way to take my part.

Yes, I do. I do not have any more outrage in it, but, uh, yeah, it's over. The Kickstarter dream is, is it's a store now. It's a platform. They've, they've scaled back on what they said that they were going to be because they've got, they got competitors. It's like, oh, okay, we give them the idea.

They do it better than we have to catch up. And so, and now I, I thought pebbles move to go back to Kickstarter to get their new product done. I thought it was great. I mean, that's as a business move, that's a smart idea. Go back to the well. And they did. And they, they, they knocked it out of the park.

Yep. So no more outrage about that. It is what it is. Yes. We got kickstarted in the balls. Yes, we did. That's all done. Uh, medium announced some upgrades today. And I know you're a, you, you profess to hate it, but you still kind of like it secretly. I think. No, I never go to medium anymore.

Unless, unless somebody puts an article on there that is decent. I just don't even, I have no interest in medium because it's, it's a mishmash of people trying to write long form. And now they're trying to make it short form and long form and open it up to everybody to just to make it more friendly, which means that they still don't have no clue with what they're doing.

And I'm just not going to write on somebody else's platform anymore. I just, I refuse to. So I write on my blog. That's where I put everything. I'm going back old school and I just don't understand why people still do this. You know, after the, in the blogger thing this week, you know, speaking of Evan Williams, you know, blogger came out and said, Oh, we're, you're taking down your porn.

And then like, you know, a couple of days later, they're like, you know what? We thought about it. You can have your porn back. Cause they just thought nobody still used blogger, I bet. But yeah, they, they flip-flopped on that. But I just don't, I don't want to put my stuff on anybody else's platform. I've been burned so many times. I mean, hell, I still miss my live journal account.

Uh, so no more, no more of that stuff. I just, I, I keep it in house. So that's why I just don't care about medium. Yeah. Well, I, I, you know, I don't really see much of a point in, in either. Uh, the one thing the article tells me is that they still have no idea what their business plan is.

No matter how many people are actually using it, even the president is using it, but, uh, there's no, there's no concept there of what to do. And they're really just kind of hacking around trying to find something. Well, they're spending a shit ton of money to get, you know, professional authors to come in and write stuff for it. But yeah, they don't know how they're going to monetize it.

They're trying to get people to the service and, you know, Evans got two, you know, knockout successes in his past, but I think they're scrambling with this one. Cause I think, I think people are just tired of writing online for other people to make money off of, unless you're getting something in return.

And with medium, there is just no return proposition for me. Yeah, I agree. Uh, news out that Apple is working with record labels on something bigger than subscription streaming. It's just, nobody knows what it is. Uh, we've known that Apple's going to move into a subscription streaming service, uh, for a long time.

That's they're taking their sweet time with it. Uh, but word is that it will be something more. So I can just assume that we're getting pinged to anything that starts with unknown sources close to the, you know, close to the product. If it's in there, just count me out. You call me when this is a thing.

It'll be a thing. I just don't know what else they could possibly do besides trying to attach some sort of social aspect to it. What else are you going to do? It's music for God's sake. Yeah. There's only so many ways you can put it in your ear holes. Yes. But putting things in your eye holes, they did actually made something with the, yes, the multiracial emoji, which has been going around for the week, but you had a take on it.

So I thought I'd just let you go. I don't really have a take on it. I was just, uh, you know, I, I'm glad that this is a thing. Not really. Who cares? Honestly, I know. Who gives a shit? I'm glad that we've solved the, the racial problems with emojis so we can get on with more important things in our life.

Uh, the best thing is that that has, this really has to solve the problem because Asians are pissed off that it's a yellow, like a bright yellow that's being used to there. Everybody's like, what the fuck is that? Yep. That's how it works. Yeah. Good times. They should have just made them all black and blue and golden white.

Exactly. Stay away from actual skin tones. Everybody should just be purple. Purple. Nurple. Uh, what else we got here? Um, oh, there was a nose about a Siri two, which is not going to be Apple specific. It's not Siri two electric boogaloo. No, it's, it's going to be called Viv.

Oh my God. All this money, all this brain power, and they can't hire like a naming firm. It's going to sound like a waitress from a 1950s, like detective novel. Hey Viv, get me another cup of Joe. Yes. Well, there's a lot of push that this is going to be the first big step in artificial intelligence because they're not going to be platform specific.

Everybody will be able to get the app and it will send things to massive databases that will then populate. It's basically to do what Google does, which is, you know, it's going to leverage the entire amount of things that people have been searching for and asking for to try to find out the best possible information for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Same shit, different day. At least Google had their AI beat a bunch of Atari games. That was at least progress. This one, you know, I still don't use Siri. I mean, now that I know I can Shazam, that's about the biggest update and that's using like seven-year-old technology. I'm like, Siri, go open an app for me and tell me what it does.

But yeah, I just, it's coming. It's coming. I'm not really looking forward to it. But yeah, I'm not a Siri user either, but I do know tons of people that just live by it now. I always feel weird talking to devices. I'm not into it. It reminds me of Star Trek when Scotty picked up the mouse when they went back in Star Trek four and started to try to talk to it and felt kind of silly.

I guess Star Trek just came to mind again because of Nimoy. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I'll be watching some Star Trek tonight. Two bits of news from my new hero and everybody's hero for a long time, Elon Musk. Hyperloop construction is going to start next year with a first full-scale track, which should be pretty awesome.

Well, it's only five miles long and they're putting it, this is what, this is, drives me crazy. They're putting it on the I-5 in between LA and San Francisco. And if you've ever taken that drive, you know, that point in the road is where Cowswitz is, which is what we call Harris Ranch because it is, you see miles of these just poor cows sitting in lakes of crap and you have to roll up your windows.

You have to know 10 miles before, roll up your windows, put on the recycled air and hold your breath and go as fast as you can. And that's why there's always speed traps there too, by the way. Coming out of Harris Ranch, there's always speed traps. So I think in the name of consistency with naming, they need to drop the Hyperloop and just call it the Hyperpoop.

Oh, that's very funny. I'm sure they'll scent it. I'm excited about this, but, you know, Elon Musk has got some really great ideas and full disclosure, I actually, I sold some of my Apple stock a couple of weeks ago because I've just had too much of it and I was trying to figure out what to buy and I invested a bit in Tesla.

So here we go. That's probably a good move. I think it is because of the next story that I'm about to tell you about, which is their Tesla just kind of threw out this idea that, oh, by the way, we're going to be making home batteries, not just the batteries for our cars. Yeah. I don't think they just threw this out.

I think this has been in their plans all along. Oh, yeah, but it was just casually mentioned during a Tesla earnings report. Yeah, because they're building a new battery factory because they need more batteries. But, you know, a good chunk of the portion of that goes to homes because they've got the solar lighting company as well and end up selling electricity back to the grid and say, hey, well, instead of selling it back to the grid, why don't you just keep it at home and get off the grid?

Yeah, I agree. I think it's a brilliant idea. And the reality is, you know, our grid and our system is totally antiquated and it needs an update. And this is a great way to go. You have solar panels and then you have these awesome batteries. And the thing I really like about Tesla is they are the only company I'm aware of that is really moving forward with actual like trying to push the technology of batteries.

And I think they're going to nail it. And I think we're all going to have these in our homes within 10 years. Now, the interesting part about this article that I really liked is, you know, you're always anti-disruption, but this is talk, this whole thing about putting batteries in homes is going to completely disrupt the energy industry.

And they talk about that in the article in very good detail about the weird circuitous route that the energy companies are dealing with right now. It's like, OK, well, they want to lower the buyback price, but if they, you know, lower the buyback price too much, then this happens. And if they keep the buyback price up, it's going to push more people to batteries, which mean they won't have a customer at all.

It's really good. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, this is here's the problem. I think that this industry needs to be disrupted because the grid can't handle the power that we're all pulling from it these days. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, power going out was very rare.

We have rolling power outages all the time now. And it's not just major cities like L.A. The grid is antiquated. It's not working. It can't cover it anymore. And the systems aren't incentivized to fix it themselves. They're just not. So somebody else is going to have to come in. And just on a purely planetary level, let's please do solar and batteries.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's going to take a long time. But I mean, it's going to go that way eventually. Yeah, because the grid is going to just fall apart and there's not going to be enough money to put it back together. Exactly. Especially, I mean, I was going to pick on California. But if you look at the East Coast, I mean, they've had full on coastal outages in the past 15, 20 years.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just it's it can't handle it anymore. It needs to be replaced. So I found one article in the L.A. Times, which was interesting. And it's called Women Are Leaving the Tech Industry in Droves. And it just talks about how hard it is to basically be a woman in tech and not get ahead.

Right. And you know what, though, I think this I mean, it is a very good article and it's very on point. But you could also put in that category people over 40 as well. It's like women and people over 40 are leaving tech because you can't get ahead because all these kids come in and then you just are you're the old guy in the room and nobody wants to give you a shot anymore.

That's why I love working, you know, for myself and for my clients, because I you just can't make it anymore. You can't I can't I can't walk into Facebook and get a job, even though they're hiring engineer after engineer. And I know some people that work there that are dumber than dirt, but, you know, and they're in their 20s and they they're making, you know, one hundred and seventy five K a year.

Yeah. Well, the tech industry has absolutely no respect for for experience. We know that. Which is mind boggling because, you know, it's like the things that programmers hate to do are doing the same thing over and over again. So if somebody can just show you how to not do something over and over again that have gone through and the problem solving phases that learn from that, take it and bring these people in to be, you know, like the mentors for the for the younger generation.

But, yeah, I mean, it just ain't happening. I see older people like, you know, friends of mine who have worked at companies like Razorfish for 15 years. They're canning them because they can bring in younger people cheaper. And my friends don't want to stay in tech because that's going to happen over and over again.

I there, you know, they were making one hundred and fifty grand a year doing beautiful websites for, you know, massive brands. And now they're tending bar. And that's no joke. That is literally what happened with a friend of mine. He's a he's a bartender now, barely making barely making ends meet when he's got so much knowledge in advertising, branding and in the Internet.

It's like, what a waste. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's that's been your and my experiences as well. We've been lucky enough to keep on to certain bits and, you know, lower our expectations of what we're going to do. You and I both decided a long time ago that we weren't going to be multimillionaires in the tech industry and we were just going to try to eke out a nice little life for ourselves.

But that's getting harder and harder. The tech industry is driving anybody out. It just is. And I'm not surprised that women are leaving. We see these stories all the time. A friend of the show, Tara, talks about this stuff all the time on Twitter. It's it's it's awfully rough out there to be a chick. Well, there is one chick that it is not very rough out there to be.

And this is the the woman who did the Disney collector YouTube sensation videos. You know, she was huge. They're making five million dollars a year. Finally been unmasked. And it's a Brazilian porn star. That brings a new meaning to the term handjob.

Hey, oh. No, it's it was an interesting find that they actually found her. And she does not look as good as she did in her former glory, which was really damn good. But, man, she figured out how to make money in tech. That's amazing. I mean, the story is fascinating no matter what.

But then when you bring in the fact that she is an ex porn star from Brazil, that this is just amazing. Amazing. Cinderella. Cinderella story. Cinderella story. Yes. I got to admit, I mean, the security segment for us is never the most uplifting anyways.

But the Leonard Nimoy news is I'm reeling from it a little bit right now. Yeah, I think everybody is. I just looked at a couple of my feeds and everybody. I mean, he was he's an icon. Well, especially for for us in our generation. I mean, this, you know, Star Trek basically created geek culture, which we all grew up in.

I mean, this is, you know, and it's Spock, for God's sake. This is the bastion of science and intelligence. Yep. Yep. And one hell of a voice actor. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Oh, well. All right. Let's get into this. Yeah. So ready. OK, so we are going to go in search of security.

See what I see what I did there? I see what you did there. OK, there's some numbers finally out on the target breach come comes in. It's about one hundred and sixty two million dollars for 2013 and 2014 with I guess their insurance covered about 90 million of it.

So the you know, the big number was two fifty two. That's how much money it costs to fix their crappy security holes. And, you know, now the insurance companies are going to have to raise their premiums because they had to kick out 90 million. But, you know, they're not poor anyway. So I really I'm not going to shed a tear, but they're going to pass it on to us.

Yeah, of course they are. I mean, this is all going to get passed on to us, which is, I think, something that these hackers never think about because, you know, a lot of them like to cloak themselves in this idea that we're doing something good. But really, you're not hurting them. It's going to it all gets passed down to us. That's this is trickle down economics in reality.

Yeah, it's nuts. I don't know. I and I don't really believe that they think that they are Robin Hoods. I think they're money grubbing, you know, evil little bastards and they know it. So I really don't think they think about us very much. Yeah, probably not.

In drone news, this is local for me. LAS, which never really gets into the security thing, posted a story about there being creepy drones tracking cell phones in the valley here. Yeah, this is a new ad company that's, you know, they're doing the same thing that you can do on towers.

They just put it on drones and they're trying it out to see if it's cheaper instead of putting a tower up. Yeah, I don't really understand how this is actually going to work. I mean, I know the idea is to do hyper local ads, but what are they going to I guess I guess if I'm browsing and they hack into or they they make a deal with an ad company, I'll get something for the taco joint down the street.

It'll appear on the side. I actually really don't have too much of a problem with that. It's when I start to get unsolicited texts or things like that that I have issues. Yeah, I think it's more going to be, you know, selling location and unique ID data to ad companies who can then do like the follow on ads and the retargeting and all that stuff because they're going to have to have a vehicle to get you the ad, which either means it's going to be with an app company who has like a deal with an ad company like I ads or websites.

So if you're browsing the website, but I don't think anybody's going to or and here's what it could be an app that has push notifications that they can then send you push notifications. So if you do have the Starbucks app and they know you're coming by, they can ping you and say, come and get a free crappuccino. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be something like that.

When you mentioned that how this stuff is already out there on light towers and power poles and all that, I got a little bit intrigued because I never really think about that. And I found an interesting article on Wired, a field guide to the internet infrastructure that hides in plain sight, which is pretty cool.

It shows you what all this stuff is that we see around us and never even think about what it really is. And and I found this fascinating. No, this is cool. I'm really glad that they put this out. I'm going to have to go through it and check it out. But the thing to do is when you're walking around the city, just look up, look at look at the light poles, look at the boxes on buildings, all that stuff.

They're they're gathering IDs from your phones. There's there's sniffing license plates. They're just gathering data, all of this data and creating these huge stockpiles of it so that they can just then sell out, you know, because they're private companies. And the people who buy this stuff increasingly is the government.

Yeah, because they can just outsource it and buy it without having to have a warrant. Yeah, it's easier. Yeah, it's much easier. Yeah. So back in in more drone news, the Secret Service said, you know, since other people are flying drones at us, we're going to fly drones at them, even though now D.C. is a no fly zone for drones.

And at least the DJI is putting in the oh, you can't fly your phantoms around us. But that doesn't mean that other drones that don't have those, you know, restrictions can't fly. So the Secret Service just says, screw it, we'll get our own drones. Right. Well, not that's hardly surprising.

As long as they don't put like a 50 cal on it and just, you know, like that other one that we saw, they just put some string on it, some silly string to knock down the other drones. But we'll see what what kind of drones these guys have. I bet they, you know, they're all black with sunglasses. Yes, they all have nice suits.

And last week we talked about the the big Gemalto hack with the SIM cards that were stolen with all the keys. Well, they came out in like six or seven days and said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That happened, you know, or probably happened back in 2010, 2011.

But it's very unlikely that they got any keys. We're fairly certain that nothing bad happened. And everybody just laughed at this. It's like you guys are just you're so bad at covering your ass. So you did a security audit from a hack that happened years ago on software that is known to be incredibly good at covering its own tracks, deleting itself, not being able to be found.

And in six days you have said, you know, undeniably, we're safe. The keys are still good. My ass. Well, you run a company. That's what you have to do, right? I just love the photo of the three old white guys sitting at the table spouting lies.

Yeah, that's pretty much what it is. There's there's no way in hell that anything that came out of their mouth can be true. Nothing at all. Nope. So your keys are still out there. Yeah. Now, Ars Technica had this very long article on Cybergeddon.

Mm hmm. Pardon me. Cybergeddon. Why the Internet could be the next failed state. Well, isn't it? Yeah. The thing is, yes, it probably will be. It is it is very chicken little. The sky is falling.

But it is very correct. And a lot of a lot of what it says. And they they posit a couple of different futures on how things could go. And I don't think any of them are going to be particularly, you know, siloed into what they're saying. I think it's going to be very messy going forward and it's going to be it's you know, it's going to be like walking down a city at night.

You know, sometimes you're going to get mugged. Sometimes you're not protect yourself. And going forward, we're not going to have a utopian society where everybody will just post llamas and kittens. No. Well, they probably still will post llamas and kittens. But then as soon as you post it, your machine will get hacked and your bank account's gone.

But we'll see how it goes, you know. Yeah, it was a really good article. I mean, I definitely you know, this is this is right up your alley for the security segment. So I enjoyed it. I don't for once, I'm not as doom and gloom as all of that. I don't think it's going to be that bad. I think it is going to be a big mess.

It's going to be, you know, think New York City, 1970. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, I like that. I like that analogy. Now, Yahoo doesn't have any money, but what they do have are giant cojones. So the CISO, the chief information security officer of Yahoo, went up against the director of the NSA and just blatantly asked him.

He's like, so if you think this is a good idea, which nobody does, and you say we need to build in golden keys and back doors. What happens when China asks us, should we let them have their golden keys and back doors, too? Because we have over a billion customers and we're a multinational company.

So when they and this guy was just like skirting the issue, being condescending, laughing at him and, you know, just kind of showed how big of a dick the NSA is. Yeah. Yeah. You got to give the guy credit for getting the balls to stand up and say it.

No, no. It's pretty impressive. And to have it be somebody. Well, you know, Yahoo doesn't have much to lose, do they? Not particularly. No. And they were outed as being, you know, one of the main people that were complicit when the Snowden leaks first came out. So it's in their best interest to be ahead of the game on this and keep coming out as being, you know, the cheerleader for protecting the customers because they've already gotten dinged pretty hard from it.

Yeah, definitely. Now, this next one is interesting because this this goes into that gray area that we're starting to get into where the Internet and Internet of Things and physical and virtual start to collide. And we now have there's a digital mill that can create untraceable guns that you can get that you can get for a grand.

Oh, joy. Yeah. It's cheap and it works. And FedEx and UPS aren't going to ship it. OK, so why don't you send me a digital mill that can make the digital mill that can make the guns? I was about to say, can't they just break it into component parts and ship them individually and then you just put it together?

I mean, there's so many ways to get around this and I don't understand. It's a weird. OK, this is such a gray area. It's unbelievable. It's such a weird stand for a company that does nothing but ship to refuse to ship something. I don't get it, especially when there are no laws right now that prohibit.

People from owning that device. Yeah. You know, that's a really big overstretch. We're just we're sprinting ahead of laws with with our technology and the things that we can do. We haven't caught up. I mean, this even goes back to the Yahoo thing, because, yeah, you're a multinational corporation.

We don't have multinational laws about how these things go. So we're so far ahead of our legal system and even our morality in many ways. This is weird. It's very weird. And the interesting thing is the guns that you make are not necessarily illegal.

They're just untraceable. Yeah. Because you can make an unlicensed AR-17 legally in some places in the US. So in some places. Yeah. Hopefully there's a Waffle House near one. Exactly. Exactly. Because roadie, the Uber for package delivery, have teamed up with the Waffle House for your pickups.

And so you can just have your your roadie go pick up your, you know, your gun equipment and send it to the Waffle House. And then you can get some, you know, heart attack on a plate and your and your digital mill at the same time. It's such an interesting move for them. And I like it.

It's it's it is very social or I mean, it's it's very new economy of them to just go ahead and make it an entire new business model for themselves. Come get your waffle and your gun machine. Well, I mean, now you can go pick up your Amazon packages at 7-Eleven. So you can get a hot you can get a hot dog in your, you know, your Amazon goods.

So why not be able to go pick up, you know, your your gun gun machine equipment, score some pot in the bathroom and then have a nice breakfast at the same time. What a world. It is strange world we're in right now. I'm telling you, this is this this weird mushy gray area where everything just isn't quite solidified and everything's in flux.

And it's interesting to just, you know, kind of see where it's going. But it's it's many, many science fiction books are coming true right now in this era that we've we've talked about a lot of the Glenn Greenwald Snowden stuff.

And we've also said many times, well, you've said many times, I don't have anything to hide. Why should I worry? And I always come back and we fight for a little while. And I just want to send everybody to go watch the Glenn Greenwald TEDx talk or I don't even know if it was I don't think it's a full TED talk. I think it's a TEDx, but it's called Why Privacy Matters.

And in 19 point some odd minutes, he sums up all of the arguments that it took us about 30 episodes to get through. And it is worth watching. It'll only take you 19 minutes, 19 point something. And I think you'll enjoy it. I did enjoy it. I actually did watch it. And you aren't entirely giving my argument the full do.

Yes, I do say that. But it's not that I don't feel that it matters. I just feel like, you know, we've opened up the Pandora's box and we're not getting back in. We're definitely not getting back in, but there's going to be there's going to be a lot of change. I'm really looking forward to picking up Data in Goliath, Bruce Schneier's new book.

And hopefully I'll have that done for the next at the library. Because everybody's saying it's a it's a fantastic book and it talks about big data and what's going on with it and what people are using it for. So tell me a little bit more about big data, Brian. Big data is a gigantic buzzword that can have many, many, many, many different meanings.

The reality of it and the one that scares us is the fact that people can collect so many different aspects of data about your life that they can basically piece together a statistical analysis and make very well educated guesses about what you would be doing at any particular moment or what you would spend your money on or where you might be, et cetera, et cetera.

Ars Technica, which you hit a lot, has a nice, really well thought out and really, you know, high end list of what big data actually is. And it's a guide to it. So you can read this and you will be educated and understand the reality of what big data is.

Exactly. It's a very good primer. If you if you really want to kind of get up to speed on what it is, they did a really good job with it, which kind of dovetails into this other article that Vice put out called Looking Up Symptoms Online. These companies are tracking you. This is this is nothing new. Absolutely nothing new.

What they're talking about are standard analytics that everybody uses. Ad companies still use them. These people know this already. They've known this for years. This is just a shock piece that is, you know, saying shit that we've known for at least five years. This is nothing new.

But it was getting passed around a lot. And I'm like, there's nothing new in this article. Because this is something that is nothing new to you and I, but to, you know, moms at home who are Googling and looking up things about their kids. This is I think this is good because this is an article that gets attention for people that aren't super techie.

Because a lot of stay at home moms read Vice. Come on. But you said it's been passed around. They do read Facebook. So hopefully some of them are getting it that way. We'll see. We'll see. I mean, it's good to know. Hot llama talk. That's what I'm going to say. I mean, like everything we're talking about here has been completely negated by the fact that the FCC made this great ruling.

And then people are talking about llamas in a goddamn dress. And I'm just like I was banging my head against the wall. I'm like, we are never going to get ahead. We are just going to die in a pool of our own juices looking at cat pictures, sunsets, and now llamas. I just I sometimes you just want to, you know, just crawl under a rock.

But we got to try. We got to keep trying. Keep on keeping on. Yep. And yeah, WordPress, keeping on, keeping on with the security updates with the well, this is a security flaw. Over a billion WordPress sites are imperiled by a critical plug-in bug.

Again, WP Slimstat, which I've never used. I've never used them either. I don't plan on using them. And the thing is, I really think that once a once a plug-in starts to get, you know, critical mass on the WordPress plug-in marketplace, once they hit like a number that could cause catastrophic failure on a lot of websites, they should be forced to be doing regular security audits and provide those to WordPress to show that their their plug-in is secure.

Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with that. That's the issue with using WordPress is everybody has it. Everybody's using it. And, you know, the flaws can affect all of us. You get what you pay for. Honestly. WordPress. I know. I know. I'm still scrambling from that last Russian hack.

Assholes. Assholes. How do you say asshole in Russian? Putin. Good one. Thank you. Now, I'm not a fan of Burning Man at all. I just don't really want to go get dirty and watch people screw in the desert because I just think, ooh, lube.

No, it's just not my cup of tea. But I got to give I got to give credit to the people that tried to jump the line, even though they were dumb and got caught. They like these hackers in San Francisco figured out how to get past the Burning Man ticket countdown timer and got a bunch of tickets.

Yes. Problem is they got past the they got past. They bought the tickets. They know who they are and they know when they bought the ticket. So they're just going to have to get the money back. And it's like, OK, it was it was an you know what I say? Nice try.

Kudos. Nice try. Yeah, it was a nice try. But yeah, it's they're shipping the tickets to your house. They know where you are and they can. I'm assuming there's a timestamp put on the purchase. Exactly. And your credit card information. So it's not like you can't be caught. This is not a clever hack. This was just these were line jumpers who got into the club before it opened.

And then the bouncers came and said, you out and you're not welcome back. It's so not burning, man. No, I mean, it was a simple flaw in JavaScript. Like the timer was in open JavaScript. And if you know anything about web development, you can just open up your your editor on your browser and just your inspector.

Take a look at it. Change variables in situ. And then the things on the page change. It's very simple to do. JavaScript is not really what you would call secure. Yes. And a flashback to my comment about traffic school. Thank God they use JavaScript. Exactly.

Now, I found this library where people are learning how to inject JavaScript directly into an image. And now who the fuck thought this was a good idea just to even try? Jerks. Yeah. Yeah. We don't want this. This is bad. No, we really, really don't. And he's German.

What are you going to do there? What are you going to do? That means it's going to be really good. Yeah. It'll be a very good hack. It'll work very well. Inject JavaScript in different images into GIFs, BMPs, WebP files. BMPs work best and nobody uses BMPs.

But, you know, now we're going to now those cat GIFs are actually going to cause problems.

This week, we've got a bandwidth donation from Herbert Fillmore via the PayPal link on the website. Thank you very much, Herbert. We appreciate you helping keep the lights on. So you are a bandwidth sponsor for the month of February. Herbert also writes.

Thanks very much for that, Herbert. He wrote, thanks, guys, for turning me on to the Reckoner series. The two audio books, oh, he's one of you, Jason, became bonding points for my 12-year-old and I. Hard to break through all the modern media washout of his brain, and this did it. Rant. Issue with video games, social or not, is the lack of demands on participants' imagination.

Books require you to contribute. Otherwise, we are just on our way to becoming battery farms. So thanks for saving my son from the battery farm. P.S. We also listened to this cast together. I didn't realize how much cussing there was until I was listening with him, no matter he wasn't phased. Sorry about the cussing. It happens.

But, you know, I don't think that we use language that any 12-year-old isn't using over at school with his friends. True that, true that. I'm glad you like the Reckoners, and I'm glad you listened to the audio book. I thought they were very fun. Yeah, yeah. I'm actually surprised that you don't have an issue with his thoughts on video games, Jason, because I know you are a bit of a gamer.

I tend to agree with that, but I do understand that the recent video games have a lot more sophistication and thoughts involved with them, I guess. I don't know. Depends on what video game you play. Honestly, there's both sides of the spectrum. You know, I don't have a stance on it anymore because I haven't really played any modern video games in, say, 10 years.

I put up my Xbox a long time ago. The only thing that I played was Rock Band. And, you know, that was pretty much it in the last 10 years, and I was damn good at it, too. And I am glad to say that they are coming back. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are coming back for the PS4 and the Xbox One, which I don't own either of.

All right. Well, hopefully that will save the music industry. Well, they made a decent amount of money on it. Yeah, they did. I was actually not kidding. I spent, I mean, the game cost me 60 bucks, and I spent at least $500 on tracks over the course of my playing.

So that's more than the console, more than the game combined that I bought music from those games. So when they went away, I was amazed. But so we got another comment from listener Shane Simmons about part of the great Prius debate.

It's a very long comment. And you and I talked about this. We want to pick that one up on the next episode when we can actually put a little bit more thought behind it, because he's got some really interesting points. He does. So we're going to we're going to pick that one up on the next one. So, Shane, we just want to let you know we're not we're not dismissing you. We actually are thinking about this one and we'll pick it up next episode.

And thank you very much for making me think about Priuses. Jerk. Why are you always going to be like that, man? He's a fan. Jesus. I'm very excited.

The synopsis to Armada has been posted online, which is the second novel by Ready Player One author Ernie Klein. I loved Ready Player One. I thought it was fantastic. It was almost a game changing book for me because I hadn't seen anybody approach kind of doing near future sci fi with such pop culture acumen.

It was fantastic. And listener Herbert Fillmore, please, please do check out Ready Player One. Link in the show notes. You and your son should read this one together. Oh, especially if the son likes video games. This is a spot on one. And if you get the audio book version, Will Wheaton reads it. Oh, well, there you go.

Super geeky. It was. It was a very good book. Now, is Armada a follow up or is it a brand new seat like series? It is a brand new thing. It is not a follow up, which I actually kind of like as well, because I think he pretty much nailed that story and it was good. Yeah, that was a that was a one and done on that one.

Yeah. So I guess this is this will be coming out July 14th and I will be getting it the day it comes out. Nice, nice. And I want to just do a quick follow up on the last segment where I mentioned Data and Goliath, the hidden battles to collect your data and control your world by Bruce Schneier. And I'm sure it's going to be an amazingly fun read that you're going to come out of like feeling like I could I could look at llamas all day.

Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be awesome. I actually I'm working through two books right now, so I've got nothing done. So I have nothing to report here. Yeah, I've been working my ass off all week in preparation for my trip to California. And I've got like six books that I'm halfway through. So maybe next week I'll get through some of these and we can get back on track with it.

Yes. But if you have not read Ready Player One yet and you listen to this podcast, you will. You should. I concur. Yes. Software, apps and gadgets. Friend of the show, Mike Walter, sent me this link.

I was vaguely aware of this company, but I didn't realize how cool what they're actually doing is. I mean, this is going to be a massive game changer if it actually works. The woman's name is Meredith Perry, and she is head of this company called U-Beam, which is going to be wireless power.

And she foresees a future in which U-Beams are everywhere and we just carry around our devices and they are always charging. Okay. Now, we talked about the dangers of Wi-Fi radiation on plant life and how it can kill plants. And now we want to just beam electricity directly into the air, into your pocket, next to your junk, charging your devices all the time.

Yep. What could go wrong? Yeah. I do worry about that. I mean, alarm bells were going off in terms of both security and environmental and health considerations about this. I mean, again, it's one of those things where we've raced ahead of everything else.

We still don't even know what's going on with the Wi-Fi stuff. And we do know that it is bad to some plants, sort of. And we know that we're blanketed in it 24-7. The idea of beaming power around, first off, I don't even know how the fuck that works. I'm very interested.

But it does not sound like it would be safe in any way, shape, or form. I'd also like to see what the infrastructure is going to be like in terms of charging. Like, are you also sending information back and forth so we know how much to charge my device because of how much juice I took away from the public library I was walking around in?

Yeah. Public library. Like there's going to be public libraries. I actually just got my library card the other day. So, yes, there still are. They're very nice. Yeah. And here's the funny thing. When we talk about, you know, billing transactions, that's what SIM cards were invented for, really, was so you could, like, you know, talk to your provider and they can find out how much usage you're using.

So, yeah, it's another avenue there because you're going to have to send IDs back and forth and stuff like that. So, there will have to be some kind of data transfer along with your juice. I mean, we're already, I mean, they have those kind of wireless pads that you can put your devices on and they charge.

I've never personally used one. I actually don't even know anybody that has one. I prefer at least something that I'm setting something on as opposed to things just being beamed into me. Yeah, yeah. Now, I've had one of those, I think, like induction chargers, I think they're called. It was like a Sonicare toothbrush.

And you just set it on the base and it charged wirelessly overnight. Right. No big problem there. But, yeah, this just sounds a little sketchy. Is this woman related to Tesla in any way, shape, or form? Because he, you know, said that he figured that out before he died. But he was also kind of a kook at the end. But who knows? Who knows?

I don't really know. It's pretty interesting. And one thing that I will give her, there's a link in the show notes where she actually gives an interview. And it's, you know, kind of a piece, a bit about her. This is not a woman that is leaving the tech industry. This woman's pretty badass. And she is strong-willed and opinionated.

And she's smart. And I like her quite a bit. So I'm going to be following this company, even though I'm terrified of them killing us in the future. It's very interesting. She's very interesting. Sounds cool. It sounds cool, yeah. And, you know, can it be weaponized? Can you just turn up the juice? And be fried.

There's that as well. And I don't think these things will be sitting around on walls. I can't wait for them to all just be droning around and wirelessly charging us from the sky, then determining who we are through big data and shooting us. Yeah, the distance thing, that actually makes the drones a little more interesting. If you can charge at a distance, what's the distance?

And can you just keep your drone flying 24-7? Yeah, well, that would be the thought, right? You would never have to land a damn drone or anything. Oh, okay. Thanks. That was scary. Mm-hmm.

Media candy. So I was listening to Radiolab this week. Mm-hmm. And I like that podcast. It's pretty good. I mean, it's actually really good. And there was a segment inside of one of the shows about professional wrestling. It was called The Montreal Screwjob.

Okay. And it's fascinating. They really do go into some of the deeper aspects of professional wrestling, which I've kind of been drawn into because I work for a wrestling company sometimes. And this story, I didn't really know. It's, you know, basically about how the WWE was like, they changed how they did business and were catapulted into what the WWE is now.

And they were the WWF back then. Right. But it is a fascinating listen. Well worth the time. I mean, even if you're not into wrestling, from the story aspect of it, it's awesome. Just, it's, you know, 20, 25 minutes. And I think you'll come out of it with, A, a greater appreciation for wrestling and storytelling.

And it's just really fun. I just, I wanted to put that in because that was like the best podcast thing I've heard all week. All right. I know nothing about wrestling. Then you should definitely listen to it. I think you'll dig it. Okay. And as we all know today, it's House of Cards Day. Are you excited? Are you excited?

I am excited. I'm a little behind on some other shows, so I don't know if I'm going to leap in right away, but I'll be getting into it. I really enjoy the series. Yeah. I don't have time to do what I usually do, which would be, but by this time, when we recorded the day that House of Cards season two came out, I'd already seen five episodes.

But I have not seen any, and I don't even know when I'm going to be able to schedule this in, but I'm excited. I'm glad it's out. I want to get to it quick before the spoilers start coming out. Yeah, me too. That's the only problem with the dumping the entire series right away thing is like people just, people will watch the whole thing today. People have already seen the whole thing because it's, you know, it's, it's 1230 here.

It's been out for 12 and a half hours. You know, people get catheters and diapers and just don't move or they take their iPads into the bathroom and just watch it there. Who knows? But anyway, yeah. I mean, my prediction on this is it's got to be closing up to the last season.

Now that he's president, what are they going to do with it? But I'm very excited to watch it. And in more important news, if you have not seen the Sesame Street House of Bricks House of Cards parody yet, it's four minutes of awesomeness. OK, I haven't seen that yet. I'll drop that in the show notes. You've got to watch it. It's very funny. OK, should I should I wait till I'm done with season three or should I watch it before season three?

I don't think it has anything to do with the actual real plot. It is a take of the of the crap. Why can't I think of the fairy tale right now? The three pigs and the big bad wolf. Oh, the three little pigs. Yes, it's a spoof of the three little pigs. You know, the one with the three little pigs.

Yeah, it's called the three little pigs. Yeah. And instead of Frank Underwood, it's Frank Underwolf. And it's very funny. OK, I'll check that out. Now, the original House of Cards was only it was a three part or two. So I may who knows, maybe this will be the last one. Maybe they've run the well dry. Yes, but America has a habit of taking a series such as, say, The Office, which is also only three, three seasons long in the UK and turning it into 12 season long extravaganzas.

So we'll see what happens. We beat shit into the ground until it can't get up. Yes, we do. Now, I saw an awesome movie this week called What We Do in the Shadows. It's all it's like a New Zealand movie from the people who made Flight of the Conchords. And it's like a spinal tap with vampires.

OK, it is so damn funny. It doesn't move very fast. It's a little slower paced, but I loved I loved every minute of it. I highly recommend it. I'm not a vampire guy, but I thought this was excellent. I'll definitely have to take a look at it because I love the Flight of the Conchords, guys.

And, you know, I grew up goth. I've got a I've got a special stake in my heart for vampires. I think you'll really dig this then. And half tip to Dr. David Teeter for this one. He let me know about it. And it is it is awesome. Excellent. I've actually been going back and watching the West Wing again.

You can't go wrong there. You cannot go wrong there. And in fact, it's the perfect antidote to many of the horrible things that we discuss all the time on this podcast. Corporate culture, environment, politics going bad to go back and watch an idealized version of what things could actually be, not even just in politics.

I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat, just the way that they do this and portray it. And there's a beauty to it and a simplicity that that I find very attractive. But it's even just the can you imagine being in a corporate office environment where everybody was actually really friendly, had a lot of respect for each other.

They helped each other and they were intelligent. Yeah, that never, ever happens. Sounds so good. And it makes me so happy when I watch it. If you've never seen the series, you cannot go wrong. It is Sorkin's finest moment. It's what the newsroom could have been but isn't.

The female characters are very well written, incredibly intelligent. It is it is I really do think it's one of the best shows that's ever aired. Yeah. I mean, it did kind of taper at the end there, but for the most part, it was awesome. It's the U.S. beating things into the ground.

It probably should have been about five seasons. It went seven. Now, this this came out. I heard about this a while ago, and it's the cables cable companies are taking reruns and speeding them up. So they can put more ads in them.

So now it's your podcast listening theory. See, that's why I probably never noticed it, because I can watch I can watch something at 2x and just be normal for me. When I hear it in 1x again, though, I'm just like molasses. Come on, guys, get to the damn point. But this is this was on Tech Dirt and the numbers in there.

They speed up Seinfeld by 7.5 percent. They can get in like two extra minutes of commercials. Yeah. And you know why? I mean, first off, this is just wrong to begin with. But particularly with a comedy, comedies are all about timing. Well, if it's relative timing, then, you know, relative comedy.

But it's not relative timing. I mean, beats have to be delivered and sometimes things have to sit for the person thinking about it. This doesn't work. This doesn't work for me at all. In fact, I watch that Seinfeld bit that they show. And if you watch the regular one, it feels off. It just does.

Well, yeah, I'm sure it feels off because they're speeding it up by 7.5 percent, you know. But even the humor feels off. It doesn't feel right to me. There's a cadence to human transactions and communication. And when you speed it up, it goes off. I can't listen to podcasts at double speed like you do.

I just can't do it. It doesn't work for me. Yeah. Well, it apparently doesn't work for a lot of people, especially with TV. And it's just, you know, it's dirty. It's a dirty pool. It is. And you can look at it, was it like five or six years ago? I mean, maybe even 10 at this point when at the end of a movie, they just started taking the credits, speeding them up in a little tiny box because it was, you know, a requirement by law that they had to run the credits.

They're like, they never said how fast we had to run them. We're just going to put them over here in a little box and they're the credits. They're running. I absolutely hate that, too. It's wrong. Wow. What are you going to do? Are you going to sue the cable company? Yeah, nothing because they don't give a shit about us. Just our money. Are you kidding me?

Love it. On the list of things that I can't for the life of me ever understand why they got greenlit or happened, Oral-B smart toothbrushes have app connecting things to it. And it's who the fuck decided this was a good idea.

Why do I need an app connected toothbrush? Oh, I don't. I don't. No, I don't. I don't need to be reminded to brush my teeth. Thank you. Well, the thing about the app is it's very well done. It's, you know, they spent a lot of money to put this thing together. I know. This is what drives me crazy. Like, we have so many good things that need to be done that have to be done.

Really, really good ideas. And we can't get any money spent on them. But Oral-B spent a ton of money on this. Well, you know what? Some agency made out, like, bank. So good on them for being able to push this through Oral-B and getting it made, even though it's going to be a giant flop and they're probably not going to get Oral-B's business in the future.

They may have just laid waste of their field on that one. But, hey, they got a payday. Yep. Yeah. Good times. So I've had this in the notes for a while and I just had to put it out there because, you know, it is the season for drinking because it is winter and nobody wants to do anything but get sauced and watch House of Cards all day.

This is Ben Franklin's 200 plus synonyms for drunk. I love this. There's some great ones in here. My favorite is Sir Richard has taken off his considering cap. I, like, got on his little hat. No, this is a great list. If you're just looking for a fun little read, something to pull out to use at your next night at the bar, check out this list.

It's very funny. Closing shout outs. I've got some musical shout outs this week. First off, happy birthday to George Harrison, who was born February 25th, 1943. He, believe it or not, is my favorite Beatle. I know Jason has nothing to say about this because he hates the Beatles.

Oh, I did. I was going to say, wasn't he a Beatle? I think. He was. He was indeed. Very talented guy. Happy birthday, man. He is missed. And secondly, I'm going to see one of my favorite bands of all time tonight. I'm going to see The Church here in Los Angeles.

And I highly recommend if you've never listened to them, there is a link in the show notes to their best of. Great band. Love them so much. Can't wait to see them tonight. Now, I've actually got a musical shout out as well. Oh. I'm going to give a shout out to the Blues Brothers soundtrack. Awesome. I've kind of changed my morning ritual.

I used to listen to, I'd pick an album and like for a month or two, I'd get up in the morning, I'd listen to that while I do my routine and it would get me juiced. For a long time, for I don't know what strange reason, it was Graceland by Paul Simon. Okay. That's what I'm saying. It's an odd choice. It was an odd choice. And I just got hooked on that album.

I'd wake up in the morning, I'd play it and it would just put me in a good mood. Yeah. And then I was just ready to hit the day. And I've switched over to the Blues Brothers soundtrack now because that is an awesome album. I just love it. It really is. That is a great album. So I'm with you on that one. Yeah, the Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin tracks are just, I mean, they just put you in a good mood and make you want to dance.

But I don't dance. Okay. All right, man. Still a good choice. And finally, let's just, let's say it again. Rest in peace, Leonard Nimoy. Yeah, you will be missed. You will be extremely missed. It is a very, very sad day. Yeah. All right, man. On that bummer note, let's go put on the Blues Brothers soundtrack and cheer up a little bit.

Will do. Will do. I'll talk to you next week. Talk to you next week. Grumpy Old Geeks is a fan-supported show. If you'd like to help keep the lights on, you can donate to grumpyoldgeeks.com. Ten bucks or more, we'll get you a copy of our official soundtrack provided by The Man Among Us, who you can also 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 98.

Live long and prosper.

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