Stuff You Should Know - What's with this "Internet of Things"?

Episode Date: July 7, 2016

You may have heard about the Internet of Things and not known what the term meant. It's basically a collection of object conected to your life and the internet. We're talking everything from your smart phone to your fitness tracker. Cool stuff, but fraught with privacy issues. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's a lot over today. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerome's to my right, uh, and this is Stuff You Should Know. There's probably some people going, did they replace Jerry? With Jerome? They named Jerome.

Yeah. No. That's just the nickname we have for Jerry. It's an arcane reference to the librarian at the beginning of Ghostbusters whose uncle thought he was St. Jerome. No. Remember? Really?

That's what I've always been referencing. I thought we were on the same page about it. We also call her Jerry's. That's a reference to nothing. Yeah. Great Jerry. Right. That was a great Jerry, Chuck.

Um, Chuck. Yes. Have you ever been on the Internet of Things? Well, you can't really be on the Internet of Things. I don't understand. Explain. Well, the Internet of Things, my friend, is really just a collection of interconnected devices to make your life simpler and less private, pretty much, in front with potential

complications. Yeah. But more convenient, allegedly. There's a lot of people who also say, this is all just a bunch of naval gazing in a lot of ways. Yeah. You know, like, do we really need these apps? I ran across a vape for smoking weed, as they call it, that has an app.

A vaping system for smoking. It's just a little pipe. Marijuana. Right. But it's just a little pipe. And it has an app that goes with it that remotely controls it, the heat settings and stuff. Oh, does it track things like you've smoked? No.

One ounce of weed this month? No, which would be pretty intriguing, I guess. Pretty useless. Yeah. And that's the point. There's a lot of stuff that you can point to and say, this is pretty neat. This thing feeds my cat while I spend 23 hours a day at work. Yeah, that's neat.

It's nice that I can keep this cat alive, that I have no connection with any longer, because I'm at work all the time. But this machine feeds it, because I can control it remotely with an app. Right. But if you have something tracking how much weed you smoke, you're either smoking far too much or not nearly enough. Or you have too much money, is another way to put it too. You know what?

My friend Clay, I don't know if you've met Clay, but he told me something that the way, as far as being concerned about security and privacy rights and things, is what they do is they sell it to you first as convenience, and then before you know it, dot, dot, dot. Clay never finished the sentence. He did. But you know, I don't remember exactly how he finished it. Clay said this in like 1993. Oh yeah?

I think I like Clay. Like way before, like he was probably just talking about, jeez, I don't even know, like a credit card or something. And he was just like, just beware, man. He was like, they sell it to you as a convenience, and before you know it, everyone is doing it that way. Yeah. And it's fraught with complications, was essentially what he was saying.

Yeah, I think that's very prescient, because that's exactly the point that we're at right now. Yeah. And we'll talk a little more, well, a lot more, I'm sure, about security and privacy and all that stuff. But ultimately, it's like you said, the Internet of Things is this, a lot of other people call it the Internet. Like, this is just the next wave of the Internet, this is where the Internet's going.

But the, I guess the best description of it is, it's a series of interconnected machines that sense the environment in a lot of cases, can carry out some sort of function, usually it is a sensing function, and can communicate with central servers, usually in the cloud via the Internet. It's about as simple as that, like that's the Internet of Things. Yeah, like if you think, boy, this all sounds weird, and I don't use stuff like that. If you have anything that has the word smart in front of it, then you're probably using the Internet of Things already.

If you've got a smart phone that connects to a smart thermostat, or a smart smoke detector, or if you were an exercise tracker, that's the Internet of Things. Right, exactly. And there's a lot of obvious steps that are right there on the horizon coming after this, like the idea that your refrigerator will be able to be like, oh, these guys are almost out of cashew milk, I'll contact Amazon and have it delivered in two hours. Yeah. And you're like, I don't drink cashew milk anymore, Fridge.

You stupid Fridge, how many times do I have to abuse you? But that's pretty neat. I mean, I think a lot of this, it's both good and a little creepy, like that'd be cool if I showed up at home one day, and I was out of milk, and it was waiting on my doorstep. I... How about milk? You wouldn't want waiting on your doorstep. Well, cashew milk, it doesn't matter.

Oh, you don't have to refrigerate it? No way. Because it's not milk, it's cashew juice. Yes, it is. That's what they should call it. I don't disagree with you, right? Like I'm sure it is pretty neat, it's pretty cool, and in five years it'll be totally second nature to us, right?

But in my experience, the more mechanized, the more automated, the more convenient, and I just made air quotes, life gets, the more difficult it is to keep up with, the less simple it is, and the more horrific it is when something breaks down. Interesting. And within simplification, you think it becomes more complicated. Yeah, because you rely on machines that can break, and when they break, you're like, I forgot how to order cashew milk. Well, you get that stuff.

So you think we're headed for idiocracy? To an extent, but I think it's more than that. In the short term, I think it's just that it's so much easier to walk to a grocery store and buy cashew milk and walk back home than it is to ensure that your fridge has all of the updated firmware and make sure that it's ordering correctly from Amazon and to make sure Amazon gets there, and you're just relying on all these other components rather than your own two feet and the idea that the people at the store are going to have your cashew milk.

I see that in a way, but I also disagree in a way. Like for instance, I have a few things in my life that I've set to auto order, like air filters, baby formula, stuff that my fridge water filter. Like this stuff gets shipped to me automatically, and it's wonderful because I don't have to think about it at all. So does your fridge order itself, or you just put a timer on Amazon? Yeah, it's on a timer to these, not even Amazon, like the fridge filter company. You can just set it to auto deliver like every 60 days.

So it's nice because I don't have to think about it. The only thing's missing is the camera or the device itself being hooked up telling the company, hey, my air filter is over, or spent. Which would be pretty awesome to tell you the truth. If your air filter could be like, it's actually, we're at 90%, we need to go ahead and order anyone. However, you know what? That's a little, I never really thought about that being a little dicey because you need

a new water filter, trust me. Right. Really? If you get another month out of this one that you're throwing away and you're ordering early, then they can sell another two a year to you. Right, exactly. That's what I assume when they're trusting them. Like when they're like, you have to change your oil every 3,000 miles, or yeah, you

need to change your water filter every three months. You're like, I never change my oil. Yeah, forget that. That's for chumps. That's a scam. Anyway, all right, so that's a little personal overview. The phrase Internet of Things is actually coined, they think in the late nineties by a guy named Kevin Ashton who worked for PNG.

Oh, I'll bet he has a t-shirt that says I coined the term Internet of Things. Well, just so you can invite people to punch him in the face or give him a hug, depending on who you are. Okay. He worked for Procter & Gamble and he had a presentation there at work where he said, you know what we should do? We should put radio frequency ID tags, RFIDs on lipstick in the store and have that hooked up to a machine where we could automatically send that information and say, hey, this store

is running low on lipstick, get a shipment over there. And he coined the term Internet of Things supposedly in that meeting. And apparently though, at this time prior to that, the nineties were a big time for something called ubiquitous computing, which is basically the predecessor to the idea of the Internet of Things where computers would just be integrated into our lives totally and completely. And the Internet of Things is in that vein a little similarly, but from stuff I've read, there's a lot of people who didn't quite fulfill the promise of ubiquitous computing.

This is kind of like life's slightly more convenient now thanks to this. But his original idea, Kevin Ashton's, makes total and complete sense. How many sales do you miss when your lipstick thing is empty until you find out it's empty and then get to refill it? If your lipstick, the last one can be like, hey, I'm the last one here, you guys better send some replacements. It's great. That makes perfect total sense.

And that was ultimately the original basis of the Internet of Things. Just taking dumb things and making them, like you said, smart by giving them the ability to sense their surroundings and communicate that data to a central server where that's analyzed and then the proper people are alerted. Yeah. And here's the thing that I also never considered is they must have discovered that there was a need for that. And the only need I can imagine would be that the employees were so bad at realizing that

they were running out of stock that they would go several days without having lipstick on hand. Right. So they were like, these people can't even do that. Well, what if the automated? Let's say that you have a person whose job it is to restock lipstick, right? And they go one week and there's like five million tubes of orange. So much orange.

They just take some, a handful and throw it away just because they don't want their bosses to feel bad about the orange lipstick that's not being sold. Tubes of orange. Come back, right? Yes. The next week and it's all gone. Yeah. It's sold out.

And then it's erratic like that. You've got an employee you're sending there that's just hit or miss whether you just wasted a bunch of gas in the employee's time rather than being alerted like now you guys can come right before it's too late. Sure. That's the thing that makes the most sense to me. Kevin Ashton, genius. Maybe so.

I meant to look him up, see what he was doing these days. If he was just wearing that T-shirt. Or he might be a professional term coiner. You know. The other one's haven't worked out quite as well. Sit back in the. Fishnet of the future. Yeah.

That was, that kind of caught on a little bit early in the 2000s. Yeah. But then it just, yeah. It went the way the Dodo, which was coined by Kevin Ashton's great-great-great-grandfather. Older brother. I was going to say. Oh, was it? Yeah.

Tommy Ashton. That's been around for a while. It's the Dodo. It's the Dodo. Died. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about a little bit.

What you've got essentially is a step-by-step system that many times starts with a smart phone that's connected to the internet. Then you have other pieces of hardware in your home that are also connected to the internet. And there is most likely an app for that hardware on your smart phone. Right. And then that's usually sent out to the cloud. It's not some guy or some lady sitting in a room. In your guest room.

Yeah, looking at your data. It's to the cloud. You took 8,000 steps today. Just following behind you counting. I lost count. No, they're looking at the data from your wearable. Yeah. But they're just in your guest room.

That become neat. I don't know. No? I mean, it depends on whether they get along with you or if they drink all your cashew milk. Well, Todd drinks all the cashew milk, so. That's why Todd's not wanted. He's being counterproductive.

So then it usually goes to the cloud, which is where we send our data these days, where it's analyzed. And that's a big, that's a big part of the internet of things to Chuck is the cloud. Because that means that you don't have to analyze the data in the little machine, in the little sensor. All it has to do is sense stuff and create that data and then send it to the cloud where you're basically outsourcing all the analysis that takes a lot more computing power. Yeah.

That was a big development that there's such a thing as the cloud now. Yeah. It's the smart into it all. And if you're wondering how big it is right now, it depends on who you ask, but some say between 15 and 25 billion devices already that are connected. And some people say by 2020 or 2025, it could be anywhere from 50 billion to a trillion devices connected depending on how much it catches on, you know, how every day it becomes. But it's headed that way for sure.

I don't think there's any going back from this. No, there's no point. I think they're going to stick a some sort of computing hardware that taps into the internet on everything. Yeah. Everything. Okay. Yeah.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be a smart thermostat. Like they have devices now that you can tag to everyday items to keep up with things. Yeah. And there, let's say cameras that, let's say you have a security system at your house that you can view from your smartphone from anywhere in the world. Yeah. And maybe it automatically calls the police. That's the Internet of Things.

Right. You know? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of great applications for it. And again, like this is just, we're in the nascent period of this. Like the stuff that's like, wow, holy cow, I have a smart doorbell. Right. That's amazing.

It's awesome and it works really well, but there's, you basically can't apply your imagination to predict what's even going to be 15 years into the future as far as the Internet of Things goes. Like just the change in how we deal and interact with the internet and our surroundings is, it's inestimable. Yeah. Who wrote this one? Was this Strickland?

No. This was Bernadette Johnson. Well, she wrote a line in here that I'm just going to read because it really kind of hit home for me. She said, we've essentially given common physical objects, both computing power and senses. Yeah. And that explains it to a T.

Yeah. She did a good job with this. It was a lot of information. Like you could do anything, you can make anything smart that you wanted. You could have a smart can opener. Smart tube ellipstick. Yeah. Exactly.

Or smart tube of toothpaste. Yeah. And you're squeezing the end and you're, how do you get all the toothpaste out? What's your method? Oh, you know, they make a little remover. I can't remember what it's called. Oh, you got a machine? No.

Oh, yeah. I have a smart toothpaste remover. It's like a little, it looks like a, remember those candy lips, the wax lips? Yeah. Sure. It looks like those, but it's plastic. I have some in my pocket right now. Okay.

So pull those out. Yeah. When you put the lid in the lips, you put the tube of toothpaste in the, like the end of it in there and you just kind of tilt it at an angle a little bit and it puts pressure and you just slide it along and it pushes it to the, to the front. Yeah. Huh. I use my toothbrush to do the same thing.

How? Oh, you slide the toothbrush along the. I just set the toothpaste tube on the sink and just, you know, use it as a, a flattener squeezer. Squeezer. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah.

I never realized you just hacked your toothbrush. What do you, uh, what do you pay for something like what you got? Like a dollar? I mean, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing, nothing too much.

Well, boy, I guess I got away with it. See now, if, if I, if there was some sort of computing chip on this thing that calculated how much toothpaste was left and sent that information to my app, that would be a smart toothpaste squeezer. Right. That's it. I'm going to go home and open the mailbox and there's new toothpaste. Yeah.

Like I didn't even know I was out because I haven't been using my, my lippy device. Right. You know? Yeah. I forgot to brush my teeth for three weeks. Let's take a break. Yeah. It's getting a little silly.

Yeah. And you go brush your teeth and we'll meet back in here and, uh, how long does it take you to brush your teeth? Like seven, eight seconds? Great. We'll be back here in eight seconds. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to

look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology?

It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, seven or eight seconds is not nearly enough time. Aren't you just... No, that's washing your hands. You're supposed to do the alphabet twice.

For brushing your teeth? Either for washing your hands or brushing your teeth. You know, I think you're supposed to do like three minutes for brushing your teeth. I've got the, we won't name check here in Buzz Market, but I've got a mechanical toothbrush. Mechanical? And an electric toothbrush, and it beeps, and you divide your mouth up into four zones. Oh yeah, I think I have the same one. Top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, and it just beeps and...

Mine doesn't beep. It vibrates. Oh, really? It's already vibrating though. How can you tell the difference? It changes its vibration. Really? Yeah.

I guess maybe it's a pause in the vibration now that I think about it. I just assumed it was a vibration. Yeah. Same deal though. Yeah. And they, again, they're smart toothbrushes that can keep up with how much you brush your teeth and that kind of stuff. Are they really?

Yeah. Huh. They're Wi-Fi connected toothbrushes that connect to an app. You know, my brother-in-law, the Marine Corps General, he, I used to laugh at him because I was in his bathroom once and opened the drawer and he had a log of his razor and shaving log. Wow. And like how many times he'd use the razor.

Yeah. And it's basically pre-smart internet of things, smart razor, because I'm sure they have those now, to alert you like when you should change your razor blades. I haven't heard of that one, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was. I just thought it was very funny. I mean, I said a lot about who he was. Oh yeah. You know?

And no surprise that he's the Marine Corps General if he's keeping up with stuff like that. I can see him like, I met him, he's a great guy, just sitting at the edge of the bed right before bedtime, petting his cat 50 times, no more, no less, and then putting it in the foot locker at the end of the bed for the night and like tucking himself in. Yeah. He's the one that turned me on to being sitting down too. Oh yeah.

A great debt to him. Nice. Heads off. Is he coming to our DC show again? No, man. They're transferred overseas for the first time ever. Are they coming to our UK shows? No, not that overseas.

Are they in the Azores? I'm not allowed to say where he's going. Okay. That's cool. I'm with you. Top secret, huh? I can tell you off the air. See those blinks?

Yeah. That says, I see what you're saying. It probably doesn't matter. I'm just respecting his privacy. That's cool. By telling everyone that he taught me to peace sitting down. You really are starting that national combo, aren't you? I just think it's important, you know, you need to be talking about it.

No mistakes is the motto, the tagline. No drips, no runs, no errors. Nice. Did we just take a break and we came back with this garbage? Yeah. Maybe we should start over again. No. We're all right.

We'll get that up to Jerry. All right. Well, let's talk about the tech. How about that? Yeah. Telemetry. Nothing new. No, apparently this says, and again, the whole basis of the Internet of Things is what's

called machine to machine communication. Yeah. M to M. Right. You have like your smart lipstick just sitting there sensing that it's the last tube. It can sense all day long and it's still a dumb stick of lipstick unless it can communicate that data to the people who need to know that stuff. And they do that through machine to machine communication.

And like you're saying, telemetry was the original version of that, which apparently dates back to 1912. Yeah. When it comes from the Greek, tele means remote and metron means measure. And that's where you're basically in a remote area, you would measure something and then send that back then, telephone line. Right. Like an Arctic station or something set up to watch animals like deep in the jungle

or something. It's like there's a wildebeest. Oh my God. There's a wildebeest. Yeah. That was early telemetry. And that's essentially just an extension of what we're doing now. Yeah.

Or now it's an extension of from then. Well, we've built upon that. I mean, think like the first dial up stuff that was, I would guess probably telemetry, you know, the series of like the, and all that. I mean, you're sending signals from one machine to another saying, let me online. Yeah. What's your problem? Yeah.

Why are you so slow? And what's allowed the Internet of Things to take root very simply, it gets more complicated, but the invention of the World Wide Web by Mr. Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. That's off, man. Then the ubiquitousness, is that a word? Ubiquity? Ubiquitousness. Ubiquitousness of Wi-Fi.

Although, yeah, I think ubiquity is, yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Wi-Fi. I did the porcupig thing where I just skip it. The widespread nature of Wi-Fi all of a sudden where you don't have to be physically connected to something. That really advanced things.

That's a big one. High speed. And then, like we already said, the cloud. Yeah. I think the cloud is the thing that really kind of allows it more than anything else. It's just, if you had to have that kind of computing power right there in the sensor, then it just would be very limiting. You couldn't put it on just anything, and it would be a lot more expensive too.

These things that they're adding to normal inanimate objects, to make them smart, are very cheap to produce. They just need a few components. They need computing hardware, they need sensors, they need communication hardware, and then they need some sort of power source, which you can get that from the machine itself that you plug in. Right. So, like if it's a smart coffee maker, it can draw power from the plug that the coffee

maker runs off of. And then it needs internet access, which, if you have a smart coffee maker, but you don't have internet at your house, you made a poor decision in your coffee maker purchase. Yeah. Like, pretty much everything comes with internet access at this point, right? In the western world, for sure. The other thing we've kind of been talking about is your own devices in your home. But it just, you don't have to be just hooked up to things that you own.

You can hook up to other system devices, like, let's say your town has devices that monitor traffic conditions. You can tap into that. I guess that's what Waze is, right? Or is that all self-reported? I looked up and it seems to be all self-reported, but there's something called Waze Citizen or something like that, and it appears to be Waze trying to get smart cities to let them tap into their information.

Like traffic cams and stuff like that? Yeah. And finally, that's already a thing. Like if you just leave your phone open or like the Bluetooth on, if you're driving through a smart city with traffic sensors, it basically uses your phone's information while you're in traffic as real-time traffic information, because your phone has something like an accelerometer in it, so it knows how fast you're moving at any given point. And if it's giving that information to just a panel on the side of the street, that panel

can put all that info together and be like, oh, Peach Street's super backed up right now, and then if Waze can get their hands on that information, they can send that out to their users. But for right now, Waze, as far as I know, it's a social app, so it relies on its users to update conditions, which by the way, Waze I think might be the best app of the 21st century so far. I didn't start using it. I had it on my phone for a while, but I never used it, but have a little bit recently.

And I don't interact with it much. I'll just set it to tell me where to go. Like I don't report accidents and things. Oh, you should. Does that mean I'm a bad user? I mean, you're using the efforts of other people without contributing. I mean, the point is, is for everybody to contribute, it makes it more robust, but it's not like they're going to show up at your house.

Like safely. You pull over on the highway and you've heard an accident. That's probably the one big thing about Waze is that like you're not supposed to be using it in that situation. If you're the driver, you're supposed to be the passenger. But they're also kind of telling you to, you know? Well, I mean, there's a thing that when it comes up or when you try to start, it'll say like, are you a passenger?

And they just assume that you're going to just be truthful about that. Yeah. It's like the websites that say like, tell us you're 21 by clicking here. Right, exactly. And then welcome to the party. Yeah, and a 20 year old's like, no, shoot. Yeah. Click on this thing.

So close. Two weeks. I'll be back in two weeks. The other thing I was wondering too, like what if the lipstick as an example, what if they, that's open to where you can look at your app and say like, well, no, this store's out of lipstick. Oh, that'd be cool. You know?

Yeah. I said I haven't a call and talked to a dumb person. I know it's awful. I'm waiting for them to go look with their eyes. Well, but, you know, I get it though, because nowadays you call and say, Hey, I want to check and see if you have something in stock. And you usually met with, all right, yeah, hold on and not like, sure, I'd be happy to go check right for you, sir.

They're like, oh man, I can't wait to get outsourced to a robot. Right. But then you get to the store and they don't have it in stock. You're like, I called and asked someone and they're like, who'd you talk to? There's no one by their name. It works. And he's like, got covered in his name tag with his hand. And Chuck, speaking of smart cities, you know, traffic info is a big one.

Sure. So is, um, smart traffic lights, which I wish these had been around starting when I was 16. Yeah. Because there is, there are a few things to me that are more of a waste of time than sitting in a traffic light when there's no traffic going through. Yeah. Decatur, where near while it was famous for its lights not being timed or tripped.

Or whatever. And it's horrible. Yeah. Yeah. Decatur does have really long lights and yeah, they don't even have the, we found out it's either a metal detector or a weight sensor that where there's like the lines that where they obviously cut out the, the, um, the hard top in front of you, in front of the light. If you don't even have that, that's a problem.

But even those ones that have sensors don't always like to it immediately, this should be like, it should be a lot smarter than that. And that's part of what's coming. You sit there revving your engine. You're that guy at the stoplight. You know, Decatur's motto when you drive in, it says, Decatur, what's your hurry? Really? No.

Oh, I could kind of see it actually. Slow down. Decatur. What's with all the baby strollers? Could be another one. Um. Off-road baby strollers. What?

They have those big off-road like jogging baby strollers with the huge tires and all that. Yeah. But that's. You live in Decatur? Uh, well no. I don't really go off-road, but that's because the sidewalks in my neighborhood are awful. It's off-road. They're, they suck.

Yeah, it is off-road. Might as well be. Like tree roots growing up everywhere? That kind of thing? Yeah. They're like, oh, this tree's never going to grow. Let's put a sidewalk up right next to it. Right.

Um, while you're talking about smart cities, the other cool thing potentially that they could do, they might actually be doing this is infrastructure, like embedding sensors into sidewalks, well, that's a good example, like a sidewalk that becomes cracked or broken or a bridge that becomes weak in one point. They can send a signal and say, hey, maybe you should come check out this bridge. And then eventually they will send a signal to the robot sidewalk crew who will come out and repair this sidewalk and everything will look perfect all the time, thanks to the robots. Right.

But there's 40 robots and like 30 of them are just standing around and 10 of them are there. And where did they learn to smoke cigarettes? Yeah. This seems weird. Um. I used to get so rubbed at cigarette breaks because I didn't smoke. Oh, yeah.

And I was always like, you know, I'm just going to go stand outside and the boss will be like, you can't do that. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, you could take a break, but cigarette breaks weren't even real breaks. Yeah. I'm just like, I need to smoke. Yeah.

But you can never go, you know, I'm just going to stand outside for five minutes. Right. Like you have to be killing yourself to make that a loud. Yeah. No, that dawned on me when I was a smoker too. But that's when I was young and like, uh, you know, I was more angry back then. About justice. Yeah.

So again, we can sit here basically all day and talk about, you know, devices and applications for this kind of thing. Sure. But there's some hurdles that are coming up that need to be addressed, um, pretty soon. And we'll talk about those right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. This episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikala and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too.

There's a Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuckers, we're back. Hurdles. So right now, there's some immediate hurdles, including the idea that a lot of smart technology operates on using totally different languages, different protocols, different everything. So that if you have a house full of different smart gadgets, you probably have an app for every single one of them rather than one integrated app.

And it's not a hurdle like you can have that many apps, but the idea of it being seamlessly integrated into just one part of your phone would be great. And if they could talk to one another without you having to control it, like the light sensor on your light shade notices that the sun's starting to go down, so it opens your blinds a little bit. And when that happens, your smart cantaloupe slicer knows that you like a slice of cantaloupe before dinner, so it slices up the cantaloupe and they're all talking to one another. So it's not like everything's on a timer and things happen at once.

It's happening because one thing is sensing this and it's relaying that information to the other devices in your houses as well. That's not happening right now. Yeah. What I need is a, I need between 7 and 9 a.m. I need my toilet to flush about every eight minutes. Oh yeah? Man, alive.

That'd be my smart house. Or as soon as the coffee starts brewing, seven minutes later, the toilet flushes. That happens to you. Coffee's good for that. It's great for that. But that's another thing that's coming very soon too, smart toilets. I can tell you like, you got a lot of billy rubens in here. Yeah.

What's up with that? That's what it'll say. What's up with that? So basically what you're talking about is systems that aren't integrated because there's a bunch of different companies with all their own devices. But there are companies trying to come together to join up with open source platforms and one of them is created by Qualcomm called the All Scene Alliance, which is like it sounds something like from a future horror movie.

Yeah. That sounds really creepy. The All Scene Alliance. Right. Or Newspeak. Like we might as well just say like, we want a camera in every room of your home. So we can all just talk to each other and make your life simpler. Just relax, lay back.

People's home kit, they always make it sound cute and not creepy when it's probably creepier than the All Scene Alliance. Yeah. A bunch of people have one. Google has them. Samsung. There's one called Everything that's Missing a Couple Vowels. Wink is a big one.

I've never heard of Wink. It's a big one right now. Yeah. It controls some stuff like I think Phillips Lights and it works with Nest maybe or something like that. It does like two things. So it's like cutting edge right now. But as the author of this article, Bernadette Johnson puts out, none are all encompassing.

Which I saw that and I was like, Mitch Heberg would have liked that sentence. None are all encompassing. Yeah. He said he was like trying new words and rather than like totally, he said he was using totally too much. They'd be like, Mitch, do you like s'mores and be like all encompassingly. So another hurdle that we are already getting around was back in the 90s, we started to realize we were running out of IP addresses.

The standard IP address was the, well, it still is in some ways the IPv4. Yes. IPv4. And in the 90s, they got smart. It wasn't like the Y2K bug where they're like, oh my gosh, things are going to be different in a month. But they got on this a while ago and created the IPv6 and started basically created potentially, what's the number?

An undecillion number at 340 undecillion addresses. So many. That is one with 36 zeros behind it and enough to give IP addresses to everyone on the planet times 10 to the 28th power. So basically they said, we don't want to run out ever again. Well, the funny thing is Chuck is in 1981 when they came up with the IPv4, that came up with 4.295 billion possible addresses. They were like, no way.

Yeah. They're like, that's, we're done. And then what? Within like 30, 30 years, 35 years, they started to really run out and apparently there was a prediction that in 2015 we were going to straight up run out of IPv4 internet addresses or IP addresses. And apparently that was a cliff we avoided obviously because we're still making things that have their own IP addresses.

Oh, I thought they did run out. No, they used different things to mitigate it, including this network address translation really kind of opened things up. And that's where a server identifies a network as a single IP address and then leaves it to the local network to decide where the information that's supposed to be going to one computer on the network goes. Right. See what I'm saying?

But to the server, to the rest of the internet, that whole network, which can be a ton of computers, is just one IP address. So you just reduced it by that many computers that are on that local network. Gotcha. That was a big one. But then also building new things on the IPv6 platform has helped mitigate it a little bit too. It was a cliff that we came very close to but avoided going over.

Well, it doesn't matter now because IPv6 is the new way forward. It is, but there's a lot of stuff still in use that's plenty good for the next couple years. Yeah. That have IPv4 addresses that still need to like, they're like, me too. Well, that doesn't matter. They're compatible now. Well, they're working to make them compatible, I think.

They're already a long way down that road. They're using both seamlessly pretty much. Okay. Cool. Well, there's a great wire. Well, I think so. There's a great wired article about it and they basically said, at first, they weren't entirely compatible.

You had to have some sort of layer in between to make them basically be friends. Okay. And they're still working on it. It's not like finished. But it said so far, the transition has been pretty seamless like you're using, you're interacting with IPv6 right now. You don't even know it. Yeah, I would assume like, if you have something that was made in the last couple years, it's

probably IPv6. Yeah. That's what I would guess. Sure. So that's pretty neat. Undecillion. Didn't even know that was a thing. I didn't either.

I had to look it up. It's like, what the heck is that? A typo? Right. On. So, I don't think we can put it off any longer, Chuck. There's a lot of security and privacy concerns that crop up from the, just the presence of the internet of things, right?

If you have a bunch of sensors in your house collecting data and everything from, you know, how many times you toss and turn in your sleep to, you know, how many minutes the toilet needs to be flushed in intervals to, whether you're moving around your house or not, whether you're home, there's a lot of sensors in, even now, the standard home in the United States that can, that are collecting data, and there's not a lot of regulation on what happens to that data, who has access to that data, how safe that data has to be. And it's just wide open for government surveillance, hackers, targeted ads. Yeah.

I mean, if you're paranoid about government stuff, then this probably worries you. Hacking is a whole different can of worms. Right. Like everyone should worry about that. Yeah, I feel like everyone should worry about government surveillance as well. Big time. Some people, you know, think that's bunk, but government surveillance. Well, some people, yeah, sure.

They're fools. Maybe so. People are utter fools. And the world is full of fools. That's crazy to me. Yeah. How could you not, I mean, like there's, there's testimony from the head of the NSA. There was Snowden releasing the prison files, like how could anyone just say, no, that's

not the case anymore? Well, what you're saying is everyone should be as up on this as I am. And that's, that's the foolish statement. If you went and asked 100 people on the street today, I bet 50 of them would say, oh, that's just, that's just conspiracy stuff that government wouldn't do that. I see. I see. I see.

I thought you were saying like people knew and, and they were saying like, no, this isn't a real thing. No, I think I got you. Most people probably have their head in the sand about this stuff. Okay. Okay. I see what you mean. Yeah.

I still think they're foolish. Well, sure. And, and sad because there's the one thing that would press security into the internet of things. Yeah. There isn't any right now. There's virtually none. Well, I mean, it's all got to be self installed, not by the person, but by the company.

Right. Like, Hey, we know you're probably worried. So we've done this, this and this. Right. Right. And the way that that will happen is if people say, ooh, that brand's not very secure. I'm going to go to their competitor, which is super secure. Or if they get sued.

Sure. And that will cause brands to, which are self regulating right now as far as security goes to become more secure. But if people are unaware of it or just don't think that kind of stuff is going on, then there's not going to be any call for that. And they'll be able to continue to put sensors, sensors in our home, devices in our home. Yeah. That can eavesdrop on us, that can detect all sorts of different things about us without

any thought for security whatsoever. Yeah. And we have a great example in here and it's not just the internet of things. This is already happening with target, this dad in 2012 got mad because his teenage daughter was getting baby ads targeted toward her. And he was like, why are you trying to get my teenage daughter to have a baby? Why do you keep sending her this stuff? And he found out she was pregnant and was like, he actually apologized to them.

And I still think like he had a beef because what I thought is they were just using her search information to target ads, which is what goes on all the time. But she wasn't. What Target does is they have every customer, every time you shop at Target with a credit card, you have a guest ID number that says, oh, here's that credit card from Josh Clark again. Sure. He's back in my store.

He's bought. So let's target ads at him simply by shopping there without using cash, which I didn't know that happened. Well, yeah. And it used to be you had to sign up for like a rewards program, like a Kroger card or something. Yeah, that I understand. This is the same thing without you opting into it. Right.

Yeah. It's just tracking your credit card. And I think it's New York Times or Red One article where eventually they quit talking to the New York Times, but he got a little information at first. And he said he talked to a Target employee that said, here's a hypothetical example. Let's say there's a girl in Atlanta shopping here. She buys cocoa butter lotion. She buys a big purse that could be a diaper bag.

She buys magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. They might just surmise, hey, I bet this lady's pregnant, but she's going to have a boy because she's going to buy that bright blue rug. He's going to smell like cocoa butter. And yeah. And so, you know what? I bet she's due in August, too, determined to buy what she's purchasing. Right.

So let's start bombarding her with ads. And that just seems a little creepy. If you're not opting in with a, I mean, it's a little creepy anyway, if you get like the shopper's card. Yeah. But you're saying like, sure, I'll take a little bit of a discount in exchange for you keeping track of my spending habits. Or you willingly check the box terms and conditions without reading it.

Yes. I think terms and conditions should be a whole other episode, man. Yeah. There's a documentary about that. Yeah. That's, I think it's called Terms and Conditions Apply. Nice. And it's maybe, but boy, it is creepy.

Yeah. Yeah. There's nobody ever reads that stuff. No way. And they make it that long so that no one would, but it's, yeah. And there's actually, and we've read this Guardian article, did you check that out that I sent you? Yeah.

In the Guardian article, there's a mention of Samsung, which had, they had terms and conditions for their TV, I think it was in 2014 or 15 that it came out. And it says, in the terms and conditions for the TV that you bring into your home, please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition, which means your TV is listening to you and transmitting your conversations or at the very least keywords from your conversations in your voice to somebody else who can figure out how to target ads, who can put you on a government watch list,

who can do anything, which means that you're talking normally in your own home and your TV's eavesdropping on you. Yeah. And you, you think, you say that's okay, not you, but one says, no, that's fine because I don't want to touch my remote. I just want to say turn up volume, right, you know, yeah, I can't be bothered to use my finger. Find Nicholas Cage movies, comma, bad ones.

He doesn't make bad movies, dude, getting used to love Andy Sandberg's Nick Cage on SNL. I don't think I ever saw that one. So funny. I like Nick Cage's tiny Elvis. Oh yeah. That was good. It was so bizarre.

He's, I love Nicholas Cage because he's on a bash. He will do some really great, smaller movies where you're like, man, this dude is an amazing actor. Right. And then he'll do the worst garbage you can imagine for money. Yes. And just like, yeah, I want to buy eight new motorcycles. But I think he's a great example of what a good director can do with an actor if they

know what they're doing with them. Sure. Because he does virtually the same thing in all, all movies. It's just how much more he's doing it and how much he's reigned in or how good the script is. Yeah. He comes in and he's like, you want 20% Cage or 80% Cage? I mean, you're right.

He has made some great movies, but man, he has made some bad ones. Wow. Oh, wait, hold on. Yeah. Let's get back on track. There's one other thing too. There's a big debate going on right now, Chuck, about whether your phone is eavesdropping on you for at the very least targeted ads.

Again, if you think that your phone is not eavesdropping on you, you're, you're diluting yourself. Yeah. Your phone, your TV, your laptop, everything around you that is connected to the internet and has a microphone and or a video camera is eavesdropping on you. And you don't care, right? I do care, but I also have a feeling like, but you have a smart phone. What can I do?

I know. Well, you cannot have a smartphone. That's part of it. And there's, there's a, that's a big thing. There's a, there's a trade-off. It's like, okay, I want to be able to read Twitter every 30 seconds and just be like, I was boring. And then do it again 30 seconds later and I'm willing to trade that ability for the

idea that, yeah, I'm being listened to in the, in the gamble that, well, I mean, I guess I'm not saying anything that important, you know, but I mean, like that's, that's, that's wrong. Like that's wrong. Well, or the people say like, if you don't have nothing to hide, then you know, who cares? That's a fallacy. That's a logical fallacy. A lot of the people collecting that data bank on, it has, it still has a, it still has

a chilling effect on, on society at large. And if they ever do want something on you, brother, they got it. Yep. And sister. Man, I'm sorry. I'm worked up. I was good. I, well, dropping in.

Going to get on my smartphone and check Twitter. I'm going to, I'm going to be cool. No. No. Then that light didn't change green. It all went south. It's a dumb traffic light. All right.

So we talked a little bit about hackers. And we're not just talking about stealing your information or tapping into your bank. What about if you, if you're, if your grandmother who is a shut in has this great new smart health system that is hooked up to her body and alerts her doctor. If something's wrong, she's low on meds. These are all great things. But what if someone can hack into that and tell, you know, and hack into grandma systems where it doesn't alert, then her life is literally at stake.

Yeah. Or what if you have, and this has happened too. What if you go into your baby's room and your baby monitor, you hear some guy's voice on the other end yelling and screaming curse words. Yeah. In Russian, I think that's happened too. Yeah. Your baby's just like, what's this guy's problem?

Yeah. He usually tells me nice stories. Where's Sergei? I want Sergei back. It's all really creepy, man. You know, uh, one of my heroes, Charles C. Mann, who wrote 1491 and 1493. I never heard of it. He also, he wrote an article in Vanity Fair called, Look Out.

He's got a phone. And it was all about the ways that the internet of things could be hacked to like basically really threaten somebody. Like if you've got a smart pacemaker or smart insulin pump, those things could be hacked. Yeah. You know, and that's a, that's something that we're going to have to deal with or we're dealing with now as it stands. Well one of the things that could help in what should be going on is these devices at

the very least should be giving you options on how much data they get their hands on, how it's stored, uh, and what the expiration date on that is. Like if you quit using this device, they still have your information. Right. Um, or it might still be collecting it too. Yeah. Absolutely. Or, uh, one I didn't think about when these systems are no longer supported, like, you

know, the, the company shuts down or something, it needs to have a suicide, uh, measure programmed end to where like it kills itself after it's not supported anymore. Yeah. And it should do it gruesomely. What about economics? Well, as you can imagine, if there's hundreds of billions of devices on the horizon being connected, it's going to have a pretty big economic impact and they're talking about something on the order of what was it, $4.3 trillion in value by 2024, up from 900 billion.

Yeah. It seems low to me. Yeah. You know, like think about just in cashew milk alone. Sure. It's a trillion dollars. Yeah. Well, it's also costing some companies, um, how so?

Well if you've heard of square, yeah, you probably pay for a lot of things with square these days. It's a great thing because it allows a small business, previously there was only one way to make credit card transactions. You had to get a fairly expensive system that, uh, or a cash register that, uh, you know, made it all possible. Right. And you had to, they kind of had you over a barrel a little bit, then square came along

and said, no, you know what? You don't need that stuff. Let's democratize this. Yeah. We have the internet now. Here's some competition. All you need is this little thing to plug in to your tablet and you can swipe it right there in the cab or in the place of business and avoid the middlemen and use, uh, or use

PayPal and basically skirt these companies that have kind of been ripping you off. Right. Um, as a business and then that business passes the cost on to you as a customer. So in a way, or they're like, we don't take that credit card, their fees are too high or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, but you're right.

It's the democratization, which is good. I mean, it's great. It's opened up a lot of, a lot. It's taken Etsy into the real world. That's right. You know? Isn't that awesome? Oh yeah.

Um, there's also worry that it could cost jobs. Like you said, what if the lipstick, um, stalker gets fired, um, cause he threw away all those orange tubes of lipstick and he deserves it. He didn't do his job. Good enough. Um, well that's it. Like this, I think this article kind of just kind of glosses over that issue and it's a big issue in and of itself.

I don't know, but I don't think it glossed over it so much as there's a, a school of thought, a very like prominent school of thought that says, no, that's not what happens. Yeah. It, people get different jobs and learn new things. And the one example they used in here, which I think makes sense is, um, ATMs, ATMs popped up everywhere and people like, oh, well, there's not going to be any more bank tellers. No one needs to go to a bank. And well, yeah, but they actually increased in number, right?

Yeah, they did. Um, and they think part of that reason is because banks could open more branches because they didn't need to staff it with 14 bankers. They just needed a couple. Yeah, but more branches meant ultimately more tellers. Yes. Just not in one place. The thing is, is I, I would be very curious to know whether that was an anomaly like

that. You know, if, if typically in an industry that gets replaced by a machine, a good one, like an ATM works pretty well, um, if they, if they actually, if jobs actually go up or if that was just like one of the very rare examples of it. Well, I think it's, it depends on your industry. If you're one of the people that did that thing, you're like, well, I lost my job to a robot. If you build the robots, you're like, I got a job because I'm now building robots.

Right. And again, I think we talked about this. We don't remember in what episode, but if you are getting rid of an industry and, and putting a lot of people out of their, their employment careers, um, I'm not against automating stuff like that, but I think part and parcel with that is to figure out a way to take those out of work people and train them to go into new fields or just to, to, um, build the stuff that's that took, took over their jobs or whatever. Yeah.

You can't just be like, best of luck. We figured out a way for a robot to do what you're doing. Right. Go, uh, go get hooked on Oxycontin and go die. Wait, we got a, what was that? Cause we got a great listener mail about that. Yeah. That's, that's what I was talking about.

It was a certain amount of people from this industry. It was a Kentucky coal, coal industry. Something like that. We're then cross trained to do computer work. Right. Uh, it wasn't even that long ago, but I can't remember exactly what it was. Cause that's exactly what I mean. Like that's number one, that's a role of government in my opinion.

Yeah. It's one of the, it's one of the clear things that you can look at and be like, oh yeah, that's what government's for. They're supposed to invest in infrastructure and education to, to, um, keep people employed. Yeah. So that everyone can earn a decent wage. That's, that's my soap box. This has basically been one long soap box, hasn't it?

I don't think so. Well, that's the internet of things. There's literally nothing more to speak about it. Okay. No more. Uh, I'm just kidding. And if you want to know more about that kind of stuff, you should go check out our compadre John Strickland's podcast, tech stuff, I guarantee he talks about the internet of things every

other week. Yeah. I would imagine, um, if you want to know more about it in the meantime, you can look up this article on how stuff works.com by typing internet of things on the search bar. And since I said, uh, things, it's time for listener mail. No, sir. Oh yeah. We already did listener mail.

Okay. But we have a bonus because now we're going to finish up with part two of, uh, administrative details. Okay. All right. Again, if you're new to the show, this is when we thank people for the nice things they send us. And it goes a little something like this.

Uh, PETA, the organization, people for the ethical treatment of animals, they send us a cat care package after our cat podcast. Oh yeah. And I think probably partially because of my soapbox on declawing and outdoor cats. They're like this guy. Yeah. Send them some cat stuff. Get them some cat stuff stat.

So thanks for that. Put a cat in a box and mail it to them. That's PETA's way. Uh, we got a, um, postcard from China from Mary Kate Muller. Oh wow. Thanks a lot for that, Mary Kate. We appreciate it. Beautiful.

Here's a piece of black bow sweets. Send us some candied pecans. Dude. Those are dangerous. Oh yeah? They did not last long in the Clark House? No. Almost didn't make it on the right home.

I had to be like, I, yeah, man, they are good. Uh, Aaron Supple sent us the bottle of Sonoma County declawing companies west of Kentucky bourbon number one. I haven't tried it yet. Is it good? I have not tried it yet either, but I'm very much looking forward to it. So thanks a lot, Aaron. Uh, and speaking of whiskey, uh, 33 books, Dave from 33 books sent us a whiskey tasting

set. Yeah. Which is a little, uh, I think imported from Ireland even, a little whiskey tasting glass. Yep. And book for notes. Uh-huh. And a pen even. Yeah.

It's everything you need. Everything you need to taste whiskey. So thanks, Dave, for that. Um, we got a postcard from Caitlin and her fiance from the Mayo Clinic. Remember the Helen branch, um, mentioned, and I think like, uh, I think some unsolved mysteries. Weird. The episode on unsolved mysteries.

It's a long time ago. Yeah. But we, uh, got a Mayo Clinic postcard. Huh. Yeah. Why not? Uh, Robin and Aaron sent us some, uh, coasters, some Detroit coasters. Cause they, they know, even though we poke fun of Detroit, we secretly love Detroit.

Yeah. Thanks a lot. So thanks, Robin and Aaron for that. So we got a pork singleton over at Rudolph food, sent us a ton of pork rinds and a bunch of great gear to go with it. So we can wear a camouflage hat while we eat our pork rinds. Right. As it should be.

Sam Meckling of Jepsen's Mallort of Chicago. Oh yeah. Sent us bottles of Mallort. And if you've never heard of Mallort, it is, uh, Chicago's own special, uh, liqueur. It's something. It is. It's, um, known for its, uh, harsh after taste. I guess, I guess that's a good way to put it.

Yeah. The great thing about Mallort though is they know the deal. They're not like, this is so delicious. You're just never going to have anything better in your mouth here. You seem to be having a good day. Let's change that. Um, yeah. But Mallort actually have gotten, this is the best thing you can say, I've gotten used

to it. Nice. Yeah. It's an interesting taste. You should try it out. Well, thanks to the dudes who sent us that. We appreciate it. Yeah.

Thank you, Sam. Um, speaking of booze, uh, I think we mentioned it the other day, but also again, thank you to the people at spring 44, which is a Colorado distillery for the old Tom Jinn that they sent us. Yeah. That was just beautiful. Yeah. And actually just ran out.

Yeah. So. Just that far. Just throwing that out there. Uh, Badger body, uh, body products, um, a competitor of my own wife, even. That was Dave who sent us those day from Badger body products, uh, from out of New Hampshire, sent us shaving stuff and sunscreen and beard oils and such. Yep.

That was Dave Morel. He was the beer guy. Yeah. He worked at Sweetwater. Yeah. And he used to bring a sweetwater. He's a great guy. And like all beer guys, he ended up in New Hampshire.

Yeah. Um, but Emily actually, uh, my own wife, who has her natural body, uh, product company went and she usually poo-poo's because people say they're natural and aren't. Right. She went, Oh, she's like badgers. Good. Good. Actually.

Yeah. She's like, they make good stuff. Yeah. So I use their beard oil now. Well, thanks a lot, Dave. Yeah. I've been using the, um, the, uh, they have a bug repellent sunblock that works, smells awesome.

Yeah. It smells like citronella. It works like a charm. So thank you for that. Uh, pie lady and son. Oh yeah. Out of New York. They sent us pie.

Dude. And they were just getting started with their shipping program and pie lady and son, I have to tell you, it worked great. They showed up fresh and delicious. Yep. But delicious. I mean, really, really delicious. Yeah.

Thanks a lot for that, guys. Yeah. So you can support them as well. Pie lady and son out of New York city. Um, Zach Detmore sent us some beautiful cherry walnut and maple wood boxes. Those are great. Yeah. I'm cute.

Got mine on my desk. Yep. Same here. Uh, Matt Dent, uh, sent us his, he's a, he's a comic strip guy who's created the willy who comics. Uh-huh. Been around for 25 years. I know.

I saw that book. It's amazing. Yeah. He sent us a big collection. Um, Chuck, somebody, uh, made us a longboard that I've got. Yeah. Stuff you should know longboard. It's amazing.

I don't know. We lost the correspondence. We don't know who made it. Yeah. So if you made it, send that in and we'll read your name. Yeah. We'll re thank you, but thank you very much for the longboard. Our buttery, uh, butter, our buddy Tyler Murphy.

He's our butter. He is our butter, our bread and butter, uh, from South Dakota, sent us, um, instant empire shirts and records. Yeah. Uh, which is really cool. Thanks, Tyler. And I just realized that Tyler's emails have been going to my spam folder, so I emailed them today because I never look in there and I happen to for something else.

Uh-huh. I saw a bunch of emails from Tyler. I'm like, dude, so sorry. Yeah. Um, Hillary, uh, Lozar and Mike, dude, I don't know if Mike's a Lozar or not. Who knows. But, uh, Hillary and Mike have been with us for years. They are also from the Dakotas and travel to see our shows in Seattle and they're wonderful

people. Hillary's a teacher and they, as always, sent us delicious, delicious Flathead Lake cheese. Dude, that is the best cheese on the planet. I think you've got better cheese than Flathead Lake. Send it in. Let us be the judge. Exactly. Uh, Rachel Stone, who is an artist from Australia's East Coast, she has a site called landofwonderful.com.

She sent us a lovely handmade card and letter. So thanks a lot, Rachel. Yeah. Uh, and then finally, you got any more? Nope. Um, Emily and the crew at Kickapoo Joy Drinks. Oh yeah. Uh, they have their Kickapoo Joy Juice and they're Atlanta based and they make all natural

drinks, juice, juices and sodas and things. Kickapoo juice. And, uh, they sent us a box and that was super nice. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks to everybody who sent us stuff. We appreciate it every time. So thank you. Uh, if you want to hang out with us on social media, you can go to SYSK podcast on Instagram

and Twitter, you can go to facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable

happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's to the great American settlers. The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills. Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say.

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