Artwork for 03: You just gotta hump it!

03: You just gotta hump it!

1 h 1 min

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Summary

Jason DeFillippo and Brian Schulmeister discuss Roger Ebert’s death, changing habits around phones and music, and ways to earn money from creative work. Guests demonstrate Flip Book It and discuss their Kickstarter campaign. The hosts also examine Facebook notifications, The Huffington Post, and the television shows of Bill Maher and Jon Stewart.

  • The hosts reflect on Roger Ebert’s embrace of the internet.
  • They discuss how mobile devices affect attention, memory, and listening to albums.
  • Google Reader’s planned shutdown prompts a discussion of paid and free services.
  • They consider the costs of building apps and their experiences with online payments.
  • They discuss building an audience and earning money through writing and podcasting.
  • Wendy Marvel and Mark demonstrate Flip Book It and discuss their Kickstarter experience.
  • The hosts question Facebook notification behavior and a possible change to privacy settings after app updates.
  • Brian criticizes The Huffington Post’s celebrity coverage, while Jason recalls an encounter with Arianna Huffington.
  • The hosts disagree about Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, and their television shows.

Key moments

  1. Phones, attention, and music

    The hosts discuss constant connectivity, forgotten phone numbers, and changes in how people experience albums.

  2. Google Reader and paid services

    Google Reader’s planned shutdown leads to a discussion of subscriptions, freemium services, and online payments.

  3. Building an audience

    The hosts discuss blogging, podcasting, advertising, and earning money from a personal project.

  4. Flip Book It demonstration

    Wendy Marvel and Mark demonstrate Flip Book It, explain how buyers can use their own images, and discuss their Kickstarter campaign.

  5. Facebook notifications and privacy

    The hosts discuss notifications arriving after logout and question whether app updates changed privacy settings.

  6. The Huffington Post

    Brian criticizes the site’s celebrity content, and Jason recalls how Arianna Huffington alerted Technorati to a profanity filter error.

  7. Bill Maher and Jon Stewart

    The hosts compare the presenters’ interviews, arguments, and television shows.

Full transcript

207 lines · machine transcribed
  1. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly podcast where two old internet vets talk about technology, the internet, where it's going to shit and what we do to fix it. I'm Jason. And I'm Brian.

  2. You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash Grumpy Old Geeks, on Twitter at GOG Podcast, or on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Or you can email us at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com. And now you can also subscribe to us on iTunes. Just search for Grumpy Old Geeks.

  3. De Plane! De Plane! Back in the flight path. Yes, we are. I've had a dog problem recently. At least the dogs aren't barking. Who let the dogs out? Oh, God. You know I might have to use that as a music segment, though. Okay, go for it. Dude, I'm fucked up out of my gourd on DayQuil today, so I've been sick all week.

  4. Have you? Okay, so you're messed up, and I'm messed up because I've had a crazy work day and been running around and looked at 75 to 85 emails in my inbox, so this should be an interesting podcast. Well, you need to listen to some Merlin Mann action. Inbox Zero, brother. I used to have Inbox Zero. It doesn't seem to be possible anymore.

  5. Type faster. Fuck. Filter! Come on! As fast as I type, my clients type faster, and as you know, if you ignore an email and let it sit for a while, they will solve their own problem. Yes. Oh, absolutely. So, Inbox 75 is about my new reality.

  6. Okay. Yeah, we figured that out when my partner and I were running MetBlogs, our blog network, that problems left to themselves, unlike Murphy's Law says, will tend to go away because people will figure it out. When you take away the teat of knowledge, people tend to get off their ass and figure shit out for themselves.

  7. Yes. The problem is I'm really big on immediate response. I mean, that's kind of what I figure my clients are paying me for, but I have definitely discovered that sitting and waiting 10 to 15 minutes tends to take care of a lot of problems. Yes. So, that's my new rule about responding to emails. Well, and in this day and age, as budgets decrease, response time should increase.

  8. Oh, I agree 100%. Yes. Yeah, add a zero, then you can, you know. Yeah, add a zero, but I will write you back immediately. Yeah. So, I just want to say, I want to throw one out for my homie, Roger Ebert, who left us today. Thumbs down.

  9. I know. On this news. I was amazed at how he came back from his surgeries and just – I lost track of him for ages, and I used to watch the show religiously because I'm from Chicago. I think we all did, too.

  10. Yeah. I mean, this was the day of three channels anyways. Yes. So, we all watched that. That was – there was no rotting tomatoes. There was none of this stuff. Yeah. So, that's where we found out about movies. And what I really loved about him is he kind of did a George Takei. He was one of these older guys that just embraced the internet and ran with it, and especially given all the things that he was dealing with, I mean, he couldn't speak anymore.

  11. Yeah. So, he had to type to get his words out, and amazing guy. Yeah. Amazing guy. And he wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which is one of the greatest films ever made. I actually have never seen it. Oh, my God. Don't watch it alone. Well, who should I watch it with?

  12. Someone. Someone that you can hug and go, ah, what was that? It is not the movie you – So, not you? No. Okay. Just checking. Yes. There are – oh, what's the guy that did all the big titty movies? Corman.

  13. Corman. Yes. It's in that vein. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, I've read up on it. I've just never actually seen the movie. Yeah. I do know that he's kind of revered for it, and it's one of those – well, like one of the bands that I really like, old-school industrial band out of Chicago as well. My Life with a Thrill Kill Cult used to use a lot of quotes from his stuff.

  14. And back before you got nailed for sampling in your music, and definitely on the live shows, they always had the clips going on in the background, most of which were probably from that movie or Corman. So – Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, the old days. So – Yeah, we are getting old, aren't we?

  15. We're starting to reach back to the past because things were actually better. I'm starting to really think so, man. And I was listening to something this week about cell phones and attention, and I just kept thinking back about the old days when we didn't have computers in our pocket always on.

  16. And, I mean, our biggest tech when it came out was a pager. Yes. And that was perfect. Yeah. You know, then you pull over. You would get a notice somebody wanted to hear from you. Yeah, you pull over, find a payphone, make a call. Yeah. You know? Well, immediate response is expected now. Yeah. So if I text somebody, I expect a response.

  17. If somebody IMs you, I mean, all these things, it's wonderful when you first start dealing with it because you think how great it is. But I definitely notice – and I'm somebody that actually even tries to put limits on things. But I find myself, if I know I have a text message, I need to fucking check it.

  18. I can't wait. Like when we do this podcast, I put my phone out of sight because – and I have to bring down my email and I have to close my IM window because I'm incapable of not paying attention. I think we all are as humans. It's just – but it's not healthy.

  19. No. And I think IM is the worst thing that ever happened. I mean, even the cell phone thing, you know, now you can't go out without – Well, nobody IMs anymore. I am so old school. It's all text messaging. It's all I do. It's all kids do. All I do is IM all day long. Well, you're too old. I know. Well, then the people – I have next to nobody on my IM window anymore.

  20. It's like you and that's about it. Okay. That's why it takes you so long to get back to me. Yeah. I hardly ever notice it. But texting is rampant. That's what everybody does now. Even my clients text me and I'm like, don't text me because I can't keep a record of that. Email me so I can send this back to you later when you yell at me and I can prove that I'm right.

  21. Well, here's the thing. You should never give them your actual cell number. Give them your Google Voice number that's tied to your cell phone because then there's a record on Google Voice of everything that happens. Never thought about that. I don't have Google Voice. Go get it. Ten bucks. I think I'll be doing that tomorrow. Yeah. I got a 213 number on there, which is hard to come by nowadays.

  22. Oh, that was on the Today Show earlier. It was. Because apparently Vonage is petitioning the government to open up to get all kinds of area codes and stuff like that. Because area codes is still a big deal. But is it really? When was the last time you – well, actually, when's the last time you even really knew somebody's phone number?

  23. We just put it into our cell phones now under their name. I couldn't tell you anybody's recently their phone number. I know my parents' number because they've had it since I was born. I don't know your phone number. I don't know yours. That was one of my claims to fame.

  24. Somebody could tell me their phone number once, and I would remember it for ten years. Well, seven digits. That's the way the brain works. That's the limit, apparently. Well, it's ten. On a swing of numbers. Ten. Well, ten. I traveled a lot, so, you know, I had to know the whole thing. Yeah, that's a – I mean, I remember studies about that sort of stuff.

  25. So that was the limit on what you could actually really remember as a human. You could ping on that. But really, I'm going through my mind right now trying to figure out if there's any one of, like, my top ten friends where I actually could tell you their phone number. No, I can't.

  26. I mean, I know my mom's number. I know my dad's number. But, again, that's kids. Yeah. We were kids. Yep, and, yeah, as soon as you got a phone and the phone had an address book, done. Yeah. You could free up that part of your mind. And, you know, at that part, I'm not sad about not knowing people's numbers because it's a convenience and it leaves my brain open for other things.

  27. Do I use it for anything more productive? That's, you know, I don't know about that. Okay, but there's also the flip side of that, which just came to mind right now, which is iTunes and music and things like that. We don't remember track names. We don't know song names anymore. A lot of people don't.

  28. I thought about that. You play the song and you know, oh, that third or fourth one is really, really good. But you don't know the name anymore because you don't study album art because it's just in this player. And you go, oh, I like track four. What the fuck is track four? Yeah, no more liner notes because when you used to get an album, you'd read the liner notes, you'd read the lyrics along with the songs, get to know the songs.

  29. You'd memorize the song names. You'd be looking at the artwork while the album was playing. So you'd be like, oh, yeah, this and this and this. Song names are gone. Album titles are gone. Nobody really kind of even remembers that. Oh, my God. Yeah. I go by the picture in iTunes now.

  30. Yeah. And it's funny, I've had this Rise Against album that I've been listening to for a year now. When I go to work, I put it on loop and I listen to the same album over and over again. I couldn't tell you one track name on that album. And I don't think I can tell you the name of the album.

  31. This is a sign of something a lot bigger. I mean, this is why people don't care about music anymore and why people don't care about these things. You don't have the investment anymore. It's such a throwaway commodity now. You don't even remember the song title. You just know you like it.

  32. Yep. It's three or four and you'll just skip through and find it. There's no investment. Well, I mean, in the old days, you knew when the records were coming out because you'd go to the record store and they'd have the board that had the dates that the records would come out. You'd get out of school. You and your buddies would hop in the car, drive over to the record store.

  33. Everyone would buy it. Then you'd go, you know, if you were lucky enough to have a car with a CD player, which I wasn't, you know, I had cassettes in my car. And then you'd all go listen to it and, you know, talk about it. And I was friends with all the employees that worked at the record store because I was in there so often. And they would have the board of their recommendations.

  34. And that's how I found new bands, you know. And I bought these magazines obsessively to find out, you know, I was a total Anglophile when I was a kid. So everything I was listening to was coming out of England. And there was no internet. I couldn't just, like, find out about stuff.

  35. It came through magazines and, like, the really hot chick that worked at Tower Records with the tattoo on her shoulder that I wanted to get to know real bad. I can't remember her name. I think it was Shannon or something. She had a Jesus Stone statue on her shoulder. Oh, nice. I was like, oh, yeah. No, and God bless him.

  36. My buddy Mike Vinicor, check him out, punkvault.com. He maintains his entire living room is vinyl. He's got racks and racks and racks of vinyl. And still, like, when he goes to another town, he goes to record stores. You do lose me on the vinyl stuff. Well, I think he's more of an archivist.

  37. But when he plays them, they sound incredible. Like, if you put a CD on versus the vinyl, it sounds amazing. I mean, for me, I'm stone-cold deaf, so the nuance is lost on me, and I really don't care that much. But, you know, it just reminds me of how things kind of used to be. And it was – I think we lost something with all this.

  38. We've definitely lost something. I mean, again, just going back to even – not even knowing your friend's phone numbers anymore. You just push a button. You don't know track names. You don't know anything. It's a different world now, and I don't necessarily – a lot of the world is better.

  39. We see all these sorts of things happening on Twitter and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, regimes fall, whatever. But we've lost – there's a bit of romance that's been lost. Oh, a huge amount of romance. Yeah. Everything is immediate and throwaway. And we don't cherish things the way that we used to.

  40. It's a vapid, vapid world now. Oh, vapid.com. Don't go there.

  41. Today's podcast is fueled by Flying Dog Brewery. We're drinking Gonzo Imperial Porter today with, well, a little bit of Jameson. So – For spice. For spice. Got to have a chaser. I got to say, the Gonzo is pretty good. It's nice. It's – yeah.

  42. And the artwork is fantastic. Ralph Steadman, he can't beat that. Yeah. So you get something nice to look at while you're drinking your beer. And I do have to appreciate Brian's taste because he has been buying all the beer because I have to commute to come here. So that's the deal. I drive the car. He buys the beer. That's true.

  43. That is the deal. And I do wait an appropriate amount of time before driving home. So just in case. Nobody drive drunk. We're not supporting that. So have you seen the Google Reader dust up? I know that the Google shut down Reader. Well, they're shutting it down. It's coming.

  44. Oh, okay. I think it's July that they're shutting it down. Right. Are you a Google Reader user? No. I was never a big RSS guy. I've never really kind of done that. I've put it on all my sites because apparently a lot of people are. But no, I've never used that.

  45. I'm not a fan of aggregators. I like to find things organically. Why do you hate the internet? Because I've worked in it for 20 years, Jason. Do you hate serendipity? Or you love serendipity. That's it. I love serendipity, yes. I like, you know, if there was a version of that that I would like, it's probably StumbleUpon, which I don't even know how well that does, and I've never used it.

  46. But I like randomly running into things. I don't use Google Reader. I don't use RSS aggregators. I don't do that. Okay. By the way, StumbleUpon is fantastic. I love it. Is it really? Oh, I love StumbleUpon. I should probably give it a run. And if you put your content in there, you can get some serious traffic out of it.

  47. I put content in there. This is the weird, fucking bizarre thing about me, is I know about all of these things for my clients, and I use them for my clients. I just don't personally use them. Okay. So anyway, well, the Google Reader stuff brought up a bunch of just blog posts from everybody screaming, oh, why won't they let me pay for it if this is paid?

  48. What are these blog things? Yeah, we'll get back to blogs. You mean Tumblr? No, blogs are the things you read in Google Reader. Oh, okay. Like Tumblr, where the porn is. God bless Tumblr. Best free porn on the internet, except for 500px, which got pulled from the App Store.

  49. I don't know if they're back yet. I'm not aware of that either. Oh, it's a photo sharing. God, I'm sorry. It's a photo sharing site for high-quality photography. Oh, HQ Nudes then. It's very... You can see every ripple in that fold. Yes, you can. Every zit on the ass shows. But back to what I was saying.

  50. The thing about the Google Reader dust-up is people were missing the point that it wasn't about paid software versus free software. And Google was just shutting it down because it was, you know... Not making money. Well, it was just... It took away resources that they could use for things that made them more money.

  51. Right. Is pretty much what I gathered from the team. And they never liked it. Jason Schellen was on the original Google Reader team, who's a friend of mine that I know back from the blogger days. And he basically helped start that thing. And he's got some really good insight on it. There will be some links in the show notes to his take on what happened.

  52. Okay. But I think what really came out of the conversation about Google Reader was this idea of you have to pay for something if you want it to stay. Nobody pays for anything on the internet, Jason. That is so not true.

  53. Stupid people pay for things on the internet, Jason. Well, then I must be a fucking idiot because I pay for tons of stuff. I've got... No, but we're old school. We understand. And we're creators on the internet. And we work on the internet. And we understand what's involved in building things for the internet. And the time and the effort and all of that.

  54. That's why we pay for things on the internet. But why should anybody else who doesn't understand that pay when they know they can get it for free? Well, you can't get Basecamp for free. You can't get Beanstalk for free. These are services that a layperson would never use.

  55. I bet most of the people that I know who are lay people on the internet... Lay people. Excuse me, beer. They... Flying dog. Call us. They use Basecamp at work. I mean... Right. But doesn't their office pay for that then?

  56. Doesn't their... Right. But it's a paid service. Right. So, you know... Yes. Every major studio that I've worked with in the past two years... Yes. You know, from Disney to Sony to NBC, they all use Basecamp. Right. So they pay for it. So that's a paid service, you know? Well, Basecamp is doing quite well.

  57. Even though I think that it's not the best. It's a nightmare to navigate. I don't quite get it, but... The new version is pretty nice. Okay. I got to give them that. But you pay for hosting. So you have websites. You pay for hosting. Bandwidth. Yes. Bandwidth. And...

  58. I host in all my client sites. I pay for hosting. I pay for server fees. I pay for upgrades. I pay for everything. Bandwidth. Do you do online accounting? Yes. Who do you use for your online accounting? Harvest or one of those guys? No. I'm actually just using Quicken and QuickBooks.

  59. Do you have to pay for your online access to that? I have to pay a certain monthly fee for the... For QuickBooks and Quicken to connect to my banks. Okay. Which is a load of crap. Because I would have paid to go into my banks. This doesn't involve anything. So why am I getting $9.95 a month?

  60. Because somebody's got to make money to pay for the service to build it. Exactly. You know? So, I mean, I pay for my Beanstalk account, which... I mean, just... That's source control management. Mm-hmm. And deploying from your source control to your servers. It's a geek thing.

  61. But for me, it's worth $15 a month... Right. ...for me not to have to go write that. And this is one of the things I want you to teach me about. Yes. Because I'm still very old school with my source code. Yes. You dash old dot HTML. Exactly. That is exactly what I do. In this day and age, you still know source control.

  62. But GitHub, same thing. So I have a Beanstalk account and a GitHub account. And GitHub is different, but we'll get into GitHub. But I pay for Netflix. Well, actually, I used to. I just canceled my Netflix account. I canceled Netflix about three years ago. But I'm about to renew because of Arrested Development.

  63. Yeah. But there are things that, you know, you pay for that are good services. But there are also things that you can get for free. And then they do upsells on you. Yes. So the lay user. Yes. The freemium model. The lay user can come in, get a taste.

  64. Like Flickr, you get 100 photos. It's like the first taste is free. You know, it's just like a drug dealer. Yeah. And if you really want to stick with the little baggies, then you pay a little extra. Yes. And a lot of services use that now, like Dropbox, Evernote. Most apps are freemiums.

  65. Hmm? A lot of apps on your iPhone or iPad are freemiums now. Yeah. That's the model with them. Like my app last week that I talked about, TripIt. There's a free version, and then there's the pay version. Yes. I mean, but especially with games. Yes. Games is the other way to go. Well, I'm never a gamer.

  66. I've never been a gamer. The last game I think I really was into was Spy Hunter, the arcade version. So this one got nothing on. Speaking of games, though, if you want to throw down. For Marathon, of course. Yes. If you're a gamer on the iPhone and you want to throw down, my gamer handle on Game Center is JPDeff.

  67. I will school your ass at Subway Surfers any day of the week. Subway Surfers. At Finn McCool's at Trivia Night two weeks ago, onto my team, Fergal, his daughter, who is 11 years old, grabbed my iPhone and asked, can I use this, please? And that's the game she downloaded.

  68. Yeah. So it's now on my iPhone. I've never played it. Well, if you ever do, I will school you. Okay. I think she might kick your ass. Not going to happen. But anyway, yeah, the freemium model, people think this is a new thing. We were doing freemium way back in the day.

  69. My first company, or the thing that I built from scratch, blogrolling.com, that was a freemium service. Was it? Yeah. I could have paid you? I kind of feel bad about that now. You should have paid me. No, the basic service had just the basic level of share your links and all that stuff.

  70. And then I added little cool things where it would take all your links and it would make shapes out of them. So you could have triangles, inverted triangles and all this stuff. So when your links showed up on your site. Right. But it was a $30 flat fee, PayPal-ed me, and that was for life.

  71. One time for life. Yeah. Is it still up there? Blogrolling is sadly dead. I ended up selling the company to two cows and they killed it after many years. Although I hear it was very big in the gay porn community after I left. They used it a lot.

  72. Triangles. Oh, yeah. It's an inverted triangle. But then you get to your basic free services, which nowadays are either... Social networks who are selling your information. In ways you can't even possibly understand.

  73. Yeah. You're the commodity on there. And I think besides that, most of the free services are people that are trying to find a business model that have gone from VC funding or angel funding and are just throwing it out there until they can figure out how to make money.

  74. Like, oh, say Twitter? That's how that started. Everybody's just waiting to sell to Google. I want somebody to explain to me, Pinterest, how they're making money. Oh, wait. They're not. They're not. But they are captivating an incredibly valuable and good demographic, which is single mothers, 34-year-old mothers, work-at-home mothers, basically older women.

  75. No, just women in general. Women. No, it's a women's thing. If you're a dude on Pinterest, I'm sorry. And I know some dudes on Pinterest. There are some dudes on Pinterest. I'm sorry. I don't understand why you're there. And also, I don't understand why brands go on there.

  76. I think Pinterest is quite possibly the world's worst offender of copyright infringement that we've ever seen. Oh, it's beyond that. That we've ever seen. All you're doing is stealing things from around the internet and putting it up on your page so everybody can find it there. No accreditation.

  77. No nothing. There are linkbacks. Oh, yeah. Linksbacks. Okay. But who was ever? You didn't ask my permission. Linkbacks are barely even in WordPress anymore because it's just fucking died. Oh, well, you're talking about trackbacks. That's different. Trackbacks. I can do an entire episode on trackbacks. I wrote a literal 13-page treatise on how trackbacks were such a bad idea because it was going to be used for spam, and I sent it to Ben Trott when he put the spec out.

  78. And nobody heeded my advice, and now it's a giant spam magnet. This is why we're grumpy old geeks. Yeah. Nobody pays attention to us. But the accreditation on Pinterest doesn't matter. Nobody ever goes back to the original source site. Nobody ever cares. You look at it there. That's it. Although there is a subset of people that use Pinterest to make money by posting pictures.

  79. What? People who are using affiliate links, posting funny pictures, using the accreditation or the credit link, posting back to their Amazon page or a pass-through to a different affiliate. Well, those are what we call the smart people.

  80. Some of those work-at-home scams are basically teaching people how to do this. And they're like, I made $30 today using Pinterest by only spending 15 minutes posting shit that I stole from somebody else to fake people into going to shit to buy that they don't need. If somebody told me that all I would make is $30 for the entire day, I wouldn't even get out of bed.

  81. 15 minutes, though. So if you spent the entire day doing it? Right. But then you – I don't want to go into the mechanics of that because I don't want to give people bad ideas. Yeah. This is a bad idea. Yeah. And just going back to how all these services work, I mean, most of the paid stuff you can't do yourself from home.

  82. No. The freemium stuff, yeah, if you're a programmer and a designer and you have a team. The free – I mean, most of these things are company. This is all like company-based money-making. Well, let's talk some of the reality about money about this because this is something that's come up recently in my work world about how much an app actually costs to create.

  83. Now, obviously, there's a huge scale of apps. But I've heard from friends of mine that our app developers were $200,000, $100,000, bare minimum, $50,000 to build an app. Okay.

  84. Even as a freemium. So somebody at home? No. Putting in the effort to do this and what's the app? Well, let me ask you. How much does a website cost to make? It's the same metric, same fuzzy sliding scale, complexity.

  85. Yes. You know, and – Design, complexity, reach, what do you want it to do? Do you need it to be functional? Are you going to sell things? And if you're going to sell things, what? E-commerce. How? And e-commerce is such a fucking black art still. Oh, it's getting way better.

  86. It is getting better. Yeah. Check out Stripe if you want to see how good it's gotten. Oh, I'll tell you what that. Put that in the show notes. I wish Stripe was there from the beginning because I have built so many e-commerce integrations that I never want to do one again until I saw these guys. I would love to never see Authorize.net again.

  87. Oh, my God. Authorize.net. Talk about the bane of every programmer's existence. Oh, I've had to deal with those guys so many times and they are such a shit pile. Yeah. Worst, worst company in the world. At the time, that was the fucking giant gorilla and then you could do PayPal, but that would be shit.

  88. I've done great PayPal integrations, I've got to say. I've done – because we've gone through – this is getting a little off topic, but I just want to say – I have to say this podcast is powered by DayQuil and Jameson, so it's going to be a long fucking work day. Terrible long work day.

  89. But I just want to say that some of the PayPal integrations I've done have been very successful. They charge a little bit more than the credit card companies, but they work. But ease of use. And the fact that PayPal is the devil, they freeze – they froze my friend's account for weeks, like his actual bank account.

  90. They called his bank and froze his account and there was no recourse. I mean they are – they're like the mafia. Well, I can tell a story about Authorize.net that doesn't make them much better. I used to run – this is on topic, Free vs. Femi and iPad.

  91. I've run a number of artist fan clubs, pay fan clubs, and I was running one for a spectacularly successful band, and we just decided to launch it, and it was the best album of their entire career. This was one of the biggest, biggest fucking albums ever.

  92. So not Weird Al. We launched the fan club with Authorize.net. The day we launched over $100 of orders. Authorize.net never mentioned that there was a cutoff on how many people they would take.

  93. They just shut it off in the middle of the – middle of the day while people were trying to sign up, and we lost probably another $300 worth of orders. Wow. And those people never came back. No, yeah. But they never mentioned that there was a cutoff.

  94. Yeah. It's evil. But they didn't freeze your bank account and keep you out of the money. They didn't freeze the bank account, but they cut off orders for a week. Yeah. No new orders for a week. Yeah. You should have sued them for that. Probably should have. Not probably.

  95. You should have sued them. Well, that's where the intricacies of what we do for a living gets very bizarre. Management companies, lawyers on both sides. Who gets to sue. Who gets to sue. Who gets what. Yes. Oh, man. So, yeah. We've come a long way in payments is all I got to say.

  96. Yeah. Just check out Stripe. Stripe. I think it's – yeah, Stripe.com. Yeah. They take all the pain out of it. Perfect APIs. So getting back to the rest of the stuff. People at home, it's – like me or you just want to sit down and build something.

  97. We've never touched a computer before. I think that's what partially started the blogging craze besides the huge amount of narcissism in the world and everybody wants to have their 15 minutes. Because even today, you can start a blog on a topic, build an audience, start selling advertising, start selling e-books, maybe do a podcast and make money at it.

  98. It's much harder than it used to be. But you can do it now, but just know that there's this giant blog fatigue in the world because we beat it into the ground for 10 years and every smarmy marketer has been down that road already. But I think it's still a viable way to make money if you have the time and the patience and the – And you're interesting.

  99. Yeah, and the knowledge base and – It comes down to content again. Yeah. So, I mean, the tools are there. I don't disagree with you about that. And I do think there is blog fatigue. I'm tired of hearing about what people have to say. I mean, you and I can talk about Twitter and how we both hate that and it's that immediate 120 characters just like – And there's a lot of that with Facebook too.

  100. I mean, as much as I love Facebook and I love doing my updates and all of that. But the blogging thing is long form. It's a long form experience if you want it to be. Obviously, everybody abuses it and it's the world of telemarketers and scamming and all that kind of bullshit.

  101. But for people that I can actually write and are interesting, but some of my friends are incredible writers and I don't go to their blogs. Well, we live in a world of TLDR. Yeah. You know, too long, didn't read. Yep, exactly.

  102. And I want to say whoever came up with that – It's catchy while you can. I want to punch somebody in the face for that saying. It's like, you know what? Somebody took the time to write it. If it's a subject you're interested in, relax. Take a breath and enjoy it and take it in and don't go with the summarized version of it.

  103. But I'm somebody who even prides myself on that and I know there are 15 to 25 of my friends that write amazing blogs and I never read them. Yeah. Because I don't have the time because we're all getting pushed and pulled to this bullshit insanity quickly.

  104. Well, that's – why are people listening to us? You know? It's like the same – Well, we're long form. I'm hoping. We are long form. I don't think people are listening to us. We'll see. Make sure you subscribe on iTunes. Give us a five-star, please. And give us a rating. If you're actually listening to this and like it, please say something because we don't know.

  105. And I feel bad for a lot of my friends and it's always on my to-do list. Like there are a couple of my friends that I know write amazing blogs and I see sometimes there are updates in my feeds and I'm like, I got to go read that. Which is why Google Reader, I'm kind of like – I need some kind of service.

  106. Well, that's Evernote, right? No. I'm going to tell you exactly. I know exactly what you need. Okay. And this goes into one person who knew how to code, makes money on the internet. Marco Arment, Instapaper. He created Instapaper by himself for reading things later.

  107. That's what it's for. It's a read later service. Because bookmarking doesn't work for me anymore because I have 10,000 bookmarks. You've never used Instapaper? No. Oh, my God. It's the best thing ever. You get a little bookmarklet in your favorites bar, a little JavaScript bookmarklet. You click on it, it saves the page to your Instapaper account.

  108. Then you get the Instapaper app on your iPad and you read it in the shitter. That sounds fantastic. It is. That is exactly what I need. Yeah. Because there are so many things that just flash across and how do you save it and know to come back to it later? That's – I mean there are a couple other read later services but his was the first and the best.

  109. And he's back into PHP and MySQL. Good for you, Marco. Is he doing freemium? I believe the – No, it is freemium, yes. Okay. Well, the iPad and the iPhone app cost money because those cost money and that's why it paid for it.

  110. And it should because he obviously has built something fantastic and he puts a lot of time and effort into it and I'm sure he does support and all those sorts of things. Yes. And he should be fucking paid for it. And he drives a BMW for it. So good for him. There you go. I have – I do not begrudge him one bit for the success he's had because he's busted his ass and he's made a great product.

  111. Right. And so the main service, if you just want to use it on the web, is free. He's got a couple upsells for subscriptions so you can subscribe to a blog that gets pulled into your feed automatically, I believe. I believe that's what subscriptions are. I never checked it out because I don't use that.

  112. But I paid for the app when it first came out and he's had great success with it and totally freemium, I believe. But either way, that's going to solve your problem. I think it might. Yeah. Just Instapaper.com. Greatest – one of my greatest tools.

  113. First thing I'm going to do after we're done with this. We'll put that in the show notes for sure. But going back to blogging a bit. Yes. The whole blog thing, I went through the whole blog up and down. I mean I started blogging in 1996.

  114. Well, your first blog is one of the reasons I knew you when I actually finally met you. Right. It's a lot of spew and – yeah. So I mean – but I wrote an engine to do that stuff. Yeah. In Perl. You built it. In Perl. I just didn't open source it. I looked through that source code.

  115. I gave you the source for that? Yeah, you gave me the source. Oh, goodness. I'm sorry. That's embarrassing. Flat text files, pipe delimited, baby. So I did that site and then I got into the – I saw what was happening with gray matter and movable type a couple years later.

  116. And I'm like, oh, I should write a blogging platform. And then I saw they did it and I'm like, oh, well, there's no use writing one of those. Damn. But I followed – from there, I've been with blogging the whole way forward. And watching how blogs have gone from – it was like the desktop publishing revolution. When anybody got their first Mac and their first laser writer, then you started getting family fucking newsletters.

  117. And the noise just went through the roof. And when people found out they could make money on it, then it just became a shit show. And I think now that it's calming down a bit, like people have gone – But how is it calming down? We see the stats. We see more and more blogs every fucking day.

  118. It's not really – You do, but people – but like the good blogs, people don't stick with. Yeah. So I think that since it has gone through that cleansing period where people have done it and people have dropped out, you start to see like the talent bubble to the top now.

  119. Like people who know how to write concisely – let's stick with the concisely bit – and still get their thoughts across. I still think that there's a way to do it properly. But are they doing it solo or are they getting hired by an aggregator, a slate, a salon, a Huffington Post?

  120. I think the good people are. I think they're seeing – they see how much work it takes to make them – their personal brand like bubble up through the ranks. And then they get tired and they're like, oh my god, I can just get paid. I can go right for Gizmodo. I can go right for any of these big conglomerates who took all the blogging and made it.

  121. Your lifehackers. Yeah. And those places are just – they're sweatshops. They are sweatshops. Yeah, I was going to say, are they paying well? They're paying. But you have to do like 15, 20 posts a day because it's all about ad revenue and stuff like that. That's where I'm thinking if you're passionate about a subject, do it yourself.

  122. Stay with it. Stick with it. And you can still like create your brand, your audience. And going back to what we were talking about before with Merlin Mann, I think he has done a fantastic job of what he did. It's starting out with 43 folders. Right. Building up that whole like – it was kind of life hacking but productivity hacking was his thing.

  123. And now he's a speaker. He's a podcaster. Didn't really get to the book part because he kind of dropped that one. Yeah, but nobody buys books anyways. But he's made a brand out of himself by doing the thing that he liked to do. Right. And I think that there's still room for that out there, but you just have to be dedicated to it.

  124. Is that what we're doing here? Are we dedicated to this? We seem to be pretty into it. I've been driving my ass out here for two months, so it better be. No, I get what you're saying, and I totally understand and agree with the – if you're passionate about something, you stick with it and you fucking do it.

  125. And maybe you should do it yourself and not sell out to these horrible sites that will pay you pennies, if anything. I mean we've – both you and I have had experience with this where we get paid next to nothing to do something really cool for somebody else. I just don't get how you get the audience.

  126. And this is something you and I are dealing with now with this podcast. We're throwing it out there and like how do we get an audience? Yeah. How do you build it? And how do you – it's great if people listen, but how do you get people to like engage and give you a good review? Or do you put a donate button up and say give us a buck or two or you do the Adam Carolla, please click on the Amazon.com through the way through?

  127. And how do you make a living being creative anymore? Well, I think you have to have income already. This is a passion project. It's always a secondary thing. This is a passion project. And I think that if somebody is going to go do a blog or a podcast, it needs to be a passion project first.

  128. Right. Then you prove your passion. You prove you can make money at it. And then you transfer. You don't get on the – you don't jump off the train until the next train is coming. Seriously. You don't want to be standing at the platform with your thumb up your ass going, anybody got some spare change? No, you can do that when you're younger. When you're younger, but we're not younger.

  129. Because that's how I left off the train and started my own company. Yeah, but – Now I wouldn't do that. No, you can't do that now. Yeah, I mean – I have responsibilities. Yeah. Yeah. And – And I've got a nut to make. Yeah, exactly. You got – I mean I got dead out the wazoo.

  130. I can't not make money. Yeah. So – but that's why you make money. Do your passion. And then if you can, transfer. Right. But I think – and especially with people our age, we've got experience. We know things that people might want to know. Right. And I think if you're going to start a blog, you don't start a blog about crocheting if you don't like crocheting.

  131. You're not going – you're not going through the Google like what's hot on AdSense this week and what am I going to get – I'm going to start a mesothelioma blog. No, it has to be something to live, breathe, and eat. Yeah. You need to be able to talk it back and forward, talk about it 24-7, be able to talk about it for 30 minutes straight.

  132. Yeah. Minimum. Minimum. You have to be able to do a TED Talk on it. Well, I've seen some pretty bad TED Talks. Yeah. There's been a lot of bad TED Talks. They finally changed their intro. I didn't – I've never been to TED, but I actually – because I was in Long Beach.

  133. I almost bounced off of Al Gore coming out of my favorite local. Really? Yeah. That's neither here nor there. So yeah, I still think there's ways to make money as an individual with an idea and something to say.

  134. But you're going to rely on finding an audience – or an audience finding you basically. No, you hump it. You've got to hump it. You've got to hump it. Yes. I mean I've been humping it with this thing. I've been posting. I've been talking to people. You use your connections. You talk to people who have like minds and you network.

  135. It's a slog. But the money is through affiliates and hopefully getting some advertising. Yeah, that's how you start it. And then once you get a big enough audience, then you do direct sales. I know – I used to be in Federated Media, one of the early blog ad networks.

  136. I just went to Shadow Stevens and Federated, but you didn't grow up in Southern California. No, I didn't. Southern California people will get that one. So being in Federated Media, they – it was an entire blog network. And we ended up dealing with them in a different way because they would always just sell ads to the big blogs.

  137. Right. Which were back then Dig and Boing Boing. Yeah. And it came out of Boing Boing. But in those meetings, I got to hang out with Merlin. And what Merlin did was genius. He would – it's kind of the same thing John Gruber does now. Basically sponsors the full-text RSS feed. Right.

  138. So if you want to get my show or get my content through RSS without having to come to the site, see any ads, you know, this person is going to sponsor it. Right. And that's how he started making a ton of money and doing it himself. He went to Office Depot or Staples or something and got them to sponsor it and eventually left the ad network and just did direct ad sales, made a boatload of money.

  139. Right. So once you get an audience, then you have power. Once you have the power, then you can determine how you're going to make money. You know? Right. Okay. Very interesting. I'm a little fascinated and we can probably talk about this a lot more. But it's time for us to move on to the next segment.

  140. And I want to talk about one of the big blogs out there. Oh, you want to talk about the – I want to talk about Irina Huffington's little baby. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, I hope that was interesting at least. I mean, it wasn't really about paid, freemium-free, but, you know, it – I just want to make sure that people know that there are still ways to make money out there that aren't douchey.

  141. You made me question some of the paradigms. Okay. And I'm actually thinking about it right now. I think we might have to cycle back to this at some point. Oh, my God. I made Brian think. That was – okay. Out. Out. If you'll all gather close around the phonograph and listen carefully, I'll tell you how we're going to have a whole lot of fun.

  142. And we were halfway through a segment and, of course, my business partner, Wendy Marvel, decided to show up at that point. And I said, text, and she called. Hi. So this is my business partner, Wendy Marvel. We're Slender Fungus. Hi. And Mark. Hi, guys. We came bearing gifts, though.

  143. Yes. So Mark and Wendy run Flip Book It, which I think you've heard us talk about before. And Jason hasn't seen Wendy for an awful long time. No, it's been a while. Jason. It's been a long time. I've been listening to your podcast. And? And I was so excited to come on. You mean the podcast you're on right now? Yes.

  144. Yes. That's kind of meta. Well, I was so excited to come over and see the drunk boys perform, so – Hey, now. Tipsy, not drunk. But, yes, we brought Jason something. We brought you a Flip Bucket. Okay. I'm excited to see it. I haven't seen one in person yet.

  145. So show me. What's it do? Well, I'm going to describe it for everyone who can't see it. This is – I mean, I flip it. This is a podcast. That would be everyone. That would be everyone. This is a – this is sort of an adaptation of some artwork we did, and it's based on like those train station signs, those – that's called a split flap display.

  146. Like the time when it flips over? Yeah. Like 9, 8, 5, 0, 8, 0, 5, 0, 8, 0, 7. Yeah, the old-fashioned one. Right. And we – so we've set it up so that you could put graphics in it. Right. And so we've made this toy, and it's got a little hand crank. I'm going to crank it. We're not farting. That's the actual – that's the actual device.

  147. That's like a horse galloping right now. Is that Edward Moybridge? It is. Yes. Oh, look at – look at the knowledge being dropped. Hey, photography, man. That's my thing. You guys also did this on Kickstarter. Yes. Which I spent the entire last episode shitting on, so.

  148. Yes, that was exciting. Thank you for mentioning us. How was the Kickstarter experience? We could write a book. Yeah. We've really loved it, but at the same time, there were so many pitfalls that we had no idea. And, yeah, we're going to go on a lecture series for it.

  149. Okay. Well, we'd love to have you back on to actually talk about your Kickstarter experience. Yeah. Let's do a full segment with you guys at some point. But right now, this is just an ad. Oh. Well, if it's an ad. So, why don't you plug your stuff? Yeah. So, yeah, we'd love you guys to go and take a look at these at FlipBucket.com.

  150. And they're pretty cool. I wasn't sure, like, how we would fit into your podcast, but then I realized this is kind of cool. A cool product. Yeah. Are you on Facebook, too? Yes, we are. Do you know? You don't. What? It's a plan where it's FlipBook and Kit or FlipBook It.

  151. Right. Yeah. Or just check our show notes, too. We're going to have links. I've got to say, this is the first time I've seen one in person because I was following the Kickstarter campaign. This is very cool. I really like it. It is very cool. Yeah. I have one downstairs as well, and it's a cool gift. And you put it together yourself.

  152. I put it together myself, although I was a little frustrated at that point because I had extra bits, which you didn't have in your documentation at the time, but I hope you fixed that. No, we added the extra bits because people drop bits when they're making stuff. See, if Ikea did that, then we'd all be much happier people, like, much happier Farfagnugan type of consumers because I do have a bed called the Farfagnugan, and I ran out of screws in the middle, so I appreciate you adding extra parts.

  153. I almost forgot, Jason. This, you can add your own images to. I can put my own stuff in. Yeah. I'll explain that really quick because actually this is one of the coolest parts. Yeah. So we built software that will enable you to upload video from your phone or whatever device.

  154. Or even just images, like 24 images, and it'll take that video and create 24 images for you so that you can download it, print it at home, and put your own images in. Awesome. I can't wait to try that. Assuming your printers work correctly. My printer's broken, but I'll get one. I'll go to Kinko's.

  155. So put your own photography in there. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. Although I do like the Edward Morbridge stuff. Look for the Grumpy Old Geek exclusive flipbook at coming soon with a wonderful image of Jason and I. Oh, that'd be great. What? Drinking beer?

  156. Drinking beer. Or maybe just beer. We'll plug you guys on the flipbook it's saying. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you guys came in and let's definitely have you guys in because I'd love to talk to you about your Kickstarter experiences soon. Oh, we would love to tell you. Okay. Great seeing you guys.

  157. Bye. Take care, guys. I want to throw something out there to anybody that's actually listening because most of you are probably relatively tech savvy. Maybe you run your own Facebook pages. I have two questions here, both related to Facebook.

  158. If you have the Facebook pages app on your cell phone, do you have that, Jason? Yes, I do. Okay. If you're logged out of it, why does it still give you updates? Because it's probably using your system Facebook login and keeps you perpetually logged in. So there's no differentiation between your personal account and your professional work life on Facebook.

  159. I have a problem with that. But it's the pages that you, as a Facebook user, admin. Yes, but I've logged out of my Facebook pages account. It is logged out. Why is it giving me updates? It's logged out in the pages app. Yeah, Facebook pages app, logged out.

  160. But you're still getting... I'm still getting updates from the Facebook pages app on my pages, even though I'm logged out of the Facebook pages app. I can explain this from a technical perspective, I believe. Oh, I can, too. Yeah, it's because it's a push service.

  161. Somebody forgot to put a little switch there saying, are you logged out? No, because the way push notifications work are different from... You get push notifications from Facebook from their server. You should not get push notifications from any app if you're logged out of it.

  162. No, because you've already logged in and said, I want push notifications. So it takes... No, it takes your device ID, your Facebook ID, marries the two. When something happens on their side, they say, oh, okay, we've got a device ID. We've got a Facebook ID for the user. We've got a pages ID.

  163. There is new activity. Push the update to them. Okay. Jason has now explained it. It doesn't matter if you're logged out. Because when you log out, it doesn't disassociate your Facebook ID and your device ID from the push notifications. Because you've already said, I want push notifications.

  164. It's a completely separate subsystem. Okay. You've explained it, but it's still wrong. Okay. Well, then call Mark. All right. Unless he's killing a goat in his backyard. My second throwout question about Facebook is, I want people to, if you guys have experienced this, because I have every single time, every single time that Facebook pushes a new iPhone app update, sorry, I'm not on, you know, Android or whatever.

  165. I don't know how that works. I have an iPhone. Every time that Facebook pushes out a new iPhone update for their app, privacy settings get reset. I'm 99% positive about this. So screen, next time they push an update. I want to know if everybody else out there has experienced the same thing.

  166. Please let us know. And I'm going to start taking screencasts. Yeah. Next time they push an update, you see it in your little app store thing. Go and take a screenshot of your privacy settings before and one after. Yeah. And there you've got your proof. Okay. So if you guys, yeah, if you guys see an update come through, do the same thing.

  167. Send it to us. We'll blow this shit wide open. Yeah. We want to talk about this because it's been really annoying. So speaking of annoying, let's go back to our main topic, blogs. Let's talk about one of the biggest blogs out there. The Huffington Post. Okay. It is a blog, right? It is.

  168. It runs on a blog software. A blog software? One of them. I don't know which one. I think. Okay. I didn't do the research on it, but I mean, I know they started with WordPress. Okay. Like Huffington Post originally started to run on WordPress and it was basically a blog and it was a blog that ran updates and news from Ariana's perspective plus a bunch of her friends.

  169. And I used to love the site. I love Ariana Huffington. I can't get enough of her accent. I'm like Bill Maher. I just totally want to bang the crap out of her. Darling. Darling. Whatever. I love her books. I love How to Overthrow the Government. I love Pigs at the Trow. I love Fanatics and Fools. I loved the Huffington Post for years and years and years.

  170. I bring up the Huffington Post right now. Let's see. Most popular. Emma Watson's sexiest photo shoot yet. Hmm. Hot. Courtney Cox's Wiles without makeup. Kim Kardashian's dress pushes limits. It's official. Something about fucking Miley Cyrus.

  171. And let's go down the other side. Let's see. Howard Feynman. Okay. He's a good writer. There's a lot of good writers, but Marlo Thomas. Award winning actress. Do I care what she thinks? Yeah. I mean, Huffington Post has become this fucking wasteland of a news aggregator that basically focuses on tits and celebrity opinions.

  172. It's not technically an aggregator because an aggregator pulls things in from other sources. That's her source. Well, no. She has her own writers, but it's also an aggregator. They do pull in news stories from other places. They do. They just tag their own name on it and have a little two-sentence commentary.

  173. That's skeezy. Yeah. It's totally skeezy. Yeah. So I'm loathing the Huffington Post now. I've never gotten into the Huffington Post. Even though I go there every single day. Yeah. I don't. I've never really checked it out that much because when we started with Metblogs, we had a contrary type of setup.

  174. Right. So if I'd have gone with my original idea for my blog network, I would have been Ariana first. So I have this deep-seated envy of what she's pulled off. Well, she's making a ton of money. She made $300 million. Yes.

  175. And how much of that did she give back to the writers? I'm assuming they're not getting paid well. Well, it was a big controversy, but I don't know if they ever got anything back. I don't know the exact stats on that, so we'll put that in the show notes. We'll definitely Google that. But, I mean, for me, it's just disappointing because the launch of the Huffington Post was supposed to be about, this is the new media.

  176. Again, Amanda Palmer. This is the new music. This is the new media. And it becomes fucking tits and ass. Well, it's owned by AOL now. Tits and ass and stupid fucking celebrity opinions again and again and again. But that sells eyeballs. But that's the only thing that people want to look at.

  177. Yeah. I mean, have you looked at the stats from before and now? Are they getting more traffic now? Oh, yeah. I mean, just from... Huffington Post is ramping up to be one of the biggest viewed sites on the Internet. It's getting up there because they're selling lowest common denominator, and it's disappointing. And Ariana has become disappointing.

  178. She used to be amazing. Like, when she used to be on the old Bill Maher show, the Channel 7 Politically Incorrect, that got canceled because he made an unfortunate comment, which wasn't wrong, about 9-11. What did he say? He said something about, you can say anything you want about the people that brought down those towers, but they were not pussies.

  179. Well, that's actually pretty accurate. It takes a lot of balls to kill yourself for something. Yeah. I mean... That's all he said. Okay. So, just a side note, I hate Bill Maher, but we'll go back to him. I love Real Time with Bill Maher, and let me bring it back to Ariana Huffington.

  180. Go back to Ariana. And again, I used to love her. All of her books were fantastic. All of her TV appearances used to be fantastic. Now, every time she shows up on Bill Maher's show or wherever, it's, well, if you saw on the Huffington Post. Oh, if you looked at the Huffington Post. She doesn't even have any content anymore.

  181. All she does is drive people to her site, which is what you think should happen if you're going to run a blog. She's a PR machine. I mean, that's... But there's no content. Well, there's a lot of content. It just has no substance. It's push, push, push, push, push. It's no substance. Right. It's, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's snack food.

  182. She's a smart girl, very funny, incredibly intelligent. And this is what she's become. She's PR-ing a bullshit machine that has Kim Kardashian's fat ass on it. Well, I mean, I, she did us a solid one time back in the day, as I just got to say.

  183. Okay. When I worked at Technorati, we were, we did some, some political stuff before I got there. They did a whole thing with the RNC and the DNC, I guess, for the, whatever that shit is. I don't follow politics. But, so she was friends with the owner.

  184. And we had worked for two months on this giant relaunch. And we had this little intern that came in. His little name was Ryan King, who is now like one of the head engineers at Twitter on the API. I don't know if he's still there, but he's, he's a great little kid. And he was in charge of the profanity filter to say, for the top search terms, take out anything with this list of words with, you know, fuck, shit, piss, whatever.

  185. And right before we launched, he made a little change, checked it in, which swapped the arrays with the filter words and the unfiltered words. So basically the top search terms were fuck, shit, piss, you know. And I think the top one was fuck George Bush because this was back in George Bush days.

  186. And Dave gets, we're sitting in the conference room, we're round table and doing it going through because we had performance issues and all this stuff. And Dave gets a call and he's like, hello? What? What? Ryan! And it is, it was Ariana Huffington column saying, darling, your site says fuck, shit, piss.

  187. What is wrong? So Ariana Huffington is the one that, that, that alerted us to our, our faux pas. Right. And at that point we were so exhausted from busting our ass for two months that, I mean, we, we were crying. We were laughing so hard. We called Ryan and he fixed it.

  188. But thank you, Ariana, for that. I have to give her props. Well, there you go. And I still think she's a wonderful person. I just, I'm not a fan of her big site. Yeah. So you have something that you love? No, actually, now that you brought it up, I'm going to talk about something I really don't like.

  189. Okay. We're switching. Yeah. Bill Maher. I fucking hate Bill Maher. I love Bill Maher. Well, Bill, the problem with Bill Maher is he's a lazy intellectual. I look at Jon Stewart. You could, Jon Stewart, you can put him in a room with anybody and he's knowledgeable.

  190. He can argue thoughtfully, but you put Bill Maher in a room with somebody and he just goes. He finds the black chick and tries to bang her. No, he just goes back to standard rhetoric. I don't like God because God doesn't exist and you're an idiot. He doesn't, he doesn't have a thoughtful argument for most of his, any of his positions.

  191. Both of them have staves to write their positions and do their research for them. Staves? Are those like staves? Staves. Like, like, like in the old days with the sticks? Shut up. We're three beers in. It's the third segment. Go ahead. I get it. I mean, I, well, I don't see a difference between Bill Maher or Jon Stewart.

  192. They have staves that write their positions that go through the news that bring it to them. I don't think Bill Maher is an idiot. I think he's more focused on getting stoned and fucking a black chick. Here's the deal, though. It's not about the canned pieces. You look at Jon Stewart in an interview.

  193. Yes. He is, he can debate, he can talk on all the points, and he's knowledgeable. It, Jon Stewart, or I mean, Bill Maher in a debate is a rock. He doesn't, he doesn't have the wherewithal to rebut something from an intellectual point of view.

  194. But do you just like his show? I actually like his show. I just wish he was fucking smarter. Well, that's fair enough. Yeah. I mean, I think his show is great because it, it, he brings in some of the most interesting people that never get airtime anywhere. Like who? By far. He'll bring in Salman Rushdie.

  195. When's the last time you saw Salman Rushdie interviewed on a live TV show? Well, the whole, the whole. In real time. But the fought was over. Oh, sorry. The fought was over. The real time. I did a plug for Bill Maher. Oh, yeah. EOS Money. No, the fought was over, though. They, they, they pulled the fought. Well, yeah, but still, nobody brings him on.

  196. He's an interesting guy. He brings in a lot of interesting people and has really straightforward discussions with them. Most of the time I see it, it's a loaded panel. I think the interviews on, on real time with Bill Maher are far better than what Jon Stewart does. I agree with you. I think Jon Stewart is a way more intellectual person and funny person and smart person in person.

  197. But I actually like Bill Maher's show better than like the Daily Show. I don't. Yeah. See, because with, with Bill Maher, it just comes down to him shutting people down saying, you're an idiot. You're an idiot for taking this position. Cause I'm, I know everything. And it's like, explain your position.

  198. Take it, take a stance. You know, it does that a lot, but the panel often overrules him and, and they start to talk about things that are interesting. But I mean, even the one-on-ones when he's talking to the screen with the, you know, with his remote guests, it's, it, I don't know. Okay. We can, we can disagree on this one.

  199. I just, you know, you brought, you brought up Bill Maher and he's one of my, my touchstones because I want to like him, I want him to do more research and I want him to be fucking smarter and stand by the positions that I agree with too. Atheism, you know, free drug use, whatever. Being human.

  200. Atheists are a big atheist. You know, he's the one running the flag right now. Oh, Dawkins. Dawkins is the, well, it was Hitchens, my favorite guy. Hitchens is now dead. I know he's my favorite guy in the world. I used to watch him on bullshit and he, he was the only guy that would sit there with his scotch and scotch on the rocks and get fucked up and tell you my hero.

  201. Yeah. All he did was get drunk and tell you why you're wrong about everything and then give you a reason why. Yeah. The mother Teresa, not even argue with the mother Teresa stuff was genius, but anyway, so I just, I just want Bill Maher to just do his fucking homework. Well, let's hope his show gets better. I mean, I urge everybody to watch it because I think it's fantastic.

  202. It's, it's my favorite thing to do on Friday night. It's to watch it. I love it. I think it's fantastic. I've given up on the daily show. I think Jon Stewart's funny, but I don't want a funny wrap up for news. I want something more in depth and you get that from Bill Maher. I think you get it from Jon Stewart, but he wraps it in comedy.

  203. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. Well, that's it. That's it. Next podcast. Yeah. Um, what are we talking about next week? Oh, I know what we're talking about. Our favorite topic. What? Social media. Shit. We're going down the rabbit hole. This is when I'm going to get fired by everyone.

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