11: Social media burnout. Fact or Fiction?

Welcome my friends to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly conversation where two internet vets talk about technology, the internet, where it's headed, where we wish it was headed. I'm Jason. And I'm Brian. You can find us on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Hey Jason. Hey Bri. Welcome back. Thank you. How was the trip? Amazing. Excellent. I'm feeling quite refreshed even though the beginning of the trip was insane.

Insanely hectic. I flew in at the ass crack of dawn, had to go downtown Chicago, then back to the suburbs, then sleep for like four hours, get in the car, drive to Madison, go see my, pack up my brother's dorm, then watch 3,300 kids graduate. Then drive all the way back, then go out to dinner, and then basically crash for as long as possible. But it was cool to see my brother graduate. Excellent. I did enjoy the photos of the

Bloody Marys at your various stops. Oh yeah. Well, that's my, that's my rocket fuel when I fly. It's a good one. I do the whiskey coke on the plane, but. Well, I, I, I've toned down in my old age because it used to be two double Bloody Marys before getting on the plane, then two double Bloody Marys on the plane, then pass out and hopefully sober up by the time you land.

That sounds very reasonable to me. I used to have a time to a T, but this was only a four hour flight, so I had to kind of dial it back a bit. Right. Did you find yourself having to work at all or did you have a real vacation? I had to work almost the entire time. Ah, and what was your traveling gear of choice?

A company laptop. Oh, there you go. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I don't own a laptop anymore. I actually sold all of my mobile gear. The company I worked at before gave me an Air, and I had an Air, so I traded it for rent and utilities for a month because I didn't really need it. It was depreciating.

Right. And I found, like, I can do almost everything on my iMac with my iPad for general stuff, but yeah, when I travel, I have to have them give me a laptop to take. And since it's a company laptop, it was like a 17-year-old MacBook semi-pro that weighed about 18 tons.

It's the MacBook amateur. Yeah. Yeah, that was about it. Right. So yeah, there was, there was unfortunately some work that had to get done, but we, we launched the product while I was out there and, uh. That's good. Yeah. I might actually put a link in the show notes to it. I'm not going to say it right now, but.

Okay. You can, you can pimp your work. I can, but I want to make sure it's cool with the clients because it's, it's actually a pretty cool thing. I mean, yeah, it's still a Facebook game, but it's a pretty advanced Facebook game. Do people still play games on Facebook? Yes, they do, because my side feed is always full of that candy crap.

Yeah, but that's, that's actually an iPhone game. Oh, is it? They might have a Facebook component, but it's like you tie in, you know, standard app shit, like join your friends, invite them to come along and ruin their day by all these damn invites. At least it's not, remember mobster wars? That was one that was just the worst.

Yeah, that was all over the place. You used to be able to kind of block seeing things, but I don't think you can, well, you can block it from your news feed. No, yeah, you can still block some apps. Although I've blocked Spotify four times and I still get your fucking Spotify updates all the time. How was the new skinny puppy, by the way? I like it. I like it. I was, I was a little worried. And one of my friends commented on it too, because the past couple albums haven't really been what I would call skinny puppy.

They sounded more like the side projects, but this one's really good. I, you know, there's no like standout track that I can go, this is amazing, but I've enjoyed listening to it. And I'm definitely looking forward to them touring because they're quite, it's quite a show. Yeah. So I think I saw them at the Henry Ford. Yeah. That was a pretty good show. Yeah. So it's good. It's good. It's, it's, you know, things have changed so much now. It's, we've talked about this a couple of times.

You don't really devour music the way that you used to. You don't delve into it, or at least I don't. It's definitely more, you know, kind of a come and go thing these days. So I've listened to the album a couple of times. I like it, but I'm not like in love with it. And I don't know if that's an age thing or if that's a technology thing, you know, it's because I'm 40 now and I'm not going to sit and listen to a skinny puppy like I did when I was 18.

Or is it the technology? Is it not holding the CD in your hand and having the liner notes and only having the one disc in your car and you listen to it while you're driving around and trying to find your girlfriend or whatever. So it could just be, it's not that good of a CD. I don't know if you need to go too deep into it. Yeah. Well, Carl Hyde from Underworld just put out a solo album, which I've been listening to tons.

So maybe it is just not the greatest skinny puppy album, or maybe I'm just not into that kind of music anymore because it is kind of harsh and industrial and you've mellowed with age. I'm not so angsty, although we'll get to that later in the hate section. Yeah. So when I was on the trip, I was, I was noticing that I was sleeping better, like ridiculously better.

And I was chalked it up to, um, just being on vacation, you know, relaxing in between work and travel from hell and all that stuff. But I still like slept. Amazing. And on one of the, uh, well, getting back to like, I was reading again too.

So I was relaxing in the morning. Can you scroll that down? Sure. Cause I'm waving my arms around and trying to get you to do it. I'm just going to ask you to do it. I wasn't sure what you were doing there. So I found an article that was called student science experiment finds plants won't grow near wifi router. Right. Now it starts out with these girls having problems cause they sleep with their cell phones next to their head.

Right. Doing whatever. Because they're getting texts constantly. Yeah. I see. I used to do that because I would fall asleep to an audible book or a podcast. And I definitely noticed when it was like right next to my head, the next morning I was fuzzy, cloudy, and, you know, not factoring in vodka, gin, or beer.

I just, I distinctly noticed something different. So I've, you know, since then I've put my, I put my phone on airplane mode right when I go to sleep, which is also great for when people try and call you in the middle of the night and bug you about a server being down. Right. Um, and I noticed it, it kind of went away. So when I saw this, I'm like, interesting because they couldn't replicate the, it was just for like a science project, but they couldn't do the cell phone testing because of, they didn't have just the equipment.

Right. I think they're in Sweden or Norway or Denmark. They're in Denmark. Denmark. Yeah. And so what they did was they approximated it by taking two wifi routers to check the signal out of those because it approximated a cell phone. Right. But the random thing they found was the plants that were next to the wifi router just wouldn't grow, which is just bizarre.

Yeah. And the ones across the room did. So is the signal coming out of a wifi router that strong that it can, you know, modify biological, uh, cells in some way? Why not? It's, it's all energy. There are waves coming out of it.

Just like the radiation from the sun is a wave. Sound is a wave. That stuff's a wave. Yeah. I mean, and I posted, posted this thing and, and, uh, good friend of the show, Dr. Uh, Dr. Teeter basically just ripped me a new one saying that's not science, you know, because you have, you do have to deal with things like wavelength.

Yeah. Um, that's, that's a lot, what the cell phone companies are always saying. The wavelength is too long for it to have any meaningful interaction with your cells. Right. But I'm just going to say from when I got home, the first night I was there, I slept like crap again because right next to my bed, literally on my nightstand, not more than a foot and a half from my head are two damn wifi routers.

Right. My cell phone was off in an airplane, but in an iMac on the other side of it. Yeah. So what I did was I'm, I completely rearranged my room, but the wifi routers on the other side of the room moved my bed, turned off my iMac at night and turned off my cell phone at night.

So just that the only electronics in the room are the wifi routers at the other end of the room. Right. I have slept like a baby. Now this is not, this is, you know, you can't really get a scientific result out of that. This is completely. No, but personal experience and it's definitely working for you.

And I'm looking at the photos on this article, which was in the show notes. Um, it's a little hard to argue with that. It may not be science, but that one has, one is covered with green and the other is dead. Yeah. So hopefully somebody will actually do real research on it.

That's not sponsored by the cell phone companies. Yeah. So how far away do you put your stuff to notice the real effect? Like the routers? Cause I'm looking down right now and I'm sitting literally on top of two wire wireless routers all day, every day. Hope you don't want children. This is a concern.

Um, so I didn't do any like testing to say, put it two feet, three feet, four feet. I just basically put it as far away from me as I could get it. So it's about eight feet away, eight feet away now. I'm going to have to do some restructuring around this office. I just sit here too long. So although our houses are all covered now, like I'm thinking downstairs where I sleep, I've got an Apple TV and an Apple, uh, you know, ethernet express.

Well, the, the express is a broadcaster, but the Apple TV is a receiver. It doesn't broadcast. Okay. So it's just the, that one. And then I do usually have my cell phone downstairs, which I'll stop doing. And I have an old iPad touch that's wireless, which is connected to the, you know, the, my clock alarm radio.

So I'm going to have to start shutting that off too. Just, I mean, I just keep everything in, cause I'm not going to turn it off cause I still need, I'm going to start having my cell phone back on, but I keep it farther away and I put speakers up. So it's not next to my head to use a little crappy in phone speaker. Right. But I, I, I really like going to bed with an audio book or, you know, something cause I just have trouble sleeping most of the time.

Yeah. But even in, um, I think it was the four hour body, Tim Ferriss was talking about how, um, he noticed like sperm count going down because he kept a cell phone in his pocket, which also not science, not saying it's, you know, um, hard science here, but he stopped carrying his phone in his pocket.

Why hasn't a university done a hardcore study on this? Maybe they haven't. We just don't have the data. So we should, we should, we'll look it up and see if we can find anything. And if there's, if there's any good studies we can find, we'll put them in the show notes. Or if you, if, if you're listening and you know of any good studies, uh, check out the contact form on grumpy old geeks and send us some links.

Yeah. Put them in the show notes. And, uh, Cause this is definitely something that affects all of us geeks. It affects everybody. Now you can't get away from wireless signals. You're blanketed by them everywhere. So it, yeah, I want to know. I want to, I really do want to know. How does this affect us? How far away should we be? I mean, it's obviously prolonged exposure that causes this a real problem.

Sleeping 24, you know, 12 hours, 24 hours. Who sleeps from 24 hours? I wish I could. I would love to, but, uh, and I mean, there were all the studies back in the day that they said that it's not harmful. And Penn and Teller even did a bullshit on it, a little segment on bullshit on it.

Yeah. And, but the, the real issue is, it's like, I don't think we've had enough time to really figure it out. And cell phones have changed with signal strength. You've got Bluetooth chips, you've got GPS, those are receivers, not broadcasters, but you got, you know, emitting Bluetooth signals. I just, I think there's just so many things going on right now.

You just don't know. And I'm not trying to be like, you know, oh, the chicken little, the sky is falling. I'm just saying, let's look into it and figure something out. I agree. And you think about like, you know, when these studies were being done or you think about the fact that, you know, maybe they're only testing one wifi router. If you're in an apartment complex, you're getting hit by, I know right now I'm in range of 15 different wireless signals.

So they're all overlapping with each other and they're combining with each other and nobody's studied that. Yeah. And, and also, I mean, if you're looking at signal strength from the source, you know, like your neighbor's wifi probably doesn't have the signal strength. Shit, it barely has the signal strength to get my iPad on it, let alone, you know, fuck with your physiology.

Yeah. But sitting right next to it all day, every day. Yes. You don't know. You don't know. And on the subject of health, let me tell you what the beer of the day is, Jason. It's a Jason pick. So you beer snobs, cover your ears for a second. We are drinking Michelob Ultra. It's the superior light beer.

I think it is. And tell me again why we're drinking this, because I actually quite like this and I might have to, it's not a bad beer. No, it's actually not. It's very light, because in the summer, I love, like I used to drink Coors Light, because after you're mowing the lawn, ain't nothing better than a frosty Coors Light.

And I'm not joking. I love, it's terrible stuff if you're like, you know, in the middle of winter and you're looking for a decent beer. Right. But for refreshability, this stuff is pretty good. And the upside is, okay, 95 calories a bottle, which isn't really the important part. It's 2.6 grams of carbs.

Right. That is good. Which is less than a glass of red wine. Right. Yeah. And it's not bad. And you've noticed the effects of it for just drinking it for a few weeks, right? Well, yeah, what happened was I got to Pennsylvania and my stepdad bought me some beer, because he knows I like beer. And he rolls this stuff out and I'm like, you've got to be shitting me.

And I had like nine of them the first night. And I'm thinking, oh my God, I'm going to be huge tomorrow, be bloated, and standard beer stuff. Like the next day after we usually do this show. Yeah. I lost a pound. Drinking nine beers. Well, and exercising and doing the normal stuff that I would normally do.

This is a diet I can get behind. But I'm saying, ever since then, I've been drinking this stuff. And coupled with going to the gym every morning now, this stuff is my wonder beer. Right. Wunder beer. Wunder bar. Wunder beer. Well, cheers to that. I mean, I'm going to take you up on this, because I've just recently started redoing P90X, getting back on that bandwagon, P90X2 specifically.

Yeah, and I'm trying to get as healthy as possible, you know, right after the 40th birthday shenanigans and all the unhealthiness that ensued. It's back to the grind and back hardcore, so. Yeah, and I would definitely, we were drinking the bottles today. Check out, see if you can find it in cans, because A, it's cheaper.

You don't have to deal with the CRV. And the cans are really skinny and tall, so they don't take up as much room in your refrigerator, so you can put more in. There you go. Wow. Well, I would definitely be doing that. And, yeah, that's just also another little, you know, hint for you, for you young grumpy geeks that are out there.

Get started being healthy early. Don't wait like a lot of us did. Yeah. Start exercising now. Don't sit in front of your computer all the day and drink a low-carb beer, apparently. Yeah, as long as you're over 21 or have a brother or sister who is. Or, you know, whatever. Hobo down the street will take five bucks.

So, and to the workout thing, since I got back, well, when I was in Pittsburgh, my mom had a gazelle. Remember that thing? They used to show it on TV. Oh, yes, yes. The one you'd go and you'd swish back and forth. It's kind of like a low-rent elliptical sort of thing. Yeah, and you basically just go back and forth. So, I was doing that for an hour a day.

Right. And I'm like, I was feeling great. I'm like, okay, got a new beer, got a little workout regime going. Right. As soon as I got back, I started going to the gym every morning. So, now, by 9 o'clock, I got my 10,000 steps on my Fitbit. I feel great all day. And I go to bed at like 10 at night because I get up at 5 in the morning to go to the gym.

Right, yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to do it. I mean, you're supposed to work out first thing in the morning. It's supposed to be way better for you. I always try to do that, but I fail miserably pretty often. At 5 in the morning, it's like I force myself to get out of bed and there's just nothing else to do at 5 in the morning.

That's a good point. Don't check emails. I don't even turn my computer on until I get back from the gym, have my breakfast, and get in the hot tub and take a shower. So, I got a nice regime in the morning now. Do you have a Michelob Ultra in the hot tub at 9 a.m.? No comment. No comment. Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub?

Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub?

Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Do you have a nice regime in the hot tub? Yeah. It's about our favorite subject, I think.

It both giveth and it taketh away. It's awesome and incredibly frustrating. Social networks. Okay. It seems to be kind of in popular culture right now, being social and everything. But definitely I've noticed this week there's a plethora of articles.

Did you say plethora? Plethora? Plethora? A plethora of piñatas. Plethora of piñatas. There's articles all over the place about how people are really using social media, social media burnout, fatigue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So since we live in this world and we work on these stupid social medias all day, let's talk about it.

So I think it started off with that Pew study that came out. Yeah. Where they studied like 800 teens saying that, "Oh, we don't like Facebook anymore. It's a burden to us." Right. They hate it that their parents are on there.

It's not a safe place for them to be teens anymore. Yeah. And they've moved to other avenues like Instagram or Tumblr or Twitter. But the article did say that they feel the need to stay on it and check in basically constantly on Facebook. Even though they've moved on to other things, it's a burden but they have to be there.

Kind of like heroin. Oh, yeah. I suppose. It can be a burden. It's the Facebook on our back. Yeah. And that's the terrible thing about Facebook is that since everybody uses it, you can't not use it. We talked about this with Joey.

Yeah. He's lost friends because of it. I personally can't stop using it because I work on it. Yeah. I work on it and it's how I keep in touch with a lot of my friends who I don't see in person anymore. And I'm certainly not going to be doing phone calls or Skyping or anything. It's great for that but I do feel the burden aspect as well.

I feel like I have to check every couple hours. But why? I don't know. See? It's just become a thing. It's become a thing where you have to. You have to see what's going on. I might be missing something. A friend could be down the street having a beer at Finn's without me.

That can't happen. But maybe he didn't want you to show up. Maybe he was having a beer with other people that he liked more than you. That can't possibly be happening. No way. No. I mean that is kind of the feeling that's in my mind with Facebook.

And Facebook is kind of really the only social media that I particularly involve myself with or I'm on all the time or do updates on. I mean as an experiment recently just because I felt like I had to. Well I'm on all the other ones for bands or stuff.

But I've actually signed myself up with Instagram, Foursquare, all these other, what else am I? I signed up with Vine as well. And all my same friends that are on Facebook are on these other medias. But they're doing things on the other media that I don't see on Facebook.

So now I feel like I have to check them there too. It's getting ridiculous. But this is the sound of history repeating. This is nothing new. Since there has been social networks, the same thing happens. People get on it. They get addicted to it.

Then they burn out. Then they never touch it again. Right. That's why there's always a cycle of people going through it. You get people that have never. Like my mom just found out about Pinterest last week. And now she was like, have you seen this great little thing?

I can look at pictures and all this new stuff. I'm like, yeah, I've seen it. Yeah, we've seen it. Yeah. And there's always going to be somebody who's, you know, never seen it before. So it's new to them, new to their friends. Yeah. There's always going to be late adopters, middle adopters, and early adopters.

We tend to be in the early adopter category. Yeah. Which is always frustrating because by the time this shit gets popular, we are so burnt out on it. We're done. We never want to see it again. Yeah. This has always been the way. I mean, it started back in the day. You had Blogger. You had LiveJournal.

Then you moved into MySpace. And all the, you know, the subset sites that came out of those that are long gone that nobody can remember anymore. Yeah. You know, flash in the pan. They're big for a year and they move on and they disappear. Right. And it's never going to stop. There's always going to be this turnover.

But now, since it's in, you know, the zeitgeist. Yes. The zeitgeist, as it were. Yes. It's, now it's just everybody's on this shit and you can't get away from hearing about it. But this is, this behavior I don't think is anything new.

Right. I mean, even look at Flickr. Flickr, now that they've done all these, you know, wonderful upgrades to make things pretty and annoying. I don't, I personally don't like the new Flickr. I, I'm not a big fan of it, but. Yeah. That's not the point. The point is, there used to be great communities on Flickr.

They burnt out. They faded away. They disbanded. Right. Trying to get them to come back. That's not what, I don't think that's what they're going for. I think they're trying to get a new crowd in. Trying to get a new crowd in. And not to, you know, not to revive the old communities. Because once a community lives, it has a lifespan, you know, then people move on.

Right. And, but it's, it goes in with the whole burnout too. It's like, you spend enough time on Flickr looking at other people's photos, you're going to get burnt. Right. And you're going to move on. Then you move to 500px. That's probably not a thing anymore either, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, those are kind of almost more targeted communities. So I get that. It's, it's more like the Instagram and the Vine thing where you're just seeing updates from friends. And I started to ask myself because it does, it does feel like heroin. It's become this drug that I think is affecting all of us where we need to know everything and see everything and make sure that we are caught up on everything.

And I'm like, how many photos of, uh, how many of my friends sunset photos do I actually need to see? All of them. Or pictures of their kids. All of them. I love my friend, Sasha. I love her little baby. And she occasionally posts the photo on Facebook and that's enough for me.

But if I look at her Instagram, there's 30 more pictures of her. I don't need to see it, but I feel like I do. And I think we all kind of feel that way a little bit. We feel like once we get on these things, we've got to check them all the time. And you also have to post or you will become irrelevant.

Right. And I got to make sure that people like my Instagram status and it's, it's insane. And there was another article that actually came up about on Huffington post, what really happens on a teen girl's phone. And they talked to this one particular girl. So it's obviously not incredibly in-depth study, but I did find it really interesting where she did a list of all the metrics that she found important, which I am trying to find right now.

Here's what this girl regularly tracks. The number of contacts stored on her iPhone. The number of people following her on Instagram. The number of people who've asked to follow her on Instagram, but she's refused to accept. The number of people following her Tumblr blog. Her high score on dots. One of your likes.

Also the Jared Leto album. And she beat me. The number of photos she stores on her phone. Uh, the number of photos, her friends store on their phones. So, you know, which is kind of a weird metric. Uh, the number of people she's friends with on Facebook. The number of acquaintances has quit Facebook.

She also uses the app Insta follow to keep tabs on who's unfollowed her on Instagram. She can unfollow them. Uh, that sounds like a full day. It is. It's a full time job. Yeah. And we haven't even talked about Twitter, which is the biggest time. Yeah.

Which, which she may or may not be on. I'm, I'm surprised that wasn't listed. Um, and God knows, you know, she's probably on 20 other apps that we haven't even heard of yet, which the kids are just finding out, you know, it did mention earlier that she quit Snapchat. Okay. And God knows what she was doing on there, but we have forensic science to get that.

Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, it is a full time job. That's, that's half of the problem with it. And when I was big into it, you know, back when a lot of the stuff was when, when, when these systems first came out, I was always, you know, at the beginning of the line to try them out.

And, you know, my hatred for Twitter doesn't come from the fact that it's not a useful service. It comes from the fact that I just didn't understand it as a tool when it first came out and I used it improperly. Right. I would try and have conversations with people, but it was public.

And it's like, yeah, it was, I, I completely used it wrong in my hatred for Twitter. It's a broadcaster. Yeah. I'm reevaluating that now because it is a tool. And we're Facebook is a very, if you do your privacy settings, right. It's a private conversation. Yeah, exactly. Twitter is a public conversation.

Yeah. And that's where you can really like communicate with a lot of people. And that part I'm, I'm trying to get back into because I do kind of miss that global communication feel. Right. But it, I, I'm just terrified that I'm going to go back down that rabbit hole. You know, I'm not gonna, I don't want to have tweet deck open ever again with my 18 lists and, you know, all my tags and filters and all that shit.

Yeah. It's yeah. Twitter burned me out too. Cause it's just, it's too, it's too much. And, and you know, you just have to look all the time and you feel like you have to be posting all the time. Or like you said, you become irrelevant and you're dropped out of whatever thing is happening. And for me, it's just, you know, I'm happy doing my couple of Facebook updates a day that are quite funny and that's good enough for me.

And I'm happy to make my friends laugh. I don't need to make a mark on the world via Twitter. And I don't, it's just like you, you start to feel ridiculous. Like you show up at a place and you have to check in on four square and then you have to do a Facebook update about it. And then you should probably tweet about it.

And then maybe I should take a photo and put it on Instagram. And then I should probably do a quick look seven second video of me drinking my beer to put on vine. And I don't get to sit and enjoy my beer. I have to do 18 things as soon as I get somewhere. It's ridiculous. I know. And the funny thing about this behavior that you're describing is something that my crowd did four years ago, five years ago, you know, and you know, we're over it now.

For the most part, I've done that. I've been there. I can selectively post interesting things because I know what's not interesting. Right. I'm trying to get better at this. I, I did post all of my Bloody Marys on my trip to Instagram. But I enjoyed that. That's fine.

That was, that was part of a narrative arc. Right. That wasn't the sandwich that I'm having. The, the infamous cheese sandwich. Yes. Yes. But you did have, you connected your Instagram to Facebook. Yes. So I don't feel like I'm missing out because I see it on Facebook.

Now, I don't understand the people that have the Facebook and then the Instagram and then they're not connected. And it's, I just. There, well, that's a fine line. That's a very fine line between with cross posting. Right. You can, you can piss a lot of people off if you have a tweet that goes to your blog.

Right. You're everywhere. You know, there's a, there's a really fine line. And I've selectively, I don't post every photo on Facebook that I post on Instagram. Right. I selectively post things that I know that my friends that are on Facebook would like to see that are, that have no idea that I'm on Instagram.

Right. Because Instagram also is kind of more of a broadcasting medium. Yes. Like Twitter. So. Yeah. You can, same with Twitter, you can make private accounts. Right. But for the most part, I don't know almost any of the people that follow me on Instagram. Yeah. And that just seems like such a weird thing to me.

It's, it's, it's somewhere I don't really want to go. I'm not into doing things that like people I don't know would see at, but that's just me. Yeah. It depends on, it depends on your goal, what your, your personal level of, you know, narcissism and, and, and, and drive to fame is, I guess I would score low on Dr. Drew's narcissism test.

And I go look back at when I started blog rolling and that started to pick up steam and get popular. My personal blog, which had nothing to do with blog rolling, but it was just, I, it was linked from your basic. When you start up, you know, I, I fudge the power law because when you start up an account, like, like the, the WordPress blog roll pre-populated with a bunch of links to get free traffic.

Or when you joined my space, you became Tom's friend. Yeah. So I did the same thing there. And one day I like after six months, I never looked at stats on my blog. Cause I'm like, okay, well there's like seven people that look at my blog. 10,000 people a day were reading my blog and I've, it flipped me out.

I'm like, Oh my God. You know, I just posted about cooking. The power I have. No, I just posted about like having a Jack Daniels sitting in the nude cooking a steak on my grill. I'm just like, Oh, okay. You know? And that brings into focus a lot of things that people shouldn't post, but that's a top different topic.

That's a whole different topic. But you know. But the burnout thing is, is, Oh yeah. I mean, I've only been doing this stuff for a week and I'm burnt out. Like I could care less. I'll probably never open up Instagram again. So in it, cause it's, it's different strokes for different folks.

Yeah. And like, I mean, we've said a thousand times, these sites come and go. But the interesting thing was you just had a list of the top 10 social networks. Actually the top 15. Okay. Top 15 social networks as of May, 2013. Now the biggest surprise for me is not that my space is at number five, because that's, it's still fairly.

It's pretty surprising to me. Well, it's still, you know, got a lot of legacy stuff. A lot of legacy links going to it. Right. Live journal is what freaks me out. It's still at number eight. Right. I'm actually really shocked. Let me just run down the top 10 really quick. So, you know, people can hear it. Uh, number one is Facebook.

No surprise there. Number two is Twitter. I'm a little surprised. Number three is LinkedIn. I'm not. That's been picking up steam for it. Really? The past five years has been completely picking up steam. Wow. I just, is it really useful? I mean, I guess it is in this hardcore business world. Well, and they also did that thing where they like replicated like the Twitter timeline so you can post status updates to LinkedIn, which I, which I find ridiculous.

Yeah. And I'm on, I'm on, I'm on my way to canceling my LinkedIn account. It's nothing but a headache, but whatever. Um, number four is Pinterest. No surprise there. The mom brigade. There you go. I mean, it's Pinterest is, is made for women and, uh, there's a lot of women on the internet now and this is hugely popular site and I get why, but I will never be on it.

Can't move on. Number five being my space. I, I still can't believe that it's number five. Uh, but then again, we start to get to these number six, Google plus, uh, you know, I don't know anybody that's still on there. It's still on there, but it is. It's like I said, I said on a previous show, it's a broadcast medium.

Nobody's consuming. Nobody's engaging with stuff. Other people post at least not to the, cause the way they, uh, formatted the circles. Now it's like now all I see are my friends. I don't see the like 10 other circles that I've like shared from other people and all this stuff.

So I've got 10,000 people. I'm in 10,000 people circles on Google plus. I post something, I get one or two pluses or maybe a comment from people that have already commented on it on Facebook. Right. Yeah, exactly. Have you ever done one of the hangouts? Um, yeah, I did a bones brigade hangout, which was pretty cool.

Right. I mean, I heard the hangout feature was actually pretty groovy and I'm surprised that nobody has stolen it. And well, the tech is pretty cool too. The way that the way that like focuses the camera on who's talking and it's pretty neat. And the video quality was pretty good. We actually started using hangouts for work instead of Skype because it's more reliable than Skype and it gets through corporate firewalls easier.

Oh, smart. Yeah. It works pretty well, especially for multi-user. Like, so if you've got like a four team, like a 14 chat, it works way better than Skype. Yeah. Especially if somebody doesn't have, uh, the premium account, then you're screwed. Yeah.

You need one person that at least has that. Uh, number seven, deviant art. Don't know much about it. I do. Lots of pictures. Okay. It's, it's, you know, basically, uh, it's kind of like flicker for artists and digital artists. That's cool. You can get some, there's some really talented people in deviant art.

I know that's one of my brother's top, top sites, I believe. Oh, cool. Very cool. Eight live journal. Cannot believe it. That's, it's really surprising. Uh, nine tagged. Never heard of it. Never heard of it. Ten orchid. Heard of it, but I didn't know that was still a thing.

No people were on it. Uh, 11 cafe mom. I think we know the target market there. Never heard of it. Um, they should probably make a deal with Pinterest. Number 12 ning. Wow. I thought, I thought they, I thought they went out. Yeah. Me too. When they went all paid. Yeah.

There's no, no free. Yeah. That pretty much killed it. So, uh, 13 meetup. Um, I personally have never used meetup, but I know a ton of people that, you know, we are here in Los Angeles. There's a lot of people that move here. You move here. Don't know people. Meetup supposed to be fantastic for that. And I've never, I have a bunch of friends say it's great.

I've done a couple of meetups. They're pretty fun. Oh, cool. You do get to meet some, some neat people. Excellent. Uh, 14, my life. I, I just know that it, when you Google someone that always shows up, whether they're on it or not, I didn't, I didn't know anybody was actually on it. I don't think anybody is on it. I think they basically just scour databases.

Yeah. Public data. So there you go. 15 is multiply. Never heard of it. And they didn't really, um, you know, there's no, there's no Tumblr on here, which I guess they're not considering a social network, but yeah. Well, if, if they were going with that blogger would be on here too. Yeah.

So right. Or they're not like Instagram or whatever. Yeah. I mean, you can follow other people's blogs, but it's not as interpersonal type of thing. So, yeah. So that's an awful lot of social networks and an awful lot of time if you're on all of them. Yeah. It's.

Yeah. And you know, I don't know. And you, you talked about four square before. I still don't understand the purpose of that. If they did auto check-ins, like if I get to a place and I'm stopped for a good bit of time. Yeah. Check me in.

I don't want to have to sit there and manually check in because check-in fatigue was a, it was a huge one. What was their competitor for a while? It was really pretty. I think they were out of Austin. Yeah. There was another one. I loved, I loved them just for their design. I thought that the fate, when Facebook rolled out their check-ins, I thought four square would go away. But the, the thing I like about four square where it could be really cool is, is for businesses that offer the deals when you check in.

Yeah. But not enough people use it anymore because it's going out and not enough businesses are doing anything like that. But I thought that was like, that's pretty groovy. Like Dennis Crowley says that they're still getting more check-ins than they have before and they're still doing okay. But you know, that's. But I agree. You should be able to have like it automatically on all the time and just like it'll pop up and say, do you want to check in here?

Yeah. But then you get into the privacy. It's like, do I really want to have that all the time? Right. Be trackable. It's like. Yeah. I actually didn't really look into four square enough. Like I assume that I would assume that it's only people that I follow that see my updates, but it may not be.

They could. They get a pretty decent, um, uh, preference package. I'll have to actually do this. Yeah. I checked into them when I was starting on the book and they had a, they had a pretty good set of privacy controls. Right. I think it's a great concept and I was always a little bummed that Facebook didn't actually just kind of use them and try to do their own version.

So. They might've just not let them. Yeah. They might've not. Yeah. Like you look at that, that blow up with Facebook and Google, like the cross pollination between, you know, user accounts and stuff like that. Yeah. There's always, there's always back channel stuff that you never hear about. Yeah.

So. Yeah. If they could all just get along then. Yeah. Well, you know, that again, going back to the past, we were saying that when, in the great browser wars, God, if only Microsoft and Netscape could get along and pick a set of standards so we didn't have to recode everything.

I guess now they sort of finally did. Yeah. Well, I mean there's, well now Google split off the, um, their engine that they were using with Chrome that was basically Apple's engine. Like that's, that's a new thing. But if you look at the check-in history, Google's been basically driving web kit for the past like two years.

Yeah. All the check-ins were them. So. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I don't know. I, I've been kind of wanting to get back into it just because we're doing the podcast and I've got some other things coming up where I kind of want to have my personal brand to be back out there.

Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt that it's, it's, if you have something to sell or promote, it makes sense to be on all these places. It was also kind of fun. Right. I did get to meet a lot of people. Right. On, with, with using, you know, my social network prowess and I got invited to a lot of parties and had a lot of fun.

Right. But yeah, then you do tend to get burnt out when it doesn't perform the way you expect it to perform. I've had that happen and you know, then you get frustrated and then you say something stupid and then you lose half your friends. Yeah. I drunk posts or accidental Instagrams.

Well, and that's the, that's the thing that I've been kind of struggling with. It's like, okay, yeah, I used to be pretty popular on these and then I got to be fairly unpopular cause I kept, you know, having blow ups and having problems with them. And it's like, can you rebuild your reputation? And I, I'm, I'm of the mind that you can because it's a whole new crowd.

I mean, I, I look at my subset of people that I was really close with and it was close with being, you know, a relative term, but it was like, you know, virtually close with. Yeah. I mean, I, I, in my heyday, I think I probably had 9,000 Twitter followers. Right.

And I systematically unfollowed them all. And I, I just had, I had bot fatigue too. I'm like, cause everybody's like, Oh, how many followers, followers, followers? I'm like, it doesn't matter. They're 90% of them are bots. You don't know if anybody's ever read your post because there's some people just check it once a day and they look at what's on their screen and then they move on.

Yeah. They see the 15 or whatever that they've got right in front of them. Yeah. When you look at, when you look at the actual number of completists who look at where they stopped, then when they launched Twitter again, go back to exactly where they were and read every post. That's a, that number is very small and I'm sure it's getting smaller all, all the time.

Yeah. And I remember back when I was first like really getting into Twitter and you were, you were on your way out already. Uh, what's that guy, the director, Kevin Smith, who I wanted to follow. I followed him on Twitter and I remember bitching to you about how I can't handle it because he was using it completely inappropriately.

Oh, he was writing pros and like 140 character chunks in 35 posts in a row. Yeah. And I'm like, I can't do this. I can't follow. This makes no sense. It hurts. It hurts my head, Jason. Well, and he's, he's, he basically has no idea how technology works. I, I, I got some, some backstories from, from his, I actually.

But that's fine. He doesn't claim to and that's not his job. No, but he should have, he should have, he has people. He should have people that in, in, it's like the whole George Lucas thing. He made a shitty movie because all the people that surrounded him didn't tell him his movie was shitty. Kevin Smith is making shitty tweets because his people aren't saying, uh, sir, that's not how you're supposed to use it.

You know, it's 140 characters for a fucking reason. Be brief. Yeah. I mean, he's super smart guy. I love his books, but yeah, he's, he was using Twitter just completely wrong. And it just blew my mind and I couldn't handle it. And that's one of the reasons I never got into Twitter too, because.

Well, you could have just unfollowed him and. Yeah. I did. I did. But I, what I discovered about it is I actually like long form. I don't like short form. That's, that's why I don't dig Twitter. I can't, I don't want it condensed down to 140 characters. If you have something interesting, it's going to take more than 140 characters, unless it's a cool little funny joke.

And I'm not, I'm just not into it. I get Twitter for breaking news and trends and all that sort of stuff. But for me, I, I know enough about myself to know I don't like Twitter. I will probably never be on it. I occasionally do an update. That's it. Yeah. And like I said, I'm thinking about going back and I also look at things like a flip board who takes the, they'll take all of the links that your friends have posted that day and create a little magazine for you.

Right. And this was a fun thing when I started reading again, when I was in on vacation, because I haven't read a lot as far as tech news goes. Right. In years. I subscribed to the Tim Ferriss information diet theory for a while.

And unfortunately I took that to the extreme and stopped reading all of the industry news. Right. So now I'm getting back into industry news and I'll read a hundred articles a day. Just flip through them like on the treadmill. But here's a million dollar idea if somebody wants to go make it.

So flip board takes all of your, the posts from your friends and, and displays them to you. So why can't I thumbs up, thumbs down those articles and say, this is something I want to read. And on the back end, they algorithmically unfollow people that I have, you know, regularly not liked their links.

Just, just take them out of the, take them out of the algorithm. And so say you post a great link in two of your friends post a great link, match that, match them, match them up and auto follow your friends. Right. And find, you know, find like interest.

But then that gets into privacy issues. Why? It's just, it's a, it's a Twitter follow. Okay. No, I'm saying using, using Twitter as, as a news aggregator that basically you are driving, but it's algorithmic on the back end. That is a really good idea. So you can, you know, you basically have your new swarm.

Yeah. But you don't have to, it all matches on the back end. I mean, I have a flow chart that I wrote out about it. So this is kind of a, kind of a quick overview of it. But I think, yeah, I'm just not good enough of a programmer to probably pull that one off. But I think, I think the core, there's a core idea there of using social networks.

Like, especially Twitter. I mean, Facebook, I really don't care about because it's pictures of cats kicking themselves in the face. Um. No, that's Tumblr. No, that's GIFs. GIFs. Sorry. GIF. G-g-g-gif. Not according to the inventor.

Well, the inventor can suck my ass. Look, if somebody has been using your product for 20 years now, your invention for 20 years now and been calling it GIF, you can't stand up now and say it's GIF. No. GIF is peanut butter. F-Y.

Well, I'm not going down that rabbit hole. But I'm just saying, I think that there are some cool tertiary uses for, for these technologies that, I mean, people have been working on forever, you know? Yeah. It's, there's still some fun stuff to be had, I think.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess. I don't know. How much value is there really to it? Obviously a lot since this is driving our economy now, but. I don't know how it's driving our economy. No, I don't either. I still don't understand that. Well, you show me one social media expert out of a thousand that's, you know, making money.

Oh, well, everybody's a social media expert now. Of course. There was, there was this guy that I introduced to you recently. He was like, yeah, I do social media and all this stuff. I'm like, okay, cool. What's your page? I'll follow your page. And once every 45 minutes he posts a link on how social media can jazzercise your business.

And I'm like, if you've got so much fucking business, why are you posting all this crap? You should not have time to post this stuff. It, it, it got to the point where it just, it was laughable. Right. You know, and I, I listened to a podcast the other day about this woman who wrote these Pinterest marketing for dummies books.

And. Wow. Two of them. Two. There's two dummies books on Pinterest marketing. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, I think she's making more money on the books than she probably ever made marketing on Pinterest.

Oh, for sure. Yes. And I mean, it's one of those things where, yeah, you can, you can go down that, that rabbit hole and deal with these social media experts who, you know, have basically taught themselves from reading other social media experts who probably sold them a, a package deal on videos.

Yes. Those, those horrible, uh, webcam videos where they're just sitting in front of a white wall and you pay a hundred bucks on app sumo and they teach you how to do something that is, you know, has been blood dry six months ago. And, uh, sorry, I went off. No, no, no, it's okay.

I was just, uh, I was going off in my own mind about like the series of like how to make something viral that I saw recently. I'm like, Oh my God, you can't make something viral. It just happens. You can't force it. Oh, we had, although, although apparently there was a big, huge article.

We'll have to talk about this in a future episode about how size thing was actually, you know, not viral. It was actually really created supposedly manufactured, manufactured viralness, but who knows? So interesting. Yeah. We'll have to look into that. I mean that, that, you know, the craziest thing that I find at least from the business perspective, because I approach social networks and social media from a business perspective, because in general I'm doing it for bands, not so much for me.

And, uh, it's just the lack of, of accountability and a lack of metrics and a lack of stats about everything. And it would be so easy for them to build in real stats, but they don't want to for obvious reasons. And if they are keeping stats, they're keeping it internally for, for, you know, advertising reasons and trying to make money.

But I mean, what kind of stats are you looking for? Let's look. Cause I think nowadays, especially with Twitter, they've got their own URL shortener. So they can track outbound links. They can see who clicked on what, you know, I mean, that was the impetus for them creating their own shortener. I'm sure. But you can't see how many people see your, your update.

If you're an advertiser. They have to be active and click. No. Like when we first started this podcast, just out of the blue, they sent me $50 worth of free Twitter ads. Right. So I created a promoted post for us just to get some people in the door to see how it went.

Right. And the, um, the stats that they gave me were actually pretty, really pretty comprehensive. Yeah. I saw how many times it was posted, how many times it was clicked. I got, you know, pretty good targeting. I only wanted people who spoke English in the United States and did all, all the, you know, didn't mind the occasional bad word.

Yeah. Over 18. Right. Um, and I did target just kind of like you do with AdSense. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, it was 50 bucks. I think we got 130 clicks out of that. So. And I've done the Facebook ads before too. And I, the same thing, you get pretty good, you get pretty good metrics on that.

But yeah, I mean just your standard average, like post that say doesn't have a link. I'm just doing something and I'm going to, for a band, I'm going to put it on Facebook. I'm going to put it on Twitter, put it on MySpace. I'm going to put it on blah, blah, blah. But there, I mean, there, there are companies that actually do social media metrics now that you can actually hire and pay to do that.

And you use your URL shorteners for the different things that get shortened, shortened, double shortened. Yes. You know, so you got the round robin. It's like bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce. Yeah. 18 fucking bounces before you get to the link. Yeah. But I mean, you, you can track this stuff.

It might not be, cause Twitter is not interested in you making a post and your metrics on it. No. Because you're not paying them. Yeah. To advertise it. So why are they, why are they, yeah. Why are they going to. Why would they? Yes. So.

And I get that. So. It's in their best interest to like. It's in their best interest to have it be a useful tool for people. Yeah. And. Especially for businesses. Mm hmm. And, and the thing that still boggles my mind is why Facebook is actively, you know, basically waging war on people who have built Facebook apps and, and making, making the tab smaller and hidden.

Yeah. And cause it used to be, you know, you make a Facebook app for your brand front and center. You could make it the page. You could make it the homepage. Yeah. And you can't do that anymore. It's, it's relegated to a tiny tab. Facebook is getting rid of that stuff fast. Yeah. And I just don't understand why they, there's so much money that people put into these, these apps and games to get people to come to Facebook to play these games.

Yeah. Or, you know, any kind of like engagement app. I, I still don't understand why they're trying to, you know, push that off to the side. Yeah. It's a little surprising to me too, but I mean, I mean, can you, can, do you have an explanation for it?

Why would they do that? Seriously? I mean, can you think of anything why they would be doing this? Uh, the only, you know, they're, well, they want to control everything. They want to close garden. I think that they're moving away from the open garden policy, so they don't want anybody playing around with their APIs anymore. Absolutely not true.

Okay. There was just a, I was just reading on their, their blog, their, their ecosystem and how they're expanding it. Really? Yeah. Well then it makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever that the entire interface is basically banished. Anything that you can create. Yeah. That's what possible to find.

That's why I don't understand it. Why are they? I don't even understand my personal page anymore. Much less the layouts on, on the, on pages. Yeah. I do. I do like the new graph search because you can find out some crazy shit in there. I mean that, the new graph search, if you know how to structure a query, you can find some interesting things about people.

Well, it's the new, it's the new Google's, you know, ability. The new Google Google search ability. If you can put together a good query. Yeah. The graph searches is funky. And yeah. Even more reason to check all your privacy settings on Facebook. It doesn't matter. They're going to reset them for you. I know they'll reset them the next time you install the app again.

Or just on the website. Even if you don't use the app. Mm-hmm. So, I don't know. I think, I, I definitely think that as far as what you're saying with, with trackability and stuff like that, if you don't, even if you're not getting it through this service, there are other services out there. There are services you can go get it.

Yeah. Not, not, I don't know if they're any good. Cause some of the ones that we've tried in the past for, for different marketing campaigns have just, the stats have been abysmal. Right. And you know, some of the stuff is untrackable. Yeah. And that's fine. And it doesn't really bother me so much because I, at the end of the day, it's, you're trying to sell something and you don't really know.

I mean, you can find out some stuff, but it's more eyeballs and just, you know, it's like commercials. You just, you just want to get your brand out in front of people and hope it sinks in and eventually maybe they'll come around and take a look at something. And I don't care if they click on the link or if they just remember it later and type it in.

I don't care. Yeah. Yeah. You can't, that's unquantifiable. Exactly. Especially like the cheap ads that you just throw out on Facebook that you don't want people to click. You know, that was a, there was a whole black art to that. People were doing really completely unclickable ads that you would never click on, but you would remember it.

Yeah. And then later on they would do a different campaign where they wanted you to click it. Cause they would get like these high priced ads that were just whatever, but they'd have a certain person's face on it, which was the, the, whatever chintzy ass marketer was trying to sell you a product. And then they would come back and get the cheap stuff and then, you know, recycle through there's, there's a whole bunch of that stuff going on, but I completely lost the train where I was going with that.

It's the whole marketing thing with it, I guess. Yeah. Well, we kind of got away from the whole social media fatigue thing, which is going to be our original. Well, because I think we got fatigued. Yeah. We got fatigued with it. That's definitely true. So I don't know. I, I still, I'm hopeful that I can go back to it.

So you're, you're being very optimistic about it right now. And I'm definitely being a negative realist at the moment. Well, like I said, I, I, in my, uh, my little diatribe on my blog, I'm starting up new stuff. Yeah. And I need to get back out there and talk to people and meet people and get back on the horse.

It's not, I can't just sit in my room and just hope people will show up. That's true. You gotta throw yourself out there. Get back out. And I did, I did actually, sadly enough, Lee, I left Tumblr. My blog is now off Tumblr. It is back to WordPress.

Well, yeah, we've talked a thousand times about how crappy WordPress is, but I applaud your decision to get off Tumblr. Because I do think you should own your own shit. Yeah, no, I have control now. Yeah. You know, and most of it's my photography stuff that was, I put up there two years ago. And so if you go to jpd.me, personal plug, shameless, um, you'll see, you'll see all of my photography stuff in a couple posts, but I'm going to start ramping up the post now that I'm back from vacation.

Let me ask you a question going away from the fatigue thing, since you're obviously not fatigued and you're jumping back in all the way. I've been fatigued. I am, I am getting a second wind and don't call it a comeback. Don't call it a comeback. Okay. You've got your own blog. Yes. Correct.

You've got your own Facebook. You've got a private, private Facebook account. You've got a private Facebook account. I don't have a public Facebook account. You've got an Instagram. Which I don't use anymore. You've got a Twitter. Except for that. Right. Yes. Okay. I have, I have eight Twitter accounts. What else? What else are you, what other social networks are you on?

Or slash apps? Social app. I've still got Flickr. I tried Vine. I thought it was useless. Right. It has absolutely no value to anything I want to do. So my question is when you decide you want to do something.

Yes. Whatever it may be. How do you decide what goes where and where it belongs? And do you cross pollinate if it's something big or that you really want to promote? Does it go everywhere? Or are you selective? Or how, how do you make your decisions on what goes where?

Okay. Oh, and don't forget my app.net account. Enigma Labs on app.net. And, uh, you can find me on Google plus. Um, so basically what, whenever I have something that I want to get out there, like, like say a new episode of the show. Yes.

I will craft a message for the audience for each individual service. I do not post the same message across every service. Ever. That's, you know. That's one Oh one. Yeah. Because not that most social network experts know that. Learn from cold, hard reality.

Yeah. Several times. They're like, why the fuck am I seeing this? Especially the cross posting from Twitter to Flickr. That was, most people have figured out not to do that anymore. Or I think I've just banned Twitter. So I don't see people's tweets that come across. Cause if I'm following you on Facebook, guaranteed I'm following you on Twitter.

Right. No doubt about it. Cause my, my circle of friends, I know my, mainly from Twitter. Cause I was on Twitter before I moved back over to Facebook and I just kind of. Yeah. But so I have cross pollination there. So on Facebook, I craft a much longer message. Because it has something. Yeah.

You know, and pick the right link for the, um, like sometimes I'll post the link to the iTunes store for our podcast. And sometimes I'll post it directly to the, the actual episode page on our, on our. Yeah. Because if I'm talking about show notes and what we talk about, then I want to go to the episode page.

The page. Excuse me. Michelob. Michelob ultra is give a little gassy. Yeah. So. So, but yeah, basically to your point, I will, I will craft a message for each individual service. Right. Knowing my audience on that service.

Okay. So yeah, there you go. That was my question. Yeah. I was just as somebody that is active and getting active on, on a number of different services. I was just like, what goes where, how do you decide? Like, do you just do the same thing all the time? Which seems to be what some people do or, you know, I don't know.

Yeah. And, and, you know, you use metadata differently. Like there's a tagging on Facebook is doesn't exist. So like on Instagram, I'll use a different tag on Twitter. I'll use a different tag. Tumblr. I'm not really using anymore except for following a few friends blogs, but then I just use RSS.

Right. Quick, quick, funny story. It worked today. I got an email yesterday saying, Oh, well we put up this new Tumblr blog and we're getting word that the RSS wasn't set up. Right. Can you go check it out? I'm like, okay, it's Tumblr.

You don't set up the RSS. It kind of comes with the, it comes with the car, you know, it's like floor mats. It kind of comes with the car. So I click on it. It was like, okay, there's the XML. Send it back. I'm like, no, here it is. There's a fucking link. And I find out today, like the entire story.

Apparently there's a PR company out of New York that these people use on occasion. And this woman at the PR agency, a senior at the PR agency was just like, well, I don't know why when I click on the link, it just, why do I have to download an app to look at RSS feeds?

Why doesn't it just happen? Why do I have to copy and paste? I just, this is, this just doesn't work for me. I don't know what we're going to do. Why do you have it? Oh man. I'm like, okay, well, granted RSS is on its way out, but that's how the fucking shit works.

Yeah. That's just, that's what it is. I mean, yeah. Some feed burner, you get the pretty page where you can, but no, RSS is a, it's a fucking link to some XML. Yeah. That's ugly code. But somebody that's a head of a PR company that works on the internet should know how fucking RSS works.

Well, anyway, sorry, sorry. Quick, quick aside there, but I'm actually self editing myself. Cause that one might get me in trouble. Okay. Well, this was, this was unnamed and unsourced, but yeah. So, you know, I'm just, I'm working to get back on the horse with the social media and, and try and get past the fatigue.

Cause I had it, I've had it several times. I've, I've, I mean, it's like a fucking sign wave with me and social media, but now I'm older and smarter and no, now I know how it works. And I know that it's a tool. It's not, I don't want to use it for entertainment. Right.

I'm using it as a tool to talk to people, to get to know people, to get my stuff out there and learn about them. And you know, quid pro quo and all the whole nine yards, you know, cause it is a conversation and you can have fun with it. If you're not stupid and follow 2000 people on Twitter or have a thousand friends on Facebook.

Yeah. It's not, it's never about the number. It's about the quality. Yeah. Completely about the quality. I agree with that. I'm still fatigued. So I'm not quite ready to jump on the horse with you. I will let you ride off into the sunset and let me know how it goes and maybe I'll follow you. All right.

If you don't answer, I'll just bring it off the wall. I know he's there, but I can try to call. But we'll be hanging on the telephone. And we'll be hanging on the telephone.

And here's my I'm a hypocrite report. Yes, yes. I actually funded a Kickstarter after all these many episodes of me shitting all over it and hating it, but not hating Kickstarter, the concept, hating various aspects of it, the celebrities.

But I did fund a semi celebrities Kickstarter. I'm happy to report somewhat breaking news right before we started the podcast that Zane Lamprey, his Kickstarter made it. Chug is on its way. Chug is on its way and I'm quite looking forward to it. And it's the first and no, it's not the first Kickstarter I ever funded.

I did fund my business partner when he's flip book it. That doesn't count. That doesn't count. That's nepotism. Yeah, that's nepotism. But this is the first one I actually really went for and I'm looking forward to the show and we'll see. I have next to no interest in the behind the scenes emails and all the crap I'm getting, but I will wear my chug shirt and I'm looking forward to my digital episodes.

I too will wear my chug shirt because I funded it as well. So, and I think we both came in at the same, same price point. So we will have the same t-shirt. So we have to, we have to coordinate our wardrobes because we don't want to end up at fins we're in the same shirt. No, we can't do that. That's that's wrong. But it, one of the interesting things about, about Zane's reading those behind the scenes emails that I learned was he raised 500,000 and listening to his podcast, he also did some of the math on his podcast, about $150,000 of the 500,000.

Well, $50,000 immediately disappears. Right. That goes to Kickstarter and Amazon. It goes to Kickstarter. And Amazon. And Amazon. They each take 5%. So that's 450. Right. Which is a shit ton of money. 50 grand. Yeah. So, and then on top of that, another 100,000 goes into the perks.

Yeah. Printing all the shirts. Printing all the shirts. Yeah. Printing shirts. Printing shirts. And the parties and all that crap. So another 100,000, 150,000 is out the door. So their gap funding is coming from his pocket. Right. He's paying for it. So.

Or he's got to produce the show with basically a quarter of a mil, 250. No. He said he's putting in the rest of the money himself. Good for him. So. And he. We like that. Yeah. And he said that they knew that coming out of the, out of the gate, that even if they got the 500, it wasn't going to be enough. So he's going to personally put his money in for the rest.

Right. And he's going to be about the same as what, what they raised. Yeah. You know, so. Cause they're doing eight episodes and the, the budget on this is more than three sheets. Yeah. So. So looking forward to it. Happy I did it. We'll see how it goes.

Yeah. I love Zane. So. Me too. Good for him. I hope the show is as good as three sheets was. That's all I'm hoping for. Yep. I actually have two new printers sitting around the office at the moment. Neither of which will work, which brings me to my hate of the week.

Uh, not the printer tech support, tech support, tech support, tech support. But why isn't it the printer? If you have to call tech support because the printer doesn't work. Well, because the hate expands beyond the printer. I mean, it's just, everything is made so cheaply now and it's all like, it's basically built to fail.

And. Oh God. Tech support. Um, my, my new theory right now, and I'm just going to pass this on to everybody as a, as a grumpy old geek. If the shit doesn't work right away, when you plug it in, don't even bother. Don't call. Return it.

Return it right away. Get another one. Plug it in. If that one doesn't work, get something different. Tech support is useless. I'm not even going to do any kind of rant about India because I, I don't care. You connect me to somebody on the moon. If they could fix it, I'd be happy, but nobody can fix anything.

Nobody can fix anything anymore. And the process that you have to go through the level one, the level two, the level three. Now we got to kick it up to a supervisor. Now we got to kick it and you have to go through it. I just want, when I pick up the phone, I'm like, I know what I'm doing. Do not put me straight on to level three.

I've already done all the, I've, I've started it and restarted it. Yes. I've plugged it into a different, I have eight computers here. I've tried it with the eight different computers. It does not fucking work. How many people call them every day though and say, I know what I'm doing. I get it.

You know, I'm sure there's got to be some sort of accreditation thing that we can do. No, no, we need it. We need a secret word. We need a secret word. We need a secret word. Geeks need to establish some sort of bananas. If we call and just say bananas at the very beginning, kick us right to level three, please. For the love of fucking God, because I cannot handle the hour and a half it takes to get to level three anymore.

I can't do it. I want to shoot myself in the face. Oh, I have a migraine. I can't believe I, now I, second printer here also doesn't work. Two grumpy old geeks tried to get this thing to work. Yeah, it doesn't work.

And I'm going to have to call tech support again and go through the whole process to get them to return it. Oh, I want to die. I can't handle it. The whole process of tech support is so fundamentally flawed if you know what you're doing.

You just want to kill yourself. They should give you a pass. Bananas. No, no, no. Even if you've been through the support before, you should be able to say, I've been through the queue. It still doesn't work. Can you bump me? They won't let you. They don't let you.

It's ridiculous. I mean, that's just burning money for them. That's so stupid. Yeah. And it's horrible customer service and it turns you off on the product. Like, I will never get another Epson printer now. Ever. We shouldn't have. If you asked me in the first place, I said, fuck Epson. I went off the reviews off the Apple site that said it is 100% without a doubt completely compatible with everything that I have.

I did the work ahead of time. Well. And it's lies. Lies, I tell you. Did you check to see if all the reviews were from Epson employees? I should have. I should have. I should have looked into that actually. Uh, it's insane. And I don't want to, you know, I'm sure Epson is a fine company, but this printer sucks balls.

So I'm going to give you a tip. If you ever have to deal with, um, and you should never have to deal with this, but I, we used to have AT&T DSL. Yes. The best tech support that they have is in India. If you deal with the Americans, they're fucking retarded.

But if you wait till after eight o'clock at night. Yeah. Pacific standard time. Right. Call them up. You can get an Indian tech on the phone and you can tell them, I know what I'm doing. I work in the business. Here's the problem. Here's my Mac address. Here's all this stuff.

They will give you deep down tech support, like straight. Yeah. Straight from the. I've got to say my, my second call to Epson tech support, because this one will be the third, just to get rid of it. That guy was from India. It was later at night. The earlier call was a frigging waste of time.

And I actually ended up hanging up in anger. Like I just gave up on them. When I went to the second call, he was great. Like he ran me through every single step. He's like, all right, this is the absolute last thing we can try. And after that, we're just going to send you a new printer because you've done everything. Yeah. So.

Yeah. So, well, I'm sorry for your woes. And I should have, could have told you never buy an Epson printer. Uh, it was highly rated. It said it was a hundred percent compatible. I just can't. It's, it's, I've been stuck in, in the tech support world this entire week, both with the printer.

And then I've had a couple other things go wrong and it's just soul sucking experience and, and so incredibly frustrating. And if I hear, have you turned it off and turned it on again, one more time, I'm going to shove my face through something.

They don't say, uh, have you cycled the power? Yeah. No. Oh, okay. Turn it off and turn it on again. Wait 10 seconds, sir. Oh, oh, you know what? That's, that's only if you're in corporate America, when the IT guys go, oh, have you cycled the power? Have you cycled the power? Do you mean turn it off and turn it back on?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm also having a problem with the trivia app. So it doesn't, it doesn't work for you anymore. It stopped working. And you paid for it. And I paid for it. And I sent them an email 48 hours ago now. Wow. There's a lot of other people. No response.

Yeah. Yeah. Good times. Well, I'm sorry for your woes. Yeah. Well, it's technology. I don't expect it to work anymore. It's, I do miss the old days when we could actually like take a screwdriver, open things up, actually tweak it a little bit ourselves and kind of get things working.

But the, the, everything's moved on. It's all modular and cheap. And like I said, if it doesn't work right away, don't, don't bother anymore. Just get a new one, get a new one. So speaking of the old days. Yes. Which is very, very retro.

Mm-hmm. And a lot of people, this, this is kind of a, a touchy topic for some programmers. Because my pick of the week is the movie Hackers. Oh. Came out in 1994, I believe. I believe, no, '95.

I love that movie. Angelina Jolie, Johnny Lee Miller, before they got married. Yes. Fisher Stevens, Penn Jillette. Uh, it was, it was so cheesy, but so damn good.

It also has a fucking amazing soundtrack. That is the movie that turned me on to Orbital. Yeah. Because on the intro. It was awesome. The first, the first song when they're flying in after he gets busted when he's a kid, he flies in and they're playing, uh, playing Orbital.

Took me, took me a while to figure it out. And then I, I've been a huge Orbital fan ever since. Yeah. But that whole soundtrack was, well, most of the soundtrack, it was pretty damn good. Yeah. It was a great soundtrack. Yeah. The whole thing. The only downside of that movie is they used rollerblades instead of skateboards, which is, well, it's no gleaming the cube.

Gleaming the cube was, uh, also known in the States. I don't even know where that came from. No, but also known in the States as a re-release as a brother's love. Really? That was the re-release title for gleaming the cube. Wow. That's even worse than the original title. Yeah.

So, but anyway, I just, I, I've seen the movie like 50 times. I just re-watched it recently and it's got legs. Did it hold up? It still, it totally holds up. I haven't, I haven't seen it in at least 10 years. They did such a good job of basically pulling out what the hackers are actually doing into like this visual metaphor that was so cheesy.

But when you go back and watch it, it's, oh my God, I just, I love it. I love that movie so damn much. Um, I'm going to delay the Arrested Development and, uh, probably watch that. You haven't watched Arrested Development yet? I haven't watched it yet. It's getting shit reviews. I've heard that it takes until the seventh episode when things start to gel and then everything comes together and then you have to go back and watch the seven that you've already watched because there's things that you didn't get until you got to the seventh.

Okay. Well, the fact that it's so bad that their stock prices is, is down because of it. I saw that today too. That was shocking. Um, you know, whatever it's Arrested Development. How can it be bad? But we'll review that at some other point when I've actually finally seen it. So yeah.

Okay. Check it out. But if you're, if you're, if I'm telling you, if you're, if you're into computers, you like kitsch, you like good music. Angelina Jolie, young, beautiful. Topless. Topless. And, and I actually, in my first site spew, I did a story called hackers bait and switch because I had a copy, a little postage stamp, quick time of the trailer.

Yeah. And there were a ton of scenes that they cut from the final movie. And I went through and I'm like, I, I timeline, like this wasn't in the movie. This wasn't. Oh, that was hot. And that wasn't in the movie. That sucks. Is there a special edition DVD release with all these? They're never going to re-release that movie ever.

Damn it. Which sucks because it was, I mean, it was a great movie and I'm glad to see John Lee Miller's back on the horse with, uh, elementary. He's awesome in it. Yeah. Haven't watched that yet. Oh my God. It's my favorite show on TV. I'll have to check that one out. Yeah. He plays a good Holmes. I mean, it's a totally different Holmes, but it's, it's good.

Well, it's got Lucy Liu. I'm not a huge fan of Lucy Liu at all. I am. Yeah. She doesn't really do it for me, but, um, but yeah, he's really good in it. Okay. So check that out. I will check that out as well. We're out of time. So I had a, I had a bunch of other stuff I want to talk about that tied into hackers, but we'll leave it for another show.

Yeah. Well, I'm going to start up the next one with that. Okay. All right. So, uh, on the web, you can find us at grumpy old geeks.com on Facebook, uh, facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks. You can email us at podcast at grumpy old geeks, or get in touch with us via the contact form on grumpy old geeks.com.

We're not going to mention the Twitter right now because Brian hates it and is not going to use it. He's driving back on the horse. So you can take care of that. I'm not going to. I got my own. I got eight accounts. I got to deal with it. I'm going to have to do it. No, never. I'll see you guys next week.

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