13: Upward spiral of innovation

And here we are, episode 13. Our first, well, our second episode with a new format. And

there's something about Bob. Yes, our stunning little intros and outros and segment bumpers are done by our good friend, Mr. Robert Fogarty, editor-in-chief of Locker Gnome. Thank you very much, Bob. Yes, very, very nice of you. I owe you many beers, many, many beers. And a pizza, I think. Oh, yeah. So you can come up here and collect that, and we'll give it to you in person and have you be a guest, or we can send you some gift cards or something.

Well, he's getting married, so I'm going to go down and buy him pizza down there. Oh, there you go. All right. I'll send some cash and some booze. Okay. And we are joined in studio today. We do have someone sitting across from us right now. Yes, Dr. David Teeter is here. Hi, Jason. Hi. Hi. Hi, Dr. D. So, Dr. Teeter has been a fan of the show for a long, well, maybe not fan, but he's been an advisor to us over the run of the show. I've listened

to all the episodes. Yes, I've heard all your comments, and it's nice to finally meet you. Thanks for making the drive down here. My pleasure. Yes, you're in town from lovely San Francisco. You're escaping the man poo for a few days to come join us. Yeah. Of course, I had to drive on I-5 to get here. So, you just traded man poo for cow poo. Yeah. How was Kauschwitz this time of year?

It was just fine, actually. And as an aside, I actually read an article by an agricultural professor who actually said, Kauschwitz follows best practices. So, all these people who keep knocking it actually don't know what they're talking about. Oh. And for those of you who don't know what Kauschwitz is. Kauschwitz is the Harris Ranch that's halfway between San Francisco and LA on I-5, where if you get the wind rung and your window's down, you could quite possibly die. It does smell

horrible for that little stretch. Yeah. Like the cows that soon will. Yeah. Hey, I like a good burger. Yep. So, I met David four years ago in Venice, California, right down the street at Intelligentsia. Yeah. At Intelligentsia. Yeah. Wow. Fru-fru. Yeah, very fancy. Now you'd have to wait in line to meet him.

Why? Because you can't get in the door of Intelligentsia without waiting in line anymore. Oh, well, we actually did wait in line, so that was... I didn't. Well, you're crafty. We're normal folk. We don't know. We don't know. We're not wise in the ways of Intelligentsia. Yeah. So, we were actually our friend Joey Ito, who's now a big wig.

Yeah. Well, I guess he was a big wig back then, but now he's a bigger wig. Well, at the time, he was, still is, an angel investor. He was the CEO of Creative Commons. Other things. And now he is director of the MIT Media Lab. He's on the board of the New York Times, the MacArthur Foundation, recently Sony.

I was going to say, a little stint at Sony now. Yeah. I know there's more. So, he's having a tough time in this economy is what you're saying. Yeah. He's having a real tough time in the economy. So, yeah. And I met Joey because my first little project, Blog Rolling, he was my angel investor. Out of the blue, one day, he PayPal'd me $1,000.

He's like, oh, this is cool. I like it. Keep doing it. I'm like, sweet. I met Joey through photography, of all things. Yeah. Oh, another photographer as well. Well, I didn't notice the camera when you came in. Well, that's it. I got Joey back into photography because he was traveling around the world for all these stints and never took a picture. And he had $500,000 worth of Hasselblads and Leicas sitting in a glass case in his living room in Japan. I'm like, take your fucking camera with you, man, and go take some pictures. So, yeah. But yeah, we were going to go to Singapore

together, but you, you kind of wussed out and didn't go, but the rest of us went. So, Singapore wanted to bring in Joey to do some tech incubator work, startups, and I didn't see there was anything for me for there. So, I just kind of pushed back on that one. But I got to meet you. I got to meet Sean. It was great.

Oh, fuck off. So, tell me a little bit about you. What do you do? Why are you here? Why did we think you were interesting enough to come down and be on our show? Oh, God. I'm here because I'm your friend and because my girlfriend wanted me to come. I'm like his girlfriend.

Yeah. Hi, Jen. And so, you know, I thought about it. It's like, well, on the plus side, come down and see you. On the minus side, I can piss off my clients. You should have heard our first three episodes. Yeah. Call undue attention to myself and just generally embarrass myself. I'm like, well, sounds like a good choice to me.

Perfect. Plus, we gave you Tapatio chips. They were good. Spicy. You're sweating. I can tell. I'll try not to touch myself in the wrong place. Yeah. Well, tomorrow morning, I think you'll have to because these are going to be vicious. Yes. I've been a friend of Jason for now. It's almost four years, I think.

It's almost exactly four years. Yeah. We met up here. Ended up, Jason was doing startup work in San Francisco. I introduced him to some of my photographer friends. We started hanging out and we're just kind of like souls. We both like to complain and hate. We're both grumpy old geeks.

Wow. Yep. It's good to have a third one. Yeah. Comment of the week. This comment of the week comes from AA, who I shall dub anonymous asshole. His email address is a at email dot com. Clever boy. Subject. Self-centered subjects. His message is, you guys really

should make every subject all about you. Capital U. Not the word. Comma. Not. Dot, dot, dot. Wow. Well, it's our fucking podcast. You don't like it. Fuck you. Okay, Jason. Yeah. We're going aggro. I'm just fucking around. It's a fucking podcast. What the fuck? It's us talking. Of course it's about us. Next week, just for you, AA at email dot

com, I'm going to do the entire podcast as Boris Karloff. Ooh. Ooh. That's good. It's going to take some research, but I think I can do it. I want to suck your blood. No, that was Bela Lugosi. That was Bela Lugosi. Oh, yeah. But, yeah, I'm going to do it to somebody else instead. Let's do personas from now on, because that's what podcasting's all about. Can I be Bjork? Only if you wear the duck dress. I've got to find the duck dress,

yes. So, that's our comment of the week. Sorry, dude. Sorry about it. But he's probably not listening. No. Oh, well. Yeah. In the news. So, WWDC's going on. It's all, well, it'll be over by the time this airs. And the big Apple keynote announcement with iOS 7 was the big one. I know you. I am me during it saying, are you watching this? And I went, nope. So,

I gave you a play-by-play that you didn't want. I read it. Yeah. Yeah. And so, iOS 7 came out. I'm a developer, sort of. I have an account. I'm a developer, sort of. I have an account. I'm a developer. I have an account. I'm the only one here that installed iOS on his phone.

Yes. Because I need to use my phone. Yeah, me too. I looked at this time and said, no, no fucking way. I've been through five of these so far. And I think four was the worst one. Four was the one that literally rendered my phone and camera useless. I remember you talking about that. So, I have decided to wait. Five and six were pretty good, though. So, it was four.

Four was the bad one. No, no. But five and six, I had no problems at all. Yeah. Actually, they didn't have a problem with those either. Those were pretty good. Right. So, I'm thinking, oh, seven. I'm in. Well, yeah. Good luck with that, Jason. It's pretty. Well, what I was able to glean from online was that this is basically a facelift and it's almost entirely cosmetic. They got rid of the real world feelings. No. Well, that was most of the write-ups online are about

getting rid of kind of the yellow notebook for the notebook, making things flatter, making them. Say that word again. They have gotten rid of the skewmorphic design. Oh, yeah. Use the big word. That's why they're. Well, the whole thing with, I believe, Scott Forstall was the proponent of that. He's been given the boot. Yeah. Now, Johnny Ive is in charge of, you know, visual design as well as hardware design, which I still don't know if that was a great decision, but there's a lot of other big Apple fanboys. If you want to listen to

that, people drone on about that shit for hours. You can go find other podcasts about that. I'm just going to give you my reaction on it. I'm running it on a 4S because I still can't get my 5 because AT&T fucking hates me because I give them all my money and they say, no, you can't get a new phone. Right. But it's definitely slower. It's got some visual ticks to it that make it feel slower when you press the button. Sure, it's not just because you're on a 4S. No, when you turn it on, it fades in. When you turn it off, it fades

out. That'll be annoying. It already is. It makes it feel slower. It's like I want instant response. You have to turn on. I can't snap for shit. I'd be fine with it on an iPad, but not on my phone. Yeah, I'm still waiting for the iPad. Yeah, the phone you want instant response. The floaty background stuff was really cute for about 30 seconds. And now it's just like, why are the notification buttons moving too? It's like, I don't know if you guys notice

on iOS 6 when you open the music player and you tilt it. Yeah. The chrome on the buttons actually moves to make it feel like it's skeuomorphic. I don't need that. The mail app, I love the new design. I love the clean design. They use that really skinny font on the keyboard now, which I really like. But the issue with the keyboard that bugs me is you don't have a visual

uppercase and lowercase. You can't really feel like when it's switched. Yeah. Jesus. I'm spacing. Visual feedback. Visual feedback on case. We shouldn't have had an alcohol-free taping in honor of Beach Mama. I know. This is the problem. We get sober, we get sloppy. So that part is really

annoying. But you kind of get the hang of it. But your thumb is sitting over the shift button most of the time, so you can't see it. Right. There's a ton of little visual things like that. So anything major with the iOS? I can block phone calls now. I can block phone numbers. I always wonder why you couldn't fucking do that. Yeah. I threw the fucking in. Yeah. Hey, Mike. So. Oh, bad language.

No. No. Brian has a specific way. This is my particular emphasis on fucking that some people have keyed up on. Yeah. And that's going to be our first grumpy old t-shirt. T-shirt. Fucking L. So you can block calls finally. You can block calls. That's fantastic. What was the other one? There was one other. There were two features that I thought were amazing. Oh, multiple items in a, multiple pages in a folder. You can hide the newsstand. Oh, that was it. You can put the

you don't have to use that app anymore to do it. Oh, you don't have to. Because there was a hack for it. You're on its own separate page and keep it off in the backyard. No, you can put it, yeah. Before you had to put it on a page and nobody used it. Does anybody use newsstand? Anyone? Well, no. I read the, Marco Armitz, the magazine. And now that he sold it, well, actually, I kind of unsubscribed because it wasn't actually very good. The content in the first couple episodes, issues, not episodes, it's a magazine, were decent, but I killed it. So I have nothing in newsstand anymore. You can do folder within folder now? Not folder

within folder. You can put newsstand in a folder. Because newsstand was a hack that turned it into a folder. Right. So I thought you could do a folder in a folder. I don't know. I'll have to play with that when we're done. I hope they do that. Because I saw that meme. I put folders in your folders, dog, because I heard you. Yeah, I don't know about that one. But you know what? Here we go. Let's do it. No, you cannot put a folder in a folder. Okay, still in a folder within folder. You can have multiple pages in a folder. So beyond that.

Okay. All right, gotcha. But yeah, I mean, I like it. I wish it actually worked, but it's a beta and it's my own damn fault. So I've definitely been missing phone calls and texts from people. And I got a phone call yesterday, which crashed my phone instantly. But luckily you can easily switch back. Well, I don't want to talk on the phone either. You can easily switch back if you

know what you're doing. Okay. Sure. And by that, I mean Google it. Because I don't know what I'm doing and I find people that have done it and I can switch back. So any thoughts on Maverick, the new desktop operations? Don't give a shit. I am thrilled because at least they're finally doing e-books, which since I'm an e-book developer. You're finally going to do that? Yeah, they're finally going to have their e-books app on the actual desktop. I'm sorry, they're called iBooks. Or iBooks, whatever the fuck they call them. As a developer for those, that massively increases our commercial market for

it. That's true. Yeah. So I'm thrilled. Yeah, there are many times I would maybe. I'd like to sit at the desktop and be able. Why do I have to sit on the iPad and do it? It'd be fantastic to be able to just sit on my laptop and look through these books. So it's great. I'm thrilled about that. I have cookbooks in that format. It's just like, why do I have to bring my iPad? Why do I have to bring my iPad? Why can't I use my laptop? Exactly. So that is now going to be in the next operating system. That's true because your iPad, you've got to get a stand. And when you touch it, it falls over with your laptop. Yeah. And you can just look at it and have two pages and see the whole recipe. And you don't want to get

tomato sauce all over your iPad. You don't really mind so much on the little thingy on your laptop. You can just wipe that off really quick. Suck it out. Yeah. Or suck it out. Garlic. So that was pretty much it on my iOS news. I'm probably, I say this every year, I'm going to go back and watch the WWDC videos. No, you're not. I've watched two in the past like seven or five years or however long it's been. It's kind of like Saturday Night Live. You just watch the clips the next morning. That's all you need. I watched a little bit. It is actually

very interesting to see the dynamics now post-jobs. Yeah. Apparently he's quite engaging, the new guy. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck, new guy. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, stock is up? Nope. Damn it. It will be. Maybe you can sell it and buy some Facebook stock because Facebook has some news today. I'm never going to buy a Facebook stock. Facebook added hashtags. Whee! Which everybody

was using on Facebook ironically anyways, except now you can click on them. Whee! In related news, Foursquare adds a timeline. Whee! And then Twitter added analytics, which I was complaining about just the last two weeks ago. What do you mean they've had? They've had analytics.

No. No. Do they have analytics? Not to see the news. No. Do they have analytics for the common Joe? Yes. For the common Joe. You can go in and they're very buggy. They're very beta, but you can at least see like how many people have retweeted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's coming in. So they're adding some analytics. Wow. And so just starting to feel like all these social networks are starting to integrate all the features that people liked on the other ones into each other now. And it's all just going to be one big mess. Oh, and MySpace is back. Yeah.

Your old accounts are gone. They killed them? They're not killed, but you have to sign in and convert to the new ones now. Oh. So I don't think anybody gives a fuck at all whatsoever. Although the commercial was awesome. Did you see the commercial? I have seen the commercial.

So MySpace is apparently just a place for young kids to run around in a small room, throw glitter on top of each other, and girls make out with girls. That is literally their commercial. See, if it wasn't. I'm all on for the girl on girl on action. I would never say I'm against that, but I find it very disturbing that an entity that's trying, that's owned by Fox News Corporation is. It's not. They sold it. They sold it. They sold it by Justin fucking Timberlake,

idiot. No, he doesn't own it. He has a big stake in it. He doesn't own it. He did not buy it. It's a conglomerate. Fox got rid of it. No, I thought someone, they sold it like for pennies on the dollar. Pennies on the dollar. No, he does not own the entire thing. It's a conglomerate, and he's one of the major stakeholders. He does not own it. If he owned it, I'd want more girl on girl making out in his videos. God, his videos are fucking boring. As are his new songs. But there's, what do you mean new songs? Sex Seatback is actually, if you

go for the time that it was released, it was actually incredibly groundbreaking. No, it's good. 2020 is the new one? Yeah, that's the new one. It's horrible. He's trying to be like Frank Sinatra for the new age. He's doing this whole like rad packing feel. He was still good on SNL. Well, you see, Justin Timberlake needs to get out of this music business altogether and just go into film and comedy. I think he has no interest in doing music anymore. I just figured, I thought it was more a MySpace push than anything else. Could

be. But I mean, he consistently has the best Saturday Night Lives ever. If you guys can talk about the merits of his music, I can talk about his comedy, which is epic. Dick in a box. Dick in a box was very funny. Of course, now that everyone's got these hashtags and analytics, you'd be a good time to integrate something. I wonder if MySpace has hashtags. You could call it.

Has anybody signed in to check? Friend feed? I don't know. I think the hashtag is "echo", "echo", "echo", "echo". So... Dev knoll. Dev knoll. Yeah. So that's the big news. All the social networks have made some major changes. And actually, MySpace even managed to have enough money to throw a big old party at the El Rey last night for a launch. But I didn't get an invite. Do you need big money to go to the El Rey?

No. You need confetti and glitter. Confetti and glitter and girls making out. Yeah. That makes party for me. I guess. So... I think... Oh! Oh! Google bought Waze. Waze! Waze! The little app that I never use for traffic because I have a GPS built into my car with traffic information.

But this is social. I've used it. I just want to say I've used it. I've used it. I clocked about 250 miles on it. The problem with it is... Well, besides... First off, don't we have entire advertising campaigns sponsored by the government about not texting and driving or using a smartphone and driving?

I'm not texting. Well, I was on that one. Well, how do you update Waze with your traffic information without using your phone while you're driving? Just look at your velocity. Huh? Well, no. Waze update. Waze... You turn it on... It just does it all automatically. It follows you while you're going. And if you just glance at it, it'll show you reports from people on cops on the road, traffic, accidents, everything.

Which means that they're typing in? Or clicking. Voice. It's actually got voice activation to do hands-off. Well, we could go into that because there's been studies about that, about how that does not help at all. Well, yeah, it doesn't help. The fact that you're focused on the phone doesn't... However you're doing it, you could be tapping it with your balls and it's still... Well, that's actually probably a little more distracting, but it was...

Actually, I get really focused. My problem with the app was... Laser sharp. Dude, I could go there, but I'm not. So, I plugged it into my sink in my little Ford, and so it's getting powered the entire drive. Okay. So, I drove from LAX to Woodland Hills out in the valley, hour-long drive.

By the time I got there, my phone had actually shut off from a heat warning. Right. Because it was basically generating so much heat from it. I've had that before when I leave it in the sun somewhere. And the battery life had actually decreased.

It uses so much power to update, which is like, it's cheap. Yeah, just send some fucking coordinates. Go. Right. But there's all those cute little icons. That's the thing. You get... When you check in... But here's the thing that gets me. I don't care about... Whatever. The app was... Whatever the app is. I've seen it on Fox News in the morning now.

They use it for their traffic reporting. Right. So, they're making... This company's making money on selling off their traffic data to local news, and they've got the little ducky icons and whatever. Now, Google just knows wherever you're driving. So, they can just send you... Waze is going to say, we know that you searched for Carl's Jr. six months ago, and you're almost at a Carl's Jr.

Why don't you get off the road right now and go get some Carl's Jr.? Well, better yet, try the In-N-Out. He's going to say, yep, In-N-Out. We'll usurp their ads and outbid them and say, hey, we got a burger for you. Motherfucker. But Google does no evil. I don't know what you guys are talking about. That's not evil. That's what's advertising. That's what's advertising. Kickstarter!

In the balls! So, Kickstarter again. For once, we're not going to pick on celebrities, because we actually have somebody here who knows something, and has one to pick on specifically. Don't look at me. No, it's not you. I know nothing. Hi. Take it away, man. Well, I've listened to all your comments on Kickstarter, and I have to agree with every single thing you've said.

I have never contributed to a Kickstarter campaign. Both of us have. I know. I likely will not. But I have personal knowledge of, like, just how unvetted these projects appear to be. Yeah. Why? You would think, I would hope, that Kickstarter would at least make sure that the people proposing these projects at least have some basic level of competence in the areas which they need to have it in to make the project succeed.

Design, engineering, supply chain management. And I've just seen, and you have personal knowledge of this, too. It's like, you can get one and two, but if you don't have supply chain management, good luck getting it to the people who paid for it. Exactly. We've seen that with far too many Kickstarters, even people I know personally, where they get the money, they make the product, and then they're like, oh, shit, I have to deliver 20,000 of these?

Right. And have no idea how to do it. Because once you move beyond artisanal crafts from your own house to actually having to deliver a shit ton of products, it's a completely different game. Well, I was made aware of one which just basically had me really raise my eyebrows. So, despite my talk about security and intelligence and weapons and stuff, I actually am an expert in drinking water treatment.

I've got six or seven issued patents in taking contaminants out of water. I'm a known expert in this field. I've testified in this field. And it means a lot to me. And it's something where when you're talking about water, you're talking about health.

And you don't fuck around. You don't lie. You don't make claims you can't back up. If anything, it's the under-promise and over-deliver. It's important stuff. You don't want to lose trust. Well, I was made aware of this one project on Kickstarter called Soma Water.

Soma Water, where it's a lovely designed glass carafe with a compostable water filter containing coconut. Yeah. Activated charcoal made from coconut, which that's how you make activated charcoal.

Sorry. Malaysian coconut shells. No, Malaysian. Yes, Malaysian. And it is very pretty. It's lovely. And vegan silk. Vegan silk. Is there non-vegan silk? Is there meat silk? I think it's a different... Normally, I think you have the cocoons and then you basically kill the...

Oh, so they don't kill the... Right. Well, they let them hatch and then they have to kill them because they can't sustain it. So the bugs still die, but vegan silk, okay. And some kind of compostable composite, which is okay, except for, I mean, as an engineer, I really don't think you can compost activated charcoal.

I don't think it does anything, but all right. These guys did an absolutely brilliant job with their marketing. It's very professional looking. They have brought in some of the top people in design blogs. They brought in your buddy, Tim Ferriss, to do marketing PR for them.

And Tim just basically says, oh, I trust that they can do it because I know these people. Well, guys, I don't really see that you know what you're doing with actual water treatment and understand the area you're getting into and what it really means.

Now, on their Kickstarter project, they don't make any specific claims. Okay. It's just more about design, sustainability, and ease of use. But in their press release, they actually go on to claim that this water filter will remove heavy metals and other contaminants from water.

And there's no testing, third-party testing or certification to back that up. Which is something, say, a Brita filter has gone through. Well, Brita would actually do that right. The Brita people are very professional. And on top of that, there's certain things that activated charcoal will pull out and some things it will not pull out.

You know, as someone who actually has patents on this stuff, you have to design very specific filter media for certain contaminants. It's not simple. But what I was really bothered by was in the state of California, the CDPH, the California Department for Public Health, requires that you have to apply for this and undergo third-party testing and certification

if you're going to make any claims for your water filtration, your home water filtration device, which aren't aesthetic-based, which aren't like taste and order. Heavy metals and other contaminants fall into that. There's no record of this. And just out of curiosity, called them.

And guess what? Never heard of them. There's no application. According to CDPH, they don't know what's going on. They'd love to hear from them. But it's just something where, you know, I'm sure they'll get this fixed. And I'm not really knocking these guys, per se. Because I think that it's, this is more of like a hipster water filter.

It's very pretty. It is very pretty. They're doing a nice job. They show multi-ethnic groups sitting around the thing drinking water. They're involved with Charity Water, which is a very reputable, good organization. But what I'm upset with is Kickstarter. Because once again, this is something which basically, it's like crossing the beams.

They make one claim on Kickstarter, but another claim to the open press. They are claiming, at least if I believe what I read, that this is going to do all these great things. It's basically a medical device. Which, according to Kickstarter's little list of things that they don't allow. It's on the things they can't, they're not allowed to do that.

Right, so I don't really think that Kickstarter is, this is another example of Kickstarter not doing due diligence on the projects that they should, that they are accepting and allowing to be funded. It's one thing if someone gets into trouble because they don't have the previous experience we talked about.

Right. But this is something where, you know, this is pretty much close to one step away from our herbal tea cures cancer. Yes, your standard supplements that aren't certified by the FDA, etc. If it doesn't, hey, that's great. But, you know, there's something called testing and certification.

Right. So, I think sooner or later, Kickstarter's going to get burned by this stuff. Because, you know, you can't just collect 5% and smile and say, it's not our problem. Right. It's one thing if you put up the platform and you're not making money off of it, but Kickstarter's making a ton of money.

So, people out there, you know, do your due diligence. Don't fund a Kickstarter project unless these people know what they're talking about. Right. Or unless you just don't care and are happy to have anything you might eventually possibly get.

Well, I mean, these people look at it. They make a pretty video. They make a pretty product. And they just assume that they're telling the truth. I mean, I watched the Soma thing, and I'm like, that's actually pretty nice. I kind of like that. It's a great pitch. It's a great pitch. It's a totally great pitch. It's a lovely looking product. But this brings me back to my other major issue with Kickstarter, which you probably haven't heard on this podcast yet because I just scream about celebrities.

We've removed the entire VC process, which are these VC investors are people that know their business. They only invest in things because they know they're probably going to make some money. They do their due diligence. They look at it. They go, well, okay. Everybody's laughing because you guys are from San Fran and through the internet boom, and a lot of money was thrown around at stupid things.

Yeah, I never got any. But you know what I'm saying. It's the process of going from professionals with money who are investing in things and find experts and do the research and do product analysis and all of those sorts of things is out the window with Kickstarter. Yeah.

Completely out the window. If you can make a video with a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young kid who's telling you why this is the coolest thing ever, you're getting all your money, and nothing's been tested or vetted by anyone. No. So, more bad news for Kickstarter. Well, they still got their 5%.

Well, and that's why I give them the blaster. Amazon got theirs, too. And Amazon. And just as a quick, it took literally 30 seconds once we figured out, okay, well, that's carbon. Yeah. I went to, this is also not scientific, but it took me about two seconds to go to howstuffworks.com, Oh, that's science.

Huh? That's definitely science. I know it's definitely science, but right on the list of materials that should not be composted is charcoal ashes. They are toxic to the soil microorganisms. Well, there you go. Well. But another site said, well, you can put in, like, one cup per yard. But it seems to be that there is probably something to the, there seems to be a threshold on how much charcoal you can compost.

Right. Based on. I don't think it composts, just based upon archaeological findings of fires and charcoal. It must be the interaction with the vegan silk. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. Oh, the vegan silk eats the charcoal. You guys did not take that into the equation. Because, I mean, in Pompeii, I guess, you know, there was a lot of charcoal.

The meat-based silk, now that just doesn't do anything. But the vegan silk. Prime rib silk. That's good stuff. Larry silk. I guess. Silk made from maggots. Security. Ha! So, currently, I'm a environmental and technical consultant in San Francisco.

Do environmental and technical consulting, which is basically, I do whatever people want me to do as long as they pay me. Expert witness work, I'm looking to get into advising VCs on green tech. But before this, before I did my own gig and worked for another firm, I spent around 10 years working for Sandia National Laboratories, Department of Energy, National Security Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I started working there doing water treatment, geochemistry, and science, and then kind of got pulled into the world of darkness and spookiness. Interesting timing for you to show up on this podcast, then. Yeah. How about that?

Yeah, how about that? And I'd even agreed to come up before all this came out in The Guardian. Oh, God. But for around five or six years, I was working for a very special group, which basically worked inside the government, advising them on what, at the time, it was called the PSYOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan.

Basically, here's what happens when you push that button, sir. And as part of that, I had to become an expert on all of the technology, both our side and on the other side, our potential adversaries and adversaries, and ended up becoming basically part of the intelligence community to better do my job.

And as part of that, I actually was embedded inside of one of the agencies in D.C. where I'd go there a couple times a month and help them on technical issues. And generally, you know. You're not talking just like rebooting a router. No. Okay. Just checking. This was like usually highly technical work related to are they doing what we think they're doing?

And if they are, how do we stop them? Right. Whether non-kinetic, like, you know, stuff I really don't want to say, or kinetic, which is boom. And spent a lot of time working with really good people there.

And generally, the mantra was try and make everything less stupid. If you could at least, if you could make things less stupid, you had a good day. If you could keep things as stupid as they are, it wasn't that bad. But if things got stupider the day you were there, you're not a good day.

You're not doing your job. Right. So I got to work with a lot of these agencies, a lot of these people, across a lot of areas that no one person usually gets to be involved in. I did offense and defense. I did military and intel. I developed new technologies.

And so I got a rather unique perspective of what we're trying to do and who we are. Right. And I was very comfortable with it. I was actually very proud of the work we did. People were like, you know, we're working with nuclear weapons, planning nuclear war.

And people were like, aren't you terrified of this? Doesn't it give you nightmares? I'm like, absolutely not. I mean, because this was something where knowing what we did and knowing what our adversaries did, the purpose was never to fight a war.

It was to avoid war. It was deterrence. Right. And I was comfortable with the people I was working with. I was comfortable with the decision makers, generally. And I was very comfortable with our adversaries for the most part. People got the game. They understood the game. No one was looking to fight a war.

But you have to plan to fight the war. It's kind of a weird, circular thing. But in it, it didn't bother me. I actually, at the time, I refused to get involved with this global war on terrorism stuff. Right. It just, it just didn't interest me, technically. And there was no shortage of people working on it.

People were being pulled off the stuff I worked on, so I just worked harder to support them. But I was far more worried about, you know, a gigaton of weapons that are aimed on our country than, I don't know, two kids with a crock pot full of, like, fireworks and nails.

I mean, no offense to the people who got hurt and killed there, but, I mean. That wasn't the focus. Well, I mean, 9-11, people talk about how bad it was. In my world, that was a sad day, not a bad day. A bad day is mega deaths.

Right. And you don't ever want that to happen. So, you know, people worked pretty hard to, you know, try and do a good job. And that's, during all this work, though, once I became part of the intelligence community, I fell under what's called EO-12333.

I believe that's, I've got to check, I believe that's FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Which everybody's talking about right now. Yes. And it's something that it was, you know, everyone out there, if you're working for a company, odds are you have to do some kind of corporate training.

And if you don't, you know, they ding you. You know, sexual harassment, filling out your time card, you know. We had to do FISA training. And it was very, I mean, PowerPoint slides, tests. And it was pretty clear. It's like, you know, here's what you can do.

Here's what you cannot do. And it was very clear in the original FISA, the 1978 version. And it was like, if it's out there, non-U.S. persons on non-U.S. soil. Right. Wide open.

I mean, I believe assassination was off the table. Which has changed now, too. Supposedly. Predator drones. Yeah, but, you know, when this stuff came down, when FISA came out, it was not out of the blue.

It was done in response to both our intelligence community and the FBI crossing certain boundaries that were just generally not perceived to be acceptable to how we want to be as Americans. So FISA was brought in to basically say, to build a box, I think, around the country, which said, outside of this box, aim your national technical means.

These things way out there, you know. Fly drones. Do, you know, spy. Do your job. Collect the intelligence that our president needs to make his decisions. Collect the intelligence that our military needs to develop plans. Anything inside of here? No, you cannot do that.

That's someone else's job, like probably FBI. Yeah. And, you know, you couldn't at the time, you wouldn't even think of tasking stuff inside the United States unless it was a specific R&D kind of project.

It was just, it wasn't just not allowed. It was, it was wrong. We don't do that. We were trying to protect us and our Constitution and stuff like that. I mean, it sounds naive when I say it. It didn't feel that way. I mean, this wasn't just a nine-to-five job.

I took a lot of pride in the work I did and trying to do it as best as I could and trying to help as many people. And unlike Mr. Snowden, I actually do abide by my non-disclosure agreements. I mean, despite what everyone says, he's a hero?

He's a hero. You know. Well, there was a very unpopular sentiment running around for a little bit that got shot down in the hero thing. And I agree with it, too. A traitor is a traitor. You know, some... You're a traitorous to your country. Yeah, it's, you know, it's a weird thing.

Because... Whistleblowing is always a very... Whistleblowing... Whistleblowing... Slippery slope. Well, even whistleblowing, you're going to get fucked. That's been proven. If you're a whistleblower in any agency, and even if you do things as best as you can, working through the inspector general or whatever you can...

Whatever channels there are within the organization. Odds are, and if you do any due diligence, you know you're going to get fucked. It's just a question of, is it worth it? Being pissed off for your organization, being pissed off because you were passed over for a raise, or you don't like your boss, or whatever.

No, not a good thing. But if you, as... Most importantly, as a citizen, you think that your agency is going down the wrong path, a really bad path, or is trying to cover up something they shouldn't. Well, yeah. But you don't do it by sending top-secret, sensitive, compartmentalized information to a foreign newspaper.

That's not really one of the acceptable options. And especially what happened this morning with him going to the Chinese newspaper and telling them flat out that the United States has been hacking China for years. Yeah. Which I'm pretty sure everybody already knew, but the fact that he came out and actually said it and delivered them documents...

Did he do that? Yeah. They said they couldn't verify it, so they didn't release them, but he gave them documents that showed them that the United States has been hacking... I can't help but feel that the game he's playing right now is going to do way more harm than actual good. I truly believe that he thinks he's trying to do good.

I don't know his psychological state at all. But, I mean, it's something where... Hero? No. Do I think that if this is true, that... It's wrong. It's wrong? Yes. I think it's wrong. And I think it's wrong on some technical reasons.

I also think it's wrong on just... It's not our best interest. It's not as a country who we want to be. But if he's actually passing classified information to a foreign country through unapproved means, hello, that's spying.

Yeah. And so, at that point, you know, we don't always extradite spies. But I just... It's a weird, touchy thing. Because, like, did I read the documents? Yeah. What do I think? I think this is true. As a citizen...

Oh, they're coming for you. Oh, yeah. That's what happens. Hi. Sorry. As a citizen... Black ops, helicopters in Venice. And as a taxpayer. Yeah. I'm not happy with this. It's something where, you know, if I find out that the NSA was, like, inside of the Russian Facebook...

What was it called? V... Oh. Yeah, it's something. I can't remember the name of that one. Hey. Or Bido or something. It's like, hey, good job. Well done, guys. Well done. Congrats. Inside of Gmail? No. Why? I mean... Well, Gmail's whole thing is do no evil.

Yeah. Well, okay. But, I mean, it's something where there's... What I didn't know about when I was giving you shit on Facebook was in 2008, FISA or FISA, I don't know whatever you're supposed to call it, was amended under President Bush and the FISA Amendments Act.

Well, I never knew that stuff, I'm not a privacy guy. I mean, I really don't generally... This is not the kind of stuff that gets my panties up in a twist. But it turns out it was FISA, the Amendments Act, which was used, I guess, to legitimize the alleged unwarranted wiretapping that was going on under Bush.

Yeah. And since that happened, a lot of that information, well, not a lot, but some of it has been obtained by the ACLU under what's called a FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, which is one of the...

Despite what people might say about our country, and I don't believe in conspiracy theories or stuff, FOIA is amazing. It is something that I don't think any other country has. But under... FOIA is our version of muskets now. It is our way to get back at a government that we think is becoming overreaching.

It's... Screw you, you know, people that want your guns. Sorry, I know there's a couple sitting here. This is the real way to fight your government now. Information. Or not fight, to try and basically shine a light. Because, I mean, there is some stuff where when the DNI, the director of national intelligence, General Clapper, says, you know, you don't need to know this.

This is bad. It hurts us. It's like, well, you know, there's some things, yeah, people don't need to know. You don't need to know that there's a Death Star behind the moon or something like that. But if someone's actually... I'd rather know that. If someone's in your stuff, it's like, you know, we didn't...

That wasn't in the TOS. I actually didn't read. But at least since having talked with you about this, I tried to look through what I could. And it's tough because it's like, you know, other people could say it better, but basically you have a secret law interpreted by a secret...

With secret interpretations approved by a secret court. And it's like, so it basically leaves you ignorant. Or if you know about it, you don't talk about it. You can't talk about it. You shouldn't talk about it. And that's the whole basis of black ops. That's all of it. I mean, because that's part of the thing.

It's like, when you... There's no surprises, you know, when you get into this stuff. You either agree to it or you don't agree to it. If you don't agree to it, if you're going to be potentially upset with it, don't sign the paper. Don't accept the authorization.

And go find an area where you're comfortable. But... Go back to startups and... Or if you're going to leak this at all, don't do it to a foreign paper. Why not to your congressperson? Or somebody in the United States government?

Something like that. I mean, that's... But even still, it's... There's a lot of troubling things here. I mean, it's troubling on every single side. It's not like I feel that our government is a victim in this. I don't think that... I do hope that some transparency is brought forward on this.

I hope that the truly important programs are protected. But I think that they have to go after, and to the extent possible, punish this person. Because, if anything, you have to set an example. I mean, when you're given this access, especially as a system administrator, you got almost everything.

And you can't... You can't say, oh, well, we really don't care. You know, slap, slap. No. You... Yeah. You want to prevent someone from doing untold damage. Well, they came out this morning saying that they're prosecuted... They're going after him for criminal charges. And they should.

Good. And then I also hope that these people are up for criminal charges themselves. But the best part about this whole thing is if you go after him from criminal charges, that means everything that he uncovered comes to light as well. So, yes. No, not true. Well, it might be a tribunal. It could be tried in the secret court.

Yeah. But he wasn't military. So, can you still do that type of court? I don't know. But it's like, you can have classified court hearings. Yeah. I mean, you've got Bradley Manning. Even when you're having a classified court hearing, if he's not military, at least we have some members of our government that are sitting in there and some people that can do something about it.

It's not a completely, like, it's not a Guantanamo Bay situation where we will never hear anything and nobody will ever know anything. But the part about this that really troubles me is that it's – I prefer policy to be black and white.

This is who we are. This is what we do and why we will do it. This is what we will not do and why. And one of the things where I think it started going down the slippery slope is, like, well, we want to start surveilling, like, with these new technologies, like, you know, potentially using, like, beam splitting to basically, you know, split the fiber optic, route stuff off.

But in the amendments, it's become apparent there was something called minimization, such that this kind of goes back to, I think, to the historic, like, you know, if you were, like, wiretapping. And, like, you know, I'm wiretapping someone in the mob. Yeah.

And his daughter's, like, on the phone talking about – You've got to turn the tape off then. You turn the tape off. But Hoover never turned the tape off. But you're – but once again, this is why – So this is not new for our government. No, but – Which is one of the arguments about – No, but this is why this stuff is wanted to stop it.

So it's like, you know, basically you collect – you target what you're going to collect on. You only collect specifically to that target. If it's not – you minimize the – sorry, you minimize the stuff. And, I mean, it's not clear what they're doing, but it certainly appears that with this – Isn't this the lure of technology now, of the advancements, of, like, the fact that you only had so much tape back then?

Now we have the capacity to record absolutely everything that everybody says ever. When you were talking about how nothing ever gets erased, it's always going to be out there. I kind of just kind of – I mean, I was just a little bit rolling my eyes where it's like, that's a lot of information.

And now it's like, huh. It's not that much anymore. It just easily – I think that it's something where – I mean, I don't know what they're doing. If I did, I wouldn't talk about it. But it certainly appears that they might be collecting a lot of stuff and keeping it.

And they're wiggling around this by saying, well, we store it, but – But we don't access it. We don't access it unless – right. Unless it's specifically targeted to be someone who's a non-U.S. person by whatever they said, 51%.

Or the probable cause argument. Yeah, 51%, which is a load of crap. But it's something where it still exists. So we did a 22-minute intro, and I almost feel stupid having him sit through dumb segments. Maybe we just keep rolling on this. Well, I think what we might have is a special episode here, and we just keep talking. Okay, sorry. No, no, no.

You didn't tell me to stop. How am I going to have you sit through a song of the week when we're talking about this? To hell with it. Well, we can go – here's the deal. We can just go back. We can just chop this little part where we're talking right now. We can just keep talking. I'm almost done. I'm almost done with this. I was just – No, no, no. Okay. Yeah, no. It's good to easily be in.

We can do two parts on this easy. But it's something where minimization is supposed to protect the rights of U.S. persons. U.S. persons are you, me, it's my girlfriend who has a green card. It's a company which is based in the United States.

I mean, it's a technical term which basically means us, you know, us. Yeah. It's a U.S. company that has all their tax havens offshore. Can we – to hell with them, right? No, that's us. Damn it. That's still us. Yeah, that's still us. Don't be going after Apple. But, I mean, just from what I read, it's like it's almost like they've defined the term collection.

Collection used to meant when you started rolling the tape. Yeah. And you used to only have X amount of – because I remember watching these things where you'd only have 30 seconds or a minute. And you'd have to turn the tape off and then you could turn it back on after 30 seconds. That was the old school way because technology didn't allow you to grab everything.

No, no, no. That was – that was a big deal. I don't know anything about that. Okay. Just when they're doing – I mean, okay, everything I learned about mob surveillance I learned from the Sopranos and the Wire. But in the Sopranos, when they got a court order to check Tony's phone, they would turn it on for a thing and he would start to talk about something and they had to turn the tape off.

Then they had to turn it back on and turn it back off. But didn't – I mean, isn't that the whole theory behind the Patriot Act? Is that – all that stuff went out the window? I don't know. Okay. See, that's – my understanding is the Patriot Act and – and nobody I know has actually read the entire thing.

I certainly haven't. But smarter people than I have certainly skimmed it at least. And the theory is that the Patriot Act that we all signed off on rescinded all of that. Okay. For probable cause. But probable cause, in air quotes, can mean anything.

Well, that's – so that really kind of gets down to what concerns me about this. It's – if all this data is being held on – and they kind of change the word collection, I think, to mean until we look at it. Yeah.

Once we query it under an approved, you know, FISC, whatever the court thing, then if we determine that certain parts are non-section, was it 20702 or something, then I think they have to minimize that.

But until that, it just sticks around. And so you're basically saying, as this database grows and grows and grows, are you actually trusting that someone's not going to misuse it? Well, that's the thing. When you collect everything and you have somebody that you want to get to, any three of us sitting here, anybody that we know, if you have access to absolutely every bit of communication that person has ever done, you can cherry pick to make a case to say, this guy might be up to something.

Yeah. No matter what, no matter who it is. And that's where it gets really fucking scary because anybody can target anybody by cherry picking through the everything that exists and make a case to say, I'm worried about this person. And whether it's going to be, I mean, the part where I think a lot of people get concerned, it's not, are you going to be, they're going to run something and decide, oh, wait, you're with a Canadian.

You're, you're a potential terrorist. Yeah. It's not that. It's that if the FBI has access to this stuff or other people, then all of a sudden some of these disinformation can be used for political means. Yeah. It's happened before.

It's going to happen again. And it's one thing, you know, I certainly hope that this podcast ends up in my file. Seriously, because it's like, it probably will. I think it should. But it's like, it's something where if the government's doing their job as someone who's held all these clearances and who someday probably will again, if they're doing due diligence, that's their job.

They should be hearing it. But, you know, hi. Hi, guys. I, this is not collection. This is me putting it out publicly. I'm just, you know, for, what was the reasons I'm here? Tapatia ships.

Tapatia ships and to get out of the house? Because your girlfriend wanted you. Your girlfriend wanted me to come here. But your girlfriend only has a green card, so maybe she's, oh, see, you know. Oh, no, crap. My wife, too. Oh. It's a collusion of Canadians. This is, this is why you don't get married. We're trying to bring poutine to take over the U.S.

I certainly hope that if, if at least they can't be pressured from the outside, the pressure gets applied on the inside to do the right thing. Yeah. I mean, that's the hope, right? That's the hope. But that said, watch what you do online, people.

So, just thinking about, just blue skying here, about what you were talking about before, about being able to go back and build a case. Yeah. So, let's say you're a Foursquare user. Hey. Foursquare rolled out of the timeline. They're trying to compete.

I still like the, and that CIA video. Yeah, you're a Foursquare user, so you check into a couple different embassies for whatever reason. No, no, no, no. You have a local you go to every day. Yep. Or, well, hopefully not every day, because that, I mean, that's not a good thing. But you go to a place often.

Yes. It could be Starbucks. Right. Terrorist Joe over here. Also is a free winner of that Starbucks. Happens to go there. And you just, you guys just happen to get out of the gym, separate gyms, completely separate lives. You have an intersection. You are now a person of interest. You have an intersection point. Mm-hmm.

Based on all the data that they've collected. Yep. So, they can go and build a reverse case against you. Now, they have a probable cause to look into you and to make your life a living hell. I mean, what do you think of a scenario like that? Based on them just collecting everything.

I don't know. I mean, it's something where you don't know what they're looking for, and in the end. They're looking for patterns. If you have a pattern that matches up with somebody else's pattern who is a known person of interest, you are on a list. Yeah. But even still. You are going to be checked out. Even with all the resources our government has, they're still finite.

So, even if you had, what did they say, zetabytes? Is that real? Zetabytes. But the thing is, it's the metadata that concerns me. No, no. But even still. Even if you had zetabytes and that went down to 10,000 people of concern. Right. They're still going to have to filter that down to probable 10 that they're going to go in.

And they're not going to, like, just pull you in. They're going to start surveilling you specifically. It's a situation where the government is working the way it's supposed to. Correct. Where they are doing, I'm talking about corrupt aspects of government. Somebody who decides they want to fuck with you. Well, if someone wants to fuck with you.

You're screwed anyway. You're screwed anyways. You don't need any of these programs or stuff like that. There's enough stuff that anyone could do. I mean, think about it. Just any, any, there are so many ways that people can exert leverage on you and influence.

Right. Carrots, sticks, all this stuff really, it's, I don't think so. I mean, it's, it's, it's a lot easier. Okay. Well, how about expand to a group of people? Well, let me take that back. Like a church, some sort of organization.

If, depending on what was being collected in this stuff, I mean, if someone's like case basically goes in and finds out that Senator so-and-so is like doing something like posting his dick on Twitter or something. Oh, wait a second. Oh, wait. Um, no, then it's like, you know, being able to like, Hey, we know you're screwing around on your wife.

We'd like you to vote. Yes. Yeah. Where it starts to affect. I mean, I don't know. So people in power. I mean, that's a bad TV plot that we've seen a thousand times. Yeah. But does it happen? I don't know. Not in France. So there was a, um, a post on the, uh, uh, blog post yesterday called the dirty little secret about mass surveillance.

It doesn't keep us safe. And it's, um, basically they've got a 32 year NASA veteran and former head of NSA's global digital data gathering program came out and said that it's basically by collecting all this data, they're just adding too many vectors to the, the search parameters and they're getting too much noise.

And it basically turned out to be unfollowable and you're going to get bad data basically that you cannot follow. And they've got spurious correlations. And they've got spurious correlations. Was it correlation causation? But that's just a simple matter of writing better software.

No, it's yeah, it is. It's constructing a better Google search query, but a lot of much more complicated. I mean, and I've worked with big data and it's something where if you, people will talk about, Oh, big data, Hadoop and the cloud and stuff.

If you're working with any data, the first thing you really should do is find out, do I even believe this data at all? Is what this data is saying actually true? I mean, how many people have checked into a place that they didn't actually go to because they were either like trying to hide what they were doing or trying to, Hey, I just checked into a intelligentsia as opposed to a line was long.

I went to Starbucks instead. Or I checked into intelligentsia and three doors down was the happy time massage parlor that I actually went to. No, you didn't. But look, I want to just, before we keep going, I want to just read a paragraph from this.

It says, because of excess data as compared to real signals, someone looking at a history from the vantage point of a library will necessarily find many more spurious relationships than one who sees matters in the making. He will be duped by more epiphenomena, 50 cent word.

Even experiments can be married with bias, especially when researchers hide failed attempts or formulate a hypothesis after the results, thus fitting the hypothesis to the experiment, though the bias is similar there, which basically is taking the data and crafting it to fit your outcome that you desire.

Yes, which brings us to the song of the week. Nice. No, really. Okay, break time. Break time. Yeah, candy, candy, candy, candy.

If you don't have a podcast, I don't have a song.

If you don't have a podcast, I don't have a song. So we're singing a little bit for the beginning of your candy. Song of the week for me, since we've switched formats, I don't get to troll through my music collection and find appropriate cool songs that I really like that fit with our segments. I'm just going to tell you what song I really fucking like this week.

And this week it is Carl Hyde, who is originally from Underworld. And the song is, God, I forgot the title. The Boy with the Jigsaw Puzzle Fingers. It's a bit of an odd title. Yes. But he writes really odd lyrics anyways. He's always been one of the favorite of mine.

Underworld is one of my favorite bands of all time. Absolutely fantastic. I mean, obviously most well known for the big hit on the Trainspotting soundtrack, thumping techno stuff. But he writes really interesting, intricate lyrics. Underworld themselves tend to get a little bit more ambient and interesting as well as with the dance stuff.

And the solo album is very much kind of more the ambient area. The particular song I picked is one of the more lively ones. Really interesting. Great lyrics. An amazing writer. Just really cool, interesting visual collages. He used to write Incredibly Drunk, which is how he used to create that stuff.

And he's managed to become sober and keep that kind of style of writing, which is really interesting. And he's working with a bunch of Brian and Eno associates, so the music is just stunningly gorgeous. Great album. Love it. Listen to it. It's awesome. Now, you might be a little biased because doesn't your license plate say Underworld?

On my old car, which I don't have anymore. No, that's Wendy's car at this point. So, yeah, a little biased, yes. Underworld, like I said, is one of my favorite bands. So, this is the singer from Underworld doing his first solo project. Cool.

Underworld, the room you're sleeping. It's the library. This week, I'm going to talk about a book that I read recently. Actually, I read it about six months ago, but it stuck with me. Dealing with some things I'm going through with social media and blogging and the douchebaggery out there.

It's called Trust Me, I'm Lying. Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Mr. Ryan Holiday. Yes. Ryan used to be the media strategist for a one Tucker Max, who wrote the book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Which I quite enjoyed, I have to say.

I have to say, I enjoyed it too, even though it was kind of somewhat ridiculous. I read it as bullshit. But the media campaign they did around it, which was complete and utter bullshit. They made the entire thing up. Yeah. All of the protests, they engineered.

I figured as much, because there was an entire website full of vitriol and anger, and I was like, I barely found out about this book. There's no way that too many people could possibly know about this. Yeah, they faked all of the protests. They graffitied their own billboards the whole nine years, and it actually did create some protests around it.

So in this book, he talks about his entire strategy, about how he would go to, he would come up with a premise, go to a small blog, get them to write about it, send them a press release and say, hey, nobody's really writing about this yet. You might want to write about it. It's going to be big. He would use that blog post to go to one up the chain, then another one up the chain, until he got it on CNN.

Right. You know, it's basically just using the little fish to stairwell your way up, stairwell your way up. And we're in a 24-hour news cycle, and everybody has to talk about something at some point. Yep. All the time. They've got to do something, say something. Yeah. And so he was an apprentice to Robert Greene, the guy that wrote The 48 Laws of Power and his new book, Mastery.

Interesting guy, but he learned a lot of things from Robert Greene. If you know Robert Greene's work, then you'll understand. If you don't, his books are actually entertaining. The 48 Laws of Power are really good. He did a couple other ones. Have you read those, David? No, but I'm sure there'll be links to them in the show notes.

There will. Absolutely. You're becoming a medium and manipulator. Damn. This guy picks up quick. So, and my favorite, he was the director of marketing at American Apparel. Oh, God. That, so.

I saved that for the, for the cream of the cake. Oh, Jesus. He was responsible for the, like the Sasha Gray nude ads and basically. Basically child porn American Apparel ads. Yeah. I'd assume as well. Yeah. Wow. This guy's dirty. This guy is a piece of work. Yep.

So. Kudos. Effective. Yeah, sure. Completely effective. But that's why it's confessions of a medium. He's trying to. Oh, so now he's cashing in and turning it. He's cashing in to make money on the book because all of his, all of his tactics don't work anymore. Because that's how these things work. Yeah. These people use this. It works for a while until they can't do it anymore.

And then they basically cash in on kind of the same way as we talked about before with all these guys selling you how to make money on the internet. We, we, we milked this and now we're going to teach you what we did and it doesn't work anymore. Make a nice screenplay. Yeah. So you have some experience with this, David, with manipulating the media.

It wasn't manipulating the media per se. It was to manipulate decision makers. So this doesn't revolve about anything we talked about before. We're not talking about anything like that or privacy. But back when I was a young pup at the lab, um, brought in to do water treatment work.

Um, we had the opportunity to develop a water, water filtration to take out arsenic and water, which was, is still a really huge deal in Bangladesh. Like millions of people are very, very sick or dying from this.

Okay. Way to bring it down. No, no, no. Bring it back up. But the thing is like, like you can have the best idea in the world, but unless it gets funded, it doesn't happen. And so we knew from some experiments that we were on the right path technically, but had no idea that we could actually compete with the other groups, which might've been better politically placed within the labs for internal funding.

So my very good friend at the lab, uh, Dr. Pat Brady, brilliant scientist and generally, uh, disreputable person said, we need to write press releases because our management was basically ignorant and stupid, but as our most, but by strategically writing good press releases and embedding them

inside of our corporate newspaper and then outside in the local news and in the regional national news, our management heard about our project and how important it was not from us as writing a proposal, but through the media. Right.

So they were kind of first, let's say it's just like dangling a bright, shiny thing in front of someone. Oh, yes, yes. But the other thing is like, fuck, if we don't fund this, we're going to look like idiots, look like idiots. So, I mean, it was highly successful in terms of getting the project started.

The other part was, and I cannot overestimate this. If you're going to have any project, you need to devote a significant amount of time to a catchy acronym. If you screw up the acronym, your project is DOA, dead on arrival.

G-O-G, GOG. Yeah. So that's another thing we learned. It's like with every project that you want to have funded, you have to work on the acronym. And we spent many bottles of wine on that acronym, but the one they came up with was absolutely brilliant.

It got us funding. It brought in the VCs. It really worked. The technology worked too. Can you share the acronym or is it classified? No, no, this wasn't classified work. It was called the, I was developing, basically we were using quantum mechanical methods to develop nanoparticles that would specifically take certain bad things out of water, which were out there in the one in a million while leaving everything else there.

Kind of like taking out terrorists. Oh, wait. Callback. Callback. But this stuff really worked. We were trying to take arsenic and other bad things out of water. And so we called it, I called it specific anion nano-engineered sorbents, sans, S-A-N-S.

Oh, that's pretty catchy. Which, given I worked at Sandia. Oh. And sans is the French word for without. Right. But it's something where they hear it once and instantly there was like branding in the lab, all kinds of stuff catchy. No one could forget it. It said there weren't nano in it.

Got funded. The technology actually did exceed expectations, and we got our senators, Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, who are two of the senior senators in the United States, did line item funding based upon this and some other projects.

It was, I don't know, I can't remember what, it was like $10, $20, $30 million that came in because of that. But it really helped to have a catching acronym. But we never lost our snarkiness in that, in one of the last proposals that Pat and I wrote together, I said something about how this technology could lead to, you know, new technology.

He's like, no, no, no, no. By funding this project, it will lead to an upward spiral of innovation. Which, you know, shameless, but brilliant. Brilliant. And, you know, when we set it, our management didn't even make a face.

They just kind of like, oh, yes, this is good. So, never, I think as your book author would say, never underestimate the power of these techniques. Never underestimate, or I don't know, your potential customer, they're pretty gullible.

This stuff works. That's super true. Yeah. So, you out there don't believe anything you hear. Jason, I just worked up a little acronym and a little saying for us. Oh, sweet. I mean, based on our acronym. Okay. GOG. An EF away from God. Or just an F. I actually like GROG.

GROG? We should work on that. Oh, do you? Grumpy, rowdy old geeks. Well, no, the GR, grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. Still, the GOG, you know, an F away from God. We are an F away from God. Works better on lettering. I had to throw in the EF for you people figuring out the letters. F. An F away from God.

I think you need to work with that. All right. Well, whatever. I think it's fucking awesome. But I do think you still need some press releases. Hi, this is Jason. I'm currently recording this from an undisclosed location.

We are finishing this up, and I would like to thank our guest from this week, David Teter, Dr. David Teter, for coming in and sharing his insights with us. We recorded this episode on Thursday, June 13th. Unfortunately, we have not heard from Dr. Teter since then.

He was last seen in a blue Ford heading north on I-5. And if anybody has seen him, please get in touch with us, although that might be difficult because we are kind of off the grid right now. Drop the USB stick in the usual location. Good night.

Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Have a good week. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer.

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