18: A Cornucopia of Crazy Making

Oh, right! Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong?

Hello, Jason. Hey, Brian. We're back. We are back. Very excited. Very excited. Very excited, indeed. It's very rainy here today, so I'm kind of like a caged tiger. I want to get outside and go do something. It's crappy and miserable again, and it's probably going to be thundering, and hopefully I won't have to turn off the computer this time.

That's good. We amazingly have kind of crappy weather here today as well, so I actually feel the same way, although I've had a very slow, relaxed morning since I had a big wedding to do last night. Yeah, yeah. You had a thing, for sure. I did have a thing. I saw it on CNN. It was that big of a thing.

Well, you know, it is what it is. Yeah, I've been, you know, one of my longtime clients has been the Goo Goo Dolls, and I've been friends with those guys for ages, and congratulations to Mr. John Resnick, who got married last night. Congratulations as well. Definitely.

And it was a lovely, small, intimate party. No paparazzi. I saw it. It is weird to wake up the next day and, you know, see on people.com that the party that you're at, it was listed, so. Yeah, yeah. Fogarty's wedding definitely didn't make the list.

Yeah. And I was the paparazzi. Well, you took some great shots. I like the shots that came out of that wedding a lot more than what I've seen so far from last night. I still haven't even posted most of them yet. I've got to put those up. They're pretty funny. Cool. Yeah, that was the 14-minute ceremony, so it worked out.

Awesome, yeah. Well, surprisingly, I'm not even close to hungover. I'm just, I got a little buzz last night, but we're all older professionals now, so, you know, we didn't treat it as the big get drunk and act stupid event that I would have in the past, so.

I wish I had hung out with you guys, because my stepdad's in a band, and for you oldsters out there, Jimmy Beaumont and the Skyliners. My stepdad is actually a Skyliner. Awesome. So, I went to their show last night in a church. Okay. Which, when he told me it was in a church, I immediately picture myself as Al Pacino in the last scene of Devil's Advocate.

Yeah. You know. Yeah, whenever I used to go into a church for a wedding, I would start going, it burns, it burns. Yeah. And I'm talking, it was a volunteer fire department benefit kind of thing, and a lot of people showed up. I mean, very old, lots of people.

That actually sounds like a total blast, man. Yeah, I mean, I've seen him perform a ton, but they're always really good. They're very entertaining, and my stepdad's actually really talented. So, that part was fun, and then we all hung out at the bar down the street after, and yeah, tied a couple on.

I do want to talk about a new stout that I found. Okay. So. Well, we can have two little stout discussions. Go for it. Okay. So, I'm a huge fan of Old Rasputin. Yes. Old Rasputin's one of my favorite stouts. It's got, I mean, it's like, it's rocket fuel.

I mean, it's very tasty, and it's like an 11 percenter, I think. It's really up there. And so, I asked the guy, because they got a bunch. This is actually a really nice craft beer place in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, who'd have thunk? Right. It's called the Sharp Edge. And so, I started off with a Chimay Blue, moved to a Duval, which I love Duval, although they didn't have the fancy glasses, like where they keep the salt patch in the bottom, so you get the little tornado of bubbles.

Have you seen those? I have seen that, yeah. Yeah, those are really cool. And then I'm like, oh, I want a stout. And so, I asked him about Old Rasputin, and he's like, nope, nope. He went and checked. He's like, oh, but we got this other thing. It's called 10-fitty. 10-fitty? Like 50-cent?

No. Like, literally. Like, 50-cent? Is he involved? I don't know. Okay. It is black and strong, so he made me. And the waiter was, or the, yeah, the waiter was like, it's the most motor oily stout that we have.

I'm like, bring it on. I'm in. Come on. Let's go. And he brings it in, and I start pouring it, and everybody at the table just stops talking and just looks at it, because it looks like you're pouring out old motor oil. It's thick and just black as night, and it turns out to be exactly as tasty as old Rasputin.

Fantastic. Yeah. So, if you, I'll post, I'll actually post a picture in the show notes. I took a picture of the can, because it comes in a can. It's a stout in a can. Wow. Without that crazy Guinness nitrous widget at the bottom. Oh, yeah, the little circular kind of clicky thingy.

Well, yeah. Yeah. Nitrogen. Nitrogen. Nitrogen. Yeah. Nitrous. That'd be awesome. I was just thinking that. I was like, oh, robots. Well, I actually had an amazing stout last week as well, which this ties in very well with our geekdom, because this is done by Stone Brewing Company, which is down in Escondido, California.

We get a lot of stone up here, especially at, there's this place down on Main Street called Library Ale House that does a lot of craft brews and craft brewing tasting nights. You'll find me there often. But they did a, and just in time for Comic-Con, although I did not have it, I did not go to Comic-Con, they did a collaboration with Will Wheaton, you know.

Oh, no way. Everybody knows Will Wheaton. So, they did a collaboration with him, because he's such a huge fan of their beers as well. So, they made the Stone Farking Wheaton Woot Stout. Oh, my God. That's amazing. And I helped myself to at least two or three of them down at Library Ale House the other day.

It is ridiculously strong. It's 13% alcohol by volume. Oh, my God. But you do not taste it, and it's a very good stout, and it went down super smooth, and big shout out to Will Wheaton. I even, you know, after the second one, I felt like I should tweet him about it.

So, I did. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, Will was one of my original writers on Blogging LA, and I was in a, I was in the first national phone camera art show with him and Weird Al and a bunch of, and I think Coop was in it.

But I got to ride in the elevator with Will Wheaton and his family, but he had his family, so I didn't even want to say anything. Right. I was like, hey, man, how's it going? I was just like, I'm like, it's Wesley fucking Crusher. I'm not going to say anything. So, I know he hates that. Yeah. But he seems like a totally cool guy, so I'm glad he made a totally cool beer.

You there? Yeah. Whoa, I lost you for a second. Did you lose me? Oh, okay. That's weird. Yeah. You totally blinked out. Oh, my God. The internet has failed us. That never happens. Yeah. Well, I've actually been surprised at how well Skype has been working for us, because I remember Skype just being a nightmare all the time, so.

Yeah. No, we did good, I think, so far. And props to our previous guest, Joey Rabier, for telling us to turn the video off, because it screws with the audio quality. Yes. So, yeah, there you go. So, off the stouts, and on to the geek. Yes.

So, you have a bit of follow-up. Sort of, yeah. I mean, I just thought it was really interesting, because we talked a little bit about the homeschooling thing and online schooling. We've discussed that a couple times, really. And just recently, there was an article about San Jose State completely suspending all of their online classes and credits, because basically, more than half the students in the first batch of online courses failed their final exams.

So, these were not the self-starter and self-motivators that you and I had discussed that this stuff is good for. These were just people that were lazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's not surprising. Not surprising. I mean, I think most people need a kick in the ass. And, you know, even I do every now and then.

Even, I think back to my college days, and I go, okay, 95% of my classes I probably could have taken online, and I would have done the work and aced the finals. But the ones that you aren't that interested in, you need somebody there kicking your butt. You're not self-motivated enough. So, I think this might be a trend that we're going to see, because, again, you know, everybody thinks that, oh, put it online.

That must be free. No, no. It costs these schools a lot to put their classes online. It's not cheap. And if there's no turnabout and the failure rate's that high, I'd love to see some statistics from other places that are doing it. Yeah, and this comes on the heels of the, it's called the Fundamentals of Online Learning, Planning and Application, which was taught by Fatima Wirth from Georgia Tech.

And it was basically a class on how to teach a class online. So, we're all just tearing up our own asses on this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely the snake eating its tail. Yeah. And within the first class, like, it just, it went off the rails. And it's actually linked in the article that we're going to link to in the show notes at GrumpyOldGeeks slash 18 about this San Jose State course.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's kind of a mess. I, I, you know, there's really no, um, no substitute for being in the room. No, there's definitely not. And we see more and more things, uh, just in regular life kind of moving online and it's not always a good thing.

You know, there, there's, there are definite reasons to be sitting in a room with other people interacting. And, uh, I'd say learning is definitely one of them. Absolutely. No, absolutely. And, you know, it's in, it, it, I don't know. I mean, I've had such a hard time with school like my whole life, but it comes down to having great teachers, you know, and people that make you feel comfortable and make you want to learn is, is a, yeah, that's a huge part of it.

I mean, you get a bad teacher in the room, you get a bad teacher online, there's still a bad teacher. So you can't, I mean, you can't get rid of the bad teacher problem, I think. Um, so there's, there's, there's a lot of vectors where this stuff can go wrong. Yeah. And I think, I mean, you just, you tend to lend yourself to, to slacking off with the online stuff because you figure, oh, I can just scan through this later.

I can just look at the keywords and I can just take, it's just, you're not getting the full engagement that you would get otherwise. And, and it's just, uh, you know, I, a lot of people I think are just using it as a way to kind of get around stuff. And obviously it's just, it's not working. Yeah. And, uh, to the, to the followup point, um, I promised that I was going to look into the, uh, the school we talked about last week.

Yes. I have been looking into them. I'm not ready to comment yet. So, uh, in a, in a, in a future episode, cause it, it, the, the rabbit hole is deep. My friend, the rabbit hole is deep. I had a feeling I did a quick Google search myself and I was a little surprised at things that started to pop up.

So yeah, I'm looking forward to you, uh, to your entire report. Yes. My in-depth analysis will be coming up in a future episode, but I'm not really ready to do like an off the cuff type of thing. I want to, when I, when I talk about this stuff, I want to talk about it and make it right. Yeah. So, um, yeah, there's, this is, it's not as cut and dry.

It's not as, it's not as cut and dry and it's not as free as people think it might be. So yeah, let's just say, let's just say there may be some tax dollars involved and subsidies and shit like that. Oh, of course. Yeah. So you may be paying for this shit and not even knowing you're paying for this shit.

Of course we are. Of course we are. Mm-hmm. That's what I'm saying, my brother. All right. Uh, yeah. So the online learning thing, it's, it is what it is. So I think, I definitely think that there's a good place for it. I think if you're, if you're, if you're self-motivated, I'm glad that the material is there.

Yeah. I'm really glad the material is there because that just adds to the, the, you know, compendium of human knowledge. Exactly. And I love it. I love it for free, like for things that don't matter. I mean, I've taken a number of online courses just for fun. Um, I'm not taking them for any kind of accreditation or anything I actually really need to know, but there's great stuff out there and it's a great way to learn and brush up on things that, you know, it's five steps above just going to Wikipedia or Google.

You know, this is, these are actual like learned professors that have studied things and give you suggested reading materials. And, and there's some back and forth because you're, you, there is some interaction, just not a great amount. So it's fantastic for that. It's just, I can't see it ever replacing real school for real things.

Nope. I think we're on board with that. Cool. And it's weird. There's a chipmunk that just came up to my windowsill and is staring at me. Oh, really? I don't know. I don't know what he's looking for. Uh, I usually get bumblebees staring at me or hornets or wasps or, but now there's a, oh, and this morning I had a, uh, hummingbird.

I usually get homeless guys and I know exactly what they're looking for. Toilet paper? Yeah, that's one thing on the list. In the news. Apple has had a problem for the past couple, well, almost over a week now without, I was about to say 20 years, but okay.

Hey, hey, hey, hey. No, they, they got hacked on their developer portal by a Turkish researcher in London who had apparently sent them some, some holes and said, Hey, yeah, you guys might want to fix this.

And then they didn't. Then what he went ahead and basically hacked them. Right. And got a hundred thousand, about around a hundred thousand, approximately a hundred thousand, uh, accounts and info about the account and said he's deleting them and all that, that jazz.

So maybe, maybe not, but that prompted Apple to do, to basically do a scorched earth policy on their entire developer system and take the whole damn thing down. Which is smart. Actually, that, that, that is the best response to something like that. Just fucking get rid of it for the time being, because nobody is in a vacuum anymore.

If this guy figured out the holes, somebody else did too. And the thing is, I mean, um, Marco Arment posted on Twitter, it's like, this actually is probably a good thing, but they, um, they have a bunch of disparate systems and each one is, is, is different.

Yeah. And so this one is vulnerable. So they're going back and patching and fixing and doing all the crap on it. And, uh, it's just almost like, come on guys. I want, I want beta four. Hurry up. That's all I want is beta four. Right. Yeah. So I'm, I'm glad they're taking it seriously, but I wish they'd just hurry up.

Yeah, me too. I mean, the thing is, I saw that you had put, put the story up and I was going to like post some other follow-ups and I ended up not being able to just running out of time, but Apple is hardly the only company that's dealing with this right now. There seems to be a rash of, of, of, you know, companies, both big and small that are just getting hacked daily.

Now you see, you see new stories daily about people like, you know, I, I get email blasts from all these small development companies that, you know, whatever, like old message board systems I used five years ago and they still have my email address. You know, we've been hacked. We know that they got all of our information. Please log in, change your password.

If you use your password on anywhere else, which you should never do change it, change it, change it. I mean, this is a daily occurrence now. Oh, well, here's the deal. It's been a daily occurrence, but now it gets, you know, news coverage. Yeah. It's, it's, it's been a occurrence since Kevin Mitnick was hacking Oracle back in the day.

There was a Nintendo hack where people were logging in with basically logins that people had stolen from other sites. And guess what? They worked because you know what? People don't change their passwords. It's called one, one password.com. My friends from agile bits, get it, use it, love it.

Yes. I have actually finally switched over to that as well. So it's fantastic. Yeah. Or last pass or whatever. Last pass is just ugly though. Don't use that. Yeah. Don't use that one. And one other thing to do, which, which maybe people never even think about is generally 99% of companies give you a way to actually shut down your account.

And in theory, they remove all your information after you do that. If you're done using something, go do it. If you're getting junk mail from something that you haven't touched in a while and, and you have an account there, go close it. Just spend a couple of minutes to close it out so your information isn't sitting on another database somewhere that's eventually going to get hacked.

Yeah. Every time I get, I get an email from a service that I used to use and I just go back and I unsubscribe from the mailing list. Then I go back to the site and try and cancel the account. Yeah. Try and cancel the account. I'll tell you what thing, people like Facebook who put your account basically in cold storage, they Han Solo your account, drive me fucking nuts.

You have to jump through so many hoops to get them to delete your data. It's crazy. I got more on that later in another segment, but people who, I mean, when I ran blogrolling.com, I did several things that made people love me even more and love the service and actually increased my retention rates.

First, be able to take your data with you, period, in any format you want. Not their proprietary export format that some archaic XML, like I did OPML, I did plain tech. I had like four different export formats because it's their data.

They should be able to take it with them wherever they go. I'm just – they're paying me to be a service pro – I don't know what the – whatever. I'm a temporary blip on their radar in their travels through the internet life.

They pay me for a little while to use my service, but their data, the time that they spent collecting that data, that makes that data theirs. That's the package. So they take it with them. When a service like Facebook, where you've spent thousands of hours putting stuff into it, won't let you take it out in any format you want, drives me nuts.

Well, let's talk about MySpace, which when they updated to their new formats, all your old data was just gone, and you never had a way to get it anyway. Well, that's because they were MySpace. I know, but it's a perfect example. I mean, a lot of us here, if you've been online long enough, you had a MySpace account, and you probably did it a lot, and all that stuff is just gone, gone, gone, gone.

That's one of those things, like, MySpace was so butt-fucking-ugly. I could not get into it. I mean, it was like – it really was very much like LiveJournal to me, because it was – everybody could have the ugliest website that they could envision.

I would have loved to have seen a psychological evaluation of the hideousness of a website versus the mental instability of the person who made it type of thing. Or at least the age range, you know, the 12 and 13-year-olds with their shooting star gif animations everywhere, and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pumping unicorns or whatever. Yeah, that whole thing. So, I don't know. That was – I just – I can't – I'd never jived with MySpace. I never really used it. I had an account. I looked at a couple bands, but it was so terrible.

I mean, it was terrible. It was just from – I can't even express how terrible it was. Just from the usability standpoint, I'm like – apparently, they've never heard of Jacob Nielsen, even though he's kind of retarded half the time. But there was – from a usability standpoint, it was unusable.

It was just unusable, and I just don't understand how it got to be so popular. Critical mass, man. Critical mass. For the time – at that time, it was better than Friendster, and everybody was on it. End of story. It was Justin Bieber of the internet at the time.

Yes. Okay, so moving on. Moving on. I want to talk about a little thing that creeped me out a little bit. And this is something that's been ping-ponged back and forth across the internet for quite a while, where Monsanto, the giant trans-global seafood manufacturer, they do everything, I'm sure.

Yeah, they got their hands in everything. Yeah, basically, they just ruined – Well, no, they're pretty evil. They ruined the lives of farmers and everybody else on the planet, and – oh, we've got to talk about the bees, too, but we'll get to that. They bought Blackwater, which has – since they were Blackwater, now – since then, they were Xi, X-E, Xi, I believe is how it was pronounced.

Xi. Xi. Then now they're Academy. Academy with an I instead of a Y, which makes it sound more French. I know. They went from American to Chinese to French. Well, hopefully, if they're French, they're just going to drop their guns and run away.

That is what the French are good at. But apparently, Monsanto did actually buy them, because in 2010, there were rumors going around that they bought them. Right. And now the proof is in the pudding, and it's coming out. Now, I'm going to put a little caveat on this, because all of the news sources that have been talking about this are not news sources that are known to me specifically.

Right. And I don't know, really, if this is just kind of a reach-around clusterfuck type of thing where they're making this up and just posting it on a bunch of sites, you know, very much. Yeah. Just a quick Google on this, too.

I'm not seeing this coming up on anything I'm particularly familiar with as well. Yeah. So it could just be this is, you know, the claims of, you know, Black Helicopter, it's being suppressed by the major media, or it just hasn't been researched enough yet by anybody in major media.

Yeah, this could be an under-the-tinfoil hat type of thing. But if it's true, even if it isn't true, it's on the books that Monsanto has hired Blackwater in the past and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get them to do either espionage for them, you know, corporate espionage, or I don't think they've actually shot any farmers yet, but I don't think they're far off.

Yeah. Yeah, this is scary stuff. I mean, they've shot them in the wallet. Yes, definitely. That's the lawyer branch, but yeah, I'm not a Monsanto fan at all, so. I'm not a Monsanto fan at all. I'm not a Blackwater fan at all. I mean, it's terrifying that the fact that there's this basically real-life, real-world, massively funded and frightening mercenary army in existence that is funded in part by our

governments and multinational corporations is scary. I mean, that's like straight out of science fiction, and you don't want to believe that it actually exists, but it does. As I'm scanning through this article more and more, I hate Monsanto. I hate Blackwater. I like Bill Gates, and they're ramming Bill Gates in here.

They still have 500,000 shares of Monsanto, which I also want to do some research. Well, I mean, you can't say it's a bad investment. No, but that was from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that bought those shares, which is the altruistic branch of the family, so it just doesn't kind of jive.

I mean, I thought he was busy with malaria. Why is he? Yeah. Why is he throwing his? And, you know, it's an organization, so it might not even be him type of thing. Exactly. I mean, history will show that Bill Gates is a cutthroat motherfucker no matter what. Oh, no, definitely.

That part, you know, he's not sweet and fluffy. You go back and look at Bill Gates. He's a bastard. No, Microsoft got to where it is by absolutely horrible means that involve monopolies and payoffs and bribing and just steamrolling over people and not giving a fuck.

But at least he's doing something super cool now. Well, okay. Okay, enough of that. Since we don't really have, like, super hard sources on this, I'm not going to spend too much time on it. Yeah, I'm going to actually be adding this to my Google alerts, though, because I want to see if there's a follow-up in major media and what comes out of it.

Because if this is true, it's pretty damn frightening. Yeah, corporations should not have armies, and armies should not be corporations. I agree. So, I mean, granted, these guys are badass, but after there's a video of them in Iraq basically just driving down the street, shooting out of the back of their SUV and killing, you know, dozens of people that are just basically driving to work, and that's why they changed their name from Blackwater to She, because of the bad press.

Because, you know, these are a bunch of vets who like killing people. You know, it's, if you want to know more about the mentality of killing, go read the book On Killing, and you'll find out that, you know, a lot of soldiers don't kill people.

They don't like to kill people. They will aim above them, and the people that do kill people, they're a different breed. They're a different breed, and those are the people that work for Blackwater. That's that 20%, 10% that are basically shooters. Yeah. Well, from one thing that makes me feel absolutely horrible to another, yet another, yet another, thank you, thank you, yet another study came out confirming what we all kind of know, which

is that social media makes us fucking miserable people. Yeah, this time it's Instagram specifically, and the logic, the link is in our show notes. It's offslate.com. Selfie Loathing. Great title. It just cracked me up.

Instagram is even more depressing than Facebook, and it totally makes sense. I mean, we've all dealt with, you know, watching people's humble brag updates where basically you're only seeing the best parts of their lives, and they're so much better than you, and all you see is good things, good things, good things. Instagram distills that down to even a finer essence and a more painful poison, because all you're seeing are people's photos of them having amazing times, great vacations, looking really good in bikinis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So it's just another study that this time the Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon did, which just people that are on Instagram more often are even lonelier and depressed than people that aren't. Yeah. And higher rates than other social networks like people that are just on Facebook.

Yeah, I got nothing on this. That's 100% true. Yeah. You know, it's, I definitely wanted to punch more people in the face with their Instagram photos than their Facebook updates, because it's just like, screw you.

I mean, I think I've always been able to put some sort of line in between just going, wow, this person has this amazing life, to understanding that they're human. And it's, you know, of course, it's a tendency that we all have. We want to present ourselves in the best light. We're going to post the good things and hopefully not the bad, although there's a whole strain of people that use social media purely when they're drunk and depressed and just whine about their lives.

Oh, that would be me. Yeah. But in general, you know, it's an assumption that I take readily at face value when I load up a social network that I'm only going to be seeing the pluses of people's lives. And I'm not going to let that get me down. But it is working and it is happening to lots and lots and lots of people.

Yes, you are more self-aware, obviously, than the general populace. That's all I got to say there. Okay. Because, I mean, I'd pop up Instagram and I follow a bunch of people who are my friends who are, you know, upwardly mobile tech entrepreneur millionaires.

Right. And they were hanging out with people that I would stand in line for hours and get autographs with and they're out drinking beers and having a good time, you know, and I'm just like, God damn it. Yeah. Well, maybe you should stay off Instagram for a while, Jason. More later.

Okay. So, and if you want to stay off Instagram, there is an awesome exporter called Instaport. Right. If you go to instaport.me and you want to pull all your photos down, which you should actually do anyway, just for an archival type of thing.

Because they may at some point get to be like Twitter where you can only get your last 3,000 tweets, even if you've paid 30,000. It's good now and again to just go back up your stuff. That's great that there's an apporter. I mean, just like I was saying, there never was for MySpace in the day and I'm sure there isn't for Facebook yet either.

Just a way to grab absolutely everything that's automated. It'd be fantastic. Did MySpace not have an API? No, of course they didn't. Oh, that's right. They were running on ASP. Yeah. Yeah, that was something I was shouting and screaming at about three or four years ago.

I was like, I want to be able to pull all my photos off. I want to get everything off MySpace. I'm not stupid. I have backups of all the photos and everything. But updates and things like that, I thought it'd be great to grab it all. But who's going to sit there and just manually copy and paste things? And that's what you had to do if you wanted to.

But now it doesn't matter because when you log in, they force you to their new version 2 and all your old stuff just goes poof. That's okay. Hey, destroy the past. Yeah, exactly. At least it's gone. Except for, you know, internetarchive.com and places like that. But those are spotty at best.

Well, that would be archive.org. Oh, sorry. By the way, just in case everybody wants to go check it out. And I do recommend the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine, yes. That one's fun. It's a lot of fun. Oh, here's the thing about the Wayback Machine that still pisses me off. Spew, my first website, sold the domain in some crazy porn deal for a laptop when I had a few too many drinks.

And they let it go and it got bought by a Chinese conglomerate and got bought by a Cayman Islands conglomerate. And it's stuck in this limbo. I can't buy it back. And Blackwater probably owns it. Yeah. So here's the deal. If you buy a domain and you currently own it, even though it has a vast, you know, wonderful history like my website did because it was awesome and amazing and was the queen of the internet.

That's how I do about you before I even met you. Exactly. So if the current owner drops an HT access, no follow file on it, completely takes it out of archive.org. Really? Yep. Even if at that time there was no robots.txt file, they don't have any way to basically allow what the rules were for spidering in the past.

Right. It's only the current rules. If I went and got, if for some, some miraculous way, I got Microsoft.com and threw a new robot.txt file that said, don't allow spiders, it would completely remove it from archive.org. That is crazy.

I'm a little more than a little surprised by that. I'm pissed off about it because I own that domain. I own the content and I want to see it. Right. Well, don't you have backup somewhere? I got a million backups. I think I deleted them all last week though. Okay. In my fugue state. There you go.

But also, one last thing on archive.org, there is an amazing documentary about those guys. I'm going to put it in the show notes. What they're doing, how they do it. They don't deal with the cloud. They have all the servers on site. They're like, we own the boxes.

We have the data. It's just a really cool 20-minute documentary. Awesome. I'll put it in the show notes. Very good. Kickstarter in the balls. So we have another Kickstarter. I'm a little torn on this one because, as we talked about, I love the Everything is a Remix series that's out there on the web by this guy, Kirby Ferguson from Brooklyn, New York.

I loved it. It was great. It was well-researched. It was really interesting. But he has a Kickstarter, too, which Jason discovered. Yes, I watched Everything is a Remix, and I thought it was fantastic. And if you do go back and watch Everything is a Remix, when the credits roll, that's basically at halfway.

So watch every episode until the end because I missed out on a lot. Oh, yeah, yeah. I had to go back and re-watch it. Yes. So, but yeah, at the end of his last episode, episode four, he basically announces his Kickstarter for This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, which is a video series that was supposed to be out before the last election.

Right. It is now July 27th, 2013. Yes, and it was successfully funded. So he wanted, what, he had a goal of $48,000, which is... $48,000, he got $54,600. A lot. So he made a lot of money to put together another video series, which is great, except it never showed up.

And it's still in progress. His last update was May 6th, and it was for backers only, so we don't get to see it. But there's still nothing. There's a lot of comments, and I would not be as kind as a lot of people are if I had sent this guy. I liked everything as a remix enough that if I would have known that this was happening at the time, I would have pledged maybe upwards of $50, and I'd be pissed if nothing ever showed up, and everybody else is like, take your time, I'm sure it'll be great.

I would not be so nice. I would be, I want my money back. Yeah, I'd be like, get off your ass. I'll send you the $50 again once you finish it. Yeah, I mean, it's ridiculous. He had a plan, and apparently his plan went off the rails, but I mean, put out something.

No, you know, yeah, exactly. You know, it's one thing to take somebody's money ahead of time to make your goal, but you know, this is just, it's vaporware, and this guy's got $55,000 in a pocket somewhere.

Who knows if it's ever going to turn up? Yeah, and that's the thing. It's like, at this point, he's a year over date. Mm-hmm, and you know, as we talked about before in previous things like this, there's no way to get your money back, really. There's no process. There's no nothing.

It's just, this guy could never finish it, ever, and just, that's that. Yeah, he'd just walk away and take a nice vacation and say, see ya, suckas. I mean, you ruin your reputation online, fair enough, and he definitely, you know, he goes out of his way to make you be able to find him.

It's not a problem. He links directly to his Facebook page. You know this guy is going to disappear, and I hope he finally gets it done, and I hope it's really good, like everything is a remix was, but these are the problems with Kickstarters. Yeah, I mean, and you go to the website, and the last website update was April 29th, where he says, move in, pardon the mess, where he moves to a new host, which looks like he actually went to Squarespace, I believe.

Interesting. So that's where all the money's going, and he's paying for his Squarespace dues. Right. No, I mean, you know, I'm sure this guy probably has, like, a full-time job, and he obviously put a lot of time and effort and research into everything as a remix. I'm sure he's doing the same thing now. That's all well and good, but, you know, you've got my $150, or my God, he even asked for, like, pledges of up to $3,000.

If I would have gave this guy $3,000, and it's over a year late, I'd be very angry. Well, there are two backers at $3,000. Well, there you go. Well, somebody's probably very upset. It's ridiculous.

I mean, like I said, I did like his work, and I thought the first one was great, but this is the, you know, this is the fucked-up rabbit hole that people who get money through Kickstarter, it's like, look, if you say you're going to do something, be committed. You've got to do it.

Be committed. But, you know, this is going to adversely affect his online reputation, and next time around, should he actually finish this one, and he does another Kickstarter for another one, I'm sure that there are a lot of his previous backers that are going to think twice about it. Yeah, I'd hope so.

One would hope. So, there you go. Kickstarter again. In the balls. No, seriously? Are you shitting me? I've spent fairly large sums of money on pieces of clothing before, not going to lie.

I don't do it often. In general, I'm pretty much okay with fairly cheap clothing, but every now and then I spend, you know, a good amount. I'll toss a decent amount of money on a leather jacket, a nice pair of jeans that I know I'm going to keep forever, a suit, whatever. Have you ever spent $120 on a t-shirt?

On a t-shirt? No. Yeah. A button-down, I've spent a lot more, but a t-shirt, no. I've never spent more than $30 on a t-shirt. I think I've actually spent maybe close to $120 on a t-shirt before, but they were like very specific, you know, artsy designer types, limited edition whatnots.

No, I take that back. I have gone to Nordstrom's and I have bought very nice, fine quality t-shirts, basically. I mean, it's like, but 50 bucks is the most I've ever spent and they're, they're gorgeous. Would you spend, say, $120 on a plain white t-shirt?

Not in any universe that has ever come into existence. Where are the words APC West were silkscreened on the inner neckline? It's just a white t-shirt. No. Okay. Well, Kanye West is selling them. So, the only branding on the t-shirt is on inside the neckline that nobody can see.

Yeah. And it's just a plain white t-shirt and it's not even particularly good quality. Who makes the t-shirt? Haynes? I don't, I'm not entirely sure. I didn't, uh... You're not going to spend $120 to find out. I wouldn't spend, I didn't even want to spend the three minutes to research it that much just because I hate Kanye West and I think this is the biggest douchebag move ever.

Well, it's the biggest douchebag move from one of the biggest douchebags that we want. Yep. His little hissy fits over the press. I'm like, dude, know where you come from, you little piece of shit. Yes. Yeah, so... And enjoy your fat new wife. It's a crazy story that got a lot of press for a little bit, so there were links all over the place.

I'm sure most people have probably heard about it. In our show notes, there's a direct link to a very specific take on it by somebody I actually love, which is Teresa Strasser, who used to be Adam Curl's co-host on his radio show. She's now doing a show called List, and I quite liked her little video bit about it.

She does, she gives it even more of a, are you fucking kidding me, than I do, so... Okay, cool. I'll, I'll, I'll, yeah, I just, fuck that guy, seriously. Yeah. So, uh, my little bit of you shitting me is, there's a thing in Japan now where they're called the Bagel Heads.

Okay. There are people that are getting these body mods where they basically squirt a, basically a bag of saline into your forehead. Then you press it in the middle, and it looks like you have a bagel in your head.

And it does. I'm looking at the photos right now. It actually kind of, you know, depending on the angle and the lighting, it can either be a bangle or a butthole. I mean, I'm looking at the second shot right now, the girl in the middle, uh, it's in the show notes, so you're gonna have to take a look at this.

Tell me that it doesn't look like a butthole. I'm not even looking at it, because I can't, I'll just lose it. Oh, ass face, ass face. I'm never surprised by any bit of weird-ass news that comes out of Japan, but this one is pretty spectacular.

Yeah, and, and the upside is, it's non-permanent, apparently, they say, because the saline is absorbed into your system. Right. But what I'm thinking is, a couple years down the line, when people who do this habitually are basically gonna have, they're gonna need a forehead bra because of all the saggy bagel flesh that's coming down off their forehead.

Oh, yeah, no doubt, actually. After the repeated stretching, you know? Yeah, that'll be interesting. Oh, I love Japan. I really do. You know, Apple does those commercials where basically they, they kind of pimp their app store and say, anything that you could think of is in there.

That's gotta be true at this point, because this app called Heard that I just discovered about, this is, I can't believe this even exists, and they're selling it. Activate the app, and it starts to record everything around you on a 12-second buffer.

Push it to five minutes if you pay them two bucks. Anytime you want, click the push to save button to the current clip, do nothing, and the self-destructing buffer lets the audio slip into the ether. Why would anyone not in the NSA want an app like this? With Heard, you can capture everything from your baby's first word to a key point in a lecture without hovering your thumb over the record button all day.

How, how lazy are we, again, that, you know, if you actually want to record something, you just, you know, open up something and record it. So, and also, you can't use your phone for anything else. You have to leave this app just running all the time, recording all the audio around you. It doesn't, doesn't go in the background?

I don't believe so. Oh, boy. Well, you're going to have to bring it up. Come on, man. You got to do the, click, click the push to save button. Otherwise, it just goes away. And then you can put it in the background and let it, let it record. All right. It's still stupid. Well, I mean, the iPhone comes with a voice recorder app.

So, yeah, it's a bit of, I mean. It is built in already. Yeah. It's kind of, I mean, it's a convenience where you're, I, yeah, it's kind of a douchey app for sure. You know, they're trying to market it. It's, it's a, Heard is a useful app for settling those, but I said, and then you said arguments with your kids.

Yeah. If they're your kids, then just say, I'm your dad. Shut the fuck up, stupid kid. And go back to your room. Plus they, they, you know, discount the fact that the kid probably knows how to use the app better than you do. And they're going to catch you on your shit. Oh yeah. Yeah. Trust me. Yeah. If you're going after your kid, he's going to, he's going to be way more savvy than you are.

And all the, the hidden spy cams he's already placed around your home for enough to. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a dumb app. I don't get it. It's silly. So. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the, the free 12 second buffer is just useless. So you have to pay, you have to pay for it.

To make it work, which is one of those, you know, I, I hate apps like that to, to make it actually do something that you want to do. Screw that. It's like, be upfront about it. Drop it, drop the buck 99 from the get go. Yeah. And, you know, be honest about what you're selling.

Exactly. Cause it's a 12, a 12 second buffer is nothing. No, you can't. What are you going to add? That was about it. Or I think that we should be done. Yeah. Exactly. You got it. Nailed it. Nailed it. So you got one too. Yeah. If this, then that.

Yes. Which is a very popular web service already, which basically ties together. Uh, it's basically ties together APIs with triggers. Okay. Um, so if you do something on website, a website, B website, C, then they can do push crap to website D or API F, you know, type of thing.

And this is the type of stuff that as programmers we've done forever, but the fact that they turned it into a very savvy, smooth little app is pretty cool. Right. You know, you basically go, there's a, a giant list of APIs that they support. You can connect them and then they give you all of the stuff that you can do with them and say, okay, you post a new picture on Instagram.

Okay. Well then repost on Tumblr and send an email to a list on MailChimp, you know, you can do stuff like that, which is pretty cool. Yeah. And now there's an iPhone version, which the apps that support it on the iPhone, you know, with the different hooks and it's cool.

I got it sending me all sorts of crazy stuff now every morning. I know what the weather is. It's going to, it basically, if it's going to rain, it sends me a text message. It's seven in the morning. Yeah. I mean, I love that sort of stuff. I mean, you know, I was writing batch files for windows 35 years ago or something.

Well, not quite 35 years ago. Jesus. I'm like, but you know, batch files for windows. I mean, this is just, you know, it's, it's great stuff. I love automation. I love the fact that there's an app to do this. I'm a little like it's free, which makes me go, okay, how are they making their money? And, uh, there are some, I was scanning through the customer reviews after I'd paid for it a bit and there's some definite concerns about it.

Wait, wait, you said it was free. And after you paid for it a bit, you paid for it? No. How did they make any money? No, sorry. After I downloaded it, sorry. Downloaded. Yeah. See? After I downloaded it, I was scanning through some of the customer reviews and there do seem to be a lot of concerns with their privacy policy and the same kind of concerns that would trigger in me automatically.

If free, then I'm worried. Um, and you know, one of the comments, not satisfied with the privacy policy. And I don't want anyone nosing around in my camera rule or email, even Gmail warned against it. That should tell you something. So yeah, then don't download it and don't use it. I get it.

So, but I like the transparency aspect. I would like to know how they're making any money, what their plans are. And I haven't read through the entire privacy policy. I probably should. And I'll get back to you about that. Okay. Yeah. I haven't done much, you know, deep dive on them. I know a lot of people use them.

This was my foray into it because it was one of those things where I heard it was free and I didn't even bother with it because it was free. Because this has been a web app for a long time and you know, and the cool thing, the one cool thing I think is that you can create your own recipes and share the recipes with other people.

No, that is super cool. That's cool stuff. So if you'd come up with something really cool and then you can just share it with everybody and say, I figured this cool thing out, you know, I like that. And this is one of those apps, you know, even if it is a web app, you know, 15 bucks a year, 10 bucks a year, I'd pay for it. I would too.

And actually we could create our own little recipes for like posting to all the grumpy old geek services at once, share it with each other. And there we go. Yeah. It's called the piss people off recipe. Exactly. It's called the Jason, Jason. Don't do this after like, say midnight and seven beers. You're a dick.

This week, false advertising. Never wet. This was the magical thing that really did have some serious viral stuff going on. I mean, I saw a bunch of my friends posting links and what the fuck and holy crap. Magic is real, you know, type updates.

With links to their, you know, promo site and their promo videos. And they actually even made it onto, I think the Today Show talked about them and they, you know, they had the guys in to do their demonstration or whatever. It looked amazing. It looked like a spray that you could put on basically anything.

They claim anything, especially in their videos, where, you know, you put the code on it and it would be rendered immune to water and other liquids. Things would just slide right off of it. You know, they're, they're, uh, the company I think is called, uh, oh dear, I've lost the name of the company.

Whatever. It's called Never Wet. Um, and you can find out Ross Nanotechnology. There you go. So they're claiming to be, you know, super nanotech and everything. Uh, it was not made available to the public for a long time. This, these videos have been out for a while, uh, at least two years now. Um, but they finally announced that they'd be available nationally at Home Depot for 20 bucks.

And they released a couple more amazing videos, uh, even including putting a iPhone in a big bucket of water and pulling it out and having it still work. Um, and then they put it out to the general public and it was made available at Home Depot.

And one of my favorite tech writers, Farhad Manju, who writes for Slate, went out and bought it immediately to try it. It never worked on anything. It did not stop water at all on, especially not on clothing. It did not work on electronics at all. And what they'd never show you in their magical videos is when you spray it on there, it is not clear.

It is thick. It looks like you're spraying on plaster. This stuff is complete and utter bullshit. Okay. Well, I got two things to say about this. First, Never Wet was the, uh, the nickname I gave my frigid girlfriend in high school.

Um, so I, I have a problem with this. Damn it. You got me with that one. And, uh, second, we bought, we actually bought some of this stuff. We've got it here. We're going to try it out. Okay. Um, my mom had a, my mom had a, has a couple of bird houses that are like these really artisanal bird houses.

And I told her first, I'm like, let's try it on something that isn't what you want to protect. Yeah. Try it on something you don't care about. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, we've got some, some outdoor furniture that you can use it on that like basically wood bottomed furniture where you don't want the wood to basically rot.

Yeah. So we're going to try it. We're going to try it on that because, um, this is one person's review and I never want to, you know, discount the fact that it could be a pebcac error. Right. Um, and this guy just might not have known what he's doing. Definitely possible.

Used it wrong. So I want to, I definitely want to follow the instructions to the T and make sure that we're using it properly and then check the results. Please do some photo documentation and put that up on our site. Absolutely. Absolutely. Excellent. And, and the fact that it does have like a, uh, a white milky type of, you know, sheen to it or whatever that, you know, so I think that's why they used a white t-shirt and white tennis shoes and everything that they're using with fabric is white.

Yes. You know, you noticed that, right? I did notice that. Yeah. I mean, that's how they're getting away with it right now. So, so it's not just that they're saying, oh, we're going to use this on a white surface. So it looks so you, so you can't see the stains, which is what I originally thought. It's like, oh, we're going to show this on like something pristine and white.

No, no. It's because of the spray is white. Exactly. So it definitely falls in the false advertising category, even if it does work and it just leaves a mite, you know, horrible white layer on top of everything. Uh, that's definitely not what they're claiming in their literature and in their videos. Yeah.

So, so go give it a test, Jason. I love the fact that the grumpy old geeks are actually getting in the field on this one. Yeah, no, we're definitely getting in the field. It's bought. We've got a couple of cans of, there are a couple of cans of the stuff and we're ready to go. Uh, as soon as it stops raining, then we'll give it a shot. Um, I'm, I'm actually going to go out and buy some diet Pepsi and some Mentos so I can do, oh wait, that's a couple of years old now.

Yeah. And it's diet Coke. But it actually works with any of the colas. They only use diet because it's less sticky. Right. You can use Coke. Okay. Um, so the other thing I wanted to point out was a video that came out a little bit ago. I actually don't know exactly when it came out, but it hit the social media scene.

Uh, it's a behind the scenes at a McDonald's photo shoot and it's McDonald's in Canada. Yes. And the marketing director of McDonald's Canada literally goes to a McDonald's, buys a quarter pounder, takes it to the photo studio where they're doing a real shoot and have, have, has them shoot both of them.

Yes. And I thought it was a brilliant video. It was very honest. I love the fact that they actually did it. I mean, huge props to McDonald's for putting this out. Yeah. And you know, it's like, well, why doesn't my burger look like the one in the photo?

Well, because everything's pushed to the front. Because if you put pickles on a burger and take a picture of it, you can't see the goddamn pickles. Exactly. You know, that's, that's exactly, I mean, that's straightforward logic, but the way they did it and pointed everything out, I thought it was brilliant.

And I gave them huge props. The fact that they explain why, why it looks so much bigger is because it's in a cardboard container and there's steam, which shrinks everything. I'd never even made that connection. I was like, Oh, I totally made that connection. Yeah. Yeah. And everything just, it basically cooks down and it's, but Hey, you know, you know, it's not going to look like it does in the photo.

It just shows you all the crap that's inside. Yeah. So I thought it was a pretty amazing video and really interesting. So, and I, again, really huge props to McDonald's for actually doing it. And of course it came out of Canada. There's no way McDonald's USA would have done this. Yeah. I, yeah, I don't know. I think they, I bet they're probably pissed at Canada for doing this, even though they had to get home.

I think they're probably pissed too. Because you'd think this would come out of Oak Brook and, because I used to live down the street from McDonald's corporate and, oh my God, that was the best place in the world to live. If you like McDonald's, we got to make, we got to make rib years. So, suck it, America.

So, thank you, Canada, for making an awesome video. This will be, we'll post it in the show notes and definitely check it out. It's like three minutes worth watching and very insightful. Very insightful. Very interesting. And, and again, doesn't even make McDonald's look crappy at all, really. So, now what I really want to see is Taco Bell do one of these, because you know what?

Taco Bell doesn't, there's no, they, they're indefensible. Taco Bell is indefensible with the crap that they put on their pictures with the little shit pile that you get. Well, they could never do, they could never do this because they couldn't show how they actually form the, the, uh, tortillas out of cardboard and the meat that comes from horse.

Or Arby's. Arby's is like the meat that comes in the, basically, the food that they reconstitute into physical manifestation to become roast beef again. So, it's like, oh, I didn't even close. Okay. Anyway, enough of that. It's the library.

Okay. I did want to point out one thing in our last segment. Um, I am drinking Diet Mountain Dew today. Yes. And since it is, uh, false advertising, did you know Diet Mountain Dew, the second ingredient in Diet Mountain Dew is concentrated orange juice?

I did not know that, but I've never been a Mountain Dew guy. Oh, well, I, I like this stuff because, well, I used to drink it warm when I was, when I first started out in programming, I would drink a 12 pack a day warm. I'd have it at my desk and I would just pound them. Right. And I, my, my theory was since it's warm and my blood's warm, the caffeine's going to get into me faster.

Now that I'm old, I know that when you drink cold things, it burns more fat because you have to warm it up to your body temperature. So, I'm now down with cold Diet Mountain Dew. I do have a problem with, uh, aspartame and the phenylketalurics and what they do to your memory.

But every now and again, I need some fucking rocket fuel. And the one thing I wanted to point out where it says zero calories per can on a can of Diet Mountain Dew. Yes. And it has concentrated orange juice. Those two things don't align. Yeah. That's not possible. You know what?

You can have 4.9 calories in a can of soda and the FDA lets you call it zero. I did not know that. Well, that kind of destroys the entire premise of Pepsi one then, right? Or Coke zero. Or Coke zero. Coke zero is pretty tasty, by the way. I don't know if you tried that stuff.

Uh, it's all right. It's all right with rum. Yeah. So it's Diet Mountain Dew. Yeah. Um, so anyway, I just wanted to bring that up that that's why I'm talking so fast and so manic this week because I have had, I've had four Diet Mountain Dews since we started recording. And neither of us have had any alcohol, so.

Uh, I had a glass of wine, like, at lunch. Oh, okay. Because I, I had a really long night last night, like I mentioned before, and I needed that, uh, little hair of the dog. There you go. So I had a little glass of cab to kind of wash down my, uh, hot dog sandwich that I had for lunch.

Well, we both had pretty crazy weeks and, uh, big nights last night, which explains why we have not finished this book, uh, Who Owns the Future, but we're going to talk about it anyways. Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier. Yes. A, a bedreaded large man from, I believe he's from New York.

I think he's from New York or, yes, or New York City. I was right. Yes. Um, I just, I know him from being on the scene for so long because he was big in VR virtual reality back in the day and he is quite, he is, he is credited for popularizing the term, which doesn't mean he coined it, but he was, he was big in VR.

That's where they came up with the term avatar. Um, cause they needed, you know, language around it. That's back, back in the day. Like, uh, when you had the, you'd go to, uh, like the crazy arcades, you put the headset on and walk around in a little circle.

Yeah. If you've ever, if you've ever seen Hackers, um, they, he's wearing one in Hackers, the, the villain, what's his name? Fisher Stevens has one in his apartment. Yeah. That was the big stuff. But now he works for Microsoft Research, but he has written this book that we have, we've actually talked about before on the show.

Um, and you had a quote that you wanted to talk about that was what we talked about in the initial episode that got us interested in this book. Yeah. I mean, the reason I got so excited about the book when I heard it was coming out and I read kind of the blurbs before it was coming out was he's hiking off the exact subject that, uh, you and I kind of started doing this podcast about, which is how do people make money?

What the hell's going on with the economy? How is this digital world changing things? Um, I mean, obviously not all of that was our initial intent with grumpy old geeks. We wanted to have beer and talk tech, but I think you and I both noticed that we tend to circle around this conversation again and again.

And we talk about, uh, you know, these companies that, that make a ton of money and, you know, we talk about, uh, the economy and how few jobs there are out there and how hard it is to make a living and, and all the people that we know that are unemployed and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, this whole book is about that.

It's called who owns the future and it is his take on this and where things are headed and how we can change them. And, um, because if we don't, we're in some deep shit, um, it's something that I thought I was going to open up and just kind of read cover to cover within a couple hours, but I find myself stopping every couple of paragraphs to really think about it.

So it's taking me a long time to get into it. Um, I, I, and I agree. I've actually had to reread several paragraphs, you know, it's just like, just to kind of think about it. And I think this is a really important book and I think this is a, one of those watershed things that, uh, if enough people read this and if it's gets some critical mass, it could make some changes.

Um, the one paragraph in particular, and this is, you know, that really stuck out for me that I wanted to talk about a bit here. Um, I've gotten a bit further into the book. This is just in the intro and it blew my mind. Uh, so he starts to talk a bit about, he's talking a bit about what the book is about, talking about the online economy, talking about what's going on.

Um, here's a current example of the challenges we face at the height of its power. The photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera, but today Kodak is bankrupt. All those people out of work, you know?

Um, and the new face of digital photography is Instagram, which we've talked about multiple times when Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars, a billion dollars in 2012 and employed 13 people. Yep. That is concentration of wealth. That is completely destroying entire industries.

That is what we're seeing going on again and again and again with our new digital culture. Music industry, destroyed. How many fucking jobs have we lost there? Photography, completely destroyed. We're watching the dismantling of journalism right now. It's just going to keep going and going and going.

Movie industry is next, and we all know that too. Yeah, and I think what he points out, which is really good, is that, you know, if you have a few of these industries that get destroyed, you know, in the basically the transition to the internet, you can survive it.

Yeah. But when every industry starts to get destroyed, then you have a problem. Yeah. When you lose the middle class, you lose the middle class. And this is, this is one of the things that really resonates with me is the internet has destroyed my job on the internet.

No. Same thing for me, you know. It's the fucked up part. It's like, I, my job has been for 20 years, been building shit on the internet. The internet has destroyed my job. It's a fucking, I said it before, it's a snake in its tail. I feel like I'm watching Millennium. Yeah. Yeah. And he starts to, I mean, it's just, it's, this book is the distillation of everything that you and I have been kind of playing around with and, and kind of circling around.

I think this is going to be an amazing read. I'm no more, more than a quarter into it so far. And it's just, it's fascinating. It's a lot about the economy. It's a lot about just, you know, how all of these small trickles that used to go out to a middle class because, because a company would employ so many people are all now being concentrated in the hands of five or six people or whatever, um, how everything is starting to be controlled by the people that, that own the servers, your, and the distribution methods, your, your iTunes, your Amazons.

And, uh, it's just a lot of money going to just a few people and what the fuck are the rest of us supposed to do? Well, think about this. Think about this. It's almost like the music industry back in the heyday was around distribution. Yep.

And this is kind of like the original days of the music industry, but just ported to the internet where now all of our digital information is being pumped into, you know, gatekeepers and distributors. Yeah. Back again, because that was the great part about the internet was there were no gatekeepers.

Yes. You could post your own stuff. Yep. And that's what, that's what we did because we were the tech savvy ones that started on the internet. I have all the, all the websites I ever made, I made money on because I would post my things and I would make, I would have advertising or sponsor deals because it was my content.

Now I post things on Facebook or Instagram, they make, well, Instagram has never made a dime except for the billion dollars for their audience. They sold their audience. That is an awful lot of dimes. Yeah. A couple of decimal points there.

Just, just a few. Yeah. So, but Facebook takes everything I post and they sell it. Yes. We're all giving our content away for free right now and we're actually giving it to people that make money off of it. Well, I, that, this is what I wanted to talk about because I, I, I, you know, skirted with this in a couple episodes and talked about it a bit.

I have taken everything I've ever made off of Facebook. I'm in the process of taking everything I've ever done off of Instagram and Flickr. And I'm going back to my own website because you know what, practice what you preach. Right. You know, I've always had my digital hub, which was in my control.

The big difference now for me that I'm still having a hard time dealing with is that all my stuff is on a, on a cloud server that I still don't own. Right. So in the old days I would have to drive to a server farm and pick up, I literally go to Fry's, buy a box, drive it to a place, plug it into the ethernet, get an IP, do all the system stuff, you know, all the, I had more e-machines.

Remember e-machines? I do. Yeah. All my servers were e-machines from Fry's for years. Right. They worked great. Now I have no idea what I'm on. I'm, I'm, I'm at Media Temple somewhere in Culver city with a bunch of retards running the boxes because Media Temple is one of the worst hosting providers I've ever had.

Right. But that's where it's at. You know, it's like, I know what my boxes used to do. So I'm still working my way back to being in control. I don't think, I don't know if I'm ever going to get there because I don't know if I can. I don't even know if it's possible anymore. Yeah. Well, yeah. I guess we get our own T1 line, but even then AT&T or whoever we get the T1 line from.

Dude, I had a T1 in my bedroom in Hollywood, in the Hollywood Hills. It cost me $10,000. Yep. Oh my God. Two deer just ran by my window. I'm sorry. This is bizarre. Like literally two white tailed deer are walking in front of my window.

Okay. I'm sorry. The tech, the tech bit just got derailed by deer. Oh man. Okay. So yeah. Servers. E-machines. I used to have to drive them. I'd have a connection that somebody would literally physically bring in. Now it's just all the cloud-based thing just makes everything so ambiguous because you don't know what your points of entry are to your data, all that stuff.

And in the worst case scenario, my ISP went, you know, tits up. Right. I would drive over, I would pick up my server, take it to another provider, plug it back in, change a few config strings, back on the internet.

There's my data. My data was in a box, literally in a box. Now it's in this amorphous fucking blob that I have no control over. Period. Right. So I'm at least taking control back from the people who are profiting on my data and spending money so I can at least, you know, have a little bit of control over my digital identity.

Right. And it's not like I'm like a celebrity or anything. I just, I've been doing this for so damn long. I just want it. I need that control. Right. But the problem there becomes distribution because you're not getting your stuff in the eyeballs where people are at. They have to actively come and find you instead of just it being part of their stream.

That's if that's your goal. Yeah. That's not my goal. I made a blog post the other day when I moved everything over. I put this stuff up there for me. Right. This is my diary. This is my way of speaking to everybody. I'm not out there to become popular for the stuff that I say.

If that happens, okay, fine, whatever. It happened before and I got creeped out. So that doesn't mean that's really like good for me that people start reading it. But I want to have a legacy. I want to have a digital legacy to have something that people can see that at least makes me feel meaningful for the, you know, all the shit that I've done.

You know, there's that. Yeah, there's some ego bits that go along with that. But it's like I type for a living and most of the stuff that I've ever done has been deleted from the universe. Right. Okay. You're talking about straight up ownership now though. But there's still the question of, okay, well then how do you make any money doing what you're doing?

I don't think this. Here's the deal. I think, I think Facebook, no, no, no. This is important. I think Facebook and basically every social network has figured out how to monetize the human race's spare time.

Because these people wouldn't be making money on this stuff. This is their spare time. They have monetized people's junk, you know, junk time. What they'd be doing, you okay though? You sound like Darth Vader. Yeah, sorry about that. I was taking a sip of water when I said, mm-hmm. So this is the genius of what these guys have done.

They literally have monetized everybody's spare time. What people would generally be doing, like putting pictures in their photo albums or sitting around chatting or whatever. No, those are things that nobody's ever made money on because they were just what we did to communicate and have a nice time and, you know, get close to each other.

They've monetized that. So I don't think a lot of it is, this is kind of where Jaron's argument breaks down where it's like, if these people are making money, then we should make money.

But it's not an activity where we would normally make money because we generally go out to a job and make widgets. Yeah, but the widgets and stuff like that are starting to go away more and more. And that is the thrust of where this book is starting to head. And I think I've gotten a bit further than you on it.

So his point is, as all this stuff kind of keeps rolling forward, more and more and more of the physical daily jobs that we have out there are going to go away. Pretty soon, we're not going to need employees at McDonald's because there will be robotic machinery that does all that, that just beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and we're not going to even need drivers anymore.

Google Car is going to get rid of taxis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so his point is, we're all moving to this place where the only real value we provide anymore is our opinions and our thoughts and et cetera. And right now, we are putting all of that out there for free on Twitter, on Facebook, on whatever, on whatever the social network, big social network of the future will be.

The way things are set up right now, we are still putting up all of our thoughts and all of our whatever. The only value we're going to start having as humans are our brains. And what we buy. And what we buy. And we're setting up a situation where we're not in control of that.

And somebody else is. And somebody else, a very small group of people are making money off of that. And the rest of us will not anymore. So his thought and his push is micropayments, which we've all thought about for a long time ago. And if you like something, you click on a button.

And instead of it just being an ego boost, I'm like, look, I got 55 likes on my Facebook post. If my Facebook post was that good, every single one of those likes would kick a little money my way. Okay. And to that point, have you heard of Flatter? I have. Flatter is awesome. It's basically you put in a bunch of money every month and then you quote unquote like.

Yeah. You flatter. You flatter somebody. If they have a blog post you like, you flatter it. If they have a picture you like, you flatter it. And it sends a little bit of cash that way. Yeah. It takes your money and then distributes it evenly across the pool that you flattered. And basically people can make money off of it.

Yeah. And it's from Peter. Peter. I can't remember his last name. Pirate Bay Peter. Basically. One of the guys from the Pirate Bay. And I was an early adopter for it. I was a beta tester and I loved it.

Loved the idea. And when I stopped creating content, I stopped caring about it. Right. That's its fatal flaw. But now that I've read this book and we've talked about this, I have re-embraced it and love it.

We desperately need something like this to take hold because his point is, and I agree 100% because I think we're seeing it more and more every day, pretty soon that's going to be all we are. All we're doing is creating content constantly. Whether by liking something, by talking about a band we like, by expressing our thoughts about what's going on.

I mean, that's it. That will be it for humanity. That is all we're going to be doing. That is the only job we have. God, it's an opinion-based economy. Exactly. That's exactly where we're headed. Name one thing that can't, you know, probably within the next 50 years disappear as a job other than thought.

Well, I could come up with 1,000 of them. Well, they're completely like, oh, let's go with the obvious example, music. Okay, maybe computers can eventually write music, but maybe not. But it doesn't matter because we've already destroyed that industry. Musicians are already not getting paid.

Photographers. Photographers are already, that industry is almost dead. All these kind of creative endeavors, we've already destroyed getting paid for them. Yeah, I don't think. The whole thing, it's just, this totally brings out my nihilistic side.

It's just like, we're fucked. Well, he basically says that in the book, but then he starts to think about different ideas about how we may not be. And we both have to read a lot more. I mean, we're both just kind of getting into this. We're dipping our toe in the water. But I got so inspired by the first, like, 40 pages that I just, I'm like, you know, I've been talking about this.

I'm taking it back. And you look at my old friend, Tante Chalik, who's one of the Microformat's founders. He has been on the forefront of this. Nothing he posts is, you know, specific to a site. Everything lives in his control.

Like, even his tweets. His tweets aren't even on Twitter by himself. He doesn't go to Twitter and type in a tweet. It's on his site. And he retains his own intellectual property on his server. Right. You know? Yeah. Well, it's going to be. But when you go into, when you think long term with billions of people, it's like, oh, well, I can sign up for Facebook and I can publish.

Or do I have to jump through all these hoops, get a server and figure out all this? It's like, yeah. These systems make it easy for people to contribute to the global mind space. Yeah. But there needs to be a system where they can contribute and get reimbursed for their contributions.

Right. Shit. I think we just came up with a new business model. We might have. Instead of Facebook, we'll call it Pocketbook. Just give you money back. Tell us your deepest desires. We'll sell your shit. We'll be honest about it. And we'll give you a cut. That sounds good to me.

Well, I think this book is going to be really interesting for all of us. And I have a feeling that we're going to be doing at the library segments for probably the next month where we're just going to be talking about this. Because this really is at the heart of at least everything that I've been thinking about as far as the online future and our economy and my own personal business.

I mean, it's really kind of right there. I mean, he's talking exactly to me at this point in time and to most of us. No, I mean, and this is the same stuff. I mean, I thought about this the day that I saw my first LiveJournal account. I'm like, why would I write something on somebody else's site instead of writing it on my own where I can get paid for writing it based on advertising?

And their argument was always more people are going to see it. And that's true. But if you're not getting anything for it, you're selling yourself for nothing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what's your goal? To earn a living or to have people see you? Is it, you know, I mean, that's just, that's crazy talk.

Yeah, exactly. So more on this next week for sure. Definitely. So we have an awesome guest on deck for next week, Mr. Shane Nickerson, who I've met through a couple friends on the interwebs.

And he's like a comedian TV producer. He's big on the Twitters and generally a good, good guy and a bud. So I am so excited that he will be here next week. Looking forward to it. It's been a little while since we've had a guest. We're going to try to start doing that more often.

So cool. Yeah, definitely. We like to have people that are more interesting than us on every now and again. So that's, that's definitely on deck for next week. And you guys have a great week. All right, and see you guys next week and talk to you soon, Jason.

Later. 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.

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