20: Booze, beef and books with Mike Malinin

Okay. So, we're back, and I have something that's troubling me. Okay. So, I've been looking

at the stats on the website, just because we made the change over to WordPress, and it's all fancy schmancy now. We got the cool show note links and all that stuff, but now I can track incoming Google search queries. Right. Yeah. Turns out that the episode we did with Joey Rabier, where we mentioned Ladyboys in the title, yeah, well, we're showing up quite

a bit of searches from Google Thailand. Whoa, imagine that. For Ladyboys. That is fucking funny. Yeah, I was quite stunned. I mean, hey, at least we're ranking, you know? Yeah, we're ranking. We're ranking well. Let's call this episode Kim Kardashian. Yeah, really. Oh, man.

Or was it Royal Baby? Royal Baby. Royal Baby Kardashian, that's what it's called. Excellent. Well, that's really funny, actually. You know, not one of our more stellar episodes. Well, hell, it was a hell of a lot of fun to record, but... Yeah, we had a ton doing it, but it was definitely not on the list of things that we're going to be remembered for properly. A little bit on the tipsy, vulgar side, for sure. Definitely. Well, that's good to know. It's good to know

that we're, you know, maybe we should do a whole episode in Thai somehow. I'll have to take lessons. We'll see how that goes. Well, I think we just go to Bangkok and do it. Oh, that's fine with me. Actually, I prefer any of the beach cities. I can pass on Bangkok. I've been there. It's fun, but I don't think I'd go back. I'd much rather enjoy the coastal Thailand experience. Yeah, I've never had the coastal Thailand experience. It looks amazing, but...

It's beautiful, and everything is so cheap. It just takes so damn long to get there. How's the Indian food? Because I tell you, the Indian food in Bangkok was the best I'd have ever had in my life. The Indian food is great, and obviously the Thai food, fantastic. I mean, I basically just ate curry and drank beer for a week straight. Sounds good. I'm in. It was awesome. So, yeah, someday, maybe, you know, when we're, when the grumpy old geeks are rolling in the dough, maybe we'll just move there and base ourselves out of Thailand. I can do that.

I can dig it. I'm in. The only problem is all the Russians walking around with their tap-out t-shirts. Eh, I can live with that. I've been to New Jersey. I can hang. So, welcome to all of the new Facebook fans, too, I gotta say. And with the new Facebook fans come Facebook comments on our fan page. Yes. With the comments and the posts on the fan page, I have discovered that Facebook is

absolutely useless when it comes to following a comment thread on a post. Yes, they made the step of being able to actually add the ability to comment on comments and keep them in somewhat of a thread, but it's still a complete mess, and it's just a horrible commenting system, and I can't believe that they haven't tidied it up or tried to fix it. No, it's ridiculous, and most people don't reply to the original, so it gets in the mainstream. Yep. And you can sort by either recent, which doesn't sort by

recency, if you've noticed, and doesn't show all of the comments, because I was like, Dr. Teeter made a comment on one of our recent posts, and I tried to reply, and I couldn't find it. Right. I had to like jigger it, refresh, move things around, and finally I got it, or you can show by top comments. Yeah.

And what is a top comment? This goes back to the whole Facebook, you know, completely. It's like, okay, it's a comment. It's not going to get its own view. You're not going to have a metric on how top the comment is unless people reply to it. If people don't reply to it, then it's random. Exactly. What the fuck are they doing? It makes no sense whatsoever, but...

And this goes back to what I was saying before about how they control the experience, and once they control the experience, then it's a useless medium for marketers, people, anybody. I mean, I have to go and like my own posts when I make a post anymore, because I took everything off, but I like my own posts, because when you go to look at the stream, and it defaults back to your, you know, top whatever. Yeah. So something shows up, because most of the time, it's not going to show

up. And most of the stuff you write on Facebook, basically nobody ever sees, because you either have to pay for it, or have, you know, audience participation, but you can't get audience participation, because nobody's seen it. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I struggle with this, because I run a number of Facebook pages for different bands and whatnot, and the ability to actually get people to see things is nil. And we experience that ourselves. I mean, the funny thing about why we have so many more

Facebook friends for Grumpy Old Geeks, as of yesterday, is because I finally realized that half of my real friends in the real world, who see my personal posts, and I talk about doing this podcast all the time, still had no idea that I was even doing this podcast. So I kind of did the, what in my mind was the icky thing to invite all my friends to like the Grumpy Old Geeks page. And there you go. Now a bunch of my friends actually know that I'm doing this. So yeah, I mean,

and that's what you have to do. Or you have to pay to boost. Or you have to pay to boost your post. Yeah. But as far as just a self promotion medium, Facebook is useless these days. They've completely changed everything. So and for obvious reasons, they want money. So I know, but they're already making money off of us selling our, you know, our identities to all the advertisers. So if they can't make money off of that, and now they want us to jump through other hoops, to post, you know, to pay to post, when they're already making money, it's just, that's, you know, burning the candle at

both ends. Well, it's bugger and Paul to finger Mary. It's wrong. Yeah, but it's still, it's still the big game in town, you know, what was the name of that pay service social network that you were on for a while? Well, we can go back to that someday. It's not a paid social network service. It's app.net, but it's, it's, it's basically just a paid back end. It can do almost everything. Yeah.

But it, it, the point is that you pay for, and it stores your data in your buckets, you control it. Yeah. And any app that basically can use the API can tie into it. It's like having just the back end of Facebook, but any number of front ends to it. It's, you know, one of these days we're going to sit down and I'll, we'll have an episode where I can dive into it and tell you how cool it is, even though I don't use it anymore because I've been busy, but the promise is there. The promise

is really cool for what's there, but it just as a Twitter or Facebook replacement, that's not what it is. And that's not what it's meant to be. It's basically you pay for a back end that you control and you can back up and you can FTP and get all your stuff out. It's, it's super neat, but yeah, it's not, it's not Twitter. It's not Facebook. It's not my space. It is a paid back end that kind of replicates what those services do. Gotcha. All right. All right. Got it. Got it. Good.

Making sure, making sure I've said it before. I just, I don't know, I have to make some post-its for you and mail them to you. Well, I just, I never ended up signing up for it. So someday I will check it out. But for now, you know, we're still pretty much stuck with Facebook, love it or loathe it. And most people do seem to loathe it these days. And, you know, we talked about that study a couple of weeks ago where teens are kind of, they're on Facebook because they feel like they have to be, but they aren't using it. So. Yeah. And I'm on there because I have to be because of

the pages I do for clients. Although that's going away. I mean, clients don't really care that much anymore. Yeah. Well, I mean, the abilities to do anything on, on your Facebook page, uh, as you know, been severely limited as soon as they got rid of the tabs and all now, you know, you can make custom pages, but nobody's going to find it. You can't, it's just, it's a horrible system.

Yeah. And they're buried and you know, you have to click on the thing. If you know to click on the thing, it's like, how is it there? And yeah, it's a mess. And they're, you know, they're causing their own demise. If they don't, if they'd have made it, they need to make it friendly for marketers. That's what it needs to be. Yeah. I agree. And if it's not friendly for marketers, then they're not going to make the money, you know? And I mean, a whole bunch of companies must've gone out of business too, because I remember at the time there were companies that existed solely off of building, building Facebook apps. Zynga. Yeah. Well, I mean, the games,

the gaming is still there, but like, you know, all those little custom pages that, that, you know, bands would build in and things like that. And all that's gone now. It's just, uh, nobody's paying for it anymore because you can't find it. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's funny because I did for a previous client, I'm not going to name the client, but we did, we did a, a close to a million dollar

Facebook game that lasted for three months and the engagement on it was about 35,000 people. Yeah. That's a lot of money for no return. Uh, they counted it as a win. Really? They counted it as a win in their, in their, in their, in their whacked ass engagement metrics that somebody in an office, cause you know what? I'm sure they, on their side, the person that was doing the engagement metrics was like, I got to turn this into the win that we spent almost a million bucks.

I've got to make this look good somehow. Yeah. I got to spin these numbers, but at the end of the day, the client was happy. Well, that's all that really matters. Yeah. It made, you know, a lot of vendors a good bit of money, but I don't know if it sold their widget. Right. You know? So who knows?

Who knows? I, all I know is my stuff is off of there. The only stuff I post there are just throwaway links. Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed that you've been doing that. So yeah. All my stuff's on my blog, jpd.me. Go check it out. And I don't know if you've noticed, but I mean, I've obviously tried to step up a little bit of involvement on the Grumpy Old Geeks Facebook page and, and on Twitter. So I've been posting some things here and there on both. So, uh, you know, follow us on those things as well, please. Definitely. Brian will talk to you. Exactly. I will. Well, maybe I'll talk to you

depending on how many beers I had that night. Excellent. Excellent. Our comment of the week comes from Lawrence and I just want to give him a big shout out because this was pretty awesome. It was a very cool email to wake up to in the morning. Uh, Lawrence says, thank you for this podcast, gentlemen. I will face my 66th birthday in a few days, probably passed by now. So happy birthday.

Happy birthday, Lawrence. Uh, so you will understand that I do not consider you to be old. Well, thank you for that as well. Uh, I listened to a lot of podcasts now that I live alone and suffer insomnia. My first computer was the Bally Z80. I actually remember that did not have one of those, uh, followed up by a TRS 80. Didn't have one of those, but my friend did. And I used to go over to his house all the time to play around with that damn thing. Did he have the, the, like the, the all in one? No, it was like the separate one that had the tape drive that connected through the

exposed ribbon cable. Oh yeah. My friend had that too, but he had the, he had the all in one that was like the futuristic look like it was from like 60 sci-fi. That's the one I loved, but he had the tape thing too, but okay. Sorry about that. Uh, see, we're geeking out on this stuff too. Uh, then use the original IBM PC, which became a doorstop. As soon as I purchased Apple's Lisa, when the Lisa's power supply went belly up, I traded in for a Mac plus and I've been a Mac fan ever since. Uh, he created the first children's book ever done entirely on a computer, eight bit pre Photoshop color titled the mirror

out of print since 1986 or so, uh, coded websites in raw HTML. Hell, I still do that. Yep. Same here. I created a website for keeping software updated versions.com, which I believe you used. By the way, it was awesome. I missed it. It was great. Yeah. You basically would send you an email whenever the stuff you used was up to up a new release game out. It was very cool. I geeked out on that.

And that actually made a profit for a year or so. And one called children's Z books.com that never did make money, but it was a great idea. Well, that's, that's our lives. Uh, and more all while I was making a great living as a professional artist, painting and sculpture back in the day. Really? I find your comments on the grumpy old geeks podcast to be topical, intelligent, and thoughtful. And I look forward to each new offering. You may not have a ton of listeners yet, but I just wanted you to know that there is at least one listener who sincerely appreciates your efforts. I'm now heading over to PayPal to make a donation. Please keep up the good

work. And you did make a donation and we thank you very, very much for that. That is a very kind of you and awesome. Made it made me feel good. Yes. Lawrence is our bandwidth sponsor this month. If Brian will ever send me the funds, I can pay our bills. Yes. I should actually transfer some of that over to you. So that'd be peachy. Um, yes, definitely. Thank you, Lawrence. And, uh, I checked out his, his site and his art. He's a great artist.

Yeah. Yeah. I took a look at it. It's really cool. Native American paintings and cool stuff. So yeah, thank you very much, Lawrence. That, that definitely made both of our days. Yeah. And we'd also like to thank Pogo Fire and I'm going to butcher this one in Bari Ares for the, for their iTunes comments and five star reviews.

Yeah. Thank you guys for that. Um, it's been great. We've been just watching those reviews slowly come in and you guys are very generous with the five stars. It's really nice to see that, uh, you guys are liking what we're doing. So thank you all. Yes. Greatly appreciated. And, uh, if you want to get on the next comment of the week, go ahead and, uh, leave us a comment on iTunes.

So lots to talk about in security this week. We're not going to beat it to death like we usually do because I think we've, we've, we've been kicking this around for a while and, and it's just so prevalent right now everywhere. So, uh, we don't need to, to kill on this one.

Yeah. Yeah. Basically, I mean, woke up this morning to Lava Bit, which is in a secure email provider, like an encrypted email provider going tits up on their, of their own accord because they wouldn't play ball with the U S government and good for them. Sucks for them. Sucks for them.

But, uh, this is, I mean, this, this is getting into some really dangerous territory when they can't even talk about why they're going out of business because the government has a gag, order on them. I mean, I'm like, excuse me, like seriously, they're an email provider there. They should be completely exempt from any of this craziness just because they've got one crazy client, you know, this is ridiculous. And I don't like where it's headed at all. And no,

neither do pretty much anybody. Even the New York times, the guardian, all of them, everybody's seen that. Everybody's coming out like, Whoa, this is, you're really getting into, into scary territory here. Yeah. It's a super dangerous precedent to set. Um, again, they weren't, you know, he decided to shut down. I completely agree with his decision. I mean, I hope that the lawsuit works out well for them. Um, they are a private company with private data and, and supposedly, I mean,

from our understanding of the stories in the past couple of weeks, the NSA could find anything anywhere, anytime anyways. So I don't understand why this would even be happening or what they were possibly asking him to do that. He just said hell no to that. So, well, he's probably trying, they, they want him to hand over passwords to accounts because this is end to end encrypted email, right? They can't, they can't snoop it. Right. Okay. But the chilling part, the chilling part here is that other secure email providers have already backed down and shut their doors

too. Yeah. Which is, you know, it's like, okay, this is really not good. Yeah. Basically all of the options that we kind of have out there for, for any kind of secure communication are going away. Yeah. And look at Tor, like it's in the Tor browser has, has decided now that it's phoning home to the NSA. Yeah. So they, now they know where the Tor nodes are. So Tor is completely useless. You can't, for those that don't know what Tor

is, Tor is basically a whole secondary internet that was pretty much secure. I don't know if it's ever been, but now that people are paying attention, you know, they're finding all this stuff they, before you could have some security through obscurity for what the NSA was doing. But now it's like, everybody's looking at every packet that's going everywhere. Yep. And I mean, the problem is, you, I mean, they're so far upstream, you can't, unless you're doing

end to end encryption and look at, look at Skype, like they're supposed to be end to end encrypted. They're not, you know, definitely. Um, so it's, it's to the point now where you just, you have to know the fact that anything you say on the internet or on your telephone is being listened to by somebody else. How fucked up is that? Seriously.

And it is big brother. I mean, we knew this was coming and, and we're here now. So it's going to be really interesting to see how people decide to react. You know, there's a lot out there right now about it. People are talking about it. Is it just going to blow away and people are just going to go, meh, meh. Oh, well, it's going to happen. Or are people going to take stands and fight like the lava bit guy did? So I like that. Uh, I want to see more of that, but, uh, yeah, who knows?

Yeah. I, well, I mean, the internet and telecommunication, it's such an integral part of everything now that I think there's going to continue to be pushback. I think most of the people are still going to be sheep and go, Oh, I don't care until they start, you know, browsing around four chanted three in the morning, drunk and some kiddie porn pops up and somebody beats down their door. Then they'll give a shit. I didn't mean to. Well, you were on the site. Well, I didn't mean to, I didn't actively look for it, but you, you

got it. So we saw it. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that Joe that I fired at work last week accidentally put kiddie porn on my computer. Oh, I didn't know that was there. Oh, but we did because we've been looking at your computer. Guess what? Doesn't matter. You're still going to jail. You know, there's a, when you, when you get down to the nitty gritty, it gets scary and it's just, people are going to have to stand up. That's I'm hoping they're going to stand up. I don't know how they're going to stand up. So

Oh, you can't even use paper notes anymore because the post office is taking pictures of every piece of mail that goes through. Now they said they were only taking photos of the outside. But there were, there have been a couple of cases where people have, you know, they have subpoenaed or they've had court orders to actually open the mail and take pictures of the inside for certain people. Right. Um, but that's, you know, that's an edge case and that is through the courts, hopefully, because it would be a pain in the ass for them

to open and close every piece of mail. And honestly, that would be pretty crafty if they did that. But, um, that would be so anyway. So let's, let's transfer away from, from security things that we can't possibly fight against to some just stunning examples of stupidity.

Begin, please. Since we had, uh, two links that, that we're going to talk about here. Um, one is making the rounds on, uh, on the social medias right now. And I thought it was absolutely hilarious. Uh, some guy got his phone stolen and he had some sort of app on it that basically uploaded all the camera photos directly to his computer. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me, let me, let me go back a second. I do believe it was a chick that got her phone stolen. Oh, is it

a chick? Okay. Yeah. She was skinny dipping in Ibiza and left it on the thing. And in the software's Dropbox, the Dropbox photo app. So any photos that come in basically get synced to their Dropbox. Yeah. Which is awesome because, uh, yeah, she is basically started a Tumblr of all the photos that the guy who stole her phone has been taking. And it's just fucking

hilarious. And yeah. And the, the comments are the inspiring story of a feed from Dubai, the douchebag who stole my phone. Yeah. Which is, you know, it's one of the best. Ooh, there's new ones up. Nice. This guy likes to take a lot of selfies. Yeah. They're big on the selfies. Oh yeah. Now let's get a bottle of tap water and party the shit out of here.

I don't know. It's, it's really funny. I mean, seriously funny. Yeah. It's just, it's, you know, this guy has no idea that this is happening, which is, uh, this is just one of my favorite stories of the year so far. Yeah. It's in the, I mean, there's in the comment threads, it's like, everybody's like, I'm a feed. Can I have my phone back? Like, no, I'm happy. Everybody wants to, wants to join in. Yeah. So then the other story is, I think you found this, uh, and I

can't believe that this actually exists. And if anybody actually does this, you're, you're just stupid keys duplicated.com. Um, this is actually one of several, several of these that I found basically you can take a picture of your key with your iPhone with, from multiple angles, they can infer the three dimensions out of it and cut you a new key and mail it to you now to your address that you give them. And now they have your key. Well, see, that's

not the scary part. I don't think that that's fine. I'm fine with that. I don't, these people are reputable locksmiths to have the technology that are doing this and they are very upfront about who they are and what they're doing. Now, when I go to a valet, I give my valet a valet key, which does not have my house keys on it, which does not have anything on it because it's a common scam where a valet will run off with a clay block, make a copy of your key

because they can look at your registration, figure out where you live and basically reverse engineer how to break into your house because you've already given them your house key, you know? So that's why you give a valet, what's called a valet key, which is just the key to your car that doesn't open the trunk. Yeah. You know, but now you go take a leak at a restaurant, I can reach into your purse and pull out your keys, take a picture of it, put them back in your purse. Nobody's the wiser. No fuss, no muss. Takes two seconds and they

mail me your key. Yeah. From five bucks later, I've got a key to your house. And this can go with any key. I mean, it makes it so easy to steal keys. I mean, that's all it is. It is just a key stealer. It totally is. I mean, I've always, you know, wondered why we're still doing keys, why we aren't doing magnetized car strips or, you know, things like thumbprints to get into our houses. You think this is bad now. I mean, as soon as we all have our 3D printers, we're not even

going to have to ship out anything. We just take a couple of pictures and boom, we're done. We've printed a new key. Uh, it's, it's time for the death of the key. The key is not secure anymore. Well, here's the deal. Your house isn't secure. I can break a window. That's true. Before I deal with your key, I can kick your door in in half a second. That part doesn't matter. It's just the whole, just the whole thing is ridiculous. It's like, I don't know. I don't even know where to go with it. Cause you can look at it from either side. Okay. Keys don't matter. So go ahead and make an

easy key. Right. But so that's it. I'm actually going to try this out. I'm just curious. Be fun. Yeah. See if it works. Yeah. I'm not going to do it with my house, but I'll do it with someone else's. I'd see. I wouldn't, I still wouldn't be paranoid about them having to copy the key.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, that's security unless you got anything else. Um, I was going to talk about the pony express, which is a, a, uh, hack in the box type of thing where it's basically a hacker in a box on like a dick in the box or closet or Kelly in a box. Um, I'm just going to put the link in the show notes and people can go check it out themselves. It is, it's a technological feat of craziness. It's literally a box that you just put in somebody's network

and it just steals everything. It's like a, it's like you put a 13 year old with no social life in a little box and let him type. It's crazy. Um, and it's, it's for the price is like a grand and you can just steal, steal, steal. I mean, it's made for, you know, professional penetration testers, but they're not going to ask me what I do for a living. I buy 10 of these things and go leave them over at Intel or wherever. Yeah. Go to town, go to some office,

find a little, uh, ethernet port, plug that sucker in and you've got everything. Yep. Stand outside with your cell phone and boom, Bob's your uncle. That's what I got. I'm just going to leave it in the show notes cause it would take too long to talk about this thing. It is. It's honestly very cool. It's yeah. I'm reading through it right now going, Oh, well, game over again. Well, this is, this is generation two. This thing's been around for years. Oh really? Wow. Oh yeah. That's fantastic. They've got them. They've got them that look like air

fresheners. I mean, there's tons of, there's tons of little like built in hack tools like this, but this is state of the art. Like literally it's got four G broadcasting. So you can sit outside with your cell phone and control it if it can't find a way out of the network. Right. So, all right. That's what I got. Security. We're screwed. We should actually rename this segment to no security. Yeah. Security. Huh? Yeah. Later.

Welcome on our guest. And I don't want the world to see me. Cause I don't think today don't you stand. When everything's sweet to be broken. I just want you to know I am.

And I don't want the world to see me. When everything's sweet to be broken. I just want you to know I am. And I just want you to know I am. And I just want you to know I am.

And I just want you to know I am. And I just want you to know I am. We are talking to Mike Malinan from the Goo Goo Dolls today who is sitting just outside of Washington, D.C.

And he's kind enough to basically take his day off and talk to us on our stupid little podcast. How are you doing, Mike? Oh, I'm doing good. Thanks. I'm locked up in my hotel room. Yeah. Across the street from my mall. It's interesting. Nice view. Excellent.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourselves, how you got to be where you are now, touring around the world with a big old rock band? Oh, gosh. How I got to be where I am now. I moved to L.A. in 1992 as a struggling musician like everybody else.

Happened to get there in a very transformative period because all the hair metal bands were just dying. Right. So I actually ended up getting into the local sort of underground scene pretty quickly because it seemed like all those guys that had been in those metal bands were toxic.

Nobody wanted to deal with them. So the five of us who never had been came in with clean slates and found musicians to play with. And so I just started playing around town. A couple of years in, got known a little bit and started getting auditions for some bigger bands.

And the Goo Goo Dolls was just one of them. Right. Auditioned in 95 and now here I am. So 18 years of touring and I'd imagine that has all changed a hell of a lot, especially because of the technology aspect. Bits of it have and bits of it haven't.

Right. Gosh, I don't know. I mean, you know, getting in your bunk every night is the same and the traveling is the same. But it's amazing that we used to travel without cell phones and things like that. But I can't even imagine that now. But everything just came on so slowly.

It seems like technology just happened overnight, but it sort of came on so slowly I didn't even really notice that things were changing. But now, yeah, all of a sudden you look back and it's a completely different world. I mean, I used to have, you know, my first tour in 95 with them. I had my Walkman cassette player and a box of cassettes and that's what I listened to on the bus.

Right. Yeah. And you're also a huge reader. So you used to just carry tons of books around, right? Yeah. And now I carry a Kindle and a ton of books around. And I basically don't use my Kindle, but I should. Because I still just haul a million books around.

I hit bookstores all over the country. So I tend to, I haven't made that transition yet. I do use the Kindle, but not as much as I should. Right. I have too many books just hauling around. Now, you were on MySpace briefly as yourself, and now you're kind of an avid Twitterer.

What do you think about these things for your personal life versus your band, etc.? Well, I think Twitter is important basically as a tool, social media for bands and stuff. It really helps. It keeps you in touch with what's going on. People can find out where you are.

I think it's just kind of a good idea. But you've got guys like Rob Thomas, who are Twitter geniuses, who have garnered a lot of attention for their accounts. Right. I think it really helps him. I think it helps his solo career and his band's career and everything else. I think it's the wave of the future.

You can't really avoid it. So you have to be accessible to fans that way. Right. There is a bit of that mystery that's just gone now, right? Because you're telling your fans what you had for lunch and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, that was the whole Ashton Kutcher thing. He started that, right? He started tweeting what he had for lunch. And he got 10 million followers doing it.

It was crazy. He was one of the early guys on there. So what do you think has been the real impact of technology specifically for the music industry? I mean, obviously, we've seen Napster and the demise of people buying music. How has that affected you?

And what are your thoughts on it? Oh, gosh. I don't know. That long article you sent is great because it just shows that royalties have always been screwed up. Bands have never gotten paid what they were supposed to get paid. And there was a rant by Steve Albini on the internet, what, 15 years ago?

Has it been that long? It's been that long before. Yeah. And long before Napster or anything else. Bands were getting screwed back in the old days as much as they're getting screwed now. So I think it's just more... The record industry is more vocal about it because they're finally getting screwed along with the bands. That's true.

I don't know how many sales are lost now compared to back then. I don't know if percentages are worse now than they were back then. I literally don't pay that much attention to it because I just keep touring. And we're a fortunate band. We can actually make a living just touring and playing music. It's frustrating.

Sure. But I don't know what the answers are. Yeah. I don't think anybody does. I mean, you guys are in a really interesting position in that you can still make a really good living touring. You've got the fan base already. I always wonder what these new bands are doing because nobody buys albums anymore. People just want singles. So we're kind of seeing that whole thing go away too.

Yeah, which is weird. It's kind of a shame as a music fan just seeing the... Because when I was a kid, of course, it was all about the album. You wanted the big 12-inch vinyl in your hands and you wanted to check out the whole thing. Now people just want a song. It is true. It's weird. So the concept of what a band is has changed.

Yeah. You're not going to have another Pink Floyd coming out and making Dark Side of the Moon. It's never going to happen again. No one's going to have the patience to listen to it. It seems bizarre. Yeah. And no record label is going to fund a band for the 10, 15 years it might take for somebody's songwriting to get to that level.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, everything just seems so temporary now. But it's weird because maybe it helps a band like us because we're on tour this summer with a lot of people showing up to the shows, more than anybody expected. So maybe some of the next generation is actually interested in some bands that were around 15 years ago and we were making albums.

And it was more about live performances and things and building a career. But I think that's natural. I mean, when I was a kid, I gravitated towards Cheap Trick and Kiss and bands like that that were already big by the time I really started getting into rock. And they'd been around for, you know, years by the time I got into them.

Well, years in my 16-year-old mind, they'd been around years because they'd been around for like four years. Right. Yeah. So they seemed sort of like career bands to me at the time. Things were different back then, obviously. Yeah. Now, you've also done your own side project called 40 Marshes, which I was involved in.

How did you see technology in terms of the recording, especially compared to, say, going back and recording the first album that you did with the Goose? Well, just because it's all Pro Tools now, it's so easy. And that can be an asset and a bad thing as well.

Because I think it makes it too easy to record and too easy to fix things. And a lot of bands get lazy and a lot of bands try to make things too perfect. And that destroys records. I've never understood that. You know, I always use, to me, the classic example of a track that's perfect the way it is because it wasn't fixed is, you know, a classic rock song.

Bob O'Reilly by The Who. Right. It comes in, the drums come smashing in, and then the band breaks in, and the whole thing slows down like five BPMs. Any producer now would have stopped and said, no, start again. Because, you know, it's flawed. It's completely flawed. But does it matter? No, it's one of the biggest and greatest songs ever written.

It doesn't matter at all. Right. And that is kind of lost in music these days, and it's sort of a bummer. Some of it starts with a recording process. Everything is just, you know, just fixed. If there's any flaws that make it human, people try to fix it. It's just, there's no field of music anymore.

I mean, I know people ask me who some of my favorite drummers are sometimes, and I honestly don't know anymore because I can't tell. Unless I'm live, I can't tell. I can't tell from the recordings. Well, even live now, though, I mean, because the need to kind of have more of a stage production, et cetera, et cetera, a lot of drummers are playing to click tracks even live.

So the ability to kind of slow something down or do a jam is kind of lost, even in the live show setting now. That is true. That's very true, and it's kind of a shame, I think. Yeah. But what do I know? You know, if I ran the world of music, then the Handsome Furs would have been the biggest band of the last 10 years.

So what do I know? We'll have to put them in the show notes. You introduced me to them. I quite like them as well. Oh, great, man. It's a shame that they're no longer around, but Dan from that band is now in the Divine Fits, who's another cool band. They're doing really well, actually. Where are you right now, Mike?

And where are people going to be able to see you? This is coming out on Monday, so you're out with the Goos right now, and you guys are in the middle of your summer tour with Matchbox 20, right? Yes, we are, right smack dab in the middle of it. Cool. So everybody, go check out Googodolls.com. They're coming around.

Buy tickets. Go see the show. You guys, I mean, it is one of those bands where people don't really believe me, and I've seen this happen. I've taken friends to your shows, and they think that they don't know any of your songs, and it's just like, yeah, we don't know that. Oh, love that song. Oh, every single one of your songs is like part of American public consciousness.

It really is. So if you guys think that you don't know the Googodolls, you do. Maybe. If they ever went to a grocery store, yeah, they've heard it. It's in that category. I mean, whoops. Sorry, let me stop that. Sorry, whatever.

There are two bands in that category. They're, you know, Collective Soul was in that category. Other bands, nobody thought they ever knew them, but you'll know eight of their songs if you hear them. Oh, yeah. Their greatest hits, it's ridiculous. It's just, you know everyone. That's why being on tour with Matchbox 20 is a great fit.

We just both have a lot of songs that people know. Yeah. Yeah, you guys too. Now, you're also very active in the vegan community, correct? Yeah, getting there. Yeah, I tend to deal a lot with some of the activists and some of the active groups for animal rights and for veganism and things.

Yeah. Cool. And you just, you wrote an article for what magazine? Veg News. Veg News. I have a little article for him, which is the big vegan magazine out of San Francisco. And, you know, I know the editor now. He's a nice guy because I met him through this whole thing.

Just, yeah. I basically wrote an article, short little article right at the last presidential inauguration called, they do a segment called 72 Hours that basically just talks about what you eat for 72 hours. So I, you know, wrote where I was because I was in D.C. and wrote the restaurants that I went to and things like that.

And then the other article I wrote, I just helped edit a music magazine for them that just did profiles of a handful of musicians who are vegans or vegetarians. Very cool. Do you find it incredibly difficult to stay vegan on the road? Yeah, I do. I actually, sometimes depending where we are on the road, I'm kind of a lazy vegan because it's very difficult to be strict about it.

So, you know, I don't, so that I don't ever get called out by the vegan police. I generally just call myself a vegetarian because there are times where I'll just, where I'll have dairy when it's difficult to avoid. I try not to. And when I find vegan restaurants on tour, you know, I always try to go to those places. But occasionally when you're in the middle of, I don't know, Toledo, Ohio, it's kind of tough.

Right. Yeah, I've seen you send out a couple tweets asking about if there were vegetarian restaurants or vegan restaurants in the area. So that was pretty funny. You ever use a, do you use Yelp? It's a lot easier now than it was five years ago. It's getting easier all the time. Almost any college town has at least a couple of sort of vegan restaurants. Like I say, I like supporting them.

I like going there and spending my money there. And at home, of course, I can be a lot more strict because I live in L.A. It's easy there. That's true. The grocery stores can stock you with anything you need. Lots of stuff in the news this week that we want to talk about.

Should we start with the Washington Post being sold to Amazon's Jeff Bezos? Sure. That's an interesting one. Yeah. Old media getting bought out by, well, not really new media. Amazon is basically just a store, but an incredibly successful one. So he bought it and says that he's not going to make a lot of changes.

Well, he's worth $23 billion or something, right? Something like that. It's not a big hobby, but I can't imagine the purpose behind buying the Washington Post except for being able to tell everybody, hey, guess what I did? I bought the Washington Post. If that is the way that it actually is going down, I actually applaud that.

I mean, somebody's got to bail out these institutions. I mean, we can't lose all journalism, and we're on that path right now. So if he's really just buying it as a kind of, you know, I made a shit ton of money, and now I'm going to do something good for the world and keep this propped up and make sure that they're a real journalistic institution, fucking A, that's awesome.

That is awesome, if that's what he's doing. But we always have high hopes. That's what these people are doing, and it never seems to be that way. So we'll find out, I suppose. I mean, I hope it doesn't become an ad campaign for Amazon. I know he says he bought it, you know, personally, right? It had nothing to do with the company. He just bought it because he wanted the newspaper.

Yeah, he bought it out of his own pocket, basically. And, you know, he's got a pretty good track record of being a pretty stand-up guy. So I've got pretty high hopes that he won't fuck it up too bad. Right. Well, I just hope, you know, of course, when you own the newspaper, he can censor things if he wants, and we'll never know if that's going on, of course.

But, I mean, it's the Washington Post, so people know what to expect from it. I'm sure the journalism will continue the way it does, hopefully. I mean, that's one of the last, you know, that and the New York Times are the two big papers left, right? Two real papers. Yeah, and I hear that the New York Times is up for sale now, too, right?

Or at least they're getting offers from, I can't remember who. Yeah, I'm not surprised. I'll have to look that up. But, yeah, so I'm not too bothered by this. I think it's a good thing. I don't know what I think of it. I know there seemed to be this huge outcry because there's always horror when some rich dude buys a major institution like that.

That's the way the world's going anyway. Yeah, and if he didn't buy it, somebody else was going to buy it. Exactly, exactly. So it's hard. I don't have any preconceived notions about what's going to happen. We'll see, and I'll keep reading it and see if at the bottom of every article it references things you can buy on Amazon to give you more information.

I don't know. Let's see. Yeah, if they put an affiliate link in every article they wrote about something, they could probably do a buyback of all the money that he spent on it. He could actually make a profit on a newspaper, finally. Yeah, but Amazon is probably one of the reasons that I got a computer six months before I would have otherwise because I found out when it came out.

I said, oh, there's this massive bookstore on Amazon. I can get everything. Okay, sign me up. Get me a computer quick. You got a computer to buy physical books from Amazon. Basically, yeah. Whatever that was, 96, something like that. No, I mean, Amazon is definitely one of the stunning success stories of the Internet.

I mean, there's no doubt about it. It started off as a bookstore. I mean, that's all it was, and look at them now. Well, since I am so slow to change, to me, it is a bookstore. I was forgetting anything else on Amazon. They have other stuff, Mike. You can actually probably buy your next set of drums on there.

But everybody has to remind me that. I only ever go there when I'm looking for books. I know people that actually have recurring buys set up for their groceries. They have their toilet paper, their paper towels, and their broccoli all delivered to their door, like, every week, straight through Amazon. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. It's crazy that they do that now. There's drugstore.com. I don't think that's associated with Amazon, but I buy a lot of stuff from them. Right. Because, you know, when I need my particular sunblock and things like that, I buy it from them. They have everything. It's massive. Yeah.

You can get literally everything from Amazon. It's just kind of frightening. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, there you go. So, we'll see what happens. I'm definitely going to keep an eye out on that. And, you know, I'm just happy it wasn't Rupert Murdoch that bought it. Yeah. Well, obviously, the Post wouldn't have allowed that to happen.

I mean, the guy's family who sold it, of course, they've owned it for, what, 80 years? Something like that. Yeah. Long, long time. The article I read said they've been contemplating selling it for a year. So, when they found a suitable buyer that they don't think, they at least hope doesn't have his own agenda, they sold.

I mean, I'd buy the Washington Post. Why not? If I had that kind of money. If I had that kind of money to burn and lose, because he's definitely going to lose money on it, at least for a while. But, we'll see what happens. Who cares if you own a major newspaper? Exactly. Again, it's not money. Yeah.

I mean, realistically, we do need people like that to buy out papers. We need people that can afford to run them as a loss and basically just do it for prestige, do something good with their cash. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, and also, maybe he has the internet smarts to figure out how to have it make money going forward.

That, I read, was one of the big parts of what he's going to do. He's not really going to touch the print version so much, but he's planning a massive overhaul of the online site. Oh, thank God. Yeah. Which needs to be done. Yeah, I never really visit them online. I usually go to NewYorkTimes.com.

I don't usually see the Washington Post online. Yeah. Is it bad? Their line setup's just no good, huh? It's not one of the better news sites out there. It's definitely, it's trickier to navigate. You know, they fuck around with, you know, a lot of different ways to try to force ads into your eyesight.

But, you know, I'm sure actually that probably won't get much better because he's really good at doing placements and whatnot online. So, we'll see what happens. So, there was another big story. I don't know if this is, like, one of those cases of, is there actual outrage about this or is this just because there's an internet thing, the Jeopardy kid?

Oh, yeah. I hadn't heard about that until you told me about it. And if there's outrage about it, that's just awesome. Hold on a second. Before we even get into the story, didn't the kid lose anyway, even if he'd spelled it correctly? He had no chance of winning no matter what, anyways. Right, because the other guy, all I read was, if the other guy had missed it, but the other guy didn't miss it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's like a Schrodinger's Cat Jeopardy type of thing. If he had, if the other guy had lost and he had spelled it correctly, he would have won. But he didn't. The other kid got it right. He fucked up. So, the kid had a chance of winning anyway, but he was just upset about it. It's in the rules. What are you going to do?

No, that's the thing. It's the rules. And by the way, this is Jeopardy. This is the last, like, bastion of anything even somewhat smart on television. Yeah, the last best intellectual game shows. Yeah. So, I don't care if he's a kid. You've got to fucking spell the damn thing right. Yeah, I agree.

I agree. And, I mean, the worst part for me about this story is this kid's parents. Because this kid's parents should have been like, guess what? You got it wrong. Suck it up. Shut up. They're actually actively supporting him online in his complaints. And, you know, it's just, shut up.

You got it wrong. End of story. Yeah, there are bigger things in the world to be pissed off about than this right now. And what a lesson this kid is getting from his parents right now. Complain and whine. Complain and whine. You can screw up all you want. Just complain and whine. Maybe it'll go away.

Sad thing is he's probably smarter than the parents, which is why this whole thing's happening. Oh, probably, yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, he wouldn't have won anyways. But, yeah, this just won't die online. The story's up everywhere. Everybody has to talk about it. And I can't believe the number of people that are, like, siding with the kid.

I just like that this qualifies as a major news story. Yeah. Oh, well, you know, I can go off on a rant all day about that. Just load up HuffingtonPost.com and start reading headlines. Oh, yeah. And you'll lose your mind. Yeah. So, oh, speaking of non-stories then, but this one is actually really, I think, important to all of us.

New story in the Atlantic. Why are American drinkers turning against beer? We cannot allow this to happen, people. This has to be a horror to you, Brian. This must be the worst thing you've heard in years. Well, I kind of figure maybe there's just more for me then. Maybe. That's a possibility. But the, I don't know, drinking goes in phases.

I'm always fascinated by it. I'm fascinated by percentages of alcohol sales. And I used to have some friends that worked at Miller and I'd discuss with them for hours, literally, you know, percentages and things that make people buy and ad campaigns. And it's just everything's cyclical anyway. I think just wine and hard liquor are just more popular right now.

I think so, too. There's been a lot of push. Like, this article discusses about how Americans are finally starting to become educated about wine. And definitely, I mean, just from what I see advertising-wise, I mean, wine is getting huge pushes right now. Beer, not so much. And, you know, the whole beer thing, I think it's just, it started to split into, you know, all the craft beers, which you can only get in certain parts of the country.

It's not like you can, you know, you don't have the option of, like, kind of these amazing, tiny, small breweries all over the place. So, I think, I see beer drinking going up in certain areas, like, especially around here, definitely here in Venice, because we've got a couple craft breweries just opened up in the area.

And we've got places like Library of the House that just have all these, like, insane, like, limited edition beers. And that stuff is more popular than ever. Yeah, but you're getting too high, bro, on the subject. You have to remember that, I think, close to one in four beers sold in America is a Bud Light. Yeah. So, remember that.

It has nothing to do with quality here. That's when people stopped drinking beer, because they were perfectly happy to drink nothing but Bud Light for 20 solid years. And that's what beer sales were. And it's not like people are putting down their Bud Light to go become an artisanal cocktail maker. Exactly. Maybe just a simple explanation.

I sort of have noticed this, that younger people are just drinking less. Yeah, I was going to ask, because you're playing up in front of, you know, groups of kids every night, practically. And you can see out there and see, are the crowds less drunk than they used to be? Are they less rowdy?

Or, you know, are people throwing wine up on stage instead of their empty beer bottles? It's definitely less rowdy than it was, but I don't know if anybody's less drunk. It depends where you are, I suppose. But we're also playing first, so by the time Matchbox 20 is done, I'm sure the crowd is a lot drunker.

I think they're still selling plenty of those 24-ounce cans of beers at the show. Yeah, I'm sure that they're still doing quite well. But yeah, it is interesting. I'd like to know what's taking the place. Mostly wine, they say, huh? Just wine sales are way up.

Wine and liquor are up. And bottled water. And bottled water. There's a lot of arguments that could be made that Bud Light is bottled water. True, true. Hey, but milk and soft drinks are down.

Also, powdered drinks. Well, I mean, I think that a lot of it is probably the health stuff. I mean, we've been beat over the head that sodas are stupid bad for us, even diet sodas. And everybody knows that, you know, the calorie count in beer, you don't want beer if you're trying to stay thin. You know, you can drink a lot more wine or a lot more, you know, you have your vodka soda with two slices of lime in it.

That's way better for you calorie-wise than a beer. Right. Well, I remember there being a study. This is probably 15 years ago. And this is when those beer companies started advertising towards the more athletic types. That's why you see, you know, Michelob Ultra commercials with bicyclists and things like that.

Yeah. But it turned out that in a survey of recreational runners, I think this was 15 years ago, and it turned out that the average American at the time was drinking, average American that drank, was drinking between three and five beers a week. Right. The average person that ran was drinking between eight and 11 beers a week.

So the industry noticed that and said, oh, yeah, we better start marketing towards these types of people. Yeah. Well, I get that. I mean, I actually think I probably end up drinking a bit more than I would if I'm working out heavier throughout the week. It's just you're burning off more calories. Absolutely.

Yeah, you're just ready to go. So on to – Oh, go ahead. And after a couple hours at the gym, you know, what you do need to cool down is a beer to kind of make the pain go by by you. That's true. There have been plenty of times when I've gone running and then just ended at a bar.

It's amazing to just walk in all sweaty and get a beer. Yeah. It's a good feeling. It's a good way to end – like I do that sometimes on my bike rides in the summer. You know, you're sweating and you're hot and it's like I'm halfway home and then I'm biking past Finn McCool's and I'm like, man, cool beer would be awesome right now. Yeah, exactly.

Then you take a cab home and leave your bike. I think those days of getting that drunk are long gone for me. I can still manage to bike home these days. But it's funny too how I think – yeah, some of it must just be lifestyle advertising and things as well because you mentioned that.

It's funny. You're right because 15 years ago, I'd run races and there'd be always runners. It's at the bar that I had before. Now, you see people running a half marathon and they're sipping Gatorade for 48 hours leading up to the race so worried about hydration levels and everything else. It's like nobody cared about that 15 years ago.

We're actually ironically running faster 15 years ago so who knows. Yeah, when I was a kid playing football, I mean they'd give us like a little tiny Dixie cup of water and say get out on the field. We'd play for four hours in the sun in North Carolina and we didn't die.

So now he's like you have to have a camelback and be sucking on it every second of every day when you're outside of the house or you're going to die. You're going to shrivel up like a raisin and just go poof. Yeah, the push for hydration in the past few years has just been ridiculous. We must all be so – I mean for older people, like people our age, I think you do have to worry about it more.

But yeah, when I was 21, it didn't seem to matter. So it wasn't this – you know, I was riding my bike like crazy. I'd go for 50-mile bike rides in Texas in the middle of summer. Right. And with like one bottle of water, you know, 20 ounces of water is fine. Yeah, now they tell you if you do that, you'll die.

It's like, no, you won't if you're in shape and you get used to it. Yeah, you can handle it. The body will manage. We do not need to be ultra hydrated all the time. Exactly, yeah. So speaking of hydration and juicy meat, did you guys see the lab burger this week?

That's one of the most exciting things I've seen in years. I was actually going to ask you what your take is on that since you are kind of vegan vegetarian. What do you think? Would you eat this? Absolutely, I would eat it. Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. Yeah. I have no problem eating it. And, yeah, there was a massive reaction to, well, isn't this kind of gross?

You know, throwing meat in the lab and eating it, isn't this the ultimate genetically modified food? And my counter argument, which is a strong vegan argument that people tend to ignore on a daily level or they wouldn't live like they do. Right. Is that much grosser than hitting a cow over the head, slicing its throat, watching it bleed out onto the ground, and then cutting it up and eating that?

That's not gross. Eating something grown in a lab is too disgusting for you to handle. No, I agree with that 100%. I think the idea has always been there. And, you know, the ultimate ideal for a vegan is for there to be a world where you can obviously eat without having to kill animals, which is the Star Trek world.

They make those references in Star Trek The Next Generation all the time. Yes. And, you know, growing meat in the lab, it's not a new concept. They're just now starting to be able to do it better. And I think in five or ten years, hopefully they'll do it well enough, it'll be indistinguishable.

Because in theory, you shouldn't need a nervous system and an entire brain of an animal to grow the meat. You should be able to grow it from stem cells, essentially. Pretty much, yeah. I mean, they're talking about how they're taking cells out of a cow's neck right now. But the issue seems to be with, I guess, muscle and fat.

They're having problems with that. But this is just a matter of, you know, tweaking it, right? They'll get there. That's the hope. The hope is it'll just matter of tweaking it. And aside from the moral arguments of it and everything, they say just sustainability, it'll be so much better.

Oh, yeah. Totally. There's so many problems with the meat industry besides the moral arguments. There's so many problems just about land degradation and inefficiency and everything else. So even if you're not even worried about the suffering of the animals, there are plenty of other reasons to be against the system as it is.

Well, hell, that and it'll make the drive from L.A. to San Francisco on the 5 a hell of a lot nicer. Oh, yeah. Cowshwitz. Cowshwitz. It's just a horrible place. Yeah, no, I have no problem with this. And, you know, I'm sure they're going to get it there. Right now they even said, I think the person who tasted it said it was somewhere in between the taste of a Boca burger and a McDonald's crappy burger.

So it's getting there. So I'd probably love it because that sounds perfect to me. I know. Yeah, Boca burgers are pretty good. I like Boca burgers. Yeah. So it's getting there. I mean, I'm totally down with this. I would love to have just a vat growing in my, you know, future kitchen area that was just meat that was growing by itself and replenishing itself and didn't involve any actual animals.

No, I mean, as Brian knows, I was a hardcore carnivore for years. Yes, you were. There are so many vegans that I meet and when we talk about meat substitutes, there are some of these people who have been vegan so long that they go, yeah, they're great transitional foods. And to me, these aren't transitional foods.

I'm constantly going to eat the fake meat products. I like the fake chicken and the fake beef. And if it can be improved, I'll like it even more. So I don't think it's going to be, for a lot of people, not transition. But, you know, I'm not one of those vegans who does it because I don't like the taste of meat.

I love the taste of meat. I just, for me, I decided it was wrong. I just didn't want to be part of that system anymore. So bring on the laboratory-grown hamburgers. I'll eat them like crazy. Are you kidding me? All right. We'll have a lab meat barbecue as soon as they get close, man. Awesome. So let's go back.

I forgot about this story when we were talking about the Huffington Post thing about the Washington Post. Did you see Stephen Colbert and the Daft Punk episode by any chance? No, but I heard about it. I heard it was not surprising though, but Viacom was trying to shut him down.

Since they had signed on for an MTV thing, it's just so ridiculous. Yeah, it's completely why I just, you know, I'm surprised that these networks just don't get it. Old media doesn't really get how this stuff works. Yeah, so basically, in a nutshell, Daft Punk was booked to appear on Stephen Colbert's little, you know, what does he call it?

Colbchella? Steve Fesco, Colbchella show. And they were going to do Get Lucky. And they were basically told at the last minute that they can't do it because they, well, this kind of gets to, if I'm going to blame anyone, I'm actually blaming Daft Punk's managers right now. Because they signed this contract that said that they would be an exclusive appearance on the MTV Video Music Awards next month.

So, you know, they never should have signed that, especially when you've got the song of the summer. And of course, you're going to want to do other promotion. Anyways, so they pulled out of the show and he did, Colbert just nailed it. I mean, did this great little funny thing to the, funny skit to the song and had, you know, called in a bunch of favors from other celebrity friends.

And it's really fucking funny. And he went off on MTV, big time. See it, go online and watch it. Yeah, it's really funny. So, it's just another, like, case of, like, why would you do this? Why would you, you know, try to ban somebody from appearing on a show? Why, why, why?

I don't get it. Stephen Colbert made the best joke ever about it where he said, yeah, you know, this is how music works. You see a band you really like once and you never want to see them again. Yeah. You know, that's exactly what happened with the Beatles on Edward Sullivan.

Nobody ever wanted to see them again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, as if, yeah, people were going to see Daft Punk on MTV and then refuse to watch it somewhere else. It's just so idiotic. Yep. Well, glad we're all agreed. Yeah. All right. Anybody got anything else they want to talk about in the news?

I think I ran through my list. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I guess there's plenty of talk about Snowden in Russia. But, you know, one of the best things I saw about that, just to comment on it briefly, of course, is somebody tweeted the other day, I forget who it was, but tweeted, if somebody landed at JFK airport and the Russians demanded that he be extradited back to Moscow, there's no chance in hell the U.S. would send him back.

Hell no. So why are we acting so holier than thou that, oh, we need to send him back or you're our enemies? It's like, give me a break. Yeah. Yeah. It's a weird story. I don't really, I don't know where I fall on it still.

I'm torn between thinking that Snowden is this amazing, great hero, almost, for doing all this versus, well, he is kind of a traitor, too. I don't know where to go on it. Yeah, I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of the U.S. government. It's just so ridiculous. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, we can only be policemen of the world for so long. It's like, we have to get over this. It's ridiculous. No, we're becoming more and more like a bad parent that's, you know, it's don't do as, do as I say, not as I do. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now, every day that goes by, we talked about this last week where we were on the fence about Snowden and how, you know, this is kind of a tough decision.

Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? But every day that more news comes out about the shit they're doing with, you know, the DEA sharing data with the NSA and all the stuff that's happening, it's just kind of snowballing now where I think maybe he's actually pretty okay.

I mean, he didn't talk to anything we didn't already know. He just sort of brought it back into the spotlight. Well, he proved it is what he did. He did prove it. Yeah, everybody always kind of new in the back, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. They're doing this. They're doing that. But now it's to the extent where it's like, okay, now you know that everybody's reading your email.

Everybody's listening to your phone calls. Even if they're not doing it in real time, they've got a computer that is going through and rereading everything and doing, you know, sentiment analysis and just all this shit that is just, you know, it's there. It's happening. The story, did you guys hear the story about the woman who was researching backpacks and pressure cookers?

Oh, yeah. Arrested or something. Is that correct? This woman got arrested. It was completely innocent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the story. She was looking at stuff online and it triggered someone somewhere and they sent somebody over to her house. And I think they, did they arrest her? I can't remember. No, no. Well, it's actually. I brought her in for questioning something.

I don't know. But it's something ridiculous. Basically, what it kind of was, was it was her boyfriend slash husband who had gotten fired or was leaving a job, but was looking, he was Googling those things specifically on the company internet connection. And one of the IT guys who was watching what was going through then called the local police, who then called the federal police.

It was a whole clusterfuck snowball, but it basically came down to, it was a dude at work Googling for stupid shit who then basically caused the cops to show up at his girlfriend slash wife's house. Right. Right. Yeah, well, we're going to see a lot more of that, obviously.

I mean, that's just going to be the way of the world now. If you string together a couple searches that, if they were put together in an odd way, makes you look really bad, you're going to get a, you're going to get a knock on the door. Yeah, it's probably true. Yeah. Well, that's it for the news, I think. I think so, too.

All right. Good to have you. Good to have you with us. We've covered everything in the world. Excellent. Yes, we've solved all the world's problems again, like we do every week. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you very much for joining us, Mike. and we'll let you go enjoy the rest of your day off, which you will probably enjoy in a typical way for you. Run 50 miles and have a couple beers.

Not quite. I'm actually going to go to, what's the name of that movie that's opening today? Elysium. Yeah, Elysium. Yeah, we're going to go see Elysium at 6 o'clock. Oh, cool. Awesome. So, it should be cool. Let us know how it is. Beware the humidity. It's nasty out here. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, so we'll see. I mean, I can see the movie theater from here, though. It's only a half-mile walk, so it should be okay. You'll make it. Cool, man. Well, thanks again for coming. Everybody, check out Googodolls.com. Go out and see them this summer. It's a great show, and you will be surprised by knowing every single song.

Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right, Mike. Well, thanks, guys. All right. Take care. Okay. Thanks. Bye. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. So, this week I want to talk about basically a utility. Oh, okay. It's called Pinboard. If you remember back in the day, there was Delicious that Yahoo bought, then killed, which is basically link, you know, just a link box where you store all your links, and that was one of the first places where tagging really got huge.

Yeah. And basically, I look back and I think of the foundation of tags, and it came from Delicious and then moved into Flickr and Technorati and all that. But when Delicious went tits up, this gentleman went out and created a site called Pinboard, and it's called Social Bookmarking for Introverts.

Okay. Pinboard is a fast, no-nonsense bookmarking site. No ads, no fluff. And basically, you sign up for a one-time fee, right, currently, and it changes because it depends on velocity and how many people are in the site and what it costs and all that stuff.

As far as I remember, I can look it back up, but I, whatever. It costs $10.17, right? Yeah, I was looking at that, and that cracked me up. Such an interesting price. I'm sure it's algorithmically generated because he's an introvert who likes to bookmark.

I've played around with a ton of bookmarking services, some that have crazy Chrome and social features and all this stuff, like Kippit, I think, was one of them, and I don't know, there's tons of them out there. And this one is ugly, utilitarian, and completely gets the job done.

Right. That's all that I care about. I, you know, I really wanted something prettier. I'm like, oh, this interface isn't working for me. I'm not using the social features, blah, blah, blah. Right. And everything else was so crappy that I just said, screw it, I'm going to embrace Pinboard. Pinboard is my go-to.

Okay. And they've got full export. You can export in multiple formats. RSS feed of people's public link feeds. And you can make links public or private, and you tag them, leave descriptions, the whole nine yards. It has a bookmarklet for Chrome. I use this thing probably 10, 15 times a day.

Now, are you using this over Instapaper now, or are you still using both? It's two different use cases. Right. I mean, you can use Pinboard as a read later service. Right. But I like the app for Instapaper so much that I'm never going to switch. Okay. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Instapaper user until the new owners screw it up.

Yeah, I've been using Instapaper a lot myself, so you definitely converted me to that. So, yeah, Pinboard basically is just, I've been using it for a couple years, and everything that I come across that I need to reference, it's just anything that I want to save it for going back and whatever the fuck you want to save.

It's like a bookmark file. It's an internet bookmark file. You know what you bookmark. You know why you bookmark. It beats the crap out of the built-in bookmarks in your browser. Well, yeah, because it's also, you know, it's stored in the cloud. Yes. But the good part is you can just pull your bookmarks out, no fuss, no muss.

And I've also recently embraced the public feature because there's a ton of cool stuff that I find that people can share. Originally, I was using it for a lot of work stuff that people should never see. Yeah. But I said, screw it. I'm going to just go with it. And I'll put a link in the show notes to my public feed if anybody wants to check it out because I'm posting tons of really cool WordPress stuff because I'm in the middle of a gigantic WordPress project with writing my own themes and plugins and stuff.

So I'm diving really deep into that stuff. So if that tickles your fancy, but I've also got a tag called awesome, which is just all the crazy stuff I find day in, day out. Right. So I can't recommend it enough. There is no official pinboard app, but since it has an API, oh gosh, golly darn, think about the goodness there.

Other people can go out and create apps against it. And I bought one. It was like $2.99. Works fine. Put a couple up and check them out. I'm not going to recommend one over another one because I didn't really put in the time. I found the one with the prettiest icon and the best reviews and said, okay, I'll go that route.

The way most people pick their apps. Yes. Yeah. Well, for this, I mean, it's a list of bookmarks. I just want to be able to get to it quickly instead of having to go to the website and log in and search and all that stuff. So it's a decent little app. I'll put the one that I got in the show notes. Right. But beyond that.

This looks really cool. And I think I might have to give it a shot. So especially, you know, the weird pricing has sold me. I just love the fact that I'm going to pay $10.17. Forever. Yeah. And you're done. Pinner. Pinner is the name of the app that I got. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah.

And it's just, it does what it's supposed to do. And you can import your current bookmarks file. So you're not, you know, you get up to speed real quick. Very cool. Yeah. So you got something? I do have something. This is probably the geekiest thing I'll ever do in my entire life.

But a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Wait, that's the wrong series. I found on YouTube a 24-hour ambient Star Trek, the next generation bridge slash engine noise loop, which I used to just put on all day and listen to in the background.

Not just because I love Star Trek and it's super geeky, but it's actually really, really nice and ambient and enjoyable. Probably not if you weren't into Star Trek, but if you are, it's the best thing ever. Unfortunately, about, I'd say maybe two or three months ago, it disappeared, copyright claim or some bullshit like that.

It went away. But a new and improved one has appeared. This one includes computer noises and some really, this guy has spent some time on this because there's like low-level conversations taken from the series. So you can just kind of, sort of, hear Troy in the background talking.

This one's only an hour long, but it's a really great loop. It's on YouTube. We're going to put it in the show notes. If you're a Star Trek fan and you're just kind of sitting around, maybe you're concentrating on some coding or something like that, throw this on in the background. It's pretty awesome. It's a lot of fun. Thank you, Ender for Life, who is the person, the YouTube channel that this one's on.

And, you know, Ender for Life, that's a cool name too. We can talk about the Ender movie coming up soon. It's very exciting about that. So this is my shit on my computer this week. Nerd. That's right. Such a nerd.

I know, but it's so good. It's so good just to play. I really do agree. You know, if I were a single man, I would probably go to sleep with this thing playing, but it doesn't play well with the ladies. Well, you didn't get your wife at Comic-Con, that's why. That's true. I think there was a booth where you could pick those up, but...

Nerds from Russia.com. Hey, there's a bit. Oh, shit. I think you just found a market. Cut that out. Cut that out. Register domain. Click, click, click. Yeah. No, I'm in. I'll try it. I listened a little bit to this one. I prefer just the bridge thumb.

I mean, this is where we're going to get really funny. I prefer just, I just prefer the warp drive, medium, thrum, thrum. Yeah, yeah. The computer stuff, it just kind of... I think he went a little overboard with the computer noises. It's constantly going on. I mean, it sounds like, you know, the bridge has been hacked or the NSA's gotten control of it somehow and it's just freaking out.

But I do like the inclusion. Maybe there'll be a third version along someday where he cuts back a little bit and it's good stuff. Good and relaxing. Excellent. So, I found this awesome site called leasthelpful.com.

Yes. Now, you know, going in with that kind of domain, you're in for something. Basically, they call it the daily dispatches from the internet's worst reviewers. Now, I kind of take umbrance with that because some of these reviews are just awesome.

Yes. I mean, just some of them, yeah, there are people that are just completely fucking brain dead. But this one, this one, I mean... Okay, this is for the Shark Week 20th Anniversary Collection from Kathy J. Toreen from Illinois.

Here we go. I have been to Universal Studios and the shark there is on a timer to leap out of the water. Same one they used in Jaws, I think. Speaking of Jaws, why is that shark not shown in these? What a sham! I like that shark. She just ate people and, you know, was like, hey, SoCal, stay off my beach and stuff.

Just a lonely shark trying to get along with the world. Did you know sharks never stop moving? If they do, they die? There's so many fat people who could learn from that. I don't mean just the result. I mean, just move, people. Does it hurt that much to take a walk once in a while? Supersize it all you want, Bubba.

You will not out-swim the sharks. No, I love this site. I mean, I'm looking at one now. It's a review of Panda Express. And my only issues are that they never carry meatloaf for some reason. It's Panda Express.

Meatloaf, not big on Chinese culture. But this is the Panda Express in Columbus, Ohio. Apparently, it's a statuette in Columbus that every restaurant has to carry meatloaf. I think it's on the state flag. No, this is an amazing site.

And it's actually, I mean, this is, the review thing has become almost an art form. And I kind of agree. Like, these aren't the worst. These are some of the best I've ever seen. I know. This is a beautiful thing that has come out of, you know, the whole internet experience is these crazy, like, everybody has their voice.

Some of these people have to be just drunk all the time. Other people, I think, are doing it. Some of these have just got to be for fun. I mean, even George Takei is doing that now. I don't know if you've seen. He points out his, he goes in and writes Amazon reviews for crazy products. And they're fucking hilarious. So, yeah, it's become like, you know, it's a thing that people do now.

But this is just a fantastic collection of them. This site's amazing. I'll be on here for probably the next four hours. Yeah, definitely one of my new favorite finds. It's really fun. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. Five stars.

Speaking of five stars, feel free to go to iTunes and give us a five-star rating. And leave a comment. And leave a funny comment. Holy goats out! Well, I think that's just about it for yet another podcast by us. Number 20, right, Jason? Number 20.

They can find the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 20. There you go. Big thanks to Mike Malinan for taking the time out from his touring to talk to us. That was pretty awesome. Go check them out on tour this summer, people. Definitely. Cool.

I thought you were choking on like a shrimp or something. You know, I'm drinking because we're doing the podcast early for my time. I'm drinking my cucumber water right now rather than my beer. So once we're done with this, I'm going to have to go out and do my bit for King and Country and the beer industry and try to go get some down.

Oh, God. If I had cucumber water, I would just vomit. Oh, I love it. It's so refreshing. Oh, God. It's like... Oh, that's like sucking tainted cock. Oh, that's bad. Well, no comment. And while I never have, I can just...

That's what I'm saying. And speaking of tainted cock, you want to tease our guests next week? See, now that's a segue. Of course. God. Okay. The only thing I hate worse than cucumbers is Peter Cetera. So I just was...

Oh, God. Just gross. Just thinking about it makes... Okay. So anyway... Now that we've established you do not like cucumber water. I'm sorry. I had to cleanse the palate there. Okay. Next week, we're going to be joined by the awesome Mr. Laughing Squid himself, Scott Beal, which will be very fun.

Scott and I used to hang out a lot in San Francisco, and he's now living in New York and checking out the scene there. But I think that it'll be a fun catch-up, and if you want to hear what it was like seven or eight years ago in the fledgling startup scene after the first boom and bust, we're going to have a lot to talk about there.

Yeah, it's going to be a fun episode, so looking forward to that. Yeah, definitely. Scott and I used to hit all the parties and hang out with all the players who are now gazillionaires. Oh, that must be fun for you guys. Well, I think Scott is a gazillionaire, too, so I'm low man on the totem pole. All right.

Well, that'll be next week. Yep. It'll be a fun show, for sure. And it'll be fun. So thanks again for listening, everyone, and we'll see you next week. All right. Peace out. 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.

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