21: Ye Good Old Days with Scott Beale

Hello, Jason. Hello, Brian. Episode 21. Woohoo! Blackjack. That's right.

So, yeah, I'll let you take it because you were the one running a bit late today. You had a client call at last minute. This time I was ready. Ha. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't even a client call. It was just, you know, of course, the frantic emails that something's broken that wasn't my fault like right before we start. So. Yes. Well, I've been dealing with that as well. Thanks a lot again, Twitter. What, did you say something you shouldn't have? No, no, no, no. Just like Twitter breaking. You know, it's, you know, you know what our life

is like now as a developer. We use all these third party tools and we use their APIs. And once they change them and old things break, we have to deal with that. But the client doesn't understand that it's not us. It's them. So. Oh, how funny. Guess what my problem was with my client? What was it? Third party developer updated the Twitter functionality on their thing and it broke. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's, yeah. Trying to explain that to people that aren't particularly tech savvy is always a pain in the ass. And at the end of the day, you know,

they don't really care. They just want it fixed. But it's really hard to explain like, you know, Twitter drastically changed their API. And I'm sure most people have noticed that Twitter feeds all over the web have gone down and they don't really allow you to do a lot of the stuff that you used to do. So explaining to a client that you can't have it exactly the way that you used to have it. And then they just go, well, why not? Yeah. So. So is this part of them pulling all

of the like old functionality where you could do searches? Yeah. Some of that, some of its design issue, some of it, you know, it's just the whole, the new API is pretty different. I mean, I was able to get around a lot of it using the OAuth stuff and got most of the functionality back exactly the way it was, but it was a massive pain in the ass to do. And a lot of people haven't figured out how to do it yet. And the documentation out there is a bit spotty at best. So, but I was able to wade my way through and actually do a little bit of real coding this morning. So that was fun. Oh, good for you.

Yeah. Felt nice. Yeah. It's just them requiring those, requiring the API keys and the OAuth keys so they can throttle anybody and everybody. Exactly. And that idiotic, what guidelines are those? The look and feel guidelines basically where it has to look like exactly like it would on the Twitter site. Yeah. If you're going to, if you're going to roll your own stream, that's not a widget.

Might've possibly ignored that part, but that's okay. Yeah. But they'll see now they can shut you off if they see it and they don't like it, which is crazy, crazy. Cause it's still your own data. Well, yeah, it's, it's your own data, but it's, it's a free service. Well, that's also depends on if you're like snarfing. Oh my God, a spider just killed an ant outside the window. Oh wait, no, an ant killed a spider. That's impressive. Ape has killed ape. Yeah. Yeah. The other,

the other issue is, you know, the throttling that they do now. So I actually had to write a caching system and then a cron job to pull the Twitter feed every 15 minutes. So we don't go over and things don't get shut down. Fun. Oh, you could have pulled some of that code I wrote for you a long time ago that had that. Oh, does it still work with the, with the new version? No, but you could all the caching stuff and the database storage stuff was pretty cool. Right. Yeah. I guess I got to go back and rewrite that now. Yeah, you do. Oh, I would do it this weekend, but I'm moving this weekend.

And after almost dying in a tractor accident this morning, it's going to be a great weekend. You have an interesting life now. I know. I know. I didn't realize that the, these old tractors, the brakes don't really work that well. And we have a very steep yard and I had a trailer full of trees and it was, yeah, fortunately I didn't panic, but I almost, I almost, uh, did a sunny bono this morning. Wow. On a tractor.

On a Sears tractor. That would, that is not the way to go. Excellent. Not the way to go. Yeah. So, uh, speaking to it. I was going to say, yeah, go hang on. No, the, um, what I was going to mention before was like all this week in my, my day to day, I had to deal with getting my hands dirty again in HTML and CSS and jQuery and all that stuff.

Right. Man, the world is different. It is. Yeah. Coding is so different from what we did even five years ago now. Yeah. And I, I, you know, I'm, I'm using this stuff as, as a way to get my chops back up and doing it the right way. You know, like using sprite sheets and all that stuff for CSS rollovers and trying to, trying to put as much into pure CSS and well-formed code.

Mm-hmm. And it's actually really fun. I mean, I've, it's, it's a bit evil, like trying to figure out how this all works on all the browsers because, you know, there's always IE, my favorite. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't even looked at my stuff in IE yet and I don't want to, um, but doing like multiple floating pin divs that, you know, emulate like just all this crazy stuff. And it's, yeah, it's, it's fun actually to learn all the stuff or get up to speed.

There's a lot of cool stuff you can do now and it's a completely different way of coding, but you know, I don't, I'm not a runner anyways, but I, I understand the concept of a runner's high. I get it from coding sometimes. I don't know if that happened to you this week where you're just, you get so into it and you're like, this is cool as shit. And you're figuring out how to do stuff and it makes sense and it clicks in your brain and you just run with it. That's great.

Yeah. I, I mean, I know, I know that feeling intimately, but no, basically it's, I can get about 20 minutes of uninterrupted time. Then it's, I have, I get distractions here. So I miss that. I would love to have, you know, six straight hours to sit down and just do CSS and JavaScript and, you know, all this stuff and then, you know, scream at WordPress for their shoddy

plug-in support and crappy plug-in writers. Yeah. I really wish I had a year to fork it and rewrite it and come back to the world with like a properly done WordPress. It's not just spitting bubble gum. It is such a mess. If you look under the hood at that thing.

Oh, it's so MacGyvered. It's ridiculous. And trying to make even the most basic changes sometimes. And, and some, the way that some people write their themes and Oh my God, what a nightmare. No, that's the whole plugin thing where you just, you give up, you give up hope when you, when you use a plugin and when you, when you're using like 20 of them. Oh geez, I got a client that's literally running 40 plugins at one time. Right. And, and they're running like a plugin to left aligns or right align a date field. It's like, why do you need a plugin for that?

Yeah. There's definitely an over-reliance on plugins for basic stuff because people don't know they use WordPress, they use the tool, they start off with the tool and they don't know the underlying mechanics of how things work. And yeah, when you don't have that underlying mechanical knowledge, then it's really hard to, you know, roll up your sleeves and do it yourself.

Yeah. And I try to explain that to clients all the time when they just, you know, the automatic assumption is, Oh, well, we want something super easy. Let's do it in WordPress. We don't want to spend a lot of money. We want to be able to do things ourselves. You're not going to be able to do things yourselves. It's, you know, once you go beyond the basic, you know, modifications of a theme and simple plugins, you really got it. You have to know even more than you do if you're just building a site by hand. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, without the, you know, without the

functionality of structured posts, I mean, there, there are plugins to, to make it into a structured post type of thing where you can have, okay, you got four images on a page. These images go here. They're going to be this size and automatically resize them. Text wraps this way, you know, without that, they have to know basic HTML. Yeah. And, and after running net blogs for eight years and trying to get the authors there to even understand basic stuff, I mean, literally five times a week, I'd have to go in and, and smack somebody's wrist because they were posting

full res JPEGs to the homepage of the site, like five of them. So, so the homepage turns into like a 12 meg page load because they didn't, they, they like, Oh, well, I didn't know how to size it in an image tag. I'm like, it's called height and width. I can only explain it to you so many times, but you can see where it says medium, click media. And I wrote up these elaborate, this elaborate documentation with screencasts and all this and without fail, you know?

Well, I mean, that's, that's the curse of, of these, of these free services that are out there that have, you know, Facebook, your Twitters, et cetera. Like clients don't realize how much money Facebook has put into making their structure. So it was easy as possible for everybody to do an update. That is a, you know, billion dollar effort in programming and design.

And that's why you can make a Facebook post. And most of the time you're not going to screw it up. That does not translate to the rest of the world out there. Well, that's why a Facebook post is a little bit of text in an image. It's really kind of hard to screw that up. I mean, if I wanted to make all my clients have their updates with one, one image with one, either one link, one image and some text.

Yeah, that's really, it's not that hard. Okay. Yeah. That'd be pretty boring. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just, it's the mindset that people have now gotten into from using these things. They, they go, well, of course I know how to do stuff. Yeah. So, so, so somebody should just, maybe that'll be my Kickstarter. I'll Kickstarter a year off to rebuild WordPress and I'll go, yeah. And I'll just go get a cabin, a cheap cabin in the

woods and just a, a monthly beer delivery. They can just come up and fill the big tank and now I'll just sit there and rewrite WordPress from scratch. That is a Kickstarter that I would buy into. And I'm sure many other frustrated people just like us would as well, because man, I am so sick of using that damn program. And, but it has to be somewhat compatible, you know, cause I mean, you could just go write a new CMS. Anybody can go write a new CMS, but yeah, but you want to be able to take the

WordPress code base and just fix it from the ground up. Yes. You know, make it object oriented, do not support crappy old languages. And I mean, that's, they're, they're in the, the windows realm now where they got so much to support. Yeah, exactly. It's like, no, clear the slate.

Oh man. So you got something about, uh, some, some clickiness that our, that our friend, the good doctor dug into. Actually. Yeah. That was a, that was really kind of interesting. Um, Mr. Dr. David Teeter, uh, got intrigued by the concept of the click track that we had talked about with, uh, with our good friend, Mike from the Goo Goo Dolls last week, who was a drummer. So we were mentioning that he had never heard of a click track. He went online, he did a little research. He found this cool little site with these, that this guy has a

music machinery. Uh, it'll be in the, uh, in the loads in the show notes, um, where he basically created an online program that analyzes songs and basically a way to figure out if the drummer was using a click track or not when they recorded the song. And it's pretty cool. Um, it's a good read. He created a bunch of APIs, of course, cause everybody creates APIs now. Um, they've run a ton of songs through, they've got a whole database now. It's pretty cool. Um, what I liked most about it

was like version one of, of the site and we'll put, or of his post, uh, we'll put both in the show show notes. Um, he hadn't really figured, I mean, this guy looks like he's a musician, but he got thrown by the fact that you could actually create tempo maps when you're recording, which basically speed up and slow down click tracks. So he got a little thrown by that. And some of the songs were a little confused, but then through the comments, you had like other musicians and recording engineers commenting in on it and saying, well, you know, you can do this or that. So that'll shove your data

this way. And he refined his, his, uh, algorithms and it's pretty damn cool. Neat. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely want to check it out. I was talking to him on the phone about it the other day and it sounded really interesting. Yeah. I was, uh, it cut me up for, uh, for a couple hours when he sent me that and I was going through it and it was a lot of fun. So, so, uh, audio geeks go at it. It's, it's pretty cool. Cool beans. And, uh, and, and to go back to another guest,

uh, Mr. Shane Nickerson, who was, uh, we, when we were talking about social media, you know, and, and how celebrities kind of fumble their way through it and you know, you haven't seen it that much anymore because pretty much everybody's been on, but now we have a new, a new entrant into the arena. Yes. It made the news. Oh, Prince. Our pal Prince. Yes. Yeah. He, you know, he's,

uh, figuring it out, but he posted his obligatory food pick on number three. Yeah. Well, to be fair, he does what everybody else does. Here's what I'm eating. Yeah. So you can check him out. We'll put his link in the show notes if you really care. It was a, it was a toss salad by the way. It was a toss salad. I'm not going to say if that's appropriate or not. Yeah. Well, the funny thing about this is actually, I mean, Prince back in the day was way ahead of the game online. He was one of

the first musicians that kind of created a pay fan club. He was, you know, when he was pissing around with the record labels and he was off them for a while, he was doing self-digital distribution via his website. I mean, way, way ahead of the game. And then, you know, he hops in on Twitter and just looks like a total noob from 10 years ago. So I think we discussed this on the show. You know, who did his first website, right? Yours truly. Really? I built the first print. I heard the first

Paisley Park website for his, uh, for his whole shebang at Paisley Park. And it was the first client that I got fired by. Yeah. Well, Prince is notorious for firing people left, right, and center. So you know what, this was, this was actually from one of our shows that we never aired. We were talking about drinking and coding and doing really stupid things and they were, they were making really

stupid mistakes and I got really drunk one night. I mean, this is when I was 25 and, uh, went to my AOL account and created a new alias and handle. And this was after the site went live and I sent them scathing feedback about the website from this, you know, non-existent AOL account that I just created, but I was at the office at the same time and they were smart enough to match IPs.

Oh man. Oh well. And, and they fired, they fired us and didn't pay the bill. So don't drink in, in feedback. No, never. And, and definitely don't do it from the same location. Hey man, you live and you learn. You live and learn. Yeah.

Fortunately, I was doing that before most people knew what the internet was. So I learned early. This was literally 95, 96. Hmm. Yeah. Long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. So at least, you know, Prince is, you know, trying to get back on the wagon somewhat, somewhat here.

Somewhat. We'll see what happens. Yeah. Okay. That's all I got on Prince. Me too. Welcome to this week in shit. We put on our computers. So I got a new app this week that I've been trying out. Is this for your computer or your phone?

This is for my phone. This is for the iPhone. Um, a while back, you got me into using the Fitbit, which, uh, at some point just kind of disappeared from existence. It's probably in some of my one backpack. I have somewhere maybe on in a suitcase. Uh, I went away. I stopped using it for a bit. And, uh, then I saw, I can't even remember where this popped up an app called moves for the iPhone.

I think they're going to do an Android version soon. Who knows? Um, who cares? Who cares? It basically, you know, does pretty much the same thing. Uh, it calculate, you know, as long as you keep your phone on you, it calculates the amount of steps that you take every day. Uh, you can plug in height, weight, age, and it kind of does rough calorie, you know, calculations or whatnot. Uh, the thing I really like about it because I bike a lot is it actually differentiates between walking

and biking. So for me, that's frigging fantastic. So like yesterday I biked 14.4 miles and, but only walked 4,000 steps. So I'm able to track all of this stuff. Um, it, it also, you know, differentiates when you're in a car and it just says transport or whatever. Um, and they're supposedly going to be working on the app. So it gets even finer delineations between what type of travel you're doing. I can't wait to take this thing on an airplane and see what happens. Um, it's pretty

cool app. I like it. It's a lot easier for me to use than Fitbit. You know, it doesn't have the tie into a website and, and calculate stuff and all that. But, uh, you know, as far as a simple thing, just to track how much I bike and walk every day, absolutely fantastic. I'm loving it so far. Of course it's completely free too. And I haven't seen an ad yet. So who the hell knows how they're going to make any money, but there you go. Oh, that was a, that was going to be my first question. Yeah. I don't know how they're going to make money. I mean, I don't know if there's much, you know, money to be made from, from getting all this information about how much

people are walking and cycling. But right now it's, it's a free app and there's no ads. Yeah. I'm sure VC sponsored and all that good stuff. Um, I have actually used this app. It looks a little bit nicer now than when I used it. I used it a while ago and I actually did fly that with it and it got really confused. Um, and the one thing that, um, I had a problem with was battery life just was abhorrent. I mean, I, I literally had half a day's battery

when I used it. Right. Yeah. That seems to be better. I haven't noticed it being too bad yet, but I'll let you know, uh, on the next podcast because this weekend I'm going to be like popping up to Santa Barbara and I'll be going out and about a lot without a charger around. So we'll see how fast it drains. I mean, they talk about it a lot on their fat on their fact on their site about how they're trying to work with that and get it better and better and better. But so far can't complain. Yeah. I mean, and, and you've got a five, I got a four S and I tried it on a four S right. Yeah. So yeah, it doesn't seem to be doing too

much drain. So the thing that really kind of, that turns me off about it, there's no social, there's no real, uh, do they build an export in the app yet where you can at least get like a CSV of your data? No, you can have like a story. Okay. That's a deal. I need to be able to export and throw it in a spreadsheet so I can track over time.

I'm surprised that they actually don't have that because I mean, it does send all the data back to their servers where they do all the calculations and then push that back to you. So I'm sure it's just a matter of time before you're able to sign into your account on their site and do an export if they get that far again. Or even in, even in iTunes, you know, like when you go to your app section in iTunes, be able to just pull down a CSV of the database or whatnot. Yeah. I mean, it looks like they've got, you know, under the settings, they have this thing called apps, which nothing is in there yet, but they're going to try to do like,

you know, they should obviously try to like attach it to something like my fitness pal, which is one of the really popular kind of, you know, calorie versus expenditure apps that are out there. So hopefully, I'm sure it'll grow. Yeah, it's pretty. I mean, I give them that. It is really pretty. And again, like I said, just because I bike and Fitbit doesn't really take that into account. It's great for me. So the people who should buy this right now are Foursquare. They should buy these guys and integrate the two services.

That's an extremely good idea. Well done, Jason. Oh, thank you. There's a free one for you moves, guys. Or Foursquare, guys. Or Foursquare. This would be perfect for Foursquare because that way you'd at least be able to start marrying the activity data, the geolocation data. Because I always thought that Foursquare should be auto-checking no matter where you're at.

Yeah, yeah. That would totally make sense. And yeah. But if they could turn Foursquare into a fitness app as well as a social drinking partying app, then you've got your social that moves wouldn't have to do. And then on the Foursquare side, you've got the fitness side that they wouldn't have to do. I think it would be a pretty good marriage.

It is a pretty good marriage. And I wouldn't mind an ad popping up here and there when I'm biking saying there's a bike shop five blocks away if you need to get a tune-up and that kind of stuff. So that would be pretty cool. Yeah. So, I mean, it's free. So you might as well check it out if you're into that company.

It's free. It's pretty. If you're a cycler, I think it's great. You're going to want this more than any other app I've tried out so far that does kind of tracking on stuff. Yeah. So mine this week is it's kind of a throwaway just because I installed it after reading all of the security stuff that's been going down with email and Gmail and how Gmail is no longer – you can just not expect privacy in Gmail, period, which you should have never.

Yeah. It's amazing the outrage that has gone around about that because of it. Duh. Of course. It's Gmail. Again, it's free. Why did you think there would be privacy? I mean, they're serving ads. But that doesn't mean that – it's a totally different thing. Computers scraping the email, which was what they would always say in the beginning.

Yeah. Nobody's looking at your email. It's completely private, completely secure. We're just – our algorithms go through, look for keywords, and give you ads. That's all it is. That's what they said from the get-go. But that was 10 years ago, and things change over time. Yeah. But I got a – I'm a Mac guy, and I actually use the Mail app. And then the funny thing is all of my mail that runs through the Mail app is Gmail-based. But I got a great little package

called GPG Tools, which is basically they're using, you know – was it new PGP type of thing? Right. Oh, OpenPGP. Sorry. Okay. But it's a really nice wrapper for OpenPGP that works with mail. So you can do like one-click email encryption straight in the app. It's really clean. You can do email signing. Super fast to set up if you're using the Mail app free because it's running on OpenPGP.

Right. But if you're interested in doing OpenPGP mail encryption and you own a Mac, perfect. There are a ton of PC programs that have OpenPGP encryption as well. So you'll be able to, you know, co-mingle and encrypt back and forth with your buddies.

Yeah. I'm still stunningly using Thunderbird for my PC mail program. And it does have – there's a bunch of apps out there that tie in with that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're interested in email encryption, you know, this is one of the great, great easy tools for the Mac. I'm sure there are other ones. I mean, I used to run – I used to pay a lot of money for PGP. I had PGP Desktop, PGP Disk. I had basically

the entire PGP suite. And they kept screwing up and weren't ahead of the curve on OS X upgrades. Well, I was actually going to ask, is this – are they going to be coming out with this for the iPhone mail? I don't think they can.

That's – see, that's too bad. I mean, most of us now, you know, I'm always doing email on my phone, so. Yeah. You'd have to have basically an app that was just running – that was like a secure email app. Yeah. Which wouldn't – I mean, yeah, I mean, it gets tricky when you're just doing it from your phone. I don't actually do that much mail from my phone anymore. I try not to.

Right. I try not to do that much email anymore, period. Pairing your life down. Always fun. Yeah, it's actually pretty nice. I deleted all of my sent mail for the past 10 years yesterday. Completely deleted it, or did you archive it first?

I archived it and encrypted the archive and threw it on a backup disk. Yeah, that's the way to go. So, if I ever need to go back for legal purposes – You've still got it. I've got it. But it's not in Gmail anymore. That's what I'm saying. I pulled it all out of Gmail. It's on some backup somewhere.

Oh, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Once it's on the internet, it's not coming off. That's right. Although, you'd be surprised. Some of the great blog posts I've written over the years, I try and go back and find archives of them somewhere. Right. They're nowhere to be found. Even the Wayback Machine and all those? Nothing?

Nope. Yeah. Can't find them. Well, so there are some things that fall through the cracks. You can always write the NSA. They've got them. I think these were pre them getting real big, but we'll see. I'm sure they've got it on a floppy somewhere in the vault. A five and a quarter?

No, three and a half. Oh, yeah. Okay. Moved on. They're the NSA, man. They had three and a half ten years before we did. Okay. Maybe it's on one of those zip drives. Remember those? Oh, those zip drives, SyQuest. SyQuest were my first removable media drives. I think I still have them somewhere.

I've got a zip drive sitting around somewhere. I can't believe it. And a disc. I wonder if it still works. Probably not. It could be. I mean, I actually kept a Quadra 650 for probably seven or eight years just because I had a stack of zip disks that I wanted to one day go around and pull the stuff off.

Right. Then I finally pulled everything off and me and my buddies went out back with a sledgehammer and went all off his space on it. What are you going to do, man? It's a Quadra 650. It's not like it's good for anything. No, that's true. Yeah. Bust it up. And there were beers involved and it was fun.

Yeah, it usually is. Yeah, so that's what I got this week. Hopefully something more exciting will come along next week. But this was actually one of the easiest installs I've ever done for privacy and encryption software. It was like smooth. Yeah, I mean, it's a great site.

They did nice design work, so that gives me a little bit of hope for them. And it seems pretty straightforward. I might actually have to do this on my laptop. We'll see. Do you actually use your Mac now? Slowly transitioning. Good man. Good man. We're working on it.

We'll get you there. Might take a couple more years. We'll see. Well, no, I'll be back in L.A. soon and we'll get you hooked up. All right.

The whip's not dead. I'm kind of a gear nerd. I don't want to. Some people use the term gear queer, which is, you know, I've got some gay friends and then they kind of tend to not like that term. So, I'm going to go with Gear Nerd. Okay.

So, I found a really fun site this week. I was watching the random show, the Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss show. And Tim threw this one out and it's called Everyday Carry. Cool. This is everyday-carry.com. And it's basically people taking pictures of the crap they put in their pockets every day.

Which, this was a thing on Flickr a long time ago. It's like, what's in my bag? Yeah. Type of thing. But almost everybody on this site is like, quote unquote, tactical. They've got knives and flashlights because I'm a flashlight nerd too. I've got my $250 Surefire that's in my bag that I carry with me.

But these guys definitely take it to the next level. Yeah. I've been scanning through the site. It's pretty interesting. I mean, God, I'd be so boring. I don't carry that much stuff with me. And everybody does seem to have a knife. Oh, yeah. No, definitely. That's the fun part. You've got to figure out what knives are good.

I mean, I've got a Ken Kershaw onion that I've carried with me for 10 years now. And that thing's still going strong. I'll put a link to that one in the show notes. If you like knives, it's an assisted open, lasts forever, little serrated blade. And it's actually the knife that Tim Ferriss was carrying for a long time because I turned him on to it.

Right. But he turned me on to the serrated version. I always kept carrying the straight blade. He turned me on to the serrated. And that was a good call on his part. Yeah. This is pretty interesting. It's just cool to see what other people consider to be so crucial that they carry around with them all day. So we should actually take photos of our own stuff and throw that up on the site for when this goes live.

I can definitely do that. I will do it as well. Mine will be very boring. Mine will be fairly what you expect that I would be carrying. But yeah. And the problem with this site is I have found probably at least 10 things that I want to go buy.

It is making me look at a bunch of stuff. I like the fact that there's so many moleskins in there. So I'm not alone on that one. Yep. Very pleased about that. But other than that, yeah, I don't know. Maybe there is some stuff I should start carrying around with me. Yeah. It's, I don't know, man.

It's just pricey. The stuff that these guys carry is like top notch. And I prefer for my everyday carry stuff to be cheap. Yeah, everyday carry stuff, except for my phone, is stuff that I'm not going to mind losing because I tend to lose it. It's my sunglasses rule. I will never spend more than $15 on a pair of sunglasses ever again in my life.

Amen to that, brother. Amen. So, yeah, okay, let's do that. Cool. We'll throw it up on the website for this week. Yeah, we'll have pictures of the shit that we carry around. Now, is this just in pockets or like if I'm taking my little bag out to go do something? I think it, well, I think this is every, it's an everyday carry.

So just if you're taking your bag with you every day, then that counts. All right, fair enough. It's basically, I consider it what I, when I leave to go out for the night, that's what I take with me. Okay. All right. We will do that and add that to the site. How exciting for all of you to see what we carry.

I bet there's a lot of people that are going to like this site that listen to this show. Actually, that's true. I found a great site. Well, it's doing the social rounds. Everybody's already posting it already. But thischarmingcharlie.tumblr.com, which is just, it's Peanuts cartoons and he's replaced the words with lyrics from The Smiths and it's just, it tickles my fancy.

See, the thing about this site, I mean, when I first saw it and then you send me the link for our little thing in Mammoth, check them out, mammothhq.com. They're awesome. I'm looking at it and I'm like, oh, that's so maudlin and sad.

And I didn't know that it was Smith's lyrics. I read the whole damn thing without knowing it was Smith's lyrics. And by the end of it, I'm like, oh my God, that is so fucking depressing. I just want to go slit my wrist. Okay. I could see if you weren't aware of the fact that it was Smith's lyrics, it would be just be like, oh my God.

But the fact that it is, it's just genius. I mean, this is like the ultimate mashup of culture. This is, this is what the internet's all about. This is why we have an internet. And it just, it kills me. There's only so many he could possibly do. I don't know if he's actually still producing new ones or not.

He kind of shouldn't because I think he hit just about every major lyric already and just spot on comics that he used. I mean, he used some of the best stills and it just fits perfectly. Oh, that's great. Yeah. You know, it's going to take 10 minutes of your life to scan through them all, pick your favorite, post it. And, uh, you know, then the internet will be on and done and move on.

But, uh, for this brief moment, this is my favorite thing on the internet. So I don't know if you remember, remember this one. And this is, it totally reminded me of it. It was Garfield minus Garfield. I do remember that. Yes. Basically, John, just looking, you'll be just the whole panel, all the, all the Garfield comics, but without Garfield.

So there's just no context and it's just John and it is so unbelievably funny. I don't know. We got to see if that's still out there. If it is, we're going to try to find it and we'll put it in the show notes too. Yeah. Like the first comic is just John sitting there with his arms crossed going, I've done things in my life that I regret.

And then just two more panels of him staring at nothing. Oh, digital ennui. I know. It's so great. So yeah, I got to put that in the notes too. Cause it's, it, as soon as I saw the, that, as soon as I saw the Charlie Brown thing, it totally reminded me of this fun with comics, kids, fun with comics.

And, uh, and the Smiths, the Smiths are no fun. Hey, there's no fun. You know what? I've always been a big fan and believer in the fact that miserable music can make you happy. I enjoy the Smiths. They make me happy. I enjoy listening to really old, angry, depressed cure.

It doesn't bum me out. It makes me happy, but I'm weird. Yeah. You know, I listened to a lot recently in the past 10 or so years, I listened to a lot of that stuff and it doesn't make me happy. Okay. Well, a weird, a weird thing that happened this week actually was I found a, a, a, a mix CD that I made 10 years ago.

Right. 10, 15 years ago is basically an MP3 CD with 27 songs that I had made for driving. And I'm like, Oh, it's a, you know, tunes for driving. And I just put it in my car yesterday and I was driving around and it was some of the best old punk rock stuff that I haven't listened to since probably I made that disc.

Right. Totally brought me back to my youth when I was happy. So I'm thinking maybe this type of music brings you back to your youth when you were happy. Oh, that's totally what it, well, I mean, not that I'm not happy now, but I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's the time of your life. That's what you're remembering. Like if I were just to listen, if I had never heard heaven knows I'm miserable now by the Smiths and I just listened to it now, I'd be like, Oh my God, what a bummer.

But it reminds me of, you know, being back in high school. Yeah. I mean, because you have, you have that baggage of memories that goes, goes along with it, but this stuff, you know, it was the same thing. I'm like, Oh my God, my girlfriend was so hot when I had this song. You know, it's just like, I remember all the good stuff now.

It's just like, and I knew all the words and it was just this flood of memories and endorphins that came back. And so I'm thinking that even your depressing music links you to the happier times. Oh, of course it does. Of course it does. Yeah. Because that's, hence me reading Charlie Brown on the Smiths and, and basically wanting to crawl in a bed and put a shotgun in my mouth by the end of the, end of the strip.

But you know, now that I know it's the Smiths though, I would, I went back and reread them and I laughed my ass off. Oh yeah. It's absolutely hilarious. But actually I, I just thought of something, you know, the Peanuts cartoons always kind of bummed me out. Oh, they're miserable. They were never funny. I never laughed.

I mean, I remember just the, especially like the Christmas movies or the full length movies that they did just being heartbreakingly sad and kind of a bummer. Absolutely. And Charles Schultz was a dick. Did you ever see the documentary with him? No, no, it's, it's been on my list of things to watch for a long time because I think he's a fascinating guy, but yeah, apparently he was a raging dick.

Raging asshole. Yeah, definitely. So I think a lot of that probably came through. I think Lucy was probably his incarnation pulling the football away, you know, but did you ever see that the one beautiful Peanuts cartoon was when they, um, mashed up the Peanuts to Bad Brains?

I haven't seen that one. No, no. Okay. That'll be in the show notes too. I, this was going around last Christmas, I think, cause I think they took it from the Christmas special and like mash it up to a Bad Brains song. It was, it was amazing. And I really don't like the Bad Brains, but they picked the one Bad Brains song that I really like.

That's awesome. So I'm going to have to head down to a Knott's Berry farm this weekend, go over to Camp Snoopy and throw a bunch of Smith songs on my iPhone. Absolutely. But you got to take pictures and draw your own thought bubbles while you're there. Oh, good idea. Yeah. Come on, mash that shit up, man.

Welcome, our guest. We're joined this week by Mr. Scott Beal from Laughing Squid. Hey, Scott. Hey, how's it going, guys? It's going great. We haven't talked in a long time. No, it's been ages. I know. Well, I mean, we were, uh, we were kind of in the scene way back in the day.

And then we, like I left San Francisco and then as soon as I was coming back, you left and like, we haven't kind of run across each other in a long time, but, uh, I'm glad that we could finally get back together and actually have a chat today. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I know you primarily from Laughing Squid, uh, the, the website and the hosting site because all my friends were hosted on, on your service and, um, but I think most people

probably know you mainly as, you know, the primary tentacle as it were from Laughing Squids. Um, so can you just like basically tell us what you do and the people who might not know you and, uh, just give us a quick rundown on who you are. Yeah, most people probably know the blog.

It's a blog about art, culture, and technology, uh, that I started, officially started formally in 2005, but I was kind of proto-blogging before that. And then prior to that, I'd also been running this web hosting company since 98. It's, you know, smaller, uh, customers, lots of blogs now, WordPress, a lot of WordPress.

And, uh, so those are the two sides of Laughing Squid. It's kind of unique that way. So the hosting company sort of underwrites the blog to some degree. I know we do have, we do have advertising now, but it's not, it wouldn't be enough to run it. Uh, so it kind of works out that we don't have to do things based on page view decisions or anything like that.

Nice. Okay. So, so you actually don't, the Laughing Squid blog is not the primary, like monetary concern of the company? No. I mean, maybe it'd be good someday because who knows how hosting, it's funny that hosting still exists because there's so many free options, but there's still limited, of course.

Uh, you know, the way you can do with a full, a full hosting account. Right. But, uh, what you may not realize is that I have nine full-time employees working for Laughing Squid. For the, for the hosting company. Well, and the blog. So I have four full-time bloggers and five on the hosting side.

Wow. Excellent. Since I, last time I saw you, I probably only had a couple of people just on hosting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You had three, I believe. And it was just me doing every blog post. So I did the first, you know, 11,000. So now I've got help. Yeah. After 11,000 blog posts, you know, it's time to, you can step back and hand the reins over to somebody.

But what you may, people don't realize, even though I don't have the byline on many posts at this point, I'm still, I'm still going through RSS and curating and all those various sources. And, you know, a lot of what's on the site is still things that I've kind of put together. But also our bloggers will present stuff and, and Rusty, our managing editor, finds a lot of cool stuff too.

So who gets the final say on what goes up on the site? I mean, it's still me. I basically, I mean, our bloggers will pitch me as it were, you know, and we have a whole system we use for that internally and, and kind of they find things. And I mean, it's almost, it'd be very rare that I would say no, unless it's something we've already posted or, you know, they, you know, we'll do what happens, right?

I mean, you know, things will resurface or like, hi God, we posted that in 2007. Here it comes back around because it got on a Reddit or something like that. And then we have to decide, like, do we post it again? Cause there's thousands, millions of people haven't seen that first time around because they were, you know, 10 or something, uh, you know, or whatever, but you know, so that I always find that that aspect is just fascinating.

The way things that just keep popping up cyclically. Always. Yeah. And we're sometimes it's an older post of ours. We'll come back through whatever used to be stumble upon. Now it's other things that make it resurface. Um, but yeah, I still, I still hold on to that, that final say.

And, you know, we have a masthead with more publishing like titles of editor in chief and that sort of thing. Oh, that's cool. That's cool that you actually still have your, have your hands in the whole thing. Oh yeah. Um, cause I, one of the things when, when I, when I met you, I was running Metro blogging.

I had my, my writers out there doing our stuff for our different cities and we were not that organized. So we eventually got to the point where we had to tell people like, okay, before you post this, go read the damn site because they'd be posting something that somebody put like four posts ago that had moved down.

It wasn't above the fold. And we're like, come on, come on guys, you can't do some research. So it is our search. We just, every, all of our guys are training the search and everyone who submits, we sit on our submission form and it's pretty good. People are fairly good about searching first, uh, you know, on the bog itself.

Are you running that whole thing off WordPress? Yeah. Yeah. It's WordPress. We've been WordPress since 2000, since we actually officially launched in 2005. Cause we all met Matt in San Francisco and I kind of helped too, knowing the guy, you know, like he came, came to town and had a meetup and that was, to me, was like one of the first times that I'd met the person who makes the stuff I use, you know, now it's like always right.

It's almost like I don't want to use something if I don't know them practically. Um, and also it came up recently. That's, that was the, during the, uh, heyday of Technorati. That seems to come up a lot lately for some reason. Oh God. Who's bringing that up? I don't know. That's how I met you.

Uh, actually, you know, I think I met you at Matt Mullenweg's apartment. And I'm like, how are all these people working at Technorati? Like everybody at that party who are very different people, right? All worked at Technorati and then they all went their separate ways. Yeah.

That was the funny thing. I'm see, I met, I met Matt online in a giant feud when I, when I, I redesigned Chris Perillo's locker gnome site and I used tables. Right. Oh God. And he, he had this whole jihad against me. They're like, he got his, his, his Mullenweg army to say, we're never going to locker gnome again until you use CSS to fix it.

And that was right when I was going on a vacation to go snowboarding and I had to cancel my thing. So I hated this kid. I couldn't stand it. Who's this little punk from Texas telling me what I can write in? Funny. So the first day when I got to San Francisco to start at Technorati the next day, our friend MJ Kim was having a little, a little get together at a, at a club and they're like, Matt got here.

It was my first day in San Francisco and it was Mullenweg's first day in San Francisco. And they're like, Matt's coming to the party. Either you be nice or you're out of here because Matt's cuter than you and we want him around more than we want you around. And that was the first night that I actually met Matt in person and we shook hands and we're like, okay, we're cool.

We're all good. And then you've redesigned absolutely everything in tables again, just to piss them off. Hell yeah. I miss tables. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's when in that whole Technorati crew was, that was, you know, it was Tontek and Kevin Marks and such a diverse crew because it wasn't Derek there too.

And like, um, yeah, Derek Pawazic and I started the same day and we left the same day. Niall started a couple months after. It's Niall Kennedy. Right. It was, um, big Mr. Writer guy. Now, um, he started a couple months after and then almost got fired because of the, there was a, uh, uh, uh, what do you call a, uh, a kerfuffle about some stuff he got drunk and posted.

And, and instead of, you know, talking to everybody, he went straight to the New York Times. And so when he went to the New York Times, we're like, well, shit, we can't fire him now. He went to the New York Times telling them that, oh, I screwed up and they're going to fire me. And it was like, well, shit, we've got to cover our back now. We can't fire him. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. It's come up recently because of, you know, back then, remember it was Technorati 100 list and we were nowhere near it.

Now we're actually on it, but I think it's because there's a lot of missing blogs on there. And I don't even know, it's surprising, like, uh, do you know Pingdom, the monitoring service? Yeah, totally. So they, they've been doing blog posts about top blogs using the Technorati 100 list as their place where they're sourcing, you know, what the biggest blogs are.

So that's, that's kind of how we, we realized it was still around. And so we're, we're, I mean, it's funny that we're finally on this list that no one cares about. But yeah, because I, Technorati is basically from what I know with my little insider scoop is, is primarily an ad serving technology now that they're, you know, they're, they're like a federated media type of thing.

Yeah. That's what I heard. Yeah. So hopefully they'll turn it into something because I got a ton of stock. Oh, right. Didn't make any money, but I got a bunch of stock. They're calling right now. Yeah. Who's phone is that? I don't have a phone down here.

Oh, no, no, no. I have to apologize about this. My, I'm in my, I literally am in my mother's basement in Pennsylvania and there is a phone down here that, that it, I can't find. I'll put, I'll post a picture on the grumpy old geek site of what I'm moving this weekend because this is our craft room and there's $10,000 worth of silk flower sitting behind me and somewhere in there is a phone.

So I apologize for that. Wow. Oh, man. Yeah. Those, those, those old days at those parties were fun. It had to be probably the one five release or one four release of WordPress that we met then. Yeah. Good. I think it's good and type in Technorati and go all the way back.

You'll see. It's back when I was like a blog post would be me posting about an event, you know? Mm-hmm. It's pretty funny to look at those because there was one, there was some kind of, it was one of the very first things I went to that met you guys. It was at a bar or something. It was some, I don't know, milestone of some sort, you know.

Oh. I can almost find it because Technorati is all going to be, oh, no, it was. Was it the Technorati users group? Something. Let me see if I can find it. Okay. Because there was one that Niall Kennedy put together that got him the job and you might have been at that one. That was, that was funny. Yeah. Oh, no.

This is a good one. Technorati 1 billion links. I think it was, yep, it was an event. That's so funny. 1 billion links. Do you know the other thing I tell people about that's like when I want to explain how ridiculous it was back then? Tag Tuesday. And if you look on the, if you search Tag Tuesday, you'll find Tag Tuesday, which back then it was a big deal, right?

Tagging. Oh, my God, this is a big thing, which is funny if you think of it, right? Because hashtags and everything else now, that's so ubiquitous, but that was, I think, Kevin Marks and I forget, maybe Tontek. Well, it was, it was Kevin, Tontek, Dave and me and Derek. On Tag Tuesday?

Well, we were the team that created the tags for Technorati. We were the guys that, I think the main thing was Kevin Marks because we were dealing with Delicious a lot and Flickr and he came up with the blog tagging idea and Tontek came up with a micro format and I did a bunch of coding on it and Derek made it pretty and Dave paid us to do it.

So that was pretty much all of us on the team that did it. So this is how riveting laughing squid was back then. So in June 20th, 2005, the new Technorati, that's a blog post. And I guess it was because it was a website relaunch. So it kind of shows how incestuous things were, that that's what I would write about.

Yeah, that was, that was the big party. That was, I didn't work, I didn't have a day off for 40 days up until that launch. And then we had, yeah, I had, I had literally had band-aids on all my fingers and they were bloody. It was fun. That was, that's how you worked back then.

And I'm sure there are kids that still do that today, you know, because it was, I mean, it was startup land and we were like in the startup world. Well, all these things. And I was like, now I'm like the old guy telling the kids, you know, how it was back then, especially when it was in San Francisco. It's even further removed when I'm in New York talking to a 22 year old founder about stuff, which they would just not know about.

They, you know, cause what, like eight years ago, there's just no way, you know? And, and then I, I always try to bring up things like super happy dev house, which was really important, which was just like a, not really a land party. But it was just one night where people got together and, you know, drink Mountain Dew and eat pizza and beer and stuff like that.

And just worked on projects that weren't part of their normal day job. But what that led to was bar camp, which people have now completely forgotten about bar camp. I saw the picture the other day with Ryan King, Chris Messina, Tontek, and like the, where they were getting the domain and all that.

I was supposed to be at that. I remember I was supposed to be at that ritual roaster meeting, but I was somewhere else and I didn't realize that was the seminal founding moment. Well, you were probably at foo camp, Mr. High and Mighty. No, no, no. I was at bar camp, but Laughing's Good was a sponsor. I remember we planned the whole thing on IRC, so I should say something right there.

And well, remember IRC was having its comeback during that time period, you know, as far as popularity. And then, yeah, now it's, again, now it's back. Yeah, I remember literally being in a room with four people at Technorati, this tiny little conference room, and it was me, Tontek, Kevin Marks, and Derek Powazic, and we were all literally, nobody was saying a word, but we were chatting on IRC.

It was the nerdiest, stupid, and now that I just looked up, I'm like, guys, we're right here. Well, that hasn't changed. Now everybody's just texting each other. From the other room. That's still there. I did that with my wife today on Skype chat. You know, we're like talking, and then finally I just walked in the other room, like, you know, this would be easier if I just talk in person.

Higher bandwidth. It's cool that Chris Messina, like, you know, we were talking about hashtags, and he came up with a hashtag, and, you know, back then he was, what was he doing back then? I can't even remember. Now he's Mr. Big at Google. You know how I met him, and this is also a blog post.

It's actually, I actually appreciate this blog post. It was the thing I was talking about when Matt Mullenweg had the first WordPress meetup I went to. It was the very first thing I ever took my 20D to, my first DSLR camera. It was, I brought my 20D camera, and it was this WordPress meetup, and it's where I met Om Malik, and Chris Messina, and Glenda, and Tisa, and Chris was working on Spread Firefox at the time.

Oh, that's right. Yeah. Remember he did the big ad? I think it was New York Times, or I remember I contributed to it, and back then it was like, oh, Spread Firefox, yeah, you know, screw Internet Explorer, because that was the alternative back then. And then, right, Chris, I can't remember the sequence, but remember it's like, Flock, and all those things.

Yeah, I mean, it's such a, there's so many projects that everybody did, and so many people came out of it, just like, they're like the superstars that you talk about today. But you can see the origins of Hashtag back then. You can see his interest in those things, and how later on, it made sense that he proposed this.

But it's just weird when I see hashtags on billboards and stuff, like, hashtag, remember AOL keywords? AOL couldn't pull it off as giant AOL back in the 90s, and now, you know, this sort of open concept succeeded. Yeah, and it's crazy.

Like, I'm stuck here with my family, like I mentioned before, and they watch America's Got Talent. And they've got Nick Cannon on stage saying the name of the act, hashtag, like, if you want to vote for this person, hashtag this and that. And it's just like, where do we live? This is like some weird William Gibson's, like, splinter universe.

It is, because it's so, it looks so strange to, like, the average person. It doesn't, you know, Pfizer or Palm Assembly, like, doesn't look, you know what I mean? It looks very, you know, code-like or something, and so it's amazing that succeeded, you know. Yeah. Oh, man.

And there was a point where we were both going to all these parties, like, since you had your DSLR, I had mine, and we were going to all these parties, and we finally got the bright idea to say, I'm going to the party, so you shoot, and then you're going to the party, so I can, so we could, so we could trade off and we could drink.

That was the whole point. Well, I always, it was like the flicker arms race, because, you know, I was just shooting my little compact cameras, and then I joined Flickr in 2005, and I'm like, how are they getting these great photos? I look at the XF data, and like, oh, I see, so they're using a DSLR, and they come down enough in price that it was, you know, it made sense to kind of try that out, and then I think people just kept trying to one-up each other on, you know, okay, now let's get a

really good lens, you know, or get a prime lens, and, you know, I remember I met Thomas Hawk, who's a fairly well-known photographer, you know, I remember he was asking me, like, how'd you get these, like, low-light shots and stuff, and... Wait, this was before Thomas Hawk had a DSLR?

No, he had one. I ran into him at a party. He wasn't, no one really knew him. I don't know what he was doing. He just got into photography, and he was asking me about how I was getting some of these low-light shots I had, and I, you know, and I was telling him a lot of what had to do with the lenses, and so he, then he was buying a bunch of lenses, and of course, he went way beyond, like, that's all he does, like, that's what he's known for, as a photographer.

That's right, we'd shoot the Dignation events. Oh, yeah. So crazy. So crazy. Yeah, the first live Dignation, I remember that back out at the, what's that park out at the end of, Golden Gate Park? Yeah, yeah, it's, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, like out there. Beach Chalet.

Yeah, yeah, when they first started doing that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and Kevin Rose, when he was a little kid, now he's Mr. Superstar Google guy. Google, I know, it's crazy. And then I've run into Prager and Mauricio, you know, they just, they, you know, he left Revision 3, and they started to think Distort, I don't know, which is, like, focused on slow motion video, and that's really great.

Yeah, I can't get past Prager's beard. He looks like, he literally looks like a troll from Lord of the Rings with that beard. Oh, yeah, I saw the video of them shooting the mini cannon into the ship. It's so great, though, to see that, but it's funny, because I'm always the guy trying to piece together history to other people, like, oh, but these guys did this before, and all that, and, like, so after Technorati, the next company everybody worked at, we knew, was Dig.

Like, Dig was the company, like, everybody at some point seemed to have worked at Dig, you know. Yep. Which is ironic right now, because that Dig is back, that Betaworks bought Dig, and I know the guys in the Dig team, and then they also took over doing a Google Reader replacement. So, recently, I went to a Dig party that was the launch of their Dig Reader Google Reader replacement.

Wow. And I told them, this is really weird to be in New York, and nobody from the old days was there. It was all new New York people in the tech scene. Wow. And I put, like, when I put it on Foursquare, other people, like, didn't, some people still didn't realize that Dig is actually back and doing stuff.

I get their email every morning now, and it's got great stuff in it. I've got to give it to them. They do. And you know what? When we get on their front page, we do get traffic. It's not, obviously, it's not like the old days, but it's getting better. Like, it does send traffic. That's cool. So, you know the Betaworks guys? Yeah, I love Betaworks.

There's so many projects you don't even know are Betaworks projects, or things that are associated with Betaworks, like Bitly, or some of them kind of spin off, or, and then there's this, there's some, like, stuff, like, trying to think, like, Branch and Medium, and some of those things sort of have crossover into that.

It gets kind of confusing, because they also will invest in things. But they just bought, they bought Instapaper as well, right? Yeah. They bought Instapaper. So, at that party, I met the guy who was taking over the lead developer for Instapaper. Okay, do you trust him? Is he good? Because I cannot lose Instapaper. You seem like a cool guy, but I don't know.

Although, I noticed they just launched a bunch of stuff, right? Didn't they just, didn't they just do their first round of feature releases, didn't they? I think. I haven't checked it. I know Marco Arment posted a beta of what the new Instapaper website's going to be like, and it was gorgeous. They did a really good job with it. They've got some good designers over there.

No, it's great stuff. And I was surprised how many people were on the Digg team. I felt like it was 10 or 12, like, at this party. It was like, it's, you know, they're bringing in, what was it, NewsMe, and they have other things. So, Digg and also Digg Reader are going to evolve beyond just that sort of thing.

It's going to try to pull more stuff in. Yeah, because losing Google Reader was a huge blow for me, you know, on my daily workflow. Yeah, same here. We actually had a show about it, and I convinced Brian had never used an RSS Reader, and I convinced him the wonders of Google Reader.

And he's like, thanks. They just closed. Yeah, that was awesome. I had about a week of using it. It was cool. I did not call that one because I thought FeedBurner, it's definitely FeedBurner's next. And, you know, I purposely don't even give out FeedBurner anymore and waiting for it to go.

And they stopped development on it, as far as I can tell. Yeah, but it's still up and running, which is, you know, good because I still use it. It's going to be a pain to flip that over. And that's probably why they didn't want to break. The difference is, right, they turn off they're going to break websites versus, you know. Yeah, they're going to break a lot of the internet for them.

And I was worried about Reader going away, too, if we'd lose some people because, you know, there's a lot of vlogs that update infrequently or also people who source from us from there. But I haven't seen too much of an impact. It's not like it wasn't a huge change overnight or anything.

So that's good. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. Hopefully people, like, slowly migrated off. Like, I tried Feedly for a bit and all that stuff. You know what I went back to? No. Net Newswire. Oh, my God. I went back to Net Newswire 3 because the 4 version is terrible.

I went back to Net Newswire 3. What I know, I'm like, it gives me news. That's all I want. Give me news. I used to use that until I went to Reader. And that was part of my whole, like, just let's go into the cloud, browser-based everything. Yeah, Dig is almost there. It's still missing a couple of features for me, so I'm on Feedly.

But I'd like the Dig layout better. Yeah. Yeah, I think they did a good job. I give those guys props. But it's definitely weird seeing Dig back and not being, you know, Owen and Kevin and all those guys, you know? Right. Because, like, right when I met Kevin, he had been on Leo Laporte's Twit podcast and said something really nice about Technorati.

And this was actually at one of the WordPress meetups somewhere in the Castro. We were just, like, we left and we went down to Lucky 13 to have a beer. And then Kevin rolls in with a couple of his buddies. And I'm like, I went up and said, hey, dude, thanks for saying the nice things about Technorati on Twit.

And he's like, oh, cool, thanks. And then we got to be friends. And we found out we lived a block away from each other. Wow. And ended up hanging out. That's how I got to be friends with him, like, over the years. It's like all those weird little connections back then. Oh, it always happened. It's crazy. Yeah. And you look back at the people you knew back then.

It's almost like you're making stuff up that you would know all these people that have gone on to do these pretty big things. Well, I mean, you look at Soma back then. Like, my first day at Technorati, I go back. Tontek takes me out for a bagel. And this crazy-looking woman comes up, like manic, asking Tontek questions on the side of the corner while we're waiting for the light to change.

And she's like, I can't find this. I can't find this. Where am I going? Tontek's like, go over there. Go around the corner. And she scurries off, and he goes, that was Heather Champ. And I'm like, who was back in the day an A-list photo blogger, and everybody knew her. And in that community, she was like, you know, top of the heap, who then turned out to marry the other guy that I was starting with.

It was very weird how incestuous that startup community was. Because I don't think people realize how small it was. Right. No, it was crazy. Yeah. I think going back now, it's different, right? It's just so big. And now that all the backlash has been happening there every other day or something, you know.

Yeah. Well, you can't even move back now that the rent's so high. Yeah. Well, I had never stood, like, after the 90s, I thought, okay, cool. Like, it's the internet. We can work from wherever. Everyone's going to make cool shit around the country. But then they all started coming back in the mid-2000s, which I know because it's VC and Google and that sort of thing.

But maybe on this third wave, finally, that they can just do it from wherever, you know. I mean, New York, obviously, New York's got its whole scene, but that's not any cheaper. Nope. Right. But it is a little, I mean, it is bigger in some ways.

Like, you can go out in Brooklyn and stuff like that and be a little more affordable. And I like that, like, Kickstarter is so committed. You know, they were leaving Manhattan, going to Brooklyn, and they bought a building. And they're just going to put their headquarters in their Greenpoint building they bought, which is pretty awesome.

Don't know how I got into that. Well, actually, that makes me want to ask you. I mean, what's the difference in the scenes from San Francisco to New York, like, back then to now? Because you're obviously there now and seeing all the same kind of startup mentality. And is it a lot different, or is it kind of history repeating itself?

Some of it, yeah. But the cool thing about New York is that it will never be dominant. It's always kind of the underdog thing. And you can instantly escape it, right? Because it's New York. You can go do all this other stuff. But I've had experiences, like, sitting in, like, I was in, where is it, Flatiron, just sitting out on the outside things.

And the guy next to me was having this big API conversation, you know, loudly. I'm like, oh, that's just like the old days in San Francisco. And, you know, it's definitely, I think it's repeating some of the stuff faster, where, like, there's more people coming and stuff.

And then people who were doing stuff before aren't coming to things as much. The difference is, I mean, Bloomberg has really been involved in things. And he comes to everything. And, I mean, we didn't really have that in San Francisco. Like, you know, I think Gavin Newsom acknowledged it.

And I think Ed Lee is a reactionary, you know, like, he knows he has to pay attention to it. But it's not really his thing. But, you know, Bloomberg brags about, well, you know, that he had a startup and that he used to rack his own servers and all that stuff. He would say that.

It's so funny. Of course, that's coming to an end. So we don't know who the next unknown person is going to be, if they're going to be involved with it. But, you know, there's a New York City, they have a chief digital officer, Rachel. She comes to stuff.

Like, there's definitely, it feels like there's more of a commitment. And that's impressive because it's, you know, it's New York City. It's not like, you know, it seems like it would be way easier to do that in San Francisco. Yeah, definitely. Like, New York City would be like, if it were Bay Area with that.

And, but, you know, that thing is great. It's like, there's so many co-working spaces. There's events every night. So it's definitely, there's a lot going on with it. Oh, the other thing, too, that the startups are much more public facing, right? So it's fashion startups and other consumer type things that I always think of San Francisco as a lot of companies making stuff for each other and then figuring it out later.

Like, Twitter is a great example. Like, Twitter is like, what do we do with this? I don't know, let's play around with it. And it took Twitter a long time to kind of figure out what it would be out to the general public. And I feel like a lot of things here are, from the beginning, much more consumer facing, you know. Right. Because all these headquarters are here.

All these companies have headquarters. And I don't think, you know, at this time you don't have to explain, you know, oh, Twitter and Facebook are important. They get that. So I think they're ready. Like, okay, how do we get out to the next level? And they're here. So it's not like, you know. I think that's a big advantage for companies here because a lot of those companies are here.

Plus Europe. You've got the European stuff that's closer, I think. But it's pretty crazy. Yeah. And definitely with New York, with most of the industries in New York, they're used to making physical things. And in San Francisco, basically what we did was all ethereal, ephemeral bits and stuff.

That's true. That's true. You know? That's definitely. But I do remember, like, at the first Webby Awards, the mayor of San Francisco actually did show up. And Willie, what was his name? Probably Willie Brown. Yeah, Willie Brown. It's Willie Brown. Like, he's not going to pass up an awards ceremony. There was an open bar.

It was great. Well, you know what's funny? Okay, Webby Awards is great. I was just at a party last night, co-sponsored, co-hosted by the Webby Awards. Because they had moved out here early 2000s and still have their event. And they also work with Internet Week.

So that's funny. We have an Internet Week here, which is kind of funny because I guess every week is Internet Week in San Francisco. Yeah. But it is kind of – it is interesting because it does focus things a bit for a week. And people come from out of town to it, you know, and a little South by Southwest-like, I guess, you know, because there's panels and talks and parties and stuff.

But, yeah, I forgot how I got on to that. But the difference also here is that the tech parties are on rooftops in the summer, which is nice because there aren't really rooftop parties in San Francisco. Very few. Very few. And the rooftops are so small that you can have, like, 12 people up there. Here, summer is the rooftop season.

And last night, it was – I don't know if you know the Barbarian Group. They have this beautiful rooftop, and they'll co-host with a different company each month. They call it – the party is called Roofies, which is fun. Hashtag Roofies. Hashtag, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And last night was Webby Awards, and then the previous one was The Onion.

So that's a cool, you know. Oh, yeah. Right? But it's funny because – so sometimes you see crossovers like that where it's, like, people who are not known as a tech company are doing some tech stuff for the digital – they have a digital side. And so that's kind of cool. All I'm doing is listening and getting massively jealous.

I've been based out of Los Angeles pretty much my entire career, and it's like we have a lot of tech here. We're getting more and more every day. Like, Venice Beach is becoming Silicon Beach. But we don't have this kind of engagement or crossovers or parties like you guys have in San Fran and New York. It just doesn't happen here. And if they do, and if they're across town, you're not going to go to them, right?

Exactly. It's too damn far away. And think of that. So that's where you get spoiled, too, right? It's, like, no driving, really. Yeah. No one knows driving. We've got public transportation running all night. We have, you know, even cabs are decent. Uber now. Uber and Halo are in town, and that's another good option.

You know, like, last night, just walk back from it. You know, like, it's kind of nice not – because San Francisco was – there's always that thing to do. If you drove, then you're going to drink and drive, or you have to park, which is, like, that whole thing, you know. So I think that the infrastructure of New York City really helps, I think, sort of support this kind of, you know.

I think of, like, Foursquare, you know. It's, like, it was a great city for them because they're out using the product, going to these bars, and going out to the team to dinner and stuff like that. And so I also have my other little theory about it being a good place for, sort of, developers and stuff is because you don't have these artificial constraints that you do, and especially in San Francisco, where you could work late as a company, and then you could still go out to eat.

Like, it could be 10 o'clock. Amazing. You could still eat. And then you could go to bars, and you don't – they're not, like, kicking you out at 1.30 and turning the lights on. And so you could do that, and then you could actually come in later. And it's, like, you can kind of shift around because I know some startups that do that where maybe they don't come around until noon, but they go late.

And that's just the way it works for them on their development cycle. San Francisco was – for me, it was always about hitting these arbitrary constraints. And that's not just San Francisco. I guess a lot of cities are that way. Anybody with a 2 o'clock bar close time, basically. Which is most of the U.S., right.

But, you know, but L.A., like, there are at least 24 – like, swingers are coming. The swingers are like, yes, I can go to a place and get food late or canters or any place like that. Like, San Francisco has so few of those, and it's amazing. Like, why don't they have more? Because there's definitely people who would go to them, you know.

Probably just city ordinance. They're probably not – because everybody's so packed onto each other. You can't have a business that's running 24 hours when you have, you know, the old Ukrainian lady living upstairs. Yeah, that was always a mystery. But, yeah, so New York's really good for that, obviously. And I don't know.

Yeah, it's – because a couple years ago, when I moved here three years ago, it felt like – I felt like it was, like, maybe 2006 San Francisco or something like that. Wow. But, yeah, I think – now it's – I mean, it's definitely more of its own thing. And there's a lot of people going back and forth, right. So I have some friends that have moved to San Francisco or a lot of them because of Facebook.

But then we've had a bunch of people from San Francisco move here, like Aubrey. You know Aubrey, right, of course? Yep, yep. And a bunch of people like that have moved here and some now going to other cities. So I think it's good. There's a lot of flow. Like, a lot of people I know who grew up in New York, they want to go live somewhere else, which I think is awesome.

Like, yes, go, you know, try out another place, you know. And it's also – people also come here all the time, too. So I end up – all the people I miss from San Francisco, a lot of them come through here. So I kind of see everybody. That's cool.

Yeah, and I think the other one is between San Francisco and New York, I think Austin is the next big one. Austin and Portland. Portland's great. I think there's a pretty good tech community there. Even Boulder. I always put Austin, Portland, and Boulder. Too many hippies in pot in Boulder.

Oh, this is me. Okay, this is me coming from San Francisco saying there's too much hippies in pot in Boulder. So Portland would probably be – I don't know if it's quite hippies, but yeah. Portland is hipsters. Yeah, the Portlandia kind of thing. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of mustaches on the apps.

That's true. Yeah. Austin has barbecue. So I'm big in Austin because they've got barbecue, they've got good weather somewhat. You've got South by Southwest rolling through. Yeah, it's a good time. That's when you Airbnb your place and leave town and go hang out somewhere else.

Oh, it's really bad. I mean, every year I keep trying to quit, but I still have been going to it for some reason. I only went one year. I went the year that we were doing JPEG Magazine. Wow. And I got a tattoo. This was the year that it was, I think, the second year that Twitter was big.

But literally in front of me was the Adaptive Path crew. And this was the annoying part. Jeffrey Veen was sitting in front of me, and he put his briefcase under the seat into my seat because he's so damn tall. But we literally had the executive team of Twitter, Adaptive Path, oh, God, I can't even remember.

Basically, every major startup that was going on that year in 2009, 2009, 2008. I can't remember which year. But we were looking around at each other going, holy shit, if this plane goes, San Francisco's lost. We're done. True. Because it was literally like the last plane out of San Francisco.

We were all working, and we're just like, let's get on. That's amazing. And that was the only year I went. Wow. Yeah. I've been going since 2005. But, yeah, I think it's probably time to stop at some point here. But you quit Burning Man. Yeah. So I've gone officially now south by longer than Burning Man.

Burning Man was hard because Burning Man was like, oh, if I just go – I went eight years. I was like, oh, I should make it to $10,000, a nice even $10,000, but it's a lot more work, obviously. I guess it's not as expensive because south by all the official hotels are already sold out.

And you have to – every other hotel, any other one that has availability, you have to prepay. And that's a pretty serious commitment. Yeah. Three to $5,000 or whatever it ends up being. That's just a lot. But, yeah, Burning Man.

Yeah. I don't know. People still go. It's crazy. Yeah. I know a ton of people that are – they're showing all their photos now. I'm just like – one of the things I could never do. I could never do it. Did you never go? No, I wanted to. I wanted to. But I never got – by the time that I was ready to go and after I'd been in San Francisco and everybody was going, I fell in love with the street parking for that – the Burning Man time.

I'm like, I can park anywhere. I can park anywhere. And then everybody that would come back were like, oh, it's dead. It's dead. It's like the same people coming back from South by. Before it was even dead, it's still not dead. It's thriving and it's going. And they're just like, oh, it's not the same.

It's not the same. It's like my favorite band sold out. Yeah, but my first year at Burning Man was 95 and I got there. They're like, oh, this thing sucks. I'm never coming back. I swear. I'm like, what did I miss? Because it had been out there five years at that point and it had doubled to – it was 2,000 people to 4,000.

I went and it was 4,000 people. And they're just like, yep, too big. We're not coming back. And they didn't even have a fence around it yet back then. And so I think it's still – it's the kind of thing because someday it will not be there and you're like, I should have gone. Yeah. I'm still kind of bummed that – well, I'm stuck here in Pennsylvania right now, so I can't go this year, obviously.

Right, right. Yeah. I would dig it. Well, you know, so the same thing. It's like, okay, these things start. They get big. They kind of fizzle out. Then somebody else starts a new one. So what's going to be the next Burning Man? That's a tough one because it's such a unique set of circumstances.

Because the environment came together because it's the desert. It's fireproof, right? You know, I don't know. We thought of this. Like, where else could it happen? It may be like Australia or some other places that are pretty open-minded that have deserts if you're doing that kind of event still. Yeah. But it also comes down to, like, the mindset of the people of the time that start the event.

You know, it's like – And proximity to Bay Area, I think, is pretty important. Yeah, definitely. Right. That's why there was no East Coast Burning Man. I think you just have that. And there was a lot of crossover with tech scenes from back then. I mean, Google. I think Larry and Sergey still go. So there's all those – that crossover, you know, and things back with Burning Man.

I remember when Wired Magazine started kind of the same time, you know, close to the same time as far as the desert part of it. And then plus then all the pre-existing history of the hippies and the beats and all that and the merry pranksters. Like, all that stuff, I think it was just sort of a culmination of that, you know.

I mean, Cacophony Society is the crossover that I came through, you know. Yeah. And by the way, I don't know if you've seen there's a book out about the Cacophony Society. It's – this is my business partner, John Walls, was part of the early days of Cacophony, and I came in later.

And I don't know how I got off to that. No, I was actually going to bring that up. I did see the book. I wanted to order it on Kindle, but you have to get the hardcover right now. It's kind of worth it, though. I mean, I get it because I read all e-books and stuff, too. But it's a big book, and it's got these great illustrations. I'm in it a few times.

Like, it's funny. There's like an email printout of mine in the book because there's a – back when other cities wanted to start up their Cacophony Lodge chapter. And back then I was giving them subdomains through Laughing Squid. So if they, you know, they wanted a Cacophony website, you know, we give them web space.

And I don't know if you know, there's a Chuck Palnick connection. Fight Club is loosely based on the Cacophony site, or the Project Mayhem from Fight Club. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. I didn't realize that until I was reading about the book, and I'm like, holy shit, that is fucking cool.

Well, he was hanging out with Portland Cacophony, and so we organized these Santa kind of events, you know, where you get all the Santas. And we took it to – after we got kicked out of San Francisco the second year, we took it to Portland, and we were going to one of the stops on the, you know, itinerary. And this guy shows up with a little notepad, you know, like, you know, I always talk to those guys.

And he was writing for Harper's, and it was Chuck Palnick who was unknown at the time. You know, Fight Club, the book had not come out. But he was hanging out with those guys and considers himself a member of Portland Cacophony. And so, yeah, now he wrote the foreword for the book, and he's doing a Commonwealth Club thing that just got announced with the Cacophony guys, the authors, at the Castro Theater, actually.

So, yeah. So, that's the crazy thing. It's like – I know we're going a bit long here, but it's just like – I want to just say that it's like you look at the people in the time and, like, just all the crazy stuff that came out. It's like – and you look at the startup scene in San Francisco and New York and all that stuff.

Now, it's, like, completely different. Everybody's worried about business. Back then, it was more about art, fun, and craziness. Right. And it's like, how are these things going to – how are you going to get cool shit like this coming out of that type of environment where everybody's just like, I got to work, I got to buy pizza, I got to drink Mountain Dew, and I got to ship my app.

It's like, no. Back then, it was just like – like with Technorati, even. We're just like, let's have some fun. Let's make some search or whatever. No, actually, that's how I would describe San Francisco. But especially with the art scene is that people were there to do their art. It wasn't about being discovered. That's where you went to New York or L.A., right?

Whatever your thing that you work on. You know, and that's why even, like, San Francisco would lose filmmakers to L.A. and, you know, or whatever. Like, people would stay there or stay in there not because it wasn't for the money. It was, like, so they can just do it in kind of weird shit they wanted to do. So, I think that's another thing that gave birth to it, you know, to things like Burning Man and all that.

And open source. I think of open source kind of overlapping with that. Even, you know, I used to say the SantaCon event is sort of open source because there's – no one controls it. There's just this model for it, and it keeps evolving and mutating. And I guess now it's really annoying to people, basically.

It is. They hate it here. Like, the fact that I was an early organizer of it would not be a bragging point because it's a totally different event here. In New York? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. They hate it. It's weird because, like, friends who are, like, in a tech scene who don't go to it because it's kind of after their time or before their time.

And that's what I'm talking about. Like, it's bad. It's so bad. And they take over, and it's kind of the sort of bro scene, you know, and just more of a bar hop. And it wasn't that way originally. And originally, too, it was, like, this convergence of all the different cacophony chapters would pick one city to go to. And, you know, we try to do unique things in that city.

And so we did Portland, L.A., and then New York. And that was the last one I did was New York. But it was in 98. So, you know, things have changed. It's still going. Anyway. Oh, man. Well, it was great talking to you on all this old stuff. I'm feeling very nostalgic.

We've definitely gone a bit long on this. But I could probably talk to you about it for another five hours. Yeah, that's what happens. Yeah. Yeah. So before you jump on to the next stuff, are you cool to stick around for a bit? Are you going to run? Yeah, hang out. Yeah, sure. Okay, cool. Well, then, Brian, take us out.

We'll pop into something new in a second. Will do. Kickstarter in the balls. This isn't a Kickstarter, but I did stumble across this this week. Mars One is crowdsourcing, basically sending people to Mars. Yeah, this has been going for a while now, since May, I think.

Yeah, it's been running for a little while. This is one of those times where I think I want a government involved, or at least a gazillionaire. I am not putting on a space suit that's crowdfunded. Well, no, they're not crowdfunding the money to go to Mars. They're crowdfunding people.

Basically, they said, we need people that want to go to Mars. Sign up, fill out our application, and if you are accepted, you can be one of the people for a one-way trip to Mars. No, they're also taking money, though. I did see that part. They're doing both.

They're crowdsourcing both the people and the money for it. And they're taking Bitcoin donations, which is, you know, very cyber of them. Well, that's good. And I also think Patrick Stewart did the voiceover on one of their ads. They played it on CNN this morning. That's one of the things that struck me.

You sent this to me a couple days ago, and I was looking at it, and I'm like, I recognize this. It's like, okay, these people, are they Canadian, I believe? I think they're all over the place. But, yeah, they are looking for people who will basically volunteer on a one-way trip to Mars.

One way. To start a colony. Yes. And it's called One-Way Astronaut. Would either of you guys sign up for a one-way? No. So, a separate campaign to get you back? Or do you have to do the campaign on Mars? Is it a – Yeah, this is – I can't even imagine people would do this, but I'm sure there are some.

Well, they're calling it for – what they're saying is it's for a permanent human establishment. Oh, I see. Yeah. Human settlement. But that's like – You have to build the settlement, too, because it's not already there. So you have to get there and then build it. This is like Burning Man Xtreme.

Well, yeah. We were just talking about where the next Burning Man is. I think we got it. We found it. It's on Mars. Yeah. Except nothing burns on Mars because there's no oxygen. But imagine how good the costumes would be. Oh, my God. Oh, man. What does Buzz Aldrin have to think about? He's the big Mars guy lately, right?

Hasn't he been in the push? That's his thing, right? Yeah. I don't know what his take on this is. I bet – I don't know. We should call him. That is interesting. I mean, I'm sure he's kind of probably coming along the same lines. of me as in, like, maybe the government should be doing this one. But, you know. There's no government space agency anymore.

That's true. NASA just pulled out of Kepler. No, they're not fixing – we've got the Kepler Observatory up there. NASA has just pulled out today. They're saying they're not going to fix Kepler because there's no money. So you have a choice between, what, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Richard Branson.

Which of the three do you want? Well, no. There's another one. There's another one. What's his name? The guy from Quake. John Carmack. Don't forget John Carmack. Okay. I'm going with Branson because, you know, Virgin Atlantic rules. So at least the flight would be decent. He's already flies people around. He's got that stuff down.

Well, I didn't, and I went out with our good friend, Shani Jardin, to see one of those ships fly. And those things are no joke. They fly. So I will go with Branson any day of the week. Yeah, that makes more sense. But he's not going to Mars.

He's just going up to go have M&Ms and roll around and take money. But these guys are literally trying to get to Mars by 2023. It's extremely ambitious, and I'm just a little freaked out by it. So you would – well, you have a wife.

You both have wives, so you have families and would not, you know, obviously volunteer for this. But apparently over 100,000 people at this point have signed up to say, I will go. Really? Yeah. As of this morning on CNN, there were over 100,000 people who have filled out applications to be one of the people that goes on this trip.

Hmm. That's shocking. I mean – well, I think there's always a big drop-off between people who fill out the application versus, okay, we're going to send you – what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's look into the safety on this now really quick. We're not coming back?

You forgot – what? So I don't know. Well, I'm pretty sure the fact that it says one-way astronaut in the application, I think they know what they're signing up for. I think they're just – Oh, you overestimate people again, Jason. What? You overestimate people. It doesn't matter what you actually put on the webpage.

Nobody's going to read it. Oh, that's right. People don't – Yes, Jason the optimist. That's not how I remember. First time he's ever been described that way. Oh, so my reputation precedes, right?

Yes. So they're not going to have any kind of stasis or anything yet because that's not really been – No. It's not that far. It's not that long. It's not. I guess I'm thinking of another sci-fi, yeah. Yeah. But wait, how long does it take? Because they're always doing these simulations, right, where they're – I mean, is it six months or how long?

No, I think it's close to a year. Let me – Is it a year? Okay. Yeah, but I mean, it's definitely not – Yeah, it's not like – Right. It's not like Planet of the Apes kind of thing where – No, no. Oh, no. That definitely not – I just remember that scene because there's like, oh, three of the four made it and then, oh, there's a skeleton.

Oh, well. Yeah, it was definitely – The first one. Yeah, I guess – They're taking two rovers, so you got a go-kart track on Mars. That's something to do. Yeah, it's not saying how long it's going to take, but it's not that long. I think everything just has to start.

Like, I think everyone's just like, well, let's just start these things and eventually it'll be a reality. Yeah. Well, I think this one, from what I remember reading about it before, because it's been a while since I read about it, but this 2023 date is because of the launch windows in the proximities of the planet.

Right. And it's the cheapest. And it's the cheapest to get somebody there. So they're probably going to launch in 2022. Right. I'm guessing. I like that in the fact they have an entry called, what's the historic success rate of missions to Mars? Historically, missions to Mars have had a low success rate of around 50%.

Sign me up! And those were for machines. There was no meat that had to, like, get up and walk around on those. Yeah. And I mean, are they planning to send, like, shipments of food? Are you supposed to be completely self-sufficient once you get there?

This just sounds like a nightmare. Or a sci-fi movie. No, this is just corpse in space. Yes. That's all it is. There you go. So, but you were mentioning Planet of the Apes, and to go back to that, good old Chuck Heston.

I actually saw Planet of the Apes with Charles Heston sitting in front of me at the Egyptian in Hollywood one time, which was awesome. Because his grandson was asking him questions about, like, the sexuality in the movie. He's like, I'll tell you when we get home.

After he shows him his gun collection. Yes. And so, but going back to Chuck Heston, Soylent Green. Soylent Green is people. And the other Kickstarter slash crowdfunding, because there was no Kickstarter this week, is Soylent, which is food for people that is not food.

It doesn't even taste like people, does it? It does not taste like people. You know, it tastes of chicken. Ah. Yeah. I actually listened to a podcast with the guy who started this. I can't remember his name off the top of my head. I should have looked that up. But he was asked by the podcast interviewees, like, why are you selling something that looks like a cup of semen?

It does not look good at all. Well, to his credit, I think they've changed the picture on their website. To his credit, he said, yeah, that was Gen 1. We kind of fixed that. So. Didn't work in the focus groups, I guess. No. No. Well. Well, I mean, when you're going.

I'm not going to go. When you're starting with the name Soylent, you're not too worried about what people are going to think about your product, I'm thinking. Right. Either they're all into it. Yeah. And then they look it up. And they're like, oh, crap. You're geeking out and you're into it or you just have no idea. I love this idea, though.

I've always been kind of like, man, if somebody just made a pill and I just had to take that, I would take that like five days out of the week and then I'd go eat on weekends or whatever. I might actually have to try this stuff. It's not that expensive, actually, for what they propose.

But the thing about it is everybody's different. So they're trying to come up with a universal food that everybody can eat or drink because there's no chewing involved, which brings into other concerns about your jaw muscles, atrophying. I mean, there's a whole – we eat for a reason.

We're all going to look like Roger Ebert after like 10 years of drinking this crap, no jawbones and just like – But this might be the perfect stuff to take to Mars. But they don't have food scientists on their team. You've got – if you look at the team, Rob Reinhart, who's the guy – actually, that's the guy.

He's a Y Combinator alum. Why do all these guys come out of Y Combinator? This guy is a COO, industrial – this guy comes with a degree in industrial systems and engineering. So sales and finance, experience in operations and sales, communications.

Nowhere on here is a single nutritional scientist. Nowhere. Right. Okay? Nowhere. They're disruptive. That's why. Yeah. They're disrupting the industry by not knowing anything about it.

Yeah, and what they're saying, what early adopters are saying, one guy says, as a biologist slash chemist, I approve of Soylent and I really want to start using it. But no name. Right. No credentials. Oh, the taste is awesome. Like a bunch of – this is like when you see a movie that's – you know, there's two weeks out before they release the movie and you see all of the press clippings.

If the names are really small and they're blipped by really fast and you can't read them, that's because it's from the Des Moines Herald and one dude in the Midwest liked it. It's not from Rolling Stone. It's not from the Washington Post. So they've got the same thing going on with their quotes about what early adopters are saying and there's literally no attribution to the – Right.

To the – I don't know. I don't know what the hell is going on with this. Scott, would you drink this stuff? I'd try it. I would definitely try this for like a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but how long – what's your baseline for trying it? How long? You don't know.

Right. The whole idea. Do they have different flavors? I haven't really looked into it that much. Oh, really? Soylent flavor. Yeah. It could get monotonous. Right, right. It's going to get monotonous. There's no doubt about that. I mean even just doing like protein shakes, which I do, and I can get a variety of flavors.

I get burned out by those real fast. But I would do this for a week. I would totally try it and see what happened. But I totally – I'd want to get – Even in the Matrix, they had to use a spoon, you know? Come on. This is just a – this is a shake. You live on a shake. And it doesn't have like a long shelf life.

Is that the idea too? Right. I thought – I remember. Oh, they don't – I don't see anything about the shelf life. Maybe. All right. So it's just efficient and inexpensive. Yeah. Yeah. It's – I mean and honestly, I could probably go live off the shakes that I got at Target right now for probably a year without any ill effect.

Yeah. And probably bulk up because they're mostly protein shakes for muscle builders. Yeah. I think this is the extreme end of it where we're working towards other things with like the stem cell meat and stuff like that. Like I think there's other things. This is like seems to the very end of it where you just have like one thing, right?

Yeah. This is it. It's like – this is funneling all food down into a shake. It's like, okay, if I want a shake that I can eat every day, I'm going to go down to the awesome Mexican place down the corner. I'm going to get a steak burrito with extra sour cream and some horchata. And I'm going to pour that into a blender and that's Soylent for me.

That's perfect. Got everything. Yeah. I'm okay with this. I'm okay with this being crowdfunded. But again, like we've talked about this a hundred times. When you look at the list of people involved and not a single one of them is like a biologist or a food specialist or anything, that's like how do people just go ahead and fund things without looking into it?

It's a little scary to me. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. What do you think, Scott? Would you fund this? I don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't know. I guess what is it – what do you get? I didn't look at the funding. What do you get? Like you get the first – one of the first tastes of it or something?

Well, for 65 bucks, you get a week. 75 bucks – Oh, that's like immediately committing to the program. Yeah, that seems like a bit. Yeah. Right. Oh, okay. 130 bucks, two weeks. It's basically up to a month's supply. I'll go to the launch party and try some samples. How about that?

I'm a little bummed I don't get a T-shirt. If I chip in an extra five bucks. Or maybe they could sign the first package they send us. But the guy on the podcast said it will be FDA approved, which I don't know how they're going to do that without any food scientists on the roster.

That's crazy. Plus, that takes a while as far as I know. It takes a couple of years. And they're expecting delivery. They're estimating delivery between – no, December. December this year. Right. Is when they're estimating delivery. So, how can you – you can't get anything through FDA approval by December.

Not unless they're already fast-tracking it somehow. This is just one of those things. And this is not – this is not Kickstarter, by the way. Yeah. Because Kickstarter kicked them out. They're like, we don't do supplements. We're not in that racket. Yeah. You've got to go somewhere else. And this is the first big one for a new crowdfunding app that will basically take, you know, I want to shit on my grandmother's face for 20 bucks.

Will you fund me? You know, it's that kind of low-brow type of crap. It's still better than an iPhone case, though. That's my Kickstarter joke. We get so many Kickstarter submissions. And it's always the best iPhone case ever.

Like, it's some sort of – you know, it's all – there's so many of those that are just sort of, like, prototyping type things. So, at least it's a little different. Yeah. I do like that Kickstarter actually stopped people from doing photorealistic renderings of what their product might look like in the future.

Because it was confusing people that they're like, oh, that's what I'm getting. They're like, no, no, no. We just made this in Photoshop. This is kind of what it might look like. And they're like, you guys got to stop doing that shit. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. So, no, it's – I'm not buying it.

All right. I'm not buying it. Wait. Yeah. I'll wait on some reviews before I give it a shot. I'll wait until it gets into Trader Joe's and then do that version of – it'll be like the little knockoff. But it'll kind of – you know. Like a Trader Jose from Mexican would be this – what would Soylent be?

Trader Marvin the Martian, of course. Trader Marvin. Trader Marvin. Okay. We'll go with Trader Marvin's. Trader Marvin. Jose Jones out! So, yeah. Well, that happened. Yes. We just had a major meltdown.

I'm glad your computer at least came back up. Yeah. It took about 10 minutes for it to figure out that it wanted to boot again. We lost power here in the wild woods of Pennsylvania yet again. Right. But here's the thing.

It's a sunny day. There's no wind. There's nothing happening. And the power goes out. Yeah. For like 30 seconds. And I don't know if we lost – or at least if I lost all the recordings that I had. But I don't know.

Everything is just Pennsylvania. I think it was pissed at me because I let it secret out that time moves differently here. Yeah. It is interesting that it was right after you were discussing that. We did kind of lose a segment, which is really interesting.

It's a bit of a bummer. But, you know, these things happen. Thanks a lot, Scott, for coming on and for talking so long. And it was really interesting to hear you guys' stories. And maybe we can get them back on sometime soon and we can finish that conversation that the lightning destroyed. Or the lack of anything destroyed.

Here's the deal. They released the location of Area 51 and then things start to go crazy. So you saw that in the news? I did, yeah. Yeah. So Area 51 is now not a thing. So Mulder is rolling over in his grave.

They just ruined all the sales of the X-Files here for Earth. Oh, man. God damn it. What? You just cut out a little bit again. I don't know. I thought we lost you again. Are you upset about the X-Files? Oh. You still there?

Oh, hang on. Hang on. You know what it is? Yeah, hang on. Okay. Yep, yep, yep. Here's the deal. When you reboot your computer, Dropbox tries to re-sync everything. Oh, okay. We'll leave that in as a little tech tip for you folks. When you come back from a reboot, when you're in the middle of a fucking podcast, and you're on a Mac, don't press the button that says reboot everything, and pause Dropbox.

Jesus. Fuck, what a clusterfuck. God, everything was going so good. Yes. But I guess it really does kind of go back into that whole startup mentality when nothing works right, and it's your job to fix it. Exactly. God, I'm starting to sound like Stevie Nicks. My throat's going.

Yeah. Well, there you go. I hope everybody enjoyed the conversation. Again, thanks to Scott again, and let's try to get him back on, because you guys have a lot more to talk about, and it's really interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and I really want you to jump in next time with some more stuff about what's going on with Silicon Beach, or not going on.

Or not going on. I know a bunch of the guys down there, and it really is a different lifestyle, because in all these places, you can just walk to meet the founders of every other company, and down there, you can't. No, you cannot. Yeah. It's a different thing. I mean, I know some of the guys down there, like Paige Craig, who's running some of the bigger stuff, and it's a weird vibe.

That's always been the problem with L.A. It's a weird vibe. Yeah. You know, they don't have that little Petri dish mentality where everybody's stuck in the same few square miles. Yeah, agreed. It's a completely different thing here, but, you know, it still works here, too.

It's just, it doesn't have that feeling of community at all, so. Well, it's L.A., there is no community in L.A., because everybody's out for themselves, because they're a bunch of narcissistic fucks. And there's that. Yeah. Trust me, I know that better than anybody. So do you. It's all good.

Yes, I do. So, sorry about the technical difficulties at the end there, folks. To be continued. Yeah. Well, next week, we're going to finally finish this goddamn book. Yes. That is on our list for next week. Next week, no guests, just us, and we'll talk about all that stuff that we've been doing.

Yeah, I finished it today, and I am dying to talk to you about it, because I think it's definitely worthy of a good bit of discussion, because he comes up with some good bit. And this is the Who Owns the Future by Jaron Larnier.

Yep. I believe. And I do believe. I do believe. I do believe. And this is what I was listening to when I almost went off the rails on my tractor today. I'm like, tell me about this future of Everybody Gets Paid. Oh, shit, brakes! Yeah, that's good stuff.

So it'll be a good conversation that we'll be having next week. Yes, and thank you, everybody, for listening and telling your friends. Please tell your friends. Please tell your friends. Please. Back me up, Brian. Please tell your friends. Oh, tell your friends, please. Of course. Okay, finally.

All right, man. Have a good one, and we'll see you guys next week. We'll see you all next week. 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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