35: Take a Smile Challenge in the Failure Olympics!

Welcome, Brian. Hey, Jason. How are you? I'm good. I want to first start off by saying welcome to our listeners in Namibia. Hello. We have listeners in Namibia.

I was looking at the stats this morning. I saw it because we've only had South Africans listening up until now. I'm like, when are we going to get somebody else in Africa? Namibia popped up today. I was tickled pink about that. Welcome. Welcome. Excellent. I'll have to check out your Wikipedia page just in case any questions come up about your country in my regular pub trivia. This gives me an excuse.

We still don't have anybody in Wyoming, believe it or not. I think you just got to let that one go, man. It's a big white square on this otherwise blue country. That's kind of how I feel about it in general. That's true. That's true. Oh, well. We're going to do something a little different this week because we've been so damn busy.

Neither one of us has had time to do any research like we normally do on the cool stuff that's going on in the world. Again, we've got a few things, but not a lot. Yeah. It's our holiday episode. We're going to relax and take it a bit easy. This is our pre-Thanksgiving episode. Are you doing anything fun for Thanksgiving? Going anywhere?

No. My family is just down in the suburbs of Los Angeles, so I'll be going down there. My sister will be coming down with my nephew, who I've really only seen twice so far, so that'll be nice. Oh, nice. Yeah. Should be a nice, relaxing holiday. Should be.

So I've been to do a little follow-up on the last episode where I pissed and moaned about clients not paying. Yes. They paid. All right. Congratulations. Believe it or not. Yep. Turns out, as I say, turns out, it was actually everything they said.

All the excuses that you normally get that tend to be standard bullshit. Yeah. In this case, they all kind of were true, believe it or not. You know, that does occasionally happen, I'm sure. But it is kind of more rare. And I'm glad you got your money. That's awesome.

Yeah, me too. I was just whining and moaning about that yesterday because I have one client in particular whose name will not be named. But they consistently never, ever pay. They're on a monthly retainer. I send them an invoice every single month for the exact same amount.

And 30 days after the invoice has been sent, they've never, ever, ever paid us. And I have to send the invoice a second time. And then 30 days later, they'll pay us. So they always pay us basically a month late after a second reminder. And I just finally wrote them an email saying, this has happened consistently now for a year.

Why can't you not just send the invoice? No answer. No answer. Might be time to fire them. Well, you know, easier said than done because I need that money even if it does show up late. That's true. That's the downside of it.

Yeah, that's the downside of doing this whole consulting or working for yourself thing. The nice thing is I did figure out everything that I need to do to go after deadbeat clients now. So I have processes and people in place to do my bidding for me.

So in the future, when I get screwed, because you know it's going to happen, I put it in the legwork and actually have debt collectors and people who will hound other clients when, unfortunately, it becomes necessary.

So that peace of mind alone is really worth the hassle that I went through. So if you run a small business like we do, it's really worth just taking a day or two, make some phone calls, and get that kind of system in place.

Because when the day comes, you just want to be able to drop a phone call and say, look, here's the contract. Here's where we're at. Release the hounds. Release the hounds, yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's an extremely good thing to have in place because it will happen to you if you do this for a living, without a doubt, at some point.

So have your ducks in order, just like everything else. Absolutely. So I did get to see Ender's Game. Did you finally? I'm actually – I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. I have not seen it yet. Ironically, I'm planning to see it tomorrow. So we'll see. Oh, okay.

Well, I give it a solid B minus. Okay, yeah. I mean, what I've heard from friends of mine that have seen it and kind of just reading some of the reviews online is it's a relatively solid sci-fi flick that covers the basics of the story without any of the interesting psychological aspects.

Yeah, there's a lot missing. I mean, huge holes. They mentioned technology that they never explain. They never even explain the twist ending. So it just – if you haven't read the book, you'd probably be scratching your head, I'm thinking, at the end of it.

It was – I mean, it was pretty. I give it that. They did a pretty good job with the zero-G stuff, which was what I was really looking forward to, all the training stuff when he was in the academy. I think they did a pretty good job with that. It was – I mean, all in all, yeah, solid B minus.

Solid B minus. All right. I'm going to – yeah, I'm definitely going to see it. It's funny because I think a couple episodes ago you were talking about how you didn't care about the whole theater experience and I was expounding about how I still like it for certain things. Yeah, I can never, ever get my ass into a movie theater. Finally going to do it. I'm going to go see Ender's Game in the theater.

I'll probably have a little bit to say about it next week, but probably not that much. It's just a sci-fi flick that was never going to make a great movie based on the book, so it's good to hear that they did a good job. I also did kind of read a bit about Harrison Ford's performance. What were your thoughts on that?

I thought it was good. I had no complaints about it. All right. All right. I had heard from a few people that he's basically just become a grumpy old nerf herder and just sits there and is cranky on screen these days, which seems to be his normal roles, at least in the last few movies.

Well, I thought that's what he was supposed to be in this movie, so I thought he played it pretty well. All right. Well, good casting then. Yeah, that was perfect casting. I like him. I mean, in real life, he's really bizarre, but that's what happens. He's Han Solo in Indiana Jones for people about our age and a little bit older, a little bit younger.

He's basically God. Yeah, you can't go wrong there. He's got the God complex and he gets a pass. He honestly gets a pass. He's Han Solo. He gets a pass. Yeah. And I was listening to, what was it, Adam Savage's podcast this week.

I have not listened to that yet. Oh, man. It's really good. It's called the Untitled Adam Savage Project, I believe. Yeah, Untitled the Adam Savage Project. It's really good. There's some really cool behind-the-scenes stuff that he talks about and his castmates are pretty cool. I don't know the site that they come from.

It's called Tested, but I've never really seen much about that site. I don't really have the time to go find a new website to read. But they were talking this week about the Mythbusters tour because he's going on tour and they're not coming to Chicago, which kind of pisses me off. I'd like to go see it.

So I was looking at Milwaukee because Milwaukee's not that far. I can do a quick hop-up. And the tickets are just redonkulously expensive, like in the $100 range. Yeah, everybody seems to do that now. I don't understand. They know there's not a lot of money.

It's a bad economy. I'm sure their show doesn't cost a tremendous amount of money to put on. They're not like have five tractor trailers following them around with a 75-person crew. Why so expensive? Because they can, I guess.

Yeah, because they can. Right. I'd pay it. Yeah, they've got two tour buses that they're taking around. Jamie's got one. Adam's got the other. And they split the crew. But here's where I brought it up. I went to the Ticketmaster site. And now they have bastardized the CAPTCHA to a point where it's even more annoying than a regular CAPTCHA.

And a CAPTCHA is those little things where you type in to prove you're a human. It's like the jumbled up letters, you know. What Ticketmaster has done is now, when you see the CAPTCHA, mine was an ad for Swiffer. I was about to ask, are they ads? Because I've seen that recently where the CAPTCHAs have now become ads.

So to get the code to put in the box, you have to watch a commercial. Are you kidding me? I'm getting ready to spend $100 on a ticket with an ass-raping Ticketmaster surcharge, and you want me to see an ad in front of it?

Screw you. I just closed the window and walked away. Right. Yeah, Ticketmaster is evil as all hell. Not surprising. I think they're probably one of the first commercial sites that I've heard about that's using the ad CAPTCHAs. You know, it makes sense for free content.

Okay, fine. I get that. But yeah, Ticketmaster is a site where you are going to pay for something anyways, and then they throw on their own fees and their own this, that fee and complete bullshit fees that you don't even understand. Screw you, Ticketmaster. Yeah, I mean, it's such a rape fest. It's just greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy.

Yeah. Let's Ticketmaster. So, last week we talked about that little coin gizmo to store your credit cards because obviously you have too many and your wallet gets fat. Yes, yeah. We talked about it, and I had a very heated conversation with a couple of friends about it in a bar after they had listened to our episode.

And how did that go down? Well, one person completely agreed with me, and the other funded it and thinks we're full of shit, and then immediately was, you know, they're going to fix all that before they actually release it. And I'm like, that's not the point. Yeah. But he did send me the article that we're about to talk about a little bit where they did start to fix some of the concerns that we had addressed.

Yeah, I think the feedback was so great. It's kind of the nice thing about asking people for money for a product that doesn't exist yet is you can get feedback on the features that you don't have for the product that doesn't yet exist. Well, you're outsourcing your R&D now as well.

Yep. I think the big one was the fact that you could – the waitress or the waitron or whatever you want to call them can scroll through your cards and either charge the wrong one or while they're in the back with their scanner for their card or friends. Take all your cards at once instead of just the one that you would normally give them.

Yes. So now you can lock it so that won't happen anymore. They're going to do pin support, which I'm happy to hear about because if you're an American and you don't travel abroad much, you'd probably have never come across this whole chip thing that they put in credit cards, which everybody else in the world does.

And it makes it a lot easier and a lot more secure. Apparently, they're going to start ruling that out here in the U.S. and they're going to support that with a coin as well. So that's a good thing. Yeah. These are, you know, first world problems, I guess. Yeah.

Definitely first world problems. I mean, I like the concept. If they're going to take care of all the security concerns that you and I have talked about, I'd love to have one of these things. I don't even have that many credit cards, but just, you know, I've got that – what's the iPhone case that you would recommend it to me to pick up?

It wasn't me that recommended it. If it's the one with the card slots on the back? That one, yes. That wasn't me. I don't approve of those. Well, I quite like it, and if I had a coin and I could just slip that right back here, that's all I'm taking with me from now on. That would be great. You know, I just put in my business card.

I put in my personal card. I'm good to go. Yeah. I'm at the point where I have one card. That's it. So the coin would be wasting $50 for putting in my one card. Yeah. Yeah. That was actually – my other friend has felt the same way. He basically just uses one card.

So he's like, I'm already just walking around with one card. Yeah, exactly. But I get it for people that have business cards or you've got your corporate card, you've got your ATM card, you've got your personal credit card, you've got your miles card that you use for this or that or whatever. Sure.

This makes total sense now as long as all the security stuff is taken care of. Yeah. So I'll be curious if they finally roll these things out, what the general consensus is. Yeah. Well, you're somebody that kind of leaps in usually on technology.

I'm never a first adopter on this stuff, so I'll let somebody else get it and then take a look. Yeah. And speaking of leaping in, man, I went and – I sold my iPad mini this week. Right. And I was going to go without for a while and wait for the Retina minis to come out and then get one with the LTE so I could dump my crappy Sprint, my thigh.

But I was listening to a podcast that somebody just picked up the new iPad Air and said that the weight difference was so negligible that it wasn't even worth getting a mini. So I'm like, oh, okay. It went on. And within five minutes, I'm like, there's some good social proof right there.

It's a technologist. I respect his opinion. And within 30 minutes, I got my email from the Apple store. You can come pick up your goodies. So I went out and I picked it up. So I now have an iPad, a 32-gig iPad Air with Verizon LTE.

Okay. It is amazing. It is what the iPad always should have been. Right. The thing is so unbelievably light that I'm having a hard time putting it down. Yeah, I still have a first-generation iPad, and that thing just feels clunky and old to me now.

Well, it is, yeah. I know it is. But, yeah, I basically only use my mini, but I think this Christmas season might be time to upgrade to the bigger version, the iPad Air. Yeah, because the mini was fine for me, but except for doing business stuff, I needed more screen real estate.

And I had the 3 Retina when it came out, and I loved it, but it was just too damn heavy. After about half an hour of typing on it, I had loose feeling in my fingers because of just the way it sits on your fingers and it pinches the nerves. And literally, like, the bottom three fingers on each hand would go numb after about a half an hour of using it.

So I'm like, well, there's a design flaw. And so this totally got me back into it. But, man, this thing is sweet. The biggest issue is I haven't been able to get my Verizon LTE to work yet. So I have to go sit on the phone for probably an hour with them. Yeah.

Yeah. I went through all the online registration, put in my credit card, everything, picked the five gigabyte a month plan. And it's like, OK, here we go. And it did all this cycling. And it's like, OK, you're – oh, no. Then there was a problem, and I had to go reset all the carrier settings, and then it did it again.

Now it says it works, and then it just keeps cycling and says, oh, you're out of minutes. Would you like to re-up? And I go, yes, because I'm like, well, what the hell? Then it shows me the page. It says, oh, if you'd like to go re-up, go to the Verizon app and log in. I'm like, well, I can't log in because I never got a confirmation with my username or password or anything.

It totally died halfway through the process. That's a drag. Yeah. It's no good. I've never had issues with Verizon, but yeah. Oh, well. It's my first foray into them because I've got AT&T for my other stuff. But if I got the AT&T iPad, then they kill your grandfathered old data plan.

And I'm telling you, I'm never giving that up. No, and you shouldn't. Hold on to that thing as long as you can. Yeah, so far, man, this thing is gorgeous. It feels great. Pricey, yes. But for me, it's business. I've got all my SSH stuff in there now.

I'll talk about some of the apps that I got later on. But for work now, this thing is actually really nice, especially with the problems with OS X, Mavericks, and Mail, and Gmail, all these problems that everybody's having. Yeah. Oh, my God. I've got a lot about that. No, I've got two machines side by side.

I've got my iMac and my Air. Both running Mail, both connecting to the same Gmail accounts. Completely, each one's out of sync. The best place to get my Mail to work is on iOS. iOS works great still. So I guess they're working with Google to get these issues sorted out.

And they've done a point release already to kind of fix some of them. But, man, yeah, the syncing issues with the Gmail iMac stuff is terrible right now. Right, yeah. Well, iOS is actually still having – some people are still having a lot of problems with their syncing in general.

That seems to be what is causing the blue screen of death errors on the iPhone 5s that we were talking about a bit last week. And there's been no update for it. I checked out – I'm not personally having the problem, but a friend of mine is. And I looked into the Apple support forums. There's a lot of people out there having this problem.

It's recurring, and there's no fix yet. Yeah, well, they did a developer release for 7.1. So that hit the airwaves this week. Right. Hopefully they'll take care of it. Along with push notifications to Safari desktop. I was like, what?

So now even just regular people who visit your website, if they're using Safari on the desktop, you can sign them up for push notifications for when you have new content. And I'm thinking about it. I'm like, you know, I can see the actual use for that.

If you have like a content site that doesn't update that often, you can send them a ping and say, hey, look, we got a new article or new product out. The problem is only 3.8 percent of the browser market is Safari, and I'm sure not all of that is the latest and greatest.

So you're looking at a really small subsection of the populace that can use it. A very small subsection, yeah. And I would just find that incredibly annoying. I mean, I guess you would only sign up for certain sites that you really wanted to get information from. But didn't we do push technology already?

About 10, 15 years, and that didn't really go so well. Well, that was a little different. That was just all content push. So everything was going on. Yeah, push. It was the big wired farce article. And, yeah, all the IT departments turned it off.

So whatever. So, I mean, this is a novelty. I already had a client saying, hey, can we implement this? And I'm like, no. Not going to happen. But we shouldn't. No, we've got other fish to fry right now. So let's just hold off on that one. Yeah.

I'll be amazed the first time I see it. Oh, wait. I'm not going to see it because I use Chrome. I had my experiment when I went back to Safari when Mavericks came out. And it's one of those issues where developing in Safari with their new web inspector is terrible.

Yeah. And that's the only reason that I still have a copy of Firefox is because of Firebug. Firebug does some amazing stuff. I love that thing. That's why it's been so hard for me to completely give up on Firefox. I end up just using Firebug all the time. It's a great program. Great program. Yeah.

I wish they would just take everything from Firebug and put it in like the Chrome Web Inspector. But I think, wait, because there are different rendering engines, right? Firefox, because there's the Gecko engine. Is it Gecko? Yeah. I mean, it's the skew with the engines.

God, it's been so long since I even thought about that kind of crap. I'm racking my brain trying to remember the actual platforms and everything, and I got nothing. Gecko used to be the Firefox one. I don't know if it's still named that, and I couldn't tell you what Chrome's was. But they are different. Chrome's a variant of WebKit.

Chrome and Safari use the same core engine, but Chrome recently, Google has split off because they were doing most of the updates to it to WebKit. So I think they forked it and gone kind of their own way. It used to be the same basic code base for Safari and Chrome, but Chrome had some add-ons to it.

But Chrome was doing so much development on it, or Google was doing so much development on it, that they were finally just like, why are we giving everything back to Apple? We're just going to go our own way. Yeah. So, yeah, man. Front-end development still. So I'm doing front-end, I'm doing CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the whole back-end in WordPress, which is...

So I got some pretty good swanky new tools for WordPress, I got to say. Because this one project I'm working on, they wanted all this database stuff where we have a list of, for the sake of anonymity, let's just say shoes.

Okay? And so we need a list of sortable shoes on a page in WordPress. I'm like, how the hell am I going to do this? Yeah, how the hell do you do that? There's a great plugin called Pods. So you create a pod, which is kind of just a relational data store. And you can have separate pods that are linked together with the relation.

And then you can query that stuff with... You can either do it with a built-in tag, which kind of doesn't give you any flexibility. Or you can write just a little bit of custom PHP, make your own page template, drop it in. Voila, Bob's your uncle. You have now sortable data fields in a WordPress page.

Nice. That works for me. That's actually good to know, just in case. Yeah, there's a bunch of new tools that I found having to... Flying by the seat of your pants, you know? It's like, oh, let's figure this one out. So this weekend we'll be hacking the crap out of WooCommerce to make that work.

Sounds exciting. No, no. Seriously. Stick a fork in my eyeball. But hey, what are you going to do? They pay. What are you going to do? They pay. Yeah, exactly. Now, I got an email from an old friend, Mark Cantor, this week. And he was asking me about these crazy Linux wrappers for doing high availability and self-healing Linux instances for big data and the old school stuff that used to be in my life.

And I'm like, dude, it looks cool. I can't really tell you much about it because right now I help small businesses and real estate agents get online. That's what it's devolved into. Yeah, you've left that world behind and moved on to the brighter, bigger world of front-end development for small businesses.

I'll tell you what, though. My friend sent me – she called me yesterday with an idea for an app. And she goes through the whole thing. And she got like six sentences into it. And I'm like, check your mail. And her idea was basically Hello for Evernote, the app that we covered before.

And I'm like, it's already been done. She's like, damn, there really is an app for everything. I'm like, yep, good thing people still need websites. So that market is not going to dry up. So that keeps us – that keeps the food on the table. No, it's – if anything, it's actually – I believe the website stuff is becoming more and more important.

I mean, we're seeing the free services, Twitter and Facebook, which many businesses and entertainment entities and whatnot just started to swear by. You have to pay for it now, at least on Facebook, if you want people to see your updates. And Twitter, I mean, that stuff just gets buried as well.

The website is coming back, man, in a big way. It really is. And everybody who wanted their own custom app, unfortunately, they're finally seeing the light. Even – we tell them time and time again, you don't need an app. You don't need an app.

Just make your website work on a phone. That's all you need. And now people are finally understanding. And they're going back to having their own presence that they control that's not part of a conglomeration that's going to charge you for eyeballs. It's like, oh, OK.

Good for us. Yeah, the app thing was always – I mean, at least certainly in my world with musicians. I mean, the stats on people who actually download musicians' apps or a band app is next to nothing. And so the people who make them, they don't bother.

So it's a crap app, and nobody's going to download it anyways. And you don't need it. Yeah, you don't. I mean, nobody cares. They really don't. It's like, stop giving us band updates and go make some more music. Yeah, go record some music. And certainly don't try to charge people for your app because that's dumb.

Oh, yeah. There were people that did that? Oh, you know, everybody – well, there's a lot of fear in the industry. So if they smell or see the word revenue stream, that's it. We could charge people for this? I'm like, yeah, but then you'd actually have to put something interesting in it or some special content or something like that.

So you're basically just repackaging content and selling it within an app. Why not just sell the content? Yeah. Yeah, they don't think about the hidden maintenance costs with it. Or development costs. They just go, all right, make the app. How much is it going to cost?

200 bucks? No. Add at least two zeros, and then we'll start to talk. Exactly. Oh, man. So what else we've got on here? Like I said, it's been a slow week, man. Oh, this Walmart thing. Good times.

Yeah. I mean it's been known for a long time that Walmart employees are a huge drain on the economy because half of them are on welfare because they don't get paid enough. And that's – I mean that's why I don't shop there. It's like these people made over $15 billion last year.

You can bump the salary. You really can. Yeah. It's horrible business practices. But, yeah, so the story is basically that a one Walmart store, basically the employees put out a box behind the curtain. It wasn't like out front asking customers to donate, but a little box to donate – for employees to donate to their less fortunate employees, which is basically all of them.

So they could have a nice Thanksgiving season. Yeah. It's like, what? Seriously? Yeah. So one of the employees snapped a photo of it and sent it to the – I guess there's a specific Walmart union that keeps fighting to get them actually lippable wages and stuff like that.

And then, of course, it leaked and went online and went pretty viral. Yeah. And, I mean, I feel bad for these guys that work there because it's – I mean, it's a job. So I give them credit for being out and having a job instead of just sitting home and taking all the welfare. But, you know, and they work hard.

They're normal people with a normal crappy job. So they should at least get paid enough to live. Oh, I agree. And what I find – I mean, the best part of the story for me is the Walmart spokesperson's turnaround on this. Let me just – the quote from the article. It's a company spokesman, Corey Lundberg.

Wait. Lundberg. Isn't that the guy from Office Space? Yes, it is. Lundberg. Okay. That this drive is a real and actual thing that is happening and not a piece of satire, as some suspected, shows just how much Walmart's employees care for one another. End quote. Giving out the simple fact that Walmart doesn't seem to give a shit about its employees.

That's – there you go. There you go. That's all you need to know. But, I mean, it is that I've noticed. I mean, I don't know if you've noticed this over – certainly over the last 10 years or so. We're coming up on the holiday seasons. And there's a lot of fear out there because holiday season now seems to be layoff and budget cut time.

Oh, yeah. It's always – it's a way it's always been, though. Yeah, I know. It was just such a bad time to do it for these big companies. I mean, a bunch of people I know all over the place are in total fear. They know that another round of layoffs is going to come again before the holidays.

Certainly, I mean, I've even noticed with a lot of my clients, it's like all of a sudden there was money that they were going to spend, but now they don't want to. And maybe we'll look at it again next year and blah, blah, blah. Certainly puts a damper in the Christmas spirit for most people. Yeah. I mean, what was it?

I think I summed up this story before, but Christmas 1996, 97, when Viacom, which was the parent company of Paramount where I was then working, Paramount Motion Pictures, we made the movies, laid off 550 people right like a week and a half before Christmas.

Because the parent company bought Blockbuster and the stock needed to come up a few points. So they fire all the salaried employees. So on the balance sheet, it looks like they've cut all that cost, but they still have to get the job done. So then they freelance it out and contract it out, which costs them more money in the long run instead of less money.

So it's a shell game for the investors that in the end is worse for them than if they would have just kept the employees on it and took the hit on the stock. So that's the stupid economics behind it. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's my layperson's take on it with the fact that all my friends got fired right before Christmas really sucked.

So they gutted our whole department and they kept on three – we had a department of – we were the print and web department for the entire motion picture side. So we did all those bus wraps and newspaper ads, all the posters and all the websites for all the movies that came out of there.

So we had like a 30, 40-person department and they fired everybody, kept three of us. So I got to stick around, which was just – it was heart-wrenching, man. It was Christmas and all my friends were gone. So our big thing was when we came out – everybody was coming out of the meetings and they had security guards everywhere so people wouldn't steal anything.

So everybody grabbed a stack of Post-it notes and wrote mine on it and would just go around and stick it on everything. So if somebody stuck it on one of the security guards and took a picture, that was pretty funny. You got to have at least a sense of humor. You got to try, man. You got to try. I think we need to take a quick break and I have something I really want to talk about because I was up until 2 in the morning watching something last night that is – kind of ties into exactly what we were just talking about.

So let's play a little – Let's take a little break. Play a little tune for the kids. We'll be right back. Cheer you up.

So last night I was doing a little research for the show.

And I came across a documentary by a Mr. Alex Winter. Now, Alex Winter, I knew that name. I'm like, who the hell is Alex Winter? Yes, party on, dudes. It's the other half of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Not the Keanu Reeves guy. The other guy. The other guy. So he wrote, directed, and produced a movie called Downloaded the Story of Napster. And man, was it good. Really? It was really, really good.

It goes through the whole story. Lots of historical footage, which it's like we're talking 2000. So at least the historical footage looks pretty good. It's not like grainy World War I guys in black and white running really fast. It just takes you through the whole story beginning to end and has everybody.

The whole cast of characters is in there. Fanning is in there. Sean Parker is in there. Everybody from basically the Napster side is in there. And a lot of record executives are in there. It is funny. My friend who gave me the app idea the other day, she's friends with Seymour Stein.

She always used to talk about Seymour and how much he loves him. And I'd never seen the guy before. And he's in the movie. So that was kind of fun to see Seymour. Very smart dude. All these record guys were actually really smart. They were. They were very smart. They just kind of dropped the ball on. They thought this was going to go away a lot faster than it did.

And the really weird thing, even Lars Ulrich came out of this looking pretty good. He looked fairly human by the end of this. Once he was given, you know, it was just such a crazy time and people were freaking out and didn't know what to do. And once you actually listen to what Lars Ulrich said, once he had done a little research on it because he kind of opened his mouth before he knew anything about it.

He basically has a spot on right opinion about what should have been happening. So it's a I'm looking forward to this movie. I mean, on one hand, it almost still feels too soon to me because I lived through all of this and it's the industry I'm working in. And we're still, you know, 15 years on dealing with the fallout of this.

But I'm looking forward to seeing it, especially since you've given it a high recommendation. Should be great. Yeah. And I mean, I never really had that high of a high of an opinion of any of the Napster guys. And I at the end of this movie, I had a much lower opinion than I did even going in.

They were they were really a bunch of stupid kids that ruined the livelihoods of so many people just by doing something that they could not thinking if they should. Yeah. Well, Sean Parker is has always been kind of a personal devil to me. I if I ever met the guy, I would punch him in the face.

Yeah, it's this is the evil side of disruption, which is something that's now lauded. I mean, everybody, especially in Silicon Valley, that's if you can disrupt an industry, it's good. It's a good thing. No, not necessarily. You can't stop progress.

You can't stop technology. And but you should work with the industries that exist to keep them going, not just destroy them because you can. And it's cool. Yeah. Yeah. It might give you a big like nerd boner to do it. But think of the people who like, you know, rely on that for food.

You know, you never fuck with somebody's livelihood, man, because they will come back at you. But and the music industry eventually did. And they music industry took apart Napster and killed them. Yep. Bit by bit. Bit by bit. But, you know, the Napster guys still won because they really did destroy that music industry.

And it still hasn't recovered. And we're still not sure how it's going to recover. So, yeah, I mean, I'm just looking at like, you know, DJ Spooky did the score, which is awesome. I'm definitely going to check this one out. And, you know, it's it's exactly the story I've been living.

So it should be good. Yeah. After you see it, I'm really curious to hear your opinion on it and hear your side of what you think when, you know, how they portrayed the whole thing. And in the other side, I mean, the upside is beautifully shot. It is it is a really pro documentary. The editing is really good.

Everything about it, I thought, was top notch and spot on. And the interesting thing was it was a kickstarted movie. Oh, God. Well, well, this is this is what actually got me to it is Alex Winter is kickstarting another movie called The Deep Web, the untold story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road.

Wow, man. This guy's like delved into stuff. Yeah. And the the trailer looks pretty good. And I'm actually going to fund this one because there is a one of the perks is for 100 bucks, you get a Skype call with Alex to talk about anything.

So I'm I'm I'm going to drop the coin and the Skype call will be his interview on grumpy old geeks. I wonder if there's any legal about not being able to use that for anything else. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, this is well, I want to talk to him about the movie. I want to talk to him about downloaded and especially the Bitcoin stuff, because we've been talking about wanting to do a segment on Bitcoin, but we just don't have the time to do the proper research.

So, you know, I just think it would be it would be kind of fun to have him on and talk about because I especially with the downloaded stuff and Napster and you in the music industry. And I think it'd be a fun fit. So I'm going to drop the coin and we'll get we'll get him on the show. Hopefully, if he'll do it. I'm going to watch downloaded first, make sure I actually really like it.

But if I do, I'm going to fund this as well, because I am intrigued in in kind of if he does a really good job of the research and presenting things. I want to know more about the deep web. I want to know more about Bitcoin. And these are all things that I think are incredibly important and become more so over the next few years.

And I just don't know enough about them. So we'll link to the Kickstarter in the show notes. Definitely check it out. There's only 30 spots for this the Skype call. So I need to get on that. Well, there's a new reward. It's a most excellent screening. We can watch Bill and Ted's excellent adventure with him.

Unfortunately, it's only in New York. I would totally go do that. Yeah, that would be fun. I wish you would do it somewhere else. But yeah, good stuff. No, this is really interesting. A lot of stuff I really, really want to know about. So I would love to see this movie made. Here's an interesting thing.

It goes from the perks go from pledge 100, 200, then jumps to 5,000. It's like, what? Come on, man. Ease it in. Lube up. That's a big jump. That is a big jump. What's the – oh, yeah, the Russian oligarch level for 10 grand.

You and I will watch Bill and Ted's excellent adventure together and then play air guitar on your personal yacht in the city of your choice. Travel costs and yacht are not included. So yeah, definitely check out Downloaded. You can get it on iTunes or Amazon, digital download.

I bought it on iTunes because I thought it would be a little bit hypocritical to go steal that one. I'm glad it's available on iTunes because that will make it super easy for me. I will probably watch it. I'll probably watch it before I go see Andrew's game. So I'll double down tomorrow on movies. That's cool.

That's cool. Yeah, as a housewarming gift from my friend that bought him an Apple TV. So we were checking it out. I was checking it out on that yesterday. Yeah, I still love the Apple TV. I think it's super convenient and great. I haven't done a Roku or anything like that yet, but love Apple TV.

Yeah, it's fantastic. The only thing I really wish that it had was Amazon Prime videos. Yes, that would be nice. But I can bring up Amazon Prime on my iPad and just throw it over to the TV. Oh, that's a good hack. I didn't even think about that. There you go. See, sometimes I actually have some good stuff.

Yeah, AirPlay it over. It works perfectly. That's what I do every single time I watch anything on Amazon Prime. So it works perfect. Oh, sweet. I'll have to do that with Apple. Actually, it's easier to navigate on your iPad anyways. Good call. All right, dropping the tips. Pro tips.

Yeah. Did you see this thing about LG TVs and Samsung TVs? They're watching you, the smart TVs? I did see that. And god damn, that's scary. I mean, you start putting tech in there. And the crazy part is there's a setting that says, you know, don't phone home.

It's like privacy mode or whatever. And even if you turn it off, it still phones home. Yeah. Yeah, which is not good. See, and you can't, you wouldn't know. You would have, I mean, unless you were monitoring all of your web traffic. Yeah, you have to turn everything off and do like a packet analysis on the network.

And that's what people did. And they're like, hey, this thing's pinging, pinging home. And the article says that they're, it's calling like defunct web addresses and it's returning 404s. And that doesn't mean anything because just from a resource perspective and a logging perspective, it's still hitting the server.

Yeah. It's hitting a server. So once the traffic hits that server, there's a record made in a log file. And it's just, it's actually more efficient to 404, like big log files. If you're just trying to ping something and get ping traffic and data collection.

Rather than have some processing going on where you're collecting anything, you just boop, there you go. You know where they're coming from. Exactly. And then just spit back a quick header and it cuts down on the network traffic. You don't have to run any processes on the back. And it's very efficient for that type of thing. So just because it's spitting back a 404 doesn't mean they're collecting, they're not collecting it.

They are collecting it. So I do not have a smart TV. I know a couple of people that do, but I, well, I don't have a TV. So it's, yeah, the more, and it's, I don't even know if, do these new TVs come with cameras? Some of them are starting to have them, which means, you know, we're going to have the same, I mean, this is the problem with this stuff.

These things are all basically computers now. And once they're basically computers, they can be hacked. And once they can be hacked, they can be controlled. And if you don't know what you're doing, your TV has a camera in it. Somebody could be sitting there watching your kids. Yep. Or you or, you know, whatever.

You know, watching a little down and dirty. Yeah. Do not, do not invite the cameras that you do not want into your living room. Yeah. I mean, I actually know people that have put like, you know, even on their laptops, because they're so paranoid about it. They just put a piece of duct tape over the camera thing because they just want to be sure.

That would, that would be me. That's a very, you know, it's a lo-fi hack. It's a lot easier than trying to figure out how to run a packet sniffer, but it's functional. Yeah. If you're running OSX, there's a couple deep commands that you can do to basically kill any control of the camera. Right. We actually linked to that in one of the articles where we talked about how the CIA hardens their MacBooks.

Mm-hmm. There's some, if you go back here, I remember what show that was. It was ages ago. Yes. But yeah, there's a, there are a couple of commands that you can just run to literally shut down the camera. So it just does not function.

Um, I, I skipped that because, uh, black electrical tape is much handier. Yeah. And there's no way around that. And you don't have to keep up on security. It's just, unless somebody comes over and physically removes the tape, you're good. That's it. That's it.

I mean, I did that at work and people were making fun of me at work. I'm like, trust me, trust me. It turns out that they were sniffing everybody's stuff and could actually turn the cameras on. So I'm like, ah, I'm not so silly anymore. I'm a, you bastards. Oh, um, so we were talking about the Bitcoin thing with, uh, the, uh, the documentary.

Yeah. And you see that, uh, Virgin Galactic is taking it now. You can actually buy trips to space with Bitcoins. No, I'm not surprised at all. I mean, Bitcoin has been kicking around for a bit and it's, it's starting to hit a critical mass and it's getting a lot of press and, you know, Virgin Galactic taking it.

He doesn't really, you know, that that's purely a play to get some press, which worked. So all the cool kids want to take Bitcoin right now because Bitcoin is hip and happening. Yeah. I, although I still don't understand it. I, I, I spent a couple, no, not a couple hours.

I was, I was going to spend a couple hours researching it, but then I had two beers while I was doing it and got really bored. Um, it's, it's actually really quite difficult to purchase any still. Uh, you, you have to go through quite a lot of hoops. Um, it's still, you know, and every, the amount of legal warning about all this stuff is, is insane right now.

Uh, but you know, it's, you got to look at it right now as like early adopter investing. And because that's basically what it is. I don't think Bitcoin is going to go away. I, I love the concept. Uh, there's no way it's going to stay unregulated. If you, if you're actually going to make a currency that you want to work over the, over the world, there's going to be some regulation at some point.

It's not going to be the free for all that it is anymore. And I know the people that are trying to do that. You know them personally? Not personally. No, but it's the Winklevi. The Winklevises. Um, you know, every time I, I, every time I hear their name or I say the Winklevi because I enjoy it, I don't even see their faces.

I see the two ghosty dreadlocky guys from the matrix. That's good. That is my brain's impression of the Winklevi. Um, they are basically trying to take over and control the entire Bitcoin market right now. Uh, they took their Facebook and their pistachio money and basically bought over, they own over 1% of all Bitcoins in the circulation.

And they've just filed to, uh, they've just made an SEC filing for the Winklevass Bitcoin trust, which will allow, uh, basically people to invest in the currency without ever actually having to buy it from a Bitcoin exchange. Uh, Bitcoin exchanges, the place kind of, some are shadier, more shady than others where you go to actually purchase Bitcoins.

Yeah. And you can, you can still mine them, right? The, the, they haven't been mined out, correct? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So if you've got, if you've got a supercomputer lying around, you can still mine them. But that would, that comes back to the, uh, the power, uh, power usage to create a Bitcoin, at least back then, now that they're going up in value, it might've, might've changed.

But the, the electricity cost to mine Bitcoins was greater than the actual value of a Bitcoin that you mind. So, um, man, yeah, I, I should do more research on it. I just, I'm finding it really hard to care. Yeah. It's, it's, it feels like one of those, this is now like, it's become a game for rich people to mess around with a little bit more than anybody else.

Or it's for people that really don't want other people to know what they're doing, which is, gets a little shady. Uh, you know, Bitcoin basically came into prominence because of places like Silk Road and things like that where, you know, you're purchasing things that you really shouldn't be purchasing. Yeah.

I saw a tweet from Kevin Arousas last week where he dumped all of his Bitcoins because the, the price spiked really high and he got out while he got and was good. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's going to, I mean, I don't think it's going to go away. Uh, I think there, there will also be competitive types of, of products out there. Uh, the idea of an e-currency that isn't owned by any particular government is appealing.

Um, you know, it's another one of those disruption things. We'll see what happens. Yeah. They don't cover a lot of the theft though, because there, there's a lot of stories going around where, you know, just millions of Bitcoins disappear and get shifted around and like, you know, bank robberies basically.

Yeah, basically. I mean, some of these, that's when I was reading into like the way to purchase through these Bit currency or Bitcoin exchanges, um, there, there's, you know, a lot of history of, of these exchanges just kind of disappearing. Uh, all of a sudden they're just gone. And so's your chance of getting that money.

Yeah. That's, that's where like doing a deep dive on the tech would probably behoove anybody who's actually interested in it. Um, but like I said, I'm, I'm finding it really hard to get interested in it because like you said, it is kind of a rich person's game right now. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't, I don't have the kind of money to just throw out there to, to get it just for shits and giggles and with a very high chance of it just disappearing on me or all of a sudden crashing and being worth nothing.

Yeah. I don't have that luxury, you know? No. So, um, I do want to go through a couple of cool apps this week. Okay. Uh, so the one that I got for my iPad that is, I was, I was surprised I actually ponied up for because, uh, I have the functionality in another app that these people making is panic.

The guys who make transmit and Coda and all of the fun, all really nice Mac apps, really nice programs. Yeah. So I talked about Coda light before. And so when I got this new iPad, I was setting it up and getting all my sites up and it's, it's got an SSH client in there, but what they've done is they've, they basically pulled that out and made a standalone app.

That's just an SSH client that is kind of nicer. Uh, it's called prompt. I think it was, I think it was eight bucks, uh, which is, you know, a little pricier for a Mac or for an iPad app, but I, I pay for quality and I, so I, I dragged all my SSH keys and got everything set up and it works great.

It's, it's flawless. I can't, I got no complaints. It's fast. Um, if you need an SSH client for iOS so far, this is, this is the way to go. Excellent. I've been wondering, uh, you know, if there's going to be a decent one and now we've got one, um, and there was one app that I dragged you in called that everybody seems to be playing now called quiz up.

You know, it's, yeah, I've been playing it as well. I mean, I still, I still do trivia for, for a lot of my trivia games, but this quiz up one is actually, in my opinion, it's a better app. It's got a lot more depth of questions and it is kind of funny to, to be an early adopter on something because I've just been watching my other friends kind of join in and roll in.

So this, this app is definitely kicking around right now. Yeah, it is. It is kind of fun. I left the notifications on when my new friends joined it. It's like every day there's like two or three more straggling in and a few more and a few more. Um, the, the child, I gotta say, whoever did the backend on this app did an amazing job.

It is super fast, super responsive. Yeah. Um, I've had, I've had the only problems I've ever had are when other people quit out, but I've never had a, you know, a standard error on it. Um, the, yeah, there's the, the depth of questions is pretty good. I've gotten, I've gotten pretty high up in a few categories where I do see a lot of duplicates.

Yeah. Um, the nice thing about it though, is you actually learn while you're, while you're doing it. I'm like, Oh, I didn't know that. So next time I get it, but yeah, um, there's a lot, there's a lot more, there's a lot more topics. Uh, so you can kind of drill down into some pretty specific things.

Um, so you're not going to get super depth questions there, but it does beat the crap out of, of the trivia in terms of that by far. Yeah. And you can, um, you can add your own question pack. So if you, if you wanted to create your own, you know, just category with the questions that you create and you can, you can do it.

So that's cool. And if, you know, we're going to see, I'm sure what happened with, uh, with trivia as well, where there's going to be sponsored packages in here, you know, the movies or whatever. It'll be on, you know, Buffy, the vampire slayer questions. And then you got your little button to buy the DVD box set, but that's fine.

I don't mind because it's a completely free app. So yeah, so far so good. Um, I did see somebody tweeted, uh, a picture of what looked to be the P list file for the game, which had all of the questions and answers in it. Oops. So I, that's how maybe why it's so responsive is that everything is stored locally and then you just could, you know, whatever.

I don't care. It's still fun. Uh, I had to put it down because I was getting way too, way too addicted. I got way too much work to do. Yeah. I mean, it's funny cause you're also back playing words with friends, uh, as I've noticed, um, cause you're starting to pop up on that. And, uh, I was just like, you were, you were like challenging me to games like every five minutes.

I was like, I can't do this, man. I can play like one game a day and then I put it away. Yeah. I got a couple of friends and I thought it was dead. I didn't know it was still a thing. And then a couple of my friends are like, dude, we miss you. You got to come back. And I'm like, Oh, really? Cause I made, I made a very long and epic blog post at one point about why I quit words with friends because of the cheating problem.

There are apps that make it so easy to cheat. You do a screen grab and you just open the other app and it pulls in the screen grab and gives you every word that can possibly be played. Now I don't understand the personality that would do that. I don't get it.

What's the point in playing the game if you're just going to cheat? But then again, that's why I'm not a Winklevi or I'm not a billionaire or don't have Bitcoins. I think you answered your own question on that one. Yeah, I just answered my own question. Nevermind. Yeah, I don't get it.

I actually don't really, it's kind of a weird thing that I've started to do with like these, these games on our phones or whatever. I don't play them actually with, with too many people I know in my day to day life. It's like this weird way to stay in contact with, with people I don't ever see. You're not even like communicating.

It's just like, Oh, okay. I played a game with this person from high school who I haven't seen in 15 years. I'll keep playing. Yeah. Yeah. It's, well, that goes back to the whole social interaction problem and all that. There was, I should dig it up.

There was a video that was going around about, you know, how like we're getting less connected with all of the, the social sites and all that crap. Yeah. Um, but in the comments on the, the post that somebody made, uh, my friend Liz Lawley, uh, listed a bunch of scientific research, not just here say like actual scientific research that proved the opposite.

So, uh, maybe next week we can take a look at it, like take a look at it this week and next week we can talk about it because it's fascinating that what we, what, you know, the knee jerk reaction is that it's making us less social and the evidence is pointing to the exact opposite. Yeah.

I mean, I think we should do an episode on that. Uh, I think, you know, next week because it's the holidays and whatnot, we're not going to have a lot of time either. Um, it'd be a perfect time to do it. It's something that I've still think about pretty much constantly and I don't know where I feel. I would love to read this, this research because I'm certainly in contact with more people than I would be if these things didn't exist, but I don't know if it's quality contact.

Uh, well, I think the research was mainly pointing to the fact that online interactions do actually lead to more offline interactions. Yeah. I mean, I can see that. It's certainly easier to set things up. Yeah. Or, you know, you post, I'm going to go see this movie and then everybody ignores you and you feel like a loser and you go see it by yourself anyways.

Oh, well, you know, that's how it sounds. But here's, that happens in regular life too. Like you call all your buddies like, Hey, you want to go see a movie? I got to work. I got to stay with the kids, blah, blah. It's the same thing. It's just more, it's just easier and you can type it instead of having to make all the phone calls and get rejected.

It's, it, uh, streamlines rejection. That's what the internet is good for. So, uh, I kind of made the switch back to Twitter this week. Oh boy. Yeah. I, I, I, I am my love affair with Facebook, which was never really a love affair has been, has been waning greatly.

Um, a lot of people seem to not be on there as much as they used to be. People are pulling back quite a bit. Yeah. At least. Yeah. I've, I've seen that as well. It's, I, you know, I don't know, are people just too busy or is it just, uh, things go in waves? You know, if you're on it a lot, you just start to kind of go, what the hell am I doing?

And you kind of back away for a bit, but then they come back. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, you know, so I just noticed more on Twitter, like if I need to just pop in and have an interaction, the nice thing is if you see somebody post something and you can write back and forth, like in almost in real time, it's kind of like IRC for this weird time distributed subset of people.

And when people are on there, they're just engaging a little bit more. So, you know, you can have quick one-offs with people and have, then make some funnies. And that's the other side of it. Like Facebook is kind of more serious. And right now, like just with everything that's going on, I kind of need a lighthearted, really sophomoric, fun humor.

You know, I need fart joke, fart and dick jokes. That's, that's what Twitter is good for. Facebook is more like deep research on, on the social graph. And yeah, I guess, I mean, I, I, I have a couple of friends on Facebook that basically all their updates are jokes. So I really enjoy that. And they should probably be on Twitter instead, but they aren't.

Yeah. Facebook does get a lot of the, like, you know, like the upworthy stuff that I was talking about are like, Oh, look at this terrible tragedy that happened here. Click here to see this petition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's an awful lot of do goodery on Facebook, which I, yeah. Self-righteous shit headery.

Yeah. I think. Well, Twitter doesn't enable you to do that because you could, you know, you still have your 140 characters. So that's time for a fart joke and a tag. That's all you got. You know, that sometimes that's all you need. I agree. The, uh, the other thing is on Twitter, they're not asking me where I live, where I went to school.

What bands do I like? What movies do I like? They don't, they're not gathering all that stupid information that, that they don't need because it is, it's hit and run. Well, they're not asking for it yet. I, I don't know if they're going to, I think, uh, I don't think that's going to be the way, the way they go, but we'll see.

Um, I'm just, you know, disillusioned as you can tell over the, the many episodes we've done with, you know, all these sites that gathered too much information to monetize me. And it's, it's, it's not a thing that I really care that much about anymore because it's just going to happen no matter what I care, but I can still pull back and not, not, well, I haven't given them anything in, in ages, but it's still the fact that it's there and they keep asking me for it and all that.

So I'm just like, you know what? Shut up and leave me alone. I'm going to go talk about, uh, some farts over here for a while. I'm going to go tweet. What? I'm going to go tweet. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to, I'm going to tweet a twat. Well, yeah, I mean, that's, I totally get where you're coming from.

I just, I've just never caught into Twitter. I never will. It just, uh, for me, I'm there because I feel like I have to be because of what I do for a living. And, uh, I occasionally, you know, share a joke or basically I just push our podcast and you know, some people write me back.

Some people don't. And I don't think about it too much. Yeah. That's the thing. You can't, you can't get too worried about it if you don't get any, any reaction on it, but you just put it, people say it. And that's the thing. It's like, it's just drops in a stream. So you can't make it, you can't really make it that important, which is if you go on with that mindset, then it's just, yeah, it kills, it kills a few seconds and you can, the other thing is it's, it's way more active.

I mean, I only follow 182 people on Twitter and I've got like 200 plus friends on Facebook and this, the, I can go get faster entertainment off of Twitter. If you know, it's, it's good for just when you're sitting on the pot. Gotcha.

Yeah. It's definitely a lot faster, which is what I have the problems with because I feel like unless I'm on it all the time, I can't keep up. But like you said, you don't really need to because Twitter is definitely more, you know, just a furial and it just goes and it is what it is. It's, you know, hashtag pissing in a bucket. Yeah.

And that's what goes back to the whole, like I said before, I wish that you could just have a set time where everything dropped off. And there was that service that we talked about that, that does delete your old tweets for you, but that's just such a, such a hassle. So yeah, it's like nothing on here. Nothing on here matters. I'm at the point now where I'm not going to be going to get a corporate job anytime, probably for the rest of my life.

So I don't really care that much about what my personal history says about me and all that kind of crap because I'm never running for office. I'm not going to, I'm not going to work for the government at this point, you know, because of this generation coming up and the fact that, that we're already kind of older and in the next one, if, if you did do any of that, it's not going to matter because nobody's going to be able to hold this against people because everybody's done it.

I mean, all these people that are hitting their twenties and even late twenties now grew up with this stuff and have done it. It's, you know, it's the same thing with like, with weed now, like basically we don't give a shit if a politician has smoked weed. We just don't. We don't, we don't give a shit if the president has smoked weed.

Exactly. So, and this kind of stuff is, you know, everybody's freaking out about how it's going to follow you, but there's, but everybody has done it. So there's no shame in it anymore. Yep. Well, you change the social norms and you change the, you know, the lens that you look at people in society through.

Exactly. So that's why I'm back on Twitter because I really couldn't care less anymore. I really can't. And, you know, I've had, I've actually had clients fire me for shit that I've said. on Twitter and it's, it's always worked out for the best. I mean, at the time it was, it was like financially hard, but I learned from it.

And then I also learned that those are not the clients that I wanted to work with. I've had the exact same thing happened to me about a Facebook update. I got a call immediately saying blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it wasn't even about them. And it was funny. It was still just a joke. And I finally just realized that like, I'm not going to apologize for something if you just don't get it.

And if you're going to be that much of a dick, I don't want you as a client. Exactly. Yeah. You got to work with people that make you happy, not people that make you miserable. And, you know, that client, it was, it was, I mean, it was just this giant brouhaha and it was for nothing. Yeah. You know, over just, you know, hurt, hurt feelings basically.

And misunderstanding and the client basically not getting how social media works, which is kind of why they hired me in the first place. So let me do it. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Mine was just like an art director who I made fun of because he didn't know how an aspect ratio worked. I'm like, uh, okay.

And then he bitched to the boss and the boss said, dude, we can't, we can't have that. Now I have to make an example of you. And I'm like, if you have to make an example over me because your artist doesn't know how to, how an aspect ratio works when you resize a movie, guess what? I don't want to be working with that artist.

And I don't want to be working with somebody that doesn't have my back for a funny. You should be taking the artist and sending them to school and, uh, getting off my back. Yeah. So that's, that's about that. And I got to say, it's been kind of fun. I'm actually reconnecting. I told you, I like, I've, I've given up all my past hatred from my new Buddhist ways.

So I've actually, I'm actually talking to people that I haven't talked to in years now and having a blast, you know, we were friends at one point for a reason. So if you put all those stupid shit that happens in between, uh, then you can still be friends.

Just 140 characters or less.

So after months and months of teasing, I've finally, finally gotten off my, ass and found the time, uh, to put out the grumpy old geeks presents, does it have legs? Yay. Congratulations, man. Thank you. First show is up and out.

Uh, second show will be coming sometime next week when I can find these six hours to edit it. Um, these shows, these shows take a lot more production time cause there are three people and we're doing two hour movies, which means I have to watch the movie multiple times, pull out sound bites, re-edit, re-cut, get levels right on three different people instead of two and put it all together.

Plus, you know, eating crappy food and drinking beer. So there's all kinds of bodily functions that have to be taken into account. While I'm editing or while we were recording? Both. That's true. Yeah. Well, I don't really factor in the pee break, uh, time.

I'm not, I'm not that much of a, a, a slave driver where I count, oh my God, I have to take a pee. Let's, let's clock that. I'm going to get docked. Um, no, it's, uh, there, there are productions though, for sure. So our first, our first ones out, we did the warriors, which was a, uh, a fun, fun action movie from the, uh, eighties.

I kind of came to watch the movie four damn times. I can't remember what year it came out in. Um, well, you can find that out in the podcast. I'm sure you guys mentioned it. Oh, we mentioned, yeah, we, that's the fun thing about it. Cause I, I do a lot of research on the movies before we start.

So I've got like, you know, fun trivia. I find out more about the directors, the actors, what they've done and kind of, kind of go into the history of the movie and the people that made it. So we, we definitely put in a lot of time to make it kind of a fun show. Um, I give it, give it a listen if you like, it'll be linked in the show notes and we hope to do more and hopefully you'll come on for one.

I plan on it. Definitely. Just find the right movie and figure out when I can sit around for three hours. Exactly. So we'll, we'll, we'll Skype you in when we watch the movie. We'll have a watching party via Skype and, uh, then we, then we can do the show. So it's, uh, it's fun.

It's, it's, it's interesting to do cause this, I wanted to do this show just so I had all the experience front to back on how to make a podcast. And I did, uh, you know, everything on this show, I kind of had my hands in. Right. So just to do it, to have the experience, because you're, you do all the, the audio side on our show.

Yeah. And I never get to touch that. So for me, it was like, I would just want to learn the ins and outs of it. So it was one of those things where find a project, learn how to do it, you know, like we teach people when people want to learn how to code. Yeah. Did the same thing. I'm like, okay, let's make up a new show. And so I can figure out how to do it.

And that's kind of what this came out of. And it's fun. Yeah. You know, editing audio is, is kind of fun if you get into it and if you're a gear head and it can be enjoyable. And when it's also fun to sit around every week with your buddies and have to watch a movie, you know, it's like, oh, what are we going to do this Wednesday?

Oh, I guess we're going to sit around, drink a few beers and watch a movie and talk about it for, for an hour. Oh, you know, it's, it's like forced, forced socialization, which is kind of what we do here. So check it out. Does it have legs in the iTunes store? Give it a, give it a nice rating, please.

Yeah. And, and rate us at the same time. Oh yes. Well, that goes without saying this, there you go. Even, even though we just said it. So a long time ago, I talked about, uh, something that I was going to do as far as the back to the, how to make money on the internet deal.

So I signed up for a program on AppSumo called how to make a thousand dollar a month business. Okay. Um, and that's, that's what it's called. Well, on the site, on the site, they call it how to make your first dollar. But once you get into it, it's called from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

Oh God. Yeah. Well, and by the way, a thousand dollar a month business will only pay one fifth of your rent in Venice. Well, so the, the pricing structure on this was very interesting. If you're an entrepreneur, it costs you $300 of a one time payment.

Um, and it goes down to wantrepreneur, which is $60 a month for six payments. And then there's the bootstrapper, which is $35 a month for 12 payments, which, so the price difference is if you can pay all at once, it's 300 bucks. If you have to pay $35 a month, it's 420 bucks.

Right. I went with the $420 option because I did not have $300. Okay. Uh, I'm going to get back to that in a little bit because this, the, the psychology that goes along with this stuff is, um, I'm starting in this, the whole point of me going through these, these programs and doing them in the beginning was to kind of learn the psychology of how these people make products about making products that make money.

That's the circle jerk involved with this. So I wanted to see if this one was different. It's, uh, the app Sumo guys, which means it's Noah Kagan who got famously got fired from Facebook with no stock. Uh, he worked for mint and, uh, he lives in Austin. I, I had dinner with him once.

Nice guy. Um, lots of mutual friends, but he's very energetic, very, um, very bootstrappy. And the whole pitch on this is just how to systematize coming, making ideas that are monetizable as a, that was a mouthful.

And so with the, the beginning of the course is trying to get out of your comfort zone, doing something silly, like, you know, just asking people for a dollar, you know, little stupid tricks like that, um, brings me back to Tim Ferriss's first book where he's like, okay, get out of your comfort zone, go lie in the middle of the street for five minutes, like that kind of weird stuff, you know?

Yeah. And then it moves into idea generation and it, that part was kind of interesting, but I didn't get very much out of it. It, it, the way that they pace the course, um, it's a series of steps and you have, you have to do it in order.

The software that they use is decent. It's not great, but it's decent. So you, and you, you have a group of people there that you go through it with and then it gets you to idea validation where you actually call people and ask people of, Hey, you're in this business with this idea work, you know?

Right. And it keeps going through the process and I, I stopped it. Like there's three main parts of it, three phases. And I'm at the end of phase two because I got to the point where, Oh wait, I have clients that want to pay me a hell of a lot more than a thousand dollars a month. So I'm going to go take care of them and I'll come back to this later.

So along with the, with the course, which so far is not worth $420. Um, and it could be because I haven't put enough of myself into it. That's what they want. That's, that's, that's always the, they're out is like, well, you didn't have the right mindset, Jason.

That's it. You didn't believe in yourself enough. I think that would be the problem. Yes. Uh, so along with this, along with the program, it comes with a secret Facebook group. Oh God. Yeah. So everybody that's in the program can join the Facebook group. I think there's a thousand people in the Facebook group right now.

Okay. So that's a thousand people. If they go the $300 route, if you just said everybody paid 300 bucks, that's 300 grand right there in that the people paid for this program. Yeah. Well, um, and if they're like me, that's 420 grand closing it on half a mil.

Right. Um, so I've been in this Facebook group for a while and I got to the point. This week where I, I finally shut it down because the people that are in this group kind of, uh, circle around this, this personality type of people who really want to get rich quick and they want to do it in a way that is not the traditional route.

I think, I think, right. Like actually doing something. Yeah. I mean, they do do stuff, but the ideas are so bad generally that I'm just like, seriously, are you? I, I, I, I mean, if somebody walked up to me on the street and tried to sell me that thing you just did, I would just laugh at them and I've, I've been laughing at them on Facebook instead.

Yeah. Um, but every time I see these things, I just think that this is the only business that will make the money. It's, it's the people telling you how to make a business to make money. They're obviously making money. I would be really surprised if any of these people like, God, I just, I hate this self motivational bullshit art crap.

That's kind of what it is. Um, was it Orboros, Orboros, the snake eating its own tail. Um, that's what I was thinking. So this is what, this is, there's one post this week that, that threw me over the edge and this is, this comes back to the whole mindset issue and the, the, the mindset of the people that are in these programs that tend to do it is this guy posted a link to a story

about the, um, the 10 things that rich people do that poor people don't. Right. And it was, it was like a percentage based, uh, system where it's like 70% of rich people have their children volunteer at least once a week and 10% of poor people have their children volunteer at least once, 1% a week.

And as I'm going through this and it's like rich people read audio or listen to audio books or at least two audio books a month. Poor people, like 10% listen to an audio book. Right. And I'm going, I'm going through this thing and I'm looking at it and I'm like, uh, where's the math?

Who's, who's, what's, which studies are you, are you citing that show this correlation? Yeah. And the correlation doesn't necessarily even make any sense. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I posted, I posted on the, on his thread. I'm like, look, 80% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Let's, let's have a little conversation about this. These, these numbers are pulled out of your ass. If you're just going to try to tear stuff down, it's no wonder things don't work out for you, man. So this is where it gets fun. Um, oh, I don't, I think, I don't even know if they let me back in the group.

I was going to pull it up to just, just so you can hear some of, oh, okay. They did. I, they, they still let me in. Okay. We have a chance here. We have a chance here. So, so is this a shining example of this new Zen Buddhist you? Well, kind of a minute here.

Okay. I mean, I agree with you a hundred percent. I, this is all bullshit. And the people that do this stuff are bullshit. And when there's success stories that they put up on their site, one of the three biggest success stories is a guy who wrote his own book and then published it himself and sold nine books.

And he made, I made 90 bucks in seven days. Who's that going to help? I mean, that's one of your biggest success stories right there. Great. That's awesome. Nine books in seven days. Yeah. A lot of this stuff is, uh, well, what Noah does, he's like, oh, he gets in challenges with his friends.

He's like, oh, I'm going to make something and sell a hundred dollars of it in like two hours. Okay. So he'll go out and do that and he'll hit his social network stuff up and find a couple of people that will buy his thing. And they're like, oh, look, I'm successful. That, that made, my point is made.

Now I can teach you how to do that. Right. Okay. So this comes from Tim Corley on his website, rich habits Institute, which right there is a red flag because he's obviously looking at people that want to know more about the habits of the rich because they don't have those habits because they're poor and they want, he wants to make money off of them, giving them the habits of the rich.

So, you know, like 76% of wealthy exercise aerobically four days a week. 23% of the poor do this, uh, oh yeah. 63% of wealthy listen to audio books during commute to work versus 5% for poor people. So this goes on and on. And then I, I, you know, I jumped in and I'm like, look, yeah, statistics are made up, whatever.

So I, I linked to the 14 habits of highly miserable people. Um, so this is where it gets interesting because this guy, the guy who posted the link claims that he's a scientist and I'm like, okay. And then he's like, yeah, the statistics may, may not be true, but you can derive lessons of prosperity from the statements.

For instance, perhaps 64% of the rich don't listen to audio tapes, but because the statistic is wrong or falsified, we shouldn't listen to audio tapes to improve our knowledge. Um, this is, uh, I, I, so I, I, oh my God. At that point I was, I was just like, I was ready to throw my computer against the wall because I didn't want to be in the room with such fucking stupid people.

Yeah. So, I mean, I, I just said, I'm like, you just proved my point. Saying the statistics are not true completely falsifies it. So what if 5% of the rich people listen to audio books and 64% of the people listen to audio books, poor people, um, if the statistics are not right, then the whole premise of the argument is wrong.

It, it, it makes no sense. And this got me to thinking that people want to hear these things. So they, they gravitate towards people who will tell them what they want to hear that gives them the positive worldview that they already have.

Yeah. And that's what these kind of things, I mean, these kinds of things are packaged, uh, and sold to people who want to believe in them. Whether they work or not, it doesn't matter. And, and statistics don't matter. And the fact that you will never make a thousand dollars a month doesn't matter because you want to believe that you're the kind of person that can.

Yeah. And it's like, uh, I believe all these stats are true because they are the effect, not the cause. Uh, I believe causality doesn't matter because they are, because they're poor. It's like, what did it do? This makes this, it, I'm done with these people.

I cannot take it anymore. It's like, look, my, my, my final retort was, um, I do know a lot of rich people and 100% of what they'd do is bust their ass and make money. 100% of rich people would never look at a list like this. Yeah.

That's pretty much it. Which is probably why I'm poor because I get sucked down this rabbit hole with these, these, these idiots. Um, I mean, it's, and I always come back to these when I'm like, like, like when I signed up for this, this, this program, it was when I was in a really like kind of bad place and I didn't have the money to do it because I, and it was desperation that get the drives that drove me to sign up for this.

I'm like, okay, I've obviously been doing this wrong. These people must have the answer. Let me go give them my money and they can tell me the way. Right. And, you know, obviously that's, it's like my personal personality flaw that, and I admit that I, I completely own up to the fact that I got, I got hooked, you know, bought hook line and sinker and it's not the first time.

And these people just use, use the carrot to get you in there. And I'm still paying for this damn thing. I'll be paying for it for another six, seven, eight months. And it's a, it's a, it's a lesson, it's a lesson to me. Every time I see that credit card bill come through, I'm like, they do an amazing job of marketing.

The website's very slick. They make it, you know, very convincing. There's, there's bits and parts of it that, that are good. I mean, I'm sure that they force you to, you know, sit and brainstorm and, and, you know, take a deeper look at some of the ideas that you might have or come up with things that you may not have even thought about before.

And obviously the whole, you know, the support system is meant to egg you on. I'm, I'm sure that they have plants in there that are always telling stories about how they did this or that to keep people motivated and involved. And it's almost cult-like once you get into this and at the end of the day, though, I mean, these things I've always felt are like the lottery.

It's a tax on the poor. And, and it is, it's definitely like that. And I've gotten, when I was in the middle of the program, I got into an argument, an email argument with the guy who started it, Noah, um, cause one of the quotes is, uh, the Einstein quote about doing the same thing and insanity that we talked about before, which isn't actually his quote.

Yeah. So I, so I wrote him, I'm like, Hey, you know that that's not attributed to him. So he, like I sent him the Wikipedia articles and all the other literature about the, that's not, it's, it can't be proved that Einstein ever said that. So, um, but it's not about the facts. It's not about the facts, Jason.

It's about whether you want to believe it or not. Exactly. So he wrote, he wrote me back saying, well, that's not proof that he didn't say it. Oh my God. Exactly. So if I got that, I would drive to his house and punch him in the face. Well, I'd already paid for the, I'd already, I'd already paid for the program.

So, um, I'm trying to find, I wrote it, I wrote back, uh, I don't know. Uh, oh, not, um, Mahatma Gandhi. That's, that's it. Right. Oh, I can't find it. So I basically, I wrote back and said, uh, uh, uh, so with that logic, then this quote is accurate.

And I'm like, uh, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow. We dine in hell. Mahatma Gandhi, you know, with that logic, that quote is, cause you can't say Mahatma Gandhi never said. I'm sure he used all of those words, just maybe not in that particular combination. You know, it's, yeah, it's, uh, this, that whole mindset, um, it's, uh, I just, I don't even know how people like that sleep at night.

They know what they're doing. He's not a dumb guy. He knows he is taking money out of people who can basically not really afford to give him that money. That's, that's his business. I, I just, Oh, it makes me ill. Yep. Pretty much. So let this be, uh, let this be a warning out there for these get rich quick schemes.

And there, there are people that have actually made money out of there because some people just need the motivation to get out there and do it, but you can, you can do it on your own. You know, and I, you know, like I said, I'm sure there's, there's some really great stuff in there and it's always nice to have a group of people around you that are supporting you, um, that are, you know, willing to listen to your stories and tell you to keep on going and, you know, you're good enough and you're smart enough and gosh, darn it.

People like you and are going to buy your book, all nine of them, all that'll happen. But, uh, I don't, you're not gonna, uh, this is just, yeah, yeah, this makes, this makes money for them more so than it'll ever make me for anybody else. A hell of a lot.

And, and, you know, the whole premise of like, we're charging this much for the, uh, the program to make sure that you are serious and committed to it. You know, it was like, you have to put in your, your pound of flesh before you're serious because if it's, it was, if it was 1595, then, you know, you wouldn't be serious.

You wouldn't get the results and it would look bad on us. Well, you know what? I didn't get the results. I'm still not sure that I will ever get the results because a thousand dollar a month business. Yeah. Even if it turns into a $2,000 a month business or whatever, it's, is that where you really, what you really want to be doing is coming up with ideas of something you've never thought of before that you never wanted to do just to make a buck.

Yeah. It's like, do the things that you like and figure out how to make money on it and live your fun life. And seriously, just don't, just stop giving these people money. There's so many of these shysters out there. Yep. I completely agree. It's, it's, uh, like I said, though, it's really well marketed and some people just, uh, this is going to appeal to them and they're going to throw their money at it and things aren't going to, it's, you know, it's Anthony Robbins.

It's this stuff has been around since day one, snake salesman, snake oil salesman. Go back. Well, if you go back and read, uh, the Seneca letters from a stoic, 90% of the, uh, self-help book series is summed up in the first chapter of that book.

And he said it better. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry you, you went for that, but object lesson and gave us a good 20 minutes. That's what I'm here for. I, I suffer so others may prosper. I also like that on their site, they've thrown up a whole bunch of logos from like wired life hacker, uh, CNET and a couple other places, but they don't actually link to anything.

So I'd have to go to life hacker and search for them. And I'm sure it's not a very, I'm sure that the articles are glowing. Well, and here's another trick that, that, uh, a lot of these sales guys do just because those logos are there doesn't mean that there was an article. I mean, for, for these guys, there probably were because no agent is a pretty out there, out front kind of guy, but probably an article about him starting this up and that's about it or an app or about app sumo in general, because app sumo sells other programs that I've

bought before, which are just piles of shit. Um, I, I, I, I spent probably two, 300 bucks on different courses on like Facebook marketing just to see if there is a general secret out there and there, here's the tip. There is not, um, there is every, everything you need to know about Facebook marketing.

You could have done in a third of the price of the course by just, uh, doing a B testing and trying it out on your own. That's, that's most of it. You can make more, you can do that, do this stuff easier, cheaper, and you'll learn more by just going out and doing it instead of having them tell you what to do because half the time, by the time this stuff gets to a class, it's outdated and it's already changed.

So, I don't know, I'm getting, I'm getting lightheaded here from looking at this crap. Well, close it down, go get a beer. I gotta get back to work. Hopefully you make a thousand dollars with this idea. Um, well.

No, it's time for real work from real clients that makes you real money. Uh, don't join, don't join the failure Olympics. Yeah, it actually made me more than a thousand dollars this month. So, I'm going to go back and, and make them happy. Yeah. All right, well, you go for that. I mean, I'm just looking at this one paragraph alone that would just keep me away from everything.

The failure Olympics. It's shocking how many things scare people from starting a business. Family, failing, and even succeeding in, you know, italics. This is why we made the failure Olympics. A set of tests that'll help make you fearless. Shown here are students taking the smile challenge. Uh, no, I'm out already.

Done. Nobody's going to make me take a smile challenge in the failure Olympics. And there's our title. There are no smiles in the failure Olympics. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. All right, man.

Good talking to you. I will, uh, eat a lot, eat a lot of turkey and, uh, drink a lot of beer and I'll talk to you next week. Yeah. We'll have our trick to pain episode next week. We'll see if we can stay awake. 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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