39: Beyoncé doesn't take Bitcoin

Jason DeFillippo. Brian Schulmeister. Brian Schulmeister. Brian Schulmeister. Brian Schulmeister. Crumpy old geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong?

Ah, it's the holidays. Hi, Jason. Hi, Brian. How you doing? I'm shoveling snow and packing the clothes and getting ready to go to the airports for holiday fun. Yeah, I'm getting ready to do some traveling, too. But you know what would really make my holiday? What would make your holiday, Brian? If I, like, brought out my iPhone on Christmas Eve and I saw a nice personalized message from Nike on Facebook.

Okay, you're a strange one. But if that's what turns you on, then all right. Well, does that turn anyone on? I'm getting really annoyed by this because not only am I being asked to do it for all my clients, I've talked to some other people. Everybody has to do their updates for, let's just say, merry holidays or something generic that doesn't offend anyone for no particular reason.

Who gives a fuck? I don't care if some celebrity posts a crap can message that some peon is obviously posting for them on December 25th saying, Well, boy, I hope you have a happy holiday. Yeah, because nobody's online. It's the worst. The day after Christmas is like the worst day in the world to do anything or even on Christmas. People are busy.

People are busy and nobody cares and it doesn't mean anything. And what the fuck? Why do we have to do this stupid shit? What's wrong with people? Well, charge 4X for holiday hazard pay. Yeah, that's probably the way to go about it. But I mean, really, I mean, it's, I know you're saying nobody's online. I don't think that's true anymore, especially with mobile phones.

I think people are going to be sitting around with their families, bored out of their mind, whipping out their phone and checking Facebook. But still, who cares? Do you need to be wished a generic merry holiday from Rihanna? Is it going to make a difference to you in your life? Uh, nope.

No, I don't think so. No, I have no... Even on any other day, it wouldn't matter to me. No, even on any other... You know, but you know what I'm saying. I mean, I get it if like, okay, say the celebrity or whoever is really involved on Twitter and, you know, goes on and writes a personal message or takes a photo, that's pretty cool. All right, fine.

But generic stupid message to be posted on December 25th for Brand X. Dumb, stupid, lame. Can we get over it and move on? I'm with you. I'm with you. I've actually turned down three jobs because I've got a... After this last one, I finally shipped the other day.

I have a personal moratorium. I am not working until January 12th. Wow. I'm taking some time off and just staying the hell away from WordPress, PHP, CSS, HTML5, 6, 7, whatever.

This is some time to recuperate and that. And I did this crazy 300 stair challenge with my Fitbit two days ago and my legs don't work. So I need some recuperation anyway. Yeah, I'm unfortunately not quite so lucky. I do have a break from anything major and I've kind of canned a bunch of things ahead of time.

But I do have to do small updates pretty much daily up until the 20... on the 24th. And then I told everybody they can piss off for about three or four days and I come back a little bit before that. Okay. Whee! And I'll be seeing you in about two weeks hanging out in lovely Venice Beach.

That's right. We can try to do a live podcast from Finns, although I have a feeling we'll end up doing it back here just because of noise. But we'll see. We'll see. We'll wing it. We shall wing it, as we always do. At some point, we will have some beverages and talk into microphones and record it to a computer.

Yes. Yes, that will happen. Any other crazy holiday plans while you're out? Are you doing anything with clients while you're in... You're going to Toronto, right? Yeah, I am going to Toronto. I've got a couple meetings scheduled, but they're kind of more of the let's sit around and drink and talk about things type of meetings, which I don't mind those at all.

So it's more personal. Those are the best kind. It's more of the FaceTime stuff and hanging out with some people I actually really like and enjoy. So we'll chat a little bit. You know, it'll be like five minutes of, all right, so this is what we want to do next year and here's how little money we're going to pay you to do it. And then I keep buying them beers and I get the money up and then we have five.

Do you have like the contract on your iPad that they can just sign with their drunken finger at the end of the night with the number? No, but now that you've mentioned that, I will. Yeah, PDF pen. Get a copy of PDF pen, bro, and roll with it. Exactly. So yeah, that's about it. I'm just hanging out here.

You know, we've got some nice warm weather for the holidays, as we always do, until Christmas Day. And then I go off to Toronto for about a week and a half, and then I come back here and you show up shortly thereafter. So, woohoo, woohoo. Okay. Yeah. It's going to be nice to get away from the computer for a while, catch up on my reading, my podcasts, my audiobooks.

So not really getting away from the computer, really. Well, mostly from the computer. I've got my iPad, so most of my interaction will happen on my iPad, which I still haven't gotten the damn Verizon LTE to work yet. You're going to have to sort that out now. I know. I was going to do it today before my flight, but I think I'm going to miss it.

I think they're going to be closed. So, guess what? Aw. Aw. I have two hours of offline time while I'm in the air on my crappy little two-seater jet. Still safer than driving. It is. It is.

In the news. We have been lambasted before about being grumpy and grinchy, and this is the humbug season after all.

I would like to start off our In the News section today with a happy tale. Okay. So, apparently on Reddit, there's the whole secret Santa thing that I did not know about because I don't use Reddit. Yeah. But it's a great little story about – here's the title of it.

Spoiler alert. Bill Gates did not get you because he got me. So, this is a story of this girl who got Bill Gates as her secret Santa. Wow. Bill Gates is on Reddit. So, it's pretty cool. And she got a stuffed cow and noticed that a donation was made in her name to a charity, and the stuffed cow actually represented a real cow.

Right. She got a book signed by Mr. Gates, and to prove it was actually him, he took a picture of the presents and put them in with the package. That is awesome. It is really cool. You know, you and I have fought Mac and PC since we basically met each other, and I'm coming around to saying that Mac is better, but I love Bill Gates.

I do, too. I totally love him. I just love that guy. He is awesome. He is by far the nicest and probably coolest and definitely most generous tech guy out there. But here's the other great part about him. He is a ruthless motherfucker. Oh, yeah. He will cut you.

Did you see the South Park suite where they had the Xbox or the X-Bone versus the PS4? Yeah. And he was all tatted up and killed the guy from Sony. It was awesome. It totally was a Sons of Anarchy moment. I loved it. But that's how I like to think of Bill Gates.

All tatted up and just ready to cut a bitch. And that's about right. So let's transition to a tech magnet that isn't so cool, Mr. Zuckerberg. Okay. Let's get down to our core here. Let's get down to that. Let's get back to grumpy and angry now that we've gotten the nice Christmas story out of the way.

Now, I almost thought that this should go in the security section, but, you know, we don't really expect anything good to come out of Facebook anyways. But I was even surprised by this one. This one got me. Did you know that, say, you got your little Facebook status up there and you're about to type something in and maybe, I mean, this has never happened to you or me, Jason.

Maybe you had a few drinks and you start typing an update, like, fuck you, you motherfucking fucking client name, client name, client name. And then you go delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. I'm not, of course, I can't do that. And then you don't send it. Usually I send it, but.

Yeah, usually I send it to get a couple phone calls in about 25 minutes. But, yeah, you know, say you didn't send it and you just, you know, you didn't post it and you deleted it. You think nobody's ever going to see that, right? You'd be wrong. You would be wrong. Facebook saves all of that connected to your name and your account.

They know everything that you've always typed in. To be fair, it says that they don't know exactly what you typed. There's the fact that you typed something and deleted it, which I call. I call bullshit on that. Balderdash is what I was going to say.

I call balderdash. Hooey, sir. Hooey. Because think about it. When you're typing and you paste in a link and then it automatically just goes off and finds everything relevant about the link and populates the link box. Yes, it is. Every keystroke is sent to them.

They know exactly what you're doing. And this article talks about a scientific paper that these little nerdlings at Facebook wrote about, you know, how they feel that Facebook is being cheated by people not actually posting what they wanted to say.

Because it would, it would, it would, it would, it would, it would certainly expand the human discourse. Yes. Yeah. Die in a fire, you little shit. Yeah. It's very funny. I mean, it ties in with, with the book I'm still rereading, which is the truth machine is kind of like this.

It's just like, let's get everything out there or the circle, which we also just talked about recently. But no, no, this is not fair, Facebook. You do not get to do that. They say it's covered under the terms of service. Of course it is. Everything's covered under the terms of service. Because you're quote unquote interacting with Facebook. So for Christmas this year, let's all send Mr. Zuckerberg a nice little message and everybody type into your browser, or type into the little status window, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and then delete it and then don't post it.

Okay. I think, I think people do that all day, every day anyway. Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, this creeped me out enough to pull basically every bit of content I have. I've been on the fence with the Facebook content and all that because it's just, it's, I mean, yeah, it's nice to read what other people write.

But I'm so over them and everything about them, it, it, it, this just is the, to the point where I was just, I got my skin crawled, you know, it really did. I mean, yeah, you can do it. It's, I think they're probably using backbone JS or whatever to capture every keystroke and spit it off over to them.

Yeah. You know what? No, no. If I don't hit enter, go fuck yourself. I agree. It's kind of bullshit, but you know, it gets back to the story of, of what's your alternate option. And your alternate option is to set up your own blog and then only use these social networks to kind of point things over there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is just a lot of work for, for too many people.

Speaking of, let's transition. Okay. Hang on one second. Okay. I do believe, I do believe we have a guest on the line. Oh, okay. Hello.

Welcome to the show, Mr. Sean Bonner. Thanks for having me. You just came in at the tail end of us talking about how Facebook captures every keystroke that you never post. How, how can you, how can you hate on Facebook? Come on, come on.

They're so good. They're so giving and generous. Yeah. So just looking out for the community. I mean, maybe, you know, maybe that, maybe that email that you forgot to send you, you want to have all those, all those things back later, you know? Just in case. Yeah. Just in case. Maybe you forget. It'd be great if Facebook actually accidentally posted those to your timeline like they did with private messages a while back.

Yeah. The just in case you forgot feature. Yeah. You meant to post this. We know it. Well, you know, in, in the effort of, and, uh, intention of sharing, you know, just because you decided not to doesn't mean that your friends don't want to know about it. Exactly.

So on, on the subject of sharing, we're going to, we're going to roll into our next little story here since you hit us in the middle of the news segment. Um, Kevin Rose came out with a new prototype this week called tiny, which is a blogging platform that uses you as the background.

Have you seen this? I haven't. No, it is. It is. Um, my, my notes on this, Brian, Brian, what did you say? You said it was kind of silly. I think I said it was kind of fucking retarded. Yeah. I, it's a, it's a, you know, the, the concept behind it is just stupid anyways, but, um, it's, you know, it'll take a photo or a short video of you as you're recording your blog and then post that as a background.

Yeah. It uses your webcam and then fuzzes you out with the option of filters. Yeah. I'll Instagram to make you the, uh, the subject and possibly in the future when people are reading your blog, if you're in front of your computer, it will show you at your computer while you're working while people read your post.

Again, you know, people, people work in front of their computers naked. I don't know if this is a hot idea. No, it's definitely not. So it's, so it's, so it's WordPress with a fancy background. Pretty much. Yeah. Hijacking, hijacking your, your, uh, hijacking your webcam.

Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I think it's more like medium, you know, cause that's the, the hot thing du jour. Yeah. I, you know, I actually, I gotta say writing in medium is a dream. Like I, I wish that every other blogging platform or, or editor or anything had medium's interface to write because typing in medium is delightful.

Um, but you know, you don't get a fancy webcam background. No, you don't. The problem with medium is also that it's not your content anymore. It's theirs and they get all the, there's, there's issues. They get the future revenue, you know? Yeah. There's, there's issues that go along with all of this stuff. Of course, that said, yes, I, I, I type stuff in medium and then copy it elsewhere because I love, I love their editor.

No, it is. It is. They have done a fantastic job with that. I, I have written in it, but I haven't posted anything because I'm like, I just posted on my site. What the fuck? But I'll write, I'll write it in theirs. Posted both places because the stats they give you are quite interesting. The really cool thing, the really cool stat that, that medium gives that nobody else does is it tells you how many people actually read your post to the end, which I think is, is kind of cool, especially if you're writing something that's a little bit longer than, you know, like a 30 second read or something.

If you're writing something that's maybe a, you know, a five or a 10 minute read, um, to be able to see how many people actually, um, finished it all the way to the end is kind of nice. That's good stats. Cause I definitely want to know if they made it to number 10 on my listicle. Right. You can see when you lost them exactly.

Yeah. It's a good way to AB test an article. You'd send it out to 20 people, like two different versions and see where they stopped and then you fix your work. Yeah. The funny thing about that is that's like 10 year old tech. It's not hard to do. Just nobody baked it in. Yeah. I do, I do like the, um, the fact that the, by default, they tell you what the, you okay there?

Yep. Sorry about that. No worries. They tell you, they do have the average read time because if it's more than four minutes, that shit goes straight to Instapaper. Where it's never, ever, ever seen again. Oh no, no. That, that is crapper, crapper reading material for, for days. It's perfect. I actually, I love the average read time.

I've started to see that show up on like, I think salon.com uses it. And that does make me decide whether I'm going to read through an article or not. That's, it's a genius little bit of stat to have on everything. Yeah, absolutely. How catchy is the headline and the read time? If those things match up, I'll read it. Yeah. Otherwise, I'm out.

Yeah. And it's a three line WordPress plugin if you're, if you're so inclined. It's quite nice for sure. So since we have you on the show, I wanted to talk to you, well, I definitely want to talk to you about a couple of things. But we were waiting for another guest hopefully to show up so we can have our, our full on bitch fest about the town of San Francisco.

Brian and I have been talking a lot offline about Bitcoin, but none of us have really had any time to do like a deep dive on it. But I see that you are a huge Bitcoin follower. So I find it interesting. I don't, I don't know that I'm a Bitcoin follower. I find, I find it quite fascinating and, and especially everything that's kind of going around with it.

Yeah. So, so I, I, I wouldn't say I'm an expert or anything like that, but I've, I've definitely done a bunch of digging on it. I also did see that they, it dove recently, I believe, like pretty bad, correct? Yeah, it did. Um, but, uh, I mean, that's happened several times now.

And, and, you know, the thing is, is if you're, if you're really sort of watching it and what's going on with it, you can see exactly what, what, what's happening. And with this most recent dive, what happened is there's one, uh, one trading site in China, which changed a policy and unlinked, uh, people's bank accounts.

And, you know, you, you couldn't, you couldn't link up a bank account to your, to your buying account or whatever. And so it was literally one policy change that changed, that, you know, changed the, the sort of valuation from around a thousand bucks down to 500. Um, but it's back up to about 700 now.

And I mean, that was only, that's only, you know, the past 48 hours or so that all that that's been going on with. Um, but if you're paying attention to that, you can sort of see when something like that happens. And if, and if you're, you know, the buying type, then that's, that's when you want to jump in, I suppose. Right.

So you want to figure out how to hack a site, you have the, have the tank and, uh, then buy and then sell when it comes back up. Yeah. I mean, I, I think it's still, it's still early on enough that, you know, really, really little things like that make, make huge differences, you know? And so, so even for some of the other, it's almost like a third world currency compared to, you know, the dollar or whatever in that, so, so crazily.

Yeah. And, and there's little things that you can sort of look forward to, and especially with some of the other, you know, sort of like the, the secondary things right now. So, so the one that I think is most interesting is Litecoin. Um, and, uh, you know, one of the really big, um, Bitcoin trading sites, Mount Gox in, uh, that's from Japan, it was one of the first ones and it's still like one of the main exchanges that people look for to see what, what the rates are.

Mount Gox has already announced that sometime in the new year, they're going to start, um, trading in Litecoin too. So you can, you sort of know ahead of time that at some point in the very near future, Litecoin is going to go through the roof because this site that everyone uses is going to start allowing you to trade in it, you know?

So it's like just, just sort of paying attention to little things like that. Um, you can predict a lot of stuff with it right now. I think, I think one of the fascinating stories that came out was there was, there was a big heist recently, wasn't there? Where people were like tracking the coins like in real time. Well, they were trying to find a drive that was like in a garbage dump or something.

That was a different, that was a different one, which is just insane to me, but I guess no different than say you had $10,000 in your wallet and threw it in the trash. Yeah, because I mean that, that's the piece of it too, right? Because it's not, it's not backed by a government, right? There's no, there's no sort of single authority someplace else that's guaranteeing it.

Like the, that, that currency itself, that's it, right? So it's like a dollar bill. Like you either have the dollar or you don't have the dollar. Yeah. And, uh, and so, yeah, if you have, if you have a hard drive that has all of your encrypted, um, coins on it and then you throw out the hard drive, like that's it. There's no, there's no other place for, you know, you, you threw out the backpack full of money, like you're screwed now.

Um, but there, so there's this thing called the blockchain, which is basically, um, completely transparent of every single transaction that's happening with Bitcoin at any point. So that, that makes it quite interesting, right? Because if I say I'm going to buy, uh, you know, I want to buy your car or something and you're trying to decide whether to trust me, you know, to give me the car or not, whether this transaction is going to go through.

I can give you my public address and you can actually go and see exactly what's in my account or what isn't like everything is completely transparent. There's no, there's no hidden transactions or anything. And so, yeah, so there was a huge heist and, and literally these people were watching the guy who stole their coins, transfer them and transfer them and transfer them and cheat.

And they were like chasing this guy, you know, across, across the, you know, the, the blockchain seeing where he was, where he's transferring the money and trying to get little bits of it and messing up his transfers in the process. Yeah. Cause there's that, that whole, the whole, uh, concept of what is it?

Tumbling. Yeah. Yeah. We're basically laundering the money through different, different sites to kind of like mask where they, where they're going and where they're coming from. I thought it was fascinating. I was, I was like riveted by that. I'm like, that part's fun. Yeah. Yeah. Because basically if you have, you know, if you have a hundred bitcoins and you're just going to transfer a hundred bitcoins, you know, to three different people, you can see, well, a hundred bitcoins, a hundred bitcoins, a hundred bitcoins, a hundred bitcoins.

But if I say, I'm going to send one Bitcoin here and two Bitcoins here and half a Bitcoin here, and then those people are breaking them up and then adding them back together, you know, then it becomes much harder to track. Like where did that a hundred bitcoins go? And that's what was happening with this, with this huge pile is they were just being divided and bounced around and bounced back and forth, but it's all public.

So you can see it. But the weird, this is the weird dichotomy of the Bitcoin and the thing that I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around is that it's built on this idea of transparency, yet it basically started because of Silk Road, which is. No, that's not true. It was, it was going on.

It was definitely, it was co-opted by Silk Road and that's kind of what brought it out into the mainstream. Silk Road brought a bunch of, a bunch of publicity for it, but it was, I mean, you know, Bitcoin's been around since 2008 or so. And, you know, I mean, it was its own, it was its own thing independent of that.

It just, it, it lined up nicely with some of what Silk Road was doing because it's anonymous. Right. So have they actually found the founder yet? No. And, and everybody pretty much assumes that it, that's sort of just a fake name that was used by a group of people. So the initial paper that was written, that sort of laid out the protocol and, and what the algorithms would be and everything, um, you know, is signed by this, by this character, which nobody's ever heard of before and who basically disappeared in 2010.

So nobody's ever heard from again. And so it, it seems weird that, that somebody, you know, would have no footprint. Prior to authoring a paper and then disappear shortly after it was published and be a real person. Um, I mean, that right there is just cool in itself. Yeah.

It's super cool. It definitely is. Yeah. Yeah. And the other, the other thing that I didn't really get about Bitcoin and maybe you can explain really quickly is how do you mine a Bitcoin? And apparently it costs more to mine one than it would just to buy one. Right.

So, I mean, it's, it's quite technical in it and I'm not technical enough to, to be able to explain the bits and bits and bits and pieces of it, but, but Bitcoin is all based on, on algorithms and computations. Right. And so mining Bitcoins is, is really just making your computer run through a bunch of equations, you know, essentially looking for prime numbers or something.

Right. I mean, that, that's a, a safe analogy on this is that you're just doing a whole bunch of math looking to find, you know, the, the, this algorithm. And so every time one of those, one of those, uh, sort of blocks is found, more Bitcoins are released and the, and the computation gets harder for the, for the next batch.

Right. So it's, um, so very early on anybody with a computer, you know, like if you had to your, you could just install the software on your laptop or whatever and, and mine Bitcoin in the background, but as, as those computations got harder and the equations got bigger, um, you know, it didn't make sense.

Like you could run, run the program for three years on your power book and never, and never can never get a coin. Right. Exactly. So then that's when people switched from CPUs to GPUs because they're like, okay, these things can do this math much quicker. And then at some point GPUs weren't doing it fast enough and they switched to something else.

So, so the hardware to run these, these comp, these sort of equations is just getting more and more, you know, specific and more and more expensive with each step of it, as well as, you know, what is the, what is the power cost in your house? If you have, you know, 10 of the, you know, maybe you have a server rack of super specialized hardware, just running these huge math equations, you know, that, that, that costs money, the hardware costs money.

So then at some point, yeah, it's like, well, the value of, of the one coin or two coins that I'm going to find every few weeks or something at this point, it doesn't make sense for the trade-off of what it is. Right. And that's where a lot of the other sort of secondary, you know, secondary crypto coins that are out there, you can still mine them, you know, just, just with your, where computer just by running stuff.

And that's why a lot of people are sort of looking at, you know, what are, what are the other options now that at least some portion of the population is saying, okay, well, cryptocurrency is, is valid, you know? Right. Yeah. We, we actually talked about an article a couple months ago at this point, uh, where somebody did the calculations on, on the power consumption of mining all the bitcoins.

It basically works. It's like, no, this will just take all the power. Yeah. Maybe that's what the NSA is doing in Utah. It just, they just built a Bitcoin miner. Did you, I know if you saw this one yesterday, basically the largest Bitcoin wallet is owned by the FBI from when they seized Silk Road and, and some of these other things.

So like the largest, the largest single owner of bitcoins is the U S government. U S government. Right. Yeah. Which, which creates, creates an interesting dynamic. Oh, it's because they can do nothing with it. Right. And then it sort of just operates on its own or they can dump them, which will then tank the currency, but then it'll bounce right back, you know?

So, and then they don't have that card to play. So right now it's sort of like, they can just sort of hold it on the side and say, well, maybe we'll release it, but you know, it's evidence. So how do you, how do you, you know, here's the interesting thing. So do you, do you know which coins are owned by the government?

Because if you're like, if they're trying to do a sting on somebody and say, Oh, we'll pay you in bitcoins, you know, like they're trying to hit the, the, the drug cartel down the street. It's like, give us a hundred kilos of Coke and we'll give you some bitcoins. And they're not, there's no serial number. So like, if I have, if I have a Bitcoin and I pay you in Bitcoin, the one I had ceases to exist and the one that you have now, now is there.

And that's how, like, you know, if it, you know, when there gets, once they get stolen, like that's it, like there's no, that's gone. Like the transaction is finite. So interesting. So no serious, no persistent serial numbers. Right. Exactly. Hmm. I'm going to have to look into this.

This is actually pretty fascinating. I'm actually fascinated by it as well. I totally want to get in at some point. It's just prohibitively expensive and a bit too much of a risk for me at this point. Well, you know, you can, the, you know, the things that make it seem a little bit safer are, are stuff like Coinbase, which is a U S based site that just received 24 million from, um, I don't know, some, some venture fund that that's failing me at the moment.

Um, probably fucking Andreessen and Horowitz, they, you know, everything. Oh, and the, uh, the, the Wachowski, whatever they are, um, that was their second, their second round. So it's like the, there's clearly official business putting enough backing behind it that it seems sort of safe enough that you can go in and you can link that up with your bank account.

So that, I mean, one of the big, big hurdles with Bitcoin before was that it was hard as shit to buy one. You know, you had to like set up an account here and then transfer money there and then moved out. It was like, you know, a day worth of, of legwork just, just to get in on it. And, you know, I know myself when I first started kind of paying attention to this, you know, I was like, this is way too much work to buy one of these things that costs $30, you know?

And now I'm like, Oh, what an idiot I was. Um, but, uh, you know, I know other people who bought, bought them at that point, but now, you know, it's gotten simpler, but like, I mean the first, the first Bitcoin that I ever bought was so sketchy. Literally, I had to go to a bank and deposit cash into some random account number and then just keep my fingers crossed that, that's, you know, a Bitcoin was deposited into my account.

It's like the early days of PayPal and eBay. Yeah, totally sketchy. Right. So, so the difference between that and, and Coinbase, which will link up with your bank account, you can just say, I want to buy, you know, I want to buy five of them or whatever, but you can buy, you know, any fraction that you want. You can buy 0.0002 Bitcoin if you want, you know, for 25 bucks or, you know, five bucks or something.

So you can, you can buy next to nothing. Um, but you can also, you can also, you know, like I was saying with the, with the other stuff, you can buy, you know, one 10th of a coin and then go trade that on one of the other sites for five light coins or something. Right. Right. Oh, okay.

So basic, basic currency exchange. Yeah, exactly. You can, you can trade it just like anything else. Cool. Well, thank you for the primer on that. Sure. There's a site called, um, um, I'm, I don't have it in front of me at the moment. Oh yeah. It's called Cripsy, C R Y P T S Y.com.

That's basically an exchange for every cryptocurrency that's out there. So you can, you can, you can send something to your wallet on that website and exchange it for anything. Right. You can buy a dog coin or quark coin or light coin or. Okay.

So all these other coins, have they been vetted as well as Bitcoin has, as far as the crypto that's involved? Or is it like, is it the same crypto? Are they just using the same algorithm? Yeah. Everybody's, everybody's using the same things. There's a handful of them that have kind of modded it in one way or another or forked it or, or, you know, what they've done, they think they're improving, you know, some piece of it or they're making this other piece function in a slightly different way, but everything's kind of based on the same, on the same initial, the initial steps.

Um, you know, their, their sites all have the documentation on it. There's the one site that I look at is called, um, coin market cap.com. And that just lists out like the top 60 or 70, um, you know, cryptocurrencies that are out there and how they're changing, whatever.

But there's links to like the main site for all of them, where all the details are. So you can look in and say like, Oh, what is this thing that's, you know, was worth nothing, you know, three days ago. And now people are buying for a dollar 50, you know? So, and then you can go look at their website and see what, what the math is behind it or whatever.

So it's pretty cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah. So interesting, you know, I don't, I don't know that it's going to, you know, change the world in any way, but you know, it's like frequent flyer miles or something, right? It's just some other, some other thing that, that adds up and you can, you can do stuff with it.

So, well, right now it seems to be mostly something for publicity as well. Cause any company that goes, we're going to accept bitcoins gets a big news article and gets splashed all over the internet. Yeah, man. There, there was a, there was a, some, um, I don't even know who started it, but somebody did a, like a black Friday Bitcoin donation thing, you know, where they were like, here's all the businesses that are taking Bitcoin, you know?

Right. And, uh, and for, for my organization, safe cast, you know, we, we, you have any number of ways that people can donate. We're a nonprofit. And, uh, and I was like, sure, like, we'll, we'll add on a Bitcoin donation. And we got like almost a whole Bitcoin Friday from, from, you know, like 10 different people like gave some sliver.

So I was like, well, that was worth it. Yeah. Considered they're worth like a grand. Yeah. Adding a line to, you know, a couple, a couple of lines of code to the site made a grand. And you can buy a Tesla with Bitcoins now. Yeah. Yeah. God. You can buy a flight on Virgin Galactic with Bitcoins.

Yeah. That was, yeah. That was the first big one that was just like, okay. Someone, someone set up a site the other day and I, and you know, I don't give a shit about this. I'm going to get the name wrong, but I think it's like Bitbar or something. Um, and it's a list of all of the, uh, of all of the drinking establishments where you can spend Bitcoin in exchange for alcoholage.

Let me guess. Most of them are in San Francisco. I don't know. I didn't even look because, you know, no, it's not my thing. That's right. Yeah. Yes. You're, you're, you're the teetotaler. Um, but, uh, yeah, it could be, but there's a good segue for you. Yeah.

So, uh, yeah, I think our other guest is going to be, uh, probably not joining us, but, uh, let's talk a little bit about San Francisco while we have you on the line. Sanford city. Yeah. Yeah. Brian and I have been kind of, uh, covering the, the, the crazy news with the, you know, what you would think were drunken blog posts, but our actual, the actual opinions of some startup founders about how they should secede.

Um, how they don't need the rest of the United States. We are Silicon Valley. All these idiots need to listen to us. We know everything. Disrupt and destroy and take over. And yeah. And now the, the new guy with, uh, was it the guy who does all the, uh, uh, hackathons, the hackathon, uh, organizer, which is, you know, in my book, that's nothing.

That guy's like a wedding planner in my book. Well, yeah. And also that with that, it's sort of like, really like you're, you co-opted this thing and you're acting like you came up with it, you know, like people were doing hackathons long before you ever thought of your company, dude. Seriously. I think you were probably in grade school when we were doing hackathons back in the day.

So good job. Good job. Yeah. What I specifically want to talk about is, uh, Mike Montero, who I've been a huge fan of for a long time. Yeah. Pretty much shit on his reputation with me this week on, uh, his pastry box post called the year we broke everything.

Have you read this piece yet? I have read that piece. I didn't get a chance to listen to the podcast that I think sent you off on the huge rage. Yeah. Oh, Jesus. I have read the book. Yes. So yeah. So he made this, he made this post on the year we broke everything where he talks about, you know, homeless people and all that.

And then he did the, on the followup on his show, let's make mistakes. Episode 120, uh, which I was listening to last night, uh, really just threw me over the edge about, okay, let, let's take a step back here. So I want to, I want to talk first about his, his post about, uh, the year we broke everything, which, which is talking about how the San Francisco startup scene has basically left all these homeless

people behind and is turning them into, you know, just soylent green for the, the masses. Uh, emphasis mine on that one. Um, and he talks about like seeing people setting up for the night, uh, outside of, uh, basically like a, a food bank.

He's talking about his, his walk home, right? So what he sees between his office and his house. Yeah. Cause I think his office is in the Tenderloin, which is the crap, the craptacular part of San Francisco where you will get shivved if you do not pay attention. Um, and he sees a woman setting up basically a little homestead for her daughter and like a little toy oven and yeah.

Yeah. And then talks about, uh, how like a couple blocks away there, they're installing a crystal piano on the outside of a building for, you know, the, the little, little rich kids who work at, at Facebook. Right. And here's what gets me. I mean, that's fine.

That, that, that's an observation, right now. And about a valid one. Valid observation. It's a totally valid observation. Yeah. And it's 100% true. There is, there is a huge, um, gap going on there. And that's, that's been a, a problem going on for a couple of years now with all the, the insta millionaires that came out of the Facebook IPO, like 220 millionaires in a day flooding that market, which screwed everything up.

And I knew it was going to do that, but here's where we get to the problem is in his podcast. He's talking about, he, he, he's a, a self self styled socialist saying we should be doing something about this. You know, we've got all this money and why aren't we bringing these people up with us?

Well, uh, pardon me, uh, starts with you. If you're going to say we should bring these people up, why don't you start? Okay. Well, that goes right now. I mean, yeah, I mean, what, what you don't, I don't know what, what's he doing?

Maybe he's doing something. No, he's not. He's not doing a goddamn thing. You know what he's doing? He's blogging about it. Okay. If you're going to blog about it, you're going to podcast about it. Yeah, but no, no, I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe he's making some donations. No, go buy that. Maybe he's making, making some donations or something.

I don't know. He'd have, he'd have said so. Okay. Um, come on. No, I don't know. Go buy that kid a sandwich. Okay. You know, if you're going to start, start with a sandwich. That's our, that's our tagline. He did, he did note, he did note in that blog post that he saw that and then he just kept walking, right?

He did say that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. And he said he didn't have the guts to go in and, and, and see the place for himself. Right. So, how much money, how much money is this guy worth right now? Not that much. I mean, he runs, he runs a successful design studio in San Francisco with an office in the Tenderloin.

So, um. Okay. So he's not doing bad, but it could all be leveraged. Yeah. He, you know, it's, it's a different thing. I mean, it's like we were talking about a little bit earlier when I was, you know, singing the praises of Bill Gates, uh, as opposed to most other tech people, but he's not at that level yet.

I'm more pissed off at the fucking Snapchat douchebags that passed up on 3 billion and could have kicked a billion dollars to something. Oh, yeah. There's always that. Ah, Snapchat. Uh, you're junk for billions. Um, but no, it's, it, this guy has, has a microphone.

He's got a, he's got a platform. He's got a very successful platform and he, he's flat out states that he was scared to go and, and, you know, interact with these people and then just puts it on everybody else that we, like we broke everything, you know, it's like, no, no, no, no.

They're individual. It's not, it's not this, it's not the Royal we. It's like there's specific few fuck ups that are screwing up San Francisco. Yeah. But if he wants to help these people, it's not hard, you know? Well, you know, I mean that I'm just going to, I mean, you know, this, this is not a simple problem.

And anyway, it's not, it's not a, a case of somebody saying, oh, here's a million dollars. Now the problem's fixed, right? There's, there's no, you can't just throw money at it. Like there's social issues and there's all of this other stuff. So that's, it's a much, much, much bigger problem in San Francisco, outside of San Francisco, around the world, everything.

I think, I think that it becomes really obvious in San Francisco because of the huge gap, you know, between, between who's rich and who's poor. The problem, the problem is that's starting to spread everywhere now. Uh, that's, that's more and more common. I mean, even think about, I believe you still live here in the Venice area along with me, correct?

No, I mean, I mean, I'm still in Los Angeles, but I'm not in Venice. Oh, okay. Well, the, he got the, he got the, he got the hell out. Yeah, you got, you got out, but, but Venice has become San Francisco just within the last two years. The, the, the amount of money that's flown in from Google and Snapchat and all these companies that have been here have driven rents up.

Um, old institutions that have been here for 20, 30 years are closing. Um, it's, it's insane how, how much of a difference that kind of money and attitude, because it's more the attitude. It's not, you know, when, when a Coca-Cola or a big corporation comes into a town, they don't cause the havoc that these tech companies cause when they come into a city.

It's a different thing. And there's a different outlook that these people take to this. Well, yeah, let me, let me, let me talk about that for a second, because when, when a Coca-Cola or like a GM or somebody with a plant comes to town, they generally raise the entire town up because they employ most of the town.

These tech companies have a very small percentage of the population that are, the, the wealth is being concentrated to them. They're importing, they're importing a workforce too. You know, they're not moving, they're not moving to Venice to hire the hot Venice talent. No, they're, they're bringing, they're bringing their staff.

Yeah. We're going to displace them. We're going to knock down those houses and we're going to build higher, you know, way more expensive apartment blocks that these people can afford. And then that restaurant down the street is going out because we're going to put a wine bar in because that's where these people want to go at night. It disrupts the, I mean, in the same way that they want to disrupt their industry, they're disrupting the cities that they come into.

Well, you can't, if you're going to disrupt, you can't go half assed. You got to disrupt everything. Yeah. Destroy it all. No half stepping with disruption. No, burn the motherfucker down. So I think my, my, my biggest problem with, with Mike's take on it and the way they treated it in the podcast was it was kind of lazy intellectualism by saying, oh, let's just fix this.

It's, it's kind of my, my problem, the same problem I have with Bill Maher that we talked about before. Um, it's like, oh, here's a blanket problem. We have a lot of money. Let's fix it. That's the, that's not how it works. Like a lot of people that are homeless and living on the streets are there by choice. They don't want to be responsible.

They want to live on handouts. We, we, you and I both know a single, a single individual that is, is a, uh, serial homeless person in San Francisco. By the way, who has a better wardrobe than I do? I don't know how the fuck he pulled that off. Asshole. That's not that hard, Jason.

Yeah. I mean, I remember back in, back in, in the nineties, you know, when, when, you know, sort of people, some circle of friends, outside circle of friends, people, you know, sort of got into the whole gutter punk thing and, and they were making a lot of money, you know, like I had friends who literally laughed, you know, at the rest of us for having jobs or doing whatever, because they were like on this corner, I can sit on this corner, you know, and I'm making like 200 bucks a day, you know, by just hanging out, you know?

And, and so it, that, that doesn't apply to everything. Obviously there are certain people who are down on their luck and I'm not trying, I'm not trying to, you know, pull that shit, but it's not, it's not that a hundred percent of the people who are, who are on the street, um, are dying to not be on the street. Right. Some of them, some of them are, but some of them are perfectly happy, you know?

Yeah. And remember, remember the story of when I used to live in the upper hate, the, the soccer moms would bust their kids in on a Friday night and let them hang out on the street. Yeah. The, the, the kids would hang out on the street for the weekend and be homeless for the weekend and just, you know, panhandle.

And then they, the, the SUVs would pick them up, like the fucking fleet of SUVs from Berkeley would come in and pick up these scummy ass kids and they'd go back and go home to their private schools with cash in their pockets. It's like, that was a rite of passage for them back then. So the, the, the homeless issue in San Francisco was very complicated, but you know, trivializing it and, and, and just covering it with blanket statements from somebody who I believe is a very smart dude and I, I've, I've read his books.

I love him, but this just really pissed me off. Get him, get him, get him, get him to defend himself. Ah, well, he doesn't, he doesn't like me on, on the Twitter. So I, I, I've talked to him. He does not like me. Well, I, I got one recommendation for that, Jason. Wait, wait until the next day to tweet him. Yeah.

He, you know what? He's got, he's, he's, he's, he's, uh, no, no shy, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, yeah. To, to putting, putting people on his podcast that, uh, you know, he has a gripe with or something. You should, you should tell him that he's gotta, he's gotta bring you on and on his thing and, and explain himself.

I think, I think, I think, I think this can go down. No, no, no. He's a designer. We're, we're developers. The, the, don't cross the streams. Don't cross the streams. I actually said that when we first started doing the show and we were about, uh, 10 or so episodes in, I'm like, Hey, you know, you guys don't have any developer shows.

It's all designers. You want a developer show on your network. We're, we're game. And they're like, yeah, we're not looking for your, your ilk right now. So the design, the designer developer problem is, is going, going strong there. Well, you know, you got your homeless in San Francisco, you got your designer developer, you know, these, these things, these, these, these don't get really get solved.

No, it's the Mac PC for infinity, you know? Yeah. We can all, we can all, you know, wax poetic about it, but they're not going to get fixed. No, ever. So, okay, man. Well, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it was cool. Now, if you ever want to come back, give us a shout and thank you very much for the, uh, the Bitcoin primer. Yeah, definitely. I appreciate that. And plug, plug, plug your nonprofit. Like, be full of shit. Um, yeah, so I was just going to say, take that with a grain of salt, because I could be totally full of shit with the Bitcoin stuff, but that's, that's as far as I've gotten with it anyway.

All right, we're full of shit every day, so it's okay. Perfectly, yeah. So, uh, just tell everybody where they can find you. What are you up to? What you doing? The whole nine yards. Give us, give us a plug. Seanbonner.com, at Seanbonner on all of the stuff, um, Twitter, Flickr. Except Facebook. Except Facebook, man.

I got a, I got an article that explains that. Fuck Facebook. Um, and, uh, and, uh, yeah. And, uh, safecast.org, um, we're sort of open hardware, open data, measuring and publishing radiation data, and now other environmental stuff. Um, you know, fucking the man.

Awesome. Cool beans, man. Thanks for coming by. And tell, uh, tell our boy Joey I said hi when you talked to him. I will. All right, man. Have a good one. All right. Take care. Bye. Yo, seriously? Are you shitting me? Tis the season.

Uh, let's, let's talk about something topical that I saw. Uh, like the Virgin Mary, one in 200 pregnant women in, in the United States claim to be virgins right now. So we've got, we've got a fucking Messiah problem on our hands. Or, these girls are full of shit.

I, I, I don't know, man. Could be the 200th coming. Without coming. Without coming, yes. Um, you know, uh, this is obviously, I mean, well, first off, the education level of these women must be next to non-existent.

Uh, secondly, they're embarrassed. Uh, third, we've created a basically, you know, fucking Nazi system for, for, for um, for, um, for under adults when, when they get pregnant and their options are, are next to nothing. Thanks a lot, Religious Right. You're doing a good job there.

Well, here's the, here's the deal. Most of these, most of these women did that vow of, uh, abstinence or chastity or whatever the fuck it is. Yeah, the promise ring. Promise ring. Yeah, no dick till you put a ring on it. You know, well. Just, just, just do what the Jews and the Muslims do. Take it up the ass.

Oh, Jesus. 200 of them. 200 of them. Um, anyways, um, this is a stupid story and I'm, it's a horrible, uh, indictment of our society at the moment. And I can't believe this isn't everywhere right now. The fact that all these women have to claim to be virgins and they don't know how they got pregnant.

You fucked. Yeah. We all know how you got pregnant. We all know your mom and dad did it and that's how you came here. And you know, that's, that's what happened. You didn't sit on a toilet seat that had some sperm on it. You didn't do all the other excuses that you didn't swim in a pool where somebody was jerking it in the corner.

Nope. No, you had sex. You got poked. Your, your doctor knows it. Your mom and dad probably know it. They might be in denial, but that's only if they're really stupid. And you know, there you go. Yeah. I just, I saw this headline. It drove me insane. Yeah. The sexual ignorance in the United States is beyond belief.

And the, it's, the abstinence thing is just, has been a terrible failure for the religious right and good because it should be. Let people do what they want to do and, and educate them on, on safe sex. Yes. The, the, the, the, the day after pill should be readily available over the counter without any question.

There should be no issues with this whatsoever. Uh, if you're not ready to have a kid, you don't have a kid. End of story. And let's take care of this problem. And I never want to see this headline again, even though it is hilarious for the holidays. Yes, it is. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. So, uh, 10 years has gone by since Portugal has legalized every drug in the, the book.

First off, I can't believe it's been 10 years. Every drug? I believe. Every drug. I thought so. Well, they decriminalized, you know, standard drug use like Coke and heroin and pot and all that crap. Okay. Um, so they took on a, a kind of a position of this is a health problem.

Yeah. Not a criminal problem. So if somebody. Exactly true. Yes. If somebody gets caught doing too many drugs, they put them in treatment, you know, instead of sending them to jail where we have to pay for them. They send them to treatment where we pay a little bit, they get better and then they move on and become useful people again.

Um, it's a problem of addiction for every single one of these drugs and that's all it is. The crime is about them feeding their addiction. End of story. So it's, it's been 10 years and the, the numbers are in drug abuse is down by half.

So everybody can get high if they want to. If you, if you go above and beyond and, you know, go on a bender, go off the rails and get caught, then you get into treatment and they fix you. Um, um, genius and obvious. And can we just say a hallelujah for this one too?

And just make it de facto standard across the globe. No, because we are stupid. We spend too much money. The drug, the war on drugs is the biggest farce besides the war in Iraq and all that other crap, whatever. Um, no, the war on drugs is stupid.

It doesn't work. This is the way to go. You legalize everything. You tax it. And then you spend the money on treatment programs for when people get caught and you get them off their addictions. And then yeah, not even get caught when they get, when they go overboard, you know? Well, eventually they're going to have to steal or do criminal activities to feed the habit because if we legalize it and tax it, the shit becomes expensive.

No, no, no. You're backwards on this one, man. No. People. You want heroin to be cheap? No. Heroin should be whatever the market bears. The problem. No, the problem is when people just use it too much and they get addicted to it and it's, it's not for recreational use.

It's for, it's a wake and bake, you know? But that's, but just standard folk who just want to have a doobie when they come home at night, that should be fine. Do whatever you want in your home, you know? That's exactly my point. My point is when they, once they start to get in trouble, it's because of the addiction element.

Right. And that's when we, we, we use the tax money, et cetera, to fund treatment for the addictions. When they get busted, when they get in trouble, when they start committing crimes to feed the habits, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they get stuck in the treatment program. They get off their addiction. And if they're capable of, of being regular and just, you know, able to go ahead and have their two snorts of cocaine at the Christmas party to make it a true white Christmas.

Great. Awesome. Yeah. There you go. Okay. We're on the same page there. We are on the same page. I think we're also on the same page about something else, except for the fact that you bought their game, uh, Duck Dynasty. We both think they're idiots, right? Um, like I, I don't have enough information to, to make a decision.

What, what happened with Duck Dynasty? Why should I be upset? You shouldn't be upset because we understand the fact that the Duck Dynasty idiots are probably racist homophobes, right? Deep South, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're white trash. That's stereotyping. Now I know a lot of white, like, you know, Southern white trash folk that are not racist and not homophobic.

So what do they do? I, I, I, I grew up, I, most of my childhood was spent in rural North Carolina, living in a shack and a mobile home. Okay. I come from, I, my roots are down there. All right. Lots of good people. So I don't, I do, I do not want to stereotype those people because there are a shit ton of good people down there.

And a lot of them are my friends and family. So tell me what these assholes did. Let's, let's go with assholes instead of stereotyping. One of the stars of the show did an interview with GQ magazine and basically lashed out against, well, I'll just go ahead and use LGBT, even though that drives me crazy, whatever.

Basically went out and trashed homosexuality and trashed African Americans. And all of a sudden people were surprised. Okay. I was not surprised. Well, I mean, it, this is an individual on a television show.

It's people are people. I mean, I, I'm not going to, I'm not going to put a blanket statement on it. Honestly, I'm not just because it's just not how I roll. This is an asshole, you know, straight up. This is an asshole. I'm not going to, I don't know the other people on the show. I've never seen the show and I'm not going to say I have, I have, I will say I have seen at least about 25 to 30 minutes of the show over time and I've seen enough of the interviews and snippets and promos to go, this is not a surprise.

These are the, the, the re the reason they got their show is they are the stereotype of the South. That was the point. Okay. So, so then to be surprised by this is, is idiotic. And this is decided to suspend the guy from the show and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I'm like, that is the show. The entire show was that. So why are we surprised? Okay. Well, I'm not going to cry for the suspension of a show about ducks. You know, if you, if they, if they cut off elementary, I would be upset because that's a great show, but I don't see Johnny Lee Miller coming out and calling anybody anything, but here's the deal.

Yeah. It's one dude on the show in the South, whatever. Just don't, I don't like blanket generalizations about my peoples. No, I agree. I also don't lump you in with those people. Sorry. No offense, but you're not running around and with a gigantic beard and a, you know, the, the Southern flag and your pickup truck that has a, you know, a gun rack on it.

That's just not you. These guys, the reason the reason, again, and this is what gets me upset. The entire show is based on that stereotype. They played up to it. That was the point. And that's why it's popular. Okay. I, I should probably watch an episode of the show just, just so I know what I'm talking about, but you know, it, it, it's a, it's a switch of a bit that I would not be that guy down in the South with a gun rack.

Hey, I got a Ford Focus and I'm in Illinois and I got a gun in my car. So, you know, it's a very short throw to get me with the only problem is when I grow a beard, I look like an old Italian woman. Um, that's genetics. I can't do anything about, uh, so, uh, you know, whatever I bought their app.

A and E got the money. They didn't get the money. So whatever. Welcome to this week in shit. We put on our computers. So I got a, a thing that, uh, I was playing around with this week. It's called stratospheric file browser for iOS.

Okay. Uh, it's kind of just like a network file, uh, browser for iOS that lets you connect to, uh, just share drives. Um, cause what I've got is I've got an Apple airport extreme with a hard drive attached to it that, so I can share files with anybody on the network.

But the problem is you can't, you can't play them through Apple TV unless you do some crazy hacks, which, uh, is a subject for another show. But I wanted to be able to watch things that are on that drive on my iPad in bed at night. So this app lets me connect to the extreme, mount the drive, and it'll play.

The nice thing about it, it's kind of got a built-in media player. So I can play like, uh, AVIs and MKVs straight from the drive, straight to my iPad without having to go through VLC and put everything on the, the device itself. Right. That's pretty nifty. Yeah, it's a couple bucks. And it, I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you can connect to Dropbox, uh, regular Windows file systems.

If you're in a, you know, Windows house, God forbid. Um, I might need this because as a, as you noticed, I am finally making my transition to Mac, but I'm still basically have to have everything work or be accessible on Windows. So this is interesting to me. Yeah, it's, it's really cool.

I mean, it's handy and it's, uh, it is one of the, uh, what do you call it? Now plus, there's a plus app either way. It works on, uh, iPhone and iPad with for one low price, which I think was like $399 or something. It was under, or $799. I don't know. It's under 10 bucks, but it's worth it.

It's a really, it's a really handy util. Excellent. You got some? Check that out. I do have something because one of my biggest frustrations as I was slowly making my, well, basically I spent this entire year slowly transitioning to a Mac and didn't really do it. I started very slowly.

Yeah. I started in earnest, uh, about two days ago because you know, the holiday workload was kind of slowing down a bit and I was just looking at it and going, man, I really don't want to have to take my, my PC laptop with me, uh, on my trip. I'd really like to just take the Mac and get some time in to sit and play around with it.

Um, but then I realized my drive that I have all my work on, I keep all my work on a dedicated external USB drive that I always keep backed up as well. I'm not stupid. Uh, but it's all right there and it's because my main system is windows.

It's an NTFS drive and I can plug it into my Mac and it can read everything, but in and of itself, the Mac will not let me edit anything, change anything. I can't write to the drive. And really, yeah. You didn't know that? No. Cause I mean, all my, uh, thumb drives are, oh, maybe they're not NTFS.

What's the other one? Oh, they're fat 32. Yeah. Fat 32 will work on both, but it's really, you know, it's a lot slower. So I've got NTFS because I've been right, you know, running everything off this USB drive that I do all my work on. Uh, that does not run on a Mac by itself, but there's this nifty program called NTFS for Mac.

It's only 1995. You install it. Boom. You're done. You don't ever have to think about it. You don't have to worry about it because I was like, am I going to copy everything over to a different drive that's formatted just for the Mac and then have to, because I'll probably be realistically using both the Mac and the PC for at least a couple months until I switch over fully.

That's going to be a pain in the ass. Boom. Problem solved. 20 bucks. Piece of cake. Yeah. Cause there's another way to go. There was a, an old app that I used to use called Mac drive that worked on the PC that let you read, um, HFS plus volumes and all the other, I don't even know if HFS plus was around back then.

Um, but it would let you read Mac volumes on your PC. So it was kind of the same thing, but backwards. I wanted to go this way because I probably got about five or six other drives that are just in storage full of archive stuff that I probably never, ever need to get to, but they're all, you know, NTFS drives too. So this is just a better way for me to move forward.

Plus once you buy it once, you can basically throw it on anything. So it's good. It's a great program. If you are like me and you live in both the Mac and PC worlds and you have drives out there that are just Mac, pick this program up, you install it on your, on your Mac and you're good to go. Cool. Yeah.

Uh, you, you might want to back up those old drives anyway, just because of that lovely thing called bit rot, which will, uh, kill those drives over time. Yeah, I really probably should do that. I think at some point in the next year, as I get more and more into this, I'm going to just pick up a bunch of those drives and, and just copy everything over and get it done with.

But that's a huge process and it's just too daunting at the moment right now. I just want to drink eggnog. Weird. I thought I was going blind for a second. My, uh, remember we talked about that app flux. Yes. It just kicked in for me cause the sun's going down here and everything started to get very orange. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm going blind.

It's true. It's true. What they said. Oh, so yeah. Um, I'm thinking about doing, uh, one of the online backup, uh, dealios while on my break so I can, so my machine can just upload like, I think backblaze is the one that most people recommend, at least the nerd, the nerds that I know use backblaze.

You're still going to go offsite for it. See, I just don't, I don't want to, I don't want to get so invested in the cloud because I still, I'm, I know I'm crazy and paranoid about the whole, like being charged for bandwidth in the very near future. And everybody's starting to think that like I'm wearing tinfoil on my head. I just don't want to do that. Uh, what I usually do and I actually have to update that drive is I have a drive that I put everything super, super, super, super, you know, I cannot live without this information.

I will go crazy if I lost it. I throw it on one drive that I keep in a fire safe that I have in my closet. Yeah. You still, you should keep an offsite no matter what. I mean, this is, this is hedging my bets against the future because I've got several two terabyte drives around the country that I update whenever I visit, I update and leave.

So when I, when I go to Pittsburgh tomorrow, I'm going to take my, my spare two terabyte that I just used, uh, Oh, what's the, what do I use? Um, not carbon copy cloner, uh, chrono sync. Chronosync is an awesome Mac app that just lets you sync drives or folders on drives.

Right. I use that and I have two, two terabyte drives that I use to sync on my photography and all my old work stuff that I didn't kill in the great purge of, uh, the summer of 2013. Right. Um, and then I just, whenever I I'm at a spot, I just offload it. And so I know I've always got something that is not in my control and locked away in a fire, in a fireproof box somewhere else.

Those fireproof boxes are notoriously failure, failure prone. Yeah. So I like to have them on in multiple homes around the world. Gotcha. So. Well, you beat me on paranoia. Well, man, I've, I've had enough data loss over my life when Winamp killed her.

I ripped all my CDs, my 2000 CDs with Winamp that I ripped back in the nineties. And when that drive died and I had to do it all over again, after that I was, I was done. I'm like, I am, I am a backup fiend. My, my iTunes is still a mess.

I ripped all of my CDs into iTunes. Um, not only did I have one drive die and I recovered most of that, but various iTunes updates over the years also trashed the library more than a few times. And, uh, it's, it's still a complete and utter mess. And I've just given up on it because now I've got Spotify.

Oh, I use iTunes match 25 bucks a year. Everything is, is better quality than I ever ripped. And I can just download anything I want, you know? Yeah. I should probably sign up for that, especially now that I'm going on all Mac. Yeah. And it's, um, well, I mean, it works on PC too, but, and it's nice because it works on all your iDevices. So you can just, if you out and you want to play a song, any song in your library, it just plays.

Um, and for 25 bucks, come on, you can't beat it. Plus you get better versions of the songs that you already had. So you, you, you sync it, then you just delete your entire library and then you can just pull everything down in like pristine master copies. Yeah. A lot of stuff I have is bootlegs though, which won't be in there.

So that stuff I'll still have to clean up myself, but yeah, yeah. But those get uploaded. So they will always be on, uh, on iTunes match from there forward. So yeah, I got to look into that. No, it's definitely worth it. So I'm drinking the Kool-Aid on the Mac stuff now. I'm just all in.

So yeah, you know, dive in. I gotta say, I mean, I was playing around with it last night and the whole, like, I might be using Safari as my major browser now when I switched to Mac, because I love the fact that whatever I have open on any, like my, my, my laptop browser is on my iPad immediately.

That is just like, that is cool as shit. I do dig it. Here's the deal though. That works with Chrome too. If you're using the Chrome browser, it, it, it, it does the same thing. And if you're a developer, Safari kind of sucks. Um, trust me on that one. Uh, the, the inspector is almost, you know, it's just science fiction trying to get anything done in that inspector.

Uh, the inspector in, in Chrome is much easier to use. And also Firefox, I still keep for Firebug, which is the best. I love Firebug. I can't. Yeah. I recommend that so much. It's unbelievable. But yeah, there is a suite of tools for Chrome that, that almost emulates Firebug, you know, point for point.

Um, I didn't know that you could get Chrome on your, on your iPhone. Oh yeah, Chrome's been a, you can get Chrome for the iPhone and the iPad. That's all I use. I had no idea. Oh yeah, it's, it's the shit. Well. And you sign in with, sign in with your Google account and it, it syncs your tabs across all of them if you want.

Guess what I'm downloading after the show. Yep. And it's free. So I mentioned before about this little 300 step Fitbit challenge I did the other day where I, I did 300 flights of stairs in one day.

Yeah, I followed you and, uh, and Dr. Teeter online doing that and just thought, what a bunch of idiots. Yeah. Well, he beat me, did 50,000 steps and 320 some odd, uh, uh, flights. I actually probably did more flights of stairs, but there was a bug in the Fitbit tracker, which you can find out if you go to jpd.me and see the entire writeup of the debacle.

Um, but yeah, so when I started, I picked up, uh, Tim Ferriss's book club selection number two, which was, it's called daily rituals. How artists work by Mason Curry. Awesome book. It was, I mean, I, and I, I, here, here's how this worked.

I played it on one X cause it's, uh, on audible, it's like a four and a half hour book. And I knew I was in for the long haul for this challenge, which ended up taking about eight hours. Um, but it got me through like most of it. I had to finish off the challenge with some Rammstein because I needed to, I needed to kick in the ass at the end.

But, um, for most of the day, man, it was a great book. Just all these people throughout history and like what their work habits were. Right. And it really made me realize that I should really buckle down and, and kind of structure my work life a little more because I'm, I wake up and I'm like, ah, what the hell am I going to do today?

You know? Yeah, I agree. I mean, I, I'm a little bit of the same way. Like I, I definitely want to restructure the way that I approach things. Um, this has been a bit of a meme recently. I've seen a lot of articles, uh, on Slate, Salon, Huffington Post about, you know, the way that certain people do their day and how they structure their days and all that.

So it must be based on, uh, probably this coming out again because, you know, journalists are lazy, but. I mean, no, this is an older book. I mean, it's, and that's kind of been a meme forever. You know, the, that was the 10 habits of highly effective people book. Yeah. Yeah. It's been around. I should, I think even Dale Carnegie put out a book on it.

It's nothing new. Hell, I bet if we go back far enough, Seneca's got a, got a tome on. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. On that. It's, uh, you emulate the people that are successful. And the one thing I've learned from this book is, um, was it Ben's dream is, has powered more, uh, more successful people than anything else.

It's, it's basically legal speed. Uh, well it was legal back then. It's not legal now. Yeah. Yeah. Amphetamines I think are on the, on the no fly list. Yeah. Unfortunately. But yeah, Benny's, Benny's and uppers were pretty, Benny's and, uh, liquor pretty much powered most of the great works of, uh, literature and, uh, in, in our history.

I agree. So get loaded kids. Yeah. Even, even Ayn Rand, uh, was, uh, high when she wrote the fountainhead, it turns out. Wow. That's not too surprising. Nah, that's true. Um, so yeah, it was a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. It was a short read on audible.

Um, and I was kind of bummed about the price because I, I just burned a credit on it. Right. For four and a half hours, that's generally not my style, but it was actually worth it. The reader, the reader was really good. Um, yeah, all in all, I give it a total thumbs up as far as, you know, cool things to kind of just kickstart you into thinking about how to, if you're, if you're like us and don't really have a structured lifestyle, uh, how to actually kind of structure it.

And you can take bits and pieces from the people you admire in history and some of the people you don't want to take the, you know, take advice from. So all in all, good read. Thomas Wolfe wrote, standing up in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator as his desk, dreamily fondling his mail configurations.

Yes. His mail configure. Yeah. He basically liked to spank it before he wrote. Isn't that pretty much how like every guy works these days with, with, you know, the internet and porn? Well, that's the secret to the standing desk. I've been unmasked.

Security. Ha! In security news, uh, the NSA review group tells Obama to ditch bulk phone surveillance and a bunch of other things that are complete and utter bullshit. Basically, uh, you know, the, the, the group that was convened to review these activities said, wow, this shit's fucked up.

We got to stop doing all this stuff, which makes me go, yeah, Edward Snowden should have been person of the year. I, I, I, I love the new Pope. I love everything he's saying, but if one person changed our world this year, it was Edward Snowden. Uh, yeah. You talk about impact. I mean, yeah.

Okay. The Pope, it's well, here's the deal. Time magazine, 60 minutes. These are a bunch of fucking worthless news outlets anymore. I mean, the 60 minute piece on the NSA was so ridiculously bad piece. Oh, Jesus. If they could have got down on their knees and filmed it that way, it would have been at least more true to what was going on.

Um, no, this is fine. Finally, Edward Snowden is being labeled a whistleblower instead of a treasonous traitor, you know? Yeah. And, and everybody is agreeing. As opposed to a non-treasonous traitor. Well, you know, alliterate, I was going for some alliteration there.

Yeah. Treasonous traitor, taciturn, whatever. I don't know. I'm out of words. I got, I got, I got a bit of, you know, it was like a ray of light of hope this week when the government agency just basically said, wow, we really need to stop doing this. This is not constitutional. This is not the American way we got to stop.

So go up, you know, go Snowden. Yeah. And it's not even this report. There's the, the federal judge in, in, uh, DC, I think, um, basically laid out a whole plan saying you need to shut this stuff down. I'm waiting on a few other things, but be prepared to stop when, uh, the verdict comes down and don't say that, oh, even if it took six months, it don't wait six months to start being prepared to shut it down.

Start shutting it down now. Exactly. Um, no, these guys are going to get their ass handed to him on a platter. Um, you know, sorry, General Alexander, go start working at Wendy's. Uh, it's, it's about time. So here, and to, to, to counterpoint that, uh, the NSA surveillance needed to fight terrorism.

It, it, as being a, uh, a necessity. Guess who said that? Vladimir Putin. Okay. Mr. Topless, uh, fighting bear guy. Yep. Riding a shark with a laser gun. This is the guy who was the head of the KGB.

Okay. Or the, uh, GRU or whichever one, whichever one was in, in vogue when he was in office. Uh, he was the head of the, you know, the surveillance state for Russia. And he said, yeah, you know what? The NSA needs to be there and they need to do stuff, but they need to rein it in a bit.

Okay. Vladimir fucking Putin says you need to rein it in a bit. You need to rein it in a bit. Yeah. That's a bit like Kiefer Sutherland looking over to you and going, you're really drinking too much. Or, or Charlie Sheen, Charlie Sheen going, maybe that's enough lines.

That's it. You know, you've had one hook or too many. Oh, okay. Time to slow down. Maybe they should go to Portugal and get in some rehab. Um, so, and speaking of tracking, uh, Google, do you remember years ago when Google turned on search history and said, here, we're going to let you, uh, track everything you've ever searched?

Yeah. Cause this will be great for you. Um, yeah. And, and immediately, as soon as I saw that, this was long before the tinfoil hat days. I'm almost like, it's like, oh, Jesus Christ. No, man, I was drunk that night. No, I worked at a porn company. I had to do research on trannies.

I'm sorry, that's not politically correct. Um, uh, dudes with boobs, um, and, and other unsavory things. And I don't want this as part of my, as, as they say in high school, your permanent record. So I turned it off.

Do you think it's genetically challenged? Is that the genetically challenged? No, these are dudes with boobs. Genetically lucky. No, they always say chicks with dicks. And I'm just like, no, that is a dude with boobs. That's it. He, he was born a dude and he got some boobs.

That is not a chick with dicks. Right. Sorry. Um, anyway, tangent. Okay, boys. Reel it back in. So now they've, they've, uh, released a, uh, location history browser, which means that they knew where you were searching from every minute of every goddamn day.

So when you were, when you turned on your search history, they also tracked your geolocation. Um, yeah. Screw you, Google. Um, so yeah, yeah, sure. It's quote unquote opt in for the people who know how to opt in.

Actually, I think it was an opt out. It was, I had to turn it off. I had to explicitly turn it off. Yeah. You had to turn it off. Somebody that has a Google account, you know, from day one. I think that's on by default. Um, I don't quote me on that. I could be completely blowing shit out of my ass. Um, well, I guess that's what usually comes out.

You, you, you had to opt out, opt out of it. I remember. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I did. Now they, now they have a, a very swanky web 2.0 or 3.0 now or whatever HTML five browser that shows you where you were and what you were searching on in a minute by minute basis.

Right. That's awesome. Yeah. No, not really. So, um, and into the creepy realm, there's a, uh, paper on the Washington post, uh, talking about how, uh, the government has been able to turn on your webcam without turning the light on for years.

Um, is this wet? Is this Mac book only? Or is this any laptop? This is any laptop with a camera. Okay. And it's probably, at this point, it's probably to your iPhone and your iPad or any, your Android device. Anything that's got a camera. Yeah. And because those don't have lights that tell you that they're on.

Now I'm looking at my Mac book air right now and I noticed where my camera is. There is six layers of black electrical duct tape because people thought that I was crazy when I did that. And I used to do it at every work computer I ever worked on. And it turns out, yeah, the people that were running the office that I used to work at would randomly turn on the microphones and the cameras and surveil you because it was in their, their rights.

Because they paid for the computer. They were paying for your time. Yeah. They could watch you sit around, pick your nose, adjust yourself. Maybe, you know, was it your man area? I can't remember. Your man, playing with your man configuration while you're writing some code.

Yeah. They tom-wolfed you. So this is not new news, but I guess for a lot of people it might be. For the paranoid of us, it's old news. But, yeah, anybody with a camera on their computer, you are vulnerable to it.

Yeah. That's why I recommend going and listening to the old grumpy old geeks where we talk about how the CIA protects their own Mac laptops. And we post the actual codes that will shut off, at a system level, your camera. Right. And not make it work, period.

Except for the fact that most people want to use their cameras every now and then. And the problem with duct tape, and pro tip here, duct tape will actually leave gummy film on your camera, which will kind of screw up the resolution every now and then. What you do— I did not say duct tape. I said black electrical tape.

Electrical tape will also do that. Yeah. But what you do is you just cut up a little sliver piece of paper about the size, you know, just tiny enough to cover the actual camera lens hole. And then you put that underneath and then tape up over it. And that will protect your camera. I have never once used the camera on my laptop.

I know you don't use the camera, but other people do. Other people Skype. Other people do all sorts of things. It doesn't matter. If you want to protect your camera but still make sure that nobody is surveilling you when you're not using it, that's the way to do it. Just have a little cut out piece of paper and then tape it up over that.

And I think there are a couple of Kickstarters out there that have little clips. Oh, we should Kickstart that. No, no. There are Kickstarters out there that create little clips that go over the top that muffle the sound and the picture. Oh, there you go. But I am not photogenic, so I will never use the camera. So there we go.

Right. All right. How else are we screwed, Jason? Giga Ohm posted a great piece called An Exposition in Slow Motion. How 2013 Blew Apart Our Notions of Privacy. We'll link this in the show notes. Go read it. It just covers everything that happened this year.

It's a great roundup. Why didn't they just list us in our segment? I don't know. I got to talk to Ohm. I haven't talked to him in a while. We started in early 2013, and all we've been doing is been bitching about all the stuff that's coming out. Well, you know, I think if you wanted to go blog for Ohm, he'll take you on.

All right. He's an old friend and a very good bud. So I wish him the best in the new year. So there's a shout out to him. All right. And finally, Target is the target. 40 million credit card numbers and debit cards.

Once again, all just stored in a database with not great security on it. All, you know, the stuff is easy to steal. It just is. Yep. So we'll link it. It's going to be everywhere by the time you hear this. Yeah. And you've probably gotten – you've either gotten a tweet from Target, which I saw the tweet today.

They tweeted out, look for suspicious activity on your cards, or you'll get hosed for the holiday. Here's the deal. When you go to Target, pay in cash. Another reason to pay in cash at Target is because they profile your buying activities and will tell you if you're pregnant or not before you're actually pregnant.

Remember that story? I do remember that story, yes. So when shopping at Target, pay in cash. Yeah. Over 500,000 American identities have been stolen by a Vietnam-based identity theft ring, which is pretty amazing. Yeah.

So, you know, if you had a Target card, you're probably screwed. Oh, yeah. Cancel it now or – well, you should cancel it anyways because what the fuck are you doing with a Target card? Get a credit card that actually gives you miles and has some security do it. Well, you get 5% back at Target. Yeah, whatever. Hey, they got great prices.

I used to shop there all the time. But I always paid in cash. Yeah, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy. Beyonce released an album called Beyonce. I'm a little surprised that she didn't have one called Beyonce already. Yeah, really.

I mean, you know, she is so egotistical that, you know, it's like – who's on the cover of Oprah magazine this month, Jason? Oprah. Oh, it's Oprah. Okay. You get a magazine. You get a magazine. You get a magazine. And you get an album from Beyonce called Beyonce. She released an album called Beyonce. It was a surprise.

There was no publicity ahead of time. It's only on iTunes. It is not on any social network. It's not on Spotify. It is not on Rdio. It is not on Amazon. It is only on iTunes. It is a visual album. I just hit air quotes. A visual album, which means that, you know, she shot a bunch of videos for it.

And you're supposed to watch it on your iPad, obviously, or your computer, or whatever. And there are 32 tracks or 31 tracks or 30 tracks. And it didn't get leaked. Nobody talked about it. Nobody knew about it. It was a complete surprise.

And this is where I started to lose my fucking mind. Because the response from the music community, which I generally respect, and who are usually pretty smart about things, has been like, oh, my God.

This is the new model. Does everybody remember Amanda Palmer with that shot, saying this is the new music industry, when she did her Kickstarter, and she got a million dollars to do her album? Mm-hmm. Who else has done that on Kickstarter since then?

Nobody. Let me think for a second. Yeah, no one. No one. No one. And no one. And no one. And no one. Okay. So, we established no one. So, that was not the future of the music industry. This is not the future of the music industry, either.

This works because it's Beyonce. This works because she made a deal with iTunes. This works because iTunes is terrified of Spotify and Rdio. And they made a deal and shot a bunch of videos and showed off their fancy little stuff and said, And because it's Beyonce, and if something comes out of Beyonce's vagina, it's on every fucking news channel known to man, here's a new album.

Well, hang on. We pay for it to come out of her mouth, not the other way around. Well, whatever. When she had her kid, it was top news on every fucking website, TV show, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Same thing with this album coming out. The second it came out, the second it was released, everybody was fed news stories about it.

It was on every fucking paper. It was on every fucking website. It was on every fucking show. And would this work for Arcade Fire? No. Yes. Would this work for a band you've never heard of? No. Would it work for an established band? Yes.

Yeah, but Arcade Fire is not even established enough for this to work. Well, the fact that I've heard of them means they're established because I don't like music. That's not even big enough for – this works for Beyonce. This works for Kanye. That's it. Here's the deal. Oh, fuck Kanye. Here's the deal. This album cost $16.

She sold $850,000 of them. Yeah. But also keep in mind it's a visual album. This is smart. This is smart. I'm sorry. This is smart. What she did was fucking smart. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just saying this is not the feature of the music industry. And the amount of articles that are out there saying, you can do this.

You can do this too. No. No, you can't. Beyonce can do this. Yes. That's about it. What Beyonce did here was fucking smart. Yeah. And here's the problem I have with the articles. They're saying Beyonce is smart. No. Beyonce's team is smart. Oh, yeah. There's somebody that is running this show.

No, you know who was smart about this? Who was smart about this was iTunes. Oh, absolutely. Because I guarantee you they came to her and said, let's do this. Mm-hmm. And you're going to block off everyone else, and we're going to sell this thing as opposed to stream it, and you're going to make a shit ton of money. And you're going to shoot a bunch of videos, so it's really hard for people to download it or it'll take a long time.

So this is genius on their part. But, yeah. So it doesn't work for anyone else. This is not the feature of the music industry. That drives me fucking insane. Shut the fuck up about it, everybody. You're all wrong. Go try it. Go shoot 17 videos. How much money is that going to take you? No. I mean, she probably made what...

She spent a ton of money to put all this together. There were a lot of people involved, and she made some money. So good for her. No. I mean, there's probably at least 10 million... I don't know. 850,000 times 16. Do the math on that, and then figure they spent probably a million bucks on production.

Yeah. ROI, as the... Yeah. The ROI on that? The ROI is spectacular. So good for her for doing this. But, yeah. Is this a roadmap for how to release a record for everybody? No. There is no roadmap for everybody to do anything.

First of all, she spent a ton of money to make a ton of money. Yeah. In fact, she had a million dollars to begin with to spend it. And she is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. And everybody's going to get whatever she's got. And if you only give them one choice, the choice is to buy it, people buy it. So there you go.

It worked for her. It's not going to work for anyone else. What actually amazes me most is the fact that there was so much production involved in this. There was no word. It was not leaked. I would love, love to see the legal on this. Oh, Jesus. Because they shot how many videos?

They recorded how many songs? There was songwriters and guest artists and extras in the videos. And what everybody must have signed must have been like, if you leak anything, we will take your – you will owe us your life, your children's lives.

Your grandchildren's lives are ours because no one talked. No one. No, this is like some Scientology shit. So is she a Scientologist? Because this like smells like Scientology legal involved in this. The fact that nothing leaked at all is just beyond unbelievable because I know how many people are involved, especially when you start talking video shoots.

Yeah. Insane. No. Well, I mean, I give her props. Well done. I say well done. Well, good on you. But yeah, good for her and I think it's amazing. But in our show notes, I linked to a digital music news article that talks about what Beyonce just taught every single artist in the world and every single point on this is wrong and stupid.

Yeah. So, I mean, and I thought some of it was actually valid. But my whole point was after reading that article, Beyonce didn't teach you shit. Beyonce's team did. And it's probably Apple and Tim Cook's team. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, some of the points are right.

Like, number eight, if they're not paying for your releases, are they really your fans? That's a damn good point. If people just want to steal your music, they're not your fans. They like your music, but they're definitely not going to help you have a life doing this. No, that's what I'm saying. There's a lot of stuff in that article that is actually valid, especially when it comes to the streaming rights and getting like slivers of a penny for streaming.

And why are you giving that up when, as an established artist, you can charge a premium price? Like, I can see the Rolling Stones doing a new album like this. The Who, anybody. I guarantee you, all those legacy acts are starting to line up something. Oh, absolutely. The Goo Goo Dolls. You know? Well, this is going to be your new best of.

This is your best of if you're a legacy artist right now and you know you still have a fan base. You're going to put out one of these exclusive visual albums with no notice and just boop, there it is. And you should have a hard-on for this because that's your fucking wheelhouse are these legacy artists. So you, sir, should stop shitting on this and get on board and get your contracts in order because this is what you're going to be doing for the next two years.

I don't get points on albums, but I'll – maybe I should start negotiating that. Exactly. That's what I'm saying, motherfucker. Holy goat out! So I'd like to say thank you to my old friend and business partner, Sean Bonner, for joining us today and giving us a very interesting look into the world of Bitcoin, which I had no idea about, and kind of reads like science fiction.

I am actually pissed because we let him go before I had the one question that I wanted to ask him, which was how is the new Daniel Suarez book because he got a pre-release copy, that bastard. Oh, damn it. Oh, damn it. I think we're going to have to have him back on because I am intrigued by Bitcoin and expect a lot of Bitcoin in 2014 from the grumpy old geeks.

Yeah, and you know, Sean and I's trajectories have been fairly similar along the timeline and we are interested in the same stuff. So I think if you listen to this show, Sean would be a good guest to have back for sure. So thank you for coming by, Sean. We really appreciate it. I agree.

Good to talk to you. I want to say rest in peace to the Omelette Parlor in Santa Monica, California. After, I believe, 37 years, it has shuttered its doors, and that has a lot to do with what we were talking about with Sean Bonner and the tech companies coming into Santa Monica and the Venice area.

Unfortunately, rents are going up left, right, and center, and this place, this breakfast place that has been here for 37 years, that everybody loves as part of all of our lives, could no longer afford to stay on the street. The rent got too high? Yeah, rent got too high.

They couldn't afford to do it. And the crazy thing is it's not the first business that's shut down on that particular street. There are five places that have shut down, and they're still shuttered because nobody can afford to move in. I don't know what these landlords are thinking. Yeah, that's too bad. That's really too bad.

It's sad to see a community start to die. Yeah, it really is, especially when you're on the front lines with it and you're seeing your favorite places going down. So it's not fun. It's not fun. Here's the deal. Snapchat, go pay their rent and just get free omelets for life.

Yeah, fuck it. Give back. You made crazy money for a stupid product, and you know you're lucky as fuck. Keep the fucking community going. Don't come into our communities and disrupt them. Yeah, with your fake pictures of teenagers junk.

You know, okay. All right, anyways, we're in the closing shoutouts. It's a holiday episode. Let's actually be nice. Let's not be grumpy in our closing shoutouts for our holiday episode. Let's give thanks to some of the other people that were on our show. Felicia Michaels, thank you for stopping by.

She's hilarious. Go check her out. She's still doing stand-up left, right, and center all over the place all the time. Go see her. Joey Rabier, our friend from Revision 3, thank you very much for coming by. And also, thank you to Rudy Jachan, our first guest, actually, on the show, an amazingly smart guy.

And check out his podcast at Timey Wimey TV. Yep. Tim Ferriss, whose TV show is doing quite well, two or three episodes in now. He's on recently. Check out his show. I've watched every episode so far. I really like it. Good stuff. Yes, and he's moving to a new network, so make sure you change your DVRs.

And also, thank you to, Jesus, David Teeter for coming by and telling us about the spooky side of the world. Dr. David Teeter, he's our unofficial third member at this point, as far as I'm concerned. Yes, he will be joining us again shortly. Mike Malin. Mike Malin, yes.

Who just had twins, so congratulations to Mr. Mike Malin and his lovely wife, Krista. They had twins. He is actually not out with the Goo Goo Dolls right now because he's on paternity leave, but he'll be out with them again next year. So check out the Goo Goo Dolls. Yeah, it's kind of hard to drum with a baby on your chest, strapped to your chest.

Two of them. Oh, jeez. Yeah. Oh, there's man boobies. Yeah. And we got Scott Beal. Yes, thank you very much to Scott Beal for coming by. That was amazing. It was so much fun to catch up. Shane Nickerson. Shane Nickerson. Oh, yeah, Shane.

And the final season of Rob Dyrdek's Fantasy Factory is on right now, and it is amazing, as always. So check out his show there, and also check out Ridiculousness that he also exec produces. And if you get a chance, he does do stand-up around the Los Angeles area every now and again.

So anytime you get to see Shane, it's a treat. He's a smart, funny guy. Yeah, so those, I think, were all of our guests. If we missed any of you, we're really sorry because we're kind of winging this one. But thank you to everybody for showing up, and I hope that you had a fun time on our show, and I hope everybody out there had a good time listening.

Yes. There you go. Yeah, and thank you, everybody who listens. We really appreciate it. Yeah, that's a bit. Everybody have a great holiday season, whether you do the Christmas, Kwanzaa, Jew thing. I don't know. Whatever the hell you do. Even if you play with your man configuration by your refrigerator, have a great one.

Keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpyoldgeeks.com, on Facebook at facebook.com, slash grumpyoldgeeks, or email them at podcast at grumpyoldgeeks.com. Have a good week.

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