53: You've Got Red on You

Hey there Jason. Good afternoon sir. How are you doing? Peachy. It's like 70 degrees here because I figure we've got to start talking with weather every time. Are the new listeners gone yet? It's 73 in Santa Monica. It is 69 here in Downers Grove, Illinois. There we go. All right. Done. Okay. Weather's done.

So is XP as we thought but apparently not. It's not dead yet. It won't die. Well you know what? This is where Microsoft has a genius business plan. Let us kill one of the most popular operating systems in the world and say we're not going to support it anymore unless you give us buckets of money.

They are getting buckets of money. The UK government alone is paying Microsoft approximately $9.1 million to continue support of Windows XP, Office 2003, and Exchange 2003. For all British public sector customers.

That's three products, right? So they're going to release patches for three products for $9.7 million? Yes. That's a lot of employees. Yes, it is. That's a lot of programmers to hire to maintain that stuff. And that's only one customer. They're going to be probably racking in $500 million or at least $50 million from just the smaller clients.

Not to mention if like the U.S. government jumps in and throws their hat in, they're probably looking at well over $100 to $200 million a year just to support XP. Exactly. Which is – that's probably pretty good profit I'm guessing. Yeah. I mean they're getting – the Dutch government cut its own multimillion deal as well.

The U.S. has not made a deal yet, but it will because many hospitals in the U.S. still run XP, workstations, healthcare devices, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, don't forget all the ATMs that are still out there that run XP. All the ATMs run XP, which is very true. I mean these guys are going to be rolling in it for years.

The Microsoft XP division is probably going to be bigger than Microsoft. No, that would be funny. Yeah, yeah. And I'm waiting for the rush of the O-days that have been like basically hoarded for this thing to – for the support to stop.

But it looks like they're still going to keep going. But homeowners – or not homeowners, but people who have XP in their home. Yeah, you're screwed. Oh, man. No, they're not screwed. Let's just put it this way. If they're running XP in their home, they're already not that savvy, which means their boxes are probably already owned and are just sitting there sending spam.

That's all they do. That's probably very true. Yeah. And that was my argument the other day when we were talking about it too. It's just like who the hell is still running XP? Well, besides government people. I can go – I know at least five homes that I can go to and find an XP machine that's running. Oh, wait. There's one on the floor under my desk. They're everywhere.

They are everywhere. They're like cockroaches. Speaking of cockroaches – Oh, we're going to talk about Facebook? Yeah, let's talk about Facebook a little bit. That was a lucky guess actually. This is something that now is dead. We've been talking a lot and we talk a little bit later because we prerecorded our segment with our special guest about Facebook and the multiple changes that have taken place.

Facebook has basically killed off brands and there's a lot of opinions about this, one of which is they've been saying they're going to do this for a long time. Shocker, the other being, well, these things are of value. Why shouldn't you be paying for them? Yeah, I get that.

The problem that I'm seeing is that it's a lot of the kind of what I'd call the middle class brands, the smaller brands, the brands that basically only existed because of social media and came into existence because of it and are actually pretty cool, many of which were mostly, I'd say, hobbies.

They didn't really exactly make these people a lot of money. They're dead now. They just can't survive anymore. A lot of them are starting to post about it and say they're kind of silly posts. But I feel for these companies because the change makes sense. Facebook makes sense to do this for your large companies, for your Huffington Post, for your whatever, your big media companies.

Sure, charge. Charge for brands. Why not? But it's these smaller guys that are getting killed and it kind of sucks for them. Well, it sucks for them but honestly, if they'd have stuck to a web-only branding and used Facebook as their tertiary branding and customer acquisition methods, then everybody would have been trained to go to the website.

That's true. And you just post new stuff to Facebook. This is just – everybody got lazy because it was free traffic. That was it. Well, I mean I would also argue that Facebook has trained not only the brands to be lazy but the consumer. Oh, absolutely. Because the consumer doesn't want to go to the website anymore. I mean you're exactly right and that's what we've been screaming about since day one with this podcast, which was link back to your site.

Link back to your site. Make your site the main focus. Only use social networks to drive traffic back to your site. But the consumer has gotten so lazy now that they just don't care. Okay, I'm no longer seeing Hidden LA's posts. Oh, well. Am I ever going to go to HiddenLA.com? Probably not. See, and this is where having an email newsletter comes into play because if you have your customer's email, then you can send them an email once a month.

And tell them – and remind them of what's going on. Email is still – yeah, email is still a massively valid marketing tool and people just forgot about it. But I know a lot of people that are making their living off of their list. Well, that's what you have to do now because you don't have Facebook anymore and you can set up multiple different mailing lists.

Get a daily digest. Get an email for every single post that's made. Get a once a month and then tailor your post. Here's the top post that we had in the last month. Here's things that might be of interest to you because you've clicked on these types of stories before. It's a no-brainer for these companies. There are ways to get around the loss of Facebook.

Stop being lazy and stop whining. Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm serious. I'm with you 100%. Yeah. So now we'll talk about something that I should be whining about and everybody should be whining about. And certainly I'm really happy to see that some of the people affected are starting to go online and do total transparency and whine.

What the fuck are you whining about now? Digital Music News posted – we've had a couple of these recently, but this is one of the biggest ones that I've seen. Digital Music News, an artist named Armin Sharkmanian – I'm probably not pronouncing that right and I apologize for that. He is a Grammy-nominated composer, keyboardist, and recording artist.

Obviously not very mainstream. Since you can't pronounce his name. It still doesn't matter. I mean he's Grammy-nominated. He's an artist with a Grammy nomination. You would think this guy's got to be doing okay. Nope. He posted his complete royalty statements from every service on digitalmusicnews.com.

He is making nothing. Oh, no. He made $11.50. Oh, I'm sorry. He made $11.50. September he made $11. And oh, wait. This one's got $19.39. So he can take him and his buddy to In-N-Out and get some burgers and milkshakes for the week.

And this is for the entire body of work that he's written over his career, mind you. Yeah. He actually doesn't have a lot. He doesn't have a lot of plays either. So if you look at the play numbers, his highest play number for a given track is on Spotify for 2088 plays.

Granted, yes, he gets 100 percent of the revenue, which is 60 cents. Well, I'm just going to – you say that's not a large number of plays and it's not for your cold plays or your Lady Gagas or your Miley Cyrus's. But it's actually – if you run the numbers, it's quite a lot.

It's more plays than most songs ever get. Okay. Yeah. He's got 14,227 performances and it made him $4.20. Yeah. He can't even buy a good joint for $4.20 to smoke up at $4.20 with his $4.20. No. Well done.

So yeah, it sucks. Here's the deal. And this guy is smart. He's like, yeah, I'm going to go write for TV. You know? Yeah. And here's one of the things that I really – this is why I like this guy because in the comments, at the first comment, this guy is like, it's just so depressing to hear the same tragic story over and over again.

This is an anonymous commenter. But the artist writes back. He's like, tragic stories involve death and destruction. Don't feel bad for me. I have a good life. I just wanted to put this out there for discussion and awareness. So he's not really getting too whiny about it but he's just saying, hey, look, this is what's going on. Work around it.

Go do your own thing. But at least he's not saying, woe is me, which I like that about him. Yeah, I like that too. He's not out there just saying I'm totally fucked but the industry is. And I want to see more people starting to post this. I want to see more of this information coming out.

I really find it fascinating and I think that most people aren't aware of this and the more people that see it, the better. I'm really surprised that they don't have nondisclosures on that with the services. But I guess there's so many services, it's a little tough. But anyway, speaking of something that's totally fucked, Vine.

Vine. No, no. I thought it was still around. They're not dead yet. They're not fucked. That's the weirdest thing. You know why they're not? Because they're owned by Twitter who has more money than God still and can afford to play with their red-headed stepchild and give it a lollipop every now and again.

And they've just added messaging. Yes. Great. They've added messaging. Wow. That's so AOL 1997. That's cutting edge. We can now send video messages instead of just posting them for everyone even though we can do that with about 10,000 other services. And the built-in shit on your phone.

Thanks for that, Vine. The option to import camera roll videos may be next. Ooh. Which means that every single video on Vine is now going to be edited for trickery. Oh, yeah. Well, it's going to come out of Final Cut. Exactly.

So there you go. And you could have done that before. You just take a picture of the screen. Yeah, exactly. Video of the screen. But anyway, I can't believe Vine is still around. Me either. Even in the article that's on The Verge that we linked to, people are like, Who the fuck still uses Vine?

Yeah, I don't get it either. I thought Instagram for sure when they rolled out their own video thing. And, you know, they have messaging too. Would have killed it. But, nope. Still there. Not dead. Yet. Welcome, our guest. So today we've got Jay Goldman, technologist, designer, speaker, author, generally swell guy on the show.

Hey, Jay. Hey, guys. I was just reading your bio on your website. I have to say you are generally a swell guy. I do my best. I do my best. So we've known each other for quite a few years now. But I think we met at a Web 2.0 conference way back in the day.

It could have been e-tech. It could have been Web 2.0. But, yeah, something like that. So since then, you've become quite the prolific author. And I wanted to bring you on today to talk about your new book. Thank you. Yeah. It's actually my second. The first book was a very dry, boring, and now completely out-of-date reference guide to building Facebook applications.

It's the nature of dead tree medium when you're trying to document something that is definitely not dead tree. So about two weeks before the book came out in 2008, it's the Facebook cookbook by O'Reilly. Well, actually, I guess it was a little more than that. About a month or so before the book came out, Facebook completely revamped the platform.

So that was fun. So we decided to delay publication by two weeks and had a mad scramble and rewrote all the code in the book to use the new platform. And I would say at this point, there's probably absolutely nothing left in it that would even work if you took the code samples and put them into an app.

And yet, I still receive a royalty check every quarter from O'Reilly. And I kind of want to find the people who bought it and refund their money. I feel like they were in for a surprise. It's almost as if Facebook took your book and said, well, we're going to take all of this functionality out now. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. I don't know if it was quite that malicious. But yeah. Yeah. I actually wanted to ask you about that because it was a – I actually was a contributor on that book. You were? Yeah. And now, was it harder to like wrangle the programming cats to have all the contributors that are in it – that are in that book?

Or was it easier to just write the bits yourself? Because it seems like there was a lot of contributions in there and wrangling programmers can be fairly difficult. Yes. Not unlike herding cats. Yeah. I think that there's no – the cookbook series by format is a book that you can read cover to cover if you want to, but really is intended to solve specific problems with recipes for doing them.

And so I had this idea when I was writing the book that people were more likely to buy it if it wasn't just me talking, but there were experts in different topics who made contributions. And so I reached out to friends throughout the technology world who had a particular skill set in one area, and I asked them if they would contribute a recipe around that area.

So, Jason, if I recall correctly, you wrote a great recipe actually around how to optimize PHP performance. And it had a – and a lot of people building Facebook apps at the time were building them in PHP. And it actually had a trick in it that I still use to this day in writing PHP code around double quotes versus single quotes and the speed performance increase in using single quotes because they're not evaluated for variables within them.

And it's a great little trick that people aren't likely to know. So, yeah. So it was a good insight. There was definitely – people were more interested in the book as a result of the fact that it had all these different experts who had contributed. But getting the articles together from those experts was not an easy task.

There were definitely more people invited to contribute than actually did in the end just because people didn't meet the deadline. But also it was a pretty short contribution. It works out to about a page or two pages. So you really didn't have to write that much. Most of the contributions that people gave me didn't include code.

They were things around code. There were some that did, but very minimal code. So you didn't need to know the Facebook platform for them. But actually the bigger challenge turned out to be getting the release forms signed by people after they had contributed it. And then I got sent the release forms by O'Reilly's legal department and had to track everybody back down again and ask them to sign a document, which in 2008 was a bit harder than it is these days to do electronically.

So people actually had to find fax machines and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, that was a bit more annoying. Yeah, I remember when you were trying to track me down for that release. Like, where the hell am I going to find a fax machine? I've got to go to Kinko's. So since we're on the topic of Facebook, what do you think about this new brand direction that they're taking with basically charging pay-to-play now?

Yeah, I'm of two minds about it. I think it is dangerous as a company to offer something to people for free and then take it away from them. And it never engenders goodwill. So the decision to charge brands for something that they were essentially getting for free, it must have been a difficult one to make.

So, you know, in that regard, I think it's tough. But I also agree with Marc Andreessen's perspective on it. He got engaged in a little bit of a Twitter battle over it. And he said, you are upset because these brand impressions obviously have value for you. If they have value for you, then you should pay for them.

But that goes against our entire society at the moment. Talk to the music industry. Right. Right. Right. Well, you know, but even the music industry, I mean, the music industry is a great example of dinosaurs with their heads stuck in the ground. To them, they were not in the music business.

They were in the CD distribution business. And when CDs were threatened, it threatened what they perceived as their livelihood. And you can look historically at any number of companies that have made the same error. Instead of having what I call clarity of purpose around what they actually are doing, you know, actually distributing music, not selling CDs, then you see companies that died off because the world shifted.

And if they had been clear about what they were actually doing, they could have shifted with it. If you look at the railroad industry, they viewed their business as railroads, not as transportation. And they got stuck in the same problem because railroads aren't necessarily the best answer.

There's lots of other ways to deliver things. If they had seen their world as transportation, they could have evolved with it, but they didn't. They saw it as laying track and running trains on it. So same sort of problem. Now, the difference, you know, with something like Facebook is those impressions do have value.

And so if you really want to promote something, then you should be willing to pay to gain access to those impressions. The difficulty is that they started off as being free. I mean, I see kind of this. This is the same model that cable companies have been doing for years.

Here's HBO free for three months. Oh, well, now it's going to be $25 a month moving forward. And I'm really surprised at the outrage from a lot of these brands because it's not like we didn't see this coming. Facebook has basically been telling us for years that we're going to start charging you for this stuff.

So the outrage is kind of a little ridiculous to me. Yeah, you know, I totally agree. I think it's one of those, okay, sure, it'll happen one day. And then all of a sudden it happens and it's like, what? Why didn't you tell us?

There has been definitely a lack of transparency about the way they rolled it out, which has been my major gripe with Facebook all along. They're not transparent about what's going on behind the scenes and they just kind of do it and then we all go, oh, did you notice that we're not getting any impressions anymore? I wonder what's going on. Yeah, and it's a missed opportunity too, right?

You know, they could have been educating people about it and what the change is going to be and helping you to understand. You know, it's the question of is it better to throw the lobster into the pot of boiling water once it's boiling or gradually heat the pot up as you go? And, you know, if they could have started months before they rolled out the paying part saying, starting on this date, this exposure will cost you $17, you know?

And you would have gone, oh, okay, well, $17 isn't bad. I'm glad I'm getting it for free now. And then when the date came, you would have been ready to start paying for it. Yeah, and one of the things that I think that they really kind of screwed the pooch on was as they've been pulling functionality away, like taking the tabs away, you know?

Like we used to have these giant, lovely tabs that would put people to our apps and all of that's been pulled, you know, just over time. It seems like it would have been smarter for them to keep a lot of functionality for brands that made it more friendly for brands to want to spend that money.

It's been the dichotomy of Facebook since the beginning. It's the battle between what the user experience and the engagement that they get on the platform versus what advertisers and brands want to see on it. And they've always erred on the side of the user. And I don't think that's the wrong decision for them.

I don't think they'd be a billion plus users if they had fallen for, you know, essentially the MySpace trap of turning on advertising all over the place, which you could argue is at least a big part of what killed off MySpace. Facebook's always erred on the side of the user and that has benefited the user experience, but it's been very antagonistic to brands.

When I'm not writing books, I work in the biotech and health industry and we help biotech companies bring products to market. And so we do a lot of their digital marketing and advertising. And Facebook has been this giant quandary for the health industry because they change the platform so often that the money that you invest into your campaign is, especially if you build things like apps, may disappear the next day because they change the way that apps interact or they change the way that they get publicized through people's feeds.

Or more importantly for the health industry, they take away the places where you were displaying the safety information you have to display about your drug. And now you're actually in violation of FDA regulations. Same problem with channels like YouTube and other places. The rate of innovation is so fast that as advertisers and marketers, it's hard to keep up with them, especially if you're in a regulated industry.

And that just translates into clients not really wanting to spend their budget there. And that's counter to the business side of their business. Very good point. So you talked about what you're doing in the health and biotech industry. So I definitely want to talk about what you're doing now and talk about your book and where this book came from.

Because for me, you sent me a copy of it a while ago, and I'm about halfway through it because it's – I think it's a fascinating book. I want you to tell us about it in a second. But first tell us, what's your background in the web field?

We didn't really get to cover that before we started ragging on Facebook, which we always end up doing. So tell us a little bit more about you, Jay. Sure. So I've been in the technology business basically as long as I can remember. My dad was a software guy.

I grew up with computers around the house. I cut my teeth as a very young programmer on HyperCard, which you may remember, on the Mac platform. Oh, yeah. And that was a great way to learn programming. And I spent a lot of time in bulletin boards and all that kind of stuff growing up.

And then I did a degree in information systems and human behavior, which is really human-computer interaction or whatever you want to call it. But that intersection between people and computers and how they work together. And I came out of that, went to work for IBM, which was a great formative experience in one of the world's largest companies.

I talk about that a little bit in the book. And it taught me, among many other things, that I'm not a big company guy and it was not the right environment for me. And so I left to do a startup. This was sort of just after the dot-com bust and things were starting to stabilize again.

So a little bit afterwards and there was some money out there. And I pitched a startup incubator on an idea. They said, this is really similar to a company we've already funded. So why don't you come and join that company instead? So I did. It was a company called InfoTreever. And this was before Plaxo had really came out, but it was the same idea about syncing contact information and keeping people up to date and all that kind of stuff.

And a problem that really still doesn't have a great solution to it even now. And I was there for about three months before they laid off a third of the company. Us UX guys are always the first ones out the door. So yeah, so I left and I started doing my own thing.

And I ran a little consultancy for about two years. And then I partnered up with some other folks, started an agency called Radiant Core, which we ran quite successfully for about six and a half, seven years. And decided that our true love was really in products. And we had, I think like many people who started services businesses, started Radiant Core as a means to fund products, but never actually got around to building the product.

So seven years later, we found ourselves still running a service business. So we sold it to one of our clients who was in the environmental space. We really liked them and we really liked the product, a company called Zero Footprint. And we all went and joined them instead and helped build out their products around carbon accounting systems for enterprises that wanted to track their footprint and offset it.

And I stayed through the transition, helped the team get acclimatized and set the direction for the new products. And then I left and joined a tech startup called Ripple, which was a VC-funded tech startup that is now Work.com. It's owned by Salesforce. Oh, wow. Okay. And Work.com or Ripple was all in the performance management space for people.

It was built on this belief that the way we do, especially annual performance reviews, is so messed up and stupid and pointless and doesn't result in performance. And it's really a thing that's imposed by HR with a checklist that people have to follow.

And so we had come up with a much better way of doing that. And it started to get used, ironically, by Facebook, among other companies, as their internal system. And it grew and grew and then was eventually acquired by Work.com. And I started to feel that I was missing being on the agency side.

Client side is fun, but I liked the diversity of the agency world. And also, I had never done product marketing before that. And so it was a fantastic learning opportunity for me. But it was also learning in a way that Ripple's biggest enemy, and I think this is true for any startup, whether they see it this way or not, your biggest enemy is actually time.

You have a limited amount of time to get your ideas out into the world, to get the product market fit, to get something developed that people want to pay for, and then to build up that audience. And depending on how much money you raised and what kind of competitive environment in, you may have more time or you may have less time, but you only have a certain amount of time.

Yeah, it's the dreaded runway. Right. Yeah, and the runway may not be a purely financial one, right? And you may have hit on an idea that's really great, but you've got a big competitor, and if that competitor pivots in your direction, it could be very damaging if you haven't built up enough of a base yet.

So that may not be a financial runway, but there's still a runway implicit in that. So one day I said to the, you know what, you guys need to go out and hire somebody who's done product marketing who's a real expert at this and who can accelerate the growth of the user community. Okay, I've taken us as far as I can, and I think it's time for me to go back to the agency world.

So I'm going to go, and they hired it. They started looking for a new head of marketing, and I joined Click, and it's been an amazing experience for the last, I guess, three and a half years. It was November 2010, so yeah, a little over three and a half years. Wow, it doesn't seem that long.

Yeah. Last time I was talking to you, you were at Ripple, and I was at my startup, and wow, man, time is flying. That's why we're grumpy old geeks, right? Fucking absolutely. That's nuts. It's interesting that you like to bounce back into that you like the agency model over the client model or like the working on the client side.

I found that working on the agency side, we never got to like dig our teeth into anything for like long enough to really make something worthwhile. But I guess that comes from working in the movie industry where everything only lasts six months, and then they throw it away. If you build something beautiful, then they throw it away.

Yeah, and we actually do some work with Sony, so I had a chance to spend some time with Sony Pictures. And it really is very much this mindset of, okay, what's the next title? What are we going to do for it? All right, release day is here. Opening done. Move on. Hand it off to home video and then move on.

Move on, yeah. Yeah, so we have some really long-term relationships. Click is 17 years old, just had its 17th birthday, our 17th birthday. Impressive. That's very impressive. Yeah, and the story of Click is pretty amazing, and that's part of what attracted me to it. It was started 17 years ago by the same three guys who run it today.

It is still a private company, never taken any investment, never raised any money, anything like that. So bootstrapped from day one. Our CEO, Leram Siegel, was 16, going on 17 when they started the company.

Had to get his dad to sign the incorporation papers for him. And now here we are 17 years later, and the company is about 400 people. We are the world's largest independent digital health agency, so we're not part of an agency network, which we think are very bad things, not only from a delivery of work perspective, but also from an employee experience perspective.

We have folks all over the U.S. and in Toronto, and we have some incredible client loyalty. Jason, to your point about things turning over so quickly, we've got clients that have been working with Click for over 13 years. In some cases, we actually have way more tenure on the brand than anybody on the client side does, and so we've become the keeper of the organizational knowledge.

When new people start on the client side, we train them on the brand because we've been working on it way longer than they have. Crazy. Maybe I just worked for really crappy agencies that got fired a lot. Health is a different space. You know, health is a fascinating space. I had no health experience before I joined Click, but the patent lifecycle on drugs means that the day your product launches, you start counting down to the day that your product dies.

Right. So it's one of the only industries where that statement is true. You know exactly what the lifespan of your product is from the minute it launches. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I never even thought about it that way. So when you came into – if you've been there for three and a half years, did you work on the idea for the book with your co-authors?

Like whose idea was this book? Or was it like a collaboration? Definitely a collaboration. So there was an interesting thing that started to happen when Click reached a certain scale. When I started – and the growth rate at Click is pretty amazing. So when I started, we were 130 people, and we're just closing in on 400 now.

And when we hit a certain scale, it was somewhere near the $100 million in revenue mark. People started to take notice of us as a company, not as an agency that was available for work in the space. And we started to get a lot of questions around how we run the company that's different.

What do we do that's different? How do we achieve – we have grown at a growth rate somewhere between 30% and 60% every single year since 1997. A slow year for us is 30% growth. And that's something that you don't see very often.

And people started to ask us, what's the secret sauce? How do you guys achieve this consistent growth? And how do you continue to attract such high-quality talent? And so when I started, and I brought with me a whole bunch of thoughts around the performance management space from Ripple, and we started to integrate those into this really remarkable system that Click has called Genome.

Genome is – it's really our enterprise operating system. It's the everything system that runs what happens at Click. Everything we do goes through Genome. Our people spend most of their day in Genome. It's a web-based system that evolved out of a ticket tracking system that really came out of our decision to ban email about 11 years ago.

And email is really – it's the worst possible tool for collaborating with a group of people. I think if you sat out and said, let's design the worst tool we could come up with to orchestrate work and collaborate, you'd end up at email. And for a whole variety of reasons.

The fact that you're essentially sending memos back and forth and carbon copying each other means that it's so easy to leave somebody off of part of that chain by accident and then have somebody else join partway through a conversation when they get CC'd in and they have no idea what the rest of the conversation was about.

You've got files as attachments. But if you didn't get the email that had the actual file on it, you can only see later on that there was a file, but you don't have it anymore. And then it disappears on somebody's hard drive and you never find it again. You get no historical record. You know, it's just a terrible way to organize people.

And so about 11 years ago, our chief operating officer, Aaron Goldstein, who's one of the co-authors on our book, decided to ban email for task-related purposes at Click. And he said, you know, this is actually a known problem. We're just going to grab a ticket tracking system like you'd find for a customer service representative to use.

And we're going to use that instead. So, you know, Brian, if I needed you to work on something, I'll just cut you a ticket, which has the task in it. And then when you're done, you'll send the ticket back to me. And from that very simple initial point, we've evolved an entire operating system for the company.

We now have a team of about 10 people who work on Gino full-time. And it wasn't so much the ticket tracking that was interesting. The moment of true insight that led to what would eventually become this book and the way that we run the company and the whole belief and operating system that we have was the moment when Lee and Aaron looked at the data that surrounds the tickets.

And they realized that by looking at that data, they could tell how work was being done in the company. So it's not so much that Brian and I collaborated on a ticket and it went back and forth a couple of times and then it got done. Or, you know, maybe Jason got assigned the ticket at some point because he needed to work on it and then it got completed.

It's that if you look at that data, especially in aggregate across all of the tickets, you start to see patterns emerge and you start to see the flow of work through the agency. And you can start to understand it in a way that you'll never get by trying to have people report on how they do their work or explain how they do their work.

And we started to pick out patterns. And they're patterns that software can easily identify. So we have a pattern that we call ticket tennis. If Brian and I were working on that ticket back and forth and we're bouncing the ticket and it's coming back to me and going back to him and coming back to me, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong.

But odds are there's something wrong. Right. So if we look historically at all of our tickets, that pattern emerges as a sign that there's an issue here. Like maybe these two people don't work well together or something like that. Exactly. Yeah. So the truth is I'm being a jerk and I just don't want to do the thing Brian's asking me to do.

So I just keep sending him the ticket back with additional questions in it or whatever. But it could also be that we're trying to do something that the requirements were badly defined for in the first place. So let's say we're two developers and we've been given – this never happens. We've been given an ambiguous requirement to implement and we're both sort of like, I don't know what to do with this.

What do you think? How should we do this? And so Genome flags those to the project manager and says, hey, project manager, I don't know why this ticket is bouncing back and forth. But historically, that represents a problem, so you should look into it. And the PM can look into it and go, actually, this is totally fine.

They're just collaborating, we're good. Or they can step in and say, hey, can I help? Do we need to refine the requirements or whatever? If you look at the behavior of a person across lots of tickets, you can learn things about them as well. So if I was passing the buck in that scenario and it turns out I'm passing the buck on most of my tickets, then I'm probably not a great fit for the company.

And that's something that would be really hard to figure out otherwise. But the data will never make that decision. It will never have Genome recommend that somebody isn't a fit. But it might highlight and say, this is a behavior pattern that, to my manager, that you should coach Jay on.

There's a teachable moment here where you can spend some time working with him on this. And so that was really the insight that ultimately has led us to having Genome. And so to very long-winded answer to your question, when I came on board, I said, this system is amazing and we should really think about how we share that with the rest of the world.

And Lee and Aaron said, we've been asked that a few times over the years, but it's so much work to share it. And we're so focused on growing the company, which is part of why we grow at that rate. And so we sort of threw ideas back and forth for a little while and we kept growing. And then we started to get more and more requests.

And then eventually I said, you know what, guys, I think we should write a book. And I think we should bring in my friend Rahaf, who has some amazing experience that's very relevant to what we want to talk about. She worked with Don Tapscott on Wikinomics and growing up digital.

She was part of Obama's social media team for the 2008 campaign. She spent the last two years in Geneva working for the World Economic Forum in their Technology Pioneers program, identifying companies that are using technology in innovative ways around the world. She really has a lot of relevant experience.

She's also written a few books. So let's see if she'd be interested in working with us on this. And the guy said, sure. And I reached out to Rahaf and she immediately said no. She said, the world does not need another strategy book about how to run a business.

There are way more interesting things for me to spend my time on. And she was living in Paris at the time. And I said to her, you know what, Rahaf, do me a favor. I'm going to send you a plane ticket to come home to Toronto. I know that your family is here anyway. So why don't you come and visit your family? If you get nothing else out of this trip, you get a chance to see your folks.

But come into the office and meet Lee and Aaron and see what we've built here. And if you don't think that it's worth sharing after that, no problem. But if you do, then work with us on the book. So she said, okay, sure. And she came home and she got to hang out with her family and she came to visit Click.

And we have a very open environment. We invited her to talk to anybody that she wanted to wander around and see what was happening. She got a full tour of genome from Aaron. And at the end of it, she said to me, this is amazing. I want to figure out if this is unique to you guys or if this is really the beginning of a movement.

And so she did a little bit of research. She looked into some other companies. She found a bunch of weak signals emerging across all kinds of industries that this was definitely the direction that things were headed in. And she signed on. And from that point, it took us about two years to get to publication.

So it's not a quick process. We did a lot of research. We found a lot of case studies to include. We wrote the book itself, sort of publishing industry end of things, finding an agent and then finding a publisher and working through all of that. I guess it was about two years from there before the book was on shelves.

Now, you guys are at the forefront of this, I'm assuming, because you built this amazing system. One of the things that I noticed in the book, you're talking about how people can get like off-the-shelf products that are currently out there to kind of coddle together their own genome type of system.

Now, is genome something that you would ever think about like putting out as a SaaS product? Or is it just too customized to your specific industry niche and basically it's like a corporate advantage to have that and you don't want to give it out? That's a great question. The corporate secret part, definitely not, because we've just written a book all about it and we've sort of shared the thinking behind it and the ideas and all that kind of stuff.

So we're encouraging other companies to go out and do this. I think it's a competitive advantage to us, but I don't think it's one that has remained unique to us. And there's lots of industries that we don't work in that could benefit from it. Genome itself, we thought about this a lot and we refer to it as a bespoke custom tailored suit that fits click perfectly.

But if you put on somebody else's custom tailored suit, it would never fit you properly. So genome itself, we couldn't turn into a SaaS product. But the fundamental ideas that make a suit a suit will definitely work for other companies. And it doesn't matter how big they are or what industry they're in.

They just need a custom tailored suit that matches them. So we are looking into how we turn that into a commercial property. And I think we're going to have an answer to that quite soon. Our answer will probably work more at the enterprise level than it will at the small business level, at least at first.

That'll be our focus. And so there are still some great tools, a lot of them are mentioned in the book, that smaller companies can use to get started with this stuff. And we even recommend in the book that there's a certain almost belief system around the value of data and how you use it and how it shapes behavior.

And it's really easy to get started with that. All you have to do is buy a fitness tracker. Buy a fuel band from Nike or a Fitbit or a Jawbone Up or whichever one you'd like. Start wearing it and see how it shapes your behavior. See what it's like to have ambiently recorded data about your performance and see if it changes the way that you operate.

And if it does, then you see the value in this whole thing. At a very micro scale, it'll cost you about $200 to do that. And you can really, you can see the impact that it has. Think about scaling that up to your business and then you'll understand quite quickly how this is a valuable thing.

Now, if you want to look at, you know, email is one of the things we harp on a lot in the book. And it's obviously the root, the origin or the root of genome. We suggest Asana as a great way for small teams who are collaborating or even larger teams to get rid of email as the collaboration platform and switch over to something that is really built for collaboration without any of the problems that come along with the email side.

So Asana is a great option. Ironically, again, founded by one of the Facebook founders. Yeah, that's from Facebook. And ironically, it's down half the time whenever I try to use it. But it's a nice system. I have used it with a couple of small teams. I definitely recommend trying it. Yeah, and we've got some really interesting collaboration platforms that are popping up these days.

So Asana is definitely one of them. There's obviously ones like Basecamp and 37signals platform, although they're now just called Basecamp themselves. Oh, but before you go on, you guys did a talk at Basecamp not too long ago. Do you know, is that video going to be available anywhere?

We did shoot a video of it. I think we are editing it right now. So hopefully we'll be able to put at least part of it up. They were quite happy for us to share it. So yeah. Oh, excellent, excellent. They're actually in the book as well. We talked to them about a product that they started called Know Your Company, which is around the idea of quantifying some of the pieces about what's sort of happening in your company and all that kind of stuff.

And they've recently actually spun it out as they've narrowed their focus to Basecamp. So they've partnered with a new CEO named Claire Liu. And Claire is now the CEO of Know Your Company. And that's covered in the book as well. Excellent, excellent. Yeah, so Basecamp, there's, it's sort of interesting.

I was just reading an article about this the other day. Stuart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr, when they started Flickr, the old grumpy geeks will remember this. Flickr was actually a game called The Game Never Ending. And the game itself never caught on. But the small piece of it that they built, which was kind of a photo sharing tool within the game, caught on, became Flickr, sold to Yahoo, you know, eventually Stuart left and then started another game company.

That's tiny spec, right? Right. Right. And spec was the game. And hired some fantastic people, actually sort of full circle, back to the Facebook cookbook. Daniel Burka, who contributed a recipe to it, was one of the designers, the original designer on Dig, went to work for Stuart on tiny spec.

And he was one of the original designers on the game. And they, you know, for a variety of reasons, I think, partly a technology platform decision, they unfortunately chose to build it all in Flash. So that had an impact. But also, you know, Stuart's view on it, subsequently, I've never, I don't know him, but in this article I was reading, he's like, they accomplished their goal.

And then it turned out that their goal was an impossible game to play, is they really just wanted a world that people could exist in. And then everybody would sort of play it and say, okay, but where's the game part? Because you just wandered around and did stuff, right? There was no sort of framework for the game. So, but what happened as a result of that is they built an internal collaboration platform to help their team collaborate while they were building the game.

And that collaboration platform started to really take off within their company. And what they ended up doing in the end is spinning it out because it turned out that it was actually a really useful tool for other people.

And it's now become Slack. And Slack is their new startup. So they made a very difficult decision to lay on. Yeah. So anyway, they started Slack. And Slack's a great collaboration. No, definitely. I saw that. I want to try it out. And yeah, I've known Daniel Berker forever. And I'm glad that he was working on spec for a while because it was beautiful.

And the cool thing about spec that I think we actually talked about this on the show, they open sourced all their old assets and a lot of the game engine, which is really cool. I thought if your company's going down, that is the coolest way to say goodbye to it is to just put it out there to the world.

I thought that was really neat. Yeah, help all your people find new jobs, all of them found new jobs, open source the assets and make them available to the world, and then pivot and work on the new thing. Yep. That was super cool. So I know you've got to get back to your conference here. Where can people find more about the book and you?

Decodedbook.com or decodedcompany.com. That's the easy answer for the book. I'm Jay Goldman on pretty much every platform that's out there, J-A-Y-G-O-L-D-M-A-N. So find me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, jaygoleman.com, all of that kind of stuff.

Very cool. Yeah. I think we're going to be talking about this for a while because I'm a big stats guy. I love dashboards. I love – we even talk about the Fitbit and ambient data and, of course, the old cliché, what gets measured gets managed.

Yep. And I think I love this book and I plan on getting through it. It's just having the broken leg is put a damper on things, which included coming to see you. No, actually it doesn't, surprisingly, because everything is so much more difficult.

You have less time to yourself than you'd actually think. Right. So, yeah, I think we're going to – this is going to be a topic going forward for us for quite some time. So congratulations on it. It's a fantastic read and I'm loving it so far. Thank you. Thank you. All right, man. Well, you have a great day. Happy to come on again. All right.

Thanks, guys. Have a great time in New York, man. Watch you soon. Bye. Bye. Comment of the week. Melissa Wagoner writes, I was wondering if there was a tool that could grab a graphical representation of web pages and their links.

I work for a nonprofit and recently joined a city board for the arts. I would like to grab before and after snapshots of major parts of the city website and the nonprofit website and be able to show a layperson to you before and after view of how the two websites are sharing links and or content. Well, there's a couple options here.

First up, I use an app called WebDevil, which will go through and basically just take the whole site and slurp it down and give you all of the HTML and images so you can drag the files back into a browser and see the website. It basically rebuilds the website for you statically. And if you're on a Windows machine, just Google WebCrawler software PC and you'll get dozens and dozens of them.

I think what she's saying, though, is she wants – is it saying a graphical representation? Right. Get a copy of Skitch, which is owned by Evernote now, and screen grab them by hand and then drag them into some presentation software, either PowerPoint or – what do you call it?

Keynote, and make your own presentations. Or you can hire a custom programmer to go in and probably build you some software that will do it. But as far as the graphical representations, that's generally screenshots. So you're kind of on the hook by doing that by hand. Yeah, I didn't see – I'm not aware of anything that does it automatically anyways.

I did do a quick Google search and I came across something called internet-map.net, which is not at all what you're looking for, but I still thought it was kind of cool. So we'll put that in the show notes and people can click around the glowing globs of the internet. I know you wanted a salad, but I found a car over here. I found interesting, so maybe check out the car.

Hey. It doesn't help you with your salad problem. We run across interesting things. Yes, we do. And I did find somebody who seemed to be talking about it as part of his PhD thesis. We'll throw that link in the show notes as well. He talks about three different pieces of freeware software that he used to kind of build a graphical representation of linkage between two websites.

So yeah, this is like a map of the hyperlink structure. Yeah. It's not really – I think what she wants is basically screenshots. Okay. Either way, this one too – also, if you want your salad, but here's a car, it's actually a pretty cool little article, so check it out. Yeah, well, you know, take a car to that little meeting instead of a salad.

They'll be shocked. Okay. So we also got another comment from Attila. One would only hope it's the hun, but you never know. This was kind of more directed to me at first. Not to take away from your rant, a man has to went sometime, which I assume was supposed to be a rant. Unless it was a checkoff.

I'm winting. A man must have to went sometimes. But regarding your problems with the clients who don't answer your questions, have you considered changing the communication style slash medium? Some people like email, some like chat, IM, some like a quick call, and others prefer face-to-face. A good way to find out what the client prefers is to take note how they communicate when they initiate the communication.

Do they send an email? Do they call? Take note of the preferred medium and try using that. It should improve the speed of the responses. Cheers, Attila. Attila, you are absolutely 100% right except for the music industry. Actually, no, the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry in general. I'll speak just for myself, and I'm sure Jason will concur.

First off, I mean, obviously, we emphasize the negative a bit on the show for entertainment purposes ourselves. My day-to-day life is not all that bad, only sometimes. But here's how communication medium works with my clients in general. They'll start with an email.

I'll email respond. Then I'll get a text that kind of responds to half of the email. So then I'll text back because that's what they used. And then I'll get a phone call at midnight. You're already making me anxious. Stop. Yeah, that's kind of how it works.

I can't keep any kind of preferred communication medium with any of my clients. It's a nice thought. I do prefer to do email just because I have a paper trail, and paper trails are extremely important in this business. Here's the interesting thing. The upcoming interview with Jay Goldman actually talks about some of this stuff and how email is quite possibly the single worst system for doing task-based communication.

So maybe we can figure out something new. Yeah, I mean, I've got to say, we do talk about that quite a bit. I didn't mention it at the time, but I was thinking how much I really enjoy Hackpad, which we use internally ourselves for our show notes every time.

It's a great collaborative medium. I've made that attempt to try to get clients to switch to such things, but at the end of the day, trying to train them and getting them to actually use it has become more problematic than it's worth. Whoop, dog. Hang on. Shut up!

Now Deadwood's here. I seem to find that to be actually the most effective form of communication. Open up the door, scream shut up, and then close it. Attila also added a little comment for you, Jason. By the way, about Dropbox having access to your files, it has always been that way, them having access to it and doing whatever they damn well please, and it's been widely, depending on your definition, known since 2011 at least.

Yeah, I did know that. I knew that there was a lot of flaws around how they store things and how you can find stuff. What I didn't understand was that they were actively dealing with the douchebags at the MPAA. That's really the thing. And now, actually, I'm going to save it.

We've got a little bit of talk coming up about Dropbox in the news. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. But yes, thank you, Attila. It is something that I have known. It is to the point now where it has become a problem, though. So thanks for the heads up. Knew about it.

Keep it coming. Keep the comments coming, people.

In the news, Game of Thrones. It was pretty good. I enjoyed it. Did you watch it? I did. Did you watch it via our friends in Sweden? I did. So did most people. So the story came out on Variety. Game of Thrones piracy for season four premiere reaches record levels.

HBO is still making a shit ton of money. Game of Thrones is making a shit ton of money. But we are seeing the big first scratches on what happened to the music industry starting to occur with TV slash video slash movies. And it will be interesting to see what their approach shall be.

HBO has taken a really weird tack at this. They're making record profits. So I'm looking at this as marketing right now. Yeah. And until their profits start to dip. Yeah. I think they're going to keep going with it. Because the HBO Go thing, they're like, eh, we don't care if you share your credentials.

Yeah. And how's that working out for them? Because HBO Go does not work. Because there's so many people on it. And I'm sure that more than half of them are probably pirates. Yeah. And my friends who actually pay for it. Me. Exactly. And my friend who was going to come over and watch Game of Thrones with us via his HBO Go account that we were going to pipe via the Apple TV.

From an iPad up to the TV. Well, yeah. Couldn't log in. So hence the sudden side trip to Sweden. So we had to steal something that he paid for. Which is funny because I had to do that long ago when there were some cable problems.

And I got a letter from HBO saying, we've noticed that you stole an episode of Deadwood via BitTorrent. And I'm like, yeah. But if you also called the cable company to find my address to send me this note, you'd know that I am a paid subscriber and have been for 10 years.

So, yeah. Go shove it up your ass. So we'll see how HBO handles this as time goes on. It will be interesting. I mean, and they aren't the only people that's going to have to start dealing with it because now Yahoo and Microsoft are jumping into the original series game along with Amazon, who already does it, and your Netflixes, and your everybody else's in the world.

Everybody wants to be a TV network now. Oh, great. Hey, who knows? Maybe we'll get some shows out of it. And maybe somebody will pony up the money and bring back Firefly. That would be interesting. That's all I care about. All of this stuff, people are funding all this stuff. I'm like, bring back Firefly? Somebody?

It was the cruelest April Fool's joke that somebody put out that Firefly was coming back. And I hate April Fool's no matter what, but that was the worst one. Just because you'd know it would be so perfect if somebody brought back Firefly. Yeah, probably never going to happen. All this money, and I just can't make it happen.

Microsoft is bringing quite a few things to the table, including shows from Seth Green, Michael Cera, and Sarah Silverman, which should be pretty interesting. Who the hell knows what Yahoo's going to do? Nobody knows, right? Yahoo doesn't know what the fuck it's doing from day to day. No, I really couldn't care less about Yahoo's programming.

Maybe they'll bring back Yahoo Serious. Yahoo Serious? What happened to that guy? Yahoo should find out. I mean, hell, you don't even have to change the branding. He's Australian, right? I think so, yeah. Yeah. Didn't he do their first ads? I can't remember.

Man, that was so long ago. Yahoo Serious. Yeah. Well, the internet is serious business, so maybe they need Yahoo Serious. So we missed this last week. It happened on Sunday, I believe, or Saturday or Sunday, right after our show. Picketers protested at my friend Kevin Rose's house.

His house. Okay. With a big banner that said Parasite on it, because he works for Google Ventures. Okay. That's getting a little ridiculous. I'm sorry, but going to somebody's home, publishing their email, I mean their home address, flyering their neighborhood. Come on.

That's getting out of hand. You know what? To Kevin's credit, he went out and talked to them like normal people until the cops showed up and they scattered like cockroaches. If it was me, I'd have walked out there with my shotgun and said, get the fuck off my porch. I'm sorry. I would have. That's uncalled for.

We've been talking about the class warfare thing that's been going up in San Fran for a while. It's sad to see it go to this level, but I'm not particularly surprised. I do wish that the people that protested these sorts of things were a little bit smarter. They are not. No, I mean they pick one of the nicest guys in tech.

I know. He's a really nice guy. It's like protesting Snoopy. Listen to our podcast, people. We have discussed some of the bigger assholes up there. Go yell at them. Kevin Rose is all right. Go to Mike Arrington's house if you want to find a douchebag. Jesus Christ. Although I think he's got the good sense of not living in the city.

Yeah, he doesn't live in the city, I'm sure. My favorite part about this is the flyer that they were passing around claims to speak for the service workers who serve them coffee, deliver them food, suck their cocks, watch their kids, and mop their – what was that middle one? Yeah. You can hire people for that?

Well, I mean obviously you can. Oh, you can. World's oldest profession, but I meant more as like a service worker that I could actually like write off my taxes every year. Yeah, you don't go to the Google Blowjob Cafe. Ooh, there's an idea. Hey, Yahoo. I got something for you.

I know you're worried about talent retention. Get on that one. I think you'll probably do that. Yeah. Well, there's more news in San Francisco about disruption and how it's actually starting to get shut down a little bit. Well, this is the dark side of it.

People are getting evicted for putting up their apartments on Airbnb. It's against the law. I didn't know that. And apparently Airbnb did, but they told everybody to read the fine print. You'd think that they would know if you're putting up your apartment in an area that is known to be illegal, that they would say, I'm sorry, but you can't list here.

Or put up a warning and say, we're going to warn you that there may be repercussions for you listing your home because it is illegal where you are at. The fact that they're not, it makes them complicit in my book. I sort of agree with that. I mean, definitely Airbnb could have done the research because there are gigantic specific areas of different countries.

It could be a county-wide regulation. But I know, I mean, it's not a regulation in terms of city or county where I live, but every single lease I've signed has said that I can't do subletting. Right, but I'm fairly certain that Airbnb is from San Francisco.

Yeah. So, I'm just saying, if I'm wrong, then somebody can write Brian at grumpyoldgeeks.com and complain. But for the most part, I'm pretty sure that these guys came out of San Francisco, so they should know that everything that they've been doing is illegal and you could lose your home.

Well, there's not a lot of paying attention to the fine print with a lot of these startups, is there? Oh, my God. To contact Airbnb, I have to become a member. Yes. Oh, well, fuck you. No, I mean, it's all these services, the Ubers, all of that that are disrupting, they toe the line.

They don't, I mean, they dance around the line. They don't toe the line about the legalities. And a lot of their whole process is hands up in the air saying, you know what? We're just providing the service. It's up to you guys to make sure that you're legal and doing things right. Well, look how that worked out for Mega Upload. You know, we're just a – I don't know.

It seemed to work out pretty well for that Kim.com guy. Well, except that Mega Upload was seized, all his servers were erased, and they took a ton of his money, and he can't, like, leave the country. He still has his – you know, he does have his giant mansion and his Xboxes and all that, but he's still a fat fuck and he's stuck in New Zealand.

So there is an up and a downside to being Kim.com. Fair enough. Google Glass, I don't know what the hell these people are thinking, but they have released an app called Livestream that lets you just stream everything that's coming out of your Google Glass straight to the internet.

I don't know why you thought they wouldn't have something like this. This is what I originally just assumed people would use it for. The funny thing is I thought it was built in. Me too. Now it's here. I mean, I just assumed that this is – you put on a Google Glass and there is a button and you are just recording and broadcasting. Yeah, I don't know.

So apparently that was not the case, and now there is an app that you can get to basically stream your stuff. It turns you into Justin TV, Douchebag TV. I mean – oh, no, no. I'm sorry, Justin TV. Yeah, oh, and I can watch the Livestream anywhere, and there's an app for that. There's – oh, I can watch it through my Roku.

There is absolutely nothing good that's going to come from this. The only good thing I like about this entire story is that the term glass hole has now been implanted in my brain, which is what I will call every single person wearing Google Glasses. Look at that fucking glass hole. I know.

It sucks though because I got some friends that have them, and I'm just like – I feel bad. I'm like, dude, why? Why did you do that? Yeah, it's – Honestly, and if somebody gave me a pair, I'd try them out too. I'm not going to be that guy. Oh, I'd try them out in my house. I will not be going out in public with it.

Maybe I'll do a bike ride. I don't know. Are we really just being – have we finally flipped the switch and we're really grumpy old geeks in that here comes a bit of technology that I am unfortunately willing to bet will be ubiquitous in about 10 years, and we're just sitting here going, I would never wear that.

That's just over the line. Now – Are we finally too old? Absolutely not. Here's the problem. I was going to actually bring this up on a previous show, but we ran a little long. We're probably going to run long now, but fuck it. I need to bring this up. When we got into technology, it was cool.

Nobody was doing it. It was – we were underground. We were reading Mondo 2000 and shit that nobody did. Hacking together our own software, playing with RezEdit, doing all this stuff. It was a subculture. We – you and I come from – we're the type of people who like subcultures.

We kind of thrive in those. You, Mr. Goth, hanging out at Disneyland, smoking cigarettes and being a grumpy little kid. That's where you came from. I was a skateboarder. And it's what – grandma has got email. The accountant down the street has Google Glass because he's the only one that can afford it.

Before this, we would – I remember hacking together Perl scripts to plug in a little camera to do mo-blogging because it was cool. So when it comes to ubiquitous capture and stuff like this, what I'm pissed about is that just it's out there now.

Everybody has got it. Everybody can play. It's not a subculture anymore, which makes me hate it twice as much. Well, you're up for a really crappy rest of your life, Jason, because there are no subcultures anymore. That is dead and gone, and all this stuff is available and open for all now. There are no barriers anymore.

End of story. There were never – there were never barriers to what we were doing before. Sure there was. It's just what you was into, you know? Considerable knowledge. Well, yeah, I guess you did have to have – you had to have specific domain knowledge because it was such an arcane art to make a modem actually work to talk to another modem.

Yeah. Now you just press a button and go – you press the idiot button. That's exactly my point. There was a huge barrier to entry back in the day. There is no barrier anymore. There never will be for any of this stuff. I mean beyond being able to work an iPad. I mean that's it. Even in photography, I mean that's what I wanted to do for a living.

That industry was killed, and we used to call it – we call it the point-and-shoot cameras, which is almost everything now. Even the $10,000 DSLRs are point-and-shoots basically. When we were in college, when I was in college, we'd call them PhDs. Push here, dipshit.

That was it. Right. Because you press one button and now computers are getting like that and now all this other stuff. I love to be able to hack together all this computer shit and make it work and make it do something that nobody else's thing did because it was bespoke to me because I made it. Now you just go buy it off the shelf and it's no fun.

It kind of comes back to what Steve Jobs' vision is coming true where he just wants basically the computer to be a toaster. You never open it up. You never do anything to it. You never hack it. If it breaks, you throw it out. Exactly. Then you get new ones. So to your point, yeah, I don't know.

I guess I am a grumpy old geek and now I'm – it's irksome, man. It's irksome. I miss being underground. We can't do anything underground anymore. I get you and I'm with you there and I do miss it. I don't miss it so much even for me anymore as I feel bad for the entire generation that's coming up because they don't have these things.

They don't have that experience of being a part or being something special. You're just all part of the fucking selfie masses. I mean look at World of Warcraft. Hundreds of millions of people play that thing and it's like that's like where the geeks go now. Yeah. Or some other – I think my brother plays Final Fantasy.

I just play it. I don't know. But it's still – it's massively multiplayer. It's a massively multiplayer world where we come from – There were no small subcultures. That's gone. And that's – I can live with that. I just – there's something about Google Glass that I just find inherently creepy.

There just is. I don't know what it is about this one product in particular that I just find so disturbing. It's a ubiquitous covert recording of whatever you do. Yeah. Yeah, that is creepy. Yeah. I mean the government does it and we're okay with that. It's the day-to-day person. I don't want my neighbors walking around with this recording me every time I come in and out of my house.

I don't want to be in a bar and have somebody overhear a drunken conversation taken out of – it's that out of context factor that I think we were talking about with Dr. Teeter the other week, which is if you hear a snippet of a conversation I have with my friends at the bar, it could be taken wildly out of context.

Exactly, but – and here's the thing. You can do that with your cell phone right now. All you do is put it on the counter. Yeah, that's true. You know, the tools are there to do everything that Google Glass does. All they do is put – it's a new form factor. They just made it. That's all it is. It's a new form factor. Well, they've made it one step even easier. It's just there.

I mean I've talked about like the little clip-on cameras you can put in your pocket or hang around your neck. There was one that was out that was out a while ago that I still am waiting for. It was like a camera and computer and Pico projector hung around your neck and you could display keyboards and still record everything.

That one I'm still waiting for. That will be coming out soon I hope. But anyway, yeah, but all this stuff is just commodity off-the-shelf bullshit vanilla hardware that nobody – it's got no fucking soul, man. No, it doesn't and that is a loss and I totally agree with you about that.

It's not interesting. You don't have to work for it anymore. It's just there. So I'm sorry I went off on a rant there. I just had to get it out. I've been holding that one in for a while. Maybe you should move to France. I know. I was actually thinking about it when I saw this story. Here's the funny thing.

I was just getting ready to say – I was getting ready to call them cheese-eating surrender monkeys. But I've been listening to Dan Carlin's hardcore history about World War I and I tell you what. The French back then, those were some brave yet dumb stupid motherfuckers who would just – they lost almost half their damn country to World War I just because these guys were so valiant.

They would just walk into a wall of bullets because they were – see, I don't know if that's brave or stupid. I don't think they understood what they were up against. But still, I'm just going to say the French in World War I, I think there's a reason they get a pass on World War II. They got the shit kicked out of them in World War I.

If you're interested in it, go read the new series that Dan Carlin is doing. It's amazing. But yes, so back to the French. I think this is a fantastic new thing. No work email after 6 p.m. I'm down. But they're also in a worse recession than we are, so maybe that's not the best course of action.

Well, it's the flip side. You can't stay competitive in a worldwide market. If the rest of the – it's just – if the Johnsons are working 24-7 and you want to be able to have the same car that they have and you want to have the same furniture that they have and you want to move up to that next deluxe palace in the sky that they're moving to, you got to work 24-7.

Or you have to work – no, or you have to work 9 to 5 and work a hell of a lot smarter. Or work smarter, yes. There is that. But we didn't actually say what the story was. The employers, federations, and two unions in France signed a new legally binding labor agreement on Thursday that encourages staff to turn off their phones after 6 p.m.

in an effort to curb burnout and promote a healthy work-life balance. And work-life balance is not something that we respect or even seem to care about in the U.S. anymore, and I applaud anybody that does this. Of course, this would certainly be a wonderful boon to my life as I – I always call it the Friday 6 p.m. dump that I get from all my clients, which is about seven to eight hours worth of work gets dumped on me at Friday at 6 p.m. regularly.

Here's where your problem is. You've got to turn your email off at 5.45. Yes, I've got to beat them by 15 minutes. I've started doing that with my clients. Basically, everybody knows it's – and here's the weird thing. I'm in the central time zone now. Yeah, so it's even earlier, yeah. It's even earlier, but everybody is getting trained to know that, hey, guess what?

It's 6 o'clock in Chicago. It's a weekend. I'm going to dinner – no, Monday through Friday. Unless it's an emergency, I'm unavailable because I do – basically, my phone goes to Do Not Disturb. So they can send it to me and maybe I'll glance at it if I see it.

But I am not beholden to anybody after 6 p.m., like I said, unless it's an emergency. All my clients can call me. Even with Do Not Disturb, they get through because they're on my pass-through list. But still, there hasn't been anything.

There have been no emergencies. Everything will wait until tomorrow. Well, nothing I ever get is an emergency. I work for bands, for God's sake. Exactly. So I think the French are on to something here. Yeah. Now to get back to Dropbox, which I alluded to a little bit previously. I have been on the internets the past few days and I am friends with many of your friends and a lot of the internet great notables and old wizened men of the nets, as it were.

And all I'm seeing is a stream of fuck Dropbox quotes. Because Dropbox has hired Condoleezza Rice to their board of directors. Well, you know, could be worse. Not by much. Could be the old VP instead of her.

Well, you know what? I think they're all the same. Yeah, they really are. It's a big... No, here you got Rumsfeld, you got Rice, you got Rumsfeld-Rice, and the president, the VP. And any of that crowd, you know, Chaney and Bush, any of those four, I'm not giving any money to any company that does business with them just because they were so fucking evil.

And they screwed up our country so goddamn badly that, I mean, most of the stuff that we're still dealing with comes from those four people. Yeah. Ass-raping us, sans lube, as it were. So, yeah. I'm staying... I'm dropping Dropbox.

Well, here's the deal. I'm going to use them for free. I've already canceled my account. That's fine. I'm using my free tier because free is free, and I'm just using them for plumbing. Everything else, I do with BitTorrent Sync now. And my new fancy that's on its way, Transporters, which gives you a Dropbox-like experience on your own network with your own hardware, encrypted end-to-end, doesn't go to any servers.

I like that. $100 per unit, so I'm getting two of them. I'm going to put one in the house that I'm living in and one in the first family member with good bandwidth that will let me put one in their closet forever. You can drop one off here as long as we get free bandwidth.

Yeah, yeah, as long as the free bandwidth lasts. Yeah, and I'm going to keep two terabytes, two terabyte drives hooked up to it. That's it. I'm done. I love this idea. It's something, again, that you and I have been screaming about since we started this whole thing. I don't want a cloud unless it's my cloud. There you go.

The Transporter is my cloud, and I'm not using other people's clouds. I don't like relying on other people's services. I don't like relying on other people's servers. I don't like not knowing who has access to my data. And I don't like anybody from the previous administration or, nay, hold on. Even this administration being on the board of the company that has access to my private data.

I don't want that. Well, how would you like living in a city with Rahm Emanuel as your damn mayor? No, thanks. Thank God I'm in the suburbs. So, yeah, in Dropbox, $120 a year for the first paid tier, which is what I was on. So two years, if I kill it for two years, that was at $240.

So that at least pays for my transporters, which will run for longer than two years, and I just swap out the hard drives, which I have in plethora around my house. So, yeah. All in all, I'll come out of this ahead in the long run. Yeah, and they're $99 on Amazon Prime right now. Yep.

Have it tomorrow. Have it on Monday. But still, I'm digging it. I'm in. I might be ordering one of these. Security! The internets are abuzz with the heart bleed bug. The open SSL, which right there you lost everybody who has a computer that does not know what's inside their computer that cares.

You lost them. Once they open SSL, the public shuts down. They go, oh, the internet's broken. Okay, we'll come back when it's fixed. Here's the deal with the heart bleed bug. It's been everywhere. Everybody's talked about it. The one thing that I find interesting about it are the people that are trying to replicate what they say that the bug can produce, which is pulling out the keys to the certificates from the affected servers.

Right. Very, very few people are claiming that they have done it. They've replicated it. They're pulling out data, but they're not able to actually reconstruct that much of use. So, that said, I think that it might – I mean, yes, it is possible.

I think it is improbable that it has been exploited to the length that these people are talking about. I think that this is a matter of people saying, this guy is falling. I personally am not worried about it. Yes, I will change my passwords on the sites that have it fixed as they fix them.

And it is what it is. Most of the banking institutions did not use OpenSSL. As they shouldn't. Yeah, and most of the stuff I do that's secure is not – it's not life-ending even if it was hacked. So, I don't know.

It's a lot of hoop and holler for I think a lot of nothing. Well, it's – this is one of those weird things where, again, like you had talked about when we were young and this was all smoke and mirrors and daggers and very few people understood any of this stuff, much less paid attention to it.

You and I would hear about something and go, oh, well, we understand everything. It's really not that big of a deal. Okay, I just have to fix this here or there. This stuff is now mainstream news anytime anything like this happens. This is coming off of Target credit card hacks and there was something else recently.

Some other major place had most of their credit cards hacked. I can't even remember who it was anymore. This stuff is – TJ Maxx. TJ Maxx. This is commonplace everyday news that affects everybody now and they don't have the backup of technology knowledge to go, oh, okay, well, this is really not that big of a deal.

Let's say that. Well, here's the – it is – it technically is a massive deal because everybody that uses OpenSSL does have a vulnerability on their machine. Yeah. It's a read vulnerability. It's not a write vulnerability. So people aren't able to write things to the server but they are able to pull out whatever is in RAM and chunk it back together.

It's 64K at a chunk, right? My servers have 8 to 24 gigabytes of RAM. So you want to pull out 24 gigs, 64K at a time? Good luck to you. By all means, go for it because that RAM is overwritten so much because with – and I'm on memcache clusters.

Trust me. My RAM is like a teenage girl's bathroom. It's a mess. I don't want to know how you know that, Jason. I was a teenager once and I used to date girls who had bathrooms and were a mess. So there. And I just – I'm not seeing that the – the people that I trust to tell me how bad this is are saying it's bad but it's not to the point – it's bad but we're mitigating it now by telling everybody and everybody is fixing it.

Yeah. Okay? That's it. And on the plus side, I mean I know just from my personal experience, my mom called me and said, I'd like to change my passwords this weekend. My mom has never changed her passwords. This is actually forcing people to do something that they should be doing anyways and we yell at them to do and they just don't do.

And here's the problem. But you can change your passwords but if they have not fixed it yet. But if they have not fixed it yet. The problem, the point is that yes. So there you go. I guess LastPass has built in a feature that lets you know if you're changing passwords on a site that have not fixed the certificate issue because the certificate needs to be issued after the date that Heartbleed was discovered.

So they're checking the certificates to make sure that they're time-stamped properly. They're like, you shouldn't even bother changing it at this point. So now actually the responsible thing to do was for these companies who are – that know they're compromised with the bug, change everybody's password across the board.

Don't let anybody log in until they do a password change after they've fixed it. That's the responsible thing to do. But I haven't seen anybody do that yet. I get emails that are like, oh, you might want to log in and change your password. I'm like, OK. So anybody that has my password can log in and change my password for me.

Then change the email address that gets the thing to – OK. Well, you just – that was the dumbest fucking thing you ever just sent me. So I'm just saying. Agreed. Now, on the lighter side of security – Not very light. Oh, this is very – well, it's actually very heavy, yes.

A drone fell out of the sky and hit somebody on the head in a triathlon in Australia. Just going to show you that being healthy will fucking kill you. Hey, yes. Eat right, exercise, die anyway. That was the best bumper sticker that came out of the 70s.

So, yeah, this – some health nut who was running along got hit in the head with a drone. Now, the drone pilot is saying, oh, somebody was channel hopping and took over my drone. It's like – that's an interesting way to say that my drone fell out of the sky and hit somebody on the head and say, oh, not me.

Somebody is channel hopping. Not my fault. Yeah. And by channel hopping, they basically take control. I think it's called channel hopping. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, channel hopping. It's like a form of hacking that can take over the signal from your controller to the drone. So, somebody basically just overrides the signal. Yeah.

So, yeah. I thought it was funny. We'll put a link in the show notes, grumpyoldgeeks.com slash – what is it? Fifty-three. And you can check out the article. But nobody is dead. We've got a couple of bumps and bruises. Yep. So, what are you going to do?

I am looking at buying a drone though. I know you are. I know. I want one bad now. That new one. I don't know. There's a Gigi. There's a DJI. It's the name of the company. It looks pretty swanky. Yeah, just in time for the Chicago Marathon. I don't know if I'd be taking anything to a marathon because, you know, that last one, the shit went boom.

I'll be staying away from that. This happened in Australia with the drone and, you know, they don't have a whole lot of terrorist stuff going on down there. Come on. It's Australia and everything tries to kill you. You guys are surprised drones are? Yeah, they've got spiders falling out of the sky that are bigger than the drones that will try and kill you down there.

Jesus. They're worried about this. Pussies. Welcome to this week in shit we put on our computers. Monument Valley. It's the newest game that everybody's raving about and posting their screencaps about and then bitching about.

It is a beautiful iOS app that I tried because everybody else was trying it. It's $3.99. It is a universal app, so it plays on your iPhone and your iPad and probably your whatever eye you got. Annoyingly, it does not sync between the two devices.

So if you play on one, you have to play it twice, which is annoying. That is annoying. Except for the fact that this game only has 10 levels, which means you can get through it in under an hour. Okay. But here's the deal. But here's the deal. It's gorgeous. It is so gorgeous.

It's basically you're moving a character through an Escher-like world space with impossible geometry. Very gorgeous music. And it reminded me a lot of playing Zenbound. Did you ever play Zenbound?

No, I did not. You, sir, should go buy – it's actually Zenbound 2 now. It's a universal app. It is – it's a thing where you move a 3D object to wrap string around it. It's got beautiful music. Play it with headphones. It's awesome. Get Zenbound 2.

We'll put the links in the show notes for that for sure. I'm sure I've reviewed that on the show. But this is the same – this actually has a better build quality I think. It's unbelievably beautiful. Yes, it's $4. Yes, it's over in an hour. But I checked out the Twitter feed for the people who made it.

They are working on new levels. That's fine. As long as they don't fist us with the in-app purchases to give us the levels. I figure $4, that gives me at least three updates. Angry Birds model, give us a bunch of levels and then you get some more levels. Then after that, you can charge for some to the point where it feels like you got your $4 worth.

Fair enough. You dig? I dig. So Carousel. I have to take a breath on that one. It really is a gorgeous game. I love it. I'm playing it very slowly because I knew it was going to be over soon. Right. So I'm on level nine now. I'm just going to restart level nine. I do like a level with breakfast so it will last a week.

OK. So next up, Carousel. Buy our friends at Dropbox. Huh. So you can now buy this – it's a free app. I don't know if it's out for Android because obviously I don't care about Android. But it uses your Dropbox photos, all the photos, all the photos in your Dropbox to build galleries and swipable, shareable galleries.

OK. This was going to be reviewed by me before I found out. Before you said fuck Dropbox. Before the devil joined Dropbox. So yeah. Yeah. I played with it. It was actually annoying that it pulled all my photos from Dropbox because I have a lot of client websites that I used to share in there.

And I got a lot of images. I got a lot of images. Yeah. Yeah. And I got a lot of assets and I got a lot of little spliced up GIFs and JPEGs and all that crap, like thousands of them for some of these catalog sites I've done. So the fact that that just gets automatically populated in there was really kind of a downer. So even though the devil has joined the Dropbox, I still couldn't recommend this app anyway, even though it's free because it's annoying.

There you go. It doesn't let you pick and choose. It just pulls in everything. It pulls in everything. Yeah. See, that's bullshit. Nobody should build an app that does that. You should always be able to choose what folders get imported, what doesn't. Exactly. Because you don't want your mistress folder in with your kids' photos. Jesus.

Jesus. Who wants to do that? Insensitive bastards. So I stumbled across – I've been – I don't know. Have you experienced anything better with your battery? Since we ranted about it before? Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah, it's definitely still bad, although I haven't really seen anybody else talking about it, which is a bit weird.

I've actually talked to people on the street who listen to the show. They're like, oh, yeah, my battery totally sucks. Yeah, it sucks since the update. And then as part of that, since I've been paying attention to it, I ran across an article in Lifehacker, which you conveniently found the direct link for, so we'll put that, which was on overthought.org.

The ultimate guide to solving iOS battery drain. And the upside of this really quickly is that that whole idea of going through and closing all the open apps is actually worse for your battery life in iOS. I knew this, and I never close an app unless I'm working on that app and I need to clear out – clear it from memory so I can reload something from like an AJAX call from the web or a REST call from the web.

Yeah, I never quit apps because the overhead of starting the app back up and loading everything back into memory and reinitializing it, doing the initial web calls to populate it, there's heavy overhead there, for at least a phone. For a computer, it's no big deal.

But for a phone where you're trying to maximize everything, that's a lot of overhead. So you should never quit those things unless you – I mean iOS is really good at putting shit in cold storage. That's what it's good at. It's extremely good at. We talk about being the toaster. It's good at being the toaster. That's what it's good at. And that's almost – this is where, to get back to my previous rant, where I almost feel complicit because I love my iPhone so much because it does all that stuff.

After years of working with crappy phones that you had to manually manage, I mean I had a Casio PDA with a plug-in Wi-Fi cellular modem that was just a mess. I think it was 1999 I had that thing. It was like $1,000 and I got like four baud.

But anyway, now that we have these things, let them do what they're good at. Don't quit the apps unless you're trying to clear it or you had a bug or it crashed. Otherwise, just let them run. It's no skin off your nose and it's actually better for the device. Yeah. It's just – it's a different world.

It's not like your computer. It is different. Your mobile devices. So I got on a power jaunt after that especially since I received my very first – Are you mad with power? I am mad with power. No, I got my first power bill from my new place and I was more than a little surprised because there are a number of things that I don't have here and I'm not running things a lot.

And I was like, why is this so expensive? And eventually, I ended up tracking it down to the idea that basically the first two weeks that I was being charged for, I wasn't here but painters were and they left lights on all night and blah, blah, blah, blah. But it made me curious because I didn't actually know and I wanted to find out a couple basic things such as is it actually really wasteful to leave your iPhone charger plugged in all day like when you're out and about running with your iPhone?

Should I actually unplug that? Does it make a difference? The short answer is not really. They suck up next to no juice if it's not plugged into anything but that's not the whole story and I found a nice little Ask a Tech Geek article that goes through the very deep details of exactly how much usage most items are using, whether they're plugged in or not.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest things are things like TVs and DVDs that we all leave plugged in all the time. When they're standby phases, they're actually still sucking in quite a lot of juice. Yeah, TVs especially, especially the flat panels. The phantom power issues with those have been known for a long time. Yeah.

The problem is that it's a pain to unplug them or at least put them on a power strip that you can get to. Yeah, exactly. That's easy to turn them off and remember it. Most people don't do that. We're wasting tons of juice by just leaving those things plugged in. Yeah, and then you have to go through things like if you actually wanted to have the right time on it, if you unplug it, every time you plug your TV back in, you've got to reset the clock.

You've got to reset a lot of things. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why do you care about the time on your TV? I don't know. Wouldn't it be your peripherals? It doesn't really matter so much. I'm just saying some people care about these things. No, no, no. This is a tech show, man. You've got to get that shit right. But your TV shows the time that's on the device that's attached to it, not the television.

No, no. My TV has its own clock built into it as well. Aren't you fancy pants? Yeah, a lot of them do, Jason. Well, the giant ones that I'm used to don't. Okay. Because all the times come from either the DirecTV boxes, the Xfinity boxes, the Apple TVs, the Rokus, all the other crap that we plug into it, the TV itself, I'd never see the time or care about the time because it's always overridden by the device that's attached to it that generally gets the time from the network.

Those devices you cannot unplug. Gotcha. You want your Xfinity or your DirecTV box to be sucking that phantom power because it's recording Days of Our Lives. Because it's recording all my top gears. Yes. Yes. I thought you were going to say all my children because I said Days of Our Lives. I zigged when you thought I was going to zag.

Anyways, it's a good article. It talks about quite a lot of stuff. And it's got this great – they mentioned this great little piece of technology called a kilowatt, which is a perfect name, which is a little box that you buy and you can plug your devices into it. And it measures exactly how much power every device uses.

It's pretty cool. That was a really cool device. Yeah. So, yeah, definitely check out the article. It was a good find. Yeah. If you really are starting to freak out about your energy bill or something like that, you can go around your house and figure out what's killing it. Most likely, it's the people that you live with leaving lights on. And if you don't have those nifty LED bulbs yet, you should switch to those.

And if you live alone, there's somebody else in the house. Ten years ago, minus one day or two, is the – it's the 10th anniversary of Shaun of the Dead, basically.

One of my favorite movies of all time. I saw it the day before it came out in the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood with the director. He came and did a little thing for it. I had heard about the movie two days before and I saw a preview of it and I'm like, that is going to be the greatest movie of all time. And my friends are like, hey, you want to go see this?

It's – we got tickets to this pre-release. I'm like, fuck yeah, let's go. And I swear to God, ever since then, it has changed my life because I just – I love this movie so much. I love Simon Pegg. It made me go back and watch Spaced, which is one of the greatest TV series ever made.

I don't know. I love these guys. I love the whole Cornetto trilogy. This is part of my being. I just feel really fucking old because I cannot believe it was 10 years ago. I actually thought it was a little bit older than that, unbelievably. But I'm very – I can't disagree more. I mean Shaun of the Dead and The Big Lebowski are up there as two of the best comedies.

You can't disagree more? I can't agree more. OK. He said disagree. I was like, what? I can't agree more. Shaun of the Dead and The Big Lebowski are probably the two finest comedies that have ever been made, certainly for our generation. Shaun of the Dead has the single best scene of all time when he's trying to pick out what records to throw at the zombies and try to kill them.

It's fantastic. The greatest movie. By far, I think, the best that they did. I do like a lot of their other movies as well, but Shaun of the Dead is the pinnacle. Yeah, I mean Shaun of the Dead is like A+, Hot Fuzz, B-, World's End, B- or A-, World's End, A-, I give World's End an A-, I really liked it.

I watched that more than I watched Hot Fuzz. And by the way, Hot Fuzz gets better the more times you watch it because there's a lot in that movie that you never pick up on. Anyway, point is, Edgar Wright, the director, gave out really cool versions of all the screenplays on his website on the 10th anniversary.

I downloaded them to iBooks. They look great. They're awesome. Just go check them out if you're a fan of the movies. If you're not a fan of the movies and haven't seen it now. Here's the deal. If you're not a fan of the movies and you haven't seen the movies, go watch them all and then don't talk to me until you do.

If you're not a fan of the movies and you have seen the movies, then go find another podcast. And you know who I'm talking about. That's right. So a new podcast I found, by the way, called Tech Douchebags.

Do they like Shaun of the Dead? I have no idea. It's some grumpy-ass motherfuckers, kind of like us. But it's actually, if you're in a 30-plus crowd, it's good. They talk about what it's like doing the things that we do.

It is almost – I would – it's almost a companion show to what we talk about, I think. Because they bitch about the same things that we bitch about but in a different – they have a little bit of a different take on it. Check them out, tbd.fm. It's pretty fucking funny.

Now, speaking of funny, you found what I thought was the funniest video I think I've probably seen in 10 years. This has been – it was passed around a bit. I haven't seen it quite go crazy viral yet. This is one of those ones that I got through the old school method of like nobody posted it on their Facebook.

I just got an email saying you've got to look at this. This is called – this is – well, it's got 5.1 million views at this point. So it's gotten around a bit. It's gotten around more than a bit, yeah. I don't want to step on it, so I'm not going to describe it. It's called The Expert Short Comedy Sketch. Yeah, The Expert.

That's it. That's all you need to know. It's a – it will be in our show notes and if you feel any of the way about any of the things we've ever talked about, you will die laughing. I really wanted to bring it up when we were in our interview with Jay when he was talking about impossible tasks.

Yeah. I'm like, yes, red line, green ink. No can do. So, yes, you have to watch this because it is just funnier. I mean I watched it twice now just crying, crying, laughing. It's painful. In pain, yes. Yes. Just laughing in pain. It almost gave me hives.

Hives of truth. Hives of truth. Yeah. So it's really good. Definitely go watch it. I saw that Battlestar Galactica is being brought back yet again, but it will be a completely new reboot as a movie at Universal. Yeah.

I'm fine with that. Everybody reboots everything so fast these days. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to hear us bitch about why there is no need for reboots, check out Does It Have Legs? Cross-promotion. Cross-promotion. Yes. Our podcast goes into great detail on why it's really terrible because on our last episode, Point Break, we talked about specifically why the hell are they making another Point Break?

And the case could be made why they make another Battlestar Galactica. It's been 10 years since the Sci-Fi Channel reboot. You know, they own the property. They can make another one. Obviously, nobody in the movie business has any new ideas. So they're like, eh, let's just pull that out of the box.

Okay. But it hasn't really been 10 years. It ended in 2009. It's 10 years since it started. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, the thing is, Battlestar Galactica, if you have not watched the reboot series that Sci-Fi did, it was basically flawless until the last episode.

It was one of the best TV shows ever made. We were not ready for a reboot. Ugh. Anyways, what's wrong? I could still go back and watch that series again because it was perfect. And the funny thing is, I had no problem with the ending. I knew it was coming.

They had religious overtones throughout the entire series. I still can't talk about it. It still upsets me so much. Suffice to say that when it actually aired, we had had a theme party and I was kind of doing the whole – oh, God, what was his name? Second in command.

Boozer. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was basically being him and I had a bottle of whiskey in my hand the whole time. He was a Cylon too, you bastard. He ended up being a Cylon, yeah. Spoiler alert. Well, hey, if it ended five years ago, tough shit. I know. So I had that in my hand and I had to be restrained from throwing it through the TV.

I can see how some people felt that way. By the way, did you ever hear the story about how they figured out who was going to be the Cylons? No. They picked him out of a hat. That's awesome. They literally drew him out of a hat. Well, I knew he drew the ending out of the fucking hat. I'm telling you, man.

That was – if you paid attention, you could see it. No, no. I mean – okay, never mind. I don't want to get – we're not going to make this the Battlestar Galactica Hour. No, okay. Let's move on to the horrible video that you saw and found and I'm so upset that I had to watch it for this show because it really made me want to vomit. I watched 15 seconds of this video because – I watched 15 seconds of this video because here's the deal.

I saw it. It's called The Devil Is Real and he made a song about social media marketing. A good title. Hey, hey. Social media marketing plus song. Yes. I mean you'd have had me at the door just by saying I got to see what the fuck you can come up with there.

Yeah. Well, A, we've got a woman who can't sing. Yeah. Talking about a topic that does not lend itself to song. Yeah. At a convention where the only people that attend are probably douchebags. Yes. So put all three of those together. This is what you got.

I wish we could just play it for you right now but I would like to – I like the people that listen to this show. So we're going to make this an – It's optional. It's totally optional. Yes. Watching the expert is required homework. Watching this and having to listen to this song is definitely optional.

Extra credit only. And to cleanse your palate if you do go and watch this song, there's an amazing article on, dare I say it, BuzzFeed. Oh, man. My apologies for talking about BuzzFeed but it's an article about Tom Lehrer who is one of the most amazing songwriters and performers of our generation who quit in the middle of – the height of his popularity and said, ah, fuck this.

I wouldn't exactly call him our generation, Jason, unless you're considerably more of an older geek than you're letting on to. I was listening to his music when I was five years old and I still listen to it today. So I don't care. He's alive. I'm alive. That's fine for me. OK? No, he is a genius.

I grew up listening to his stuff as well. I mean what was – Dr. Demento used to play him all the time, some of my favorite songs, really funny stuff. I mean I remember staying up late at night taping Dr. Demento and putting in the long tape when I was like – I knew I was falling asleep and then waking up the next day and trying to hear what I missed before going to school and see if there was any new songs that were out.

Right. Ooh, follow-up for next week. What is up with Dr. Demento? Is he still around? I thought he was dead but I think a lot of people – Look into that. I thought – there's many people I think are dead. But Abe Vigoda is still around. Do you remember that song, Boot to the Head?

That was one of my favorites. Oh, yeah. Well, that was Kids in the Hall. No, Boot to the Head was not Kids in the Hall. I'm almost positive. $20. $20. We will sort this out for next episode. All right. Who's this asshole? So Kate Mulgrew, also known as Captain Janeway from Star Trek Voyager.

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, I used to actually sit in line with her and have burritos when I worked at Paramount. I'd have shoved the burrito up her bum if I'd have known that she was going to be doing the things that she's doing now, which is lending her voice to a film that promotes the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.

An earth-centric view of the world as it were and this – I'm kind of at a loss here. It's a movie called The Principal and they get a lot of very famous scientists on – interview them for this movie and then completely twist what they say to basically say Galileo was wrong.

So they basically do a chop and paste on interviews to make them say whatever they want them to say. Kind of. But here's the problem. Kate Mulgrew says what they want her to say. Yeah. And comes out and says, yeah, everything you know about the earth and the sun and the universe is wrong.

And yeah, I was flabbergasted. I was absolutely flabbergasted. I'm like – she's in Oranges of the New Black. She's an amazing character in that. She's got to be making bank. She doesn't need to be doing this kind of swill. She's a fantastic actress. She's very smart.

I mean she's – and you'd think she would have seen this from the spaceship all those years. Exactly. She has released a statement saying – Oh, she has? Yes, there's an update to the story since then. She released a statement saying that she is not a geocentrist and was misled by the makers of the principle. Now, as much as I wanted to buy that, she is – she narrates the damn thing.

So it's really hard to twist the words unless they gave her everything out of order. The entire movie's narration will sound like this. I'm not entirely buying the misled stuff. I mean they could have basically told her they were making a sci-fi film or it was like a pseudo-documentary or something.

I guess that's possible, but – They got like Michio Kaku on here who's not like a stupid guy. So if he's on there and they duped him, they could be – they could say anything to her for this thing. Yeah, it could be a video game. It could be a piece of fiction, an audio book. Who knows? Yeah. But still. Okay.

She's come out and saying that she's not one. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. So we don't have to worry about her anymore. We can still like you. Okay. God, dodge the bullet. And check out Orange is the New Black. New season starts in June 7th, I believe. Looking forward to that. Really enjoyed the first season. God, I love that show. This one's just for the geeks and old ones at that.

Here's the crazy-ass fact of the week. Nintendo was founded as a trading card company back in 1889. See, I find that so unbelievable, I started to say 1989. I know, yeah. And then my brain just went, no, read it. 1889. Yeah, that company has been around since 1889.

Unbelievable. Originally named – and this is where I'm just going to go crazy because I'm not really good at pronouncing Japanese. Originally named Nintendo Kopai, the small business based in Kyoto, started by – I can't say his name. Yamuchi. Fusiyuro Yamuchi. Fusiyuro Yamuchi. I think you made him Italian.

We seem to make people Italian a lot on this podcast. No, Fusiyuro Yamuchi. Okay. Oh, no. Yamauchi. Yamauchi. Anyways. Yeah. So they produced – Yeroshiko onagashimasu. They produced these simple, small playing cards that are used to play multiple games, much like the more common standardized 52 playing card sets that we use here.

Nintendo's cards were handmade and quickly gained in popularity. So they started doing that way back in 1889, long before they made all of our gaming systems. That's pretty cool. Pretty cool, right? And I found a good – since we don't have our newly recorded segment bits from Bob yet, which we'll have a Huff No moment, I did stumble across this while going to the Huffington Post this week and just had to put it in there.

There's a link in our show notes to an article about a guy who got a DUI who's wearing a shirt that says drunk as shit. So that is kind of humorous. But what I actually found really humorous about the article is that throughout the entire article, instead of writing out shit, they write S-H asterix T, but then include a gigantic photo of the shirt which says shit spelled correctly on it.

What the fuck? Or I'm sorry. What the – The fucking idiots. Oh my god. Yeah. I was cracking up. I was cracking up. Because the picture is funny, but why didn't they blur the eye out?

What the hell? Consistency, people. No. In closing this week, I want to do a crowdfunding shout-out, believe it or not. What? Yes. Huh?

So there's a gentleman named Andrew Huang. I believe that's how you pronounce it. All I know him is – his name is Bunny. All right? Bunny created the Chumbie. Remember the Chumbie? It was a Wi-Fi-enabled screen with a beanbag on it. Yes, I do remember that, actually. Get like cool stuff.

And he wrote a book called Hacking the Xbox. I met Bunny when I went to Singapore with Joey Ito to do this like thing there for startups in the government and turned out to be a super cool guy. I haven't seen him since, which really bums me out. But he's got a Kickstarter – I'm sorry.

It's called Crowd Supply. A crowdfunding open hardware computing platform, which basically is a desktop or a laptop or just a board that they're building where all the parts are sourced by them so there's no NSA shenanigans going on.

Oh, OK. It's really cool. You can buy just a board for $500. You can get an all-in-one for $1,200, a laptop for $2,000, and an heirloom made out of wood for $5,000. The desktop one is actually really cool.

The way that they built this thing with the pop-up and everything, it's almost reversed from a laptop because the screen comes towards you at an angle, but the guts are behind it, and then you bring your own keyboard. It's weird. Go check out the video. Bunny is awesome. So if he's making it, you know it's top-notch stuff.

They're at $155,000 out of $250,000. They've got 37 days left. If I can scrape up the money, I'm going to buy one just because it's cool. I love the form factor on this thing. They do look cool as hell. Yeah, they look cool as hell. You won't see anything else like this.

No, not at all. I totally dig it. And it's not going to overheat because it's open air. So good on you, Bunny. I hope they make it. That looks very cool, too. So I want to do – you had mentioned April Fool's joke a little bit earlier in the show, and it is about that time of the year, and we didn't cover any last week.

But I want to give a huge shout-out to Digital Music News, who we talked about a little bit earlier due to one of the articles, for an excellent April Fool's joke that they ran. I'm not going to go and say that musicians are the smartest bunch to begin with because, well, they're musicians. And this particular link got passed around a lot in my circle of friends, quickly followed up by a sheepish – oops.

Sorry, everybody. I didn't look at the date on the article. Oops. So we've got the link in our show notes. It's basically an article written by Digital Music News, very convincingly, at least for the first couple paragraphs, about how Spotify has decided to – instead of pay the .00000014 cents per play that they are now, they're going to pay every musician a dollar every play.

Okay. No, yeah. I mean, yeah. It's a silly article. Just – I wonder why you're saying musicians aren't the smartest bunch because I know a lot of musicians over the years, and generally, they are pretty damn smart, at least the people who are into it because of the music. They like the music theory.

They know the math behind it. There's a lot of smart people in music. I mean, yeah, drummers maybe not so much, but – I'm just saying not so good with business. That's why they have managers, and that's why they eventually get screwed by them. Okay, okay. Anyways, it's a good article. Yeah, yeah. Just to clarify, they say that musicians aren't the best with business, but just saying they're not smart is kind of – I think that's a disservice because I met some of your friends who are musicians, and they're pretty fucking smart.

That's true. So just covering the bases here so you don't get fired. Some of those that you might have met might have actually fallen for this one. Just saying. Oh, my. Oh, my. Anyways, it's a really good article.

And actually, I mean, when I first saw the headline as well, I was like, oh, my god. This is a game changer until I went to go read the article, and I was like, oh, this is funny. It would be nice. In a wonderful world, it would be true. And if Spotify did pay musicians $1 per play, we'd be in a completely different space right now.

But they don't, and it was an April Fool joke and moving on. No, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, real quick. What does Spotify pay on average? Next to quarters of a percentage of a cent. Oh, so it's less than a cent. Yeah. I wonder what would the math be.

We should find out if we can do this. Find out what the math would be if they were paid $0.01 per play. Just $0.01, like a round cent. Right. If they would still be in business. That would be interesting, actually. I'll do a little math. I'm sure there's some charts out there. There's got to be some numbers.

Yeah. Because if they do one cent per play, 100 plays per dollar, actually, no, I'm just doing the math in my head right now. They would be underwater probably in about 24 hours. Okay, back to the fractions. All right, never mind. So last shout-out, just the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony was last night, assuming that the show goes up today as we are recording it, which it should.

Just shout-out to Nirvana. Seminal band for me. This is one of the first bands that's made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that was really, really important to me. It meant a big deal. A lot of us in our generation say it was our JFK moment. I know where I was when I heard Kurt Cobain died.

Big deal. I was playing air hockey at Just Games Arcade here in Downers Grove, Illinois with my girlfriend when her friend came in and said, Kurt Cobain's dead. He shot himself. I'm like, whoo? Yeah, I was sitting in my dorm room. Yep. Yep. Came on the radio. Too bad.

Too bad. Yeah, it was a big deal. So shout-out to Nirvana. By all accounts, the show was quite stellar. They had Joan Jett, Lorde, and I can't remember quite who else. A couple other people. Did you actually go? Well, no. I was in New York this year. Oh, wow. So yeah, it was a bit too much for me to make the flight to get out there.

Did any of your bands get in this year? No, none of my bands were in this year. I was Kiss, Cat Stevens. Oh, really? Yeah, I'm actually a Cat Stevens fan. No, I like his music, but he went all Osama Bin Laden on us, so I didn't know if they let him in.

They let him in, so he's cooled his heels on that a little bit, and he's not quite so – So he's back on the peace train. He's back on the peace train in a big way. Who else was – the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen was already a member, but of course he was there to introduce them. Gosh, I can't really remember even who else.

There was one other band. I'm not sure who it was anymore. So yeah, not a – yeah, I missed a good ceremony because it would have been nice to be there for the Nirvana thing. So shout out to Nirvana. So be it. So be it. All right. Well, let's call it a week, and thank you to Jay Goldman for coming by and taking time out of his busy New York conference schedule.

Yeah, thank you, man. Great talking to you, man. He was my first Torontonian to actually take me around Canada, and I still appreciate that because it was really fun, and we drank a lot, and we played with cats because there was an app for that. Cool. All right, man. That's all I got to say.

That's all I got to say. I'm not saying any more about it. I'm not going to follow up. All right, man. I'll talk to you next week. Good to talk to you. Talk to you next week. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at GrumpyOldGeeks.com. On Facebook at Facebook.com slash Grumpy Old Geeks.

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