57: Time, Ain't On My Side

Psycho, Psycho, Psycho, Psycho. Crumpy old geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? Chug, chug, chug-a-lug-lug. I got an email today. You did? So did I.

I haven't watched it yet. It's been a year, hasn't it? We have been waiting for this fucking episode of the only thing we've ever kickstarted. After all the Kickstarter bashing we did in like our first 40 episodes. And it finally came, our first episode of Chug from Zane Lamprey.

And now there are several aspects to talk about here. Now you haven't watched it yet, but I watched the first minute and a half. I was trying to get through the credits before we started rolling on this show. Yes. There are two commercials at the beginning of the show.

Fuck you, Zane Lamprey. Uh-oh. There's fucking commercials, okay? It said, this episode of Chug is brought to you by Monkey Ball Rum or whatever his monkey spooge thing is and some other thing. I'm like, no, it's not. It's brought to you by the people who gave you all the fucking money to make your TV show.

This is a very good point. So, point one. Okay. Second, second point that in the email that we got this morning, it was like, please, please, please, please, please don't share it. You can watch it, do all the stuff, but please don't share it because it's going to be on TV soon and we need the numbers.

Then, at the bottom of the email, I'm going to put this in the show notes because it's just too goddamn funny. There's a link that says, share Chug on Twitter and Facebook. Well, I'm assuming they mean don't share the entire video. We want you to share knowledge of the video, but don't share the video.

Don't give it to our friends in Sweden. Now, I totally – I understand that point and it is obviously a fear for anybody that actually creates content and puts it out there on the web. Point taken. But you didn't have to say it 18 times and we are the people that paid for this.

And also, if the music industry is any barometer or the film industry is any barometer, sharing does not reduce your revenue. In most cases, it actually increases your revenue. So, people will watch his show because they'll get a shitty copy online, although I did just download a nice 1080p version that's 2.2 gigabytes that's sitting on my hard drive.

I download that as well. I'll be watching that, I'm sure, on my plane flight. So, hopefully, it is still good even though he continues to do stupid crap. I mean, all around, as a Kickstarter person, we did this. We supported him.

We've gone through the entire process. Not impressed. Let's just count off everything really quickly that did occur. Everything was late. Everything was late. It's been over a year. The – what do they call them? The swag.

The upsell. Whatever the fuck. The T-shirt. The T-shirt was a piece of shit. It wasn't worth the – it wasn't even – it was like printed on a napkin. It might as well have been. Yeah, it was worse than a dish rag. And we get silly, annoying emails. He ended up selling the program to a TV show anyways, and everything that the TV show or TV network wanted from them took precedence over those of us who already paid for these shows.

This is basically all around sucked, and it just proves that Kickstarter is a complete idiotic waste of time. It was supposed to be a 22-minute show, but now it's a 44-minute show. Yeah. So all I got to say is it better be one damn good show, and I'm sure people are sick of us talking about it, so we can at least put it to bed.

Chuck is getting chucked. Chuck is getting chucked. Yes. So there you go. Hopefully it's good. That's all I got to say. I'm really hoping it's good as well. Well, the minute and a half that I saw, it looked like it was super pro quality, which I'd expect.

It better be at this point, yes. Oh, and also, did you notice the circular gravatars that they use on the site when you have to sign up? Because I thought that you would enjoy that. Yeah. Yeah, I did. Okay, because I know you hate those. Anyways. They are ubiquitous.

Yes. Well, because of what I had just mentioned, I will be watching the show on a plane. We're actually recording a bit early. Actually, extremely early for us, because we usually try to record and release same day on Friday. Wait a second. We record and release same day.

Didn't Jack White just make a big deal about recording and releasing same day on Record Store Day? Yeah, but he made vinyl. Oh, what the fuck, man? We do it every week. Shut up. We don't make plastic, though. That's true. And quite honestly, he has talent. Yes. Well, there's that. Yeah.

Which actually should make it harder for us. So it's even more impressive that we do it. Yeah, we got to try to suck, and he's just, you know, on his own. Exactly. So, but because of that, I am heading back to Toronto for Canadian Music Week, so it's a bit of a work trip, and I'm a bit slammed. And we're recording very early for us, which is a Tuesday.

Not much has occurred since we last recorded on Friday in terms of the news. So, I don't know. There's a lot of stuff that happened, but, you know, there are a few things we'll touch on. There's a few things we'll touch on. But overall, this is going to be a very special Grumpy Old Geeks episode.

Special as in, like, special ed, then the short bus? Well, you know, like the special episodes of, like, the Brady Bunch. We're going to travel abroad, hijinks won't sue. We'll learn a valuable lesson, not only about ourselves, but about each other by the time we end this episode. Don't surf, and put the tiki doll down. That's what we'll learn.

Exactly. So, here we are. We actually decided that we wanted to talk about kind of a very specific topic of time. How the internet has changed our view of it, and how our work days have changed, and how everything has kind of sped up, and we're in this crazy 24-7 cycle now.

Kind of a touch off a bit on that the stilldrinking.org programming article that we talked about a lot on our last show, which, if you haven't read that yet, please go do so. Which, they did mention it a little bit in the article about, you know, crazy deadlines and all that sort of stuff.

But I really wanted to expound on that, because, I mean, this has always kind of been a, it's not a 9-to-5 job when you're dealing with media on the internet. But I've noticed that it's just gotten increasingly more insane. Everything now is last minute, and it could come at midnight, it could come at 2 in the morning.

There's no sense of time anymore with our job. And I think the whole internet as a whole, I mean, people experience that just consuming it, because it is 24-7. Well, it is 24-7. People have their devices, their input devices on them all the time now. You mean, I sleep with my phone under my pillow.

Yeah. And a lot of people are like that now. It's not just me. I'm a professional, and I do it. I just do it from habit, because I always had to have the pager my whole life. When the servers go down, I get the call. Yeah. Normals now are doing this, which is the scary part.

Yeah, and I think it's really starting to mess people up. I'm fine with that. Let the normals get messed up, because at this point, I'm weaning myself off my phone at night, because I have gotten to the point where I don't have to have the phone at night.

So now I leave it charging in the other room when I go to bed. I go to bed with a book, like dead trees. I leave the iPad somewhere else. I'm actually on the other side of the bell curve. I'm coming down the slope of the insanity, because I've been doing it for so long.

It's fun to watch everybody else get fucked up on it. This is what I lived for the past 20 years, and it's fun to watch other people start to go through this. I'm going, you have no idea what's about to happen to you. But, you know, that's what's – hey, everybody's got to go through it.

You know, I am 100% right there with you, because I've been doing this for a very long time as well, and I am officially unbelievably burnt out on it. And I have actually tried to – I'm doing the job that I should have done a long time ago in terms of kind of training back my clients to go, you know what?

Okay, it's great that you finally got all that together, but it is now 7.30 p.m. I am done working for the day. End of story. Moving on. So I will take care of this first thing tomorrow, but bye for now. Yeah, exactly. I don't really let anything – unless there is something that is fundamentally broken, like a website is down, if there is a typo, it can wait.

If there is a, you know, like a bad formatting issue on a page, it can wait. If somebody can't get to the shopping cart, then I open the laptop. Right. If there is a direct financial correlation to something, then I'll get off my ass and go do it. Otherwise, I'm going to be sitting on the couch having a vodka and tonic and watching Bletchley Circle.

That's what I'm going to be doing. Yeah. But like you said, it is funny because now we're seeing the normal people kind of catch up to this 24-7 insanity that we've been in all the time because I have noticed like before, my clients would basically, for the most part, leave me alone on weekends. Now, obviously, I work with bands.

Bands tour. They don't take weekends off. They're, you know, they're in a show in New York on Saturday night and things need to be done because of that. I get that. That's always been the case and I'm okay with that. But it has become the, this absolutely has to be tweeted right now. And it's, you know, 9 p.m. on a Friday night.

I'm like, no, no, that's not going to happen. We don't have to feed this beast. Just because you're consuming things 24-7 and you're on to that now doesn't mean that it has to be that way. Well, and honestly, if they can't tweet by themselves, do you rush to their hotel rooms with a roll of toilet paper every time they have to make a poo-poo?

Good point. People are way more savvy now than they used to be. So clients can take care of a lot of things by themselves, I'm finding, which is great, you know? Yeah. Especially since people have WordPress. Whee! By the way, did you hear their funding round this week? I did not.

I mean, I saw that there was a news article about it, but I did not get into it. This is going to be a random tangent real quick because I do have to get my WordPress thing in here. Just real quick. I know I said I wouldn't, but this is big news, actually. Automatic has been running on, I think, $12 or $13 million in funding since the beginning.

They just took a hundred and, I believe, $33 million round. Right. That's a lot of fucking money. That is an insane amount of money. Especially when they're supposed to have been profitable already. They were, you know, that's what everybody was led to believe, that they had been profitable up until this point.

And this was the, they were the golden children of open source or mixed source, as it were, software. Service-based, open source software with professional services upgrades and support and hosting. Yeah. Right? Mm-hmm.

Well, apparently they haven't been doing all that well. So they had to go, they had to go back to the well, which I find very interesting. That is interesting. What I also find interesting was I just about shit my milkshake the other night when I'm watching Shark Tank. And there was, there was a, it was the last one of the night, I believe.

These two spastic little chicks from Brooklyn are up there trying to get funding for their failing party business or whatever the hell it was. And they had friends over to film the Shark Tank segment. In the back of the room, I look, there's fucking Matt Mullenweg having cake.

I'm just like, why the hell is Mullenweg having cake on Shark Tank? So I like took a picture of my TV and I Instagrammed it. And I'm like, hey, Matt, why are you having cake? And to Matt's credit, he wrote me back right away and says, because cake is delicious. So that was, that was just a really bizarre non sequitur, I'm sure.

But the fact that, that they're taking money and still plan to be growing, keep an eye out for more WordPress stuff coming for the foreseeable future. Because if they've done this much on $12 million, I'm guessing that they can do a hell of a lot more with $130 some odd million, which honestly, hopefully they can fix it.

They can fix the problems that I find. Because I spent four hours today fixing a client's hacked WordPress install. Good times. Well, and I came up with it. I had a revelation. I'm like, this thing does a bunch of checks when you first start WordPress. They say, oh, we need you to change permissions on these files, make them writable, make them readable.

It checks for permissions that aren't, that are too restrictive. What it doesn't do is check for permissions that are too liberal, as it were. And if it did, see, it needs to be, it needs to be just as stringent on the liberal axis versus it is on the restrictive axis.

So, so basically you, you're not having, you're not giving permissions to the operating system to modify files that it doesn't have to have write access to. Because that's where the problem comes in. Right. So, I'm thinking, man, if they just spent some time and built that, baked that into it, they could solve 99% of these problems.

I'm just saying. That's. Yeah. Well. They could write, I mean, they could give you a little script to say, here, paste this into your shell window and just change all these permissions. Boom, Bob's your uncle, you're done. We can, you know. Yeah. But will they? Well, I hope so. They got 130 million bucks.

Let's go. Come on. Let's rock it. I'm going to send Matt, I'm going to send Matt a note and say, hey, you know, you got the money now. Make this happen. Well, as we all know, throwing money at things always gets things fixed just the way that we want them to be. The one thing I know, I'll give Matt a lot of credit that he is actually responsive.

And the fact that he will respond to my Instagrams, I'm hopeful that he will not take that analogy I said like 10 episodes ago about killing Hitler to heart. But he said if I killed Mullenweg that it would solve all our problems with open source. Yeah, it was a good idea to repeat that one.

That's all I'm saying. He doesn't listen to the damn show. So, anyway. Anyway. I'm sorry. That's my... That's your WordPress rant. My WordPress random tangent. Where the fuck were we? All right.

Who's this asshole? So, this time around, the assholes are us. Me, Jason, you, the listener, the person sitting next to you, jerk in the car, everybody. We're all assholes. I feel like we're an opal. You're an asshole. You're an asshole. You're an asshole.

And you get an asshole and you get an asshole. No, we're all assholes because we squander time and we freak out about it now. And we live in this 24-7 asshole cycle of being stuck doing things. And we know how the 20... It's crazy to me because people talk about the 24-7 cycle and we know it's a bad thing because we've laughed at the 24-7 news cycle for a long time and we know how it's completely killed journalism and people have to fill...

CNN is basically a joke because they're filling 24 hours a day with nothing. But somehow we feel it's different with the internet and we're happy about this 24-7 thing. And we seem to be eager about it and we're always reloading and rechecking our Facebook and reloading Twitter and making sure that we don't miss anything 24-7 all the time.

So we're assholes for that. And this was kind of brought to my attention and I know Jason stumbled across this video last week as well. An author, Douglas Rushkoff, put up something, a video called Present Shock, discussing the always-on digital culture.

And full disclosure, this was actually sponsored by and brought to you by Whole Foods. Whole Foods and their magazine Dark Rye. Yes, Whole Foods has a magazine called Dark Rye, which I guess is what you would expect it to be called. You know, it's funny. I see Dark Rye and I'm like, is it like their version of Mondo 2000 from back in the day?

Oh man, do I remember Mondo 2000. I actually still have a bunch of Mondo 2000 books, believe it or not. I mean, man, I would kill for a full set of the old Mondo 2000 magazines. I should eBay that. But anyway, we're getting off track. So yes, Whole Foods produced an amazing video of Douglas Rushkoff talking about his book, Future Shock, and how it explores the anxiety and dissonance of our always-on digital culture.

That is exactly what it does. Yeah, and it's an amazing video, and it talks about, like, the different types of time. There, you have your Kronos, which is time on the clock, and you have your Kairos, which is perceived time. Yes, exactly.

And how the two don't actually mess, really mesh up very well. And how I, well, he didn't really discuss it, but my thought was that how they're separating more and more all the time. They're becoming more distant, and that's really starting to screw us up. We're getting away from very natural, basic rhythms, and this scares me a little bit because, you know, we tend, this can take us into a hippity-dippity place, and I am anything but hippity-dippity, but.

Hippity-dippity-doo. Hippity-dippity-doo. But for, I really, like, this is about a seven minute and 40 second video, and I just felt like something really switched in me when I was listening to it. It really impacted me. Yeah, same here.

There was definitely something in there that resonated with me, and I like Douglas Rushkoff's stuff that I've read, which was only one book, honestly. I mean, I've read some of his news articles, but I read Life, Inc., which is one of those books where I actually had to stop reading it because I was getting depressed. It's a very good expose on when, it's on corporations, and how when corporations are given the rights of people, basically everything went to shit.

So, if you really want to get depressed and find out why we're all puppets of the big corporations, go read Life, Inc. This is one of those ones where I put my tinfoil hat on and go, yeah, that's not good. But I honestly had to stop reading it because it was really bumming me out that much.

That says something. He definitely seems to have a theme then because I have also read only one of his books. The book that I read was Exit Strategy, and it was insanely depressing, but very, very real. Exit Strategy was basically a set up of the .com craziness of the late 1990s.

And I just remember, I was very, very happy that I was not working at a startup, and I was not working for a company as I read the book. It probably, I don't know how well it's aged, because it was set in the near future of 2008. So, it's been a few years on since he wrote the book.

But, yeah, it was very depressing, but very, he's got dead-on ideas. It's so funny. Our ideas of, like, dystopian techno-culture have changed so much. Like, if you go back and read Microsurfs, that's almost like, you know, daytime poppy comedy.

It's almost like watching an episode of Friends compared to everything that's come out since then. Oh, yeah. Or, like, Douglas Copeland wrote the one called J-Pod as well, which, if you go back and even, I just gave it a scan when I was moving all my books a couple weeks ago, and I was like, this doesn't even sound that bad.

And at the time, he had meant it to be, like, this horrible, dark, like, I can't believe we're living like this. And I was like, that sounds pretty easy, actually. It's gotten way worse. Yeah, you know what? We could go back to the old self-help analogy of the frog in the pot of the boiling water, which turns out is not true. If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it actually jumps out.

Oh, it will freak out, yes. It will jump out. But if that analogy were true, that's where we would be. You know, our sense of self has been eroded over time. And when it comes to the passing of time, when we were talking about the Kairos before, I've been reading that book, Moonwalking with Einstein, about memory.

Yeah. And the part that I just got to the other day was talking about people who are trying to expand their perception of time. So time moves slower for them. Even though that they only have the same amount of lifespan as everybody else, they can fit more into it because they're basically hacking their memory to make it seem like their life is longer.

It's a really cool – I mean, the funny part – it's a cool concept. And the funny part about it is if you go back and look at one of the Star Trek Next Generation films, I forget which one it was. But there was one where they go down to meet the indigenous people of who the fuck cares.

Of whatever planet, yes. Yeah. And the one red-shirted guy dies. Yeah. Well, and Picard falls in love. And this woman teaches him to, you know, fall into the moment. And like a moment can last a lifetime if it's perfect and all this shit. And it's kind of the same thing but not in such a really terribly written sci-fi perspective.

But it revolves around novelty. So every day if you do something that's novel, that's out of the normal realm of what you would normally do, your memories will latch on to that and it won't be just a fucking day-to-day-to-day grind where you go to bed at night and you just – you like are crying yourself to sleep because you're like, I was just here.

How the fuck am I back here? How did this happen to me? Which, you know, honestly happened to me for a couple of years and I'm just like – because nothing changed during the days. It was the same drudgery, the same like grind that everybody goes through. And it's like by injecting just a little bit of novelty every day, you can turn that on its head and go, I had something fun happen to me today.

I had something cool happen to me today. Right. Which expands your perception of time. It's like, you know, you can go a year and it will feel like a day or you can go two days and it will feel like a year. Gotcha. So it's just one of those cool hacks that I'm going to be experimenting with.

And on that note, I finally got to use that app, The Walk, which was the game that I got before I fell prey to the black ice of Chicagoland. Yes. The app that gamifies walking. It's amazing. I love it. Okay. Honestly, it's got maybe six minutes of audio in it per day because you go through these missions and you have to walk and hit checkpoints.

It's got these fun little maps. And while you're walking, you can like click on the map to find little things that move the story along. But I find myself walking and like waiting for the next bit and I just keep going and then, oh, new bit. Then I hit my mark for the day and that's it. But it's fun.

It's a lot of fun. And it just changes the walking that I normally would, like listening to a damn audio book that isn't something that really is memorable. Right. See what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. So finding things like that is a really cool way to kind of make the day just fun and kind of get out of that and, you know, expand that Kairos perception of time.

Yeah. I mean, there's a reason that our brains kind of do that with time and drudgery. It's on purpose. It's I don't want to remember every single time I drive to work. I don't need to remember that. You know what I mean? It's boring and it's I don't care.

So any time that you interject something interesting or novel or out of the ordinary into it, your brain will encode that stronger, obviously. Yes. But I think evolutionarily, we're not meant to be doing repetitive tasks like that. You know, our ancestors out on the plane running around hunting buffaloes and elks or whatever that whatever you have it.

They didn't they didn't commute. They didn't go to work every day. You know, well, they did. But it was basically trying to kill a bear or running from a bear that was trying to kill you or looking for berries. Right. You know, the modern age has given us this repetitive, hideous lifestyle, this cubicle farm lifestyle with with the commute.

Well, that is exactly. I mean, that's that's one of the points that that he brought up in present shock as well, where he starts to talk about how we are so removing ourselves from from the rhythms of life that that we are meant to be in. And we've kind of we've so distanced ourselves from that that we are starting to functionally break down because we are not meant to be either doing these incredibly boring, repetitive routines day after day after day or as we're talking about more specifically in present

shock, being on all the time, being just in a constant state of ready because things are always happening. We're not meant to do that at all. And it's it's totally messing us up. I mean, one of the better one of my favorite quotes that came out out of this this of the present shock is where he talks about 911 operators and air traffic controllers.

Let me hear it is. So this is a this is a great little line from this. The only kind of people that were interrupted this frequently and insistently used to be 911 operators and air traffic controllers. They would do it for only two to three hours a day and they would be medicated in order to live that way. Present shock is the human response to living in a world where everything happens now.

I mean, it's a great quote about how we're just we're really killing ourselves with this stuff. Yeah, we've engineered the the tools of our own demise, as it were. The the one of the things that he talked about were how we're supposed to react to phases of the moon because our brain releases different types of chemicals in different stages of the moon, the lunar cycle.

I found this to be fascinating. I found it to be fascinating. I also found it to be very dubious. So I want to do some more research on it because it sounds very woo woo. Granted, I do understand that I am completely different in different stages of the month.

Well, I was about to say, yeah, I got a little terrified when I Googled it because it's just a bunch of hippity-dippity bullcrap that comes up until you start to dig down a little bit further. And I'm I don't want to believe in something this ridiculous. And but I do tell me why you tell me why you don't I don't want to just because I have this this still kind of this built in manmade hubris about I can control everything and I'm

not at I'm not at any you know, I'm not at the mercy of the pounding of the of the surf and the title the title changes are not going to change the way my brain works. God damn it. But having said that, I agree with you as well in that I've noticed I've never quantified it.

So this is something that that we as grumpy old geeks seem to like doing. Perhaps we should take an experiment for the next two months or so and kind of quantify how we feel at different points in time. I guess we should actually for the people that haven't seen it seen this talk yet or heard about it.

Let me quickly just run over what he he proposed. So he's basically saying that the phases of the moon radically affect how our brains work and how we kind of deal with things are common neurochemical responses of the four week lunar cycle each week a different neurotransmitter seems to dominate on one the first week after a new moon acetylcholine emphasizes new social contacts the next week serotonin seems to take over enhances productivity in the third week.

There's increased dopamine which emphasizes risk taking and recreation and in the final of the lunar weeks norepinephrine sorry norepinephrine that one heightens our analytical skills so obviously I'm not in that stage at the moment.

So basically he says this is what's going on and it's natural and we just work better at certain things at certain times and obviously since this is we're all under the same phase of the moon all of us do so we could actually start to kind of shift things around to make us more effective.

Well and this comes with presence of mind so you know we don't think about these minor changes in our perceptions because we have so much going on but I guarantee if you if you just write down your your mood what you're feeling where you're where you're where your desires are taking you as it were I know that's that's especially hard to quantify but when you think

about like the cop cops will tell you flat out full moons people go batshit they go crazy that is it I mean that is just it's not lore it's true you look at the crime statistics the moon has an effect on the population it's not even just looking at the crime statistics I mean I can tell you firsthand having lived in Venice for 15 years now when there's a full moon out it's going to be batshit crazy on Main Street exactly so in thinking that it's just you know oh it's you know the

alignment of the stars and all that shit that's astrology astrology yeah bullshit a rock that far away does not have enough you know gravitational pull on you but the moon does the moon is responsible for the tide so there is actually a gravitational uh difference in us so I think that I don't like I said I don't know the science I'm just I'm putting my woo my woo out there but it's a tad

the fact that I mean we are mostly water and if it's if it's affecting no no I'm just no I'm just talking about actual just gravity like you feel heavier some days things you know you're less let me let me just put it this way I call that a burrito I don't I don't I don't fucking know science okay I just feel like there's something that changes with the phases of the moon and it could be hormonal like he's uh saying which I I have like I said I have a hard time believing there are these hormonal

changes what I do know is during the month there are times when I feel like I am in production mode there are times when I feel like I am in consumption mode and there are times when I feel like I'm in reflection mode those three are like you know my three go-tos and there's also the social mode I try and be more social but I'm an introvert and I fucking hate everybody so that the social mode is like like 20 minutes on a Sunday but those other three modes I think if you look at the times of the month

those actually can be correlated to cyclical events so like I said this is getting a little too fucking hippy-dippy for me but it'd be fun to just do a little I'll whip up an excel chart for us and we can start making notes do you feel do you feel like you're in a certain quadrant as it were like he put out you know the social you know it's honestly social productivity um recreation and

risk-taking which I don't do recreation what the hell is that and uh analytical skills I'm I try and be analytical every damn day because I don't want to be stupid but let's uh I'll whip up a little quadrant thing and we can do it just for fun we'll quantify it just for fun but I mean that that's um whether you buy it or not I mean that's kind of a larger uh time period that he's postulating and I again I can see that there might be some truth to it so let's find out but the more interesting

thing to me about this entire thing was kind of just again he was talking about we are keeping ourselves busy we have we're not giving ourselves time to reflect we have built these machines that run 24 7 and rather than using them for to run by themselves and to do the tasks that we don't want to do we're actually matching our time to machine time and how that's totally screwing us up

we're expected we we expect everything immediately now we we really do and I've fallen into that trap as well I get upset or at least I used to I'm really struggling with this right now to try to change my approach but like I'll get upset why hasn't that person texted me back immediately that's the whole point of a text as I send it I could see that they read it I want an immediate response that's how my clients treat me with the emails that they send and oh man it just messes you up and I'm

really struggling to put the phone down and not respond to text messages right away everything can have its time yeah there's um there are three people right now that I know are waiting on me to do something that that I got emails for right when we started the show and I'm like no I'm gonna do the show and I tell you what it feels like ants yeah on my shoulder blade right now because I want to go do

it but if we didn't do that quite honestly Jason you and I have dealt with this almost every single podcast that we've sat down to do if we didn't say no and just sat down to do it we would never do this podcast it would take us all day because there's always something coming that has to be dealt with immediately or at least some people think it has to be dealt with immediately and and we we actually dealt with this a lot when Sean Bonner and I ran our company together met blogs we would get emails

all day long from authors who had a problem right and eventually we came to the conclusion that if we waited one hour to reply to an email the problems would mysteriously and miraculously go away because people would figure out figure it out themselves yes so um I don't know about you you probably still do this I I've given up on this a long time ago my email client one hour I can't do

the Tim Ferriss you know once or twice a year check your email and tell everybody else I'm on sabbatical fucking a goat uh no I only check my email once every hour my phone I turned off that little red ass dot that tells me how many unread messages I have for everything notifications gone turn those off your life will get a thousand percent better out of the gate and but don't you just find yourself

then launching the program to see what's in there for the first uh about two days yes and then you relax then you let it go you let it go remember how I told you that you would get used to that swipe left to delete shit yep and you did yep same thing same exact thing you can retrain yourself fairly easily and easier than you think it's something that I definitely need to start doing and I think all of us do um the level of frustration that that technology has brought everybody and the level

anxiety like we talked about I mean a lot of people do run around talking about you know the depression of the digital age and I don't believe it's depression I believe it is just anxiety to go back to your earlier um discussion of the difference between the two it is an anxious ants gotta go gotta do something I'm missing something I'm missing out on something what happened without me and it's it's constant and it just wipes you out I don't remember being as tired and it could just be because I'm 40

now but I don't remember being as tired as I am all the all the time now ever before in my life it's yeah within the last four years it's just gotten worse age creeps up on you very quickly as it were the one of the things I think that really kind of uh is is the cause here let me start that again one of the things that I really think is the cause of

that anxiety is in the technical world everybody is going for the brass ring or the golden ring or the golden ticket or the brass toilet plunger whatever the fuck it is so you want to get your ideas to market faster everybody thinks that there's this race and when I first started immediately I mean I'm talking 1993 and 94 I'm sitting there with my girlfriend and we're we're playing with their mac quadra 650 and I'm like I gotta think of the next idea I gotta think of the next idea because there

are rooms of people right now out there thinking of the next idea so if I'm not thinking of the next idea I'm not going to be the one that has the next idea well and and yeah you know what she was with me so she was she was a damn enabler but she also came with me to California to go do the web thing so yeah well I mean that was a good partner to have I feel that that you know I'm running my own business and I just feel that way there's a almost an unstated pressure that's there that's just like

if I get an email from a client and they want it now I know that there's probably somebody else out there who would respond to everything immediately they could get this done immediately and they don't have to pay me and wait for me to do it because I've decided I'm not going to live my life like this anymore so there's that that freak out that occurs as well it's just it's the fact that you know that somebody else will do it if you won't yeah and I think nowadays I think that immediacy has passed

I think we're still dealing with the remnants of the dot-com boom from the old days because right now I tell you what the person who is sitting around their house thinking longer and harder about the next idea is going to be the one that comes up with something that is not crapped out like everything else on the market right now oh yeah so I mean I think I definitely think that there's just this false

um false time constraint as the uh the marketers would say yeah no I agree I'm coming up with it just uh on a on an even more basic level certainly for like what I do on a day-to-day basis if if we were to take our time and to craft a press release and make sure everything is spelled and all the links are right and we get the right materials and maybe we craft some really nice imagery to go with it and we waited a day or two to get all this stuff together and we put it out that's going to be a lot

more effective than a has a really hastily scribbled out misspelled link broken tweet which is what we end up tending to do because we got to go got go got to go got to get this out there right now and I think I think that comes from just so many goddamn noobs in the market because us all those people who have been around were like no settle down settle down whippersnapper relax cool your heels cool your jets yeah cool your jets and let's let's let's let's arc you know yeah architect something let us you

know consider the response properly let's think about the total vision and what we're trying to do here and not just immediate let's be yeah let's just be measured and be reactive but in a good way i'm just i'm just describing all the old fuckers that were in my way when i first started you know i know that's what i was thinking too i was like wow we were kids we just but uh but it's i think it's a different level now it's it's definitely a different level yeah we're the old guys in this

business who have done it so it's not like in the old times it was people from print who were always in our way but now it's now we're now we're in our own way exactly yeah interesting this week in false advertising do you remember what uh uh lawrence welk's license plate was i do not a one and a two he spelled it out i thought it was pretty clever that is pretty clever

oh look another random tangent so i wanted to talk a little bit about an article that came out in ny mag uh last week and it was called the sharing economy isn't about trust it's about desperation okay we're gonna talk about some of my favorite companies yes we're gonna well there's a wide cover story about the rise of the sharing economy but this is a this is a tale about how the sharing

economy isn't exactly what it seems and like the numbers are off it's just people trying they're desperate for money so they're doing whatever it takes right point number one this is not the fucking sharing economy this is the economy okay yeah you're not people you're not sharing with uber or lyft or airbnb you're paying for the services you are trading work in your time or money that is the

economy this is not the sharing economy mickey krimmel's old uh website where you could trade uh the saw from your garage to your neighbor for the lawnmower that was sharing because you're sharing stuff you're not trading money yes if i give you a pig and a bushel of apples in exchange for you basically cleaning up by lawn that's sharing that's that's trade that's an economy it's not it's not a it's a monetary monetary

economy well i guess you know okay i don't i don't want to i don't want to slice this apple too thin here's the deal uh yeah it is about desperation right now because everybody needs money uh there's some interesting things i heard about lyft though from our good friend dr teeter and i found and i did a little bit of research i don't know if they have changed their uh terms of service but do not get in an accident if you are in a lyft car because by just getting in the car you agree to their terms

of service which uh basically says that you have given up your right to a trial by jury if there's if there is any type of litigation that ensues yeah that's uh people are what yeah people are getting really smart about that sort of stuff and and the terms of service that nobody ever reads anymore basically for anything that involves any kind of any of these services that would actually maybe put you in some sort of danger basically take away the right to arbitrate it's just gone so that i wouldn't

be surprised if that's almost all of these companies not just lyft so the i mean we get back to this whole thing with people are just trying to make a buck wherever they can because the economy is so crap and the middle class is disappearing well okay okay you go put some duct tape on that record it is definitely broken so i think that i i don't know i don't know how to explain this in a very

concise amount of time that we have it'll probably take a couple hours but i am just i don't know how to i i honestly don't know how to put this that in a way that is not going to make me just sound like i've sounded the rest of the time that we've been doing this fucking show i have i have an idea let me let me try it really quick hodor hodor now did you pay for hodor did i pay for hodor or did you share it from your sharers in sweden as it

were i i pay for hbo okay so i i i pay for a friend to come over who pays for hbo by giving i get i get my hbo through the sharing economy i actually do i buy beer and then hbo shows up on my tv there you go all right so tangent yeah sorry about the tangent you posted an article about uh someone who posted basically made a best-selling novel and posted it to amazon and almost made made

almost nothing right well i mean this is this is where i was you you'd posted the sharing economy article and i got really upset about it because it does they spend a lot of time talking about how you know people are moving up basically full-time jobs are being eliminated and people are getting part-time jobs and trying to make up the extra income doing these insane things like like lyft and uber and driving around and in their spare time whatever uh it's it's just it's it's tough out there to be a

pimp right now and that just made me think about we we've posted numerous articles about about the record industry and and musicians who posted the the real facts about what money they've made and they're they're people that won grammys and they're making nothing uh and when you know we a long time ago we talked we broke down the reality of what you can make being a youtube star that was near quotes and it was basically nothing again and i ran across this article about a guy who self-published on

amazon because you know that's the thing that we can do now this is what this wonderful internet has opened up for us it's the ability to basically create our product ourselves and put it on kickstarter to get some funding and then put it out to the world all by ourselves except we don't make any money and that's exactly what happened to this this guy um his name's patrick wesnick wins wins and uh he put a book up on amazon and uh did a nice little article on slain on salon.com

explaining how basically he didn't even make enough money to pay rent for a year even though it was a bestseller he made some total of twelve thousand dollars how much was he selling the novel for like twelve cents no i think it was a relatively normal price book uh he didn't actually list the price in here and i i haven't gone back to look at it on amazon but it's a regular book that was up there at regular cost and uh it's just you don't sell enough and then everybody takes their slice and by

the time that you actually you know pay off the the tax people and amazon's taken their cut and everything's been said and done and the fact that nobody fucking reads and there aren't really that much uh you're not going to sell that many books to become a best-selling author not much money okay um i'm gonna i'm gonna put on my dick hat for a second do you mind no no okay first up yes this guy didn't know what he was fucking doing he might have written a great novel his pricing was wrong i'm

gonna tell you right now his pricing was wrong i don't even know how much it was the fact that he had if it was a quote-unquote bestseller and he came away with twelve thousand dollars his pricing was wrong i see people out there making information products that are making literally a hundred thousand dollars a month on selling information that you can get with a google search look at i'm gonna i'm gonna this is this is a preview of my show that's coming out soon if i ever finish it

um i want to talk to you about john lee dumas the guy who started the entrepreneur entrepreneur on fire podcast okay he does a podcast today about 30 minutes each he interviews a quote-unquote entrepreneur so he now is apparently a podcasting expert so he created a podcasting book which i thoroughly panned on amazon because it was bullshit it was terrible what does he do he raises the price

to 1200 dollars and creates a course now he's a millionaire he has sold over a million dollars in six months of memberships to his podcasting tutorial education program okay okay let me tell you what you're doing no no no but here's the deal it's marketing it's marketing and pricing this guy could have written the best book in the world he's not going to sell a bunch if he's not marketing and

pricing it properly one guy's over here with a bag of shit that he's going to sell you for 1200 this guy might have the next great american novel and he's selling it to you for 99 cents okay now let me give you my quick thought on this i've just looked at the pricing it's it's a good price for a book uh if it's a bestseller he should have made a lot more money it's it's not crazily priced 14.95 for a paperback at 8.95 kindle edition it's not like he priced it for two dollars

or anything like that so i i don't have the stats on actual sales but if it's an amazon bestseller it probably did relatively well now what you just did talking about a podcast that happened to make a shit ton of money is exactly the kind of thing that we talked about with the youtube stars the the article that we talked about way long time ago probably 30 episodes ago now basically pointed out

the one or two success stories and said anybody can do this you can't take one success story and just say well obviously this will work for everyone then no there's an awful lot of luck that goes into it there's an awful lot of who the hell knows and there's an awful lot of gaming the system obviously this guy could have marketed things better obviously this guy could have maybe priced jinked with around with the pricing to maybe get more money or the reality is it's all the game's kind of rigged and

every now and then there's a winner because it behooves youtube for for there to be winners that so that people keep putting their content up there and keep trying to become the winner it's a big fucking lottery well i here's the i i take umbrance with one thing you just said that the game is rigged the game is not rigged the game is the game is there but if you if you play the game and you play the game smart and know and learn how to play the game then you can win at the game i don't think it's

rigged because there's no one pulling the strings it's like this guy went out there built a product busted his ass and made a bunch of money on it i do i think he deserved it hell no do i think he's smart because he did it that way hell yes do i wish i was him hell yes but i'm not i sat around and i bitch about it with you and don't make any money so this guy's out there not bitching about it and

providing value as it were to his to his listeners and makes a shit ton of money even though his value is fucking dubious and you could get it with a google search but it gets me back to your author guy i want to know exactly i just i want the numbers i want he's not posting enough numbers air it's down a little bit further in the article the book sold plus or minus 4 000 copies the publishing industry is hazy like that so the book publishing industry is obviously much like the recording industry

and you'd have to actually go in and do an audit to actually get any real numbers so the best he can figure out is around 4 000 copies at writing 4 000 copies is nothing i'm sorry it's enough to be nothing it's enough to be an amazon bestseller and that is kind of the other point about all this stuff is there's so much stuff out there that there's there's too many that everything is split up into a gazillion little pies now there's very very very few books that will sell you know unless

you're the oprah book selection of the month and you get a book and you get a book and you get a book you're not going to make big sales like that anymore that's what we've we've downgraded what platinum selling album means by hundreds of thousands of copies because nobody sells that much copies anymore everything is smaller now so how does he make a living how do you make a living well ace you don't you use i guess he i guess he needs to spend the rest of his time when he's working on his next

book driving an uber around to pick up people to make some money or become a better marketer look at i mean i'm sorry but there's tons of people out there that make a shit ton of money off of bad books this guy could be one of those guys spend less time writing his book and spend more time marketing it i honestly end up with an inferior product don't you if he's spending less time on his product and more time on marketing but if his goal is to make money if he's bitching about not making enough money

if money is his if money is his goal then he's going about it the wrong way because writing the greatest novel in the world is not going to get you rich being the best marketer in the world is what's going to get you rich it's about what what his goals are and his goals are not aligned with where he wants to be and i can point you to about a thousand different e-products that will tell him how to make money on the internet most of which we've debunked on this show absolutely but somebody's

making money and it ain't this guy no it's not and it's just again it's just another one of those articles where i think it's really fascinating to see these kind of breakdowns and realize that okay the game may not be rigged but it's very very difficult the amazon ebay even itunes to a certain extent and a lot of anybody that lets you put a kickstarter they sell this idea that you will be

successful and that is not necessarily the case in fact more often than not it is you will not be successful but it's in their best interest to keep that that idea out there it's it's it's selling the american dream as it were and because that's what that's how they make their money and that's how they have their power yeah i don't disagree okay there you go

yo seriously are you shitting me since we talked a lot about time uh the are you shitting me crazy fact of the week is time is actually slowing down this is a fact it is scientifically proven as much as we've talked about how much everything else seems to be speeding up in our own human created timeline real time chronos is actually slowing down if you define real time as the hours minutes in a

rotation of the planet that we happen to exist on which seems fair enough to me since that is what i would define as time yes due to tidal friction from the sun and moon the solar day is actually lengthening by 1.7 milliseconds each century as the earth's rotation slows down and uh we've got some science on the on the blog to back that up so go to goodcompanyoldgeeks.com and i decided to use a

post link just because i thought it'd be funny okay so time is 1.7 milliseconds per century is kind of negligible since most people don't live a century but i did see something that there is one woman on the planet that is 116 years old right now i wonder yeah she must have noticed it could be you know this monday is a lot longer than that one was 97 years ago or shorter oh it's slowing down

yes it would be longer okay oh god the brain the brain closing shout out on an episode about time i'm gonna give a shout out to the big three galileo who recognized that there was something funky going on here's the quote i do not define time space place and motion as being well known to all which i certainly feel especially on days after i've had a few drinks i was gonna say that is the four in the

morning hungover where the fuck am i and what's what is my name okay and then to newton for the first bit of classical mechanics and a working linear theory of time that works on our planet with all the laws of physics that implies and the p diddy of physics einstein who realized that there is no way in hell those laws work outside of the gravitational well in which we live and gave a damn good theory as to how it might work out there so there you go i would say that einstein might be e diddy e diddy oh i missed

that one i diddy no he diddy yeah apple's probably got a patent on that already yeah also one big shout out to a friend of the show and a previous guest felicia michaels whose brand new comedy cd milf and cookies is out now you can get that on the itunesy not the itunesy not the itunesy yeah the itunesy itunesy well done felicia congratulations i can't wait to listen to it now i had a really

fucking bizarre dream last night where i had a a new watch that i got because i was reading our show notes before i went to bed and i had a new casio that i was showing off to some chicks who punched me in the face so i blame you for my terrible dreams last night of getting punched in the face because of my watch now why did you talk about a casio watch in our show notes so just enlighten me and the people's why you said that you got a calculator watch when you were a kid and never got laid from

it i have no idea why i put that in there which is why i left it out when i was doing the shout outs okay it was at the end of the thing and i'm like so i said no other shout outs yet because really we just don't know and we won't until we get people off this rock but one for casio for putting a calculator on a watch when i was 11 and ensuring girls wouldn't think i was cool for another three years until i started wearing guy liner and you put the eyeliner bit in like two days later so there's something that was brewing in your head i think uh i think uh that that tea might be getting to you

i think i might be having too much of the tea now there was a grander theory that i was going to go for at some point and then it just kind of went away as time just slipped away okay well i'll see you next time and have fun in uh the land of maple cookies um where i assume that i will be getting some when you come back i will get a box of your damn cookies and i will ship them to you but i will

ship you a potbelly sandwich i'm not sure how well that'll travel but oh oh my goodness it's time they're coming to get me all right jason i will talk to you next week travel well my friend i'll see you later thank you man keep up with the grumpy old geeks on the web at grumpy old geeks.com on facebook at facebook.com slash grumpy old geeks or email them at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com

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