59: Is Edward Snowden in a Dystopian Gay Mafia?

Psycho, Psycho, Psycho, Psycho. Grumpy Old Geeks. Two old farts, a microphone, and the internet. What could go wrong? We're recording a little early today. We are recording a little bit early. We're heading into Memorial Day weekend, and everybody's got either a half day today or are completely off today, so I thought let's just knock this out so I have the afternoon open.

I thought I would anyways. Got one of those crazy clients this week. You know, the people that just don't understand anything. I've been working on a comp for a homepage redesign for them. They've changed things about 10,000 times. And as of yesterday, finally, we got to sign off on a comp. So, of course, I got a text message this morning saying, we'd like the website up today.

Well, all we did was have a comp. Now we have to break it down. I have to actually build it. I have to find plug-ins. It's just, you know, I've railed about this stuff a lot. It's because we made things so simple with Facebook and Twitter and Twitter on your phone. It's just the assumption that this takes no effort.

Well, once you get the pretty pictures done, that's all there is to it, right? Yeah, yeah. You just put it online. You emailed me the homepage. Why don't you just put it up? Exactly. Yeah. I can't believe you still have to deal with that shit. It's, you know, it's the music industry. It is what it is. They're very good at certain things, not so good at other things.

But it's fine. And, you know what, I'm just actually going to tell them that they can wait because it is a holiday weekend. And one of the other things that we always discuss on the show is the need for downtime and I need downtime. Absolutely. Yeah. Although I've got a three-day work weekend, so that'll be fun.

Man, yeah. So we had to caffeinate early and I have a new tea that I'm trying out today. You've been telling me about Puerhs quite a bit. So I am having a Wild Leaf Menghai 2003 Puerh from the Red Blossom Tea Company in San Francisco. Wow.

They do, like, ears as if it's wine. It's delicious, though, man. I got this stuff from – Dude, this tea, you can't – I mean, this stuff is great and it's supposed to be absolutely fantastic for you. Yeah. I got one of the quarterly boxes from Mr. Ferris and this was in it and it's amazing.

The downside of that box I got, though, is this is like a past quarterly box and they just had a few lying around, so I got to pick it up because I missed it. And I wanted the – there was a book, Vagabonding, signed by Ralph Potts. Tim actually talked about that when he was on our show and I went back and picked it up. Well, there's a thing about selling boxes that have perishables in them because there was a bag of blue bottle coffee in there that was roasted in November of last year.

Which, when I opened the bag, smelled like a cat's ass. And I thought, OK, maybe it's just – I'll grind it up and I'll give it a shot. Nope, tasted like a cat's ass, too. So they need to really work on that perishables with the old stock thing. Yeah, that's very true.

It was quite the bummer because I was really looking forward to it. But the tea is still good. Oh, yeah. I'm drinking my Pura tea as well. I'm drinking a ginger organic. It's a blend of ginger and orange peel. It's the ultimate cold fighter, apparently. I didn't – I wasn't aware of that. Maybe I should have been drinking it last week before I got sick.

Yeah, you were sick last week. But I get mine shipped to me from a place called David's Tea, which I believe is – there's a couple locations in the U.S., but the only one I knew of is in Toronto. So when I was actually there, I stopped it at the store, picked up a couple, brought it back with me. Davidstea.com has a nice selection of Pura's to go from.

And I can't recommend this tea enough. It's really good. Cool. I'll give it a shot when I'm out of my red to blossom. So climate change apparently is on your mind this week. It's kind of more of a follow-up from last week when we got the news that the glaciers were melting and there's nothing we could ever do to stop it and we're kind of screwed.

Learn to swim. Learn to swim. Learn to swim, yeah. But there was a series of images done by a guy named Nikolai Lam. This actually did the rounds a while back, but it's obviously popped back up on sites because of the news about basically the oceans are going to rise and there's nothing we can do to stop it.

We have the link in the show notes. It's actually really interesting imaginations of basically what's going to happen if the ocean rises the four or so inches that they're predicting for a lot of U.S. major cities, Boston, Chicago, New York, Washington. No, no, no, not Chicago.

Oh, no, they didn't show Chicago. Well, that doesn't mean you're not going to get anything, but we'll see. Well, we're in the Midwest. We have a lake. We have a great lake. That's true. The great lakes are not fed by the ocean, so guess what? Yeah. You can come visit me high and dry. Well, I'm looking at the illustration predicting what will happen to Venice Beach and actually it's looking pretty good for me because of my location up on the hill.

I think I might actually be – I'll be closer to beachfront property, so my value should rise. So you'll just go faster when the tsunami hits. Pretty much, yeah. Some things go up. Some things go down. Yeah. It's the way it is. So the images are really cool. I like how they did that. They've got this cool little funky – you can just swipe back and forth and see the waters rise over various landmarks in various cities.

This seems to be pretty spot on. I mean he put – this guy put some serious thought into it, did some math, did some trigonometry, did all that sort of crap. So there you go. And some cool Photoshop work. And some cool Photoshop work, definitely. So speaking of the weather, right before we came on the air, I got a new Chrome alert telling me what the weather was where I'm at.

I have disabled Chrome alerts three times so far, and they just keep coming back. They're like cockroaches. I don't know why Chrome just keeps turning it back on whenever it does an auto-update that I don't even ask it to do. It just does it by itself now. Yeah. Which is fine. I mean I'm fine with that. They seem to have like improvements every time, minor tweaks.

But this Chrome alert thing is just driving me nuts. I don't want it in my menu bar. My menu bar is so full of crap already. It just – it's too much. I just don't understand the process of the development of software like this where they could just so easily build in the keep all the preferences when we do an update.

It's the same – like I've complained about with my iPhone. Every single time there's an update, it switches Bluetooth back on. I don't use Bluetooth. It's a battery drain for me. I don't ever use it. Every single update, boom, it's right back on. Yeah. It's so annoying. You know, you get what you get nowadays.

Speaking of like weather alerts, again, this is another frustration of government and technology and when they get access to funky tools that they never had before. I thought I had had all this sort of stuff switched off. And I actually thought that it was – they had to have very special processes to go out and do alerts.

Yesterday in the middle of the afternoon here in Los Angeles where we just finished a massive heat wave. It's finally cooled down a little bit. But there is no chance of rain whatsoever. I got an alert on my phone followed by – I had the Dodger game on in the other room that was just playing.

And I could hear the TV go off into like a three-minute like warning, warning, warning, warning. We had flash flood warnings blasted out to our phones and our cable TV with zero chance of rain. What the fuck? You know, technology is supposed to make these things easier and better.

And do we really need warnings blasted at us in 7,000 different ways even if there was a reason for the warning? I blame the hackers. Well, if you weren't watching TV, you wouldn't have known it was on the TV. And most people – we know TV is dying, you know? That's true. That's the way it happens.

And to turn that off, if you go on your iPhone, if you go into settings, notification centers, go all the way to the bottom. There's two toggles for government alerts, one for amber alerts and one for emergency alerts. I keep the emergency alerts one on because I'm here in the Midwest now and we have things like tornadoes that will come and try and kill you.

True, yes. And flash floods. We got a flash flood warning last week. So I keep that on just in case because it is actually useful. It didn't give me an alert that golf ball-sized hail were on the way so I could put my car in the garage. But fortunately, we have the alert network of our friends who give us a call and it's like, dude, get your car in the garage.

My house is dented now. I saw some photos from that. It looked insane. Oh, my god. Yeah. And I saw a car yesterday that had gone through it and it looked like a golf ball with all the pitting on it. It was crazy. I couldn't believe it still had windows. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyways, that was another setting that I'm reasonably sure that I've had off and since an update has switched back on.

So can you developers please stop doing that? On the update side, Facebook rolled out an update to their update, which it took the most recent item feed list, whatever, and moved it from the feeds up to the favorite set or like the quick launch tab.

Yeah. Because they got so much like gruff for pulling it out of there. So at least they made a change. Yeah. At least for once they finally listened to how people actually use their service and kind of gave in to the public exclaim and outcry going, you fucking assholes.

Yeah. They moved it. They moved it to the bottom of the favorites list now. So you can get to it a little bit faster. A little bit faster. But still, it's it's. It still won't remember your preference. No, it doesn't remember the preference. It doesn't remember the preference. If you if you're in most recent, you go look at an article and you come back. Yeah. It will still revert back to newsfeed.

I know. It's unbelievable. It's draconian. But, you know, fuck it. It's Facebook. Hey, it's free. Yep. But, you know, it's not free. Book in your favorite band to come play at your party or your house. No, it's not. This is. Yeah, this this was sent to me by numerous people. Oh, it was.

OK. Yeah. I thought I thought I had a scoop here. No, it's definitely making the rounds right now. This is one of the. So it's a list of how much. Your favorite band would cost. Yeah, if you wanted to book them. So, you know, basically, that's how most bands make their money. And most bands that you actually think that might not even be active anymore are probably doing two to three corporate gigs a year.

And this is how they still make money and quite a bit of it. It's a really interesting chart. This is one of the the good slash bad things about the Internet, because this information is kind of supposed to be very, you know, off the radar and not public. But here it is. Basically, almost every single currently active band in the world telling you exactly how much they ask for for corporate events or private parties or whatever.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. Seeing this list and a number of my clients happen to be on it. I'm definitely not. I know. That's what the first thing I did was look up all your clients. I'm like, oh, my God. Alanis is a bargain. I can get her for 150K. Yeah, I mean, it's people just look at this and just think that that's that's flat out like, OK, some sort of rating chart of what an artist is currently doing or active.

But you've got to take it into account like, all right, Alanis basically could come and just do it by herself on the acoustic guitar. She doesn't necessarily need to have an entire crew. You have a band like Green Day or, you know, any kind of larger band. Then you're talking the price goes up because they have so much equipment.

They have crew. They have to get a truck. They have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So but still, it's it's it's a funny little list and quite interesting. And no, I'm just I'm just looking at it going, man, I want to win the lottery so I can book some of these people. Apparently, you know, we could have Tori Amos come over for fifty thousand dollars.

I wonder if I can get Smashing Pumpkins on a discount because they're local. I'd only ask for the original lineup. That might drive the price up a bit. It could be. It could be. Yeah. So in more music news, something kind of interesting happened. Spotify actually released numbers, sort of.

Sort of. They released an infographic. They released a nice little infographic. They've hit 40 million active users. I actually thought there would be more than that in 56 countries with 10 million subscribers. That number I'm surprised by because if they've only got 40 million active, one in four is actually paying.

Yeah, that's that's a pretty good. That's a good turnover rate there. It's really impressive, actually. But what they didn't do and we talked to I've talked about this quite a lot internally with with my music industry friends is they didn't release it. By country. And there are other countries that have much stricter piracy laws.

There are other countries that have basically more, let's face it, morality about stealing things or getting stuff for free. So I'm willing to bet that a huge chunk of that 10 million subscribers, probably the original countries that they started in. A lot of it's going to be European Union.

I don't think that there are all that many subscribers actually in the U.S. But it would be nice if they released that information but that chance of that ever happening. Yeah, man, look, be grateful for what you got. Exactly. Well, this is how the world has become now, isn't it? We used to have – well, I'll get to it later because we have an article that talks about it.

Okay. The one thing I noticed this week is Soylent has actually started shipping. Yeah, yeah. Are you going to order any? I'm tempted to try it. I'm really tempted to try it. I am tempted to try it as well. It's $255 for a full month or 28 days worth of food packets.

So I mean for an experiment, it might be kind of fun and $255 is not bad for a month's worth of food. It's not bad for a month's worth of food but I don't even think I could eat just pizza for a month. Well, now you get used to it. You get used to it. I did that two-month fast and it was just basically a bite of chicken and some water all day and some vitamins and you totally get used to it.

Yeah, well, maybe we'll have to both order it and give it a shot. The one thing, the Ars Technica article that we'll link to in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 59, when they beta tested it, this guy was like, man, the farts were insane. And that was the biggest thing.

He's like five days of farting is like what you can expect when you try this and I'm like, well, I don't have to have any client meetings so I can probably get away with it. My roommate might shoot me. I was about to say, you have a roommate. I live with someone who would definitely not appreciate this. So I like to keep the flora and fauna in my gut on somewhat of an even keel.

But they said it – they fixed it in 1.0 for the most part. So it is non-pootierific as it used to be. I might have to adopt my policy regarding TV shows and I might have to wait for 2.0 before I actually give this a shot. Let's see what else happens to people.

Yeah. Let's treat the food replacement like Apple hardware and never buy version 1. My god. It reset back to farting. The farting preference has been turned back on. And something else I'm testing in that quarterly box from Tim Ferriss, I got one of the somas that we had Dr. Teeter on who railed about so much.

I actually tried to give it to him. I'm like, would you like it? Test it out. And he's like, put a goldfish in it. Put it on your shelf. So I'm actually giving it a shot. This weekend, I will do some side-by-side testing to see if the water tastes any different or any better. All right. I don't have any arsenic to put in it to see if I can get it out.

But as – Gesundheit. Sorry. Excuse me. The cold is still lingering. Yes. We don't have cough buttons on these new fancy USB mics. No. That actually would be good. They should build that into 2.0. Yes. We were talking about Comcast and the bandwidth issues before and how you're constant railing on how nothing is going to be free much longer as far as data goes, data caps on that.

What I've noticed recently is they keep jumping up my bandwidth here and they're not charging me anymore. That's what a good drug dealer would do. Exactly. First case is free. Get your hooks. Yep. And I tell you what. I am hooked. I've got a photo that I'm going to put in the show notes. I've got a newer one.

I hit 110 megabits per second download this week. Wow, man. That's amazing. For like $60 a month. They are definitely not doing that here because my bandwidth speeds are just not even close. That's amazing. It's funny. I made my first Throwback Thursday blog post yesterday and I put up pictures of my first ISP that we had in my Hollywood house.

And we were paying probably $3,000 a month for a T1, which was 1.3 megabits. So, I mean, it's crazy how like that has changed. Not to mention the 12 phone lines that I had to have my street torn up to run into my home and all that stuff.

And the TSU, DSU, all that crap. Oh, man. It was a pain. I think running that ISP only cost me close to $12,000 at the end of the day. Wow. Because we never made a dime. Yeah. There was an article going around by this journalist, Quinn Norton, and it's called Everything is Broken.

It's on Medium. It's a fairly long read. It's like, you know, it's not short. But she sums up in this article everything that we've been saying. It's taken us a year and a half to say about how software is just inherently fucked. Yeah, and we were railing out this when we had that other article.

I think it was two podcasts ago where we just started to talk about what a colossal fuck-up everything on the internet is, how everything is basically duct taped together. This takes it to an even deeper level. It's a great read. And a client who wrote me saying, why can't homepage be put up immediately?

Go read this. Yeah, really. But, I mean, I was really drawn to it because she knows a lot of security people, like hardcore security people. And, you know, they can't sleep at night because it's such a mess. So, like she was saying, the ones that are like the smartest and the deepest into it are the most alcoholic and nihilistic of the bunch.

It explains a lot about both of us, too. That's true. You know, I read through this article and I was just thinking, going back to, like, the Facebook updates and how – remember, Jason, you and I were at the forefront of this. I mean, sure, we're not computer scientists by any level.

But back in the day, we could put together our own computers. We knew what the things actually did inside that little weird box. Everything is locked down now. We have no idea. And the really interesting thing about this article is how she starts to talk about it is just, like, there is not a single person on the planet right now who knows everything that's going on in a computer or with an operating system.

Yeah, they're just too complicated. Yeah, they're all too complicated now and no human could possibly understand it. And back in the day, that was not the case. We knew exactly what was going on even with all of our code. But it's just not that way anymore. No, it's – we're to the point now where Steve Jobs' vision of the computer as toaster is getting closer and closer to reality.

Like, I've got an iMac on my desk. I can't even open it. I can't even put a – I want to put a new hard drive in. I want to get an SSD in the thing and I can't. Yeah, everything has to be external now. You cannot open up boxes. You can't get inside anymore. You can't look at the guts. And a lot of code is the same way these days. We're all using code that we basically either can't access or arguably better, arguably worse, everyone in the world can access.

Yeah, and one of the main things that she talks about is the OTR encryption that's used in a lot of IM clients. And that's fine. But it sits on top of a piece of software, a library that is so buggy and patchy and just full of holes that it kind of renders everything else moot.

It's like why bother when you get to the – when you get down to the guts of it, it's like you just almost have to give up and just say, hey, shit's going to happen. Get used to it. It's like building the most strong structure for a bridge ever than forgetting to lay down any pavement and just leaving it open in the middle. Yeah, like using marshmallow as a foundation for your home.

Yeah, and that is the internet, people. Yeah, and speaking of that, I – this week I was really, really missing fuckedcompany.com. I miss that thing so much. And right now is the perfect time for it to come back, but I guess Pud is probably too rich now to give a damn.

Probably. He should sell it to one of these little kids up in San Francisco to have another run at it because it's perfect now. Although, you'd have a hard time keeping up because these things come and go so fast. Yeah. And half of them aren't even real companies. It's three nerds in a basement.

So there's some kind of like flop house. Speaking of which, Silicon Valley keeps getting better. Oh my god, it is. It really is. Watching this last episode where they're at Disrupt, I've been to Disrupt and they're spot on. They really are.

They nailed it. The thing is, they didn't even have to try. That's what it's like. That's really what it's like. They're not exaggerating. The guy who was like trying to use the microwave to heat people. That sounds dangerous. You can't do that.

No one will ever pay for this. I know. Oh man, yeah. I was watching it. My jaw was on the floor. I'm so sad that we've only got one episode left. Yeah, I'm a little bummed about that as well. But it got picked up for season two, so I'm happy about that. Me too.

Me too. It's just been fantastic viewing. I watch it Sunday after Game of Thrones, so at that point I've had a liberal amount of wine. So I'm just – it's perfect. It's a great way to set myself up for the week full of that crap. And to decompress from the sadness porn that is Game of Thrones.

Exactly. So as podcasters, it's hard not to mention the king of podcasting, Adam Carolla, who got himself in some trouble this week, although I'm not entirely sure why or how.

A lot of articles out this week taking a lot of his stuff out of context and a lot of people super angry at him who obviously have never listened to his podcast or actually read the article or – actually, it's really – it's an interesting thing because I do listen to his show every day.

And there's this article on Salon.com, Adam Carolla. The title is The Gay Mafia is Real. And you can just – even before I listened to Carolla talk about the article after it came out, you can tell that the journalist was baiting him and pushing him into a position that he actually isn't in.

And he was trying to respond to it in a way that shows, no, this is not what I'm talking about. And it's just one of those really interesting times where I can see how journalism works. I'm kind of on the inside because I listen to his actual show every day. I know what his opinions are on things, which I don't always agree with.

But everybody is getting it wrong. The media picks it up. The media picks up the soundbites that are wrong. And a bunch of ignorant a-holes start talking about what an asshole it is. Yeah, and I think a lot of this is part of his plan. He feeds the trolls.

Oh, yeah. He absolutely feeds the trolls. And here's why I think he might even be feeding into this quite a bit because he's got a new book out now. That's why he's doing these interviews. So he's got a new book. He is very opinionated. And it just comes with the territory. Now, you posted a follow-up article called, this guy blogged about the terribleness of Adam Carolla but gave up because it was too terrible.

I love that story because that guy is just a loser. Oh, completely. Completely. It's like, just deal with it, dude. Don't listen to him. There's your – That's how you hand it off. Yeah. If you hate something, you don't spend your entire life trying to get other people to hate it and then give up because nobody is paying attention to you and you feel all sad about it.

You just don't listen. And nobody listened to this guy. So the interesting soundbite – or not soundbite, but the bit that I took away from that article was after listening to Adam Carolla for a while, he – we talked about this. You get angrier. You get – your temper gets shorter and you just get fed up with things too quickly and that's why I stopped listening to Adam Carolla's show.

Every now and again, I'll listen to it if there's like a cool guest on but I can't listen to him day in, day out because it just makes me angry. I had to take a break too because most of his shtick is picking on the stupid things in life and railing on them. And as much as I almost always agree with him when he does it, it does beat you down if you're listening to it all the time.

So I do have to take breaks as well. But I like him. He's definitely not a homophobe, which all these articles call him. He's not racist. He is very pragmatic and everybody is getting it wrong. And it's just really interesting to see how sad the state of journalism is because so many of these pieces are hack pieces just meant to get clicks.

Yeah. And you can't work in Hollywood and be a gay hater. You can't. It's impossible. And you can't hate Jews. Yeah. And, you know, that's just a fact of life. So like everything where they talk about, you know, he hates gays. It's like, no, he doesn't actually.

He says the truth about them. And he's like, hey, you want to clean up a neighborhood? Bring in the gays. And it's true. Look at West Hollywood. West Hollywood is just an amazing place. Yeah. Drive down sunset from Hollywood into West Hollywood and just look at the difference. It's amazing.

It's night and day. It's a completely different world. And so he's spot on. I mean, that is just that's just an evidence based observation. So what can you say? That doesn't mean that doesn't mean anything. It just drives me crazy. Yeah. Well, let me let me quickly talk about another one that actually I was still getting over the upsetness with that stupid journalism article.

And then I ran into another one. Jason Biggs awful Twitter feed is ruining Orange is the New Black. Somebody wrote an article because they're not a fond of Jason Biggs personal humor on his own Twitter feed. And I'm not understanding why there's an article that exists about this or how what an actor on a TV show does on his personal Twitter feed who doesn't write Orange is the New Black.

It actually is kind of a bit part as far as I can tell on the show from. Yeah, I wish they what does this have to do with the show? How is he ruining the show? Why does this article exist? And why am I starting to hate everything? Here's the deal. This is clickbait. Orange is the New Black is coming back in a few weeks and they're just – this is SEO trolling.

So here's a piece of advice. If you see something stupid like this, don't click on it. Don't give them the page views and just suffocate them. Take the air out of the room. I think I'm going to have to really review the sites that I look at because Salon used to be really good and now it's a lot of clickbait. It's gone the way of the Huffington Post.

So I'm going to have to start switching up my daily reads. Yeah. You just can't – you can't avoid that kind of thing because that's – these authors get paid by clicks. Yeah. They get paid by views. So they're going to do whatever they can to get you more views. Yeah. And this rolls into another article I found.

It was making the rounds. It's a longer article but it's a fairly well-written article. It's just called America Dumbs Down. Yeah, it's on McLean's which is going to be one of my new bookmarks because it's a great, great online magazine. So I don't want to go too far into it because it's just – it's a long article and it's good.

Definitely check it out. Yeah, I read through it all. It's definitely worth a read. Now, you were talking about journalism and how it's terrible and all that. And I saw a piece on The Guardian where Neil Gaiman actually went to a Jordanian refugee camp and does a great piece from it.

It's a fantastic piece. Well, he's a good writer. How is he not going to write a good piece? I know. I just wish he would get back to writing entertainment and leave the reporting to other people. But he got into it because he was having – I guess they were asking him to retweet some of their stuff.

It's like the UN relief organization. And he was doing it and then they're like, hey, well, you want to come out actually and check the place out? So he said, yeah. And he went out and wrote an amazing piece on it. Yeah. I mean, it was a good read. I liked it. So whatever it takes.

Yeah, it was just odd seeing a powerhouse like Neil Gaiman writing articles for The Guardian. It's like, dude, come on. Get back to work. We need a Neverwhere sequel. And speaking of sequels, J.J. Abrams posted a really cool thing from the set of Star Wars.

Did you get to see this video? I did. Yeah. I took a look at it. It's pretty cool. I'm just kind of avoiding everything to do with the Star Wars reboots until they're actually in theaters. Okay. You got a ways to go then. I know. But it's basically a lottery. You buy a – there's a raffle.

You buy a raffle ticket for a lot of money. And if you win, you get to be in the movie and you get to go hang out on the set and all this stuff. And all the money basically goes, I believe, to UNICEF? Yeah, I believe so. Which is – yeah. It's worth it. If you like Star Wars, go take a look at this stuff.

Yeah. The only downside of that was they had a character walk by in the background that just looked like a really funky Muppet. Yeah. I was not too happy about that character. Yeah. That's why I can't pay attention to any of this stuff. Yeah. Well, here's the deal. Lower your expectations and that's all you got to do.

Yes. I got to go into it as if it's the Matrix, not the Matrix 2. Oof. Security. Ha! It's been a while since we've actually done a security segment because it's been kind of quiet and a lot of the stuff has just been kind of repeats from the past.

But this week seems to be a banner week for security news. Well, I had joked that we basically just turned the security segment into this is the site who stole your passwords this week. But – And guess what we're going to start with? Yeah. eBay. eBay. It was hacked.

And I saw this morning that all 143 million records are now for sale. On eBay? That would be ironic. That would be great. Now, on Pastebin, somebody posted a link. It's like, send me 1.463-whatever Bitcoin to this address and then send me the receipt and all this crap and I'll send you the link for the download.

Right. Yeah. So go change your passwords if you use eBay. Yeah. I haven't gotten an email from eBay yet, so – Nor am I. But God, I don't even know if I still have an active account. I've never really been on it. Well, if you have an account, you should just go check it. Yeah. So, yeah, I've used them kind of recently, so I don't know how many millions of users they have or if they're checking against the list of stolen ones because hopefully eBay is the first person to go out and buy this list if they didn't know exactly already what was out there.

That would be smart of them. So, I don't know. Every week, it's somebody new. I know. It's going to be a constant thing, people. You've got to start using 1Password, folks. Make it easier. Yeah, really. And alias your email address so you don't use the actual email address.

Anyway, so Snowden and the NSA and all that brouhaha back in the news big time this week. Yes, it is. They're releasing more stuff and there's a couple articles that I'm going to link to in the show notes. I'll just mention them briefly here because they are long articles. You could spend all your time reading all this stuff and doing research on it and I just scan it now just to get the gist of it.

Now, the first one was everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA. This goes back to some of the ACLU stuff with the lawsuits that were going against FISA and that was happening before and the government said one thing like, oh, no, this is indefensible or whatever.

You can't prove this. And the Snowden document said, oh, well, actually, you can over here and that back and forth. Next one that came out was Data Pirates of the Caribbean. The NSA is recording every cell phone call in the Bahamas. I mean, this is not surprising. It's surprising that they're actually just limiting it to the Bahamas.

Well, they're not. That's the thing. There are several countries that are on this list of people that they can get basically all the calls from. So they're getting full audio from the Bahamas, an unnamed country, which I'll talk about in a second.

And they're getting metadata from Mexico, Kenya, and the Philippines. Right. Now, there was some – yeah, I don't care if they're doing – they're the NSA. They're supposed to be doing foreign intelligence. Yes. You know what? Go with God. Go take whatever you want. I don't care. Just stay out of us. Yeah.

Stay out of our country. I agree. I mean, the whole point is that go do this everywhere else. In fact, I hope that unnamed country is the Cayman Islands and you're going to start to bust a bunch of tax dodgers. See, now that would make sense. Now, what happened after this came out, WikiLeaks jumped into the fray and said, hey, why are you censoring your stories?

Them and I believe it was the Washington Post were holding back a country because they thought it would – they talked to the government and the government said, please don't release the name of this country because it's going to cause more violence and people will die. And they said, yeah, we're going to do it. We're going to do it.

And drum roll, please. Yes, this morning they put out a press release from Julian Afong and named the country, which was Afghanistan. Shocking. Look, if the NSA wasn't monitoring everything in Afghanistan, I would be worried. I'd be pissed.

Yeah. Isn't that the whole point? That's why we're there. Yeah, really, Jesus. And now they think, oh, God. Well, here's the thing. Most Afghanis don't have computers or internet unless they have goat net. They're probably not going to hear about this story. So, yeah, I – fucking Assange.

He's just – he's got it out for us. So it's always one of those things. I tried to go back through Twitter today before we came on the air to find out what the backlash was from Applebaum and Greenwald and those guys. But I didn't quite get there yet. So check it out for yourself.

It's just one of those things where this guy is just digging his own grave. He's never leaving that embassy. I hope he likes architecture because he's never getting out of there. Yeah. He's put himself in a place he can't get out of anymore. Well, he just keeps digging his hole deeper. That's the thing.

It's just like go off the radar. Let people forget about you. But I guess some stories came out where they're still going after him. So now I guess he's like back on the warpath. Since he figures, hey, they're still coming after me. I'm not getting out of here. Might as well just – let's burn the bridges.

Burn the bridges completely. Go out in a blaze of glory. Now, there was a great series on Frontline, the PBS channel here in the States. Part one was last week. It was a two-hour segment. And this week was the second part, which was an hour long. So three hours in total. It's called The United States of Secrets and it tracks everything from basically 9-11 and then everything that's happened up until now.

It's a great series. It's well done and it's really cool to have a lot of the actual people that were involved in it because I read a lot of this stuff in one of James Bamford's books that I reviewed on the show before. And they actually have James Bamford in the Frontline series. You can get it online – I still think they're actually playing it on the Frontline, on the PBS site.

Yeah, it looks like they are. So I've bookmarked that. You can get it there. You can get it there or I got mine in the mail from Sweden. It's also available there. Although I hear Sweden is cracking down too. So who knows? We have to figure out where they're sending stuff from now. Our friends in Afghanistan.

Wouldn't that be funny? Now, something else we talked about where – the old secret app. And we just laughed. We all laughed. Me, you, we had Bonner on for a while on Twitter getting in like Twitter wars with the guys who started it.

Yeah, we got into fisticuffs with the secret guys on Twitter. It's as safe as email. Which is not safe at all. And so there's a great article in Wired called Whistleblowers Beware and it just talks about how apps like Whisper and Secret, if these guys get a court order or a subpoena, you're done.

They will find you. They have enough data to find you. Yeah, outside of the fact that they can probably get hacked relatively easily and everything that you put out there will be connected directly to you and could be posted online anywhere, anytime by any one idiot. A lot of the stuff is encrypted, so you have to figure out who they are from inference, but it's doable.

It's totally doable. It's totally doable, yeah. Yeah. Anybody with just probably a high school – The time and interest. A time, interest and a high school diploma could probably figure it out. Yeah. So don't – be smart, guys. And Secret just came out on Android this week, so a whole new raft of people are going to be on there ruining their lives.

What are you going to do? I'll let them. The Guardian also had a really good article this week. It's fairly short, but it's from the guy who started Lava Bit. And he finally tells a lot of his story on what happened and why he had to shut down. Right. It's a short read, but it's chilling on how they screwed this guy around.

Yeah. And it's really scary. If the government decides they don't want you to do something, you are not going to be doing it. Yeah. End of story, no matter what. I mean I still give this guy props for sticking by his morals and just shutting his 10-year company down the drain just because – because he didn't want to deal and didn't agree.

Yeah, it's chilling. Yeah. Very, very chilling. So – and this week, Brian Williams is actually going to do an hour-long interview with Snowden. What do you think about that? Because I don't – I just don't think it's going to be that interesting.

I think it's going to be a gloss piece. We'll find out. I'm going to watch it for sure. I'm definitely going to watch it. It will be interesting. I'm way more interested in that than Hillary Clinton. Yeah. Who cares about Hillary? So I think it should be interesting. It's definitely going to be worth watching. If there's going to be anything new in it, I totally doubt because it will get scrubbed by the sensors just from the network alone.

Yeah. What are you going to do? So it will be a fun watch. We'll talk about it next week. Definitely. And this one came in right before we went to air. Dan Carlin posted a link to a story on Fox in New York, Fox – a news story from Fox in New York about police using cell phone spying equipment.

Yep. Now, this isn't new news as far as the device and stuff. It's called a Stingray. And the interesting part is they're using Homeland Security grants to pay for this stuff, like anti-terrorism grants.

Yeah. And just the way that they're like shutting up about how they're using it and the towns are like saying this is like a huge privacy concern here. Yeah. The thing is the other state that uses these a lot is California. Of course. Now, the other interesting thing about this happening in California is I was dealing with some people in California a couple of years ago or back a year and a half ago where we had the police come out because it was like a stalking case with our neighbor.

And this guy was sitting across the street and some weird things were happening with the cell phones in the neighborhood there. Like people talking back and forth and the cop basically said, yeah, the bad guys can impersonate cell towers, listen to your calls, and do all the shit.

They've got all the tech that the cops have. So not only law enforcement can get these, but the criminals can. And I researched this a while ago, and you can buy one of these for like two, three grand from another country and have them shipped in. Completely felony just to possess this stuff.

You can't even have it. So if you're thinking about going out and buying one, just be careful, kids. But on the plus side, if you have it, you know they're coming. That's the problem. That's a lot of it. Yeah. You can tell when people call the police, and that's what happened. They knew when the cops were called.

Yeah. So they skee-daddled as soon as that happened. And it's interesting. But yeah, stay safe, kids. Get a landline. Excellent library. Woo-hoo! Finally finished the three-volume Origin Mystery by A.J. Riedel.

The last one was called The Atlantis World. Oh, boy. That doesn't sound good. It started off great. The first book was kind of an interesting high-tech, near-future medical mystery that had a bit of sci-fi to it because there may or may not have been an alien spaceship that's been buried under Earth for gazillions of years that's been guiding human history and the genome and how we've grown up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I saw that X-Files episode. Yeah. Well, again, that's like boner porn for me. That's just geek boner. It's awesome stuff. And I really enjoyed the first one, as I mentioned. The second one got a little... And, well, the third one, it just basically turned into Star Wars.

All of a sudden, it was aliens battling each other and the poor Professor Heumann and his very sexy younger sidekick get wrapped up in it. And, of course, they find love, but one of them almost dies and eventually everything works out pretty well for the human somehow. So, I get why he got there because he wanted to tell a bigger picture of not just human genetics but the stuff of which life is made.

But it was disappointing and it was pretty jarring to go from what was essentially pretty intimate stories in the first two books to this galactic battle. My new rating system is basically, if these were physical books, would I keep them or toss them out? I would toss these.

You can use them as toilet paper in a pinch. True. But, actually, I did get these on my iPad, so that would be pretty gross. Ew. Yeah. Okay. Well, moments before we started recording, I finished Rogue Code by Mark Rusinovich.

Mm-hmm. Now, I've reviewed his other two books here before, Zero Day and Trojan Horse. Yeah. Now, Mark Rusinovich, he's a technical writer. He wrote the Windows Internals series, Windows Sysinternals Administrators reference, and other nerdy Windows books.

Sounds like the perfect guy to write fiction. He's amazingly good. Amazingly good. Oh, there's another one. I missed a short story. Damn, I've got to get that one. So, I like his books. They're kind of techno-espionage-y, spy-thrillery type of things.

Mm-hmm. The tech is spot on. Totally spot on. That's the fun part about it. Okay. And he writes it in a way that's not too nerdy. Oh, that's good. From the tech side. I mean, these are completely accessible to anybody. Mm-hmm. And if you read them, then you might actually learn a few things, which is cool. And he's getting better.

He's definitely getting better. Like, you know, the other ones were like a B-minus, I say. This is an A-minus, definitely. He's moving up the ladder. It's about high-frequency trading and stuff like that this time. Right. Really well done. I totally dug this book.

So I recommend, if you want a good series, start with Zero Day, then go to Trojan Horse, and then Rogue Code. Good stuff. Excellent. Pardon me. The tea was coming back to haunt me there. I'm definitely going to have to actually check that out, because I really enjoyed the Suarez books that you recommended, and this is similar vein.

Yeah, this is Suarez without the science fiction. Great. Okay. That's basically what it is. It's very much in the same line. And if you actually go to Amazon, they will recommend the Suarez books. If you're buying these. Now, the next book I got was an out-of-the-blue emailer to us, who hounded us for a couple of days, or a couple of weeks, actually, to check out their new book called Spartan Up, A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles

and Achieving Peak Performance in Life, by Joe DeSena. He's the guy that runs this obstacle course race called the Spartan Race. Right. I've heard of that. I got a synopsis from before, and I'm like, hey, you know what? When you get the book, send me a copy. I'm not going to review it without reading the book because that's just how we roll here.

Yeah. Now, that said, I haven't read the whole book yet. I'm halfway through it, but it's great. It's one of those books about overcoming adversity, like mental toughness and stuff like that. Could this book be written in a series of inspirational posters?

Not yet. Not yet. No, I don't think so. No, it's full of really good stories, and I like this guy's story. It's so far so good. I'll have a full write-up next time, but I'm going to put the links in this week so you can check it out. It's – yeah, so far, I'm really digging it. Yeah, I read it in the morning before I get out of bed because it's like I need something to wake up to, and it kind of gets me going in the morning.

It's fairly inspirational so far. Well, that's a little surprising. Yeah, it really is. I expected this to be whatever that one I got last time with the bro science and all that crap. This seems to be fairly more straightforward, like be tough and what it takes to be tough and how once you get through an ordeal and you look back on the little things in life, how they just don't seem to mean as much when you go through that stuff.

I love those stories. That's so true. I mean once you get past any kind of massive adversity, give it a little time, and it's just like, eh, it wasn't that bad. That and the little things just roll off you. Agreed. Also, the Freakonomics guys are back, and I loved Freakonomics when it came out.

That was one of my favorite books for a long time. They're back with a new one called Think Like a Freak, which kind of veers away from economics and kind of hones in more on how our brains work. I have not read it yet, but it is in my queue. I have read it.

I listened to it. I actually listened to it. I got it on Audible, so I can listen to it when I'm doing my physical therapy. I liked it. I liked it a lot. I got away from the Freakonomics stuff because I heard after the book came out – there were a lot of detractors after the first book. The only thing that I really heard was that the broken window theory was basically bullshit.

It had been proven false, and that was a major tenet of one of their stories in the first book. So I discounted the whole thing, and maybe I shouldn't have. I should have taken another look at it because their podcast is apparently super famous. It's like the number two podcast after having Corolla. Yeah, it's something I've been meaning to listen to.

I think you should go back and give Freakonomics a read because one tenet of it was completely disproven. But there's just a lot of – when you have a good thinker, even if they're presenting a hypothesis that isn't correct, it's at least well thought out. And they thought everything out.

They give you pros and cons. They give you the potential downfalls of the various things that they discussed in Freakonomics. I'm hoping the new one is a bit like that as well because they just – they have a really well-researched and well-thought-out take on things. Yeah, just because something is well-researched and well-told doesn't mean it's correct.

Exactly. You know? So you take it with a grain of salt. Did you read Super Freakonomics, their follow-up? No, I didn't. Okay. So you didn't like it that much. It's actually – it's not even so much a case of that as – the weird thing that – I'm actually pulling – because we're in the at the library section right now.

I've actually finally unpacked all my books out of boxes and I have them stacked up against the wall right now. I completely forget about authors for periods of time and I just don't even realize that they have new books and they put out things. I miss it. So I miss that.

So I'm going to have to go back and get it. But I think I'm going to do Think Like a Freak first. Yeah, it's a good read. Now, caveat, do not get the Audible version. I won't anyways. I had to give them a one star for the content on this thing because it's the same fucking bait and switch as that last book I read, the Ryan Holiday book last week.

At the end of this book, there's an hour and 40 minutes of their podcast tacked onto the end. To pump it up to make it look like it's a longer book so you'll be more readily available – or readily happy to click buy on Audible. Two thoughts on this one, Jason. One, yeah, it's completely bullshit that they don't actually say that.

They should. That should be in the listing saying exclusive extra bonus content, one-hour podcast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That is how that should be listed and marketed, and it is a bit of a bait and switch when they don't do that. Secondly, get fucking used to it because this is now the special content of the book world.

It's the same thing as like if you buy through iTunes, the album, you'll get this special video that nobody else gets. It's an added-on seller to increase sales, but they do need to tell you. I'm fine with it if they say it up front. Yeah. And I'm not the only person. There are a lot of people in the comments on Audible who are pissed off.

Yeah, well, somebody in the publishing community decided this is the way to go, and it's a bit stupid. It's going to bite them. It's going to bite them because everybody that's complaining about it is giving it a one-star review, even though they like the book because it's bullshit that they're doing it. Yeah, I agree. So hopefully Audible will step up and say, hey, guys, you can't do that.

There is a really good podcast on Tim Ferriss' show this week with Stephen Dubner, the co-author of Freakonomics. I really enjoyed that podcast because he talks a lot about the methodology of how they wrote the books. Right. So you'd actually like this a lot. Yeah, I'm going to have to listen to that. There's also in the show notes I've dropped in a link from an article on Salon where they interviewed him, which I really enjoyed reading and made me want to go get the book immediately.

So this is actually how I found out about the book was this article. So it's – again, good thinkers. You just can't go wrong. Yeah, you'll definitely like this book. I do recommend it, but get the print version. Cool. The last book I think I – oh, maybe not the last. Yeah, my last book for the week.

Thank God. I had a really, really heavy reading week this week. I know. How do you have the fucking time, man? Physical therapy. I got to walk every day because of my leg and I have to walk a lot unfortunately. So – well, actually fortunately it's been great here. This one is called A Higher Call, an incredible true story of combat and chivalry in the war-torn skies of World War II.

It's the story of a German ace who comes across a bomber that's like basically crippled and can barely fly and he like escorts them out of the country, which is basically a firing squad offense. So it's a fantastic story about the German ace, like his whole backstory, his whole career, the bomber crew, mostly about the pilot, Charlie – his name is Charlie Brown, which is funny.

That's funny. And their whole story and they both made it through the war. So they ended up meeting I guess in 1990. The story of like how they came together and met is really cool and it's been optioned for a movie, which I hope they make. This would make a great movie.

Please not Tom Hanks. Just not Tom Hanks. I love Tom Hanks. He's a little old now though to be a 20-year-old because the guy in the movie was – or the guy in the book was 20 years old. Charlie Brown was 20 when he flew the bomber. So he lied to everybody and told them he was 25 so they would trust him more.

And it was – it's a great book. I love World War II stuff. So I'm a total nerd for that. And this was just – the telling was great. And the reader, Robinson Dean, is amazing. He reads a ton of – wait. No, no, no. I don't think it was Robinson Dean. Anyway, it was a great, great read, yes.

Or listen, as it were. Great listen, yeah. Well, as much as you love World War II stuff, I am in love with dystopian fiction. It is probably my favorite category of things in the world. I just love books about how the world is falling apart and it's a complete piece of crap and we can't fix anything and it's all shit.

I love it, love it, love it. Can't get enough of it. And Wired just put out a short article, which I thought was going to be a listicle, but I was sadly disappointed it isn't. The 10 most important dystopian books and films of all time. Well, I kind of wanted them listed out in order so I could argue about it.

But they just kind of – they provided a list of extremely good films and books that are just straight up dystopia, including even like The Hunger Games, which I actually really enjoyed reading because it is so dystopian. It's fantastic. There's a few things in here I've never read, but if you like well-thought-out, very depressing science fiction, this is a good list of books.

Yeah, it's books and movies. And movies, yes. And the interesting thing, they have William Gibson's The Sprawl Trilogy in there. And Neuromancer, yes, I can see. Mona Lisa Overdrive in Count Zero, no, not so much. Those weren't that good.

Yeah, I mean some arguments can be made here. And as I was talking about just authors that I forget have other books, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake I read maybe 10 or 15 years ago, whenever it first came out, and I absolutely loved it. But I had no idea it was a trilogy, and there's two books after it, so guess what's next up for me?

There you go. So a little note on the audiobook thing. I broke my rule with the Freakonomics thing, and basically it's a nonfiction audiobook, and I swore to myself that I would never get those again just because you can't retain as much. Audiobooks are great for fiction because you get into the story, and it's more fun.

But trying to get facts and that kind of crap out of an audiobook just never sticks. So yeah, I broke my rule there. And I was right. Robinson Dean did narrate a higher call. He also did the version of Neuromancer, which I just bought because of this list that you sent.

I'm like, I'll give Neuromancer another try and went and checked on Audible. And they have a new version read by him, and I hope he does the other ones. He did the latest trilogy from William Gibson as well, the Pattern Recognition Trilogy or the Big End Trilogy. Right. And it was fantastic. He's my new go-to guy.

It used to be Grover Gardner because he did a lot of historical stuff. But yeah, this Robinson Dean dude knows how to do it. He's good. Last week I talked about – I think I talked offline.

I don't think we talked about it on the show. A new app called Blinkist. Yeah. It's Cliff Notes for productivity, self-help-y, nerdy books like that. Right. So I got the app and wanted to check it out. And I went ahead and just right out of the gate, I bought the three-month subscription.

So it's $10, $3 a month for – I think they have like 60-some-odd books that they've done so far. Right. And I tested it at first. I grabbed – what was it? That unfragile one from Nicholas Taleb. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Anti-fragile. Right. And so I matched that up with what I read in the book. Spot on. It was perfect. They took out all the bullshit. It was great. Yeah. I might have to check this out because I do not have the time to burn through so many books.

And there are so many things that I'd love to just get an overview on. Well, one of them that I remember seeing in there is Freakonomics. I'll go back and grab that one. Right. Yeah, the summaries are really good. They just get – they just distill it. You do miss the stories about what got them to that point. But if you just want the skinny on a book without having to read 300 pages, it's great.

And they are perfect length for the crapper. Well, and I also – yeah, exactly. I find them helpful for me to decide which books I actually want to get, particularly in the nonfiction realm. Fiction is a different beast. But for nonfiction, being able to read an overview, then I'll go, yeah, I'm totally into this.

I need to go get the full book or this was good enough. Yeah, exactly. Because there are a couple of books that I've read and they're like the Pomodoro effect where you chunk all your work into 25-minute chunks with a tomato timer or something. I'm really glad I didn't spend 300 pages on that crap.

But yeah, it's a good overview of the books. And like I said, 10, 15-minute reads, some up to 20 minutes. So if you grab some Metamucil and just hit the crapper, you can be a super genius in a month if you just get through them all and then you can cancel your subscription. All right.

So far, I like it. I really do. I'm happy with it. All right. I'm happy with my purchase. Well, speaking of being super genius and crap, Lumosity. I joined Lumosity a year ago around my birthday. So my subscription has finally come to an end.

I believe it was something like 70-some-odd bucks for the year. Yeah, not cheap. Not cheap at all. Definitely not cheap. I totally forgot that they have auto-renew, of course, because all crap sites do. But luckily, I remembered just in time before I resubscribed.

So I switched it off. A year of doing Lumosity has not made any impact on my life whatsoever. Their neuroscience and their proven track record, that's all a load of crap. Is it fun? Yeah.

Does it put some structure on your day? Yeah. Does it make your brain work in ways that maybe it doesn't sometimes? Yeah. Does it actually do anything? No. Is it worth the cost? No. Am I happy about their auto-renew policy? No. And the thing I'm most upset about, we talked about this a couple times, it's the continued tradition of screwing over your loyal customers in chasing the dollar.

Because as soon as I had switched off my auto-renew, I started getting emails offering me sudden discounts for another year's subscription, and not insubstantial discounts, very substantial discounts, which if I just would have left their auto-renew on, I would not have gotten, and I would have paid full price for another year.

Way to treat your loyal customers, assholes. Luckily, you trained my brain well enough not to be a moron. Yep. Yeah. Do you remember the Netflix deal when they used to actually send discs to everybody and they didn't have streaming? Do you remember? Did you hear that story? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So just for the listeners, if you were a loyal Netflix customer, after three months, you wouldn't get priority treatment for the discs that you ordered. If it was like a popular disc, they would actually put you down the queue because they wanted the new user onboarding experience to be better.

Exactly. So the more that you paid them and the longer you were a loyal customer, the longer you had to wait and the more you got screwed. Yeah. That's the way of the world now, and it really makes me a grumpy old geek because I think it's complete and utter bullshit. Anyways, I have an app, and I even like it.

Whoa. What? Say what? Yeah. I know this is the complete wrong podcast for it and not our target market, but a friend of the show, Mike Walter, who I often go and watch sporting events with down at the bar, told me, I need to put ESPN SportsCenter on my iPhone, especially with the World Cup coming up.

It's an elegant, easy, quick app. You can put in your favorite teams. So I've got the Dodgers in there, and I've got my World Cup teams that I support. You click on favorites. Boom. You see the upcoming games. You see real-time results while they're playing. It's absolutely fantastic for a casual sports fan like me.

It's super easy. I get all the information I need on one screen without having to dig deeper. And if you're crazy about sports, you can totally go down the rabbit hole because then they have the stats and fixtures and all the news stories about the teams that you follow and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can spend hours on it if you really super get into sports.

But this is going to be perfect for the World Cup because I'll be able to track all the games that are going on in real time. How much does it cost? Free. Free? Completely free. They have paid upgrades to be able to do things like actually watch ESPN channels and get other kind of crap.

But I'm using the completely free version, and it's more than enough for me. Nice. Does it work on iPad as well? It does indeed. Oh, cool. Yeah. It's a great little app. Oh, it works. It's not a plus app, though. No. It'll work. It's not formatted for iPad. Okay.

Yeah, but it's basically just scores. Yeah, I think I might actually get that for World Cup. It's great. You have to give them your email to be able to do the favorites, but that's no big deal. And then, yeah, I've got the LA Dodgers are in there, the Galaxy, Bayern Munich, Germany, United States, and it's just all on one screen.

I can see when the next game is coming, and if a game is in progress, it drops the score right in there. Cool. Do they give you alerts, like when the game's starting? You can set yourself up for that. I haven't. Okay. Yeah. Because that's what I would need, because I don't follow that part. Yeah. You can totally do that, and it'll ping you when the game's about to start.

Cool. I'll check it out. I will actually check that out, because I am a World Cup fan. Yeah. My last one is for the programmers and the nerds, so I'll try and make this one quick, because not everybody's going to be into this one, especially if you're not a PHP programmer. There's a little app that I got years and years and years ago called the PHP Function Index.

It's from Artist Software, and he apparently has joined another team part-time and is working on Xscope, that designer-ly app that I talked about probably in episode five that's a really good utility for doing web design on screen.

Well, this one is just a wrapper for the PHP HTML manual files that you can just download from the php.net site. Right. It gives you a super fast way to search for a function and get the actual manual page on it, instead of like having like the built-in, like Coda has built-in books and stuff that kind of work sometimes, but not really.

This is just, it's a utility. It's a separate app, but if you couple it with Quicksilver, you could just pop over to it super fast from whatever IDE you're working on. I'm in Sublime Text nowadays and loving that. But this is, I mean, you can use it for free as like an amateur or whatever, or academic use, or hobbyist, academic and hobbyist.

I paid for it because it was only like 10 bucks or 15 bucks just to support the guy because it has saved me so much time. So if you're a PHP programmer and you don't have this in your arsenal, just go grab it. Honestly, you have to manually update the manual files. It takes like, it takes like five minutes.

There's a link in the preferences. You just throw them in a directory, point the app at the directory and boom, super fast. There's like 11 or 12,000 files in that PHP manual. I'm not joking. When you unzip it, there's like over 10,000 files in that directory. This thing indexes them lightning fast and boom, Bob's your uncle.

Definitely get it. So mentioning my prolific reading habits this week on at the library, I've had a chance to check out some new podcasts, some of which aren't new, but there's actually from NPR who I generally don't go for.

Like this could be a bit dry. This American life just does not, you know, get me wet at all. I've never liked that. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just, I'm not vanilla enough for that. No offense to our vanilla listeners. So the first one I found is the Intelligence Squared Debates.

These are awesome. They get, you know, they come up with a premise and they get two people on either side of the debate and they debate. And it's really good. The first two I listened to was Millennials Don't Stand a Chance and Is Death Final? They were great.

I loved it. And they're done in front of a live audience. So at the beginning of the debate, they take a poll in the audience. And then at the end of the debate, they take another poll to see who won, who changed the most minds. So apparently, yeah, no spoilers.

Never mind. I was going to give a spoiler, but I won't. No, no spoilers. I haven't listened to any of these yet, but I just scanned down the list of topics and some of the people that are involved. This looks absolutely fantastic. I bookmarked it. Do they, are they on iTunes as well as a podcast or do you know?

Well, what do you mean? I mean, you can get them on iTunes as a podcast. Okay, that's what I meant. Perfect. Oh, yeah, yeah. From the link. I'm sorry. Yeah, I just, I posted the link to the NPR site. Yeah, because I didn't do the, I didn't take a look yet. So I was just looking at the site, which is brilliantly laid out. This looks fantastic. So I'm going to be subscribing to this and cherry picking the topics that I like, of course.

But that's what the internet's good for. Exactly. And the people they have on are like just top tier people. It's not like, you know, they wouldn't have you or I on for anything. They have people that actually know what they're talking about. Bastards. Yeah. And the next one is actually probably that most people have already heard of.

It's Planet Money on NPR. I thought it was going to be about, you know, hedge fund investing and crap like that. It's not at all. They're just, they're great stories about money and I loved it. I love, I've listened to like three episodes so far. I love it. I'm just in. I recommend it because it's mostly stories.

It's not, you know, like the one was, they couldn't even give away, like, what's a penny worth type of thing? Right. Yeah. And, you know, they went around and left pennies on the ground and people wouldn't pick them up. They tried to buy something in Manhattan for a penny and you can't find anything for a penny anymore.

So, you know, what are pennies worth? It's really fun. They're fun, short. That's the nice thing about it. They're like 20 minutes long. Yeah. So yeah, those look really cool too. And a quick story on the penny, Canada got rid of it and the country didn't collapse. In fact, it's all a lot easier there now. Let's get rid of the stupid penny already. It costs more to make them than they're worth.

Yep. Anyways, so I have a TED talk. I know that there are technically videos, but as anybody who actually watches TED talks, unless there's a lot of graphs going on or something like that, basically you can just hit play on these and walk around and do whatever you want.

So it's ear candy to me, particularly this one, because it's not all that interesting to watch, but it is fantastic. It's old. This is from 2002 and somehow I never saw this one. Dan Dennett, Dangerous Memes. Dan Dennett is a philosopher and he talks a lot and makes a really good case for the concept of the meme, which we all know, you know, 10 years on from this talk has taken over the entire internet and argues that they're actually concepts that are literally alive.

Super interesting talk. I loved it. It was really good and memes technically have been around since 1976, I believe, with Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene. Yeah. That's where it really came out. But this was, I'd never seen this talk. You know what? I take it back. I had seen this talk, but I hadn't seen it probably in five or six years.

I had a period in my life where I went through and watched every TED talk. I was unemployed. Yes. And it was winter and it was in Chicago. So you couldn't leave the house. So what better thing to do than watch a bunch of pretentious people tell you stuff that you don't know? That is 99% of TED Talks in my opinion, but Dan Dennett is not pretentious at all.

This was a great one. And I think it, even though it's 10 years old, he probably would have had a lot more stories and examples, but it has not aged. It's perfect. This is evergreen. It is totally evergreen content. I watched it over breakfast this morning and it was fascinating. This is a must watch.

It'll take you 15 minutes. You'll come out of it a little smarter and maybe a little bit more pretentious. Yeah. And I've actually got to look up and see if he's got a book out called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. And that was from probably 2002. So I'm sure he's got something more recent and that'll be on our, at the library segment soon because I loved him.

I thought he was super interesting and I want to read a book. Yeah. I definitely want to read some of this guy's stuff. I love, love tools on thinking. So something that's kind of like TED Talks is the MIT Media Lab has a conversation series now, which I didn't know about, which is strange since my buddy's the head of the MIT Media Lab.

They've got some really cool people on there. I wish I'd have seen it before because they had Jaron Lanier on there. Daniel Suarez. This week is Rob Pardo from Blizzard, one of the main guys behind World of War Crack. And some other, there's just a bunch of people, but Joey is like the, oh, Lawrence Lessig, Reed Hoffman.

Yeah. JJ Abrams. JJ Abrams. Yeah. So the conversations with Joey and Joey's a fantastic guy. He's so smart. And I check him out. The only really crappy part about it is their player is super shitty. From the MIT Media Lab, a crappy player.

Well, here's the deal. They probably got other things to do. True. Now, another one that came out this week is a previous guest of the show, Joey Rabier, and former Revision 3 veteran, has his own new show out called 3D Straight Up. It's all about 3D printing.

So the first episode, basically, he walks around Maker Faire interviewing everybody that has anything to do with 3D printing. I had no idea how many people were making 3D printers nowadays. Oh, yeah. It's ridiculous. It's an hour of him walking around finding people with 3D printers, and they're everywhere.

It's a crazy market that I had no idea about. And I still don't understand it, because really, what are you printing? Check it out. You will find out. It's fascinating. I'll definitely have to take a look. If I do remember correctly, our particular podcast that Joey joined us on went a little blue.

Oh, it went extremely blue. Yeah. If you're listening to this and thinking, oh, I'm going to go back and listen to that one to get some really interesting information about 3D printing, we didn't talk about 3D printing. No, we got way too hammered and just talked. We had dick jokes all the whole time. There was a lot of dick jokes.

So, yeah. Anyway. So, yeah, that was not our finest hour, but it was fun to record. Yes, it was. So, this next one is from the Ask a Ninja guys. I talked about Ask a Ninja last week, that they're coming back. Well, they've also got a new show out called Poorly Explained. And if you want to see what the ninja looks like without the ninja suit, you can go watch Poorly Explained.

It's, you know, Kent Nichols and Doug Sarine. And it's these short things. The first one is on Bitcoin. And everybody I've showed it to, it just cracks up. It's like a minute and a half. I can't wait for more of these. They're funny as hell. So, did you watch the Bitcoin one yet?

Yeah, I did. I was dying laughing. It was actually, and still, it was like probably one of the better explanations that I've ever heard of it. That's the thing. These guys are really good at it because their net neutrality, Ask a Ninja, was one of the best ones that described net neutrality. Well, it's a very daily show.

It actually does a better job of explaining the news with humor than watching an actual news broadcast. Yeah, it's not dry. You know, it laces everything with very smart humor. So, I'm super happy these guys are doing this. So, best of luck to them. And in the big ear candy news this week is Amazon Prime snags the HBO back catalog.

Can you believe it? It was only a matter of time. Somebody was going to get it. I'm surprised. Yeah, they definitely outbid Netflix and that's a major coup for Amazon and a major reason for me to keep Amazon Prime. Not for me because I've watched everything already. The only thing that's in that catalog that I would consider going back and watching is Generation Kill because it was so good.

Right. I tried to watch the Pacific when it first came on. So, maybe I'll try that. But, well, Band of Brothers, too. I've got all the DVDs for that. So, I can just throw it on whenever I want. But it's nice to have it handy if I just want to throw on an episode or two because I love that series so much. I think that is the best thing that HBO has ever done. Really? Band of Brothers.

Hands down. I loved it. It was fantastic. I mean, it was a great miniseries. I've toyed with the idea of going back and re-watching The Sopranos. But I really wonder how well that's aged. Yeah. You know what? I'm happy with it where it's at because I don't even think I'm over the ending yet. It's your Battlestar Galactica.

It really is. It's just so terrible. And I can't envision going and watching The Wire again. I mean, that was fantastic, but it doesn't have the staying power for me to go watch it again. So, I don't know. I mean, for people who haven't seen it, great. There are people born who have not seen it yet. So, they have audiences.

And speaking of HBO, there is a quick little video that popped up that I was actually going to have in another segment, but it works here. This is Six Minutes of Geekery, The Science of Game of Thrones. Link is on our show notes. It's a perfect example of the internet.

It's nitpicking fiction as only geeks can. Planet Hodor. Yeah. I watched it and I was like, yep, this is a bunch of nerds talking about nerdy shit. I like it because, you know, anytime that they try to bring real world into these fantasy worlds and then come up with these crazy explanations, it's funny.

They did a good job producing it. It's funny. It's worth the five minutes if you're a Game of Thrones fan. Yeah, it's actually seven minutes, but it's worth it. Oh, seven minutes. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Odor. Odor. No, seriously?

Are you shitting me? I seem to be really attracted to time fuckery in this Are You Shitting Me segment, and I found another one. I don't know what it is about it. It's just, I love this stuff. I love the idea of not really having a concept of human existence and real time.

So here we go. Mammoth went extinct 1,000 years after the Egyptians finished building the Great Pyramid. That's crazy. I thought it would be like they'd gone to like, you know, 10,000 years before. Exactly. You just think that these things are so separated in time, but they really aren't.

It's absolutely fantastic. We have a nice link to io9.com, which has the proof and the math and the science behind it. io9.com is also actually a fantastic site if you're a geek like us. Basically, we usually think of woolly mammoths as purely ice age creatures. While most did indeed die out about 10,000 years ago, there was one tiny population that endured on an isolated island until 1650 BC, which is pretty awesome.

Yeah, it is. This is a great read, too. I was fascinated by this one. Yeah. And to io9, yes, they are great, but they have, what did you say, high velocity of posting, which is why I don't check them out. They were in my feed for so long, and if you skip it for like 10 minutes, there's 100 articles that you missed.

Yeah, that's the only problem. I mean, that's journalism on the internet right now, though, isn't it, right? They just got to keep pushing things to get clicks. It's unfortunate. Yeah, and there is good stuff on there, but I just end up missing it because I just don't have the time. I'd rather they do better posts and fewer than more in just thinly researched things.

But this was a really good one. I'm glad you found this one. Yeah, thanks. Closing shout outs! Let's give a shout out to Morrissey, who turned 55 this week. Talk about time fuckery. Who would have thought? You know, 55 years old, well done.

A new album out. Haven't listened to it yet, but did spend a good chunk of the day listening to old Morrissey yesterday in honor of his birthday. And I know everybody thinks he's a big mope, and he is, but he's an awesomely talented mope. He's very mopey. Yes. I bet he's moping today because it's his birthday.

Oh, I'm so old. Speaking of new albums, though, the Pixies have a new album out. First studio album in a long time. And first without Kim Deal. It's really good. I liked it. Is it really? I haven't listened to that either. That's actually on my list for once we finish the podcast.

I was going to listen to that. And I found it in a very surprising way. Spotify spammed me. And I'm like, I don't have a Spotify account anymore. What the hell? Turns out I did. And I had to go to their site. I couldn't do a one-click unsubscribe. They make you go to the site. I had to reset my password, go in, find the preferences, turn it off.

And while I was doing that, I saw an ad for the new Pixies album. So I clicked it and listened to it. I'm like, okay. Well, since I'm here. It worked. It actually did. Well, I'm not going to get any more spam from them, but it was a pleasant surprise. And as a long-term Pixies fan, it was surprisingly good.

It's a little different. The first song is going to throw you for a loop, but the rest of the album, I thought it was solid. I've listened to it like three or four times now, and it sticks. Excellent. I will give it a listen. Yeah, if you're a Pixies fan, check them out on Spotify. It's free now. Yes, and you are apparently one of the 40 million people.

You just didn't know it. Yep, I am. Just a quick follow-up on the results of my Medium posting experiment that I posted a post on my blog, and then I posted the same thing on the Medium. Well, yeah, my blog got about 200 or 300 uniques on that post.

And at Medium, I got 16. So there you go. So for the people who are saying that they're using Medium as a conduit to get more people reading your articles, it doesn't always work. Right. Yeah, I didn't think it would. You go to Medium, and it's just not built out that way.

I never bought that. So good to know we have some proof now. Because I was trying to figure out how I could discover it, just as a user. You can't. You have to still go do all the work. They've got a curated list of editors' picks that get, I'm sure, flagged from traffic. So you have to bring your – B-Y-O-T, bring your own traffic.

Or B-Y-O-E-B, bring your own eyeballs. And so I linked to it in a couple different places. And I got some people who are friends of mine that missed my post about the blog post. So they didn't see it originally on my site, but then they found it on Medium. And I got a couple – I don't know what they call them on there.

I don't know if it's favorites or promotions or whatever the hell they call it. But I got a couple of those. But still, yeah, like 16 or 17, that was about it. So I will be not posting anything on Medium like I wasn't doing before. So experiment success. There you go. We like data.

Data is good. Yep. All right, man. Well, go have a nice holiday. Yeah, you too. Everybody out there, I hope you have a good, nice, long weekend. Try not to work, unlike Jason, who will be working all weekend. But get your downtime, people. If you're in the U.S., get your downtime. And if you're elsewhere, still get your downtime because it is the weekend.

There you go. There you go. Talk to you next week. Later. Keep up with the Grumpy Old Geeks on the web at GrumpyOldGeeks.com, on Facebook at Facebook.com slash GrumpyOldGeeks, or email them at podcast at GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

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