67: Wanted! 1000 Crazies Like Us.

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Let's get started. This is going to be our last World Cup episode and we're going to have about three things to say about it because you won. Enough. We're done.

Yay. I did. I was unfortunately in the car driving to go bury my grandmother so I didn't get to see the last game. Sorry to hear that. That is a, you know, that sucks. It is a double bummer.

The game was a game that only really soccer fans would love. Casual soccer fans not so much. Low on scoring, heavy on defense, a lot of tries, but no goal until overtime, which made it exceptionally fun at the bar that I happened to be at because it was just a hell of a party with a lot of beer.

I missed the World Cup already. I have to admit, I don't, you know, I'm not a sports guy, but I totally now get why, why guys get into it because it's a, it's a good excuse to go out and about and drink some beer and, and completely disconnect from everything else that you do in your day.

So, uh, that was a fun month. Um, there's a really nice video that I'll put in the show notes. It's the World Cup 2014 in 240 seconds. Um, it was, it was just a, it's a good, nice goodbye to the World Cup. And of course it's scored by one of my clients. They must've made a ton of money. Oh, I'm sure. Yes. Cause YouTube pays out the wazoo, don't they?

Well, no more that, uh, they even the broadcast actually used it for, for their montages at the end of the show. So, uh, ABC slash ESPN probably, uh, licensed the hell out of that track. So I gotcha. I thought you, I thought you were actually being facetious, but you're actually being honest.

No, no, no. They, they, they used a Coldplay as a sky full of stars for quite a lot of stuff on this particular World Cup. So that was a, it was a good time. And, and yeah, Germany won. So that was very exciting. Uh, we have our four stars now and, uh, I get to, uh, bask in the glory for four years, which will basically last another two weeks until I get my four star Jersey. And then I'll completely forget about it for two years until the Euro Cup starts up. So yeehaw.

And the funny thing is four years ago when it was over, you said pretty much the exact same thing. Like I, now I get why guys like sports. I know. And then I completely forget about it for basically four years straight. And, and surprise, unsurprisingly, eight years ago, you said this. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, you know, then I, then you quickly settle back into your regular routine that involves actually doing things and not just watching a bunch of highly overpaid athletes run around. So, yeah, you know, it's funny that eight years ago when you and I were like staying up in the middle of the night

and watching world cup, I was in Chicago, you were in LA and we had, we had a webcam set up so we could all watch together. Yeah. My webcam at eight years ago, it was a connect X quick cam that had 16 shades of gray. Yeah. I believe that was a, that was mine as well. Yeah. We all had that.

And now we can do it in like full HD with surround sound and the whole nine yards. Yeah. With, with like a split screen with the game streaming in as well. And yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a different world now. Uh, any better? Probably not. No, not really.

Just, it just takes more bandwidth. Actually, just as a side note on that, um, my wife actually wanted to watch a bit of the game last night, uh, the final, because we were in a bar and it was packed and lots of friends were around. So, so, uh, while I was avidly staring at it, except for when I was trying to flag down another beer, uh, she was being social and she was like, I, I missed half the game.

Can we watch it again? And you know, ESPN has it on demand, which is great. You know, that's one of these wonderful things that, that has changed in the last eight years. It's just like, we can just bring it up last night and, and watch the game, except for the fact that you have to go through so many hoops to be able to do it. Uh, you know, what cable provider are you using? Okay. Sign in with that. Then you have, you get a code that you have to then type in and, but to get the code first, you have to sign into your cable provider.

It's just like, it took us like 30 minutes to be able to get this game streaming. So you could have gotten it from your friends in Sweden faster. I know. I was just like, I could probably Google this and just find a YouTube of it or go to, go to Sweden. Exactly. So it's, it's both gotten better and more annoying.

Yeah. Cause technically I could have watched it on my iPad on the 80 driving to Pennsylvania, but it's the same problem with the hoops. And since I rent, uh, I don't have the login for the cable provider. So I had to get that from my roommate if he even has it, because most people don't even remember that thing.

And then I'm like, okay, well do I, I've got five gigabytes on my iPad for this month. Is that going to be too much? I mean, is it going to be enough to watch the game? And am I going to have enough to work? And I did find a really nasty bug in Verizon's, uh, LTE, uh, was called pairing with the iPad.

So I paired my MacBook Pro and sitting in the backseat going on. And half the stuff that I had to do that day was over SSH, no SSH connection. It will not connect over SSH. That's not good. No. So I'm probably, I mean, granted it's, it's kind of a power user problem because, uh, how many people are, are you going through SSH on their iPads?

Not very many. I'd imagine you, me, a few other developers out there, but, but I mean, it should just be a full net connection and half the sites I went to, I couldn't get to. I could get to Google just fine. I could sometimes get to Facebook just, just cause I was testing URLs to get to like half the stuff I couldn't get to.

It was timing out on DNS. Yeah. So I tried to do some VPN stuff. The VPN stuff didn't work. I tried resetting the DNS with open DNS. It's, it's very crippled surprisingly. Well, I'll just mention some more problems that I had as well. When I was traveling, I was, I was in Canada, which is technically overseas as it were. It's international anyways. And Verizon used to be really great.

For, for, for international, they used to have this, this like $25 package that I could buy into. And I'd have basically a massive data plan and not really worry about it. Uh, they got rid of that, uh, they got rid of that, of course. So you get the like 25, 25 megabytes. Yeah. I get the 25 megabytes for like 50 bucks or whatever. And you know, it's just, I ended up racking up almost like $250 traveling, uh, just for 10 days, which is insane.

Um, so I'm definitely gonna have to find some other sort of solution when I, when I travel from now on. So thanks a lot, Verizon. Uh, also tons of connectivity issues the entire time. Sites not loading. Uh, it was just, uh, it was not good. No, it never is. It used to be. Yeah.

I had a sweet spot of a few years where it was just super easy, but, uh, not anymore. Plus battery drain was insane the entire time I was there. And I don't know why that is. As soon as I got back, everything's working better again. Weird. Yeah. That's very weird. I know my brother racked up another like couple hundred bucks. He just got back from Iceland for 10, he was there for 10 days and he had, had about the same thing, like 200 bucks overage.

Yeah. And, uh, when I went to Asia with Sean Bonner and, uh, Tara, we, we basically did the same thing. We had the 25 megabytes and we stayed under surprisingly. Yeah. Because there's so much wifi over there. We just kind of bounced wifi.

Yeah. I mean, that, that's the thing. And, and unfortunately in Canada, there's, there's none of the ISPs have unlimited. Unlimited bandwidth as we're still somewhat enjoying here, but, uh, we won't for much longer as I, you know, continue to beat that drum, but, uh, because they don't have unlimited bandwidth, uh, in anywhere in Canada, uh, they're not, they're not quick.

Businesses are not quick to give out their, uh, their wifi passwords because, uh, they will just rack up the charges as well. So, so, you know, it's when you're traveling around, you're, you're really, it's, it's hard to find free wifi. Um, luckily, you know, a lot of the places I go on, I'm quite friendly and I'm a, I'm a normal regular there.

So, uh, I've got a lot of passwords, but still just, uh, out and about, no, not easy to find. So, uh, that sucks. Yeah, that sucks. Oh, well living in the modern world. Exactly. Here, here's the deal. Turn your phone off. Well, that, that's what I actually started to do.

And I was enjoying the rest of my pseudo vacation a little bit better after that. So, uh, speaking of the modern world, Jason, um, your, your wonderful admission last week of, of, uh, you know, taking one for the team, literally, um, apparently you even beat Salon to it because, uh, uh, beat, um, there's, uh, the, the, the kind of lifestyle slash sex, uh, author over there, Tracy Clark Flory, uh, made her husband try out the auto blow too.

And, uh, wrote an article about it. So congratulations on beating the journalists. Hey man, that's what I do. Yeah. Um, I read the article and I, I, I, I, like I said before, it works really well if you pretend you're in a factory because the noise is an issue, you know, and this is, that's what he complained about the most.

And he did make a very good point or the wife made a very good point that it looks like they cut the face off of a dead hooker and put it on the thing. It really does look like that. But you know, when you're, uh, stoking the fire, you're not looking at the mantelpiece as they say. Wow. Nice.

Um, yeah, you know, and Hey, if you've got a sex writer that, you know, experiments on you every day, yeah, you're probably not going to get that much enjoyment out of, uh, the robotic blow job. Yeah. I'm just going to say, you know, so sure I would be enjoying it either. If, if my, my wife and or girlfriend or whatever she is, uh, it just happens to be sitting next to me.

I'm like, why am I using this? Well, you know, here's the deal. You don't eat steak every day. Sometimes you have to have a sandwich. I suppose that's true. So that's it. You know, it's, it is good in a pinch, but it's, uh, it is good. Going in the garage sale. I don't think there's a market for used.

You can, you can replace the sleeve for like 30 bucks. So, okay. But yeah, yeah. One robotic blow job device only, only used once. Um, because I do not want to be known as the guy who fucked a robot going forward, but it's okay. It was, it was a good experiment.

And like I said, it did the job. You are way ahead of your time, man. You, you, you have, uh, singularly approached the singularity through your singular member. Speaking of the singularity, what was that thing that you sent me yesterday with the, uh, the guys who are really worried about the singularity?

Oh, should we do this now? I had actually tossed this down in, in one of our later segments, but no, I want to get to this now because this is, this is, uh, we should have a new segment called head up your own ass for this, this piece. Yeah. But I, I really actually, I love this sort of stuff. So I, I, I, it's a, what basically it's a story about a guys, guys who sit around and do thought experiments.

And one guy yelled at another guy because by doing this thought experiment and exposing your results, you've doomed us all to damnation when the AI becomes sentient, because he's going to go in the past, it was a time distorted thinking. Yeah. You're going to, he's going to use time distorted thinking, go back and see the people that didn't help him become sentient and punish us all.

Yeah. That's basically the gist of it. Uh, this is a, uh, you know, again, back, uh, this is on slate.com. Um, it's a writeup, uh, called the most terrifying thought experiment of all time. Uh, this started with, uh, a techno futurist group that's on Reddit. Um, and it's called Roko's Basilisk, Basilisk.

I can never remember. I haven't remembered how to pronounce that since, uh, like eighth grade Greek. Here's the deal. You got to go back and watch Harry Potter. It's Basilisk. Ah, well, in the, in the, in the Harry Potter one or two, one or two, one of those ones. There was the Basilisk. Yeah. This is, this is basically the slender man or an urban legend for, for super geeky guys.

Um, basically kind of pushing on the autism scale because they take it so seriously. I love this stuff. I loved reading this article. I went down the rabbit hole for a couple hours yesterday. Uh, go, I went and read some of the original stuff. I went and read some of the, you know, other ones. Uh, there are about 25 sci-fi books that have this exact premise, which is, you know, a super intelligent AI comes back in time and, and, you know, forces people to help build them and all that sort of stuff.

And that's basically all this is. But the, the funny part is just how freaked out some of these people have gotten about it because basically by thinking it, we've created it, which is, you know, what, what's the name of that stupid book that I can't stand and all the hippie idiots like the secret. It's the secret crap. If you think it, it will become, no, it fucking won't.

So there's a big, there's a big difference between the secret and what these guys are talking about. These guys are talking about, if you think about it, then somebody will build it because now it's out in the world. Um, but, uh, there's no stop. It was, that's, that's, that's what we call technology and the world and brains.

So, so the, the problem I had with it was the thought experiment can, was basically concerned with two, two choices. You have, you have decision to make, you have two choices or three choices. You can choose box a box B or box a and B. Now here's, here's where I come into it with my logic.

Um, and this, this comes from a very astute movie back in the eighties called war games. Do not play the game and you will win. That's what I was thinking as I was reading through this entire thing as well, which is basically it boils down to the super intelligent AI is going to basically force you to help him come into being.

So your choice is you help him or B, he will give you eternal torment. And then I was like, see, well, in all the sci-fi books that I've read about this, there's, there's the third option, which is the, the guy basically offs himself to stop it from happening. And he should have just moved to Montana or, you know, just disconnect completely and become a farmer.

Like most of us are starting to do anyways that have been in tech for this long. And most of these people probably should do because they're so crazy autistic about this, that they're actually really letting this affect their real life. It's a thought experiment. That's the point. You think about it. That's it. Relax people. But I love it. Just having said that, I love this stuff.

The article is definitely worth a read because it's a, again, this is some good journalism and it's a good overview of it by David Auerbach. And if you get into it, I suggest you click on a lot of the links in there because as I, as I delved into it deeper, I got more and more both amused and thought about stuff, which is the point of thought experiments.

Yeah. You got to think to have an experiment. Exactly. And speaking of, you know, getting off the grid, I found two articles this week. One's called The Developer's Dystopian Future and the other one is Confessions of an Ex-Developer. Right. And both of these, and also if you listen to the new tech douchebags, number 16, which is hosted by Jordan, who will be joining us shortly, there's some serious, you know, nerd backlash with the internet and people just getting kind of over it and burnt.

You know, burnout is basically what it comes down to and seeing how the sausage is made, especially in the new tech douchebags. It's an old writer from Engadget that was on and it was fantastic. Yeah. I love that episode. I listened to that yesterday on my bike ride and I came home just horribly deflated and defeated and went, wow, this is kind of what we've been talking about for a while too.

Just being so burnt out on the internet and how it's just become a formula and there's not very much creativity anymore. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I mean, it's formulaic now. I just installed a new plugin for one of my clients this week that's called Headlines, which I think he, I don't think he mentioned that when he mentioned the Yoast plugin, which everybody knows it's the SEO plugin that everybody uses.

But this new one, Headlines, it's like it lets you write four headlines for an article and then automatically A-B tests them for you. And then after a set amount of time, just uses that headline because that, it knows then that that's the one that's going to get the most traffic and most clicks. It's like, wow. Yeah, it's straight built-in formulaic, A to B to C. And he, again, in that podcast, I can't remember the name of the guy that he was talking to, but it was just very depressing.

He was like, I can't even read tech articles on the internet anymore because the formula is so obvious. I know it's going to be paragraph one has brief intro and all the keywords that need to be in the article. There will be three links. There will be blah, blah, blah.

And he just nailed it. And as I was going through some of our links for our show notes, I was like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. So now it's completely ruined for me because, you know. Yeah. No, his name was Stefan Konstanescu of Tab Dump and formerly of Engadget.

Yeah. And the worst part of that whole article was just like, you know, he was, he was, or article interview is, you know, Jordan was kind of hitting him pretty hard saying, well, you're doing the same thing that you're complaining about right now. And his only answer was, I need to pay the bills. This is all I know how to do.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. Hey, I'm raising my hand right now. It's exactly the same thing. This is all I know how to do. Me too. So it was definitely a deflating week. And those two, those two articles are really good. I mean, they left me a little bit contemplative, as it were.

Yeah. And in a related and depressing article as well, we had talked a lot about newspapers and how a while back, you know, Jeff Bezos bought out some papers and we were hoping that he was going to save journalism. Not happening. All those articles and that interview talked about it. This Reflections of a News Assore, we'll have the link in the show notes by Alan D. Mutter. It was written July 16th, and it's the newspaper crisis by the numbers and just shows how the industry has completely died. And,

you know, you just tie in the lack of money with the lack of journalism, connect A to B, done. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's on its way out because, I mean, what we're facing now is just a crisis of attention. And I want to, I want to get, I want to talk to Jordan more about this when we get him on. So I'm going to kind of save that. But it's, it really boils down to people only have so many hours in the day. And in the old days, we didn't have the internet and we could sit around the breakfast table and read the paper or read the paper on, on the train to work, you know,

and it's just not how we live anymore. It's, it's gone. Yeah. So, I mean, this is, this is just a countdown for these guys. There's not going to, we're not going to be killing trees to print newspapers probably in 10 years. No, and that would be fine because I was, you know, if, if the newspapers would have just made the transition to digital distribution with the same level of, of, you know, writing and if they were making the same incomes and what, or even less income because now you have less overhead, that

would be fantastic. But that's just not how it's played out. The fact of the matter is that most people are not interested in reading good journalism or long stories, or if they are interested, they certainly aren't willing to pay for it. Um, and everybody seems to be kind of okay with a really shitty rehashed articles that basically just touch on the surface things. So, yeah, I mean, there's one journalist out there who writes the story and posts it somewhere and then there's 700 sites

that basically distill it down. And if you get the distilled down version, is that fine? And apparently it is, you know, so I think, I think what people are going to figure out at some point is that that one journalist is being fed by the, the big boys. And once the big boys go under that journalist is now, you know, working at Starbucks with the rest of us selling lattes to other people who can't afford them. That is very true. Um, I mean this week I actually let my, uh, my Apple

developer account lapse finally. Wow. That means no more reports about you installing a beta and it screwing your phone. Yeah. I'm, I'm back to the, the unwashed masses. I I've had it for years and I love to play with the stuff, but you know, it's like, it's this cycle of, okay, I'm going to break my phone to see the new stuff. And then I'm going to go back to the old stuff and wait for the new stuff. And I'm not an app, I'm not an iOS or a Mac developer. So it was just, it was a hundred

bucks a year that I was wasting for novelty. And, and you know, it helps sometimes, but I could have had the company that I was working for pay for it. You know, it's just like, I always wanted to be on the cutting edge. I have to be on the bleeding edge as the kids say. And now that I'm getting older, I really don't care about new languages. I don't care about new technologies. I'm like, I am a lamp guy till I die. That's it. Give me Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. And I can build just

damn near anything. And it does a job for what, you know, for what people want. And going back to what I was just talking about a little bit earlier, it's, uh, it's all cookie cutter out there. Now there's, there's very little reason to be bleeding edge. And there's certainly very few clients willing to pay you to be bleeding edge. So why? Yeah, that's been the thing for me. It's, uh, I have always treaded around app building, especially for, for iOS. Um, I can't, I know the basics. I've done

my research. I've read a few books. I've done some test apps, but I'll be damned if anybody's paid me to build one yet. So why am I going to try? Yeah. Why bother learning it any deeper? I mean, I know I have the skillset and the intelligence to, if somebody called me tomorrow and said, I need you to build me an app, I will get it done, but I'm not going to go any further down the road until somebody is going to pay me for it. And at this point, there are so many out of work iOS

developers. Yeah. I can just, I can hire somebody for, you know, pennies on the dollar for what I'm going to get paid. So, you know, we're moving more into, you know, the, the arbitrage world with that kind of stuff, because there are so many people who jumped on the, the, the lottery train as it were to make a bunch of money on iOS apps, even though like 0.2% hit. Yeah. Everybody thought that they were going to win the lottery. Yeah. So everybody built them. So there are a lot of people

out there who know how to build crappy apps. So I can, I can, uh, pay them to do the crappy app job that I don't feel like doing. I don't need to learn objective C, even though I, I kind of know the, the structure of it. It, it drives me batty. I coming from PHP, it's like trying to type an objective C is just like makes my brain hurt. Yeah. So I don't, I don't want my brain to hurt anymore. Well, you know, why, why, why do I do it? And the thing about apps too is, is not only is

it like one in 10 that actually hits it's even for the ones that hit the, the shark fin who's still on quiz up anyone. Hello? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, yo, yo is a joke. I mean, people just basically use it as a joke. That's going to go away soon enough. It's a, it's a, it's a yoke.

Our phones and our show notes are, are graveyards of apps that, that basically hit for a little while and then nobody uses anymore. So yeah, I mean, uh, yeah, honestly, none of the apps that we've reviewed, I still use on a regular basis, except the one I kind of went back to, I went back to, uh, uh, subway surfers just because it's a nice crapper app. It's good for the three every now and then as well. Uh, there's some price for the productivity ones. Yes. But

in general, like a lot of these things, commute, any communication things, any social networking apps that have kind of, they've just come and gone and that's that. So yeah, the, the apps I think that have stood the test of time for me are Budaphy, Paziz, and, uh, Andrew Johnson's, you know, the, the crazy Scotsman. Yeah. And, uh, uh, that's it. I think that's pretty much it. I don't really use anything else. My, I'm down to two screens and very few folders. I've

kind of, you know, yeah, I mean, run through the gamut. I kind of use the big ones and that's it. You know, I've got the Twitter app, I've got Instagram, I've got Facebook. Um, I use trip it still all the time because I think that's great. I've got Budaphy, I've got Spotify. That's really about it. The, the rest of this stuff is either productivity stuff. So if, you know, I'm out and about and one of my clients freaks out and says this absolutely has to happen immediately, I've got the, the, the tools to be able to get something done. And, uh, and the

rest of the apps are all basically for grumpy old geeks. Okay. Here's the deal. If you're using the built-in Twitter app, you're an idiot. Get Tweetbot at least. But I have no, I have no interest in delving into the Twitter world that strongly. I'm just not into Twitter. It just makes browsing. It's so much easier because all the images I'm not going to browse it. I don't browse Twitter. I still do every now and again. And I would like to point out that unfortunately I'm not in New York today because today is the opening of Hope X. I

really wanted to go to that. I was at Hope. Uh, Jesus, I can't even remember when it was. It was, uh, like 2004 or something. Uh, a long time ago. That was when I went to the hotel Pennsylvania and got to my fifth floor apartment or a hotel room, opened the window and there was a pile of crap on the, on the windowsill. Like yay, New York. Um, it was like 130 out with 125% humidity. So I, I, that, that soured me on New York, but I wish I was at the conference

cause it sounds like it's going to be awesome. The speakers are just off the hook. You got Daniel Ellsberg is keynoting and then Snowden's going to show up and via his little robot. I was about to say in person, no, no, he's going to be just lots of good stuff. His little robot guy like Sheldon from big bang theory. Yeah. I got to go out with, um, with the whole like 2600 crew when, uh, I was there cause I was dating one of the higher ups and it was, it was, it was

fascinating to just hang out with these guys and just hear the paranoia that these guys have. It's just crazy. Um, I'm surprised they didn't have tinfoil hats, but, uh, and that was the, the big controversy. The whole, the biggest controversy of the entire thing was there were two badges with one, three, three, seven on it. And I had the official one and some chick was running around with a, a counterfeit and everybody thought that hers was real and mine was the fake. Like, no, she works here. She went and picked it out of the bag for me because

I'm smart and I hacked the system, damn it. And got my elite badge. So anyway, oh, this is a, yeah, I just wish I was in New York. So I'm glad. Although if I were there, I'd tell them about that thought experiment and make everybody's heads explode. I don't know.

Those guys are pretty smart. They just might make it. You had to, you have one thing about a, um, a better to do list. I just want to talk to you about. Yeah. I mean, we've talked a lot about productivity on this podcast and, and, you know, you know, my, my, uh, my love of the moleskin and doing my, my to do lists and those are all really important to me. And my system works really well for me, but I've even discovered, um, for whatever reason, I'm getting a lot of work right now and I'm pretty overloaded. And, uh, I ran across

this as a concept and I think, you know, I'm going to, I'm keeping my, my kind of just general huge gigantic list for the week. And, but I'm switching over to this as a daily list because there's only so much you can do in a day anyways. So I love this concept. It's called the one, three, five rule. You basically distill everything down for every single day, one big thing, three medium things and five little things. And you will accomplish those nine things every single day. And I really like it. It's a great way to prioritize. And, um, in terms of like workflow,

it's great to have a big task that you can just keep coming back to throughout the day. When you're burned out, you go and knock off one of the little ones. You come back to the big one, you fuck around with the three medium size ones. And basically I've just found that this is a really good way. Um, and it just seems to work out really well for me. So I urge people to try it who have been struggling with a to do list, but want them.

So do you, do you write it that day or like the night before or do you have it? I write it down the night, I write it down the night before basically. So every Sunday I put together my, this is what I want to accomplish throughout the whole week. And then what I do every night, the night before is now I'm breaking down to one, three and five.

Okay. So I might have, might have to give that a shot. I posted a rebuttal in the show notes, uh, from James Altucher who I'm really getting into. He was on Tim Ferriss's podcast this week and I really like this guy. Uh, and the post is to do lists are ruining the planet. So give that a read. It's, it's, you know, it doesn't really, uh, uh, affect people like us who have set tasks that we need to get done for clients every day. Yeah. It's, it's more about, uh, people who are

like following their dream and independent and can, can pull this kind of thing off without having a to do list. They just have a vision and what they want to get done. So they do the things that get them to the goal. Right. Unfortunately for us, I have to reply to four emails today. So I need to put those on the list because if I don't, I don't have food. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I mean, I would never like to do listing for, for grand goals is not something I've ever really done. Um, I don't, you know, I don't do the five year plans or the 10 year plans and, and ways to achieve them

to do lists are always just for the, the meat and potatoes of this is, this is how I've been running my own company for 15 years to do lists. It's take care of the stuff. I don't put down things like I want to go to Hawaii on my to do list. It's respond to the emails, finish programming that stupid API, fix the damn Twitter thing that broke again. That's, that's what you put on to do list. Yep. Okay. Well, our next to do is to welcome our new guest, Mr. Jordan Cooper.

I can curse, right? Of course. Okay. Yes. Ask that podcast question. Is it okay for me to curse? Is this, is this the show? Is this, we're explicit. We are here with Jordan fucking Cooper and we can swear on the show. Is this the show? This is the show. That's what I'm going to, I'm going to keep on asking that for an hour and a half. We're now on the show. Is this the show? You know, the funny, that is the funny thing about swearing. Cause remember when we started Jason, the first couple

episodes that we did, not only were we swearing a lot, but we also were drinking. Um, and then we got the one complaint about cussing and we're like, Hmm, do we, do we actually stop using swear words in order to get a bigger market share? Fuck that. Yeah. Yeah. We tried clean shows.

That didn't fucking work. So we're fucking saying it. And Jordan, you basically every other word out of your mouth is fuck from my regular podcast. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we met on Twitter. Surprisingly. You, I heard you on quit. I've heard you a long time ago.

Okay. I stalk people. I don't know. Not really, but, but kind of really. Yeah. I mean, that's what I listen to. Well, we've, we've, we've, we've replaced the word stalking with follow. Ah, that's how we do it. And surprisingly, after listening to our show, you asked me on your show, which was surprising as they say, I have very low standards.

Obviously, completely obviously. So yeah, you run tech douchebags and your own podcast and you're on a couple other ones, aren't you? Yeah. I produce and co-host kind of other stuff. I mean, I do a connected comedy podcast, which is more businessy for comedians, but, uh, pretty much the main one is, uh, is my blender and podcasts, which is kind of like the, the running

thought process is my mind every week, completely unedited, unfiltered, whatever. I just opened tabs and I just rant for 40 minutes. And then, uh, tech douchebags is kind of, uh, the comedic interview support group type of thing that I started, uh, after doing two shows of my regular podcast a week where the early version was like an interview. Uh, the running through line was, you know, talking about people's narcissism online and, uh, being that, uh, kind of didn't

fit in with my other ranty curse laden, uh, late week shows that I branched it off and created TDB. And, uh, now it's on five by five. You rockstar, you. How's that? I was going to say, how's this podcast thing working out for you?

I'm not making any money off of it. Cause you remember, I remember the, the original, uh, episodes of grumpy old geeks. Uh, you can't make money on the internet. Not that we've discovered unless you build an app like yo apparently. Well, you have to get dumb people to invest in you like that. That's, it seems like that's how you get any money in Silicon Valley. You come up with something and a slide deck and that there you go. $1.3 million.

It's the way it works. Unfortunately, the way the world. So yeah, the, I was really surprised when you came out with tech douche bags because I heard your other podcast and I always said to myself after I was listening, listening for a while to blender head, I'm like, if Brian gets hit by a truck, I'm calling this guy, this guy is going to be my new cohost because I think it's fantastic. I love your just off the just crazy ass rants because they're spot

on. They're completely fucking spot on. And it's, it's a joy to listen to, listen to me like come all over the microphone here, but I really enjoy it. So it was fun that we could actually get you on the show and be grumpy with us because you are pretty, pretty fucking grumpy. I think I'm exaggeratedly grumpy. Like I'm never really angry. I'm fake angry for entertainment purposes. Okay. Some, some of the shit that comes out, I mean, sometimes like I, I like my, my, my thing is I like commenting on the people that are commenting. Like I'm a

meta commenter. Right. I don't really care about the news story. I really don't give a shit what the fuck's going on in technology or whatever. I follow it or whatever. And then I see all the articles that come out and all the blogs and they, they say, everyone's saying the same thing. And like these people are in la la land and then I need to comment on that. And then then what, what ends up happening now, it seems like in the past year, like my style of meta commenting is now hit blogs where now, now what the whole tech cycle, the whole tech cycle works out that

something that comes out, like Amazon is doing the, whatever, Kindle publishing, unlimited something or other. And then you have a, that the, all the articles about how writers are going to get fucked. And then like that happens for two days and then three days from now in order to get more page views, there's going to be all, this is how it's going to be great for writers. And then people have comment on that. So, and so kind of like, uh, I have to act much quicker than I used to on,

on getting the, why everyone is wrong, uh, opinion out before everyone else starts going why everyone else is wrong. Well, you need to move to daily then actually hourly. You need an hourly podcast. That's it. I tried doing YouTube videos. How'd that work out?

That's a pain in the ass. I record on my iPhone. It takes me 10 minutes to do. And I still go, I'll just wait until Friday and just rant. It's easier for me to just all string all my rants together. I want a very productive session of, I'm going to have 13 tabs open and I'm just going to run fucking through this. I don't want to segment my fake anger throughout the week.

But I like that a lot better. I think that, aren't you playing their game if, if you step it up to, to go that quickly? I mean, this is what we're all frustrated with anyways. We're sick of the 24 hour cycle because it's meaningless. So why, why play the game? Oh, because I'm a narcissistic fuck.

Oh, well, there's that. I got, I freely admit to that. I want more page views. I don't blame them. I don't blame business insider for putting the headline together and upworthy and all that shit. I get it. My problem with all of that is as long as you admit you're playing that game, as long as you admit you're a douchebag, I'm fine with that. But no one does. And that's my problem. That that's what I rally against is that people act like they're, they're making the thing that changes the world. You know,

HBO Silicon Valley, that's a documentary. That's not, you know, that's, that's not a comedy show. That is actually what happens there. And, uh, and no one's, no one wants to admit it. Just no one wants to admit that they're douchebags and they make douchebag things for privileged people. That's fine. That's the way the world works. Survival of the fittest. Fuck everyone else.

I have to agree on Silicon Valley. That is spot on. The fact that they actually went to disrupt and I've, I've been to a couple of disrupts. That is exactly how they are. That is a total documentary. Except the, the, uh, the jerking off scene at the end was pretty epic. I have to give him that. Well, it's TJ Miller. It's good comedy writing. I mean, it's a good show in and of itself, but the, what they're parodying is not as far off from how it actually is. In my opinion,

I've never been there. Of course I'm making judgments. I don't know, but that's what it seems like. No, I've been there. I've been through that cycle. I've been through everything those guys are going through and it is exactly how it happens. That's the, that's the great part about the show. It is so close to, to reality that it's, it's mind boggling that it's comedy.

Yeah. And I haven't played that game either. I just, I can't, I find it depressing and it makes me angry and not the fake ironic angry, but the real angry. So why does it make you angry? Because it shouldn't be like that. What, what should it be? Are you like a traditionalist? I mean, like it should, it was never, you're an old fuck. That's like, get off my lawn. Like to me, it's entertainment. I read Pando daily, not for information. Cause it's like, it's like performance art. That's what I consider all of Silicon Valley. It's like, this is a

really good piece of performance art on this dystopian future that we actually live in and watching all these people, you know, you know, try to position themselves to get, you know, $7.6 million of venture capital for, you know, an app that helps you fucking, uh, tie your shoes or do gift wrapping. And, uh, and apparently that's going to, that's going to get them a Ted talk.

No, it's true. It is amusing until you start to realize that that's where a lot of the money is actually going. And then the disruption actually causes a lot of people to lose their jobs and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then we see ourselves in the, the financial state that we're in right now, which is not good. Um, I always make the kind of comparison to Star Trek where we seem to have transitioned to a world where nobody has to work, except we do have to work because we don't have those magical machines that create the food for us.

You should get on that. Why are you making that machine? Well, I, that could never get funded in Silicon Valley. That'd be useful. Tie it to like a car service type of thing. Like the machine will also have you travel around. Uh, on demand.

Maybe we can tie that in with the auto blow too. Yes. Uber blow. That's it. We'll do Uber blow. We'll do, we'll pick you up and give you a blow job on the way to the airport. And if you want to do it self-service, it would be Uber XXX. And then we'll just convert your deposits into Soylent. It all comes full circle.

But then you have to put it in a vessel so you know, know whose jizz you're drinking. Anyways, so, uh, Jordan, you came from marketing, right? Well, I mean, I came from like web design. I mean, in comedy, I mean, I've been a comedian for 18 years. I mean, that's, that's my passion career. That's the career that, uh, consumes, you know, 1.2% of my income.

Right. But, uh, but essentially, you know, I started in, uh, the dot com boom of the late nineties where essentially all you needed to know was, uh, HTML and JavaScript and, uh, this pre-CSS. This is, you know, you're putting the 1.1 pixel image in tables in order to space shit out correctly.

Hell yeah. Bring that back, by the way. Right. You get PSD mock-ups from people and then you have to like recreate static pages over and over again and they paid well. And I worked for some financial companies and, uh, on wall street in New York city. And, uh, that's, I mean, pretty much where I started from there.

And then essentially I haven't had a real job, quote unquote, since I was 23. And, uh, so I do freelance web design and now more web marketing for small businesses. And, uh, throughout that course, you know, I was in a band, ran a punk rock venue, uh, underground poker room, basically and anything, anything, I try to take anything that I do as a, as a Jew New Yorker and turn it into a money-making situation other than podcasting, obviously.

Well, we're all trying to turn that into a money-making situation. It's just, uh, we can't get there. I did the, I went to, was it mid-roll and put in the numbers on what it would take to have a livable wage in podcasting. And I don't think it's possible unless you, uh, have your own TV show. I mean, it's, you have to have millions to have like a livable wage with, with a multi-person show. It's crazy.

But that's, that's the big lie about new media, right? It's, it's the fact that, you know, anybody can come out there and do this themselves and, and find their audience. And, and that's, that's the lie that we're all sold and everybody wants to believe. The reality is no, you still old media stars are the ones that can still make it in new media. You need some, some sort of mass media, which is old media to, uh, to promote you and that then you can do something in new media.

Well, there's the, who's the guy? Um, I can't remember his name. The lead from the vampire diaries, that guy makes more money off of his new media shit than he ever made on the TV show, you know, but he used the TV show as a long, but the only reason that people found out about him is the TV show. So, yeah. So this is what I want to ask you guys. Um, I was listening to the latest episode of quit by the way, uh, which I was a guest on. Thank you, Dan, who hates me. Um, they talk

about how podcasters in different niches are competing against basically every podcaster on the planet. And I think this comes back to basically everything. Now that's on the internet, we are in competition with everybody because it's all about attention and people only have so many hours of the day. So everything is in competition with everything else at this point. How difficult is it going to be to, you know, get ahead when everybody's got their

own fucking personal brand. Now, you know, everybody's got a podcast. Everybody's got a blog. Everybody's got this account, that account, and everybody's fighting for the same piece of pie, which is an individual's attention. Like, how do you pull out of that and get noticed? I think you overestimate what everyone is. I think that's the main problem with, it looks like everyone, but in fact, what, isn't there like a chart or something, some type of theorem,

like 90 to 90 to, you know, like 90% that don't do anything and then nine are active and 1% produce? There's something you could find on Wikipedia. Yeah, I mean, that's the old 80-20 rule. Or something like that. But I'm just saying that there's a lot more people out there that are not producing anything. It looks like there's tons of people, there's tons of podcasts, there's tons of YouTube channels, there's tons of everything. But in the percentage of people that are active on the

internet, it's about, I mean, it's more than it used to be when media was tough to produce, when it wasn't as, you know, easy to make a video or any type of show or distribute anything. But essentially, like in the grand scheme of things, 95% of people out there are not looking to be the next big self-published author or podcaster or blogger or anything. And there's a lot more people on the internet now

that it really hasn't changed since, you know, the 50s, 60s type of thing, percentage wise. So in thinking in terms that everyone has a personal brand, no, not everyone does. Not everyone's on Twitter. You know, most people are just on Facebook or Snapchat and they have their 40 friends and they watch the show on Netflix and that's what it is. And you could be one of those people for a select niche if you want to, but you can't concern yourself. I mean, maybe I have an outlier's

perspective because I'm more of a realist, but I still understand, you know, I don't want to get into the cynical nature that like I'm competing against everyone. You're like, you know, you're not, but you can't act as if your entire audience is everyone. That's the main problem that I faced doing comedy for 18 years is that you go to comedy clubs and essentially the people that show up for comedy club, people that just want comedy, they don't know who you are. They're coming because it's

their local comedy club and trying to generate a big enough fan base of people that would actually be interested in you. No one's, you know, you're doing the hacky Walmart and Waffle House jokes aren't going to cut it. It's going to make that audience laugh. It's going to make you get paid that 400 bucks for that weekend, but you can't develop any type of reach based on that because you're not memorable. So that's why like the, what I've done is, you know, say fuck stand up

essentially from my, you know, it's like writing perspective and going out and stuff and let's, you know, I get a gig that pays decently enough and I have my regular set that I could do in front of anyone. And no, I want to assemble my, what Kevin Kelly calls the thousand true fans and whatever comes out of that comes out of it. But you still need, like Brian said, a lot of reach, not necessarily mass media, but most people's perspective. And that's why, you know, your comment

on quit was that everyone that's talking here, here's the lie that, that everyone says that get on those types of shows. They've already reached the tipping point of getting enough reach where then they can be independent. They can do, they could, they have enough of a launching pad that they can now create three other projects. And then from there create six other projects and then collaborate

with a bigger person. And it seems so easy, like, oh, you, of course you should be independent. And everyone underneath that, everyone that has not reached that tipping point, a lot of times I see is too concerned about, uh, you know, monetizing their, their 200 download a week podcast for seven bucks with Squarespace ads and not realizing that, that the game in the beginning and even in the

middle and even at the end is still reach that the more people you could reach, the more opportunities that you'll be able to leverage. And who gives a shit about the seven bucks? My goal is let me get 20,000 people. Let me get 50,000. Let me get a hundred thousand people to listen to my podcast without, I don't need sponsorship like that. When people ask me, it's like, oh, you're on five by five. You're going to get Squarespace ads and now your show is going to suck or whatever the fuck

people complain about. And I'm like, I really don't even care if they're sponsored. You have a skip button. I don't really get, I mean, I'm not anti advertising, but like my goal is not to do Squarespace ad reads. It's like, if I have a hundred thousand people that listen to my fucking podcast, the money that I would make from that ad read is nothing compared to a fucking book I could release or something that I could sell directly to those people or launching pad and collaborate

with another person that has that type of reach. And that's really what the game is. And I think too many people concern themselves over stuff like, how am I going to get out there with everyone publishing everything? It's like, no, just, just build your audience and then get to a tipping point.

That is exactly how I see Tim Ferriss. I mean, that's the Tim Ferriss model. That's exactly what he did. And it makes sense, especially for anybody that, that isn't getting that old media push anymore. My only comment though is I'm so torn on podcasting. I'm, uh, it's such an odd thing. I always have the feeling that the only people that are actually listening to podcasts are people that have podcasts.

So that's not true. If you take a look at the stats, it's, but see, see, this is, this is what ends up happening. Everyone gets into their own little fucking insular bubble, especially in the tech world. But I mean, it happens in comedy as well, is that the conversations that have happened amongst tech podcasts. And I would consider, you know, grumpy old geeks to be a tech related podcast, uh, are completely opposite to what happens in the comedy podcasting world, which is the other world that I'm in. Like I'm, I'm used to that end of the spectrum. I'm used to dealing with people that

have, you know, I'm used to the, the favorite podcasts being Doug loves movies and, uh, Burt Kreischer's, uh, Burt cast and Jay Moore's stories and those types of podcasts that, that tech people would be like, I don't even, I've never even heard of those. It's like those podcasts get like a hundred thousand downloads a week. And all they do is put a snowball microphone in a green room and people listen to it because it's entertaining and people like the personality.

Their show is about nothing. Most comedy podcasts are about fucking nothing, but you listen because it's Joe Rogan. You listen because it's Mark Maron. I mean, his show is, I mean, more interviews and stuff, but you, you get what I'm saying that, that, that that's what your goal is to do. And most of those comedians have no clue technically how to get any of it done.

Someone else does that for him. But if your content is good and you have a connection with people that listen to podcasts and the people that listen to comedy podcasts aren't just comedians, they're people just looking for entertainment. And if you take a look at a lot of the segments of the podcasting market, uh, truthfully, they're not very entertaining.

That's very true. That's why I like grumpy old geeks. Well, thank you. Yeah. I started listening to Doug loves movies because I saw the numbers on it and I'm just like, okay, where's the magic sauce in there? And I still haven't figured that part out. Well, the magic sauce is that Doug has an entire fan base that has absolutely nothing, no interest in podcasts whatsoever. And they just go get his podcast because they like him.

That's the magic sauce. He's a comedian. Those are the only podcasts I really listened to either. I mean, I don't listen to a lot of tech podcasts because I do want to and I'm really not that interested. And most of them are very boring. I listened to comedian podcasts. Those are the only ones that I listened to. So, but just like, but just like in TV, this is the thing that, that us in the geek world don't seem to understand is that we're, we're fucked up as people. Like we, we get into specific things and we know everything about it.

We have a very select few interests and we're very deep, but most normal people are generalists. they have 10 different interests and they know a little bit about all of them. And when it comes to podcasts, uh, most normal people that I talk to and I see, and even comedians, which who are normal people, they'll listen to and subscribe to maybe five podcasts total, maybe 10. If they,

if they're big at Pat, you know, I show that I have a hundred and six subscriptions and people think I'm nuts. And, uh, most comedians are like, I listen to eight podcasts because you know, I listen to podcasts because I'm working all day. So I listened to like the radio cause I was always a big talk radio person to begin with. But most normal people, that's how they watch television.

I mean, take a look at the shows that you watch regularly. And is it, is it a hundred? Do you watch a hundred shows at once? Do you watch 10 shows? Most of the time? I mean, with that Netflix, you got the binge watching and all that shit going, but if you're watching a regular show, I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, uh, you know, a year or two ago, it's like, okay, I watched Breaking Bad when it came out, uh, Game of Thrones. Uh, you know, you, you could barely list five that you're

like when the new episode comes out, I'm going to download it or, you know, watch it live. But that's how people think of podcasts. And so you have to fit yourself into that type of mentality that you have to be able to be better than the other five podcasts that someone listens to primarily not because of subject matter, but because of personality. Right. Interesting. So Brian, we need to get

more personality, more coffee, more tea. You'll be less grumpy. You'll be slightly less grumpy and younger geeks and maybe inebriated. See the, the problem with the inebriated geeks, which we used to do, it just reminded me too much of the old Dignation. And when, when those guys went over the, the edge with the booze, everybody tuned out and we're just like, cause I, I would, uh, I knew Kevin, so I'd get all the feedback and they're like, yeah, we got way too drunk last time. We

lost like 10,000 people and, and you and I like to drink way too much. So I think, I think we'll stick with a sober and grumpy and old, but no, but I, I mean, I tend to, I mean, this is the new like talk radio that is podcasting because talk radio has gone out in almost every single market. And I, I, I agree because I work from home as well. And even way, way, way back in the day when, when I didn't work at home, I would have headphones on and I listened to, you know, like KLSX out here in

Los Angeles that, you know, ran, you know, Adam Carolla's show and then frosty Heidi and Frank. And I would just listen to talk radio all day. Um, but talk radio doesn't exist anymore unless you're on Sirius on some, you know, obscure channel that you never have. And Sirius getting that to run on your desktop versus in your car is a nightmare. So blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, it almost all the talk radio guys have gone to podcasting and yeah, the ones that are popular are definitely based on personality, not subject matter.

But even if you take a look at the people listening to talk radio, like that's a very old demographic. That's, that's the people that still fucking read newspapers. Like most, most of the younger set of, of people that are going to be coming up. Like we, we grew up on talk radio. We were, cause we were fucking, we had no friends or whatever, you know, like that's what we listened to sports talk radio and love line or whatever the hell was on. And, uh, most young people that will

be, you know, the mass market of media, they're listening more to number one music. Typically, you know, once you get into that teenage age range, you don't, you don't want to list the people talking, but you, you see, you know, YouTube channels like, you know, because it's three minutes long, it's five minutes long. You could watch two minutes of it and then turn it off. And when it comes to even podcasts, I mean, an hour long podcast, you better really be invested in that

person to want to listen to something for an hour. Yeah, no, I've agreed. I mean, I think if once you, once you're going over say 45 minutes to an hour, which is either in Los Angeles, a commute or for people that actually don't want to be fat fucks, a workout period, uh, you're going to lose them. Like nobody listens for longer than that, unless they're crazy people like us that sit at home and work all day. Yeah. But your goal is to assemble your crazy people.

That's true. We got to find our thousand true crazy people, right? The thousand fucked up people that are listening to people, uh, rant and rave around, uh, fucking Airbnb logos. Oh, that's coming. That's coming. Now we're getting there. We're getting there. I think was this supposed to be a serious, was this supposed to be a serious conversation? I know. Am I supposed to curse more? Nothing. What's my contractual obligation on expletives? It's funny. I just feel

like this was a therapy session. I feel, I feel like actually really good after this. I'm like, okay, now I got my marching orders. Yeah. No, no. See, I'm motivationally negative. Like you feel good now. And then two days from now, you'll realize that you're powerless and you might as well just fucking quit anyway. Well, you see, I came into that with that attitude. So two negatives make a positive apparently. Ah, okay. So, you know, yeah. Science. I don't know. I don't know if this was

alkaline or base, but it worked. It was good. Fun talking. Most things I do are base. Uh, well, I'm the guy that fucks robots. So what are you going to do? That's true. You did fuck a robot. Ah, I got to get rid of that. I think you needed to do a YouTube video. We've got a whole new audience.

An unfucking video. You do an unfucking video. No, I think I, well, you know, if, if you can have an unboxing on, on an audio show, maybe I can have an unfucking on an audio show. Now, if any, if any, uh, Grumpy Old Geeks listeners would like a slightly used, uh, fuck toy, feel free to drop me an email at Jason at GrumpyOldGeeks.com with your address and, uh, PayPal me five bucks for shipping and it's all yours. Did you clean it? Of course. I'm not going to give somebody a, a spooge stained, uh, robot.

That's just unsanitary. Can you put that like in the laundry? No, you got to kind of use some like dish soap and rub it down and dry it off. And it's a very unsavory process. Let's just say that it'll put you off your lunch, but you know, Hey, it's gotta, it's gotta go somewhere.

Definitely not getting the Caesar salad. Oh, is the robot like a Roomba? Does it like walk around waiting to fuck people? Uh, no, it doesn't have legs, but, uh, or wheels. It doesn't have legs. That's so it can't get away. Yeah. Yeah. If it saw me coming and it could move, it'd be gone. No, it's just basically a big old tube with, uh, like we said, uh, there's a, the article on slate that looks like the, the face of a dead hooker that's been cut off and attached to

the top of it. But so it's just a tube. It's a tube with a motor and a big old, uh, I, I don't know if it's rubber polyurethane or whatever kind of sex rubber they make nowadays, uh, sleeve in it. And you lube up, stick your Johnson in, press the button and it goes, and then you go, Ooh, and then you're done. And you wash it out. That's not a robot. That's not a robot. That's a machine. Okay. It's a

machine. Okay. A fucking machine. They've been out for, for tons of tons. I mean, you see them in porn movies or whatever. Yeah. But mostly for chicks. There's this is like a guy sucking robot. And this is version two. Yes. And you know, we're tech people. So version two means something.

Version two usually means it sucks. Well, version two usually means we got some found. Well, yeah, in this case it did suck. Uh, version two usually means we got a little bit of funding and we, we redid our logo. I'm waiting for version 2.0.1 with the cum fixes.

See that this, that's where the Uber thing comes in where we need the Uber integration. There's no app for it. So I can't sit there and use, use the app to make it go faster or slower. You actually have to turn a dial on it, which, you know, kind of breaks the mood, but gets the job done. But if there's an app for it and then I can sit back in the chair and have the slider and then have, or a task rabbit come and pick up, pick up my sleeve and clean it out for me, I'd pay five bucks for that.

Maybe I can yo them. Yo, I'm done. No, no. You, you set it up with IFTTT that, uh, that every time that you ejaculate, it sends a yo to people. Uh, I think, I think we've, uh, figured out the season two of, uh, Silicon Valley right there. Oh man. Well, thanks Jordan for coming by. I appreciate it. It's been fun.

Well, thanks for having me on. Uh, where can, well, we will have all the notes in the show notes where we can find you, but, uh, pimp, what you got? Well, I got tech douchebags, tdb.fm podcast every Monday. Then my blender at podcast, uh, my ranty, whatever, just me. That's every Friday blender head.me, uh, YouTube channel, youtube.com slash blender head tv. I think that's it. I think

at blender HD on Twitter. Cool. Excellent. I like how you're rocking the dot me and the dot FM. I'm a fan. Well, there, there, you got, I don't got a top. The dot coms are taken. You gotta, I'm not going to get dot sexy. I'm not getting any of that shit. Dot whatever dot guru blender head dot guru. No, fuck. Yeah. It doesn't matter. You just got to win on Google these days. Anyways, nobody types in the URL anymore. I like that. I like that

my appearance, uh, combined, uh, two ends of the spectrum of like very serious and sound business and media advice and talk and, uh, fucking cum jokes. Hey man, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta hit every age range, you know, that's, that's the way we roll here. All right, man, I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for stopping by. Okay. No problem.

Hello podcast fans. Adam Carolla here. I'm leading the fight against patent trolls who are threatening this medium. It's not about me. It's about the podcast you're listening to right now. If I go down, this show could be next. Visit fundanything.com forward slash patent troll for more information on how you can keep podcasting alive. Thank you and mahalo.

I have to say thank you to Airbnb for their new logo and podcast fodder for everyone for the week. It is a very enjoyable. Um, I saw the new logo. Well, I actually, I saw a couple, uh, tweets about it. Somebody was posting like a new Goatsy logo and I'm just like, okay, what the hell's

going on? And then I saw another one. I'm like, Oh, this is a thing. Let me go. Let me go research it. And yes, Airbnb has a new logo and with their new belong anywhere campaign. And I recommend everybody go to, uh, the links in the show notes to their, to the Airbnb blog and watch the video because the video is just a, it's a minute and 45 seconds of just simpering design, reach around

hand job. It is so ridiculously stupid that you look at this and you just like, give me a fucking break. You probably paid $2 million for this logo and nobody on the staff thought it looked like a vagina period or a cock and balls. It's, it's strangely, that's the thing. It is, it is transgender.

We have a transgender logo. It is a Rorschach test of a logo. Yes, it really is. Uh, my absolute favorite by far was, uh, basically the Peter Griffin, uh, um, chin. Yeah, that was good. Um, so somebody immediately came out with the Tumblr site with just all the logos and the new one that's up there is the picture of the guy that was caught in the, uh, stone vagina in Germany, which is,

which is just genius. Um, he gets his American student gets stuck again. Yes. It was, it's just one of these things where these people's heads are so far up their ass. They can't see the forest for the trees. And it's what happens when you have too damn much money. Seriously, seriously guys do. I mean, I'm very happy that some designer made a shit ton of money, uh, probably a team of designers because no designer would come up with that logo by themselves. This was, this was workshopped and

kicked around and conference called and, uh, yeah, this is a big firm that got this job. This is probably like IDEO or somebody who ponied up for this one. Uh, just go watch the video and just laugh at how fucking stupid people can be, you know? And here's one too. Um, Technorati who is now dead, but if you go back and look at the Technorati logo, the logo, if you, if you turn your head

a little bit to the left, looks like the chicken from the Chick-fil-A. And now that you have seen it, it cannot be unseen. I pointed this out at our meeting where we were picking the new logos and Derek, Derek Powazik, who did the famously, the blogger logo also did our Technorati logo. And I'm like, Derek, it looks like a chicken dude. He's just like, and then I'm like, or Quiznos. It could be a chicken Quiznos sub and we still went with it. So they, they could have had the vagina discussion in house and then just decided to run with it because inertia,

you know? Yeah. So just saying. So anyway, check out the, it's, it's massively funny. The, the Tumblr is worth every second of your time. It is very funny. Yes. Uh, so you remember, uh, when we invaded Panama in 1989, uh, the Manuel Noriega was a dictatorship over there.

And, uh, now I'm going to have that, I'm going to have that damn song stuck in my head all day. Thank you very much. No problem. Anytime. I, I, I'd like to throw it in there, but we're trying to be copyright, uh, positive in our podcast. Yes. I loves me some, I loves me some David Lee Roth and now I'm going to have them stuck in my head. There you go. That's all you get everyone.

Uh, that's why you, that's why you're on this side of the keyboard. Yes. So I'm also sitting here in Santa Monica and, uh, Activision is just down the street. Uh, he is suing them for depicting him and using his name without his permission in a Call of Duty Black Ops 2, where he is portrayed as a kidnapper, murderer, and enemy of the state. All technically correct. Um, so yeah, he is suing them for damages as well as lost profits because his likeness is in the game and he's mentioned,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, last week, uh, I was going to bring it up on the show, but, uh, I didn't, but I will now. Uh, Lindsay Lohan sued the Grand Theft Auto 5 makers, uh, claiming use of her likeness. As funny as both of these things may seem, they do in my mind have a point. Uh, we do have some, uh, rights to our own likenesses. Um, and, uh, I don't think that, uh, you should be able to do that as a video game maker, uh, without, uh, contacting said person and

using them. I suppose there is the fair use clause, but I don't think that works for, for people, putting people literally into your video game. Well, here's the problem with the Lohan case. I'll talk about Noriega in a second, but the Lohan case, she looks like every average big titty hoe on the side of the corner on Santa Monica day in, day out, period. I mean, so it's really hard.

It's seeing on street corners here. Well, Santa Monica is where the lady boys are. I guess you got to go up to Hollywood for the, the regular ones. Um, yeah, Santa Monica is where, uh, a Murphy got busted, but, um, and, uh, well, yeah, yeah. Go up to Hollywood Boulevard or sunset Boulevard, sunset, go to sunset. That's where Hugh Grant got busted outside the coaching horses right next to my old office, by the way, rock tropolis forever. Uh, anyway, she is so generic looking anyway. Yeah. She may not

have a point because I don't think she has a case. There was no specific net mention of her name. It was not, uh, it was not a recognizable, like this is definitely her. They were not even tongue in, uh, tongue in cheek jokes made. Yeah. So there's the thing. I mean, honestly, she, she is a, a generic looking blonde with big old boobies who likes to snort Coke. Uh, so that is almost every

hooker on the planet who's blonde. However, uh, Noriega is called by name. Uh, it is definitely him. Um, yes, they mentioned him specifically. Uh, I don't know, you know, it doesn't feel right to let some crazy military dictator sue a game company for money, but he has a point and he will probably win because, uh, a group of college athletes, uh, recently reached a $4 million settlement with

electronic arts because they use their likenesses in NCAA branded video games. So you can't do that. No, there's a big difference here. He's a world figure and he's also a dick. So, um, I, I, I, I would go with that. The law protects dicks as well.

The law is made by dicks, protected by dicks for dicks. Exactly. Um, I don't know, since he is such a public figure, they, they might have a case to, like, against, you know, Noriega on this one. That's a tough one. I'll be, I'll be watching this one. Yeah, I will as well. Kind of, not, not, actually not really. I don't give a shit. Um, I just, my big thing is I thought he was dead. I didn't know Noriega was still alive.

I guess he's 80. Oh, well, maybe he didn't find it himself. I'm, you know, I don't, I can't imagine that he was sitting around and bought the game. I was like, Hey, it's me. Yeah. He's playing with his 13 year old grandson. I just killed me. So speaking of killing markets, wow. Uh, this, this comes back to what we were just talking about with Jordan. Uh, Amazon is testing Kindle unlimited and ebook subscription service.

I, uh, as a consumer, I hope they do it. I'm in, you can have my 10 bucks and I will read probably 0.12 books a year. Exactly. Because you can have, you can have my $120 a year and I will read less than I would spend probably on physical books or Kindle books, which is exactly why I will not, uh, be purchasing this. I, I, I call me grumpy and old as as we do in this podcast. I hate all these subscription services. I can't stand them.

Uh, I hate the concept. It's almost as if we have had a complete societal memory wipe of Columbia house and how we all got screwed as kids doing that. Um, but here we are doing it again and everybody is pushing it and it makes total sense for Amazon. They will make more money because they will get $9.99 a month out of tons of people who think that they're going to read the books and we all know what's going to happen. Uh, they'll, they'll launch the service. No new titles will ever be included except for the occasional ones that appear on

Oprah's book club or whatever to sucker you in. No book I will ever want to read will appear in this maybe one or two a year, just like you said. Um, and I'll still be purchasing the books that I actually really want to read and pay nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine a month for next to nothing. Nine, nine, nine, nine. So, uh, no surprise that they're going this direction. Uh, oyster is still out there doing it as well. I don't pay for oyster cause there's

no books I want to read on it. Yeah. I dumped my oyster. I'm still subscribed to blinkist because it's actually useful because they do something with the books. Right. But, uh, yeah, I don't know. I'll try it for a month and try it out just to see what's there because you know, I like to experiment experiment. And you know, why aren't they rolling this out for, for Amazon prime members? Well, you know, they gave us their crappy music service for free and their crappy video service for free. So what are you going to do? Um, no, it'll

be interesting to see how this rolls out, especially since they're in so many fights with other publishers right now to get these guys to sign on for this. Yeah. We'll be interesting. It'll be, it'll be an interesting, uh, story to watch, but you know, I don't, I don't know. Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll try it. Uh, but I stopped, I don't read books. I listened to books. If, if this were, I, I do read books and I purchased tons of books from Amazon. And if this, this 999 service was across the board, every single thing on their site for that's

available for Kindle, I'd be in, in two seconds, but it won't be it. Yeah. Yeah. It won't be. It's going to be cherry picked. It's going to be old releases, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I really hope that they, I mean, there's talk about, uh, some audible stuff with this. I really hope they roll it into audible because I spend 30 bucks a month on audible.com right now and I get two books. Yeah. So, I mean, I can see them like I'm a power user.

I've got 700 books on audible.com. I've been a member since 2003, I think. So for me, it'd be, it'd make sense to pay for a subscription to audible to get as many as I can because I still spend, yeah, I spend 29 95 for my two credits and then invariably I go back and get three more, which is another 35 bucks. I'm spending almost close to $600 a year on audio books. So if they ruled out something unlimited for audible, I'm in, I'm in like Flynn. No,

no problem there. But yeah, for the actual reading of the books, I don't know. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about IBM and Apple. Yep. This is interesting. Uh, Apple is basically finally going after corporate customers. And I am, I'm 100% behind this because I see what they're doing is they're, they, it's a market that they don't have reach into. Yep. So they're

going to partner with somebody that has reach. And I think that in the end, it's going to basically kill, it's going to kill the BlackBerry. Oh, hands down, hands down. BlackBerry's dead. If these guys, if these guys can roll it out, right. Cause everybody's doing bring your own device already, you know? And it's, I mean, it's a, it's honestly a problem at most of the companies I worked with because people take, you know, I mean, we have sensitive information in a lot of the companies I was at and people would bring their iPhones and they take pictures of it on their

personal device and, you know, save it to the iCloud. So right there, you've got the movie poster for the next, you know, Michael Bay movie sitting on iCloud. Um, if they can lock that down with, you know, approved Apple devices for employees, everybody's going to win on that one. I think it's going to be fantastic for them. I, my only question is I can't believe they waited this long. I mean, this is something that, that I've been thinking, why isn't Apple doing this for ages? Steve Jobs had

to die. Yeah. Honestly, Steve Jobs had to die. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, I don't see this as a bad thing. I'm interested to see what the pro the first line of products that they come up with. Um, I think it's great. I, it's absolutely fantastic. So it's going to be the same. I think it's going to be the same products, but they're going to have like, um, enterprise specific applications and security levels and all that stuff. So that'll be great. So I'm all for it. I hope they do it because now my mom has a bunch of Apple stock and I need her to make a bunch of money. I've got a ton

of Apple stock too. And I actually don't really see this as being all that bad for Microsoft in, in some degrees. Yes, it's going to, it's going to, they're definitely going to take a hit on their, their corporate consumer stuff and all of that. But, uh, Microsoft is still theoretically mostly about software and there's a place for them to, to get involved here. And, uh, actually they've already started with, you know, Microsoft office on iPads and things like that. This isn't necessarily

a bad thing for them. No, I don't think so. I mean, I think it's more about filling a niche that's already there. That's being filled by BYOD stuff, you know, exactly. And for, for the enterprise, it's like, let's, let's nip this in the bud and stop people bringing their own phones and getting on our corporate networks. It's like, okay, if you have your own phone, you can keep it, but we're going to give you another one that you just use for business.

So we have it, it's controlled, it's locked down, no corporate emails that go through your own personal device. You know, just from a security standpoint, it's fantastic. It's a win for Apple big time. Yeah, I agree. And it's a win for IBM too, because who the fuck buys anything from IBM anymore? So very true. And, uh, you were talking about Microsoft, they're killing 18,000 jobs. Yeah, this is, uh, this is a bit of a misleading headline because it's definitely,

it was released definitely to time as kind of like a double hammer blow to Microsoft with, with the Apple announcement. Yeah, I don't, I see them as exclusive. I don't see the, the IBM deal is anything bad for Microsoft at this point. I think trickle down, it will be probably in five years when everybody's got Apple in house and they want to switch to max.

Yeah, probably. But this is like, this is, this is just a fallout from the Nokia deal. Well, that's exactly what it is. It's, it's not, Microsoft is not axing 18,000 people that were involved with, with the major brunt of Microsoft. Uh, they bought Nokia basically to kill the company, uh, for the tech and not the people and the bulk of the cuts around 12,500 of them are the people that were working for Nokia. So that's normally what happens when, when a company swoops

in and buys out a failing firm, uh, you get rid of the people, you keep the tech and that's what's happening. Yeah. And it's still kind of up in the air on who's getting the ax. So, um, hopefully they're going to keep the people in the factories in Finland and basically kill like the windows smartphone team over here. Just, I'm just saying as just, you know, for knocking employees, it's probably going to be better, um, and shitty for our, our economy. But you know, I, I'd hate to have

Microsoft basically come in and ruin Finland because I'd like to go there someday. Um, that's a, you know, we'll see how it falls out, but yeah, Microsoft is hurting on some of it, on some lines, just because every, everything has changed and they haven't. And they have, well, they have changed. They've tried to change, but they've done it poorly. So we'll see how it goes. I mean, they're, they're, you know, they're refocusing on cloud and mobile and their Azure stuff. Everybody I know that's used

Azure loves it. Oh, me too. I've talked to a bunch of people that say it's absolutely genius. It is so good, but not enough people are using it, unfortunately. Yeah. I think that might change. I, it might change. Um, I was going to give it a shot, but then I thought, why nobody's paying me to do it. Exactly. Uh, the last company I was at or yeah, BLT, uh, in LA, they were switching over to Azure because the guy who came in loves, loved him some Microsoft. So they were going to switch

everything over to Azure, but he was a huge proponent of it. And the stuff he showed me was actually really swanky. I was really impressed with the level of, uh, just tech that they had going on there. And it's not just windows stuff. You can get Linux instances. It's general VPS stuff. You know, they've got farms of servers and you can get whatever grade OS you want. And the, the monitoring and all that stuff was really nice. So, you know, I, I'm not counting them out yet. I think

they might be able to pivot. I'm sorry. I use that word, uh, everybody at home drink and, you know, maybe pull out of it. If the, this new guy can really refocus the company, I'm not selling Microsoft stock anytime soon. I don't have any. So, uh, last thing I got is pinboard turns five.

I love my pinboard account. Ever since I got it, I love it. I use it every day. And this is a blog post where the, the guy who, who started it, whose name I can't pronounce. So I'm not even going to try, uh, you know, run to the numbers like he does every year and just talks about the interesting things about being a sole proprietor and running his own business. That's a service that needs to never go

down. It's a really fun read. Links will be in the show notes. And I just, I like this guy. His Twitter account is hilarious because he doesn't give a shit about anything. He's got nobody to answer two. Right. So he just says it like it is. And I love this guy. It's, and it is, it is my go-to service every day. I've got it on all my devices. I got it hooked in everywhere. I can't live without that Instapaper. I've almost never used, I almost never use it anymore. Period. I might have to switch

over then. Cause I'm still using Instapaper all the time. I put everything in pinboard and then I tag it and it's searchable and I can go back and see my whole list. I don't do the, like for 25 bucks a year, you can get a service that will basically take all the content of all the links you, uh, pinned and, and you can export that. I don't need that. You know, this is basically every week I have, I have a tag for all the shows we do. So I go through and I tag hundreds of

articles and then I go through and I pick the cherry pick the ones that I like and they've got like a read later kind of service with it. It's, I mean, just use pinboard seriously. Instapaper's dead. Well, I was traveling out and about in Canada land. Uh, we have quite a few friends of the show there. Um, most of them have heard our calls for using one password and doing strong password

encryption and how kind of relatively easy it is. You know, once you get it and you've got it installed on everything and you've got safe and secure passwords and even notifications about when you should change them and all that sort of stuff, one password is just great. And I still urge everybody to try it and, uh, use it regularly as Jason and I both do. But I'm now going to tell you my dirty little secret. And, uh, because there's a story out from Microsoft that has done extensive

studies on this. Uh, we have it linked in the show notes. Uh, it's on the guardian. Microsoft has informed users to stop using strong passwords everywhere, or at least recommends it. Uh, my dirty little secret is that's exactly what I do. I use one password for all my important stuff, all the socials, all that sort of stuff. But, uh, I basically use one simple, easy password for things that don't matter like Domino's pizza, right? Sites of that ilk. I've never bothered to set up

strong passwords for things like that. Um, and I kind of do both. I use one password and strong passwords for anything that's really important, banking, all that sort of stuff. But, uh, for sites that really don't matter, straight up content sites, any site that doesn't have my, my credit card information or personal information, or is just kind of silly. Um, I just use the same stupid password that is really easily hackable and breakable for all of those. So Microsoft agrees.

Okay. My first, my first issue is why the hell are you eating Domino's? That stuff is crap. That was throw away the pizza and eat the box. Actually, you know, they've done some, some good stuff with their sauces recently. It's, it's not bad. I do not like their self deprecating TV campaigns. I hate them. Well, at some point we're going to do a show about how I can't stand, uh, how brands once they become so big, just become lifestyles anyways. But, uh, that's a whole different rant. Okay. Yeah. We're getting off track here. Let me, let me rebut you here. Okay. Now I do

the same thing when I'm setting up a new account. If I'm on my phone, I've got one, I've got a password that I use for, you know, the ease of setting up a new account that is hardwired into my brain. I use that for setting up a new account. When I get back to my Mac, I always reset the password and set a strong one password period always. And yeah, if for, you know, ease of use, it's easy to remember like one password to, to start a new account. And then I just immediately, when I, when I have time, I'd change it. Yeah. So, and there's a, there's a feature

in one password that lets you like search through and find things that use common passwords. So you can just go reset them and change them. So you don't have those legacy passwords sitting around. The, the article is more about, you know, people who don't use a password manager. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, they're saying, don't spend the time to memorize this complex password that you're still going to use everywhere. It's, I'd, I'd, I'd take umbrance with this

heavily. It's like, get a password manager and make your password to log into your password manager strong. Make it a phrase, make it a phrase from a book that you always love something long and you know, keep it, keep it strong. Keep, keep strong. Keep strong. Well, I mean the single, the single best thing that, that I had ever heard just for creating your own password that's, that's memorable, but difficult to hack was to take a phrase that you know really well, use the first letter of every word from that phrase and combine it with a number

that you'll remember. As long as it's longer than a 13 or 14 digits. Well, yeah, it needs to be a relatively long phrase like, you know, a four score and 20 years ago today. There you go. Boom. Just take every single letter and then add 20 at the end or whatever you want to do. But that, that's a pretty good, easy way to come up with a, a good password that you will remember all the time.

Another good trick is use a lens from movies that you love. Yeah. That quote from a movie. Exactly. But something long with, you know, good entropy as they say. Yes. And, you know, follow the XKCD rule if you're going to do that. But this, this article, no, Microsoft is the bastion of shitty security. Do not listen to anything they say when it comes to security. Like we talked about them taking over the, you know, the DNS manager and ruining

everybody's day for like a small subset of people there because their shitty operating system gets hacked all the time. It's like, it's not our fault. You make a shitty product. Stop it. And stop telling people to be less secure. It drives me nuts. Okay. I kind of agree with the theory.

Yeah. Well, you're an idiot. Wow. You feel free to hack into my Domino's account and order me a pizza. I'm getting kind of great. I think I just might. I think I just might just to prove a point. I think that would be fun. Um, so we talked about Google's, uh, hiding things from the internet. Yeah. How's that going?

You know, well, there's apparently a site now called hidden from Google.com because everybody's complaining that they can't hide their stuff from Google. So everybody who has seen these, you know, posts about people saying, Hey, I want this off of Google. Well, they're taking those domain, their, you know, URLs and putting them in a centralized website and say, Hey, these are the people that are not on Google anymore. If you want to go find them, which is awesome. I love the internet some days and that is a perfect use case.

Oh, we all saw this coming. Yeah, no, it's, uh, it's fun. I'm glad, I'm glad somebody's out there doing it. Yeah. Now the last thing I have in security here is, uh, this is a little terse. Um, this is the, uh, statement before the Senate judiciary committee subcommittee on crime and terrorism. Uh, Joseph, uh, Demarest, who is the assistant director of the cyber division

of, uh, the FBI, uh, basically, you know, testified before Senate. And what are you saying is about 18 computers a second are being, uh, cracked and added to botnets. Yep. So how's that weak password working for you now? I don't think my password on dominoes is helping a botnet get it. No, I'm just saying, I'm just saying, but this is, this is okay. This is an even bigger

issue, which is, uh, I, I had this with, uh, with one of my clients recently who, um, knows nothing about the internet, but then decided, you know, why am I, why, why don't I just get a server and put it in my house and I can host my own website here and I can have, you know, files and let people have access to them. And I was like, I took this, the call about it and I was like, well, you guys don't know anything about computers. Who's going to run your

server? Who's going to update it when, when patches are out? Do you even know what Linux is? No, I think I know who this, I think I know who this client is. Yes, you do. Because I tried to throw you under that client bus once. You totally threw me under that client bus. Um, well, a, you can't do that because it's against your cable providers terms of service and they find, if they find the IP, they will basically shut you down. Yeah. Uh, so there,

I mean, you can use some dynamic DNS to kind of get around that, but they don't know. They don't even know what DNS means. Anyway, they barely know what computer means. The point being is that is a certainly massively extreme example, but there are tons of, of, I mean, even these server farms that are out there that are just because the margins on, on making a profit for being a server farm these days is so small. There's nobody is investing in the security aspect of, of having a server anymore. And so this is not surprising that, that, that servers are just

being compromised left, right, and center. Nobody's doing updates. These aren't, these aren't servers. These are people's home computers. Well, that's even worse. That's what these are. These are not surprising either. I mean, you don't, your server is not going to be part of a botnet no matter what, you know what it might be. It might be an IRC bot that somebody is using, but most, uh, ISPs don't allow IRC bots anymore just for that reason. Yeah. So, and a lot of stuff now it's all VPS. So if you get into the server world, it's all VPS now. Like I use line, line of VPS, which is fantastic. And if you want to sign up for line, there's a link on grumpy old

geeks. I highly recommend them. I've had nothing but good, uh, good stuff from them so far. I am, I am preferring them at this point over, uh, Amazon AWS, which is there's, it's so much easier because you have to be a damn rocket scientist to set up AWS stuff. And I'm apparently a rocket scientist because I can do it, but here's the deal. If I'm not around, nobody else can figure out how to fix anything. So, yeah, line of stuff has just been, has been stellar. Um, but that's not

the point here. The point here is that, you know, people's home computers are just woefully insecure. Yeah. And, and somebody made a really good point. It's like, okay, out of those 18 victims per second and all of these botnets, how many of those botnets are run by the NSA? Because you do have FBI like treading on territory where the NSA is like sacrosanct. And it's, it's interesting. It's an interesting counterplay, but it's, it's a, it's a good read. It's, you know,

it's not our normal fare because it's, you know, it literally is, you know, testimony in front of Congress. So it's a little bit terse, but it's, it's, it's fun to read this stuff. I quite enjoy it. Agreed. I don't know why I'm kind of weird that way, but when I find stuff like this, it's fun.

We're big on self-torture. And I did find this from probably some, you know, site that read it and boiled it down to three sentences and a AB tested headline, but it got me, got me to the actual article, which we will link in the show notes at grumpy old geeks.com slash 67.

Exactly. And quick side note, nine times out of 10, if you're starting to read something, um, and you can tell that it's just reworded and you want the original article, go all the way down and find, or just, you know, uh, control F find and type in the word source. And then you will find the link to the original article.

Yeah. It's usually source or hat tip or something. And then you scroll down, find that. And, and most of the time it'll be another source. You can go down the source, you can go down the source hole until you get to the original, but. Ooh, good title. Down the source hole. Ooh, need lube.

Software apps and gadgets. Life hacker came out with their pack for Mac, their list of essential Mac apps, uh, worth a quick look. If you happen to be, um, a Mac person, uh, we've talked about quite a lot of these already. Jason doesn't like some of them. I don't like some of them, but some of them are pretty decent.

Well, I mean, they've got Chrome. Yes. Use Chrome. Uh, yeah. Some of the stuff in here, they've got you torrent is a list. Do not use you torrent use a transmission. It's much better. You torn is based on Java. So you have to have a Java runtime installed on your Mac, which I do. Do not like that.

No, I have no Java. Um, yeah. Uh, so what else they got? Growl, turn growl the hell off. Do not have growl. It is an interruption machine. All it is going to do is distract you. Turn that shit off. Get it off your machine. Yeah. Uh, text Wrangler, skip text Wrangler. Go with BB edit.

Skitch is great. Skitch is fantastic. Co-book. Get the hell off my system. No co-book. Thanks for that one, Jason. You're the one that got me using it in the first place. And, uh, yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. It was okay for a bit. Cause it just did the combination of all your contacts, but it had its own dropdown menu. I am very particular about shit that shows up in my, in my finder bar and I don't want that there. I don't want it there and you couldn't get rid

of it. So yeah, no. Um, dayo, I don't know. Um, yeah, if you're going to do, if you're going to a calendar thing, go with fantastic cow, all in all, yeah, it's a kind of a hit and miss list. Yep. Some decent stuff in there. Uh, in related life hacker news, I did stumble across this. Uh, I know I talked to Jason about this one pre-show and he said, well, everybody knows this. And then I countered with no, they don't. Uh, the best way to point

your wifi router antennas is perpendicularly. So you get the most surface area. Uh, if you have not done that already, go do it and you will see a increase in your wifi in your house. And if you don't know what perpendicularly means, it means, uh, in, in the case of this straight up. So I use an airport extreme, which is one of the new towers, which is already pointed straight up. So now I want to talk about overcast, which is Marco Armin's a podcast app that he

has been, you know, uh, teasing everybody with for months and months and months. It finally came out version one. It's free. It is a fine free app. It is the best free podcast player that I found to get all of the features. You got to pay five bucks, which I, it is free with limits, which I did. I paid the five bucks. The, the new stuff that's in it is actually really good. The, he did some really good algorithms with speeding up play. Like it'll

compress, uh, silences. So instead of just like playing super fast, it's very smart about how it does it. The only problem I have with it right now are you cannot set it to do not delete episodes you've listened to, which is a problem for me because when I get to the end of a podcast, there are many times, well, I'll go back and listen to different segments of the show. If it was a really good show and I want to hear again, and then I have to download

it again. It's, it's a pain in the ass. Battery life on my phone has decreased significantly since I installed this app. I mean, significantly. I don't know why it's doing it. That doesn't really make any sense. It doesn't, but I, I have noticed that my phone, it's about 50% the battery life pre overcast versus post overcast. I mean, it's, it's, my phone's always plugged in now and it wasn't like that when I was using downcast.

The UI is decent, not great, decent. The color scheme, man, it's orange and white, which I hate orange. So I'm not an orange fan. But, and it doesn't have dark mode, which kind of sucks, but neither did downcast. I like, I like dark mode.

For the most part, it's a really good free app. If you, if you are in the power user segment, it's, it's good. And if you're in the power user segment, you probably already know about it and have it on your phone. But all in all, I think it is a, um, a worthy new addition to the podcast player, uh, you know, pool. I think it's better than Instacast and downcast. So for the third party podcast apps, it gets my, my vote so far. And hopefully he'll fix some of the, the flaws. It is a 1.0, you know?

Yeah. And the, the $5 edition is worth it for me because I, I play everything faster and the, the algorithmic changes that he made are actually really good. Okay. I might try it. I'm still, still just using the basic, but, uh, I'll give it a shot. Why not?

Mm-hmm. It's free, man. Go, go, go get the free one. And it does import. It imported all my stuff from downcast from your iTunes one. I don't know if it does that, but from third party apps, it, it imported all my shows from downcast, which I usually have to go and like flip back and forth between the apps and, you know, manually search and find and, but this, this worked really well.

Okay. Well, in a more new app news, uh, the, the big room over at Facebook where people just develop things and then throw it out there to see what sticks against the wall has, uh, sent out something new, but, uh, you and me, well, we can't really use it because it's only for famous people. If you are verified on Facebook, you can get a new app called mentions. Now, uh, remember slingshot Jason slingshot. We, we talked, we both installed it two weeks ago. We talked

about it on the show. Nobody else in my entire friend list ever has joined. So that is going away. Um, this is their new one. It's called mentions. Uh, basically it is an update of the pages app that they had for very super special people because you have to be verified on Facebook and who even know verification was a thing, but they rolled that out as well. Um, if you're a verified public figure, you will get, uh, the ability to attach your, your account to a new

app called mentions, which as I stated was basically just a decent update of pages. Um, easy way. I've installed it for, for one of my clients and I've checked it out a little bit. It's fine. It's, it's super easy to use. It's a very quick way to see what conversations are involved with you. You know, when you're being tagged on things, when you're being hashtagged on things on Facebook, um, quick, easy to access to the analytics about your page. And of course, a very simple way to go

ahead and start purchasing, you know, purchasing the, your promoted posts, because that is basically the, that's, that's the point of the entire app is for you to promote your posts because nobody's seeing them any other way. You hit it on the head. That's what's for verified. Yeah. Yep. For verified people only because those are the people that have the money and that they can spend. That's exactly it. So there you go. That's a, that's the new app. Isn't that great? Thanks for spending five minutes talking about an app that none of our audience can use.

That's what I'm here for. Exactly. So game of war is my new, uh, iPhone, uh, obsession. It's a free app, uh, free my ass. Uh, you can buy gold and you know, time boost. It's basically like civilization civil is kind of like civilization. It's a real time strategy kind of game where you build up your empire and your city and all that crap. It's fairly famous. It's up there in the,

in the ranks. Um, yeah, I spent about 55 bucks so far, which is my max because that's, that's tipping the, uh, the Xbox game threshold. You know, if it, if it costs more than an Xbox game, I'm not going to pay it. Yeah. And now that they know that I have the ability to pay all the deals that they give me every day have jumped up in price in the beginning. It was like, Oh, get all this stuff for five bucks. I'm like, okay, okay. Get all this stuff for 10 bucks. Okay. Get all this stuff

for 20 bucks. Now the base deal is 50 bucks. And I'm like, uh, no, give me some more of those five and $10 ones. And I might do it. But, uh, all in all it is, it is one of those games that uses psychology and time to, uh, basically rape your wallet, but it is a ton of fun. It is a ton of fun.

I'm enjoying it even though my entire kingdom got wiped out last night by some douche bag, but you know, I'm like, okay, well, there's 50 bucks down the drain, but it was still fun. Uh, my it's, it's, it's all multiplayer. It is real time multiplayer. So everybody in the game is playing, you know, online. So that's the fun part. So like last night, this kingdom was coming to attack me and I'm like, I'm like reaching out to my Alliance. I'm like, help. And everybody sent

all their troops and it was fun. It was a blast. So I, I really am quite enjoying it. So if you, uh, are in the game, I am in the Marvel heroes Alliance. So come join me. I, I can't remember what the name of my town is, but anyway, it's fun. It's, it's actually quite a ton of fun. And I, I don't have any regrets for the money I spent for it because the enjoyment that is giving, given me over the past week has been well worth the, uh, the money spent. All right, there you go. I won't be

getting that, but no, you won't. Media County. When I was a young lad and we listened to Dr. Demento on the radio way back in the day, Weird Al was a God. And I think, uh, most boys will go through that period in, in their early puberty years where Weird Al is the funniest thing in the world. And then we kind of grow up and we move on and we forget about Weird Al for basically ever,

but he did win the internet this last week, uh, by far a good policy of releasing a video every single day. Um, and you know, starting pretty strong and with some, uh, some celebrity help, he's done very well. I want to give a particular shout out to word crimes. If you have not heard this yet, or basically seen the video, it is perfect. It is very funny. And, uh, I laughed my ass off.

So well done, Weird Al. I watched it last night and I also, as a young boy, I, and I just threw out all of my old Weird Al cassettes, like Weird Al in 3d and just the Weird Al one. And I have to go, you know, hat tip to Weird Al. Now my favorite Weird Al song is still got a boogie. That is a good one. But word crimes, word crimes is perfect for us. It was fan fucking tastic. It was so good. Yes. If you, if you are a

grammar Nazi, if you're a grammar Nazi and you get annoyed at people's LOLs and texting and basically the way the English language has started to slowly wither and die on the internet, you will love this video. It is very funny. Um, and of course, because it's the internet, uh, we can't just leave it at that. We have a link in our show notes to a slate.com article in which, uh, they basically went play by play line by line throughout the video, trying to find accuracies and inaccuracies in much the same way that everybody still yells at Alanis Morissette because her ironic song

wasn't ironic. Okay. And, and to my grammar Nazi friends who listened to this show, I'm often misused apostrophes just to piss you off. So there. Yeah. Uh, in related media news, uh, Paul McCartney is re-releasing five of his classic albums as iPad apps, because that is the way that people who are in charge of his marketing machine figured out to make more money. Unfortunately, uh, it's none of

the Beatles stuff. It is band on the run. It's wings. I was going to say band on the run in there. Cause that's the only Paul McCartney and wings song I know. Yes. So, uh, I mean, it's the new thing in the music industry for bands that, uh, can afford to, uh, spend this kind of money.

Unfortunately, you know, I I'm here guys, this is what I do for a living. Hire me. Come on. Uh, yeah. So you can check them out if you're really into Paul McCartney stuff that isn't as good as the rest of his stuff. Okay. I like band on the run. I'd like that better than the Beatles stuff, but that's just me cause I hate the fucking Beatles. Um, now my, my media pick of the week is my old buddy, Joey Ito, the head of the MIT media lab finally has his Ted talk online and it's,

uh, called want to innovate become a nowist, not a Maoist because that would be wrong. Uh, a nowist instead of a futurist. Actually it's a, it's a decent talk. I, um, I was distracted by his shirt because he obviously had just taken it out of the wrapper and needed it ironed, but, um, it, it's classic Joey. Joey's a fantastic guy, smart as a whip. And, uh, I did have some, some

philosophical, uh, problems with what he was talking about, but I'm going to save that for a later episode because I need to really kind of put that together. Um, but for the most part, check it out. Uh, it's a really cool talk about, uh, safe cast and MIT and, and, you know, education in general.

And we're going to have one of the founders of safe cast on the show next week, Sean Bonner, who was on before talking about Bitcoin, but we're going to have him back to talk about some more interesting stuff next time. So check it out. Uh, it's on ted.com and the link will be in the show notes. Are you kidding me?

It's not shark week, but, uh, news about a great white taking a chomp out of a swimmer in Manhattan beach made the news even when I was in Toronto. So this seems appropriate enough. Here is your, are you kidding me for the week? Vending machines are twice as likely to kill you than a shark is. Now we have a link in the show notes that provides the science and breakdowns. Um, my only question is, I'm not surprised about this because we all know that shark attacks are very, very infrequent and it's not as big of a deal as it is other than the primordial thing that goes off

in our brains about something swimming underneath us and eating us. Uh, but vending machines, who are these fucking morons? Well, this is what we call culling the herd. This is so sharks may not be rampant, but stupidity is and that 50 cents that you want back or the free pop is not worth hanging on the vending machine.

So it falls on you and kills you outside of the fact that the, uh, snicker doodle that you're trying to get out of there is going to kill you too. Yeah, no, stay away from, stay away from hanging on the vending machines because they do weigh about 900 pounds and they will land on you and make you go squishy. Closing shout outs. My final world cup mention for grumpy old geeks for at least four years. Uh, closing shout out, breaking news. Uh, Philipp Lahm, the captain of the German squad that won

the world cup and gets us our four stars announced, uh, just a few hours ago that he will be retiring from international football. Uh, sad to see him go. Thank you so much, Philip. You are awesome. And, uh, but I don't blame you one bit. I mean, the guy's 30 years old, which is old for soccer, to be honest, uh, especially within four years, uh, that'd be 34, definitely pushing the envelope there. Amazing player. Go out on a high. You can't beat winning the world cup. So awesome.

It was actually really good. I enjoyed watching him. Yeah. He was an amazing player. So I mean, obviously he's still playing for, I believe, Bayern Munich and things like that. He's just, he will not be on the international team anymore. So let the, the youngins on the team kind of get more experience and be ready to, uh, win back to back in four years. Yeah. I mean, even when I was 30 and skinny and doing martial arts, I couldn't run like that. That would, that's what these guys do is amazing. It's just utterly amazing. Well, that's the one thing that I think really came out of

this world cup for, for most Americans. Cause they had the crazy ass things like the, you know, the amount of miles that they ran during the game. Cause there's always like, oh, they're not really athletes. Look at football players. Those are athletes. No, you can get out there and run, you know, 15 miles in 90 minutes. Yeah. And, and, and, and here's the, here's the other statistic that people kind of gloss over. There are more concussions in football than there are in football. So more concussions in soccer than there are in football. So these guys are,

these guys are like, you know, yes, they do like, you know, feign injury quite a bit. But they also really get injured. No, no, they do really get injured. And here's the one thing, those, those times when they're feigning injury, which is something that I learned, I can't remember where I picked this up, but it was, it was, it was fascinating. They're doing that to, to buy time to swap out players sometimes. Yeah. You know, they're doing it strategically and sitting there, you know, just like rubbing it. I'm dying. Um, with, with a tap on the ankle. Yeah.

So the other teammates can, can regroup and do other stuff. So it's not just them being drama queens. It's strategic when they know they have to swap out a player. And, you know, we don't think about that kind of thing. We're just like, what kind of a pussy just grabs his leg for that? It's like, no, this is killing time. That's an extremely good point because I think most American, you know, sports, there, there are timeouts, there are no timeouts in soccer. And that's basically what that is. When, when somebody is rolling around on the floor, that is, they're taking a time out

to get the team to regroup, to maybe bring out somebody else, whatever. So, yeah. So anyways, in related, uh, German news and to kind of go against my point about how I I'm not on Twitter, I am on Twitter and I actually, I don't interact on it much. That that's kind of my point. And I don't live on there and I don't like to type a lot of things in, but I do enjoy following, certain people. And I wanted to give a shout out to two, uh, in particular that I have really enjoyed over the past couple of months. Uh, the first one is the German shutout nine quarterly

nine quarterly nine is a compendium of utopian negation. Um, very, very tongue in cheek, very funny stuff. Um, if you have a dark sense of humor, you will greatly appreciate it. And then on a more, well, on the dark side note, but on a lighter note, uh, if you are not following depressed, Darth on Twitter, you are missing out. If you're a star Trek fan or star Wars fan, sorry. Uh, his tagline, star Trek fans are probably not missing out.

Depressed Darth is very funny. His tagline is judging you all from a long, judging you all from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Um, both of them are very funny. So I want to throw one in, um, which is more on the philosophical side. Uh, I love me some Alan Watts who was, uh, he's a, he's a dead philosopher from the seventies, sixties era.

He's a hippie kind of guy. Um, uh, subscribe to Alan Watts daily. He's got some great, well, whoever's, whoever's cribbing his stuff and posting it to Twitter. I was about to say really great, really great, uh, quotes from him, mostly about living in the now. Okay. So it's, it's a really fun, really fun one to have. And you just every now and again, when you're just, you know, you get your head up your own ass with your little problems that don't mean shit, you'll, it'll bust out some wisdom that'll just kind

of break you out of it and go, Oh yeah, this really doesn't matter. So, and, uh, my final shout out for the week is an episode of does it have legs? My other podcast, which is, you know, a little nepotism here. Um, I had a special guest host, which was, um, because, uh, my general cohost and roommate was off in California getting engaged. So, uh, I called up my, I guess, boss

at resistance pro wrestling, uh, Gabriel Barron. And he's a huge movie nerd. I mean, huge movie nerd. This guy's got 10,000 DVDs, thousands of Blu-rays. It's just ridiculous what this guy knows. So I'm like, Hey, let's talk about ghostbusters. And I was going into this episode completely one way. And I came out, came out of it completely another. This guy is so good at movies. This is the most fascinating, uh, chat that I've had about movies in years. He's

really good. So, uh, we'll have the links in the show notes. So, uh, check out ghostbusters and, uh, it's more than you thought it was. I love that movie. If someone asked you, if you are a God, you say yes. Yes. Where do these stairs go? They go up. It's a great movie, man. So check out, check out the show. It's, it's really surprisingly entertaining because I'm surprising. Okay. All right, man. I will talk to you next week. I will talk to you next

week. The music we use in this podcast is by me or among us, uh, link in the show notes there. Uh, we are hosted by Libsyn. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two months free. Keep up with us at grumpy old geeks.com on Facebook at facebook.com slash

grumpy old geeks on Twitter. We're at twitter.com slash GOG podcasts, or simply email us at podcast at grumpy old geeks.com show notes for this episode can be found at grumpy old geeks.com slash 67. Yo. Okay. Last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

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