78: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.

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 one of the few times that I'm actually annoyed that we do this so damn early in the morning. As I've become older and older, I've become more and more of a morning person, but I'm a bit of a hot mess this morning, Jason. How are you?

I'm doing good, Brian. I'm sorry you're the hot mess today. It's all right. It's all right. I think I'm getting a bit of a cold, which is painful in 150,000 degree weather that we're having here in L.A. There's nothing worse than a cold in summer. No, it totally sucks. The even worse part about this is we finally figured out this whole new way of recording, so we're supposed to sound crystal and clear this time, and I can already just hear it in my voice.

So you are the single point of failure. I am the point of failure, as per usual. Oh, man. So I want to start off this week with kind of a retraction about what we talked about last week. Okay. What did you get wrong? I don't know if we got anything wrong. It's more about policy, I think.

Okay. We talked about the mid-level manager at Apple who was outed for being the one that broke the build that caused the 8.0.1 kerfuffle. Right, right. And I kind of felt really shitty about it later because, you know, I can probably guarantee that it wasn't one person's fault that this happened.

Right. It rarely is these days, especially in an organization like that, I'm sure. Yeah. An organization like that and, you know, how many people put their hands on that? Yeah. I mean, how many emails was this guy juggling that told him contradictory things or things that didn't even make sense? Oh, I'm sorry. That's my personal life. Never mind.

So I just kind of want to put a retraction on that, and I thought it was kind of just shoddy for – well, I'm the one that found the article and I pushed it, so I take blame for it. But, you know, we kind of pushed this out there without doing any more research on it. We were just kind of parroting the news and jumped on the bandwagon.

And I read a couple pieces later that – yeah, I can't even remember who was posting about it, but it kind of brought it into light. It's like, yeah, that was kind of a dick thing to do, A, for the original news outlet to out one person about this. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And because what I think happened is probably somebody at Apple has a grudge against this guy, and they leaked his name as being the guy that did it for some kind of, you know, little corporate payback.

And I just thought it was crappy, so I apologize. Sorry, middle management guy. Yeah. Hopefully your career is not too screwed up by that, but I'm sure it is. Probably, yes, unfortunately. Yeah, the next time this guy goes to find a job and they Google him, they'll be like, oh, no, you can't flip burgers at our McDonald's.

Oopsies. Poor bastard. So we've talked in the past about Ryan Holiday. Yes, we have. And his book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Mm-hmm. Well, first look this week came out with an amazing bit of journalism called The Coruscant Group, Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria.

Have you seen any of this stuff? I have. I have, yes. If you watch, if you read this article and watch some of the videos, it is a play-by-play perfect implementation of how Ryan Holiday says, this is how you manipulate the media. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in his, it starts off with a blog post to a smaller outlet and then works up the scale.

Mm-hmm. This entire thing with Coruscant started out with an anonymous government official leaking something to, like, a few news outlets. Yeah. That was it. They came out of nowhere. They did not exist. Nobody's ever heard of them. And since then, it's gone away. It's like, okay, we got our justification.

We manufactured the threat. Mm-hmm. And now we don't need the threat anymore because we sent all the bombers over. So, boom, threat's done. Yeah. No, it's really funny. I mean, even just the reports that, oh, okay, we've scattered them because, you know, we took care of it before they were a problem. Well, they never were a problem to begin with.

It was completely fabricated. Good times. Yeah. And if you haven't read Trust Me, I'm Lying, you should because everybody's using this crap now. Oh, I mean, it's our news cycle now. That's the sad part about it. I mean, that's just how everything works. I mean, the same thing is happening right now with Ebola, which really, honestly, isn't that big of a deal.

Nope, not at all. We'll talk about that a little later. Yes. So, you found a good article called What Happens When the World Wakes Up. No, wait, I found this. No, you found it. I was about to say I did not find this. I was thinking about another one. You know how I know you found it? Because it's on Medium, your favorite online news source.

So, this is an article by Alex Hawkinson who has a vested interest in the Internet of Things. So, this is kind of a propaganda-y sort of piece. I was about to say it's a propaganda piece. But it's interesting nonetheless. Yeah, he's the CEO and founder of SmartThings.

And, I mean, it's an interesting piece talking about, you know, what happens when everything can talk to everything else. And since we've talked about the Internet of Things before, I thought I would throw it in the show notes. Yeah. And see if you had anything to say about it. Well, I love the idea of the Internet of Things.

I think it's really exciting and interesting. We've talked about the security implications of that many, many times, which is how frightening it's going to be when we have our entire house connected to the Internet of Things and can control it with our iPhones and use the cloud and all of that sort of thing.

And, you know, here's the issue. I love it. I think you love it. I think we would know how to run it. But I'm not sure about the 22-year-old Disney starlets that end up with their naughty bits all over the cloud or, even worse than that, my parents. I'm going down tomorrow because my dad decided to buy a tablet.

I don't know why. And I don't know what he's going to do with it. And I don't even know how to explain to him how to use it because, basically, you know, my every other Saturday schedule involves going and fixing the computer because he just hit buttons. This is going to be frightening for people that don't know how to run technology.

And it's getting more and more scary as our entire world becomes more and more tech-focused and nobody reads the fucking manual. So I was flipping through Twitter this morning, and Bruce Sterling, who is one of my favorite authors of all time and futurist, he was at a conference today.

And the slide that they had above him, I'm just going to read this because it's classic. So it says, update, you have 15 pairs of underwear left. Okay, buy more underwear and a little parentheses find help online. Your cat checked in at the litter box. Your microwave just heated a lasagna.

Record, you stared out the window for 23 minutes. Okay, post your score. Your couch likes your microwave status update. It's raining again. Okay, 15 of your things are broken, and you haven't left the house in five days. It's just, I mean, that's funny.

It sounds about right. And this is one of those things where it sounds really cool to have your entire home connected, but why? What's the point? It's more useless information that's going to be coming at us when we already have too much, which we will definitely be talking about later.

Yeah, it's, there's no need, honestly. The more, the more, I mean, like, look, 20 years ago when we were coming up with all these ideas on what we can do with the internet, wouldn't this be cool if? Yeah. And now we're at the point where it's becoming a reality because we spent 20 years saying, you know, working on the technology to make all this stuff happen.

Now it's like, no, actually, it's not that cool. No. I really, I can open the door and look in my refrigerator and see what the milk status is. That's exactly what I was about to say. It's like, I don't need to get a little notification on my iPhone that I'm out of milk considering I open up my refrigerator every morning for my coffee and I'll know.

It's stupid. Yeah, we have, we have post-it notes for, you know, grocery lists and I don't need another app for that. Well, exactly. And we've talked about that on the show before as well, how I actually prefer to write notes and things like that. And I think you, and we, there's been studies showing that it's actually a better way to retain information.

We don't remember things as well if we just have a little beep on our phone or we type it in to our iPad or whatever. We actually remember things better the old fashioned way with actual mechanical motion of writing because that is how our brains are wired. Get to me in 20,000 years once evolution has dealt with us.

Yeah, we'll catch up eventually. You know, the one, the one, the one thing that I always wanted though, when I lived in apartment complexes, I did want a notification when my laundry was done. So some ass hat from, you know, 3B didn't go down and take my laundry out and leave it on top. Yeah, that would have been nice.

That could be useful. I could definitely see an application for that. If you, if you're in a big complex and you've got laundry and you're whatever, boom, you get a little beep. Awesome. But do I need my couch to tell me that the pillows need to be fluffed? No, I do not. Besides, I don't want to be a couch fluffer.

Ooh, that sounds filthy. I have no idea where that came from. Must be the cold meds. It must be. Actually, I haven't taken any of those yet. I should get on that. So I saw something on Facebook and I thought this was, this is again one of those things where this is a great idea, but it's just not there yet and the implementation is wrong.

So I'm going to ask, is Facebook actually racist? Have you seen the C translate option pop up on various updates and comments and things like that? I haven't until you pointed it out. And now you're noticing it, right? I have seen it a couple of times, yes. Now it's, I have some friends that are Japanese and I have some friends that are German and I have some friends that are, speak different languages and they do sometimes update their statuses in whatever language they happen to naturally speak or also speak.

And the C translate button does pop up for those when there's a big long sentence, say in German and the translation is iffy, not perfect, but good enough. But I've also started to see it pop up on things that are actually just written in English if the person happens to have an ethnic sounding name.

Yes, that's what I've noticed. Even if it's in English, it's coming with the translate button. I'm like, what are you going to translate it to, Esperanto? I know. So I'm wondering about how they're actually implementing this. And it does seem a bit wrong because I did notice this last night or a couple of days ago when I actually popped it in the show notes because a friend of mine whose last name happens to be Rodriguez simply typed no.

And I got the C translation option. I was like, well, that is actually Spanish for no. So we're good. It'd be funny if the translation was like, go fuck yourself. Yes. Well, I hit the button and it said no translation available. So, yeah, there you go. See what they really mean by this, not what it actually says.

Is this no means yes? Yes means no. Yeah, I keep an eye out for that. It's kind of funny when it pops up. It is interesting. There's always, always with somebody with an ethnic name or with Chinese characters in their name. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It'll just pop up all the time. So that is a very interesting implementation.

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Stop it. I found an article that my buddy Joey Ito wrote on anti – it's called anti-disciplinary. Yeah. It's an interesting article because it talks about like in the academic world how everybody is specialized.

But at MIT, they're looking for people who have a broad range of skills in multiple disciplines but to the point where they're actually anti-disciplinary. So they don't have a single discipline that they work in. And I wanted to bring this up because all of our talk about being a generalist fits right into the scope of this article.

Yeah, yeah. And I agree with it 100 percent. And as much as I think the article is kind of – it's written in that language that just kind of makes me go corporate, corporate, corporate. But the point is really good. And I agree with it 100 percent. And I'm always more interested in somebody that has a well-rounded base of knowledge and is good at many things rather than this is what I do, this is all I do, this is what I'm good at.

It's one of the reasons I actually – back when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, which I'm still working on, by the way. This has not been sorted out. But when I was in college and I was like, what the hell am I going to do, I had always been attracted to academia. And I kind of saw myself as like living within the walls of academia forever, becoming a professor, putting the patches on the shoulders and all that sort of stuff.

But the problem I had with it is I didn't want to specialize. I'm not a fan of it. And the only way you can do academia is you just move forward and forward and forward and specialize and specialize and specialize to the point where, you know, if you started off with marine biology, now the only thing that you know about is this one particular little squid.

That doesn't appeal to me. You don't want to be a professor of whale farts? No, I don't. As fascinating as whale farts may be, I also want to know about whale sneezes. So, you know, it's one of those things where that's why I didn't end up going into academia and instead went to the internet where now I study the things and everything.

I believe in that. I mean, I think the world needs specialists. It certainly does. But it doesn't appeal to me. And I've always been more interested in people that were well-rounded. And I like this article for that. And I like what they're looking for. It makes me almost want to apply. Yeah, and I agree with you on the language.

I don't know what happened to Joey. He's been stuck at MIT too long. He's starting to talk like one of them. Yeah, one of them, one of them. He's one of them now. But the overall point is great. I do find it hilarious that not only did you pull up a Medium article for our intro but also a LinkedIn article.

I know. What's up with that? I can't believe that LinkedIn's pivoting is apparently working because even Joey Ito is now writing for them. And he's been putting stuff there a lot. I don't know if he cross-posted this anywhere, but this is where I found it in my Elo stream. Okay, we'll talk about that.

Should we talk about that? No, we'll talk about that in a minute. Elo. Elo. Goodbye. Comment of the Week. Our buddy Mike Tamal has donated again. Thank you, Mike. And he used our link for Tugboat and picked up the At the Library level.

So thank you very much, Mike. And with the At the Library level, you get a free pimpage. So I'm going to read this little note from Mike. Okay. Gents, I enjoy listening to your show and there are quite a bit of real-world lessons that you guys don't sugarcoat that I find worth paying for.

Listening to your thoughts and attitudes on the winds of tech has helped me see the tech world as a vicious, ugly place full of incompetence and bullshit instead of all roses and wonders. I appreciate the candor and wisdom since I have pivoted my career from flying towards programming.

Industry vets talking about tech is way more credible, to me anyways, than most of the tech blogs out there. I would like you guys to pimp my cousin Rajiv's website. And that will be in the show notes at Rajiv.com or Rajiv. I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce that. But keep up the good work and I look forward to hearing about your future projects.

If you guys ever head out to the DCNYC area, hit me up and maybe we can grab some beers. That is a deal right there. I agree. Yes. And yeah, all tech blogs are a complete piece of shit. It's called the echo chamber of the internet and that's all everything is now. It's just repeated and rehashed articles that nobody bothers to actually research and they just repost them.

So yeah. And thank you. Almost kind of like what we did with the middle manager last week. Exactly. But we apologized. We apologize for that one. So yeah, I think it's interesting that you've pivoted it away from flying towards programming. Good luck with that. Thanks for the money. And yeah, it's nice to be appreciated for something that Jason and I do on this podcast that actually all of our friends in our personal lives hate us for.

Yeah, they're like, shut the hell up. Would you please, for once, sugarcoat something and don't shit on it? Stay grumpy, my friends. Yes, stay grumpy. We also got a comment from Mac. A question actually from the Ask the Geeks area on our website. So go to GrumpyOldGeeks.com and ask a geek.

This is from Mac at Snapshiss.com. Hey, geeks. When LO launched last week, all of us nerds flocked to try it out. The popular press fawned all over how revolutionary it was to start a social network without ads. And then everybody fell back into posting the same animated GIFs, silly links, and self-important blather that they're already posting on Facebook and bitching about how there's no like button.

So it felt like meet the new boss, same as, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think the next evolutionary leap in social media is really going to look like? We covered this a bit, yes, our last podcast, but LO is still out there and getting a lot of press. So let's cover it again, Jason. Okay, and just for transparency's sake, Mac is Mac Reed, who used to work with me at Metblogs, and I worked with him at Snapshiss.

So go to the Apple Store and download Snapshiss for your iPhone. I wrote the code that made the back end go. Yeah, well, let's start with it's not revolutionary to start a social network without ads because Facebook and Twitter and Friendster and MySpace and all of them started without ads.

They eventually get ads, which is probably what's going to happen with LO as well. So he wants to know what the next evolutionary leap is, and this is what we did kind of cover last time in that we don't really know. We're not going to know until we see it, and there's going to be a thousand flops before then, and something will congeal, and it will come together, but there's only so much you can do with the computers and the technology we have.

I mean, is it going to be a Google Glass app that everybody can just see what everybody else is seeing? Who the hell knows? Yeah, we don't know, but it's not this because this is basically Facebook. That's what it is. I have a lot of issues with the press that's out there right now. We'll have two different articles in the show notes at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

The first one from Salon is another one that I threw in just because my pet peeve is that they're doing lazy journalism yet again. Much like many of the early articles saying, the headline is about how Ello is stealing users from Facebook. It is not. People are joining Ello, but nobody is really leaving Facebook.

Everybody's in kind of a wait-and-see attitude, and they're on both, so that's a load of crap, so stop doing that, journalists. The second one is a boing-boing article about Ello, which I actually do like, and if you're interested in Ello and what's going on, I suggest you read that one. Yeah, they were both – well, I didn't read the Salon article because you bashed on it in our show, but so I'm like, maybe I can skip that one for now.

And so far, my stream is pretty active on Ello. And mine is completely and utterly dead. In fact, I just opened it up, and what I see is a man nipple from a photo that you posted. But if I scroll down again, then there's another post from you, then there's a post from Tara because we always have to mention Tara in our podcast, and then there's another post from you.

So my friends are not active at all on Ello. In fact, I have invites that I can't even give away anymore. I think it's a self-selecting sample at the moment. Everybody that's over there is super techie, nerdy, geeky types who want to be on the next big thing to see if it's going to be the next big thing or not.

Most of my friends who are not in the tech world have no interest, and they're not going over there because they're already where they're happy and all their friends are. Yeah, it's pretty funny. If you look at my Ello friends, it's almost a carbon copy of my initial friends on Twitter eight years ago.

Almost identical. So to answer Mac's question, we don't really know. Yeah, we don't know. And actually throwing out any ideas about what it would be would just be pissing in the wind. Yeah, I really do. My personal thought is the next evolution in social media is going to involve an evolution in the actual technology that we're using.

It's when we get past the iPhone being just a better, faster version of the iPhone. When we get to something like a Google Glass or some sort of new actual physical technology that we're using will lead to the next leap in social media. I don't think we're going to see anything until something like that happens.

There's only so much you can do with what we've got right now.

In the news. Very big bit of disturbing news came out this week. Uh-huh. Yahoo is closing its directory. No, I thought this might have something to do with ISIS. No, just Yahoo. Okay.

Just Yahoo. Closing the 20-year-old directory that, you know, started its fame. I do remember that well. I remember submitting sites to it, figuring out what categories to put things into. Oh, good stuff. Yeah. Dealing with the reviewers and sometimes getting really nice feedback from them.

Yeah, yeah, I do. That's a bit sad it's going away. Yeah, now... I mean, granted, I don't think anybody uses it. No, but wasn't the promise of the internet, like, that we would have everything forever because storage is cheap and all it is is just data sitting on a hard drive with a server in front of it?

Why are they taking it, you know, why are they dismantling this? Is it going to be in archives.org? Maybe. Maybe, yeah. Here's the thing. In the future, what I found that's really disturbing about archive.org is they respect the robots.txt for the current owner. So if you lost a domain or sold a domain, the stuff that you did way back when isn't accessible anymore.

That's kind of bullshit. It is because, like, all the stuff that I did with Spew way back in the day that for a time I could get to, like, in between owners, they turned off the nofollow and I could go back and I did screen grabs of everything just so I had them. But now I go back and you can't get to it anymore.

Well, that's a shame. I even wrote a few articles for you on that. Yes, you did. As flood. Yes, that's right. Back in the old days. Well, see, sometimes it's good that things go away. No, see, I just, I mean, it just feels like we're kind of dismantling our own library of Alexandria for no reason.

Just to maybe save a few bucks on a server or whatever. It's like, let's keep this stuff up. This is our history on the internet. Why would you take it down? I agree 100%. I don't know why they're taking it down. I mean... Look at GeoCities. Where'd that go? I think we've established that Yahoo has absolutely no idea what they're doing at the moment.

So this is not surprising, but it is sad. So I'd like to personally state to Yahoo, please keep this. Don't get rid of it. That's dumb. It's cute. It's clever. I'm sure nobody ever uses it. But hell, as soon as I saw this article, I went and took a look at it and I was like, oh. Yeah, it's part of our history.

I agree. Oh, well. Damn it, damn it. Now I can't, like, go and drill down into Venice, California, web design and tech companies and see all the other companies that were there that have failed and I'm still here. You see? Exactly. Exactly.

So speaking of failing, I ran across an article about the Amazon Fire phone, which I almost forgot that they even did and why it failed. And it was an interesting read because there was a big, Amazon really basically gave these things away. Well, they were 200 bucks to begin with and now they're 99 cents.

99 cents. I might get one for 99 cents. Well, that's the good deal, though. If you get one of the phones, I think you still have to get a contract with it. But if you can buy the phone for 99 cents, you get a free year of Amazon Prime. So, you know, if you've got an Amazon family plan, I mean, an AT&T family plan, since AT&T is the exclusive carrier of the Amazon Fire phone and you don't have Prime, you could probably get Prime for 99 cents and then just tack on, like, a $5 charge for the phone every month

and you'd still come out ahead, maybe. Just saying. Yeah. Hey, we just saved you some money, people. Go do that. That's awesome. You can get a free Amazon Prime thing for a year. Just so the article basically just states that the phone was too late, the design wasn't innovative, and it was basically a boring phone with a buy button.

Yeah, I failed on every account. So, there you go. I never even thought about doing it. Do they have a tablet as well? I can't even remember. Did they do it? Well, yeah, the Kindle Fires. Well, the Kindle Fires, that's right, which I also don't have. Yeah, they were running at, like, 0.4% of the tablet market, I believe.

Yeah, I don't think that'll be around for too much longer. Oh, well. Yeah. Somebody has peed on the campfire. That is true. Also ran across an article in the Washington Post about, we've talked a lot about music on this show because that's the industry in which I work. We've all kind of established the fact that streaming is basically the only model that's left.

Nobody is buying things on iTunes anymore. You know, Tom York can do whatever the hell he wants on BitTorrent and you can get your MP3s. But the reality is everybody that is actually listening to music is streaming it, either via YouTube or any of the services like Spotify, Rdio, Beats, et cetera, et cetera.

The problem, and as this article gets into, is that there is no money in it. There's not money that's trickling down to the artists. There's not money that's even going to these companies that are doing the streaming. It is basically a black hole of pricing. Yeah. There's too many hands in the pie.

And with the minuscule amount that you pay every month, it's just there's not enough to spread around. And I like this article because it does break down what the CD sales were, how far they've fallen. Yeah. And, you know, where the industry is losing money, where it's been the past couple of years, where it's plateaued.

So there's actual numbers in here that kind of drive home how bad it is for the music industry. Yeah. And if you want to tell me that there's an upswing in vinyl, then no. No, I'm sick of people doing that argument, too. It's such a niche market. And there's an upswing just because it had basically been completely killed off for a few years.

And then when all of a sudden, you know, there are a few a few artists started to do collectibles and things like that. And all of a sudden there was a plant again, actually making vinyl. Yes, there was a slight upswing, but it's not saving the music industry and neither is streaming. And that's what everybody's been trumpeting. Go sign up. Go pay for Spotify.

It's going to save the industry. Nope. Here's the numbers. It's not. We're still screwed. Yeah. Not for the not for what they're charging. I mean, the amount that they're charging is so ridiculously low. Yeah. $9.99 for all you can eat for a month. That's nothing. And a buck of that's going to Lady Gaga.

So where's everything else going? Yeah. They need to really, you know, revisit their pricing, even if it's, I mean, I would pay 20 bucks a month. I think 20 bucks is probably fair and would actually make quite a difference. But, you know, the problem is you've got a bunch of competitors.

You've got RDO, Beats, Spotify, and a few other people all competing. So nobody's going to take the leap and up their pricing because right now they want to get the user base. Well, I mean, doesn't this come down to ASCAP and BMI raising their rates for digital streaming royalties? If they did that, then the companies would be forced to raise their prices.

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So I think this, you know, if you look at it from just the economics perspective, those middlemen need to really kind of step up and take care of the artists and say, look, this is the minimum that we need. You're not paying us enough right now. You know, shit or get off the pot.

Give us some more money. Yeah, I agree. But we'll see what happens. It's just, yeah. It was nice to see the numbers. I mean, not nice because it made me cry. But yeah. Well, yeah. Those numbers have a trickle down effect directly to you. So you cannot buy tissues for your sniffly nose if we don't pay more for Spotify and RDO.

Exactly. Now we come to an interesting article where we are going to disagree. Oh, we're totally going to disagree on this. And I'm a little surprised that you're behind it. But bring us in. Okay. This is an article in Wired called, This Guy is Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months. It's about a guy named Pieter Levels.

I'm guessing it's Pieter. Yeah. P-I-E-T-E-R. And he's a 20-something-year-old. Shocking. Who, you know, has a business degree. He's European. And just decided, you know, look, I'm going to sell everything I own. And I'm going to be a digital nomad. And go around and I'm going to make stuff.

I like that. I'm with you so far. Okay. I think that this article was a terribly written hatchet piece. Which is the second one from Wired in the last two shows. The one they did on Mitnick was the same way. And I don't know what the hell is going on over at Wired.

But they need to get their ass, like, back in gear. Because these writers are putting way too much of their personal opinions in these pieces. It's not a news article. It's a personal opinion piece. So I think this guy is spot on. He's in his 20s.

He's making stuff. He's not taking investments. He's, you know, just living off the local cultures. And even he says that being a digital nomad should have a tax, you know, attached to it where we pay the local economies to let us work there. I'm with you.

I'm with you. Okay. So why don't you like this guy? You left out the part that he's dedicated to launching 12 startups in 12 months. Basically a startup per month. What's wrong with that? How about you focus on one good idea? Why not diversify and come up with what?

I mean, if he can finish one in a month and launch it. But then what? It runs by itself. Don't these things have to keep going? Don't you have to put time and effort into it? Don't you have to maintain your user base? Don't you have to maintain your product? Whatever it is. I don't understand the entire mindset of I'm just going to do this and then I'm moving on.

I don't see what's wrong with that because if they are self-sustaining businesses that don't require that much upkeep or if they require upkeep, do the upkeep while you're building the next one. Just don't build anything that requires massive upkeep. And then at the end of 12 months, figure out which ones work, which ones don't. Scrap the ones that don't work and then put your time into the ones that do.

I see this as the same Silicon Valley mentality of just shit it out and see what sticks. See, I look at this as the mentality that we had when we started where we would just make stuff and go on to the next thing. Make something else cool. Make something else cool.

He's just making cool stuff. And he seems like from reading his blog and reading stuff from the people that know him and have met him at conferences or whatnot, he seems like a good guy. I have zero problems with this guy. Actually, the only problem I have with it is I wish I was him.

I wish I was out doing that. I have no problems with him, everything that I've read about him. I like the fact that he's paying it back to the communities that he's working in, which is very not Silicon Valley. So he's taking a good approach with it. I just don't like the concept of I'm just going to create a bunch of different things and see what sticks.

It's like if you've got one idea that you really believe in, focus on that and make that work. But I see your points. And he's got some that are working and are profitable and don't require a lot of his time. Like his nomad list is – it's a list of places where you can go be a digital nomad, what the prices are.

And he's done a lot of the research himself. But he also takes recommendations from other digital nomads who want to put out information for the community. And he makes money off of that one by taking job listings, like automatic list jobs on there because they are a diversified team.

So that's where – I mean it's a perfect spot for them to advertise because it's like that's the only type of people that they hire. They don't have an office, so they only hire people who can work from anywhere. So he's – I think he's doing pretty smart and he's got – I mean he's got a business degree. So he kind of knows business at least.

Well, we'll see. I mean we'll see where he's at in 12 months after he's done all these. And then what's he going to do? That's what I'm more interested in. I just don't like these people that just run around and pfft, pfft, pfft, all over the place. But it doesn't affect you. No, it – no. It has absolutely no effect on you.

No, but if I took that approach, we wouldn't have a very interesting podcast because none of this stuff really affects me, but it still pisses me off. Tis true. Tis true. Yes. I do believe the sharing economy pisses you off too. You know, the sharing economy does piss me off. But full disclosure, I don't know if they do this where you are, but have you heard of Uber Fresh?

I have not. Okay. They do this thing now because they're trying to increase their market share where in certain markets, they basically will make a deal with a restaurant in the area and deliver lunch. And yesterday, they did Bay City's Italian Deli, which if you live here on the west side in Los Angeles, you'll know is one of the best sandwiches in the entire world.

They priced it at 12 bucks. The sandwich itself is $8.80-something cents plus tax. And as you also know if you are a fan of this place, the parking lot is a fucking nightmare and going into the place is a nightmare because so many people are there. So full disclosure, I was like, 12 bucks?

All right. And they're just going to bring it to me within five minutes. I ordered myself an Uber Fresh lunch the other day. Says the guy who hates the company. Says the guy who hates the company. Yes. Well, this is – Hypocrite. No, this is precisely why I despise the sharing economy because the players are basically doing a million things that are awesome except for how they basically run their businesses and they skirt all regulations, etc., etc., etc.

And you don't have the willpower to say no because there is a tasty sandwich on the other end. That sandwich is so good. So was it there in five minutes? It was. It was. They're basically just driving around the area with a bag full of fucking sandwiches and you order it and they come by and they pick it up and there you go.

Bob's your uncle. Well, the delivery areas are very specialized and localized like my friend of the show, Fergal, also wanted to get the sandwich after I told him about it but he had to walk two blocks to get it – to pick it up because they wouldn't deliver it the extra two blocks that his house is at. Yeah, well, we have an article from The Guardian, Don't Believe the Hype, the Sharing Economy, Massive Failing Economy.

This is something I do believe in. I think that we're being sold a false bill of goods. The promotion on the sharing economies, the Ubers, the Airbnbs, etc., basically make you sound like you can pick up – make a living with stuff that you already have around that's just not being used.

I don't think anybody can make a living doing this. I don't think anybody could make a living doing this unless they were doing it full time. Maybe then they can possibly get by. But what if you've got a family? You're not going to share out your car when you're driving your kids around.

You don't want a stranger in your car. All that sort of stuff. I don't know. And they're skirting all the regulations which still nobody seems to give a shit about except for me and Germany. Well, I give a shit about that too. They're there for a reason.

They're there for a reason. And you can't – I think to my mind, all these companies are basically getting a fair pass here to build their entire industry and take down the existing competitors without having to pay the fees, without paying the price.

Yeah, and what I really liked about this article because it was very well written and it also just – it talks about the haves and the have-nots and how it is kind of masking fundamental flaws in our current economy where people are basically living off the fruits of their overconsumption that put them in debt.

It's like, oh, I've got seven drills. I can rent one out to the neighbor and things like that. So if you're interested in this topic, go read the article. It's a bit of a long read but it is fascinating and I think fairly spot on. Yeah, I think it was a great article and maybe this will change some of the people's minds that I argue with about sharing economies on a daily basis.

I doubt it though because a tasty sandwich. So let's get to the meat. Okay. Speaking of tasty sandwiches. Retweet me or I might die. This is an article you sent me from Salon, of course. Yeah. But it's about a book from Michael Harris who wrote a – it's called The End of Absence, Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection, which I believe we have mentioned on the show.

But at that point, it hadn't come out yet. Oh, sorry. Shit. Totally. Part of the fun of doing this and this is actually perfect is that in the middle of you talking about this article, which we're going to talk about a lot about how we need to plug – totally disengage and plug out.

I got an email screaming at me from a client because I hadn't responded to them within five minutes and then I totally spaced out reading it and getting pissed off because – yeah. Anyways, let's get to it. Perfect segue. This is exactly what we're talking about. So, yes, the instant gratification is driving me insane and I've actually noticed that – let's talk about that specifically – with my clients over the past five years.

Our entire job used to be let's come up with a plan, let's figure out a timeline and let's implement. But because of the way that we've all become with instant posting on Facebook and Twitter and whatnot, every single one of my clients, as soon as they contact me about something, they want it done immediately.

There's no time to develop anything anymore. It's do it fucking now. Well, aren't you just sitting around with nothing to do, waiting for their call? Sometimes, yes. But that's fine. But, okay, say a client wants to do a mailer. Well, we have to design the mailer.

We have to double-check the mailer. We have to get all the links together. It's not, here you go, do it. Where is it? Yeah. I think, though, what this book is talking about, it goes into that. Yeah. But I think it's a societal problem now. Oh, totally. With the constant connection.

Yeah. That everybody thinks that everybody is always at the ready to do everything because everybody is always looking at their damn phones or their computers. Yeah. Well, I just think about when people text you or when somebody texts me, if they don't get a response from me immediately, they think something's wrong.

No, it's just I'm doing something or I'm not ready to respond or let me think about it. It is a societal thing. It's everybody just kind of expects what's immediate response to everything. Everybody's always online at all the times. We're all sitting there. We do a Facebook update and we wait and we wait and we wait.

And how come nobody's like this yet? Was it not funny? Was it not good? I don't get it. Yeah. Is there something going on in the world that I missed that everybody else is looking at that I'm not seeing? Yeah. So it's this constant connection, always on thing has been a it's been a slow snowball over the since the beginning of it.

And just me personally, I really I have to get this book. I just I haven't had time this week because I did read another book that we'll we'll talk about in at the library that ties into this very thing. But I'm really consciously trying to step back now because you can't you can't have long form thoughts.

You can't just sit and mull something over and, you know, let your brain gestate on it and come up with new ideas. Everything has to happen at the speed of a like. Yeah, no, I agree. And I've been actually stepping back a little bit as well because it's not it's not even just the long form thoughts.

It's just I felt that it was starting to become a need every time like I even got somewhere that I would whip out my phone and I would check in on what used to be foursquare then became swarm. And that's when I finally checked out of that completely. But it was and it's such a relief to not have that habit anymore and to not have that.

It started to create almost a feeling like I have to check in. So my friends know where I am. But my friends don't need to know where I am. If they want to know where I am, I'll tell them because I'd like them to meet me there or they can text me and find out and ask me where I'm at. Absolutely. It's narcissistic.

It's because it's for you. It's not for them. It's for you. It's your need to connect with them by by checking in. It's like, hey, I'm here. You know, well, the insidious thing is it's not even it didn't even it wasn't even for me anymore and it wasn't even narcissistic anymore. It was such an ingrained habit.

And that's where it gets really scary when these things just become habits that we don't even think about anymore. And all of a sudden, we're just sucked into this gigantic machine. That's one of the crazy points of the book is he talks about it like we are we're breeding technology that is becoming more and more addictive.

And and being able to pull away from it is getting harder and harder because we are getting better at making this stuff like physically addictive. Yeah, well, we were gamifying absolutely everything, which I you and I have thought about because you love gamification and I find it disturbing.

Are you sure you're talking to the right guy? Well, you well, you get caught up in gamification. How about that? I do, but I make fun of it a hell of a lot. That's true. I really don't need a badge for a cheese sandwich. But you well, hold on a second. When you upgraded to iOS and you got upset that you had lost all your badges.

I was I was being a smart ass. OK, I didn't care about my badge. I thought you were actually upset about it. Oh, God, no. But some people are every time every time you upgrade Audible, it dumps your badges. So I'm I'm back at noob again. Yeah, I don't really care about that. So, yeah, a lot of people do.

They actually do. Well, a lot of people really do. And they get really upset. A lot of people base their lives around and their sense of self-worth and their sense of who they are as a person. Now around these totally random things that don't really matter. It's all about that.

It's like if I I mean, I know people that actively watch people as they, you know, did somebody on Twitter unfollow me? Why? Well, who cares? Yeah, because you were boring, probably. Yeah. Or they had too many. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Because your life isn't Twitter. It's not. It's it's your friends and it's your it's your real social network and meat space. So I'm reading this other book right now called On Combat, which I mentioned before. There's an interesting parallel with modern warfare and cell phone use.

OK, stick with stick with me for a second. OK. In the old days, combat was, you know, six or seven hour battles. But, you know, usually during the day. And it wasn't a always on constant barrage of fighting. Yeah. So at the end of the day, at the end of the battles, the soldiers would decompress, sit around the campfire and in basically, you know, debrief each other, just have emotional dumps.

Right. That got them ready to fight the next day. So when we moved into this always on combat in current warfares, that's when instances of PTSD basically skyrocketed because there wasn't that decompression time.

And I think now this is what we're running into. It's it's cell phone PTSD because we always have the goddamn things and they're always beeping. They're always buzzing. You can't get five minutes of peace. No, I really can't anymore. And it was starting to frighten me when, you know, I would be done with the workday and it would be, you know, nighttime and have some dinner and I'm sitting on the couch and I'm having a glass of wine.

And I realize I have my phone with me and I just can't let it go anymore. And that's just not right. Mine's on my pillow when I go to bed. Okay. So I totally get it. And it is scary. So I took a step.

I took a step. I still have my iPhone five, my five S, but for when I leave the house now, when I go somewhere, I got a dumb phone. Okay. And a map book because I'll talk about maps when we get to have the library.

But, but, but what about your Waze badges? I don't need no stinking Wazes. And, you know, if, if there's an emergency, someone can call me. I can still get a text, which sucks. But if I have to reply, I got to use those nine digit keys. Well, the one, the one bit of all of this that I, I'm totally happy keeping is texting.

I love texting over phone calls. It's so much more efficient. And so I'm good with the text. When I'm out, I don't want to be bothered because if I was at home and I was working, that's when you can bother me. But when I'm out and about doing stuff, seeing family, going to a show, leave me the hell alone.

And this way it gives me, you know, deniability. I'm like, look, I was, I didn't get your text. Or I, I mean, you, if you sent me an, uh, an I chat, whatever, it's not going to come to my cell phone. Right. You know, I've got the bat phone now. That's it. If there's emergency, you call me on the bat phone.

Otherwise I'll talk to you later. And here's, here's the kicker. I found my Motorola Razr. I got one in the box. New. Wow. It does have, uh, I think it's tie, tie numbering on the number keys next to the numbers, um, next to the Arabic numbers.

But I got a brand spanking new Motorola Razr V3 and I'm going over to the, uh, AT&T store when we're done to get my SIM card. Nice. Well, that's, that's an impressive step. Um, I kind of want to go the other way in that instead of training myself, I want to train other people.

I want them to understand that I, things aren't immediate anymore with me. Um, I don't mind, you know, with, when I'm with my friends and my family, I'll just not check my phone. I'll just not look at it. That's fine with me. And what I need to do is train the people that text me to realize that, yeah, sometimes I'll write you back right away, but sometimes I won't.

And, and I want that to kind of become a norm for people to understand when they interact with me and that I will accept that behavior in them as well. You do not need to get back to me right away. Get back to me when you feel like it, when it's convenient. See, I've, I've tried that and it doesn't work because of the things we've talked about with ego depletion and you only have so much cognitive, you know, juice every day.

By the end of the day, I'm so tired from writing code or talking to people or whatnot. I am in a place where I will just make bad decisions, which means I'll pull out my phone and I'll look at Facebook or I'll play a game of words with friends or whatnot. Right. I don't have, I, I know myself well enough now to know that I just don't have the juice at the end of the day to be diligent about it.

And I will just pull it out and say, ah, it's just once. No, I got putting it away, you know? Yeah, and it's, it's such a weird thing because it is such a, it's an endorphin rush, I guess, the social media and, and all of that sort of things. Um, you know, and I'm certainly no, nobody does sit here and cast a bony finger of shame at people because I do my, I update Facebook all the frigging time.

What I'm trying to do is scale it back because I do find it to be a vapid experience. It's, you get the indoor, it's like, it's like drinking Coke instead of water. You're, you're getting a rush, but it's actually kind of bad for you. And you feel a little shitty after. Yeah, absolutely.

I think that's a perfect analogy. Yeah, because I, what I've, you know, initially, oh, social media, this is great. Oh, I love tweeting. Ooh, I got 10,000 likes on my Facebook status. Woohoo. I'm awesome. But I, I don't find that for a while there, there were deeper interactions happening.

And I certainly love social media for the fact that I'm able to stay reasonably in touch with people that I probably just don't see anymore because of geography or not working with them anymore, whatever. That part's great, but I don't see real discussion happening much anymore.

It did for a while, but I guess it just kind of falls by the wayside because it's, it's hard and it's easier to do in person. Um, but when social media just generally seems to fall into one of two types these days, it's a, you see insane, ridiculous support for everything involving tons of love and blah, blah, blah.

When somebody posts something or there's the, just, I'm going to crap on you because I'm your friend. That that's all I see on social media anymore. It's either yay. Go good for you. Or Hey, fucked hard. That's stupid. I think you've summed it up concisely. So that that's, and that doesn't, it doesn't do anything for me.

It doesn't fill, you know, it doesn't fill any void. It doesn't make me feel better. It doesn't make me feel worse. It just kind of, it's, it's a nothing. Social media has become a nothing for me. And I think it actually actively, well, there's been a ton of studies saying that all this stuff actually depresses us.

Yeah. When we see other people's photographs of them having a good time, it makes us feel shitty about ourselves. Yeah. And we, we, we know that from science. And I feel like there's just a pressure to have this curated life as well, where you're trying to, to portray the best aspect of yourself, whatever that may be. For me, you know, I think you and I both go out of our way to kind of be grumpy on our updates because that's what we do.

And that's the persona that we're taking on. But obviously we're not grumpy all the time. Speak for yourself. Well, okay. You might be. I think this comes back to, you know, an unexamined life is not worth living quote that people just took and ran with. And that's fine.

Sometimes examine the life yourself internally. You don't have to put it out there in, in 140 characters and, you know, crap on everybody's day because you're having a great time. Go have a great time. Enjoy it. And then at the end of the day, turn your phone off and don't tell anybody unless you're sitting around for coffee or chatting on the phone.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And there's, there's just so many things that don't translate when you're not in, in physical proximity with somebody. There's, I mean, not, I'm not even just talking about like sarcasm, which obviously doesn't translate well, but things like guys, guys crap on each other.

That's how we show friendship. And when we're sitting at a bar together and, you know, I make some joke and you turn around and call me a dipshit, it's funny and it means something. But when I post a Facebook status update and then you just respond with a comment, you fucking dipshit, it's not, it doesn't have the same thing.

It feels bad as opposed to, you know, when you're with that person, it's completely different. And so I'm totally just saying spend more time with people and less time online. Yeah. Smack talking does not translate. No, it doesn't. It's actually, it, it, it's frustrating and it's annoying, but when you're, when you're with that person, it's awesome.

I mean, and it, and it builds the friendship, there's so many things like that, that online just, it doesn't, it, it tears down. It doesn't build up. I want, I 1000% agree. Cool. So stop doing that on my fucking statuses. You douche. Get a fucking sense of humor.

Security. My body is starting to deteriorate so rapidly. I feel like I might have viruses or I need to go to, do I have Ebola.com. Hey man, uh, pandemics for fun and profit. That's my whole shtick now. It's a good stuff, but, uh, okay.

Mike cold is just getting horrible, but let's get into this. Jason, tell us about all the other crappy viruses that happened in, in non meat space. Okay. Well, well, we've talked about the home Depot hack and now it's turning into a criminal negligence scandal. Stu Sourman over at a cyber heist news.

We love those guys, uh, he posted a, basically a rundown on what's going on with home Depot and they are, uh, basically criminally negligent in how they handled their security. So this is, this is a story that will be going on for a while now and somebody is going to be losing their jobs and probably a lot of money.

Yeah. We said from day one that home Depot was not handling it. Right. And, uh, now it's real bad. Also in hacks of the week, JP Morgan chase has come out with a statement that, uh, 76 million households have been affected by a compromise this summer. And which basically puts it as the largest, uh, intrusion of all time.

That is, yeah, that's bad. I actually have a chase credit card and they basically told me they are sending me a new one, but they blamed home Depot for it, but it might also be their own issues. Could be, could be, uh, cloud flare, which is a very popular CDN service for WordPress users has come out with a universal SSL, which means you can now for free on their site, basically make your site secure, which is pretty cool.

That is pretty cool. You don't even have to pay the 20 bucks that would actually, everybody should have been doing anyways. So now it's free. Everyone, no excuses, no excuses, unless you don't run WordPress, then just go buy a certificate. Uh, George Clooney got married and while he was having his wedding extravaganza, he just gave everybody burner phones so their phones wouldn't get hacked.

So they wouldn't get hacked. Interesting. Yeah. You know, so the, you know, there, cause they sold the phone. So he didn't want everybody's devices being there taking pictures that could then get hacked and be scooped. Yeah. So he just said, here's your, here's your burner phone. This will get you into the different areas of the wedding.

Cause everyone has a unique code. I just thought that was a pretty good idea. That is pretty damn cool. I guess my invite was lost in the mail though. I know. I know. Damn George. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's cool to see technology used that way. I mean, that's, that's a bunch of, you know, we've, we've always had ideas about doing something like that, like at different, you know, raves and things like that, you know, coding and IDs and blah, you can get into here with that.

And that's pretty awesome. Yeah. Hacker conventions have that. They've got all the crazy RFID badges and stuff, but anyway, good for George. Yeah. Congratulations, George. Moving right along. Apple has released a patch for shell shock for OS 10, but you have to go download it manually.

It's not part of the software update. I was a little surprised that Apple has not just done an update yet. Yeah. I mean, for that, I don't think it's a big issue on max because they're generally not servers. So if you're running a server, you need to go get it for the most part, they're, you know, general machines.

Um, and speaking of Mac OS 10, there's a new botnet for the eye worm malware that is turning, well, it has turned 17,000 to max into a part of a botnet, which is a very minuscule, uh, you know, subset of how many max are out there, but it is out there.

So, uh, if you have Java turned on, on your Mac, turn it off. Well, and again, it's, it's more, it's, this is becoming more and more prevalent. We're seeing a lot more of these things happening to max now. So max are going to have to be, Mac users are going to be just have to be just as aware of all this stuff as PC users have been for years.

Yeah. As, as their market share grows, the, the, uh, attack surface also grows. So we will find more of them. Yep. And one website that I found this week that, uh, my friend John Chevron passed along was the WP scan vulnerability database. So I really wish you wouldn't have passed that on to me.

I know. Cause I, as soon as I opened it up, I'm like word fence, really shit. I know you gotta check, you gotta keep your stuff up to date and check this daily. If you run a WordPress site to see if you are asked to the wind and you most likely are exactly at some point you will be, even this isn't, this is not an, if this is a, when even when we do all this stuff, all of these plugins that we use and we've talked about on here, it's still, you got to keep them updated.

You got to be vigilant. I mean, I'm to the point where I'm basically logging into every single one of my WordPress sites every day and making sure everything's up to date and checking everything. Well, the plugin that we talked about before the brute protect, you can set it to update your plugins automatically if you'd like. Yes, that is nice.

But for some of them, you don't want them to update automatically because they will break all the customizations that you did to them. Exactly. Oh, WordPress. Yeah. That's the fun part. And this just came out. A researcher has taken the wraps off two undisclosed shell shock vulnerabilities in bash. So the story is not over.

We get to go update some more soon. Yeah. Good times. Good times. At the library. I've got two books this week. Woohoo. Yeah. A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block.

Now, this is a kind of a private detective noir fiction book that came out in the early 90s. So it's a fun read because all of the tech that he's using is 90s tech, like landlines and things like that. Right. It's a really cool read.

It's apparently part of a series, but I picked this one up due to the recommendations of Dr. Teeter and his lovely girlfriend, Chen. And they knocked it out of the park on this one, too. It's a fun read. If you like detective fiction, definitely pick it up. Okay.

Now, the next one, I got the glass cage. Automation in us by Nicholas Carr. Basically, we're screwed. I mean, automation is causing us to lose so many skills that we used to have because we would do things.

Now, we don't do those things. Everything is automated and we're losing lots and lots and lots of little skills that add up to big things. Well, yeah, I mean, this is this is an issue that we touch on all the time on this podcast. And we are definitely losing our abilities to do things.

But we're not like it's insane. Like we're talking about doing the Internet of Things like we talked about just a little bit earlier. But nobody understands how any of this works. So they break it. Now, this book will keep you up at night. It is terrifying, especially when he's talking about airlines.

And the average pilot now has his hands on the yoke for about four minutes of the flight. Yeah, but OK. But safety records have gone up. But the FAA is now telling pilots this is this came out last week that they're saying you need to fly the plane more because when something goes wrong, you don't know what to do.

You don't have the training anymore and you don't have the muscle memory. So when when the you know, you get do run through the flock of birds and you know, the 28 year old pilot is there. He's not the scully. He doesn't have the you know, the 30 years of experience, right? He's like, oh, they taught me to jiggle the joystick and press a couple of buttons.

He's like, what do I do? And there's there's so many examples in this book. It's it's a not that long of a book, but it will keep you up at night. And the one thing that really was interesting was what GPS has done to us as far as just just the cognitive abilities of wayfaring.

Right. And losing that. And, you know, that's why I bought a map book. I bought a map book because this book scared the crap out of me enough to say I'm not using Google Maps for my daily commutes or whenever I go anywhere. It's like, get the map out. Right. Are we going? And just, you know, work that muscle.

Yeah. Knowing your city and knowing where you're going and all that sort of stuff and how to navigate. Yeah. Most people don't do that anymore. I mean, I was just as you were talking about this, I was thinking back to computers, what you and I grew up with. I used to build my own. I knew how computers worked.

When you buy a laptop now, you can't even open the damn things up most of the time. And you have no idea. It's like a little door for the RAM. Yeah. There's a door for the RAM. But I mean, I used to build them custom. I used to order the parts. I used to put them in. I used to screw them in. I'd put in the power supply and connect things to the power supply.

The entire generation coming up now has no idea how any of this stuff works. And it's all being built in a way that you can't mess around with it anymore. Cars are the same way these days. Yeah. It starts off in talking about, you know, the joys of driving a stick shift and then going to an automatic.

You know, something as little as that is outlined in the book. And he's got a lot of science and a lot of history behind the history of automation. And he talks about the Luddites and what they actually did and what they were about. And it's a great read. Like I said, it's scary. But for me, at least, it's getting me off my ass.

And I also love paper maps. I'm a map nerd. So, you know, looking at Google Maps all the time is not nearly as fun as unfolding the map and, you know, cue the cliches of the girl next to you going, do you know where you're going? Why don't you pull over? Because it's fun trying to find your way around. That's why.

Yeah, it can be. Definitely. Actually, here's a startup idea. I'm just going to toss this one out there for free because I actually see this becoming a viable industry pretty soon. Basically, just a whole course is teaching how things actually work again. So we know and we understand because nobody has that anymore.

Learn to use a compass 101. Yeah, all that sort of stuff. I mean, everything soup to nuts because nobody really knows how what they do works anymore. You know, I think a really good blog to read if you're into that kind of thing, they cover this in, you know, fits and starts, but they do cover some of this old school stuff is theartofmanliness.com.

I know it sounds silly, but they cover a lot of those basic, you know, life skills. They had a really good, it was like a 21 part series on, you know, what to do, how to be a man when you leave home and like just all the basic skills, how to change a tire, how to iron a shirt, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Because now it's like, how do I change a tire? Oh, I dial triple A, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's another one of those things. So I see there being a pushback to this and people actually, well, I think people should and have to go back and learn these things instead of just relying on the technology that we built for ourselves to do it. Yeah, I don't want to be like a doomsday prepper, but I think a renaissance in actual useful physical skills is a good thing.

I agree. Let's bring it back. I agree. I'm 100% behind you on that one. I have still not finished The Handmaid's Tale as my body is rapidly decomposing as I talk. I have a feeling I'll be spending the weekend doing nothing but reading, so I will get through that. I'm still working on it.

It's really good, but like I said, it's got a very feminine vibe to it. So feminine that I felt the need to pick up another book. So I'm reading these at the same time. I got the exact opposite. I got Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, which I had never read before and I'm really enjoying. It's very manly.

Rah, rah, rah. Oh yeah, you have to keep your bro levels up. Exactly. The Handmaid's Tale was like turning me into a total chick, so I got a little bro going on now as well. So I will have my reviews of both of those next week. Well, Kitchen Confidential is an amazing book. I am enjoying it. And I think he wrote it when he was our age or maybe even older.

I don't think he didn't, he didn't get famous until he was in his early forties. Part of my job is running social media for some of my clients.

And I got an interesting email a couple of days ago from Facebook inviting me to Mentions for one client in particular. Facebook Mentions is a new standalone app for your Facebook pages brought to you by Facebook. I think I just said Facebook 18 times. It doesn't, I was a little surprised I installed it to check it out.

I totally thought that this would just be a vehicle for trying to push you into doing promoted ads or posts for your clients. You can't even access that through this app right now. I'm sure they'll get there with it. Mostly it just gets you to follow comparable pages to see how your stats match up compared to theirs. You can post to the page from within the app.

You can see mentions, notifications, et cetera. It's pretty useless, really. You can do all of this just from the Facebook app itself or from the old pages app. So I don't really understand where they're going with this. Wait, there's no boost button that just takes all the money in your wallet? No, no. I thought that's all the app would be.

I thought it'd be a big red button. Oh, it's because the Facebook boost app will be coming out next week because they have to split everything out into its own damn app now. I know. It's insane. But so I, you know, if you're a hardcore pages guy and you're doing a bunch for a bunch of different clients, you might want to take a look.

I personally, if they put some more time and effort into it and they build it out, okay, maybe as it is right now, I don't see the point. Get the app or maybe find a new career. Or that, yes. And then the second thing I ran across this week is I saw it as a promoted post on Facebook.

It was interesting enough. But I took a look at the site. It intrigued me. It's called Navdi, navdi.com. It is a, basically a heads up navigational device for your car, which is completely against everything we just talked about. It is a HUD for your car. And the first thing they say is, check out Navdi's rad video.

What happened to looking at the fucking road? Well, the nice part about this is people are doing this anyways with Waze and things like that. They're looking down at the passenger seat at their phones. This pops it up just like on all the old sci-fi movies that we used to see about when cars of the future would be going, there'd be, you know, heads up displays.

And this is the first one I've seen that actually seems to work really well, according to the photos in the video. This is something I would check out. See, you like to speak well of the Germans for being forward thinking. And you know what? They don't have even cup holders in their cars. So putting this gadget right on the dashboard in front of you so when you get rear-ended, it's basically a guillotine and cuts your head off.

I think that's a fine use for it. It is a new plastic heads up, heads off gadget. All right. We are going full Luddite now. Moron of the week. Apparently, Lena Dunham's, well, her people maybe, who knows, her publishing, doesn't pay attention to the internets at all and has never heard of Amanda Palmer.

But apparently, she decided she was going to go on her book tour with her thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of promotional money and her millions of dollars of personal money and not pay her warm-up backs. Because it's an opportunity for them to promote themselves. Yep, yep.

This has all happened before. It will all happen again. Yeah. And people got really pissed off about it because we have this thing called the internet. And people voiced their concerns about it. And then all of a sudden, she, Mia Culplett, and of course, she's going to pay them because she's always supported people and performers. Okay, quick question.

Who's Lena Dunham? You are probably completely and totally unaware of her. She does the TV show Girls that's on HBO that's extremely popular. She's been widely hailed as the voice of her generation. And she's very annoying. That would be why I don't know who she is.

Thank you for the update. No problem. She's much younger than us. And she got a $3 million book deal. And everybody went crazy about that, too. Because it's like, why the fuck is she getting $3 million to write a book? Apparently, the book is not all that good, reviews so far. I have no issues with her except for this.

This is the first thing that she's ever done that's actually pissed me off. It's hard to tell if it's her or her people. It is hard to tell if it's her or her people. But at the end of the day, it's her brand. And she would have had to sign off on it. Well, she should have read the fine print. Yes. She should have read the fine print.

And always, always pay your warm-ups. And if you're a celebrity out there now with gazillions of dollars, there's a site called celebritynetworth.com. So anytime that you're screwing other people, we can just look up and see how much money you have and why you shouldn't be doing that. Ah, the internet.

Ah, the internet. And speaking of the internet, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, Tom York released his newest album in yet another interesting way. I don't think that Tom York is a moron. I actually, OK Computer is probably one of my top five records of all time. I have not really cared for his solo work or Radiohead in general for a few albums.

And then, you know, they did the innovative, let's give it away for free or whatever people want to pay for it with, I believe it was in Rainbows, the album. This time, he released a solo album on BitTorrent, where you could pay $6 to get the torrent. Or you could just get the torrent.

OK. Yeah. A friend of the show, Miller, wrote me immediately and asked me if I had paid for the torrent. I said no, because I don't actually even care if I hear Tom York's new solo album. And he sent it to me as a test. And I was like, well, why are we testing this?

It's torrent. Of course it'll work. He's like, oh, I just wanted to be sure. Yeah, that's the thing. It's just, it's a torrent. Yeah, there's no single use. There's no encoding. There's no nothing. According to Pitchfork.com, it's been downloaded more than 1 million times, but nobody, they have not released any information as to how many people paid for the torrent.

Interesting. Yeah. So we'll follow up on that. It's yet another misguided attempt at being new and edgy that screws everybody else. It's like saying I'm going to release something on Gopher to be edgy. It's like it's BitTorrent. It's been around for years. We use it to steal shit. Exactly.

Hey, man, we're taking it back for the people. Fucking morons. The web's not dead. Since we're going full Luddite this episode, I did find something kind of interesting and intriguing.

A moral and physical thermometer. There's a link in the show notes. It's an illustrated chart done by John Coakley Letsem in basically the probably 1800 or so. A committed temperance advocate and it's an awesome old school graphics of what you should not do and we all do on a regular basis, including getting very drunk and then there's falling out of a chair, there's punching a friend and it's a funny little thermometer and a cool little, a lot.

The illustrations are just classic, really funny. Yeah. Been there, done that on pretty much all of them. Me too. So temperance for us. The second thing I ran across, which involves no temperance whatsoever, it's from Pillsbury.com and it kind of did the rounds for a bit on the nets, which is how I found it.

Oh yes, we did. Pepperoni pizza cake. Now call me American, but damn, this looks delicious. It looks delicious. I want one. Even one slice would probably kill you. Oh, absolutely.

It's a four layer pepperoni pizza. It is stunning. I'm so starving right now. I know. I'm going to go order a pizza after this because this just looks delicious. It is amazing. Closing shout outs. You teased this a little bit in one of the other sections, but I would just like to talk about pandemics for fun and profit.

I don't know where the article went. I've lost it in the history of time, much like Yahoo has lost their directory. Right. I used to have a blog post up on my site at jpd.me called Pandemics for Fun and Profit, and I need to find it because it's kind of, you know, shoehorns this whole thing.

In the old days, when H1N1 was going around, I built a little site called DoIHavePigFlu.com that went viral, as it were, because it's a virus. And over the course of four days, four days, I made $4,500 from Amazon referrals for people buying the masks.

Unfortunately for, you know, Ebola, there's really not much mask use going on for that, I guess, because it's not airborne. You have to get licked by somebody or, you know, touch their spooge. Ah, but people are stupid. They don't know that. Ah, good point. So, I have created DoIHaveEbola.com, and I use science to figure out if you have Ebola or not.

I love it. No! And if you do click on the no, you will go to a page that will give you the option to buy a fantastic book called The Hot Zone, which is the true story of the origins of the Ebola virus.

And surprisingly, it actually wasn't a bad movie either. I actually never saw the movie. Oh, really? You should throw that in your list, man. Okay, I'll check that out. It wasn't bad. It scared the crap out of me. So, if you do like Grumpy Old Geeks, feel free to post this on your social networking goo-gahs and doodads, and help out the cause of pandemics for fun and profit.

I would personally appreciate it. All right. And I'm going to do my shout-outs for things that really have nothing to do with the Grumpy Old Geeks at all. This is all sports. I don't know when I became a big sports person, but it has happened. My shout-outs to the Dodgers, who play their first postseason game today.

Hope they go all the way. I do remember being at the World Series when I was a kid with my dad watching the Dodgers go along. So, there's a bit of nostalgia. And speaking of nostalgia, on Saturday, I will be going to see Landon Donovan play one of his very last games for U.S. men's soccer, catching the Galaxy against the Toronto FC.

So, it'll be fun. If anybody's at the game, I will be there. Give me a shout-out. Okay. Well, I guess I should throw in my sports-y bit then. I will be at Blitz Wrestling in Kankiki, Illinois, tomorrow. So, if you're in the neighborhood of Kankiki, Illinois, which I can guarantee that almost nobody that listens to this show hails from Kankiki, because it is kind of in the middle of nowhere, then come on out and say hi.

I'll be one of the guys with the camera up by the ring. Excellent. And, you know, give him a sleeper hold. Or some wrestling term. Dude, I'm just trying not to get kicked in the head. That's all I care about. I don't want to get kicked in the head. That's always a good thing to avoid. All right, Jason.

We'll have a good time this weekend. And assuming I'm not completely deadly sick, I'm hoping I will as well. Hey, do you have Ebola? No. Go get better, man. I'll talk to you next week. All right. Bye. Music for the Grumpy Old Geeks is provided by Among Us.

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Show notes for this episode can be found at GrumpyOldGeeks.com slash 78. Stay grumpy, my friends. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

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