84: No Talent Ass Clown

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 for blame. Let's get started. Hey Jason, how are you?

Well, considering we just spent half an hour trying to get something to fucking record, I could be better. We had a bit of technical difficulty trying to get the podcast up and running today. I have to say on the plus side, I felt like a complete utter idiot. I have a degree in audio engineering and all of a sudden I was completely unable to figure out audio routing.

But luckily, when I had you try it, it didn't work for you either. So it isn't us. This is the fun part of the computer world these days when things update without you even noticing. Some bit of the awesome chain of audio ridiculousness that we were using to create the best quality audio we could for this podcast updated and broke on us.

So we're back to the old school method, at least until we figure out which bit of the software is broken. Yeah, we need to fix this before next episode because we went back to Call Recorder, which is the industry standard for shitty audio podcasts. Yeah, so here we are. Anyways, at least we got it up and running. So we always have a backup. But listen to you people out there, things break a lot.

Usually as soon as you hit record. Yeah. So I got a little follow up from last week. We did. We did that little tear down on Brooklyn Vegan for stealing the photo from my good friend MXV and the internet shaming machine came through. He paid up. Oh, that's awesome. Good.

And he sent an apology letter, which was, you know, kind of kind of an apology letter. But hey, you know, the internet prevailed. It's the mea culpa after going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, I'll pay you. Exactly. It's like, I can't afford the $150, but I'll pay it because it was out of my control and blah, blah, blah. Whatever.

Yeah, whatever. And after thinking about it for about 10 minutes, I will be passing on the Amazon Echo. And why is that? Because it really is a creepy ass device and I don't want it listening to me all the time. See, that's what I said. But you were convinced that because it was going to the Amazon cloud, it was okay.

Well, I also wanted the nice Bluetooth speaker aspect of it, but you know what I'll just do? I'll use my Bluetooth speaker that I already bought. We'll go with that. Yes, you can use that as well. The other thing with the Echo is I just think it's damn ugly. You almost have to set it up as a centerpiece in your room for it to be really effective.

And it's just, it's like this 1980s stereo equipment, black solid cube. I just have it play the 2001 A Space Odyssey theme all the time. Yeah, really. They should have just squared it off because right now it's just a tube. Or, you know, gone like translucent or some sort, you know, take a page off of Apple.

They seem to know what they're doing. Yeah, something like that. Something like that. So I did get to listen to some Bauhaus. What'd you think? I liked it. Yeah, it's good stuff. Bauhaus unfairly gets painted with the goth forefathers brush when the music is actually a lot more interesting than that.

Yeah, and it was a crazy gray, starting to snowy day here, which was perfect for it. Yeah, it's perfect weather for that sort of stuff. It's actually finally cooling down in LA and it was cloudy all day yesterday and I was blasting the cure and it felt awesome. Yeah. I'm not looking forward to the snow.

Well, that's why I live here. So we were talking about how the ridiculousness of hashtags confounded you. Yes. I found one that confounded me. Okay. This AT&T hashtag X campaign to let people know that you're driving.

Well, they're not doing very great at awareness because I was not aware of it until you put it in the show notes, but it's stupid. I saw a commercial for it on TV and that's the only way I – I just missed the skip commercial button when I was watching something and it came up and I'm like, oh, that looks really stupid. Let's investigate.

So from the Ministry of Silly Walks, I guess the intent is to get people to use hashtag X when they're about to leave on a drive to let people know or to pause conversations as opposed to say if you're – this is stupid on so many levels. First off, they want you to use the hashtag X before you start to drive because you're obviously not supposed to text and drive, so don't use hashtag X while you're driving.

So if you're doing it before you drive, why can't you just text, hey, I'm about to start a drive, talk to you later? You don't need to do the brief hashtag X. Secondly, there are instructions on the site to create a shortcut on iOS, so you still have to press a couple buttons or text while you're doing it.

There's an Android app, I guess, that you can install, which silences incoming alerts, turns off text messages, and directs incoming calls to voicemail. Or you could just tell the person that you're about to drive, or you could just ignore them until you get to where you're going. Or you could just do what everybody else does and ignore all of this and just keep texting anyway.

So this is only really preaching to the converted, so this is just dumb. Yep, 1,000%. I really need to get a job, so I just do awareness campaigns. No, it's just wrong on every level. Just put your damn phone away while you're driving. Yeah, that's all you really need to do.

So let's follow up a little bit on the big Spotify taste-wide conversation we had last week. Right after we finished recording and put this out for the world to hear, Daniel Ek did a big blog post. He is the CEO of Spotify. It's basically damage control after Tay Swyip pulled her stuff and got a lot of press about how she didn't want her music on Spotify.

And he talks a lot about how he's still going to save the music industry, and there's over $2 billion that has been sent out to artists, etc., etc., which is not really true because the money goes to record labels, not to artists. And then it hits a whole other level of ass-hattery accounting before it ever gets to an artist.

It was actually – I mean, I liked his blog post. I liked what he was saying. I don't – he wants to do well, but I don't really know if that's true. It's obviously a good PR move for him to put that out there. You know, Spotify is all we got right now, so okay. Well, you got your RDO, too.

Yeah, you got your RDO, too, but Spotify is definitely leading the industry at the moment. So, yeah, he said that there's over $2 billion out there, and artists should be making money. This was quickly followed up by a TasteWise manager going, hold on a second. Where's all of our money that we should have been making then?

Because he's claiming that they've only made half a million dollars when doing the dubious numbers that Daniel Ek kind of somewhat brought to light. He figures they should have had at least $2 million from Spotify directly. So that's a significant shortfall. I'd say so. Yeah. So this is just going to be an ongoing spat.

Spotify is saying they're paying. Artists are saying, well, no, not really. From my personal perspective and the artists that I know, I know that they have made next to nothing off of Spotify, but they're also not getting TasteWise plays. My guess is that it's a more complicated story.

Spotify is probably paying out more money than the artists are claiming, but then, like I said, it goes through the machinations of the record industry, and the labels take their swift chunk out and hold back a lot of money. And so that finally drips out to an artist. We're edging towards some sort of clarity in terms of the finances of the music industry.

I would love one major artist of a TasteWise level, or at least close to it, to make a deal with their record label to just put all the cards on the table. Here's where the money goes. Here's how much we got from Spotify. Here's how much the label took. Here's how much went to management. Here's how much went to the artist.

You might as well be looking for a unicorn. That's never going to happen. Yeah, it's the ubercorn experience again. I know. And can we please, please stop calling our TasteWise? I thought we liked that last week. No, you like it. I mocked you. So, yeah, just one more quick thing on that.

I'm not going to talk too much about this because I think everybody should just go read the article. It's fairly well written. It's in the show notes. It's on Slate. In the music industry today, there's the 1% and there's everybody else. We talk a lot about the 1% and the declining middle class here a lot. And we've known this has been going on in the music industry for ages.

And it's a good breakdown of basically there's the handful of artists that sell all the music that's being sold and make all the money. And then there's every other artist that is basically not able to pay rent anymore. Okay. I will check that out. And a follow-up to our middle class, you know, dissolving rapidly.

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post that breaks down on an hourly basis by every county in the United States what your hourly rate is to get a one-bedroom apartment. Wow. It's probably not good news, I'd imagine. For me, I've got to make $16 an hour to get a one-bedroom where I'm at.

For you, I think it's $22. And in San Francisco, it's $30 an hour. Yep. That's a significant amount of money. Well, it's far, far above the minimum wage. Yes, it is. So that's kind of why they brought it to light. Yeah. Good times.

Good times. Comment of the Week. We have a couple of comments of the week. I'd like to thank Mex underscore IT Guy for going to iTunes and giving us a five-star rating there and dropping a comment. Please do so yourselves if you enjoy the show.

We really do appreciate it. The Best Geek Entertainment by Mex underscore IT Guy. Love your show. I can relate to your stories of customers complaining and not understanding that they are the problem. Anyhow, can't wait for each new episode to be available. Greetings from Mexico. Aloha, man. Aloha?

So, you know, let me make a joke here. Yeah. Thank you very much. You know, I try not to talk too much about that stuff because I don't like to rail into my clients while they're ongoing. But, yes, there is an awful lot of people just – I've complained about this to friends a lot of time.

It's the Facebook and Twitter-ification of tech where everybody kind of thinks they know what they're doing because they know how to make a post now. But then they don't really understand anything deeper than that, but they think they understand. And it's an incredibly frustrating experience. And if you would like a little more insight into some of my recent client work, check out Vapid, a short podcast that I do daily where I have been chronicling a freeloader and non-payment client.

And I actually – I really enjoyed that because I deal with that a lot and maybe at some point we'll talk about that in greater detail. But, yes, there is no worse thing in the world that you could ever do than do what you do for a living as a favor to friends and family. Oh, yes.

Okay, moving on here. Mighty Nintendo says a worthy podcast. Yep, it's probably the best tech podcast. Well, thank you, Mighty Nintendo. That is mighty nice of you. Yes, it is. And we got another five-star rating by Diva Bird, who I'm assuming is female. Yay, we love it when women listen to us too.

I don't miss an episode. Love this podcast. Thank you, Diva Bird. And thank you all for all the five-star ratings. We really appreciate it. We really do. We're actually seeing a bump in our numbers and that helps us a lot. Thank you. So we have a bit of feedback from the forum on the website from Shane Simmons.

Shane writes, I don't remember if you covered this on your podcast, but you guys talking about Bauhaus and Love and Rockets reminded me of this. What the hell was Megadeth Arizona by Robin Sloan Bechtel. It's on medium. I like now that the fans are writing it and actually putting sigh medium in our feedback.

Yes, that is funny. So we were going to cover this on the show and we actually pulled it, but now that you've brought it up, we need to clarify it. Yes, we both know Robin rather well from back in the day. I actually have had no contact with her for probably about 10 years now.

So, yeah, this article basically talks about the inception of the website Megadeth Arizona, which was one of the first sites that got me excited about programming because they had the cool postcard engine. Yes, the postcard engine that we put to good use for many years after that. Well, I never got Fez's one.

Fez is the guy that wrote it and who we worked with at BoxStop when we first got together and worked together. So, yeah, within two years of seeing it, we were working with the guys that did the cool programming on it who were never mentioned in the medium article. Oh, wait. Robin would never not give people credit for work.

Oh, God, no. That sounds so unlike her. So a little background here. Robin Sloan Bechtel, internet pioneer since 1993 slash startup development and packaging slash investor in Uber, Everlane, and Phil's Coffee with valuations over $18 billion.

So my quick thing on Robin, we've actually quoted her on the show before. Yes, we have. There was a line when I first started working at Warner Brothers Records, and I said, in a company meeting, how much do we pay the artist? And with a maniacal, cackling laugh, they said, as little as possible.

That was Robin. That was Robin. And she has stayed true to message the entire time that I knew her as well. I never worked under her, which I believe you did. I attempted to work with a number of artists at the labels that she was working at, and she was the kind of head of the internet development area for different labels.

And basically, every single time I sent a proposal, I was guaranteed to get a callback saying, we'd like to use your work, but we will only pay you one-tenth of the quote that you're giving us, to which I would say no. And then I would inevitably see my exact ideas and even concept art developed by someone else.

Yes. Robin, from my perspective, is the fucking devil. I worked with her for 30 days. That was it. 30 days. In that time, Warner Brothers Records couldn't even get me my own computer. I had to bring my own computer to work. And she is the only person in over 20 years of being a professional internet, whatever the fuck I am, she's the only one that ever fired me.

Really? I would have figured. I would have figured a couple more, but there you go. No, I've only been fired once, and it was by her. Look, she's done well for herself and in the way that many people in many industries do by not being very, very nice. And she does what she does, and she does what she needed to do to get ahead.

And there was a lot of like, I'm a rocker chick working in a mail industry, and I'm not going to take shit from anyone. And I can totally understand that, especially back in the early 1990s. But you and I and people of our ilk and our generation that were coming up, there was none of that involved with us.

We didn't care what genitalia anyone had. We wanted to do cool work, and we wanted to get paid fairly for it. And by the way, we were in our early 20s, so being paid fairly was not that much money. And we generally didn't get it. And she did what she did. And like I said, she's successful and we're not.

She's an internet pioneer. Yep. And we're doing a dumb podcast. And she hated you guys. Oh, man. Like my first day, I mentioned that I knew you, and she's like, oh, them. Yeah, she was not a fan of me at all. And I never really understood why, because the only thing that I ever did was say, no, it costs more money than that.

That's about it. That's enough. So Shane, I hope that clarifies our take on that article. And you can find links to that article in the show notes. And I do believe she says something about it was the first artist's website and all that sort of crap.

And that's also a load of shit, because I did the Love & Rocket site a year before that. Okay, well, thank you for your comments, everybody, and keep them coming. Yep. Thank you. Welcome, honored guest.

She's alive. Alive with science.

Well, we just finished talking about Robin Bechtel and how she struggled mightily against perceived male aggression in the internet arena. Here's a real live woman. I feel like this is the weird science moment, you know, where, like, the fantasy woman comes to life, and now there's all this pressure on me.

I'm going to have to put some Oingo Boingo music in the background. Yes, please, please represent all women in tech, Tara. Well, you know, I'll do my best, but I think that I usually disappoint about half of the women out there, so.

Well, you know, you can't really impress anyone out there anymore anyways. Everybody's going to hate you no matter what you do, regardless of genitalia. I have the hate comments to prove it, so. I'm sure you do. Okay, so for the benefit of the audience, I would like to introduce our guest today, Ms. Tara Tiger-Brown.

How are you doing? Hello. I'm great. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. Well, we're very excited to have you, and I see that you're launching something pretty massive tomorrow that I'm kind of excited about as well. I just saw that right before we started the podcast. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that from the get-go?

Okay, great. Yes. Tomorrow, my co-founder, Luz Rivas, and I are launching Kit Hub. It's hands-on kits for the young innovator delivered every month. It's a subscription service. Luz, she's been running DIY Girls for a few years, and I founded, and I'm the chair of L.A. Makerspace.

So we're taking everything that we've learned around making DIY with kids through workshops, and we're packaging it up and selling it to the masses. So we're really excited because it's like this transition of being a nonprofit for a really long time and moving into more nonprofit, I guess.

Yeah, well, that sounds like the Internet these days. But, you know, it's something new. We're excited. So thank you, Brian, for saying that you think it's cool. Yeah, I do think it's cool. I can't wait to see what you guys are going to roll out, and it's going to be really interesting. And it's awesome that you guys are really taking that – you guys have really been innovators in the L.A. area with this sort of stuff, and to take that and package it up and kind of make it an educational thing is pretty damn cool.

Yes, I think so, too. I mean, we really want it to be accessible for everyone because – I mean, I think, you know, for people that go to, say, an electronics shack, like radio shack, you go in there and you just – even me, I'll feel overwhelmed. I don't know where to start, and what I didn't realize is that a lot of people actually don't really know what, say, a maker space is or making or any of those terms that those of us that have been, you know, doing this stuff for a long time, you know, are super familiar with.

So I think there's this huge opportunity for us to reach people that are not already embedded in that community. Right. That's very cool. And you mentioned Radio Shack. I thought they only sold cell phones nowadays. Do they still have electronics? Well, the people who work there know how to sell cell phones, but they don't know anything else that they have, so.

Yeah, I went into one recently. There's a dirty back corner that still has things, actual physical things that you can purchase, but most of it is cell phones these days. Yeah, I mean, they do have, like, big industrial toolboxes that, you know, have, you know, motors and LEDs and all this other stuff in there.

But it's just that if you need help, no one there knows how to help you, so you kind of have to have knowledge going in. Right. It's kind of like a last-ditch effort. If I'm missing out on stuff, then, you know, I'll hit the Radio Shack to pick it up. So what kind of kits are these going to be? Like, what's going to be in them?

Well, I mean, they're definitely science and technology related. And, you know, like, there's a lot of them will be intro stuff, like intro to bots and wearable tech or, you know, e-textiles, you know, fashion tech and, you know, music stuff.

So, you know, we're really trying to focus on a different range of interests, but bringing in different science and technology to it. Things that, you know, both informal and formal educators want to bring into the classroom. Like, we actually, I think that that's where, like, our groups around those are the most excited about it because they don't really know where to start.

You know, like, how do I, you know, put on this, like, tech stuff for kids? I have no idea where to start. I don't know, you know, where to buy stuff. So we're trying to appeal to educators mostly. Okay. That's very cool. Now, since I am a complete electronics noob, can I, like, pick this stuff up and, like, learn from it as an adult?

Well, yes. In fact, we test these with adults as well. We just actually, the LA Makers Space Advisory Committee had a meeting not too long ago, and one of our instructors there, they put on the workshop as if it was for kids.

And I think that the adults were more excited about it than, you know, the workshops for the kids. They're just, you know, like, oh, I'm, like, learning about circuits again or for the first time or how a battery works. You know, all that kind of stuff. So I think that we'll find that the, you know, parents for the kids and then, you know, that the teachers are actually going to learn a lot, too.

That's very cool. Yeah, I've got my Arduino starter kit that I'm saving for when I get snowed in in about a week. That's my winter project. So maybe I'll check this out for sure because I know nothing about that kind of stuff, and I really want to learn. So it sounds like it might be very cool. Well, that's almost why.

Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Oh, I was just about to say that's almost why it's almost more exciting for adults because we've lived with all this stuff and really don't know how any of it works while kids are just being exposed to it. And it's going to become second nature for them, which I think is fantastic. Yeah, yeah. And also, like, you know, I think a lot of parents are worried that kids are, you know, consuming more than they are making.

And so we're trying to, you know, get kids back into making. And then also I want to say that, you know, Luce is legit. She is an electrical engineer from MIT, and she went to Harvard. So, you know, we do have the, you know, the skills and knowledge to back all this stuff up, too.

So there you have it. That is very, very cool. So what else has been going on? It's been a long time since I talked to you. I know. I know. You know, well, I mean, like, I've been doing what's called connected learning. So I'm working with Mimi Ito at UC Irvine at the Digital Media Learning Research Hub and then a sister organization, Connected Learning Alliance, all around, like, the same idea.

It's, like, interest-driven learning and peer-supported learning and kind of connecting all those things. And really it's about kids being more in charge of what they're learning as opposed to being told what to learn. So that's, you know, like, everything I do kind of connects.

And so, like, that research and putting stuff into practice all, you know, comes back to the GitHub stuff. And then also I'm working on a project. It's around conservation technology. So my partner in that is Shah Selby.

He is a bona fide rocket scientist at Boeing. Nice. And, yes, I know. I love saying that. I think I totally annoy him because I'm, like, hanging out with a rocket scientist. But he's also a National Geographic explorer. And he travels all over the world doing cool stuff.

And one of the projects that's how I met him is because he went to Botswana and the Ukavanga Delta. And he was putting these, like, water quality sensors in the delta there. And he didn't really know where to start. And so I put him in touch with some people to help him put these prototypes together, which is really cool because I live at the L.A. River.

And I'm always thinking about, like, how do we look at the L.A. River and, like, what's the water quality like in there? Because everybody just assumed it's just, like, a big cesspool. But now, you know, we'll have, like, the technology to be able to test the water and what's happening there.

And we're about to pull out a bunch of concrete from the L.A. River. So, you know, like, in Terminator and some of those other movies, like Grease and stuff, where people are driving in the L.A. River and it's just, like, all this concrete, a lot of that is going to be pulled out.

And it's really going to affect the river and the ecosystem around that. So as part of the L.A. Makerspace Community Lab, we're testing all the water now. And then we'll continue to test it as all that work's being done. So I personally find all that stuff really cool.

That's really, yeah, that's really interesting. As an L.A. native growing up here, my entire thought of the L.A. River is it's that dry concrete bed that I drive past on the freeways. Mm-hmm. No, I know. Exactly. And, like, I live in Atwater Village where, you know, I walk out to the river.

It's a block away and it's green. There's, like, islands in the middle of the river and trees and, like, amazing bird life here. Like, we actually, this summer, we had a bunch of birds come up from Central America. It was just, it was phenomenal. But, like, not enough people here know about that.

So, you know, it's cool. Yeah. And I never knew that there was anything but cement in the L.A. River. And you can kayak in it now, actually. It's a new thing they just introduced last summer. So, yeah. It's a real thing. Okay.

So, speaking of the water quality, how bad is it? Well, actually, it depends on what part of the river you're at. There's a lot of runoff that comes, like, municipal runoff. So, it really depends on what part of the city you're in. There, I think that it's not like you want to drink it.

But people, at least in my part of the river, they're fishing there a lot. And they say they eat the fish. There's some metals and in there, we're not able to test exactly the levels of the metal yet. So, once we're able to do that with one of the prototype projects, then we'll have better information.

But, you know, like, when I went kayaking in it and I had to actually walk in the river, I didn't get any weird diseases or anything. So, I think that's pretty good. You must be far enough downriver from the hobo bathing stations that I've seen. No. I have not seen those.

Oh, they exist. They definitely exist. Well, I'll take your word for it. So, you've got a pretty long background in tech. I mean, I met you at South by Southwest. What year was that? Like, 2008, 2009? 2008, mm-hmm. And you were still at Microsoft then, right?

I was. I was just about to leave Microsoft then, yeah. Yeah, how long were you there and what did you do there? I was at Microsoft for eight years. I started in 2000 at the Hotmail team that was located in Mountain View.

So, I worked on the Hotmail team, which was an amazing experience. Because, you know, like, when you're thinking about tech startups, people were like, oh, it'd be awesome to be big and scale and all that kind of stuff. Well, Hotmail was, that was the online mail service at the time. Like, Gmail wasn't really, you know, it was just really up and coming.

So, I remember being part of this, like, you know, online service and having to understand operations. And, you know, I got to tour of the data center. And I actually remember doing a tour of the data center and seeing the Google racks, which were, like, bent and there's wires everywhere.

And I remember going, they're not going to make it. Look, they didn't even, you know, get their stuff together. So, yeah, that was an interesting time. So, yeah, I was at Hotmail for a while. And then I think I was the first person to run a development team at our India office.

So, you know, I had an opportunity to learn what, you know, how it was to work with the distributed team and all that cool stuff. And then after about four years, I decided to go join the mothership up in Redmond, because for some reason, I decided I missed my family in Vancouver. I wanted to be closer to them.

So, I was up there and, you know, doing other cool stuff. That's when Office started thinking about becoming, you know, software as a service, having, you know, online options. So, you know, being sort of at the forefront of that was really interesting. But, yeah, I think when I went to South by Southwest and I did the first base or bar camp in Seattle, that's when I started to realize that I had been in a bubble for many, many years.

It's really easy at a large company like that just to be, like, all about that company because there's so many products and services and people and interesting things going on. But I wanted to see, okay, I want to go work at a startup now, see what that's like, to see if I myself ever want to found a startup.

So, that's ultimately why I ended up leaving. And we seem to know that that worked out for you and you did want to. Yeah. Well, and actually, I had another startup I did a couple of years ago, which really never ended up going anywhere. So, that was, you know, I guess a failed attempt.

Are you supposed to have, like, a few failed attempts before, you know, you hit it? Oh, yeah. Definitely. I don't know how it works. Well, yeah. A lot of people are still doing that string and waiting to hit it, but yes. So, your startup, that was the crazy football one, right?

Yeah. That was Newt. And the idea was it was a predictive game engine. So, when you're watching a football game, either in a stadium or on the TV, you made predictions about, you know, the final results of the game or, you know, every play.

And, you know, you win on points and all that other kind of stuff. And we actually made it really far. We were, you know, pitching to investors and there was one in particular who was super excited about it. But then what happened was we were talking to him and he was like, you know, I've had this pitched a few times.

You're the first ones that really seem to get all the technical problems. But, Tara, you can't lead the company. And then my co-founder at the time was like, okay, that's fine. She doesn't have to. So, needless to say, it was over for me at that point.

I'm like, see ya, I'm not getting a few pardons anymore. But I think it was okay because, honestly, like, I wasn't super passionate about football and I realized that, you know, it's not worth working on something, you know, 24 hours a day unless you actually really, really like it and that you also have some expertise in it.

Like, I certainly wasn't an expert in football, but I understood, you know, platforms and community and product and all that other kind of stuff. But that's really not enough. Right. I totally agree with that. If you're going to do something that's 24-7, basically, you have to be into it.

If not, you're just going to burn out and it's going to fail. So. Mm-hmm. And you're bitter and mad and angry. Yeah. All that. Yeah. I was reading recently, I think it was Alan Watts who was talking about, you know, meaning and all that stuff. And you really do have to have, like, a good amount of meaning behind what you do if you're going to stick it out for years and years on end.

And yeah, I can't see you being a football fan. You either make it a nine-to-five job and you go home and you have your life. And if it's not, if it's anything more than that, you have to be into it. There's just no other way around it. And people who don't get that are the ones that end up bitter and angry.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I mean, and that's why I really like the concept of interest-driven learning because, I mean, there's a couple of things, right? There's always people saying, like, I don't know what I'm passionate about or interested in and whatever. And to those people, I'll say, well, just do a ton of things.

And that thing that you end up spending more time on, well, that's probably a good clue for you. But, you know, like for those that, you know, are really interested in something, I'm just like, do it for a while and it could end up turning into something, right? So, like with the LA Makerspace, I started it because our mutual pal, Sean Bonner, started Crash Space, but it was so, like, adult-oriented and it didn't feel super friendly for females.

And so, I wanted that sort of more, you know, entry version of a hackerspace and that, you know, kids could go to and families and stuff. So, I started that makerspace and that's, like, been my passion project. Like, I don't get paid. I spend a ton of time on it, even, you know, though it takes up, you know, a lot of my time and stuff.

But that's when I started to realize around the same time as Luke, it's like, okay, so let's see if we can turn this into something more. Yeah, so, you know, that's usually, like, you know, I tell that story to people or similar ones and then I think they start to understand around, okay, yes, this whole interest thing actually means something.

Yes. Yeah, I mean, that's how, you know, for me, that's how I ended up working in the music industry. I mean, ultimately, it turned out to not be good given the industry right now. But for 15 years, I, you know, I lived, breathed, and I ate my work and I loved it. So, yeah, passion is a powerful motivator for anyone. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, I was in music for a very, very, very short while. I worked at Topspin Media, which, and it's just Ian Rogers' company that sold to Beats that then, you know, ultimately, I think they're kind of all wrapped into iTunes music for a while.

Yeah. But that, yeah, that was interesting being in that industry. I don't know how anybody does it. So, good on you. Well, it's made me gray before my time, that's for sure. I do remember when you were over at Topspin. I think I was over there for a couple of meetings and you were bouncing around in the background.

So, yes. But they've managed to go over to Beats and make some graceful exits. So, we'll see what happens. Yeah. I guess some people make it. I think it's funny that you and Sean are the only couple I know that have his and her maker spaces. That's really funny.

I didn't ever think about it that way. Yeah. I mean, like, I think about it actually as more like sister spaces. That's usually what we say is crash spaces are sister space, mostly just to, you know, make Sean roll his eyes. But, you know, the people that are like at crash space are amazing. I think like one of the guys, Michael, I can't remember his last name.

He was just kind of tinkering around and making a rocket. And then that ultimately led to him getting a job at, you know, one of the space companies like, I don't know, SpaceX or one of those. So, you know, like, it was just so cool. I could just like so impressed with like the stuff that people do at these different hacker spaces.

And I'm seeing more teams go to them too, which I think is great. Well, my business partner, Wendy Marvel, is a big fan of the crash space. Her and her boyfriend, Mark Rosen, go there almost every week. And their whole secondary project, the flip book, it's, was born out of that as well.

So it's a, it's quite a popular space around here. Oh, I love the flip book. That was a great, they kickstarted it, right? Yeah. Yeah. They kickstarted it. Yeah. That was a great project. Yeah. I really, really loved that work. Yeah. That was our, one of our first advertisements on Grumpy Old Geeks, where we learned to not advertise a visual product on a podcast.

Yeah. You learn something new every day, don't you? I actually wanted to say, I was, I'm glad that it's, you know, audio only podcast because I'm in my pajamas right now. And usually. So am I. Okay. Oh, okay. That's good. Yeah. No, usually cause I'm on, you know, video hangouts and like, I have to get dressed or at least I have to put like a shirt on, brush my hair and stuff.

So this is awesome. So I'm looking at our show notes from the links you sent over about the interesting things you'd like to talk about and what kind of caught my eye. Would you, would you like to bring us in and tell us a little bit about that? Okay. Well, um, someone, I won't name names, put the fleshlight catalog, uh, in front of me the other day and said, check this out.

And I'm like, whatever, fleshlight, I've already seen it. But then what caught my eye is what they call, I think the freak's flashlight, fleshlights. Um, they have everything from alien to, um, Frankenstein, cyborg, zombie, Dracula, fleshlights.

And, you know, I started thinking is if I was a designer of the fleshlight and it just all of a sudden dawned on me that I could go crazy like this, how amazing would that be? Like, you know, just like the sky's the limit. Um, so I just thought that was cool.

The sky's the limit. As long as you consider that it's a round thing with a hole in the middle. Yeah. But like, okay, there's like, one of them is a mouth with like Dracula teeth. And the other one is like, there's like a necrophilia war. I just thought that was really fun.

You know, it could just be boring, but no, you don't have to be. It's definitely interesting. And we'll have the link in the show notes. I urge people to take a look at it. I'm looking at it right now and I'm looking at the Frankenstein one, which looks like a pink baseball has been shot with a bullet. Yeah.

I just thought it was delightful. Um, I really didn't understand. I really didn't know that there was a zombie fucker market out there, but apparently there is. Hey, Walking Dead is very popular. Oh, I wonder if they sell them based on that because there should be marketing. There should be.

I mean, why is there not one for Walking Dead? Why is there not one for, uh, the vampire shows? I mean, this is, you got, you got this built in. Come on, people. If you click on the alien one, I'm pretty sure they have one of the characters from, is it the Avatar movie in the background there?

I don't know how, uh, Cameron would feel about that, but, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, your blue fleshlight cures the blue balls. Uh, and also, you know, what I didn't realize is that they have the companion to these fleshlights for women.

Yes. Yes, they do. Yeah. So, uh, although I don't like them as much. I think the, um, there's just the fleshlight is nice looking. You are a bit more limited by your shape and contours. Uh, but this also, um, started making me remember about something that I was pretty, uh, well, I was, I wouldn't say into, I would say I was researching quite a bit for a while and that's

teledildonics, uh, because, and when I was researching this, it was a time when my husband and I were living in different cities before we were married and so we're thinking about long distance relationships and, you know, and how do you, you know, stay connected and all this kind of stuff.

And so, you know, the whole thing around sex toys being controlled remotely through, you know, a Bluetooth connection was really interesting. And now I've noticed that there's more products coming onto the, into the market around that idea. And I just feel like it's one of those, oh damn, missed opportunity.

Uh, but I got one, um, it's called the wee vibe. Apparently it's the pleasure product of the year and like, you know, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but I can tell you that it sucks. Um, it's not good. I don't know, you know, who, well, now hold on a second.

Yeah. If Jason were reviewing this, it sucks would be a good review. Well, that's true, but you know, I'm not a dude. Um, and no, it's just not good. It's like weirdly shaped. And I mean, you'll see the, the photo on the wee dash website.

And like, first I was looking at this and I'm like, I don't know what to do with this. You know, I was looking for the instructions and I was like, I don't know. And then, and then when you turn it on for anybody that, um, has had or owns a magic wand, just like, don't bother because this thing is, I don't know.

It's like, maybe I needed better batteries or something, but you know, like my hobby motors work much better than this thing does. So maybe you need to do some tinkering, take that into the top. You know what? That's a good idea. Yeah. I should take it apart and see if I can improve on it. Um, but anyways, I'm just going to say, don't waste your money.

Spend your money on a magic wand that you can plug in. Well, we got it from the pro here. Uh, I want to, I want to talk about this later in the security segment and see if we can hack these things in the security segment.

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you can, if you can control it with an app, that means somebody best, you, you gotta be able to hack into it. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And like, I mean, you know, I can send you mine, you know, I'll clean it off and you can let me know.

I might just order fresh, you know, just for the interest of science and all that. You know, if I share this podcast, I'm going to have to make sure I put NSFW because I think there's some younger audience people or followers that I have that's totally not appropriate for.

Well, we are labeled explicit already. So. Okay. There you go. Oh yeah. Shani was really big. Uh, Shani Jardin, our buddy is really big into teledildonics for a long time. She's the expert on the topic. Oh, okay. Well, I'll have to be sure to, to, um, tell her about this.

Yeah. But this never came up in any conversations we've had recently. So tell me about your remote sex life. Didn't come up over some coffee. You know, we do cover a lot of ground usually, you know, Shani, but no, that never did. Oh man.

Yeah. My, my, uh, my review unit has been stuck in a drawer for a long, long time. And I think it will stay that way. I was going to put it out at the garage sale that we had not too long ago. And my roommate was just like, you are not putting that out at our garage sale. Oh my God.

But like, you should have put a cam up and just like, you know, seen the reactions of people. That's what I wanted to do. I totally wanted to do that. Well, well, Jason, just like you put me on the spot with a donation to Grumpy Old Geeks for some of my older music, uh, anybody that donates $50 to grumpyoldgeeks.com will get Jason's auto blow too.

Only slightly used. That was so gross. Well, I think that's a good, good spot to wrap it up. Uh, so Tara, where can the peoples find out more about you?

About me? Well, you can tweet me, uh, at Tara, T-A-R-A. Uh, my website is TaraTigerBrown.com. And, um, I would love it if you went over to GitHub.cc and, you know, sign, at least sign up for our newsletter to learn more about the, the kits that we're going to be starting to send out pretty soon.

Awesome. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for taking the time out and swinging by today. Thank you guys. I love your podcast. This was, I was pretty nervous about coming on today just because, you know, you guys are amazing and I just, you know, everything you're just guys are, it's like so researched about all the topics and it's really impressive.

So thanks for having me. That is awesome that we put out that impression because it's so not true. Well, and also the last thing I want to say is that, um, Brian, what I love about you is that, you know, you're so convicted about, you know, your opinions and stuff, but you know, in the car, usually when Sean and I are driving, we're listening to the podcast inevitably three or four times, you know, we totally disagree with you.

And we're like, no, you're wrong. Um, and then we're also thinking, we're thinking about how much, um, you make Jason like seems super positive and happy. So it's just like, it's like amazing thing that happens when we listen to your podcast. So thank you guys.

Keep it up. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Bye. We'll talk to you later. Bye.

In the news. To prove Tara wrong, I'm going to be super upbeat and positive right now. The coolest thing in the history of the universe so far has happened. We landed on a fucking comet. That is awesome.

The Rosetta landed on a comet. It is the coolest thing that humanity has ever done. And it's all technology and science and it is fucking awesome. The problem, what made the news? Kim Kardashian's ass. Yes. And technically it wasn't the Rosetta. The Rosetta was the actual ship.

It was the little one, the little guy that came down. Okay. Yeah. Well, we met the comet with the Rosetta, which is a feat in and of itself. And then we managed to land something on it. Yes. And everybody just talked about landing a champagne glass on a giant ass all week. That was it. I'm so fucking sick of the Kardashians.

Is this a turning point? Please let it be. Because at least people are kind of shitting on her this time around. Can we stop? This time around? They've been shitting on her forever. Yeah. But still consuming and buying things and making her show popular and whatever the hell else she does. Let's... Can we just stop?

Please stop. It's not even a nice ass. It is the most bizarre looking body I've ever seen in my life. There's no way that's not photoshopped, right? There's no way that's not photoshopped. Well, I mean, I saw her on Two Broke Girls the other day and she does have a massive ass, but it just doesn't look human.

Yes, so here we are talking more about Kim Kardashian's ass than the Comet. Okay, well, in more news about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, Paris Hilton has been named Female DJ of the Year. What the fuck is going on, people? All right, I'm into EDM and I know this is complete and utter bullshit, but I will say, and I'm going to be positive again, Tara, just because of you, at least she's doing something.

Well, yeah, she walks into a club and plugs her iPod in and presses play. Yeah, I know, but people go, and it's something. She's not just dropping her trousers anymore. Anymore. Anymore, but I do have something that was in the news that I'm really upset by because this is just kind of the way of things on the Internet these days.

All these viral videos that have been coming out recently that started with the girl walking through New York City who got catcalls, and I enjoy the fake ones that then come after that are poking fun of it, like Princess Leia walks through New York or whatever. The problem I have is when the young upstart kids here that think they're going to do something cool then go out and shoot something else that's meant to be taken seriously.

The viral video of a drunk girl asking for help on Hollywood Boulevard that went around for a long time. Basically, an actress pretended to be drunk, and then guys, instead of offering to get her to the, I believe, bus station, she was asking for directions to transportation to get her drunk ass home.

And guys creepily just said, well, why don't you get in my car and I'll drive you, and all that sort of stuff. And it was faked. Color me not fucking surprised. It was all fake. The guys that were on the video were told that they were participating in a comedy thing and were fed the lines, basically.

They're all quite upset about it because they weren't told this is the way they were going to be portrayed. One of the guys actually was wearing his company's shirt at the time, and his company is not at all pleased with him. So now it's all come out that it was completely fake. So screw you guys. Unsurprisingly, guess the ages of the video's creators.

Early 20s. 22 and 20. Seth Leach, 22, who worked with the video's creator, Stephen Zong, 20, to recruit men for the video, tried to reassure this guy that was upset with a Facebook message and lure him with the promises of fame and fortune and a night of free drinking.

And this is exactly what's wrong with millennials. Here is his quote. The important thing to consider is that this video is going to get you well-known and you have a future with us and our company. He added, we're going to be huge and you are a part of it. Just go with it, dude. You are in our team now and we will take care of you.

Well, he is going to be part of the team because he's going to be suing them into oblivion, I hope. Yes, one would hope. So screw you guys. I'm so sick of the world. Okay. So also in the news, Obama, this week or early last week, came out with his plan for the Internet on Medium.

And what the fuck is the president of the free world writing on Medium for? Because like it or not, Jason, Medium is the go-to space now. Fuck it. So once that came out, then, of course, everybody piled on to him from big business. The Republicans shoved their head up their own ass where it usually is and said a bunch of stupid things.

And basically, we're screwed. They're going to break the Internet. That's it. I mean, we're fucked. I don't know. Gizmodo did a good review of Ted Cruz's crazy response to Obama. And, you know, there's got to be some government regulation.

There has to be. You cannot have net neutrality without it. End of story. So I think we need to wait to see how it shakes off. I didn't mind Obama's plan. I think it's okay. Yes, I'm worried about the government because the government tends to screw up everything.

But maybe we get some smart people in there for once. Who knows? But Obama wants it to be open. He wants it to be neutral. But this, you know, this guy, Ted Cruz, calling it Obamacare for the Internet, which is just ludicrous. Now, Cisco's CEO is coming out against it because he's not going to sell as many routers, he says.

Well, yeah. You still are going to have to sell routers. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. And you get the government contract and you'll sell them for 18 times the price. No, it's just going to be a shitstorm for a while. And hopefully, you know, commerce will prevail and shut them down like we did on the other stuff they tried that was really stupid.

But on good news, Peter Sund from the Pirate Bay is free. So now he can get back to flatter. So I can make some pennies. Yeah, I was about to say, you know, because we need the commerce on the Internet. But there ain't much of that going on because everything is free. I have I have plateaued on Sue for three cents.

I put up my best photo, naked girl with a phaser, and I'm still at three cents. So that's because Sue sucks. Yes. And in this week's Tempest in a teapot, Groupon tried to get the Gnome Foundation's trademark, which was stupid to begin with.

And the Internet came, kicked them in the balls and said, no, you're not going to do that. And he backed off and said, OK, I guess we're not going to do that. The news for me on that one is that Groupon's still around. I was I was surprised, too. I was really surprised. I don't know anybody that buys a Groupon anymore. Everybody I know that's used them has had such a terrible experience that nobody even even does it anymore.

Nobody liked it. I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, the restaurants hated it because they had to, you know, give a they would have a rush for free food for a little while. And then people wouldn't come back to the restaurants because why not? I mean, that's that's the entire concept behind Groupon is you're getting something super cheap. Yeah.

And the whole idea is to build your audience. But people never came back because the restaurants had to skimp on the food or the services. And so at the end of the day, they gave the customers shitty service. So the customers didn't want to come back. So the whole thing just eats itself. Yeah. But they're still there.

I've tried to trademark Gnome. OK, let's move on. We got enough enough enough to cover. That's right. I tried to stay in a good mood, Tara. It didn't happen. No. Security. Our hack of the week is the U.S. Postal Service.

Oh, you know, was it rain and snow and sleet and hackers and hackers, too, apparently. They did a good job, sort of. They did release all the information immediately. It's mostly employees, but also people who called, I guess, to the customer service center within a specific period of time.

So if you called the Postal Service and actually got through to a person or didn't just get like an endless phone tree, you might be affected by this. But in general, it's mostly just the employees. Yeah. And I don't know how fast they got on it because they're being sued by the Postal Workers Union for sitting on the data for a while.

I guess so, yeah. Well, it must be nice to have a union. Remember those? I do. I was part of the grocery baggers union at Dominic's Whole Foods. Might want to get that job. Union seemed to be a good thing, and nobody has them anymore. Interesting. So there was a good little – there's a new site out there that's called aboutads.info, and if you go to aboutads.info slash choices, and I would suggest you do that now with your browser of choice, you can now opt out.

And this is a complete self-regulatory program, meaning that all these advertisers have voluntarily joined this. You can opt out of interest-based advertising and tracking. Now, let me put my tinfoil hat on for a second here. Yeah. There is a possibility that all these guys just got together, and when you go there and you select all, then they now have a point of intersection for you across all their systems, and now they know who you are in between each other.

So then they can correlate all that data together and just have even more data. That is pretty tinfoil hat, and I'd like to believe that people aren't quite that horrible in the world. I'd like to believe that some companies actually do want to respect privacy and see a greater chance for them in the future.

You're probably right. But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter anyways because this is all cookie-based. So if you ever clear your cache and delete all your cookies and all of that, all your settings go away, and everything goes away anyways. This is primarily for people like, I'd say, my parents who have never, ever emptied their cache once, so I will go and do this on their computer, and they won't be tracked as much.

For me, because I do web development, I'm nuking my cache every 10 seconds, so I'd have to keep going back to the site and keep setting this cookie. Well, yeah. I mean, there's the difference between cache and cookies. Big difference. Well, I nuke everything out. And it also will probably reset as soon as you log back into Facebook because they share with everybody.

Yeah, that's actually how I ended up finding out about this site was Facebook has once again revamped all their privacy settings and everything, and they left out things like external site tracking. Oh. So in other fun news, if you are still running a Windows machine, go get the updates immediately from Patch Tuesday this week.

They are very, very, very important. Yes, they are, and I did it immediately. Okay. I'm not going to go into the technicals of it because I really don't care, but it's an 18-year-old bug. Yeah, this is a big one that's been there for a very, very long time, and the information is now out there, and it's quite bad, actually.

So if you are running Windows, go update. I know you never, ever do it, but go do it now. Yes, definitely. And this is a story that was – it was starting last week, and I didn't want to cover it yet until more info came out, but the admin for the Silk Road 2 has been arrested.

He's – I mean, he used his personal email to sign up for the server that it ran on in another country, which is interesting. Yeah. Yeah, Andy hired an undercover officer to kind of run it, help run it with him, so also bad things. And this is at least the info that we're getting from the government, which could be completely false, but the interesting thing about it is it was a joint task force, a multinational task force that took down over 400 Tor sites.

Wow. Which makes people say, how did you guys get all that? And there's a lot of speculation that's been going around that Tor has basically been reverse-engineered and breached. There was a talk that these researchers were going to give that got pulled because they said, oh, yeah, we figured out how to do it.

We've done it in the wild to figure out what your actual IP is. If you bounce around enough onion routers, we can find you. I'm not surprised. Yeah, and that's kind of what everybody's thinking is that it's been – the Tor has been broken. So, you know, don't really – don't trust it.

Yeah, I blame Aphex Twin. As soon as he tried to use that to promote anything, boom, it was all over. Yeah. And Lifehacker had an article this week that just boggled my mind because it's like – it's a PSA that says, change your IP webcam's default password if you haven't already.

Have we not covered this over the past 20 years that when you get a new piece of hardware that has a default password to change it, that we have to have articles that tell people to do this? Is it that sad? Yes. Have we not made a single dent in the habits of the dumb public who buys this shit?

No. No. I guarantee you if you go over to anybody's house right now and try to connect to their wireless router, it's going to be admin admin or admin password because they don't care. No. They don't think about it. They can type in 192.1, blah, blah, blah.

I type, how do I find porn into my Google box? Oh, God. Well, okay. On happier news, iOS is a really nasty exploit going around called the Mask Attack. Okay. Now, this one lets – Catchy name.

I like it. Yeah. Mask Attack. It lets people get apps that masquerade as other apps. Right. Hence the mask. M-S-Q-U-E. Got that one. Yeah. Yeah. And once you get one of those on there, you can basically replace all the other apps with lookalikes.

And, you know, it's an interesting hack because it uses enterprise certificates. But it's – I don't know if it works really that well in the open if you're not using an enterprise-based setup. Yeah. I was about to say this is a lot of effort to not do too much.

But if it's – if you're – if corporate espionage – corporate espionage is your goal and, you know, your targets work for large institutions that use enterprise provisioning, then it's a good in for that. Yeah. Yeah. And dumbass of the week.

A pedophile was caught after targeting the girls – or after a targeted girl's father impersonates her on Facebook. This goes both ways here. Okay. The pedophile was an idiot and he deserved to get caught because he was already out on parole for other violations. Pedophiles do tend to be idiots and we're happy about that.

Yes. The father of the 10-year-old girl, why the fuck did she have a Facebook account? She's 10. But that's happening earlier and earlier. I can't even imagine having a cell phone at 10 but, you know, kids these days.

Kids have cell phones at 6 now, 5 or 6. Yeah. I mean, does it say how old the father was? This is – I see that the pedophile guy was 23 but I'm sure the father was relatively young as well. Maybe – I don't know. What – a Facebook account at that age. No, that's bad.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. The Pew Internet – or the Pew – Pew. The Pew Foundation. Yes. Pew, pew, pew. They've put out a new study that basically says nobody trusts anybody online anymore. And thanks to the Snowden revelations and all the talk about it, everybody thinks we're screwed.

Well, and then there's you on this bastion of good information, the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast, that I bring up a place that – you know, a good site that takes out tracking and you put on your tinfoil hat and say they're just using it to fuck us even deeper. That's right. I said it's possible.

I mean remember when you used to get spam in the old days and you'd click unsubscribe? That unsubscribe button, all it did was put you on the list because now you have a verified email address that they can sell for even more money. That unsubscribe was confirm and sell. Exactly. So, you know, I come from a place of history and people doing nefarious crap with your info.

So it's always a possibility. It's always a possibility. I can go register a domain, put the logos of all the major, you know, ad providers up there and do it myself. You know, I can lie and do it and you would be none the wiser. And now you're just giving me all your data. But here's the problem with the Pew study.

Okay, Americans have no confidence that they have any control over their personal information. Are they stopping to put their personal information out there? Are they abstaining? Are they backing away and saying, well, in that case, in no way am I going to tell Facebook I'm going on vacation?

No, they're doing it even more. So it's a disconnect between people. It's like, oh, yeah, well, you know, my information isn't safe anywhere. Let me just type my credit card number into this Alibaba site. Yes, we have Aldous Huxlead ourselves into this, so that's what it is.

Now, more stupidity. Jeremy Hammond, he's the hacker that's serving a 10-year prison sentence for the Stratfor hack. When he just did an interview with the Associated Press and basically said, yeah, my password wasn't really that good. He used his cat's name.

The hacker used his cat's name, Chewy123, as his main password. Oh, well, when I saw you put the link in, I thought it was Richard Hammond from Top Gear, and that made total sense to me. No, no. This is the hacker in prison for being able to break into a company and get a lot of data out, and he didn't even protect his own password.

So I really think that we're just hopeless. We're fucking hopeless. So last week we talked about Cory Doctorow's new book, Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, Laws of the Internet Age. Yes.

My copy came. It is bright orange, which really screws with your eyes when you're trying to read it because you have this orange halo around it. That's my only critical problem I have with the book. Otherwise, it's awesome. It is a great book. Everybody should get it, and everybody should read it. Okay.

This is basically a distillation of everything he's talked about over the past 10 years in an accessible format that is as much educational as it is entertaining. So I cannot recommend this book enough. You will like it a lot. Oh, I'm sure I will.

But, I mean, he has done kind of a 180-degree about face on his position on this stuff, though, so that will be interesting. I assume he talks about how he came to this realization that things shouldn't be free. Well, I am at the last section of the book now.

I haven't quite finished it, but the first two sections are fantastic. So I'm assuming the last one will be – and we'll talk about it a little bit more next week because I do want to wrap my head around it and be – on point with what we'll talk about with his stance and how it's changed and what is different. Yes, and I actually want to read it before we discuss it as well.

So I'm getting it. Get on it. I am getting it. Yeah, and like I said last week, I am a fan. I have always been a fan, and I really do like his new outlook on this. It's 100% in line with my view of how the internet should be. Now, speaking of things that you agree with, in an effort to see all sides of a story, I bought Amanda fucking Palmer's book.

I'm glad that you did. I think my position is very clear on this, and there's no way she was ever getting a dime out of me. Yes, we will be discussing this at another point. I'm only about a quarter of the way in the book, and I find it delightful. Good for you. So, yeah, we'll review that one at a later date when we have a little more time.

Again, I'm not saying that she's not a delightful persona. Many people that I know are very fond of her. I've read some of her writing. I get the way that she is positioning and presenting herself, and yes, that's all very lovely. And I've even liked some of her old music.

She's a good musician. She has interesting things to say. We'll talk about why I hate her when you finish the book. Awesome. Okay, so you got a book. Yeah, I was going to finish the Gibson, which I have not gotten to, and I was going to order the Cory Doctorow, and I have not gotten to that because it came to my attention.

Somehow this completely passed me by. My mom told me that Anne Rice has written another Vampire Chronicles book. Now, I knew it was coming because if you're not familiar, just a quick encapsulation. If you've never read the Vampire Chronicles and you've only seen the movie, you have no idea how good this stuff is.

Go get the original three books. They are unbelievable. Anne Rice created this whole vampire, just amazing stories with Lestat being the main character. And she wrote about, I'd say, five or six that were really good. And then she started writing ones that were kind of not as great and had different characters.

And then she found Jesus, and she's, I'm not kidding. She found Jesus and basically said, I can't, I will not write any more of those books because they are not, they don't follow with my philosophy about, you know, a loving God. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm never going to revisit that world.

And she wrote a couple of books about God, um, all of which were kind of boring. And then she lost religion. Thank God. Thank you, Jesus, for shitting in her Cheerios. Thank you, Jesus, for, for turning Anne Rice off to you because she's, uh, this is her return to form.

She has written a new Prince Lestat book, uh, called the Vampire Chronicles book called Prince Lestat. Uh, the interesting thing about this is the last time that she was in this world, there were no cell phones. There was no interconnected world. Vampires could conceivably hide because we didn't have Google fucking trucks running down the street, taking pictures of your lair all the time.

Um, she, this is written present day and it's how it's really interesting. It's, if you were into the books at all, I highly urge that you get this. It is a total return to form and it does not, you know, rely on any conceits about how vampires could exist in this modern world.

Um, it was great from a technological perspective and just from the writing and the character development and where she's going with it. I'm super thrilled that she's back. I love the book. I tore through it in four days and now I have to go off and, uh, read Dr. O and try to pretend that you aren't reading Amanda fucking Palmer.

After all the trouble I had getting Yosemite to work and all the great, advancements and all the crazy stuff you can do with it now, I want to be able to just type install app name. I tried to get Spotify. I'm like, Oh, just install Spotify.

No, it's not that smart yet. So we have no decent package or managers or anything like that. You just have to use the app store. And it's like, come on for big apps like that. I just want to be able to type install Spotify and go on my merry way. So Apple get on that shit. Yeah, you really should. I mean, what are we going to have to do? Get an Amazon echo to do it for us.

Exactly. Siri, wipe my bottom. Siri. Uh, we use buffer app. Uh, I asked you a while back, like, what is the, the best like time release for social networks? And you told me, well, use buffer. Um, I have been using buffer to do the grumpy old geek scheduled posts throughout the week in the hopes that we'll get some new eyeballs, which never really happens.

Uh, and, uh, it's been pretty good. Now they have attempted to break down the new Facebook algorithm and try to tell us exactly how we can game it. So, uh, the link is in the show notes because it's a very boring, it's subject to change within five seconds and most of it's non-brainers.

Yeah. Yeah. I glanced at it is very long. And as soon as they find something that's really good, Facebook will also read this and fix it. That would be the big problem. That's why all the SEO black hats and gray hats and brown hats like we are, uh, they keep all their stuff behind paywalls and things like that.

Yeah. We keep things behind paywalls and we know the number one rule, which is just have good content. Speaking of good content, Monument Valley, that it was like a $5 app with the puzzle app. We, you played it, right? Uh, I downloaded it and briefly played it for about five minutes, which is not bad for me for games.

Yeah, it's true. Um, the biggest complaint about that game was that it was too short. I went through the entire thing in about 40 minutes. So, uh, they've been, you know, saying new levels coming, new levels coming. Yeah. And I swear to God, in the beginning, they said it won't be an in-app purchase.

Well, they've come out with new levels and it is an in-app purchase and the internet shit all over them. The floods of one-star reviews came in. Oh my God, we have to pay for something. Exactly. And if you look at how beautiful that game is, shut the fuck up and buy it.

You know how much work went into that game? It is gorgeous. The sound design alone is worth it. The only issue I would have with it is if they did come out at the beginning and say, you will not have to pay any more than you've originally paid for. Okay. But at least if you're going to do that, there should be a big blog, Mia Culpo saying, look, we put so many hours into it.

Meet our development team. This guy hasn't seen his wife in three months. This guy is living off of Mountain Dew. We need some more money, people. Just post and say that and charge away. But yes, to pay for things, people. Of course, people are horrible on the internet.

Why are we shocked that all they're getting are one-star reviews and people bitching? And the article is from Touch Arcade. It says, this is why we can't have nice things. And it's true. This is why we can't have nice things. Look, I mean, we talked with Tara just a little while ago.

And even she has admitted in the past that, you know, all she does is sit there on Twitter and talk about interesting things. And she gets shit on all the time. And I'm sure she's contemplated leaving Twitter. This is why we can't have nice things. People think before you fucking do stuff. Yeah, it's uncool.

It's uncool. Oh, wait, it's the internet. Never mind.

Media Candy. So as I stated on the last episode of Grumpy Old Geeks, I've been a fan of the podcast Serial, which I think everybody on the planet is now. Except me. There's an interesting article in The Guardian. Listeners of the podcast phenomenon turn detectives with troubling results.

Okay. It's kind of like, you know, how everybody's jumping on the bandwagon to find out what happened with the story that's going on in Serial. And there's a whole Reddit thread about it now, which, as we've learned, Redditors are not the best detectives if you look at the Boston bombing. Yeah, I was about to say, haven't we been through this a couple times?

And this thing, this whole idea of like just a roving band of everybody doing their own investigative reporting and then doing their results in real time on Reddit or Twitter does not go well. Nope, not at all. It screws a lot of innocent people. So I'm just going to keep listening to the show.

Okay. I'm going to let them do the legwork. So I've talked about the show Quit before because I was a guest on it and it is now called Grit. Okay. And this last episode, number 59, was an excellent episode, I must say. So if you're into – it was a lot about podcasting and Patreon and stuff like that and artists earning a living off their work.

You know, the things we sort of talk about a lot. Great episode. Go back and check it out. Okay. I would also like to – I talked about the You Are Not So Smart podcast a couple times. It just keeps getting better and better and better. And the new one, episode 36, the Dunning-Kruger effect, is a must listen for everybody.

Just go get it. I did listen to this. Did you like it? I did. It was a little too much to be able to play in the background. You definitely have to kind of sit and actually listen to it. But I thought it was pretty good. Yeah. I mean, it made me want to go back and listen to some of their other podcasts.

Yeah, I actually listened to this episode twice because it's a show about how we're unaware that we lack skills to tell actually how unskilled and unaware we are. Yeah, yeah. It's very funny and it's people that I run into often. I think I'm just kind of one of those crazy – it's almost weird to call it an egomaniac because I'm so aware of myself that I know when I'm not good at something.

So I don't know if that's necessarily an egomaniac because I'll step back. But you know what I'm saying? I think I know what you're saying, yeah. I'm so into myself that I know my own limits. Okay. And speaking of knowing your own limits, I want to retract my previous comments about the Dr. Drew podcast.

A few podcasts ago, I said that everybody needs to go back and give it another shot and go do a listen because he was turning a new leaf and he was going to change the course of his podcast and he was going to start having really interesting people come in and talk about really interesting things and go super science-y and talk about things he didn't know anything about.

But then the last 10 episodes has been back to his regular stable of guests and it's all just recovery and addiction talk, recovery and addiction talk, recovery and addiction talk. I'm so bored. Sorry, Dr. Drew. You were heading in an interesting direction. I guess it was too hard to book people. Yeah, I got two episodes into it and removed him.

Yeah, I'm back to not listening. But we would be remiss to not talk about the other big news in the Adam Carolla podcast community. He is launching a new podcast called Take a Knee and I would just like to state for the record that if you think that people like us are making any sort of money whatsoever or even Adam Carolla for that matter who is the de facto king of podcasting and he has the Guinness world record for most podcasts.

Listen, download it and all that sort of stuff and he actually has a network that he is supporting with some money. Take a Knee is a subscription only podcast. He's starting to charge. Interesting. Yeah. Now, he's promising that everything else will stay free but obviously he's come to the conclusion that free is not a sustainable business model.

So his new one which will be inspirational talks with captains of industry is a subscription based model. So you cannot get that for free anymore. Christ, another business interview show. Just what the world needs. I know. Moron of the week.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite comedians of all time was Bill Cosby. He was funny. Loved him. Loved him. Loved his show, his sitcom, all that stuff. Well, he's trying to become relevant again and yeah, really stepped on it this time.

Him or his people put together a meme generator and instantly, speaking of people on the internet doing things that are not very nice, pulled up his rape allegations from many years ago and just made tons and tons of basically rape memes.

And they're quite funny. They are actually really, really funny. So it didn't really last that long. And the people who did the meme generator started taking out or like filtering for words like rape. And then, of course, you know, the internet, we find a way around it.

So yes, we do. Yeah, just, you know, people have never heard about letter substitution, apparently. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The best one at the end is Bill Cosby looking off to the side going, my social media manager did what? Yeah.

And then, you know, my clients often wonder why I'm grumpy about the grand ideas they come up with sometimes for social media. And I'm just like, don't, don't. No, let's not open this up because it's going to be bad. We have a return guest to, to this segment.

We did Dr. Oz before and Dr. Oz's social media team did just about the same thing that Cosby's did. Hashtag Oz's inbox. He decided to, you know, take the biggest questions for him out there and he'll answer his favorites on Dr. Oz.com.

So he got hit big time. And they are funny too. And they are very funny. You know, if this were done as a joke, it would be just fantastic. But when you realize that people's careers are based on this, it's, it's not so funny. But then Dr. Oz is a good, good target because he is full of crap.

So I highly suggest checking out the link in the show notes for some of the best, best responses. Yes. I just got my flu shot. When can I expect to develop autism? Yeah, it's, it's very good. Some people were very, just went for the joke.

Some people went serious science. It's, it's funny shit. So good, good job there guys. Are you kidding me? We have a double dose of science in this week's, uh, are you kidding me?

Segment, uh, found this one after I just got back from my flight from Toronto. So it was, it was, uh, enlightening, particularly with the ebolas, which is now gone, I guess. There's no more ebolas, right? We're done. Uh, yeah, apparently if you, if you, uh, look at my ad revenue from do I have ebola.com, apparently it has been cured.

I guess it's been cured unless, as I heard last night, you're in the country of Africa, the country of Africa, the country. Okay. Where'd you, where'd you hear that one? Just anywhere. So, uh, this is how a sneeze travels through an air airplane cabin.

An engineer did a simulation based on airflow through planes and, uh, the typical, you know, the speed of a sneeze, it's fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to sit behind or next to a sick person. No, behind is, is the worst place to be.

You really get, you really get nailed there. So, uh, when somebody sneezes in front of you, just, uh, duck and cover, I guess. Yeah. No, it's, uh, it's gross. It's really gross. Yeah. This is fascinating. So link is in the show notes. Check it out. It's, it's pretty cool. So this one I found on, uh, I fucking love science.

It's, uh, watch a bowling ball and a feather falling in a vacuum. So professor Brian Cox, who I love, or he's a, he's a physicist. He does a lot of cool stuff. He's kind of like the smarter version of Neil deGrasse Tyson. Well, of course he's British. Yeah, exactly. They're always smarter.

So they went to this giant vacuum chamber, the biggest one in the world. And they dropped a bowling ball and a feather. And sure enough, they do what they were supposed to do. Fall at the same rate. But the video is, is awesome to watch. Hmm. I watched, I watched this multiple times and time for me to put on my tinfoil hat.

Now, the entire point of this is that, you know, a bowling ball and a feather falling in a vacuum will fall at the exact same speed while in regular non-vacuumous air, they fall at different speeds. And, and you, you see the full shot of the bowling ball and the feather falling down in non-vacuum and you see what happens.

There is an uninterrupted straight up shot of that occurring. You're putting together a video to illustrate the differences and you do not think of doing a side-by-side real time of both. You don't think about that at all. You don't think that might be interesting as it totally illustrates the point in a very simple method.

Not only that, you don't even put in one full real time shot of the, of the bowling ball and the feather falling in the vacuum. Every single one of those shots was cut or went to slow-mo. Conspiracy! Now, I went back and watched it again after you pointed this out to me and you are exactly correct.

Not one full-time shot. Not one. When this is the whole entire point of this piece. And it's like a... Who the fuck edited this? The BBC. Ah, the British conspiracy. Yeah. No, you're totally spot on.

I went back and watched it and I'm like, you gotta have both of them. Yeah. How do you not... They don't. How do you not do a split-screen full-time of both? How do you not do that? And beyond that, how do you not have a full-time real shot of them falling in the vacuum, which is cool as shit? How do you not have that?

Yeah. People. People, people, people, people. Either way, still go watch it. It's still cool. Yep. This gravity thing is obviously a load of crap. I'm starting a conspiracy. Hashtag bullshit. Closing shout-outs. A huge shout-out to Tara for joining us on the podcast today. We've been wanting her on for a long time.

Glad she could make some time for it. Do check out all of her stuff, particularly her site launching tomorrow. Absolutely. Great talking to you, Tara. Appreciate it. And good luck with the new doohickeys. I'm going to have to check those out for sure. Definitely. And I would like to say a hearty hello to our new listeners from the University of Wisconsin at Madison that my brother surreptitiously coerced into listening to our show.

Go Badgers. Go Badgers and let us know if you make a drinking game out of the show. Fucking. Do a shot. Bob's your uncle. Music for the Grumpy Old Geeks is provided by Among Us.

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